In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

And Now for Something Completely Different

I got a cordial e-mail from Grant McCracken, referring me to a post in his blog that takes up an ongoing discussion he's having with Stephen Karlson of Cold Spring Shops on the question of why people pursue Ph.D.s with little realistic hope that the Ph.D. will pan out in the expected tenured academic job. (The permalink to the Karlson side of the discussion is Bloggered, however.)

This appears to be a worthwhile discussion, because depending on the field, there may be as few as 20 percent of those who start graduate school working toward a Ph.D. who will eventually find academic, "respectable", tenure-track jobs in their field. While I lament the complacency of tenured professors who benefit from this seemingly one-sided transaction, I'm delighted to see further effort at parsing the actual economic or cultural exchange that takes place here. The more I reflect on graduate school, the more I see that I received something like what I paid for it, irrespective of whether I did or didn't get an academic career.

Grant says he admired my essay on Stanley Fish in the sidebar and suggested that, as someone who did pursue a Ph.D. and continue to ruminate on what I learned from the experience, I might have something to add to the discussion. And in fact there is a junction here where some of my trains of thought converge with theirs.

My biggest concern is the assumption that Ph.D. training suits one only for academic jobs. Based on my occasional visits to Cold Spring Shops, I think Stephen Karlson factors in elements like risk and time in economic decisions. This, for instance, is why some people prefer to get lump sum legal settlements or lottery prizes paid out in annuities. Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted has several times described academic culture as "intensely bourgeois", which I take in part to mean conformist and risk-averse. Certainly the most conventionally "successful" Ph.D. candidates are the ones who can line up the prestigious dissertation directors and stay on the right side of other influential faculty. A paper on Spenser's Faerie Queene, from this viewpoint, is most useful insofar as it fosters these relationships and achieves a short or medium-term goal of career aggrandizement. That is, if that's your economic or anthropological goal. There seems to be an assumption that there's only one set of risks and time expectations in play.

It's worth pointing out that there's an informal designation (which I semi-proudly hold) of "ABD", "all but dissertation". This refers to someone who completed his or her course work, and passed whatever comprehensive or qualifying exams may have come at the end of the course work, but didn't complete the Ph.D. dissertation. There are many people, it seems to me, who take the life experience gained in the ABD process and go on to somewhat related fields. As I look back on my fellow grad students in the USC English Department in the early 1970s, I know at least four had aspirations of a writing career of one kind or another. Of those four, one I've lost track of; one is a freelance writer and journalist associated with the National Writers Union; one has been a poet and publisher of little poetry magazines and is now head of an MFA program at an art institute; the other is me. None of us finished our Ph.D.s -- but at least three of four are definitely scribblers who are benefiting from our graduate course work.

I'm seriously pursuing writing now as a third career in my life. From time to time, I take up literary questions on this blog. I wouldn't have the chutzpah to try to do such a thing if I didn't have some level of confidence that if I opened my mouth on subjects from Milton to Charles Bukowski I wouldn't embarrass myself. The only way I can do that is to have some level of familiarity with how to do literary analysis and the things generally that have been said about the literary canon. I would submit that a bachelor's degree wouldn't qualify most people to make such comments.

Actually, I think in the time I was in graduate school, I was semi-consciously sizing up the various options I had available. One was certainly to drop serious aspirations of an academic career, get a straight job for the time being, and bank the literary training for some later time. That's the course I've actually taken. Economic decisions aren't necessarily conscious to the actors at the time they make them, but it seems to me that there's a rational basis for deciding to go to graduate school even in the face of poor academic career prospects. First, the time factor: if you're right out of college, this time is "cheap" insofar as you've got a lot of time left in your life, and you won't be sacrificing major earnings. Others, as some bloggers report they've done, find themselves out of work in bad times and may also see a period spent in graduate school re-tooling as "cheap" time if the alternative is unemployment or underemployment.

The other factor is risk. Measured against the chance of a tenure-track offer at a top-5 research school, the risk of graduate school is extremely high. But the Burkean "intensely bourgeois" tradeoff doesn't necessarily apply. Many bright and creative people go to graduate school and find, being creative, non-conformist, and non-bourgeois types themselves, that this economic goal doesn't suit them. That doesn't devalue the use of the training, especially the course work and other experience that lead to an ABD. Taking the purely anecdotal sample of my schoolmates who decided to take up writing careers at one or another time, it looks like the probability they could use their skills was fairly high -- and I believe they were making rational decisions in their choice to stay in grad school as long as they did, and to leave when they did.

So factoring in cultural assumptions -- we didn't all aspire to be Balderdash Professor of Pomposity Studies at Yale -- the fact that we saw our time as a cheap resource, and our tolerance of risk, which was greater than the normative "bourgeois" career-aggrandizing model -- I think there's considerable economic basis for the time many people spend in graduate school. It's a question of how you see the initial expectations in the transaction, balanced against the time and risk factors.

UPDATE: Wolfangel continues the discussion, I think from a similar perspective to mine: based on her assessment, she thinks she made the right choice to go, but also made the right choice to leave when she did. She'll have many years to think and rethink her choices, but for now it sounds like she's saying that there was a fair economic transaction that took place -- and none of it was an excuse not to get a job!

Minor Progress on the Agent Front

On May 10, I sent out five query letters to agents -- I simply started at the As on a Writers Digest web site list and sent queries to the first five that said they were interested in general fiction and wanted query letters. Of those so far:

• One said he wasn't interested in general fiction after all
  
• One was returned by the post office undeliverable
  
• One said thanks-but-no-thanks
  
• One I haven't heard from yet
  
• One said please send us more, first three chapters now.
  

After I'd sent out those, I decided I was wasting my time to send just query letters, and instead focused on the agents who wanted to have the first three chapters up front -- haven't heard from any of those yet. But I was convinced no query letter would excite an agent's further interest, and I'm delighted to see I was wrong on that count.

Interestingly, I've tried to get an agent for a novel during three periods in my life, and this is the first positive reply I've ever had (the manuscripts of the earlier tries are long since landfill). At this point, the manuscript of Killer App is over half complete (the whole thing exists in the form of notes), so it looks like my main task over the next few weeks will be to put it in final form.

I may one day have more to say on the Mimi Smartypants cult -- certainly, I'll bet LT doesn't cross that lady, and it may explain why he comes across as so passive-aggressive in her posts -- but for now I've got some pompous prose to get into shape and better uses for my time. I will say, though, that I've gotten crowds now and then from Critical Mass and Invisible Adjunct, but none with so many web-boors (this will no doubt excite more anonymous trolls and scolding e-mails, "oh, no, you're the web boor, and I'm tired of your pompous prose. . .") Have at it, folks!

