www.nickhodge.com

On ABC-TV’s Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion: The Way We Work, there is an excel­lent view on the world of mod­ern “work”.  The world of work has changed from a mere 5 years ago, let alone 10 or 15 years.

IM (instant mes­saging), blogs, RSS feeds, live cal­en­dars etc all dra­mat­ic­ally change the imme­di­acy of inform­a­tion and access to people. Thank­fully, I have yet to get a cor­por­ate mobile phone and my desk phone num­ber isn’t widely known out­side the internal phonel­ist. Email, blog­ging and RSS are my main outputs/inputs.

This week has been an inter­est­ing week “at work.” Being locked in a room, laptops off, being ‘induc­ted’ into Microsoft after some 4 weeks in the organ­isa­tion. I am con­stantly inspired by my new work col­legues, my boss; there is no short­age of inform­a­tion and toys to play with. So, it sorta seems induc­tion is a little late for me. Any­way, it’s required so into a room for 3 days.

There has been an inter­est­ing reac­tion of people I know to my new employer. Many are happy I am doing what I love: tech­no­logy and cus­tom­ers. Some ques­tion “what is your title again, and what exactly are you doing?” Other, more Mac-a-philes are sur­prised and ask a few more ques­tions. My ana­lysis is that Microsoft people are just like nor­mal people: friendly, help­ful but smarter than the aver­age bear.  Explain­ing your title as “pro­fes­sional geek” gets smiles and starts a conversation.

So, stuck in a laptops-off meet­ing, you have to do more “second shift” work to keep up with the RSS feeds (to know what your boss is doing) and emails.  Feel­ing guilty about not keep­ing up drives to bad on-the-lap work beha­viour. Fil­ter­ing, sort­ing, delet­ing, reply­ing. Blogging.

If you think this all sounds very “web 2.0 social net­work­ing blognor­ati” — guess what? This is how your kids are learn­ing and col­lab­or­at­ing now. IM, email, Power­points, short bursty just-in-time learn­ing. Watch and ask ‘em. I bet their “pro­duc­tion” applic­a­tion is not Excel or Out­look. It’s Messenger.

Uncle Mike warned me about keep­ing my email load down. In an attempt to be sub­vers­ive, I retain this goal. Also break­ing the rule about blog­ging when tired. Yep, doing that too. Hence the rambling.

The inner Munge Brother comes alive!

In a cul­ture where work can be a reli­gion, burnout is its crisis of faith.

About the technology-centric world in which we live: One has to won­der whether the devel­op­ments of a high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse.
Another good read is “The Latham Diar­ies”. Whilst Mark Latham has dam­aged the Aus­tralian Labor Party more than their polit­ical oppon­ents, he does detail a per­sonal crisis. The insti­tu­tion that built him in his work life ulti­mately des­troyed him. Yeah, Mark was a bit of a bloke’s bloke in a pois­on­ous pro­fes­sion — but the per­sonal toll led him to leave.

Another quote: hap­pi­ness equals real­ity divided by expectations.

I know it is a bit rich com­ing from someone who is work­ing part-time, at best: but I feel it must be said.

Time does not go back­wards. Remem­ber that.

eknow­ledger lists the top 10 stress­ful pro­fes­sions. IT is top of the list.

Bad Man­age­ment seems to be also a bug bear.

Why Do You Work So Hard?
Is it maybe time to quit your safe job and fol­low your path and infuri­ate the estab­lish­ment?

About 21 years ago, before sit­ting my “final” exams I knew I had a full-time job. Thanks to Tim Kleemann now owner of Next Byte, the IT industry had sucked me in. Janu­ary 6^th, 1986. I was work­ing for the man.

20 years on…and for the first time in my employ­able life, I am tech­nic­ally self-employed. Whilst my self-employment is by choice, but it’s still weird.

Do I call myself if I am going to be late to the office?

Adobe. 8 years. Yes, this post is going to be a little different.

On my –1’st day at Adobe, I jump on a plane and head to the US for Applic­a­tion Engin­eer train­ing. Whilst some indus­tries call this a Sys­tems Engin­eer style job, at Adobe you are demon­strat­ing and integ­rat­ing applic­a­tions. Along with a host of other greater Amer­icas and Asia Pacific Applic­a­tion Engin­eers, we immersed ourselves into two weeks of intense class work. A reor­gan­iz­a­tion was announced in my second week at Adobe. Hav­ing sur­vived 3 very tumul­tu­ous years Apple, it was situ­ation nor­mal for me. People I met: Colin Smith, Noha Edell, Terry White, Lisa For­res­ter; all still at Adobe. I felt at home.

