here for a longer explanation.
It was my first salaried job in quite a few years and one that I accepted very reluctantly. I had been offered the job in a sort of "offer you can't refuse" way after having consulted/freelanced at assorted Time Inc. magazines on and off since '95.


Hey there,

How is everything? Are you seeing any hope of a more promising round two of digital signature standards? Perhaps we should ask the Russians with their new expertise in compression ;->

So waddaya think, a dual G5 running next summer's version of OS X with an Eazel front end and an Appleseed cluster of 6100s for back-end processing and firewalled-out tasks. A few Midway-esque iBooks, some midrange Lucent 802.11 gear in a tower, Cinema displays for everybody, and I can retire happy. Well, maybe I would need food but why get distracted by luxuries?

Portland seems to be quite the scene these days. Many references in the tech press. I was sorry to see Tek sell their color printer division but at least they sold it to somebody with their eyes open. Any chance that some day an Intel plant will break away, perhaps become the next Transmeta site?

As usual, my life is long-term productive, short-term semi-foul. which really is better than before there was grounds for a "semi" in there. A while back my boss's boss collapsed of a heart attack and was taken off for a quadruple-bypass, leaving us unprotected from the Time/Warner hordes. Or should I say The T/W Borg, who are assimilating my department and autonomy at a chilling rate. Having taken my job precisely because it gave me far more freedom then an IT director at this level usually has, I'm now finding myself subject to typical vast corporation hooey such as only two acceptable models each of desktop PC and Mac, standardization of software, an ordering process that takes so long I can't even say how long as not one order has been filled yet (some pending over five weeks), etc. etc.

Amazing that we have so many expressions taken from so much fiction about immense evil corporations (in the broadest sense) that want you to join and BE JUST LIKE THEM? Pod People! Join the Dark Side! Resistance is Useless! (didn't that one start on Dr. Who?) Join the Collective! You will be Assimilated!, und so weiter. Isn't it funny that when we were growing up such expressions would have made us think of the Evil Communists where as now they are self-evidently capitalist. What must Simonyi think in his heart of hearts?

As per cliche, the folks at Time Inc, are more than eager to have me enter their little grouping of the electors. I'm now on assorted committees (in each case I was volunteered and first knew when my meeting info showed up) and, since I'm there, I of course fight to get saner policies instituted, which, as it succeeds, bulwarks up the rationalization that I should stay here, where I can "make a difference".

At these things, I feel the way that folks describe being inside Microsoft. There's that genuine relaxation and wonder that comes from being in a large meeting where *everybody*, no exceptions, is smart. Everyone's comfortably middle class or better so all of those tensions just fade into the background. This being the modern world the room is as racially mixed as a Coke commercial and the person in charge is female. And let's not forget the more venal rush that comes from operating at such a scale. "I just changed the specs on five hundred computers! I am indeed mighty!"

Then come the not-so-charming parts. Usually at least two people in any given meeting are so fat that they have trouble fitting through doorways and most of the rest of us are overweight. Everybody is tired just about all of the time. People are oddly reticent to talk about any part of their outside lives except for the canonical brief, expensive vacations and hobbies. In other words, if it's such a great gig, why is everybody so unsatisfied?

Yep, I'm working with a bunch of smart, funny, nice, ethical people to support the short-sighted foisting unremarkable and bowldlerized pap on a captive audience. Nothing new in that but for me it's getting ever more personal. They're well on the way to offering me a Party membership and the keys to a nice little dacha.

Reform from within. Isn't that the theory? If five years from now you and I are at a conference on cryptography and intellectual property rights, are you sure that we would be on the right side of the table? If it came to that, could you jump? Do you have an exit strategy? My Vermont strategy looks practical but very isolating.

[several paragraphs about one aspect of my exit strategy]

I hope you're both well and that we'll all have time to get together this winter.

