Cast of 24, season 6

Fans of FOX’s hit show 24 have been feeling antsy lately. The season that was supposed to begin in January 2008 was postponed by a full year because of the writers strike. And in this time of economic crisis, a few people have considered working at the (fictional) Counter Terrorist Unit, to bring in an income and get their 24 fix at the same time.

But before you run off to a new life of defending America from the steadily growing list of countries we’ve angered, consider these 8 reasons why working at CTU isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

1. Disaster will find you.

The CTU branch we always see is in Los Angeles. I’m not sure what’s cursed: the city itself, or Jack Bauer, who happens to be there. But in 24 world, L.A. is a disaster magnet.

If a nuclear missile is launched in Iowa and no one knows what direction it’s going in, its target will invariably be Los Angeles. If eleven vials of a deadly virus are to be released across the country, exactly one of them will be untraceable due to a broken tracking device, and it will be in Los Angeles.

I don’t know why they even bother trying to track down bad guys, when clearly they must be in Los Angeles. It’s an inescapable law of the universe.

2. Status reports every 15 minutes.

Department heads need to give status reports to the director every 15 minutes. So maybe they do 5 minutes of work, then spend 5 minutes gathering updates from their subordinates, then spend 5 minutes briefing the director.

Then the director can update the President, who also wants a status report every 15 minutes. When does anyone have time to get their work done?

3. Serious job pressure.

All CTU employees must be ready to perform superhuman feats at any moment. When Jack calls and says he needs you to shut down the power supply to the entire state of California, you have about eight seconds to get it done before you’re fired.

Don’t even think about saying that it’s your first day and you don’t know the password to the central server. If you can’t do it, they’ll find someone who can.

4. You can’t trust anyone.

On a pretty regular basis, Division will send over a new person you’ve never met. This person will be highly skilled but rude and arrogant, and you won’t like them. You’ll notice them frequently breaking protocol, for example, by making suspicious calls on a personal cell phone that can’t be monitored. If you inquire about this, they’ll threaten to report you to the director for something that wasn’t your fault.

At some point, someone will announce that security has been compromised by a mole working inside CTU, and everyone will wonder who it is. Then you’ll learn that all along, the mole was your friend who had worked with you for five years. Either that, or it was a friend or family member you hadn’t seen in a long time.

5. If you don’t die, your friends will.

While the risk to your own life is considerable, it’s an absolute certainty that you’ll lose some friends. The moles are most likely to be either the people you most suspect or the people you least suspect, so it’s best not to get too attached to these people.

Instead, try to befriend people who are well known but not interesting, as they’re usually innocent. However, these people are likely to die when CTU is attacked. Try to think of them more as goldfish than people.

6. If people come back to life, they turn evil.

The upside to your friends dying is that they might not stay dead. The downside is that if they come back, they’ll want revenge on the country that betrayed them.

Stephen Saunders, the MI6 operative who was killed in the strike against Victor Drazen, returned as a criminal mastermind for reasons he claimed we could never understand.

Former CTU director Tony Almeida was killed twice, once by a car bomb and once by lethal injection. He will return in January as one of the main terrorists, undoubtedly for reasons we could never understand.

7. CTU is chronically short on resources.

CTU is the most underfunded government agency in history. Every year or two, the fate of the world (or at least a significant part of it) all comes down to CTU, and yet they complain about being short on resources every time.

When there’s some code that needs to be broken to determine the location of the nuclear bomb about to go off, there will be at most two analysts on staff who are capable of doing such a thing. Both of them will have been working for 24 hours straight, and only one of them will really know what they’re doing. But neither of them will have time to break the code because they’ll both be busy trying to reposition satellites before they lose their only lead.

Division, Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense all seem to have an endless supply of world class consultants they can send over at a moment’s notice, but the director of CTU usually doesn’t feel like asking for help. Instead, they’d prefer to squeeze the maximum possible use out of each person and hope they last until the end of the crisis.