UPDATE: There've been a couple of interesting comments from Mimi fans after the first wave of scolding has died down here. They boil down to (1) what you see is what you get -- and there is a population that likes what they get; (2) criticizing the charcters in the "Mimi Smartypants" story is somehow out of bounds, if only because it will cause various flames and boorishnesses. I'll accept (1) for now, though the commenter "anagke", (a grecophile apparently) who accused me of missing "subtexts" in Mimi's blog, is being inconsistent if she also ascribes to (1). I'll accept (1) insofar as I also accept there will always be Michael Jackson fans or there will be people who like Rod Stewart's re-engineering himself as a crooner. But if you take that position, don't call anyone who disgrees with you a philistine. I don't accept (2), and I don't accept it for the same reason that, whether some people like some things or not, other people can explain consistently why Rod Stewart made them throw up as a rock n roll artist and now causes them convulsions doing Rodgers and Hart covers. I will discuss this down the road a piece, as I now see it, because it bears on other interesting subjects.

On Misinformation and Crankiness

Welcome to those who are visiting from Mimi Smartypants. You can see here what this is doing to my traffic. I certainly didn't mean to get the reaction I got, which is self-described as cranky. I originally linked to her blog because I appreciated it. You can like F.Scott Fitzgerald and still point out his often whiny tone, after all. But I seem to have an occasional facility for causing controversy, as I've discussed now and then here.

Reading Mimi's own comments on her blog, I'm not sure if I see real crankiness, though it appears some other folks have become cranky down in my comment section. I do find Mimi's remarks in some ways disappointing, though. She says, "I'm not following the logic that my webpage, which (as I have stressed over and over again) is a DIARY, in the true and classic sense, should 'get beyond' being 'self-absorbed.' In no way do I think of my diary as a cultural product* that is being produced in order for you to comment on, criticize, purchase, not purchase, or provide feedback on how to improve." She modifies her remarks in a footnote that says, "I know this stance is ALL CRAZY COMPLICATED now that parts of my diary are being sold as a book. . ."

Well, yes, that stance is in fact all crazy complicated. Most people keep their diaries private, and as the editor of noted diarist Anais Nin pointed out, making a diary public is, at least for some, an "agonizing" decision. A public diary invites comment, and can't escape it. A diary, even if private and in code during the author's lifetime (like Samuel Pepys's) becomes a literary artifact, and it can't escape many kinds of comment. It reveals things about the diarist, intentionally or not (lucky for Pepys, he died). If a living diarist chooses to allow her diary to be published, she invites comparison with other diarists and other writing, whether she wants it or not. It doesn't work for me to say well, this is sorta-kinda just a private diary with sorta-kinda just me and a few others reading it. I linked to the traffic resulting from the sorta-kinda coupla readers up above.

What's more problematic is that Mimi often gives her own opinions of writers, like the passage about Ann Beattie and others that I cited in the post of concern below. It's hard to avoid thinking that she feels that her own status as a writer gives her some degree of authority in making her judgments -- I agree with the judgments, by the way, but I do think that in making literary judgments herself on her own blog, she does open herself up to literary type comments by other bloggers.

And beyond that, we know from Mimi's own blog that, even if her discovery and publication were purely accidental, she now goes to public readings, which suggests she's offering her work to the public in a formal way besides in her blog, and she allows herself to be publicized in print and other media. So it's hard to avoid a sense that as long as things go her way, that's fine; if someone makes mildly critical remarks, that leads to crankiness. People are free to disagree with my comments, of course, but, as Mimi points out, the anonymous, angry kinds of disagreement aren't worth as much as the well-reasoned ones that avoid being crazy-complicated. (People are free to comment on my writing here, for that matter, though again, I tend to think of the anonymous ones that, as Mimi puts it, their "inner asshole" is speaking for them.)

So the best I can say for Mimi's remarks is that, as she appears to admit, they don't appear to be fully thought through. I'm sorry to see that, and I hope she thinks the matter through further, but so far, I'm disappointed in what I've learned here.

UPDATE: One thing that puzzles me here is the angry commenters (who don't seem to be able to make up even their own messages -- they cut and paste words either from my posts or other comments). I'm wondering if I've stumbled across a literary cult-like phenomenon here. Think about it, guys. Let's say I'm Mr. Obtuse. THIS GUY DOESN"T EVEN KNOW A DIARY IS SUPPOSED TO BE SELF ABSORBED! HAW HAW HAW! Well, then, great. Don't even give me the time of day. I'm sure that you have much better things to do with your time than explain how you're too sophisticated for the likes of me. Why in the world get angry?? Instead, the same people keep logging onto the comments and repeating the same stuff -- Gidget likes what Anonymous says so much, she repeats it! Naturally, I can't hold Mimi responsible for her readers, but I'm really starting to scratch my head at what I'm seeing here. But it's entertainment, at least, and I thought I'd have a slow several days of traffic over the holiday.

Searched All Weekend

And could only come up with this, in furtherance of the Mimi Smartypants quote from a few days ago.

[T]he important English-language playwrights and novelists who have emerged since the creative writing programs first appeared -- V.S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Tom Sharpe, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn, Kenneth Lonergan, Richard Yates, Woody Allen, Charlie Kauffman -- did not attend writing schools or programs. A striking number of them never finished or even attended college.

Perhaps this makes sense. After all, significant writers have their own style, personality, voice and pointedly unique sets of experiences -- the very things that writing programs are apt to diminish. Encouraging students to endlessly re-write their thesis projects hardly teaches them how to be prolific and productive. The "writerly" styles of the teachers and the emphasis on "writerly" authors as examples (James, say, rather than Maugham) worsens this problem.

The only thing I would add is the list of "important" writers that's cited is a pretty shamefully anemic group, however they learned their craft. I am still searching, but that particular blog may be productive in contacts and further worthwhile opinions.

UPDATE: I posted the above before leaving for some business this morning. When I got back, I had a closer look and have added New Partisan to my blogroll.

Mutual Admiration

Thanks to RP at Random Pensées for his plug of my currently-running "Killer App" series. RP's blog is very interesting, taking me back in some cases to my youth back East and visits to New York. RP identifies himself as an anonymous litigation attorney who appears to be an associate at a law firm. The film Clueless says litigators are the "most feared" type of attorney, by the way. That notwithstanding, I deeply appreciate RP's interest in pointing traffic in my direction.

My current traffic seems to consist of several score more or less regular visitors, whom I've picked up largely via references at Critical Mass or Invisible Adjunct. What interests me here is that this traffic seems to be an offshoot of the academic blog community, which, due to the number of members who've grown dissatisfied with the academic world and are in the process of leaving it, seems like a group whose prospects for growth are limited. A little like the Shakers, who didn't believe in procreation, with the result that their sect could only last so long.

