Goodbye, Avantas

Today is my last day at Avantas. I started working there just under 17 years ago, in August of 2004, while I was in college. My first job was as the receptionist. I had applied for an early-morning job running reports and doing other "office work" for a department called Agency Management. The shifts were 4am to noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The idea of waking up early terrified me, but it was by far the best paying job I could find that fit with my class schedule, so I applied, then followed up the next week, and was more than a little surprised to get an interview.

I wandered in uncertainly and was soon taken into the main conference room to meet the HR leader and the Director of Operations. I was in a good mood - which must have been apparent - and they were in good moods, we all laughed, I gave honest answers even when they were unflattering and I remembered their names when we parted. I got a call the next day - they thought I'd be a good fit for an IT internship instead, which was fine by me, but I'd work at the front desk the first two weeks while the IT leader vetted me. Avantas managed hospital staffing, and the receptionist position was normally filled by one of the secretarial pool staff that were not on assignment. But, business was booming and everyone was on assignment. Having built websites in high school, I immediately started helping the Marketing director rebuild the company's. Meanwhile, the IT director gave me data entry tasks and some rudimentary data analysis.

Two weeks later I got a cubicle next to his, and along with the other intern (a guy named Jerome who I incidentally knew beforehand) the IT group grew from two to four. Jerome was doing statistical research to predict patient volumes and I was running & modifying Crystal Reports, then learning to build them, later I started using ASP.NET to build an online portal & dashboard, learning as I went. The latter took me a few months, I coded all the graph rendering from scratch using the drawing libraries (I was too naive to know there were 3rd party packages to do this). A lot happened in the first year - Jerome and the other IT guy left, then my boss was let go. I had already been promoted from Intern to Analyst - within a year I was promoted to Analyst 2, then Analyst 3. The two guys I worked closest with then were both cynical and endearing, I had a fraction of their experience, but they were patient, they accepted me, and they taught me a ton. I didn't appreciate it enough then, but looking back, I'm tremendously grateful we crossed paths.

We modified a mostly-finished version of a web-based shift signup application that a contractor had previously built - fixing some glaring omissions and hard-coded parameters, while I softened the shrill UI. We had enough time for functional testing, but not load testing, and the night it went live (at midnight, for reasons lost to time) it timed out on the users due to the database load. No customer support plan existed, and when users called into our 24/7 staffing office, they transferred them to us. We hacked together a series of fixes that night and the following days.

Soon after, we started building version two of the app. We convinced our new director that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch - too many of the foundational assumptions in the code were wrong and couldn't easily be refactored, plus the database was horribly un-optimized. The process of defining the requirements and technical design of the new version was one of the joys of my professional career. My coworker friends taught me how to think about requirements, business object definition, database design, coding standards and more. I look back in awe at what I learned that year. Mid-way through the project, one of them left - then the other six months later. We hired a new UI Developer and I was promoted to Lead Developer. As I was finishing up the last pieces of version 2 - testing the [properly modular] interface I had designed to our 3rd party staffing software - work halted. My boss had signed a contract for another company to build us our own staffing software from the ground up! Being reliant on a 3rd party solution had long held our consulting and business intelligence businesses back, so this was a huge strategic opportunity for Avantas, and one the company subsequently capitalized on. But it meant that version 2 - the only software app I ever designed and built from the ground up - would never see the light of day.

I moved into a Product Manager role and began collaborating daily with the owner of the other company. He and I collaborated to craft and execute an initial product vision and iterative roadmaps - I was a liaison to the users and a subject matter expert, he had experience bringing new software solutions to market, which we did with Smart Square in less than four months, in the spring of 2007.

The following year and a half was a whirlwind, spent building out the rest of the toolkit that we had long envisioned providing our customers. Meanwhile, the idea of going back to school nagged at me - I had never finished my degree, having accepted a full-time position with my second promotion after my internship. I went part-time in 2008, then left completely at the end of the year to do a semester abroad in Finland (I started this blog just prior).

