It has been some time since I have had a chance to post on this blog. Between work, completing my undergraduate degree, and preparing for what I now call my “technology sabbatical,” I have just been too busy and, frankly, a bit too burnt out to write.
As of July, I began to transition from a great job, great pay, great hours where I was able to work from home to becoming a low paid, long hours, work from a building with no AC as a humanities teacher. It is a very interesting position and I am enjoying it quite a bit.
I have been working in technology for over 20 years. If I was going to continue to live where I do I was resigned to the treadmill of working on technology that output puff marketing pitches selling products most people really don’t need. It simply isn’t interesting work and after 20 years of rushing to get the next puff marketing push operating I was burnt out and needed a break.
I had been going to school part-time working to complete a degree in history. Why would a technologist get a degree in history? Yeah, I get that question a lot. It is simple. I had an ongoing interest in history and, most importantly, it had nothing to do with technology. It was my break from the technology treadmill.
When a private school in my area was looking for a humanities teacher with credentials in the history field, I decided now is a good time to take a sabbatical. In today’s work climate, everything has become how to squeeze the most out of a person until we have to replace him. It’s business, I get it. But this is a change from when I started and companies were focused on you as an investment in the future. They invested in your growth. That simply isn’t the case anymore.
Will I continue as a high school humanities teacher until I retire? Too soon to tell. It is interesting and it provides me with time to explore my interests both from an academic standpoint and a technology one. And that is an important point, I have the time to explore technology interests I just didn’t have time for in the past.
Today, I simply refer to this as my “technology sabbatical” and hold open the possibility that I might go back into technology one day. Like every career transition I have had, I do something as long as it is interesting and provides me with the opportunity for growth. When I stop growing, I change positions.
This has been a hard transition for me. I am fully plugged into the matrix and sliding into, mostly, an analog world has been hard. While hard, it has also been eye opening to the disconnect between the companies putting out hardware and software solutions and the non-tech people that are attempting to leverage them to assist them in their lives. I see a lot of opportunity for solutions in markets I previously had viewed as saturated.
So here is to my “technology sabbatical,” see you on the other side.