Actually, my own view of academics as a subject for blogging is that it is, in fact, self-limiting. Graduate school, TAing and adjuncting, being largely suckers' games, are things many people are bound to outgrow, and there's only so much you can say about them. Indeed, there's only so much you can say about declining standards, rising costs, so on and so forth. They are what they are. Some blogs that focus on these things get a fair amount of traffic, but only a fraction of it comes here. After six months or so of blogging, I'm realizing this isn't, and shouldn't be, my main focus, and I shouldn't expect many more visitors from this community.

So I've been casting about for blogs on writing, or blogs where writers show off their work. There are very few of these, and when I've e-mailed the bloggers or left comments suggesting my blog may be of interest, I've gotten very little interest and less traffic. And googling anything like "fiction writing blog" is an exercise in disappointment. Lots of people trying to sell you something, or lots of science fiction blogs, but very, very little actual writing on exhibit, and of that, it's almost all truly awful. The search for an audience here goes on, though!

Ann Beattie? Thomas Pynchon??

There's an interesting comment on Mimi Smartypants today:

I have been trying for years to explain my antipathy toward most of the Popular Fiction Of Today: the Jane Smileys and Ann Beatties and Charles Baxters and dozens of other legitimately good writers who just make me MAD somehow, who make me want to never read fiction ever again, who make my reading-matter pendulum swing violently toward nonfiction, personal essays, literary criticism, well-written web journals, and the occasional big baggy novel (Wallace, DeLillo, Pynchon, Franzen) that manages to surprise me. I am fed up with fictional characters, with the cleverly-disguised afterschool-special moments where everyone learns something about Life, to the point where even if this is well done it makes me furious. TELL, DON'T SHOW.

I tried to e-mail her about the visitor here whose comment I treasure the most of any so far, that he found my stories here "better than fiction". However, the e-mail on her site is no longer functional. I imagine she gets some heavy breathers. If anyone knows how to point her in this site's direction, I'd be most appreciative. For that matter, if she's an artsy-craftsy Chicago type, as it appears she is, she may even know my sister-in-law, who is part of the Raven theatre group.

I'm glad someone else feels the same way about current writing, though I also got fed up with Pynchon many years ago. But for a long time I could only read true crime, for what appear to be much the same reasons she has.

UPDATE: One of my concerns about Mimi Smartypants is that the lady has, of course, sold her book. So why should she bother with feedback? As a definite non-celebrity blogger, here I am with comments enabled and my e-mail for all to see -- and the result has been the occasional comment that I treasure (and none that I thought was off target), and an e-mail here and there that changed how I've been posting.

Mimi Smartypants at this point doesn't accept this level of feedback. I would certainly characterize her material at this point as self-absorbed. I would think that to grow and improve as an artist, one would need to get beyond talking about one's daughter's bowel movements, one's last toke, one's last public reading, and the like. My concern is that I'm not seeing this, and one reason I'm not is that there's no way to provide feedback -- either info on writing that's being done that might match her interests, or even stuff she might improve on her own blog.

Dartmouth Trustee Update

I had a couple of posts earlier this year (permalinks moot on Blogger, sorry) on the campaign of Thurman Rodgers to gain election as an alumni trustee of Dartmouth College. Although the Dartmouth Alumni Council had nominated three possible "safe" trustees for the position (two of whom were, no surprise, administrators at other universities), Rodgers campaigned successfully to be nominated via petition by alumni at large, then won the election. It's worth pointing out that Rodgers was helped in this by an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, which no doubt gave his campaign visibility among alums if nothing else did, and reading his biography in this press release suggests that Rodgers himself is hardly an outsider to what we would normally think of as the Establishment. Nevertheless, he's been something of a gadfly insider for many years. It will be interesting to see what develops.

Brief Intermission

I'm glad that for the past 30 years or so in the LA area, at least one radio station (with a few gaps of years) has been playing great traditional American music -- Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, that kind of thing. The other day on the radio I heard Bryan Ferry and realized I had one of his CDs stashed away. Popped it right into my desktop this afternoon and am listening to it in delight as I work. Playing it at the same time as Internet Explorer crashes IE on this machine, but what the hey. Europeans, by the way, may be anti-American as heck, but they have the good sense and good taste to play Frank Sinatra in their elevators. Take that, all you bloggers who keep posting on rock n roll.

Killer App - XX

Bob Friedlander got me another assignent out of the Chicago office, this one at Interplanetary Insurance. It was always tough starting at a new customer, because nobody ever knew who you were supposed to work with or where you were supposed to work. I always tried to get that information out of my boss or whoever was sending me there, but typically the project manager wouldn't return calls or e-mails, and it would be hard enough just to get the street address of the place I was supposed to report.

That was what happened here. I turned up at 8:00 on a Monday morning at the security desk at Interplanetary Insurance's corporate headquarters. Nobody had told them to expect me, of course, and the security desk didn't have phone numbers for the DDT people. Nobody had given me the names of any contacts at Interplanetary Insurance. So I wound up calling DDT's main switchboard and getting pager numbers for the DDT names I was supposed to see. I paged a couple of them, but nothing happened.

Finally I got a callback from Fernando Aguilar. He'd pulled off the interstate on his way down from Chicago to answer the page from a pay phone. He'd get there in the middle of the morning. He didn't know when anyone else would be in, so as far as he could tell, I should just wait until he got in. Then he could get me a badge.

Bill Baker, the project manager, was supposed to have let me in, but nobody knew where he was. He had been in charge of the project, which was in deep trouble, for more than a year. For the first year, he had been there in charge of a subcontractor that was putting in the killer app. After the year, the project wasn't finished, the customer wasn't happy, and the subcontractor decided not to continue. But Bill was still there.

When Fernando got in, he was able to get me past security and up to DDT's cubes. It turned out Bill had been there all along, but he hadn't gotten my pages or hadn't thought they were important. He set me to working with Peter Michaels.

Peter was supposedly the project's Unix expert. He seemed to know a few things, but the more I got to know him, the more I realized he mostly just talked a good game and spent most of his time and effort trying to avoid work. When I arrived at Interplanetary, he'd been there for several weeks. Nothing much had gotten done in that time.

Bill Baker had told me over the phone that when I showed up, I should work on data base replication. He hadn't told me that he'd already told the customer that the replication wouldn't work. But I sat down with Peter for a few minutes, comparing notes on how we each did installs and trying to find out what the status of the work there was. The next thing I knew, he started rolling his head around on his neck. Then he got up, said he'd come back, and didn't. That was the last I saw of him all day.

Query Letter

My project for this week is to start actively marketing the novel you've been seeing here. About half of it has been published on this blog, by the way, mostly (though not all) in the "Killer App" series. I'll keep publishing it here, unless someone buys it and tells me to stop -- though interestingly, I find few publishers seem to object to seeing stuff they print on the web. I sold a hobby-related piece to a magazine because they'd seen it on my hobby-related web site, for example. Mimi Smartypants is another such case.