I came home in mid-2009, when the the financial crisis was weighing most severely on the job market. Avantas had done a round of layoffs during my absence and any hires were out of the question. But at the end of that year, a woman who had started our Data Analytics department in 2008 hired me back to work on our patient forecasting - she actually contracted me back for a set number of hours (80, if I recall correctly, mostly to build and validate some data cleansing improvements in SAS), afterwards I proverbially 'kept showing up'. Soon thereafter, she left, and I found myself the sole member of our Analytics team!

When I graduated in the spring of 2010, I was hired back full time into a senior version of my old role. If there is one time in my history at Avantas that I wish I could go back to, it is then, so I could tell myself: "make sure you stay on a track you want to be on." Instead, I stayed - almost mindlessly - in the same role for eleven years. Why?

Because it was good enough in the right ways, I think. It paid enough, I knew enough, it was occasionally satisfying and I was always ready to believe greater things were just around the next corner. But too often in eleven years, they haven't been. The size of our team has increased by an order of magnitude, but it feels like the ability to innovate died years ago, and ultimately the promise of innovation is what has motivated me to work there since the earliest days. I am endlessly proud of the string of achievements from my first five or six years at Avantas. But the solidifying organization strangled our degrees of freedom, leading to a step-change down in our ability to deliver incremental value to our users. Successes now are small and isolated things, and many days it feels like the company - or at least the product - is in some sort of slow "run-off" mode, even though we're still signing contracts and growing revenue.

But I don't want to dwell on this, and even now it's not what I think about when I take a step back to assess the whole arc of my journey at Avantas. Even from the last decade, I'll remember working in good faith with coworkers and customers I liked and respected. And I hope - if I choose to work in technology again - that I can recapture the feeling of those early years, when I walked into an opportunity I couldn't then comprehend, stumbled around, somehow falling mostly forward and upwards, and came out the other end with the skills and experience that would define my career.

What is Impenetrable? + On getting older

In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard recounts a long series of failed attempts to write about his dad, redeemed only by the completion of My Struggle itself, in which he talks about him at length. Something about the subject of his dad and their relationship was hard for him to capture in writing - below I offer what is likely a flimsy and/or unoriginal hypothesis.

Capturing the essence of any real thing is not trivial, but it is harder yet when we are close to it. In our myopia, our understanding is often distorted. What I think is happening in these instances goes like this: we possess a mental construct of some thing (such as Knausgaard's concept of his dad) for which the core contents are inaccessible, the construct itself being impenetrable. In such instances, the 'surface' of this construct (the part we can still examine) are associated emotions which we have reinforced through repetition - an example being Knausgaard's reports that he felt anxious when he thought of his dad, even when he wasn't there - indeed, even after he had died!

Evidenced by the fact that My Struggle was published and it talks about his dad, Knausgaard got past his writer's block. But did he successfully capture the essence of who his dad was? I'm unsure.

It's been said that the best part of his book is his focus on the real, meaning what actually happened. He writes plenty about his dad and how he acted: the strict discipline and swift punishments, his fear from a young age, his dad's alcoholism and their awkward relationship as he becomes an adult. This brings the reader into Knausgaard's own state of doubt, rendering it clearly. But it never produces a satisfactory explanation as to why his dad is how he is, and Knausgaard draws few conclusions of his own.

It's a limitation of style, to be sure - Knausgaard mostly avoids speculating - and trying to answer why -which helps keep the book in the past, where it is at its best. But those why's might have been evident from what is written - certainly a person's actions can tell a coherent story, which I'm not sure they do in this case. It's odd in a book that he has said is about his dad that his dad's motivations remain so inexplicable (and note: saying he was "just an asshole" categorizes - and thus similarly fails to explain). 

Other readers might find the inexplicability interesting - I think it was a drawback for me, but that's okay, I did greatly enjoy the book as a whole. Left nagging at me is the intuition that there is something left un-penetrated in Knausgaard's understanding of his father. I suppose my flimsy hypothesis, then, is that Knausgaard hasn't fully come to terms with his memories and feelings for his father.

