On 9/15/2016 9:49 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 09:29:12 -0700, Rudy Canoza
wrote:

On 9/13/2016 3:23 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:28:43 -0700, Rudy Canoza
wrote:

On 9/12/2016 6:29 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:29:52 -0700, Hot Coals
wrote:

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 15:39:29 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

Well, I retired on Friday. 'Finally had enough.

Congrats!

Thanks. I'll tell you if it was a good idea in a few months. d8-)

Work is work, and there's a reason we have to be paid to do any (much)
of it for someone else. But your work sounded like something you really
enjoyed, and it always seemed to me you had a lot of control over the
amount and pace of it. You're still under age 70, seem to have taken
good care of yourself and be in relatively good health, so what made you
pull the plug?

I'm rushing out the door here, so this is not well thought out, but
the short story is that it was becoming too frustrating. I have an
editorial vision and the world was going somewhere else.

Or my publisher was. Or publishing is. It will take some time and
distance for me to have an accurate view of it.

Oh, I completely get the type of frustration you're talking about. I've
gone through something similar over the last 15 or so years. I've
worked all my life in IT, and from 1983 until 2005 it was all as an
independent consultant/contractor. Most of the early days of that was
spent on installing and customizing commercial vendor-supplied ERP
packages, mainly in distributing and manufacturing, with some forays off
into insurance and health care. This was entirely on medium to large
IBM platforms. I probably caught most of the second half of the big
computerization wave in the U.S., when computers went from doing some
accounting and tabulating to becoming central to firms' core business
functions. The shift meant that what came to be known as IT (after
earlier being "the computer room" and then "data processing") stopped
being managed by the CFO and came to have its own senior executive.
Except for a short spell in the very early 1990s, I never lacked work.
As an independent contractor, I had a lot of control over my time, and I
got a lot of the hardest assignments, which I liked. There was one firm
where I spent most of a five year interval in the late 1990s, and near
the end of it, the CIO got dinged in an audit because she gave me too
much of the important stuff, and there was no "succession plan" if I got
run over by a truck or inherited a few million and stopped working.

It all changed quickly in the early 2000s. First, nearly every medium
to large firm that was going to acquire and customize an enterprise
package had already done so, and focus shifted to customer interfaces
rather than core enterprise functions. Second, Sarbanes-Oxley and other
onerous regulations came into place that mandated segregation-of-duties
and extremely cumbersome change management procedures; the change
management bull**** made it harder and harder to get things done.
Third, there was a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions, and a lot of
big companies that had needed a lot of IT work simply disappeared.
Finally, there was the surge of "off-shoring" that moved quite a lot of
IT work to India and elsewhere, and also the notoriously corrupt H-1B
visa debacle that put intense downward pressure on contract rates and
salaries. In the heyday, I could bill $75 and occasionally $85 an hour
for truly independent work, and I would get offers from contract brokers
for $65 an hour; by 2006, the brokers were offering in the $35-$40
range, sometimes less. I had to give up contracting in 2005 and take a
so-called "permanent" position, of which I have now had three.

Today, I work for a huge financial services company, heavily regulated,
and the work is tedious and hard to get done because of all the change
management and regulatory compliance hoops. They motivate the proles
with near-constant reminders that failure to comply with all the regs
can result in consequences "up to and including termination" - very
cheerful. I have to take numerous internal training sessions annually
in change management, incident management, anti-money laundering, risk
management, time tracking, "diversity and inclusion" (what bull****),
and more. The work is pure systems management - no more development.
There's really no challenge to it, or very little. It has become just a
paycheck.

Now I better understand your inclination to libertarianism. I've only
had to face that kind of thing when I was a medical editor for six
years, and half the job was making sure we complied with medical,
legal, and regulatory standards. Medical editing pays pretty well
because not many people can do it, in that environment. I found it to
be insufferably tedious but it was a good-paying job when other
editing jobs were on the skids. They always need medical editors.

The regulations in that industry, however, generally make good sense.
What doesn't make sense is the huge negative consequences for making a
mistake. They grind up editors with regularity, because a mistake can
cost the company itself an enormous financial hit. I've witnessed a
proofreader getting fired for misspelling a word in a headline.
Ironically, it's easier to do that than to make a mistake in text.
It's vicious.


I envy your situation where you feel you can retire. I can't - married
late, have a 15 year old son in private school, major expenses far out
onto the horizon (unless he can get a full-ride scholarship to a good
school.) If he can get his university education all or mostly paid by
someone else, I'll sell everything and get the hell out of the People's
Republic of California and go someplace where it's cheaper to live, and
maybe then I can cut back on work or at least not have to worry as much
about chasing the highest salary.

Hang in there. We eventually get old and the kids leave the nest. g
I think I'd be cutting it pretty close if I didn't do any work at all,
but I look forward to just writing articles I want to write, when I
want to write them. It won't be many.

What happened with fishing? I might have misunderstood, but I had the
idea you were going to be off doing it for a week or so.