Now THAT is a Good Book Quote

"Idealists are frustrating. Infuriating as they are inflexible. They hold impossibly naïve positions, and equivocate, and split hairs, and get lost in pointless hypotheticals—often as the world burns down around them. And much as they’d like to believe otherwise, they’re anything but perfect. If anything, they’re more susceptible to despair and discouragement than the rest of us. It’s that detachment from reality that makes people like me necessary in a crisis. The pragmatists, the mathematical monsters, the coldhearted bastards who believe good ends justify almost any means. The necessary evils. But if you take that as a license to smother the people who resist, who dare to hope, who wholeheartedly uphold the conviction that we don’t have to become monsters to destroy monsters, and genuinely, perhaps even stupidly, believe that things can be better? When the crisis is over and the smoke fades, evil is all you’re left with."

  -- Matt, Double Blind Book 2

Nice Unscientific Breakdown of Employee Types

https://www.tumblr.com/balioc/768319203871719424?source=share

I guess I'm a blend of Craftsman and Normie? Maybe a slight tinge of Fanatic... 

On Cocoons and the Building Thereof

A couple of posts ago I referred to the book Hope for the Flowers, and mentioned that instinctive sense that this is something that will help me become who I want to be. 

It got me thinking about where I am now, and why my current position doesn't fit that description.

The journey of self discovery  is never ending, and I've learned a few things about myself since I changed careers (again) and got a Master's in Computer Science.

1) I like solving puzzles. This is good and bad, in that I've been able to really dig into the weeds on parts of our application and now know those parts better than team members who have been there a lot longer. It's part of why they like me so much. But it's bad... because for the most part the offshore team has the manpower and resources to do intensive work on things (like writing scripts to automate some of our tasks, or building dashboards to capture key information, or figuring out how and why the app works the way it does and trying to illustrate it with a diagram) whereas our onshore team - my team - is small and all too often dealing with whatever the issue of the day is. 

I have a list of self-identified projects I'd like to work on for things that would make our jobs easier, but all too often I am getting pulled into this meeting or that, or getting asked to put together the information needed for an ask on one of our tickets, or some other thing, and I rarely get uninterrupted time to focus on any of those things.

I think - I know I can handle other tasks. I've been in leadership positions before. I can do the endless meetings and powerpoint presentations and plan and manage people and discuss KPI's and whatever... but I think I actually like just quietly working on some puzzle or another. 

As I learn more about infosec and cyber security, I realize that there are parts of it that aren't actually that appealing to me. I get the whole CIA concept, and the need to quantify business risks and make the business case for some course of action or mitigation, and although I'm confident I am capable of doing so, I don't think I actually want to deal with any of that.

Instead, I think I would really enjoy doing something like reverse engineering malware or something. Perhaps learning more about how to look through Splunk logs to identify malicious activity and track down the cause. Unfortunately, tbh I am mentally exhausted at the end of the work day and don't really have the energy to teach myself what I would need to know for yet another career change, and I think it's unlikely someone will hire me with the understanding that I would have to learn quite a lot about the field before I could be productive. (I think I would kick ass at it once I get past the learning period, but whatever.)

But puzzle solving in and of itself isn't enough. If that was all I needed, my current job would work well enough. This leads me to the next point:

2) I want to have a positive impact. 

It's not that I'm not having a positive impact in my current position. I actually kind of like pointing something out or asking a question, and knowing that I have potentially saved hours of misguided efforts. Like 'hey, this source connector needs to have an IP and port address to work, and it goes through a jump server to get to it's destination. Have we submitted the request to set up that passage through the jump server? If so what's the port number we're using?'

(Note: I am trying not to go into too much technical detail, not just to save the sanity of non-techie people, but also because mentioning specific software can give away too much information to potential hackers.)

And that's all well and good, and rewarding, but ultimately the job itself is... okay I guess. It's mostly putting money in the corporate pockets, honestly. Our app does sometimes impact the end user (i.e. a normal person who is a customer of our client), and I do want to make sure they don't have any issues. Like a website taking too long to load, or having inaccurate information regarding their usage. 

It just doesn't seem as important as pushing back the encroachment of hackers who potentially make using the internet so risky that nobody would trust it. Or identifying nation/state actors trying to do some shadowy activity. We seem to have a budding cyber war already occurring outside the awareness of the average person, and I want to have some say in how that goes.