Anyhow, here is the query letter that's going out. Kibitzing on this matter is welcome, though as you can imagine, I've given this considerable thought.

Dear

At the peak of the dot-com bubble, a system engineer takes a job with a high-tech company. His mission is to sell the “killer app”, a piece of software that’s supposedly so good it will make all its competitors obsolete. His problem is that the killer app doesn’t work.

It was a bad sign when the manager they introduced us to quit a week later. I was already used to managers quitting. My first boss lasted a couple of months. The biggest talk I had with him was when I got my appraisal and was ranked last in the department. He told me it was because Human Resources told him he always had to rank the newest guy last, since he was obviously of less value than anyone who'd been there longer. He quit not too long after that. I had to stay.

Killer App, a completed 40,000 mainstream/literary novel, tells a story similar to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Bukowski’s Post Office, Melville’s White Jacket, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, using sharply delineated characters and work environments to illuminate social conditions and human nature.

It’s written from my own experience in the high-tech field, but I have degrees in English from Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California. My writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Reader, COMPUTERWORLD, Enterprise Systems Journal, and The Dartmouth Review, as well as in my blog, “In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood”.

The completed manuscript is available upon request. A SASE is included for your convenience. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Very truly yours,

Killer App -- XIX

I'd been trying, of course, to find another job all along. I had a call about that time from a headhunter recruiting for Gold Plated Software. This was the second feeler I had from them. The first time, they went through the same headhunter, who gave them my resume. Once they got the resume, they dithered around and finally wound up calling me to ask why they had my resume.

I told them they'd asked the headhunter for someone to be a security product manager, and he'd sent them the resume. This seemed to be more than they could handle, and the talks got nowhere. The headhunter told me that every time he talked to them, they never seemed to have their act together.

A year later the headhunter called me again. They had another job opening. A different guy was doing the hiring, and he wouldn't be as big a jerk as the last one. I wound up going down to their seedy offices near LAX and sat in a stuffy conference room for several hours while a series of people came in to interview me for half an hour at a time.

I didn't have a clear picture of what they all wanted to know. Some of them apparently were peers; others worked in product support; one would presumably be my boss. The personnel guy was an independent contractor who kept getting called away to some other city, where he would be incommunicado for days. It turned out that even with the stream of people coming through the conference room, I hadn't talked to enough of them, and I had a technical interview with another guy over the phone.

The headhunter thought they were going to make me an offer. The contractor doing personnel thought they were going to make me an offer. The two of them would get together every once in a while and decide they were definitely going to make me an offer. But the hiring manager wasn't in that week; she'd had a family emergency. When she got in and got through her backlog of work, they were going to make me an offer.

This went on for about six weeks, with the headhunter paging me every once in a while to tell me he'd talked to the personnel guy again, and they were sure Gold Plated Software was going to make me an offer, any week now. Then the headhunter called to say Gold Plated Software wasn't going to make me an offer after all. He said the only reason he could think was that the hiring manager was worried that if I came in, I might make the higher-ups think they could replace her with me. So I was stuck at DDT.

In a fairly brief time, it became plain that I was better off not going to Gold Plated Software, because a little over a year later, DDT bought Gold Plated Software. Gold Plated Software's stock had been falling all that year, and their LA personnel guy who was flying all over the place and incommunicado was probably working on personnel problems they must have been having in every city.

I already knew Gold Plated Software had problems, and DDT was a bottom-feeder, picking up software companies that had problems. DDT's policy was to terminate anyone they found who had previously worked for DDT in a company they acquired, so I would have been delaying the inevitable anyhow if I'd gone to work for Gold Plated Software. And for what must have been the first time, the story about the acquisition in the Wall Street Journal mentioned the open hostility between DDT and some of its ex-customers.

When I was working with the group from Chicago, they told me about the scene when DDT took over a company most of them had worked for. People got called into an office and told that they did or didn't have a job with DDT. But the process wasn't perfect, and people would get called back in and told that there'd been a mistake, and they did have a job with DDT after all, but then they'd get called back in one more time and told the time before had been the mistake, and they'd been right the first time, and they actually didn't have a job with DDT. That sounded a lot like DDT to me. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving group than the people I met at Gold Plated Software.

Killer App -- XVIII

I found out a little later what the Chicago office had to do to get someone else onto the Iowa project. I ran into the guy they'd sent out there after me when we worked together at Interplanetary Insurance in Illinois. Chicago didn't have anyone else who knew enough about the product to send out there, which is why Bob Friedlander had had me flying to Iowa in the first place. They'd just hired Fernando Aguilar, and they figured the thing to do would be to send him to San Diego so he could learn what I had learned.

At least when I had been doing my punishment assignments in San Diego, Becka Mantis was there to get me entree with the programmers. Becka was on leave. Nobody in Chicago knew anyone at San Diego, so they simply sent Fernando out there with the idea that he'd show up at the office on a Monday morning, and just like that, someone would teach him what to do.

Instead, San Diego decided he was a corporate spy. Fernando told me the managers had called him into the head guy's office and grilled him for a couple of hours on who had sent him, why, and what he was supposed to be doing there. In the end, they decided there'd be more trouble for them if they sent him back than if they let him stay, but nobody helped him out. He just sat in a spare cube and made the best he could from the copy of the program that was on his machine and the documentation. After Chicago thought he'd been in San Diego long enough, they called him back and sent him out to Iowa.

Fernando said that by the time he'd gotten to Iowa, the customer had decided to give up on the product anyhow. So he didn't have the problems I had when I was starting out. It was all the same to DDT in the end if a customer didn't want to use the product. They never refunded money. As far as they were concerned, the customer had bought the thing fair and square; if they didn't want to use it after they'd bought it, that was their problem.

Meanwhile, Kit had sent me back to the customer in San Francisco, where Bob Friedlander and I had managed to get the killer app working, with the customer happy. Bob, of course, was in Chicago, but the customer didn't like the project manager Kit had sent them as a replacement. When they learned they couldn't have Bob back, they told Kit that as long as I was back on site, they wanted me to be the project manager instead of the guy Kit had sent them. They hadn't said anything about this to me.

The first I heard about it was a very tense conference call with Kit and the current project manager. The way they explained it, the current project manager was very busy, and he didn't have time to handle all the little followups the customer wanted. So they were going to have me be the one who took little follow-up requests from the customer so the project manager could be freed up for more important things. Or something like that. They did everything they could to get me to do the project manager's job without letting me know the customer thought I was the project manager. They'd have had to give me a raise to do that. And likely someone higher up would have asked inconvenient questions about why Kit couldn't send them someone who was already a project manager.

What I'm Trying to Do Here

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've edited a couple of earlier stories on this site (the "Flyover Country" and "Bad Hire" series) into conventional short stories and sent them to the Writer's Digest annual writing competition. Now it looks like there's getting to be enough in the "Killer App" series to look at editing that into shape and sending it off to agents as the start of a novel.

