One day you and I can sit down and compare how many whiffs we have had that have nothing to do with real estate. I think I could give you a run for your money but you my friend are a player…
GREAT POST.
Still curious about the relative…
SD Realtor
I really don't know why I'm venting this out. Oh, that's right, I'm waiting for some guy on the other side of the globe to tell me what they hell they did to something I asked them to do…And this is one of those days, when I'm in a "if I only did XXXX, I wouldn't have to deal with this mood.""" Grrr…
….I wouldn't say I'm a player. In fact, I would say I got played quite a lot. The irony to all this job hopping wasn't because I was trying to chase after a gold pot. The irony to all this was each time I was frustrated with a particular situation, and had something with greater responsibility lined up, either a promotion and/or new challenges, but left a lot of "luck money" on the table accidently.
When I was qualcomm, for example, I went through pretty difficult interviews and crap to get in the door as a fresh college grad. And then when I get there, all they wanted me to do was be a test monkey. I got the runaround about "oh, you need blah blah blah masters to do development, blah blah blah PHD to do r&d. You do such a great job at testing, we'll give you a bigger raise, we can't have you move now. But if you wait 4-5 years, we'll talk." Two year later was a massive hiring year in the bay area (98). A startup basically let me offered to learn on the fly and run my own show. So it was really a no brainer to give QCOM the middle finger at the time.
And, the tradition continued, company after company in the bay area. People quit left and right for more money every 6month-year. I moved whenever I got more responsibility, so employers were pretty nice to me because I wasn't a money grabby man-hoar. The new company always threw in the "options" as a teaser, but it really didn't start to stick with me until the third of fourth company when I was working 80+hrs developing software, miserable as hell, and when I reached realized "Sh!t, all my buddies that were on H1-B visas use to be bitter because they couldn't hop around…They must be laughing their asses off because being "stuck" at those previous companies I left doing 40 hours/week and collecting booty options was wasn't such a bad thing. I work as much as my investment banking friends, but at least they're making a killing wrecking their life."
It also didn't help matters when you were hired at salary X, the next day some fresh grad punk with no experience came in at a salary higher than you, and would leave to another company that paid more 1 month later. In the long run, it didn't matter because a lot of them got flushed out after the dot bomb, because they never learned anything real.
But what made my day, was I met a lot of entrepreneurs and brilliant people up there…My best times was when the bubble started to fissle, because all the wannabe techie's suddenly stopped getting employed, and the true people that were left were the ones you really wanted to run with. Frankly I miss the spirit of those people. I can't explain, but it's just different down here in San Diego.
Since then, I learned sometimes not having choices in life is a good thing, because it makes you appreciate more what you have. It would have made me stick to one thing longer. Don't know if that would have been good or bad, but financially it would have been good. Another thing. Job hoping when you're in the twenties is not an issue. It's also not an issue when you're in the Bay Area. Here in SD, the community is much smaller. You don't want to be perceived as being flaky, so it's been really hard for me to "adjust". Why am I here, you might say? Well, I lost a coin toss to my then girlfriend, so I moved. 1/2002 was probably the worst year to relocate, because that was right after 9/11, and the dot.com meltdown. What was even more foolish is not having something lined up first before moving. Oh well, it all worked out, sort of. One of these days, I plan on moving back to the Bay Area…
I won't go into all the times I got swiddled during startups either. Or each times I feared for being put in a compromised lie with a customer when our company was trying to sell something that it didn't have 1 line of code written or other questionable things that was prevalent in these dot bombs…
BTW, where's my bailout from the Government each time that happened?