Which is somewhat related to another point...

3) I appear to have a good amount of potential for a variety of different things. 

That seems very vague and perhaps a bit self-congratulatory, so let me explain a bit more.

Throughout my life, the one adjective people regularly use to describe me is 'intelligent'.

This seems like rather boring and non-descriptive when I think about it. Like... okay, I guess I'm smart, but so what? I pick things up quickly, I learn fast, I can solve more complicated puzzles.

Great. Makes my life easier. It's part of why I do well in classroom environments, and generally make whoever hires me happy. 

It's also a trait I never really chose. Like having brown hair or hazel eyes. 

"You have brown hair."

"You are intelligent."

Why do people act like the second statement is so much better than the first? 

Granted, intelligence is part of why I'm good at puzzle solving. But then why is puzzle solving any more valued or important than someone being good at drawing? Or good at handling emergencies in an ER?

If I were to get down to it, intelligence is more an indicator at how fast you can learn something, and how deep you can go when you master a field. And it can be applied to almost any field of interest, but you still have to put in the work to learn and master that field.

In other words - intelligence might make you reach a certain point of mastery in computer science faster than someone else, or do the same for civil engineering, or physics, or any number of fields... but you still have to put in the work, and you don't really have the time to master everything. 

So it's more like it gives you more options, and you can perhaps go a bit further than others in whatever area you focus on. (It can also lead to jealousy and pushback. I know in my first platoon, as a young butterbar lieutenant, one of my NCO's said a fellow officer was less than supportive because he felt like I could 'just pick up a manual and memorize it'. Which seems a bit exaggerated from my perspective. I generally think holistically and have to figure out where to place that information in the greater whole before I can really remember it, and I'm terrible at remembering exact quotes and phrases. But sure. Close enough.)

But to get back to the main point - intelligence can help you succeed at almost anything.

Which is why even though I have been doing well at my current job, it feels like only a fraction of what I'm capable of. (There was a reason 'be all that you can be' appealed to me back in the day. I was sad to discover that that's a lot harder to achieve than it seems.)

Those instincts saying that this is something that will help? It's generally because there's a position that seems challenging.

The right type of challenging, too. Something right at the edge between 'not really challenging, and therefore won't help you grow' and 'so overwhelmingly challenging that it's too much, and you will fail.'

Something that pushes you past your comfort level, but isn't setting you up for failure by being impossible to achieve.

There might be more to it than this, but my dog is asking to go out and I don't have anything more to add for now.

Addendum

The last post reminded me of something I've heard about before, but tends to slip my mind. 

Mainly that international organized crime is a growing threat, though it's hard to get specific details. Russia is sometimes called a mafia state, for example, and that is saying something specific about how Putin governs. 

It reminds me of something I thought, back when I was on an organized crime kick and reading up on it. 

See, the members tended to have a worldview where they looked down on the typical law abiding citizen. They will spend a lot of time and energy coming up with crooked ways to make money. 

But aside from their possible influence in adding expiration dates to milk, they're pretty much parasites. 

Think about it. 

If all the people they prey upon disappeared, who would be growing food or building cars?

All the things they enjoy depend on the people they look down upon. 

Take it the other way, and think about what would happen if all the people who think like them disappeared. 

There might be some unpredictable second or third order effects (i.e. resisting a despotic government generally means using black market ties, which means crime. I got on that organized crime kick because it seemed to fit with counterterrorism after all) but for the most part humanity would be fine. 

Perhaps even more than fine, especially if they're going around collecting kompromat so they can manipulate powerful people. 

Death Threats

On the one hand, I understand how scary this is to individuals. 

On the other hand, the consequences of intimidation to this degree are pretty horrible, and I don't know that there's any way it'll get better besides refusing to let them intimidate you. 

I guess I'll just say they all have to make the choice they can live with, but I think I'd rather they just outright resigned. If that has happened enough masse, maybe we wouldn't be stuck in our current situation.

The Madness Begins

He isn't even in office yet, but the chaos of his first term is already appearing. 

He or one of his staff proposes some crazy thing (often illegal if done as originally reported), there's pushback, then they either flip flop entirely or say it's actually something else that's borderline legal, and it just never really ends. 