Take care,

-Rustin


What exactly did I do?
So, what exactly did I used to do for a living? I was that rare and obscure breed, the publishing workflow specialist. This meant that in addition to all the standard IT stuff (Why won't this video card work? Can I fit two more CPUs in this quarter's budget?) I spent a lot of time on production stuff (can we get this done in Quark XPress and if not is there a way to export the file?) and workflow (if I start having the copy routed to the senior editor will she read it or will that just stall the section?). Officially I was an expert in something called the Quark Publishing System that costs about a hundred thousand dollars to put in and has fewer than (last I checked) two thousand places using it in the world.

I drifted into the field because having left tech work to do print production (layout, design, etc.) which I liked far better, I then became more valuable back in tech because now I had *both* kinds of expertise (CPUs and typefaces). Add a background in economics and industrial organization (so I already knew workflow vocabulary and concepts) and it would have taken more self control then I had to resist a brand-new field with cool sounding titles and the promise of far more money.

In the early 1990s large periodical publishers (which mostly meant folks like the New York Times, Vogue magazine, and the Lands' End catalog) starting switching to special software for keeping track of and managing the hundreds of files (images, text, layouts, templates, etc.) they suddenly had jittering about from computer to computer and sometimes from city to city. I settled into the niche of being the guy somebody would bring in while they transitioned to this new way of working.

I got to work for names that roil with glamour and magic. Time Magazine. Sports Illustrated, Time Out magazine, J.Crew, Vogue. I got to know the details of major events before just about anybody else in the world, sitting in on meetings about how Columbine would be covered at Time Magazine, what it meant that Newt was resigning from the House, decisions about upcoming Superbowl ads. But almost always as a fly on the wall. Look but don't touch. Take a seat by me boy, but keep your mouth shut.

What did I do? Do you like sports stats? I created a system that cut the effort required to put complex tables into Sports Illustrated by two thirds. Do you read Time Out New York? I kept the talented but distant database designer talking to the writers so that the system used to list movies, clubs, and so on would actually go from prototype to real world. I was the first person to get a particular major ad agency to use smooth gradients in supermarket coupons. That kind of thing. I've probably made your life easier but not in any way that you'ld notice.

The good side: real change, the chance to be the first person to ever look at a particular problem, constant new challenges and dynamic environments. Launch parties, instant meta-families created in magazine launches, sushi at my desk on a corporate tab.

The down side: not a single day of being in a stable predictable work environment in almost ten years. Only being there when people were rushed, panicked, nervous, looking for somebody to make it all better, preferably while not spending money or time or their attention. Too many years of that and I became like a long-time beat cop who, seeing people only when something is wrong started to assume that every explanation was covering something up, every person about to break down in tears or cancel the project. I am very glad that I got out and find it hard to even picture ever going back.

Did I ever get the cool titles? Eventually. Mostly I was a freelancer/consultant so I just drifted off at the end of the day. But my last gig (of which you were reading earlier) I got to be on the masthead of a major national magazine with a big office, a spiffy title, and everything.

Did I ever get the money? Yes and no. I made a decent rate per hour but somehow with not enough billable hours (I hate paperwork), and tons of money going to late night cabs, restaurant dinners, buying my own software, and so on, none of it ever got saved up. The bottom line: I'ld have ended up far better off financially sticking to doing layout for a living.

Is my experience typical? In some ways, I'ld say yes. Others have certainly said similar things. Since I wrote this I have, of course, left the field to start the little company whose work you see before you. So I hope that you like it.

So, what is your work world like?

Would you like to submit something to Reed and Wright?
If so, then tell us about it.

Send us your point of view. I'll even look at stuff from you "creatives" out there. What do we IT folks look like to you? But keep in mind that nothing but our own blithely arbitrary judgement determines what gets on this site. We reserve the right to reject your work for reasons including but not limited to the day of the week, the current state of our fingernails, the number of letters in your address, direction of cloud movement, and what side of the screen the window opens on.
But send it in anyway. At the least I promise a response.

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