I went through a phase of sending previous writing off to agents and publishers in the late 1980s. It was a frustrating experience -- I did have a publisher say "I will read anything you write!" but I began to realize he'd read it but he wouldn't buy it. We'll see what happens now. If anyone has ideas and suggestions on what agents or publishers might be interested in this kind of work, I'd be more than happy to hear them.

Killer App -- XVII

I ran into trouble the next time I tried to set up my weekly flights to Iowa and back. Travel had approved flights for a couple of weeks running where I changed planes in Denver. It let me leave LA in the early afternoon and get into Iowa the last flight in on Sunday night. As a result, I got part of a Sunday with my wife and a full night's sleep in Iowa, as good a deal as I could expect. Naturally, travel found a way to screw it up.

The next time I called to set up my flights, they said they'd figured out that they could save $200 if I took an early flight on Sunday, or if I changed in Chicago instead of Denver, or if I flew out of John Wayne Airport instead of LAX. It didn't matter that they'd been approving my other itinerary. They could save a few bucks if they took away what was left of my Sunday and got me in a lot later Friday night (actually now early Saturday morning).

Somebody at DDT had actually written a company policy that said if travel offered you an itinerary that was two hours longer than the itinerary you wanted, you didn't have to take it. Travel could only make you take their itinerary if it was within two hours of the one you wanted. So that was what I told travel. They wanted me to take an itinerary that was four or five hours longer than the one I wanted. The way I understood it, company policy said I didn't have to take it.

Travel fixed that problem in a hurry. They called Kit, and Kit called me. Kit said I was fired if I didn't take the itinerary travel told me to take, company policy or not. "And by the way," she said, "you're starting to get a reputation. You know that, don't you?"

The new itinerary was moot in any case. While I was still in Iowa that week, the customer's computer security people came into our conference room. They weren't happy. The CIO had bought the killer app without running it by security, and security now saw problems with the killer app. The project was put on hold.

And not only that, the customer had decided I wasn't making enough progress getting the bugs fixed anyhow. They thought maybe if they asked DDT for someone else to take over the project, the bugs would get fixed. So I was off that project and didn't need to fly back to Iowa.

Yeast for the Brewing Discussion!

Timothy Burke has linked to my recent post ("Erin O'Connor's Decision to Leave Penn", permalinks moot in Blogger) in his current essay, "No Longer a Bird in a Gilded Cage". Erin O'Connor feels a useful debate is brewing on the overall question of "what it means to stay and what it means to go" as more bloggers decide to leave the higher-education academic environment and weigh in on their experiences on line.

My own experience with graduate school took place 30 years ago, and I've discussed some of the factors that led to my own decision to leave here. The circumstances, of course, were a combination of jumping and being pushed in my case. Rana has taken some exception to my mentioning her in the same context as Erin O'Connor, since Rana feels she didn't "choose" to leave the academy in the same way that Erin did, and doesn't feel her decision reflects the same level of courage.

Well, I didn't completely "choose" to leave, either. I just lost my funding. I could have "chosen" to support myself at a non-academic job (which I had) while writing my dissertation (provided I knuckled under to one of my committee members, who wanted to make things hard). I could have "chosen" to keep looking for the part-time positions that would have been available to me. Instead, I "chose" to wake up, smell the coffee, and recognize I already had a gold-plated government job that was my ticket out of grad school.

I think it takes a certain amount of courage for anyone to respond in whatever constructive way they can to all the small choices we see in life every day. I was lucky in my initial circumstances that made the first decision to leave easy. On the other hand, my life continued to change after I left graduate school. Timothy Burke discusses in the previous post on his site the various entitlement-based complaints from single faculty members who feel they should be compensated for perceived unfair treatment. He relates this to an overall academic culture ". . . which simply is, in the same way that academia is intensely bourgeois." I had a much harder time -- and needed much more courage -- to outgrow the assumptions in the kind of academic culture Burke describes. A change in occupational status was the least issue for me.

So I don't presume to speak for Rana or anyone else -- I can only look at the externals of Erin O'Connor's decision, for that matter, and compare it to decisions that characters make in fiction (since we so seldom see decisions of that kind in real life). I can't speak for the purity of Erin's real motives, or her real courage, since I know her only as a type of literary artifact in any case. But by the same token, I can't assume that Rana or anyone else has less courage in facing the particular circumstances life hands them, or will hand them.

Rana says more recently, ". . . one of the stranger things about working outside academia is that I can, within reason, work anywhere I want." This says to me that here's someone waking up to new circumstances, will likely learn much from them, and as a result may grow in unpredictable ways. That will likely take courage down the road. Leaving a highly circumscribed, "intensely bourgeois" lifestyle for the big world outside is a major step, whatever the specific circumstances that lead to it. Rana shouldn't discount her reasons for leaving or the personal resources the decision -- however minor she may feel it is in terms of the options she had -- will demand of her.

In this context, I've got to disagree with Timothy Burke's distinction between those leaving "part-time teaching or work at the periphery of the academy" and "a tenured academic in the humanities voluntarily leav[ing] a post, particularly one at a good institution, and . . . choos[ing] to do so for ethical and philosophical reasons." I'll agree that Erin O'Connor was more invested in her circumstances and was giving up a great deal, but in this fallen world I suspect no motives are pure, and "Erin O'Connor" as other than a literary artifact may have felt (I have no way of knowing if this is true, of course) practical difficulties in continuing to get along with colleagues with whom, by her own account, she increasingly disagreed.

If they were to do something like send her to Coventry or any professional equivalent, it would be nearly as hard to stay as it would be for a doctoral candidate who'd crossed a member of her dissertation committee. So a hypothetical real-world "Erin O'Connor" is probably making decisions based on a much messier combination of practical and idealistic motives than the literary version we're discussing. That doesn't detract from the real moral courage we seem to be seeing here -- it's just to say that real people's decisions are never pure, and we need to be careful about saying one person has courage and integrity while another doesn't. We don't see into people's hearts, and we don't know all the circumstances in any of these cases.

My biggest criticism of Burke's position is that it's what I would call philosophically pagan. Burke sees the implicit challenge in Erin O'Connor's decision: if she finds the academy corrupt, and if that insight may be in some way related to other recent events that have suggested some level of corruption in the academy (like Invisible Adjunct's decision to leave the profession), then Burke and all other tenured professors may find themselves in the same defective moral circumstances that O'Connor perceives -- if in fact they see parallels in their own circumstances.