Adobe applic­a­tions avail­able 8 years ago: Acrobat 3, Pho­toshop 5.5 and Adobe was just about to launch Illus­trator 8. In the print world, Pho­toshop, Illustrator/Freehand and QuarkX­press 3/4 ruled. We could call it the Creta­ceous Period in the cre­at­ive applic­a­tion world.

Whilst I had exper­i­ence on the web, and using dynamic lan­guages; Java with WebOb­jects, I sud­denly had to reskill in the print world. A pro­ver­bial comet was about to explode and start the Ceno­zoic Period of cre­at­ive applications.

Much travel, bring people into the Adobe fold, presen­ted Adobe tech­no­logy to over 40,000 people in the last 8 years. Untold num­ber of hours in a plane. Show­ing off “cool and use­ful” things that applied in the real-world was, and still is my pas­sion. Qantas Fre­quent Flyer Plat­inum, all the nice hotels. Nights alone, wak­ing up in a city whose name you for­get. My per­sonal favour­ite road­show was Pho­toshop 6.0 for two reas­ons: firstly, pion­eer­ing the re-emergency of music of 1980s as cool and hip (Generation-X now has money to spend?) by themeimg my ses­sion around “Music of the 80’s Trivia”; secondly as Liam and Avril saw the best show in Sydney. I also here apo­lo­gize to all those attendees who saw pic­tures of my MINI in demonstrations.

There were two events in this period that I was a part of that changed the land­scape. One was the change from film to digital deliv­ery of print advert­ising; the 3DAP and a small com­pany called Quick­cut (now a part of Tel­stra) enabled the tech­no­logy. The second was the move from QuarkX­press to InDes­ign by Australia’s major pub­lisher, Aus­tralian Con­sol­id­ated Press (ACP). Adobe, and more prob­ably more spe­cific­ally Michael Stod­dart and I, saved the Pack­ers many mil­lions of dol­lars by assist­ing Linda Har­kin in this change over. Killing the Xpress dino­saur with the intro­duc­tion of a more nimble mod­ern mam­mal, InDes­ign. Now in Aus­tralia, InDes­ign and PDF is the stand­ard. I proudly look at magazine cov­ers. There is a part of me in there. My name is in the about box on every copy of InDes­ign in the world. Humbling.

Dur­ing my Adobe life, I also met and spoke to the founders of Adobe; Drs. War­nock and Geschke. Met and spoken to senior exec­ut­ives too: Mr Chizen, Mr. Narayan, Mr. Elop, Mr. Steph­ens. The engine of Adobe is its engin­eers: and I’ve inter­ac­ted with many of these people too. Smart people: much smarter than I. You get inspired, and pass this on to cus­tom­ers. Listen­ing to a tech­nical present­a­tion on how the “heal­ing brush works” and real­ized that you know nothing.

There have also been some not so pub­lic events: such as Michael Stod­dart, Alan Rosen­feld, “Mur­ray” the Cro­codile and I act­ing as “Steve Irwins” and win­ning the Most Cre­at­ive 10 minute demon­stra­tion at an internal Sales Con­fer­ence. It was way funny. OK, you had to be there.

Dur­ing the most recent 3 years I decided to have a major career and job change within Adobe. Thanks to Craig Tegel for his ment­or­ship and man­age­ment (and more recently Steve Lamb­ley); I worked with a dif­fer­ent part of my brain. Work­ing with an excel­lent team of people: Emmah, Bianca, Daniel, Gavin and Lee, and man­aging the Aus­tralian and New Zea­l­and sales chan­nel. Man­aging and motiv­at­ing people has been the most enjoy­able part of the last 3 years; as has bring­ing people into the Adobe com­pany: Mark Szulc for instance: from cus­tomer to col­league. Brent Irwin, Aaron Tavakoli. Alan Rosen­feld, now a MINI owner and Mr Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite Evan­gel­ist, Europe. (aside: Hey Rosie, where’s your blog?)

Influ­en­cing the sales part of the busi­ness: whether it be Licens­ing sys­tem changes, pri­cing, avail­ab­il­ity, chan­nel strategy. Work­ing with people such as Den­ise Dewell, Anna McNally, the smartest guy in NZ: Lou Nunn, Luke Ogier in our part­ners. What a ride.

