Am I over the hill or just over it?

February 4, 2018 5:49 AM

I’m a white collar 'digital professional' facing a middle-life work crisis. I don't like what the tech world has become. Where can I go from here?

My background is largely in and around consumer-facing creative digital, mostly team or project based strategy and management with some direct production experience. After 20 years of this I'm aware that I'm losing my edge - I've seen too many product initiations and shutdowns, too many wildly overblown business cases for the next, best, biggest, easiest. I find myself eye-rolling over younger colleagues' enthusiasm for the latest coding framework or market disruption vehicle, or glazing over in yet another management meeting about growth strategies, and I don't want to be that person.

I'm especially struggling with the increased demands for me to be involved with social networking, sales and marketing, stats generation and analysis thereof – after years of trying to embrace that this is now the milieu of my professional career I just can't even any more. I'm deeply uncomfortable with where consumer tech is going. It's so at odds with my value system, and the opposite of why I got involved in this industry in the first place.

Multi projects have also left me very much a generalist and I now have a lot of anxiety about not having found a niche, especially now that friends and peers are starting to see the results of maturation in a specialist field/organisation.

Last year I made a move to a role for an organisation I’d always wanted to work for in the hope that it would be somewhere I could settle for the long term. Now, after two years of increasing anxiety in what just turns out to another poor fit I’m at a loss for what to do next. The job itself is well-supported, with a good team and an ostensibly altruistic agenda, but my work is still very focused on the cult of product within a marketing function, with senior managers who remain susceptible to the promises of shiny tech merchants. I'm finding it harder and harder to be enthusiastic about what feels inherently insidious. If I can’t 'do digital' for an organisation I really wanted to be part of, what hope is there?

Looking back over the jobs I’ve had I’ve most enjoyed involved being a producer of some sort, whether physical or digital, rather than a manager, so I’d love to focus more on those roles but this is where my generalism lets me down. Successful practitioners at my age have spent years learning ropes and paying dues. I've think I've missed that boat.

The things I enjoy and am good at are: research, story-telling, solution design, presenting, leading workshops, producing, hyper-focus on single problem/outcome over a short-time frame, independent working.

Areas I have been praised for but get stressed by: line managing people, detailed process design and general documentation, stakeholder management, managing multiple project streams.

So, given the above, where can I focus my efforts in 2018 to break the cycle of tech work misery? Are there any digital generalists out there who’ve managed to avoid the snake oil and get more meaning out of what they do? Any technologists who left tech and love it? I'd love to hear from you!

posted by socksister to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Leading the digital efforts at a non-profit might work for you. They typically are a little more conservative with their funds, and thus not early adopters of the latest and greatest that probably don't actually work anyway.

FWIW, I run sales for a digital agency and I'm struggling with some of the same feelings. I have dreams of opening my own digital agency where we eschew all the expensive bells and whistles and build simple, functional digital products that actually pay for themselves. Then I wake up and go back to work writing proposals for six figure websites that probably don't even need to exist.
posted by COD at 6:23 AM on February 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I’ve focused my digital career in higher education and non-profits. Non-profits includes a huge range of places, and I hear you when you talk about altruistic places trending towards the creepy side of tech. Finding ways to be in the mission side rather than the fundraising and marketing side has helped keep me away from the invasive tracking. We still pointlessly chase new js frameworks, but I guess one chooses one’s battles.
posted by advicepig at 7:36 AM on February 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Do you like teaching? Teaching at a community college, tech school etc might be a fit. If you're in Canada, the pay can be fine, and the benefits are amazing. Career focused schools are always trying to hire professionals, it helps train job ready students.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 7:37 AM on February 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Please write a book (or whatever medium you like) explaining why the culture bothers you so much. I agree with you, I think, and I think the reason more people don't "get it" is that it hasn't been clearly explained. When people write about it, it's usually in a way that only reaches those who already agree.
posted by amtho at 8:26 AM on February 4, 2018 [11 favorites]

I agree with amtho - when I first learned about data analysis and realized that what they were trying to teach me was being a business analyst for people's data, it drove me up the wall. Maybe you could work on the UI/UX side for government and civic technologies?
posted by yueliang at 10:22 AM on February 4, 2018

I was happy at a smaller company writing code for in-house use only using mostly pre-internet technology. The smaller the company, the broader the range of responsibilities (I was CIO when they needed one which was rarely). No social media, nothing trendy.
posted by SemiSalt at 10:51 AM on February 4, 2018

This is absolutely a thing. Worth reading up on David Graeber's bullshit jobs meme - we are "duct tapers." I always oriented toward generalism as well - and the mythos around this orientation is that of the mercenary, jumping from thing to thing, solving problems, kicking ass. The reality is a struggle against the "expert" who considers only 1-2 parts of the value chain. These roles get the kudos because the projects are never visible long enough to see the hidden costs of such an approach.

I'm neck deep in these same feelings, recently finished my MBA to try to escape "planet of devalued tech labor." I'm not a coder, but I can read a variety of code to solve production problems. There are interesting opportunities to explore, but it's still a gravity well. I've leveraged all of my new study skills to double down on learning new technologies and methodologies ahead of the curve, but even that is almost not enough. We're dealing with an economy that only values capital. Labor, white collar or blue collar, is devalued.

The hidden light in all of this is that tech continues to rely on "shiny, new" and ignore integration challenges. And it may be there's no way to address those challenges, but orienting toward generalism for managing automation cracks might be a thing too. Not to say #lifegoals, just saying.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 11:42 AM on February 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

In a lot of respects, I could have written this myself. The thing that keeps me from throwing in the towel these days is mentoring the next generation. It makes me feel good, it helps them out, and (I tell myself) it improves the industry one tiny bit. So no advice on the "job" portions of your job crisis, but perhaps helping out others would at least give you hope that things can improve!
posted by web-goddess at 1:31 PM on February 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Coming back to add that I started pivoting away from production and towards analytics circa 2013. My hope is that while there's still the same old "duct taping platforms to capture heterogenous data," I will be able to move into wider fields of production like IOT, which has wider applications than just the "browser web." Might be worth a look at some of the areas where tech silos aren't yet matured, like brick-and-mortar optimization or supply chain. I think there's even hope for blockchain, if implementations can skip the whole crypto debacle.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 4:20 PM on February 4, 2018

I just finished up a stint as a digital director for a nonprofit and I know exactly what you're talking about. Sadly, the nonprofit sector is not immune to this. It's actually super frustrating when you're at a nonprofit, which is supposed to spend its members' donations wisely, and you see millions of dollars get spent on a website that effectively serves no purpose for the org (this was an outlier but I've seen it happen at a different org). There's a ton of turnover of digital staff at nonprofits and from what I've seen, a lot of it has to do with unreasonable and unstrategic expectations from leadership.

Anyway, have you thought of going out on your own as a consultant? I just made that leap myself - it's only been a few months and actually only a month since I left my old job) so I have no idea how I will fare long term, but from the extensive conversations I had before deciding to do this, it seems like a good solution to mid-career tech malaise. It's ok if you're not a specialist, since a lot of clients don't really know what they want anyway. They need someone seasoned, like you, who can help them cut through all the bullshit and develop a strategy.
posted by lunasol at 8:47 PM on February 9, 2018