So it's incumbent on Burke to differentiate his own circumstances from O'Connor's as much as he can. Swarthmore, he argues, is a better place to be than Penn. Penn is likely the local cause of O'Connor's dissatisfaction -- not any general problem with the academy. All these adjuncts leaving -- well, of course, they're all at other schools, all of them likely not as well run as Swarthmore. So this isn't my problem. I'm a Roman Citizen, after all. Rome is a well-run place. We don't deal with shadowy questions here.

I've discussed earlier William James's category of "morbid mindedness". There are those who will always wander into questions of whether there's some kind of corruption at the core, and I suspect the rag-tag crowd of putative misfits now migrating from the academy and blogging about it are among them. James's "healthy minded" people are, I think, more like the "intensely bourgeois" and in some essential sense self-satisfied people who seem to succeed in the academy.

Certainly no one can argue that Burke must leave the academy if O'Connor does. If nothing else, someone has to continue to teach college. On the other hand, gestures like O'Connor's -- or IA's or anyone else who, with whatever imperfect sense of independent purpose, leaves this highly circumscribed, intensely bourgeois environment -- are deeply challenging to that environment. How people respond to such challenges is intensely interesting, and this is probably a reason why some find this debate of interest (my traffic lately reflects it, anyhow).

I'm not fully satisfied with Timothy Burke's response. Ascribing O'Connor's or IA's or anyone else's decisions to local conditions is inadequate, as I see it. Simply saying "I got lucky, and I'm not going to apologize for it" is inadequate, as I see it. Offering somewhat tepid thoughts on how tenure might be reformed is better -- but not enough. Naturally he doesn't need to quit teaching at Swarthmore and take up fast food management -- but I wish I could get more from his essay.

Killer App -- XVI

With all the new issues coming their way, the developers could see who was opening them, and they knew who I was. They were in San Diego, and I'd spent a lot of time down there on my punishment assignments, documenting installation procedures. As far as they were concerned, I wasn't playing the game. I was making work for them -- and not only that, by opening so many issues, I was probably trying to stab them in the back. After all, they'd spent all this effort explaining things to me, and I repaid them by making them look bad.

Meanwhile, the Chicago sales people were checking in on the activity at the Iowa insurance company pretty frequently, and they were asking me how things were going. I told them the open issues weren't getting closed, and the way things looked, they could figure out what the next step would be themselves -- there'd be the meeting with the CIO where he told them there wouldn't be any more sales until the bugs got fixed. So they started shaking the developers' tree back in San Diego themselves.

If you called support over an issue, you got to tell them how urgent the problem was. The urgency was on a 1 to 4 scale. A 4 was just a question. A 1 was something that had your system down, and it had to be fixed so you could get your system back up. A 2 or 3 was something in between. If you wanted to keep a good relationship with support and the developers, you learned to be reasonable about the urgency. Most of the issues I'd opened in Iowa were 2s and 3s -- it didn't need to be fixed today, but tomorrow or the next day might be nice.

But San Diego interpreted anything other than a 1 as "when we feel like it". This meant nothing might happen for weeks. Your choice was then to raise the urgency level -- if they weren't doing anything at all for a 2, then your only option was to raise it to a 1. But San Diego took the 1 very seriously: their position was that if you had a problem that was severity 1, then nobody could go home, at the customer site or in San Diego, until it was fixed. Nobody wanted to work that way if they didn't have to. But if you didn't want to do that, then you simply had to wait until San Diego felt like fixing it.

Dealing with San Diego became very political. The San Diego culture was to get in late, take a long lunch, and leave early. They would drift in about nine in the morning, spend half an hour eating bagels in the lunch room, and disappear to the company gym so they could work off the carbs. The developers and the quality assurance staff worked in the same place, under the same manager, so there was a lot of incentive for QA not to rock the boat. This is probably why so many bugs got through in the first place. It wasn't good form to ask anyone in San Diego to work hard, and they protected each other.

So they started complaining to Kit about me on one hand, while the Iowa people were getting more and more unhappy with the lack of progress over the bugs on the other.

Killer App -- XV

Bob Friedlander got me an assignment doing a full install at an insurance company in Iowa, which was in the Chicago office's territory. I flew in on Sunday night, back on Friday night, not too bad a trip if I went via Denver.

When you do a full product install, rather than just a sales demo, you have to apply maintenance. That means you install the current release of the programs from the CD, but then you have to call support and find out what bug fixes have been added since the last release on the CD. Then, when they tell you, you've got to go to the company site, download the fixes, and apply them to the program files that you've installed.

There were a lot of fixes. I spent half a day adding the extra maintenance upgrades. Then I sat down with the insurance company staff that was putting in the product, and we began testing. Since this was DDT, we started finding more bugs, which meant I had to call support back and start the process of reporting the new bugs and getting them fixed.

Getting bugs fixed was always a wrangle. An open bug report was called an "issue". The object of the game for everyone in support was to close as many issues as they could. If you had too many open issues, it was thought that you weren't as good a support rep as someone who didn't have as many. This could also mean, of course, that the other guy wasn't working as hard as you were, or in fact that he was less honest. If the caller had found a bug, the issue had to stay open until the bug was fixed, and at that point it was out of the support rep's hands, because he'd have to refer the bug back to the programmers who'd developed that part of the product. So there was an incentive to try to convince the caller that the problem he reported wasn't really a problem. And you had to keep watching out for support reps who would just close the issue on their own authority, which meant nobody looked at your problem.

The open issue was less of a problem for the programmers, since the whole support bureaucracy stood between them and the caller who reported the bug. If the fix was easy and they felt like getting around to doing it, that was fine. If, for whatever reason, they didn't feel like making the fix, or decided that even if they wanted to make the fix, they'd do it later, the caller who'd reported the fix didn't really have an appeal. The customer would pressure him; he'd pressure support; support would listen and log the comments. If development didn't want to make the fix, you pretty much just sat pushing on that string.

In the worst case, of course, as Bob had told me, development could simply decide fixing the bug would be too much trouble, and it would be up to support to listen to the customers' and field engineers' complaints and make whatever encouraging noises they thought would get them off the phone. In that case, a customer's only strategy would be to get the DDT sales rep and his or her manager in and tell them that no further sales would take place until the bugs were fixed. If a pending sale was big enough, it could get DDT off the dime. A customer had to be pretty well focused and have chapter and verse of the problem's history to be able to take this approach. Most customers weren't at that level.

The customer I was working with in Iowa wasn't stupid. For the installation and testing, they'd set up a dedicated conference room, where several of us worked as a group. We logged every bug we found, logged every call to support, logged the numbers, dates, and times of the open issues, logged every callback from support and every status update. We made and took all calls from support on a speaker phone, with all of us listening in. The history was all on a whiteboard in the conference room. The log entries kept getting longer, but the bugs weren't getting fixed.

Killer App -- XIV

[Note: Two earlier posts on this blog are actually in sequence for this narrative. I'm inserting copies of "Secretary" and "Staff Meeting", slightly edited, from the February archives here for narrative continuity.]