Nor does the director feel the need to request more funding for this agency that appears to really need it. CTU gets called in when the FBI, CIA, and Armed Forces can’t get the job done, yet they can’t even afford a receptionist. Every time Jack calls, he gets a completely random person. (The number is (310) 597-3781, a working number that usually goes to voicemail but occasionally goes through to a writer, producer, or actor.)

8. No bathroom.

CTU has a bathroom, but it has only been used three times in the entire history of the agency. This might result from the critical staff shortage, as people don’t always have time to hack into nuclear reactors to prevent meltdowns, let alone go to the bathroom.

Once, Chloe went into the men’s room and startled someone. It’s not clear whether he was startled because there was a woman in the men’s room, or because of the astronomical odds that any two people at CTU would use the bathroom at the same time.

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So before you decide that a job at CTU is full of glory, consider the consequences. Anyway, word has it that CTU has been disbanded in the new season (possibly due to lack of resources). If you want to earn an income online instead, read Why We’re Broke and How To Fix It.

Interesting tidbits relevant to today’s election: In season 2, 24 became the first TV show to portray a black U.S. president.^{[citation needed]} In season 5, John McCain made a cameo appearance as an unidentified, non-speaking bureaucrat.

Photo by rodrigo senna

After being laid off from my software development job last Friday, I’m now a problogger! The last time this happened, I was “unemployed.” Now, I’m a “problogger,” which sounds infinitely cooler.

I’ve never liked the fact that the term is defined by something you don’t do (have a job) instead of something you do do (reaching certain blog milestones). Hehe, I just said doodoo. I also find it interesting that people write it as one word because they’re used to it as a domain and blog name. You wouldn’t write “he’s a protennisplayer,” right? Anyway, the term problogger has caught on, so I’ll stick with it.

What does being a problogger mean for me? I’m looking at three options.

1. Go back to work immediately

For close to two months, I suspected I would be laid off on or shortly after October 3. And every time someone asked me how the job search was coming along, my answer was “I haven’t started yet.” That was still my answer on Friday after being laid off.

My boss looked at me like I was crazy, and said, “Well, you really need to get on the ball now. You need to decide what your specialty will be within .NET development, because there are lots of opportunities…” I didn’t want to tell him that I stopped caring a long time ago.

Anyway, I made it to the end, so I get severance pay. I didn’t want to accept another job before then and miss out on the severance, but now it would be reasonable to look for another job. Still, I don’t think I’m going to.

In A Year Without Paychecks, Part 2, Akemi Gaines wrote about her life shortly after quitting her admin job in Oregon:

“There were mornings I woke up and wondered what to do. Occasionally, I thought of looking for temp jobs. Then I thought why the heck would I get another admin job in Oregon – if that was what I wanted to do, I didn’t need to quit. Duh.”

I love that Duh at the end. And that’s exactly right. I’ve been looking forward to being laid off (even dropping hints that they didn’t need me) so I didn’t have to work anymore. If I went back to work right away, then what did I need to get laid off for? Duh. Besides, you’d have to be crazy to want a job.

2. Stay retired forever

The opposite extreme is staying retired forever. By “retired,” I don’t mean lying comatose under a pile of empty beer cans, just not having a 9-5. I’ll talk more about that in the next section.

Tina Su has recently ditched her day job, getting by mainly on the income from her blog’s 400,000 monthly page views. But I’m not close to that yet.

I’m going to be looking into some different options for making money, such as freelance blogging (which I already do some of), other kinds of writing or editing, tutoring kids in math, day trading (just kidding!), etc. (Not sure how much you’re allowed to do outside of blogging without endangering your problogger status.)

But I keep reminding myself that the goal isn’t just to make money. I have to be careful not to pursue paths that will involve doing things I don’t like too much, for not too much money. Even if it’s not a job, it could very well be worse than one. Which leads me to the option I’m leaning towards…

3. Have a mini-retirement

The concept of mini-retirements was popularized by Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek. Most people are participants in the deferred life plan, where you work for decades and then get to enjoy your life just in time to die. The idea of mini-retirements is that you split up your work life by taking short stints of temporary retirement, such as by living in another country for a few months. Tim’s life is now basically one mini-retirement after another, funded by the proceeds of his nutritional supplement business that he works on for 4 hours a week (thanks to masterful delegation, elimination, and automation).