Before I go further: it's entirely possible that if I'm right, it just makes the book interesting in a different way. The risk, of course, is that I'm armchair quarterbacking his writing in a way that isn't useful or is off base. That's okay, it's just a sense that I felt compelled to explore by writing down. And besides, I'm getting old, it's about time to start telling stories whose points approach ephemerality, if not total nonexistence.

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In my own past, I've found quite a few topics to be impenetrable in the same sense - on some I've reached a breakthrough, while others I haven't. Sometimes it's hard to know - truth be told, it's probably not binary, but rather a question of degree. If that's true, then it follows that I only have my own intuition to tell me whether I've arrived at a satisfactory place. (Of course, this suggests lots of interesting possibilities, such as the epistemic uncertainty regarding how completely we have penetrated such a topic.)

I recently started writing about my early 20s. Disconnected as I've been from facts about that time period, my preconceptions were mostly made up of the things I've repeatedly told myself, which are self-reinforcing and reductionist. But a truth still existed! I just had to penetrate the surface that had formed over those memories. The process of doing so seemed to correlate with a period of intense dreaming, which I imagine as the psychic equivalent of how massaging a knot out of a muscle releases toxins.

Today I turn 40, and I find myself pondering what remains impenetrable in my past, and how to go about massaging those mental knots away. One of my biggest realizations this year has been that such 'humanist' pursuits (and not material ones) need to be my primary emphasis in the second half of my life. Otherwise, what may become impenetrable is my own pathological avoidance of the feelings and experiences of everyday life.

The Years of Magical Thinking

It's October of the Year Which Shall Not Be Named, we've just gotten an early season snowfall, wind is breaking the seals around the windows, and Signe is crying in the next room, asking for a hug while Merry gives her a time out. My door is closed, I'm supposed to be working, but for the past few days I've found myself fixated on a particular corner of my memories, the time period after graduation in 1999 until I moved into the Dewey house at the end of 2003. I spent most of this time on antidepressant medication, in and out of therapy. I remember it as a painful time, I've long glossed over it, generalizing it to myself as "the years I spent depressed", much of it spent alone in my room, during which I made little progress on anything that mattered.

Where did this sudden curiosity begin? I suppose it was reading Knausgaard's autobiography, which is well-calibrated in observing distant topics, and engaging even about the banal. The "anxiety of influence" inspired me to write about my 20s, though I first intended to focus on the later years, when I lived at Dewey. I wrote about finding the house, what it was like those first few months, and what changed when I met my ex-girlfriend. But an energy kept pulling me backwards. Perhaps it was simply the narrative impulse to explain why. Why was _____ the way it was, why had _____ happened, why did I feel _____? All of these answers lay in the past, so I went searching for evidence - primarily pictures, but what I found were my old digital journals, which I had kept from the beginning of 2000 to mid-2004. What I've read in them over the past few days has re-awoken a world I had largely forgotten.

The events of those years have been weathering and congealing in my brain for over fifteen years, so of course I had forgotten plenty that occurred. And not just certain events, but the reasons for them, their sequence, how I felt about them and made decisions. And of course, most of my memories have proven vastly simpler than what I wrote in my journals. For example, did I spend a lot of time alone in my room? Well, yes, though mostly sleeping or journaling. I spent the rest of my time doing what most people do at the same age - working, in classes or doing homework, and seeing friends.

Harder to quantify, though qualitatively true: I despaired for joys past and to watch the days of my early adulthood burning away in the stasis of a life I didn't know how to live. I struggled with questions of meaning and often got hung up on the "meta" layers of decisions. Meanwhile, my tactical, day-to-day decision-making was atrocious, I didn't yet understand that success is usually a long series of small victories. I was discovering the world and was passionate about many things I was finding - music, writing, people. My writing lacked nuance, swimming in hyperbole. But I was sincere, I had real feelings, in getting excited over new possibilities I often went too far. More than anything, I was prone to magical thinking, often convincing myself of the impossible. I would do anything to shield my ego from the truth, that I was a novice at most things, and couldn’t avoid the hard work required to find my way. Instead I told myself that my misery must be other people's faults, or fate, the plight of the universe, or whatever steered its course.