I will probably wait until there's more actual action and details before saying much about the possible court martial of military generals supposedly because of Afghanistan. I initially thought the issues with that were pretty obvious, but in retrospect the average American probably doesn't actually know. 

Let's see what actually winds up happening first, though. 

I did find myself thinking a bit more about that 'Kingdom of Heaven' concept, though more in the context of an old favorite - the story Hope for the Flowers. 

If I had to explain why I take issue with the 'chriatians' supporting Trump, it's that they are engaging in the fight to get to the top of the caterpillar pillar - whereas I think God actually wants us to learn how to become butterflies. 

I wonder, sometimes. What a society that enables that would be like. 

In the story, they mention that spinning the cocoon is instinctual. There's not a clear guide telling you what to do, or how it would help. 

I think I've felt that before. That instinctive sense that this is something that will help me become who I want to be. 

Alas, they rarely have worked out. I get why, in a sense. It's hard to tell a large bureaucratic organization that they should let you do something unusual or different. Especially if you can't give a clear argument for how it will benefit them. 

At the same time, it's so frustrating. 

And I know that I'm not the only one who has experienced that. 

I wonder, if everyone is given the resources to follow those instincts - what would happen? 

Would people only go for the 'cool' things, and we'd have a scarcity of people doing the boring and tedious but necessary tasks? Or will that scarcity lead to better pay, so more people choose them? Or will it spur more automation? Or maybe people can take short stints doing them... 

How much of the competition for those 'cool' jobs is associated with the desire for financial stability or public recognition anyway? I've never liked the suggestion that people in power deliberately want the average American to feel financially insecure. I don't believe that sort of motivation makes for good employees, but that's the sort of thing I'm sure the billionaires wouldn't listen to me on. 

A society that makes it easier for people to follow their instincts, to pursue their goals in life and develop their interests and skills. 

It's a shame we seem to have gotten farther and farther away from that over the years. 

Addendum

 Yesterday I talked a little about why I feel so upset about Trump's electoral win. 

There's a lot more I could say, especially on the role of civic law vs heavenly law, but I actually want to tie what I said back to an earlier post. The one about the endgame in chess.

See - Trump and his supporters gained power through cynical lying and manipulation. And while that obviously has given them control over all three branches of government, I would still argue that it is like  building a house on sand. 

First - there are numerous Americans who voted for someone they thought would 'Make America Great Again'.

That means the Trump administration has to deliver success. Real improvement in the quality of the average American's life. 

Scapegoats and fingerpointing might work for a bit, but it will only last so long. There are some very real and sincere doubts about how this whole deportation thing is going to work. Are they rounding up all the agricultural workers who harvest our food? In which case... won't food prices rise? Or will Trump make some sort of deal to overlook agricultural workers, in which case he'll have to hide his inability to deliver on his promises.

Like - there are reasons most politicians didn't say the things Trump said. He's managed to get people to overlook his inability to actually accomplish much of anything by shifting the blame and various other techniques. I have no idea how long that can last, though. He did deliver on the Supreme Court... and now the Supreme Court is seriously discredited and legal precedents are all in question, but I'm sure his people think they can deal with all of that given enough time.

Which leads to the second problem - you will reach for the same tools that helped you succeed in the first place.

Opposition and disagreement will be handled with the same cynical lying and manipulation. After all, it 'worked'. Right?

Label everyone who opposes you 'antifa' or 'liberal', say they're the reason why you aren't able to deliver that fantastical utopia you promised, divide and conquer...

Basically, you wind up going down the exact same path every other autocratic dictator does. I'm sure they all think they could have done great things, 'if only'. If only they weren't betrayed by people who disagreed with them. If only they had more power. If only they could round up everyone who got in their way and punish them.

It's that exact same tendency, though, that is the reason why they keep running into obstacle after obstacle. They create enemies where they don't have to, they constantly have to keep up the lying and manipulation, and as soon as they make a mistake or let the mask slip everything they built will wash away like sand.

That's the endgame.

It may get delayed, one such leader might maintain control until the day they die, and only one of their successors faces the consequences, but it's just a temporary reprieve.

You can not build anything worthwhile and lasting through lies and deceit.

There is no 'but they started it!'

And if your argument is 'but then we'll lose'... then maybe you should lose. Better to lose than to win in such a way that you betray everything you ever stood for.