Secretary

Kit hired a new secretary who was turning out to be scatterbrained. She did a lot of irritating things like page you during lunch, and since the company didn't give us cell phones, you had to put down what you were eating, find a pay phone and call her back, and when you did, you'd just get her phone mail. So you'd leave a message and go back and try to finish your lunch, but then she'd page you again, and so forth.

A few days before the Friday meeting, I got one of those lunchtime pages. When we finally stopped playing phone tag, her instructions were simple. "Kit says you have to fax me all your weekly time sheets for last March, April, and May." This was October. "You know," I said, "I don't carry them with me. I can't carry all that in my briefcase, and I'm up here in San Francisco until Friday. They're probably home, but I'm not sure they're all in the same place. How soon do you need them?"

"Let me find out," she said. "I'll call you back."

About 20 seconds later I got another page, this one from Kit, with a code after the number indicating that Kit was very unhappy. (This was one of her clever innovations. If she was unhappy, she'd put a "911" after the number on the pager.) I called her. "My secretary has lost some people's time sheets," she said, "and Accounting has some questions. We need your copies right away."

I told her pretty much what I'd already told her secretary.

"Call your wife," growled Kit. "Tell her where the time sheets are, and tell her to fax them up to my secretary."

I fought down the urge to tell Kit that what she actually meant was for me to ask my wife to ask her secretary to fax the time sheets, but I kept quiet. So when I called my wife that night, I told her where I thought the time sheets were, and she took them in to work the next day and gave them to her secretary to fax up to Kit's secretary.

The next day I got another page from Kit's secretary. "What happened to your time sheets?" she asked. "We still don't have them."

I called my wife, who verified that her secretary had faxed the time sheets and kept the confirmation. I called Kit's secretary back. "My wife says her secretary has a confirmation sheet off the fax machine that says the time sheets went through," I said. "Is there anything you might be able to do on your end to look again where the fax might have gone? I sort of think my wife and I have gone the extra mile on this."

"Let me find out," she said. "I'll call you back."

About 20 seconds later I got another page, this one from Kit, with the 911 code after the number I called her. "I hear you said something to my secretary," she said. "Something about going the extra mile, or something like that."

I started to say something.

"I will not have you talking to my secretary that way," she said. "If I ever hear of you talking to her that way again, you will be terminated immediately."

"OK," I said.

"You are coming to the staff meeting Friday, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said.

"I was worried for a while there that you might not be. Well. I think you and I are going to have to have a separate little meeting after the staff meeting. We need to discuss how you are to talk to my secretary in the future. Anything my secretary tells you is actually coming from me. Anything you say to my secretary you are actually saying to me. Do you understand?"

"That's your call, Kit," I said. I could see the writeup coming. I was thinking of a number of things I would do once I got it, none of which would involve my continued employment with the company.

About half an hour after that, I got another page from Kit's secretary. "You can tell your wife she doesn't need to fax the time sheets again," she said. "I found the fax."

"Thank you," I said.

No matter what Kit tried to do to protect her, though, that secretary didn't last long.

Staff Meeting

Kit belonged to the management school that favored staff meetings, lots of them, and long ones with no particular agenda, just random talk. These started as conference calls, with everyone calling at a particular time from the office or customer site they were working in. Soon enough, they ran as long as two hours, and the customers began to complain that they were watching the DDT consultants burn up hundreds of dollars of the customers' time sitting on the phone in DDT staff meetings.


Once this happened, the project managers mostly had enough sense to find ways to keep the consultants out of the calls with some excuse or other. "Oh, he's working with the customer, Kit." Kit countered by demanding that anyone who wanted to be excused from a call send her an e-mail the previous day, and only limited, specific exceptions were allowed, like a previously scheduled meeting with the customer that could not be rescheduled.


E-mailing Kit, however, was a dodgy proposition. One of her favorite topics in the staff meetings was the number of unread e-mail messages she had in her mailbox, an index, she apparently felt, of how important she was. "I had 118 unread messages in my mailbox this morning," she would say. Her instructions on this would be that if anyone had sent her an e-mail that was actually important, they should instead call her about the issue on the phone. The unread messages built up far enough that periodically she would have to say, "I can't answer any e-mails for a while. Something has gone wrong with my mailbox." This simply meant that her secretary would need to call the help desk and have them fix the problem so she could go on not reading her e-mail.


Although the conference calls never had a formal agenda, they were predictable. The first stage (following roll call), and most important, was always the enumeration of offenses that would lead to immediate termination. This list was ever-expanding, although occasionally there were specific deletions. Terminable offenses included not having one's time sheet faxed to Kit's secretary by close of business on the day it was due. These days were not predictable, because Accounting's idea of pay periods was intricate. The threat made sure you stayed up-to-date on what they were.


You could also be fired immediately if you didn't have your weekly expense forms in overnight express by the Saturday of that week. This requirement had been relaxed from Friday only after people pointed out that they normally flew home Friday nights still having to charge expenses like parking or taxis long after the overnight deadlines had passed. This meant that people who traveled had to make an extra trip into the office Saturday to send in their expense reports or be fired.


And once Kit learned that people had found ways to avoid her conference calls, she decreed that you could also be fired immediately for avoiding a conference call. A week or so later, in one of her occasional deletions from the list of terminable offenses, Kit started the meeting with a giggle and said, "Of course, I didn't really mean last week that you could actually be terminated immediately for missing a conference call." It sounded as if someone might have spoken to someone else, and someone else spoke to Kit, and the policy was rescinded. But she said the whole thing in a way that made you think maybe she was joking this time, rather than last time, so you could never be sure, and nobody took any chances.


So the conference calls still began with a roll call, heavy with the portent of consequences to those who missed it. "Al, are you there?" Pause. "Al?" Another pause. The fear of missing a conference call was so great that people would call in while out sick or on vacation. Then Al would wake up from his doze while sitting in the office on the bench: "Wha? Wha? Who? Oh, yes. Here."


"OK. Al is here. Tina?" And so it would go. After ten minutes or so of roll call, with the usual suspects forgetting their names or otherwise delaying the process, Kit would say what she always, said, "Well – I don't think I have much this week. We'll probably get this over quickly for once, ha, ha." But Kit would keep remembering things: "Oh, yes. I forgot. I was talking to my Senior VP on Tuesday, and he wanted me to remind everyone that you will be terminated immediately if you. . . ." and so forth. Sometimes I wondered if there were offenses that could lead to delayed termination. As I write this, I realize that there certainly were, and those were the ones I was committing all too frequently. But it probably took only one.


After a few months, Kit decided staff meetings were too important to handle over the phone. Once a quarter, she decided, we would all fly in to California from wherever we were and have an all-day staff meeting on a Friday. (And after one Friday meeting, she decided this was so worthwhile that we would continue through Saturday in subsequent quarters.)