In the end, I had reached the end of my nat­ural abil­ity. A change of what I had defined as “a career”, and more import­antly “life”, was in the wind.

The worlds of Split Enz, I Walk Away ring through my head:

Just a slave to ambition /

Ten­sion your per­man­ent condition /

So much you’ve always wanted /

Too much givin’ you a sore head

So, its back to what I enjoy most; enga­ging with cus­tom­ers and tech­no­logy. Real­iz­ing this, I must take time to relearn “tech­nical stuff”.

Some Fre­quently Asked Questions:

1. Have you been forced to take this Leave of Absence?

No. This is a decision I’ve made com­pletely my own, and my family’s, choice.

2. What hap­pens to your cur­rent role?

When you take a Leave of Absence for more than 90 days, your pos­i­tion is deemed “open”. There­fore, Adobe is hir­ing for my role. I will not return to this job.

3. Is this an indic­ator of your opin­ion and/or faith of Adobe’s products?

No. I think I’ll be an Adobe Pho­toshop and Adobe InDes­ign user for life. It’s almost hard­wired. And once you have Pho­toshop neur­ons, the other applic­a­tions just link together.

This leave is for me to reset/reboot and retrain for the next 20 years of my life. For the future of self. Has no rela­tion to the incred­ible Adobe technology.

4. What do you think your future is?

Does any­one know, exactly? It has some­thing to do with End Cus­tom­ers, Soft­ware and Tech­no­logy — from a work per­spect­ive. From a per­sonal per­spect­ive, which is way more import­ant, I’d like to keep that per­sonal. Thanks.

5. Do you plan to return to Adobe?

The answer to this ques­tion is a little out of my hands, but it is my wish to return to a Technical/Evangelism style role. The work I do will be com­pletely dif­fer­ent to what I have done over the last 3 years.

I will always have a pas­sion for Adobe products, as I have for Apple products.

6. How did you come to this decision?

Once my “dream” was to work for Apple. I did that. Then what’s next? Ori­gin­ally, I moved into the chan­nel role for a sim­ilar reason: the chal­lenge. Once you meet your chal­lenge, what’s next?

I had reached the end of my nat­ural abil­it­ies and have decided to reset and go back into a more evangelist/technical/customer role. It is a strange change to “go back”; it lim­its your so-called career pro­spects and income. This is con­trary to what “your upbring­ing” expects — ever higher, ever for­ward, be ambi­tious. This pres­sure is internal, and I think comes from the com­pet­i­tion we exper­i­ence in the school envir­on­ment. Even my alma mater high school, Immanuel College’s motto was “Plus Ultra”; ever higher in Latin.

The scars of ambi­tion do not heal eas­ily. So, my career man­tra is now “what’s next”, tech­no­lo­gic­ally. How can I help a small part of the world? Where can I assist people to take the cool tech­no­logy and apply it in the real world?

It is obvi­ous to state that the future of IT is a highly con­nec­ted, yet loosely coupled world. TCP/IP pack­ets are chan­ging how the world com­mu­nic­ates. Fast pro­cessors are chan­ging how we inter­act with col­lec­ted assort­ments of these pack­ets. Some­where in this maze is a place for an IT veteran.

7. Are you avail­able for freel­ance Tech­nical Sup­port, Train­ing, Con­sult­ing, Stra­tegic Plan­ning or Gardening?

No to the garden­ing; for the other cat­egor­ies please Email me on hodgenick@gmail.com, my rates are reasonable.

8. Hey Nick, do you want to come and work for me?

Offers to hodgenick@gmail.com. All offers are con­sidered, but please do not be dis­ap­poin­ted if yours is politely declined.

9. New! Do you have plans to travel anywhere?

In short, no. Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing too much of over the last 13 years!

A Plea

As a heart-felt plea, I am going to ask you to read this post: How to Find What You Love to Do on LifeHack.org. It provides an excel­lent per­spect­ive on the thought pro­cesses needed to come to terms.

I’ve learnt that it is import­ant for your phys­ical and men­tal health to do what you love to do. No-one wants to, nor should have to, slog it out in a soul-sucking job. No-one wants to live their work life just for a dis­tant chi­mera of “retire­ment”. It is a false goal. Live life for now.

What’s Next? Do some­thing. The ideas and oppor­tun­it­ies spin in my head.

New faces at Adobe in Sydney: Mark Szulc

Where has Nick been in the most recent two months? 70 Days, 7 Countries