It hasn't bothered me to be reminded that I was full of delusions. I already knew that, it was only a matter of degree, and the particulars I had forgotten, or repressed. And it reminds me that somewhere along the way, I did manage to climb out of the hole I was in - after all, I ended up where I am today. Things are not perfect in my life, but they are better than 21-year old me had any right to believe in. And indeed, there was a real magic in my thinking then, because imagination is a double-edged sword: engaging with the fantastic has its own capacity to enrich us. Maybe it's the imaginative potency of those years that my mind has latched onto the last few days, as the pendulum of my life may have since swung too far to the other end of the spectrum, where every minute is grounded in practicality (the constancy is, itself, practical). It's not too late to think magically again, though moderation this time might go a long way.

UBI and Inflation

Time for my one economic bloviation of the year - at least I'll try to predict something.

Armchair economists (and plenty of actual economists) have been predicting inflation for years, based on ballooning budget deficits. But both treasury yields and inflation 'break even' measures suggest little market concern. Why would this be?

I believe Robert Shiller generally when he says that the Great Recession changed people's mindsets in a lasting way. Monetary velocity has plummeted as budget deficits have ballooned - part of this may be explained by foreign dollar holdings (foreign governments turn over dollars slower than US consumers). The remainder, however, must be explained by people's time-value preference for spending and saving. Since 2008, people have essentially felt less certain about their own future financial security, and they are saving more to compensate. A third factor is that we are slowly inflecting from a pension-based system to a savings-based system. The latter puts the onus on the individual to concern themselves with things like withdrawal rates and adverse market fluctuations (and the popular narrative is that these are becoming more severe when they occur).

If all this is correct, I predict that we'll get inflation when a UBI (Universal Basic Income) program is passed, which I suspect may just be a matter of time. Why? Not because of budget deficits, but because UBI is essentially a state pension. It would increase perceived financial stability because it would be a permanent income stream (assuming people found the legislation's permanence credible).

When I say, "not because of budget deficits", what I mean is that I believe inflation will follow even if the program is deficit-neutral. I don't even have to know the details - my prediction assumes the dollars being spent into existence in this program will have a profound impact on monetary velocity. Why? Because, as I said, UBI is like a state pension, and thus eliminates the need for proportionate savings. Just for argument's sake, if UBI were $1k/month ($12k/year), how much required savings per person would that eliminate just to 'break even'? It depends on withdrawal rate, etc., but assuming an annual 4% withdrawal rate, it would offset $300k of savings.

What would happen if every American suddenly realized they could do some combination of: spend $300k of savings they already had, or forego saving $300k of future income? Would that have a profound effect on inflation? My modest guess, as of August of 2020, is yes.

Goodnight

The other night putting my daughter to bed, she gave me a hug without me asking and said, 'love you, daddy', and I had a moment of recognition for how fast she is growing. I also imagined, quite suddenly, that she will be there when I die, standing over me as I lay in a bed, and in that moment she might bid me farewell much as I bid her goodnight so long before, as if pushing out from the shore onto a lake shrouded in fog into which I would, in a moment, disappear.

In that gesture, my daughter was also a primitive sort of savior, guarding my passage into the following realm.

(It's not that I believe anything awaits, but if this is all we have, then it is more important yet.)

The Unveiling

In his 2008 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett described the financial crisis which had just passed: "As the year progressed, a series of life-threatening problems within many of the world’s great financial institutions was unveiled." His choice of the word "unveiled" struck me from that first read, though I couldn't put my finger on why. Now, living through the modern Coronavirus pandemic, I think I finally understand it.