As it happened, I was scheduled to wrap things up with a customer the week the first Friday meeting was scheduled. The customer had been unhappy with DDT, but they liked me, because after all the problems, I had finally been able to make things work the way they wanted them to. And they wanted me there the whole final week, including the Friday. This was the old problem of the consultant burning up hours in conference calls writ large. The customer thought they were entitled to have me the whole week. Kit thought a Friday all-day staff meeting was more important. As far as I was concerned, the customer was always right, especially if it could get me out of one of those staff meetings.


So I talked to the project manager about the problem and suggested he ask Kit if I could be excused from the meeting. I knew I was putting the project manager in a bind, because if Kit had definite ideas about not avoiding conference calls, she was going to have even more definite ideas about not avoiding all-day staff meetings. But the customer had also made what they thought was a reasonable request under the circumstances: they thought they were going to get five more days of me in the final week; they were only going to get four; and I wasn't going to be back.


The outcome, the project manager told me, was not pleasant. The customer kept insisting, and the result was that to get me in the Friday staff meeting and still keep the customer happy, Kit had to give the customer two free days of my time the following week. In other words, I would be back after all, with a couple extra days thrown in. I could sense the bad vibes in it for me, since in Kit's mind I was the cause of the problem. Not only had I gotten Kit into a losing argument with a customer, but behind it all lay an obvious desire to avoid a staff meeting.

There had been a rush to the exits when our group was first formed. Then there was a lull, but after Kit took over, there was another rush. Kit had made the project manager who'd managed to avoid any blame for the fiasco at the bank with Becka Mantis and Katie Naylor her number two, but within a short time he announced he was going to take early retirement. He said it was to fulfill a lifelong dream of sailing his boat around the world. He was an odd fellow, whose hair grew longer and a more bizarre shade of orange every time I saw him. I never had enough confidence in his ability in any area to think sailing a small boat around the world would be a good idea for him -- but in hindsight, he may have preferred the risks in that enterprise to the risks he perceived in continuing to work for Kit.

Bob Friedlander was another project manager who was able to get out from under Kit, by wangling a transfer to Chicago. He'd come out from there, and he still had friends in the Chicago office. We'd both worked at a customer in San Francisco where things had turned out about as well as could be expected: we'd gotten the product to work, and the customer was going to keep it. Bob knew where some of DDT's bodies were buried. He'd worked as a support center manager, which means he supervised the people who took the problem and help calls from the customers on the 800 number.

"The hardest part of the job was talking to the customers who expected some of the bugs to be fixed," he told me. "The company looks at some of the bugs and decides it will cost too much to fix them, so it doesn't. Part of my job was to pretend they would be fixed to the customers who called about them."

Bob did me a favor when he moved to Chicago: he managed to have the Chicago office request my services on several projects. Of about 35 total people on the West Coast, there was regular work for only about ten of us. The killer app wasn't selling as well as planned, but also overstaffing is a typical phase the software business goes through. This was a problem for those of us in the field, because we were paid partly as a percentage of our billable time.

On top of that, you couldn't count on whether, even if you were working at a customer site, you were actually billable. Somebody would throw a couple weeks of your time in for free to sweeten a deal. So you'd work those weeks just for your base salary, doing the same job as someone else at a site where the customer was paying, and so earning commission. You had to take whatever assignment they gave you, billable or not, and sometimes they wouldn't tell you which it was, possibly because they didn't know themselves, and you didn't find out until you got your commission statement the following month. They also frequently gave the customer free days of your time to make up for some other problem the customer had, like bugs in the product. In this case, you were helping to pay for the company's generosity, because those free days didn't pay commission, either.

The straight deals where a real customer was paying real money for more than a few days at a time and earning you a commission were the least common. If you weren't at a customer site, you had to go in to the office. This was called being "on the bench". At any given time, more than half the managers and field engineers were on the bench. Some of the newer hires had been with the company for a year and hadn't yet had a billable day. While I heard at second hand that a few people were unhappy about the overall scheme of who worked and who got commission, it seemed to me that most of the people sitting in the office on the bench were happy enough to be there.

But in my case, even if I was having to commute to the Midwest to get work, it was paying a commission. If Kit had a choice, she wasn't going to send me out on the West Coast, since she was reserving those jobs for her favorites. The Chicago office made up for that.

Erin O'Connor's Decision to Leave Penn

There's already been quite a bit of comment on Erin O'Connor's announcement that she's leaving a tenured position at the University of Pennsylvania to teach at an as yet unidentified independent secondary school. I think everyone agrees that this shows a great deal of personal integrity, and it seems to me that she was quite open about her thought processes over the past year or so. She recognized that having a tenured position in a corrupt system put her in a morally compromised situation. That she would decide to leave this position, involving a guaranteed prestigious lifetime job, is the kind of action we usually see only in novels. In fact, I'm reminded a little of the remark a character makes about Hedda Gabler following her suicide: "People don't do such things!"

But taking Erin's decision on top of Invisible Adjunct's decision to stop trying to get a tenure-track job and quit the business, it suggests that both bloggers have recognized an intractability to academic problems that goes beyond single issues. When I started reading Critical Mass a little over a year ago, I was concerned (and my comments there reflected it) that there was an assumption that if this or that particular problem -- especially loony left-wing or radical feminist bias -- could be eliminated from academic life, then everything would be fine. A year ago I had the same concern for what I saw on Invisible Adjunct -- that if all of us non-tenure-track part-timers could get tenure-track jobs, everything would be fine. I think over a period of about a year, both blogs came to reflect a view that things weren't so simple -- there are problems much closer to the core of academic life.

I think Erin is correct in the post where she made her announcement -- there's only so much you can say about the specific issues. Those of us who've commented on the cartel- or multi-level marketing- like characteristics of the academic labor system have said about as much as can be said, here and on other blogs. The question of loony-left bias has probably been overdone as well. I congratulate IA, Erin, Rana, and the other bloggers who, over the past year or so, have recognized that at a certain point talk has to stop and individual action has to start.

More can be said on the overall question of academic reform. SCSUScholars points to an ABC PrimeTime segment on cheating at an Ivy League institution. I've mentioned this issue several times here, with the confidence that it's as pervasive at the Ivy League as it was in a second-string place like USC when I taught there. Let's forget affirmative action, speech codes, and the like: if some very large proportion of any school's students are getting through by cheating, you have a problem of institutional corruption on an enormous scale. The political disputes covered by FIRE and blogs like Critical Mass and SCSUScholars are simply a sideshow in comparison. But nobody mentions the elephant in the faculty lounge.

I suppose I'll discuss this as and when the opportunity arises, though for now I'm done (and have been for some months) with the job market question, and I've never had much relish for the political dispute. I'm glad that I have other irons in the fire here.