The world today is no different than it was a few months ago, but it did resolve itself to the present in one particular way - a relatively lethal, and quickly-propagating virus spread across the globe. It could've happened at any time and place, but the world has just unveiled to us that it will happen here and now.

For me, this has occurred with a peculiar backdrop:

1. At the beginning of March, we went to Arizona for Merry's work conference and a family vacation. I had kept up on the virus's spread and I knew we were cutting it close to travel when it might already have been spreading through the local population.
2. I planned to finish working in June of this year, by which time I expected to have both adequate money in my checking account and IRA to constitute a safety net. Now my real estate businesses are in distress (tenants aren't paying rent) and my IRA value has collapsed, making this unviable.
3. Now, due to the virus, all our travel plans have been put off and we necessarily spend almost all of our time at home. Merry and I both work from home and Signe's daycare is closed.

There are many silver linings, though:

1. Though Signe being home while we have to work is a logistical nightmare, it is also "immersion therapy" for a degree of accountability to my family that I had avoided for the past three years.
2. I get to spend lots of time with Signe every day, as her language and imagination are quickly developing.
3. Going nowhere and without daycare expenses, we spend almost no money.
4. My habits are strongly-formed, and anything that pushes me out of them is probably a long-term benefit. To give two examples: my drinking has decreased to almost zero, and I have cut out buying many things that had grown habitual.
5. Much of this is a glimpse into what a post-work life could be like, before I choose to go through with it.

When I look out the window in this new world just unveiled, I see something quite different than before. I see a world in which travel is impossible - indeed, much of the outdoors are literally off limits - and quitting work is financially infeasible. The world didn't change - before & after photographs out that same window would be indistinguishable - this unveiling has simply occurred with ruthless speed, along an axis I of which I had never conceived, and I stand disbelieving the sight before my eyes.

Another Country, A Second Reading

I wrote a story a few years ago called Another Country that is still my favorite thing I've written. And then I mentally let it go. About six months ago, though, I went back to proofread it and clean up some grammar (stuff that should've happened before I ever considered it finished) before finally showing it to a friend. That re-reading allowed me to see aspects of the story that weren't apparent to me when I wrote it. I've read about this phenomenon, but I had not experienced it for myself until then.

What did I notice in that second reading? Mainly, that the story contains a metaphor of women - and specifically possible romantic partners - as countries. Both are 'places' that we may visit for a length of time - short or long - and in which we may experience a great deal or a little, shallowly or deeply, leaving us anywhere between unchanged, and profoundly changed. (Funny: the metaphor isn't just apparent in the story - it's almost heavy-handed, making it that much more remarkable that I didn't notice it while writing it.) Furthermore, any Freudians would likely notice that "country" is even prefixed phonetically by an especially foul (though pertinent) term.

It wasn't just that the metaphor eluded my conscious consideration - the whole notion that this was a story about women, or relationships, was not what I considered myself to be writing. It began as a story about travel, and the way places imprint themselves on us. The women worked their way into the story, I think, as part of the natural 'backdrop' the narrator experiences (or so it seemed at the time). I can only suspect that from that point, the metaphor took hold subconsciously, which pulled them further into the story, reinforcing the metaphor, in a virtuous cycle. This would at least explain the relative elegance of the narrative alignment to the metaphor - the narrator's encounter with each woman feels harmonious with the place - not in the sense that the women "belong" in their locations, but rather that you believe his memory of each country could never be separated from his memories of the particular women. And, vice versa.

It's interesting to me that Gabby, herself traveling between countries, seems to transcend the framework in which the other women exist. So what is she? She could be seen as the counterpart to the narrator - someone else whose romantic attachments change with each country. Interestingly, both characters' home countries are referred to - early in the story, their having departed them, and near the end, their returns (the narrator's occurring in the story's last line, albeit only in his mind). This parallels the way our relationships exist within the bookends of our lives, as we arrive and depart from this life alone.