Tim previously made up to $70,000 a month in different business ventures, but was working himself to death. Now he’s basically retired and does everything he wants for less than $5,000 a month. He says he’s not a multi-millionaire, nor does he particularly care to be one.

After reading his book, people sometimes say something like, “That’s so great that he stopped chasing money, because he realized that all that matters is happiness.” But if they think that, they apparently didn’t understand the book very well.

The only reason he can do everything he does is because he makes enough money to pay for everything without working (OK fine, working 4 hours a week). He doesn’t have to be a multi-millionaire because he found a way to create the passive income of one. (Generating $5,000 a month in dividends from an S&P 500 index fund takes roughly $5 million. There are better ways of doing it, but this is just an example.)

Likewise, everyone seems to love the story of the Harvard MBA and the Mexican fisherman, and they think it’s a great example of how money doesn’t matter. Except they’re missing the fact that the fisherman can only do what he does because he makes enough money from his hobby that he doesn’t have to work. I invite you to go fishing and see if you can support your family that way.

Every loves to say that money doesn’t buy happiness. True, but it does buy freedom.

My mini-retirement

Fortunately, I have enough money to buy a little freedom, so it looks like I’ll be taking a mini-retirement. Most people associate mini-retirements with travel, but I won’t be going anywhere (or at least, that won’t be the focus). I’m just not that into travel, and I already went to Japan and Charleston, SC this year, so I don’t feel the need.

One common problem of having too much time on your hands is the high risk of boredom. Many people don’t know what to do with their newfound freedom, and need to go back to work just to have something to do. That seems like an awful solution to me.

Tim Ferriss talks about “filling the void.” You suddenly have a bunch of empty time, and you have to fill it with something. The goal is not to be idle all the time, but to be active doing what you want to do. If you can’t think of anything better to do with your time than running in the rat race, then exactly how are you better than a rat?

I’m sure it will be an adjustment, but I’m not worried about being bored. For one thing, even if I suck at this and end up craving a 9-5, (1) at least I’ll know that I need to figure out what’s wrong with me, and (2) I’ll be a lot more enthusiastic about working after a break.

Besides, I think I have plenty to keep me busy. Because I’ll have a lot more physical and mental energy, I’ll be able to take up interesting projects that I just wasn’t motivated enough to do before.

I haven’t even begun my first day of retirement yet (since I’d have the weekend off anyway), but already I’ve experimented with my first vegetarian meal. Of course, everyone has vegetarian meals all the time (I never have meat for breakfast), but I mean consciously choosing vegetarian when meat was readily available and would have been my normal choice, and real food, not like when I went to a restaurant a few years ago and had ice cream for dinner.

I had a vegetarian burrito at Chipotle, and it was good. I could have easily made it vegan too–I don’t think I would have missed the cheese and guacamole. It was pretty enormous, and there’s actually a Smaller Burrito at Chipotle Petition you can sign. I’d just as soon make it two meals though.

I’m not saying I’m trying to become a vegetarian, but I’ve heard enough that I was interested in doing some experiments, though I didn’t have the energy to try before, because I don’t really like vegetables. But now I know that rice and beans and such seem like normal food to me. It’s a first step.

This is just one example of something I’m trying. My next post will announce a really wacky personal growth experiment I’m going to be doing. I don’t know everything I’m going to be doing in my mini-retirement, but I know it will be interesting (for me at least). I’m sure I’ll be writing about some of it, but at the same time, this blog isn’t a personal journal.

Time management will be a challenge. It’s easy to manage your time when you don’t have any, or when all you want to do is unwind after a stressful day at work. It’s a lot harder to manage your time when you have all the time in the world. You become overconfident in your ability to get everything done, and then at the end of the day you find that you didn’t actually do anything. I’m going to be whipping up a new todoodlist or two to stay on track.

One trap I’m going to be sure to avoid is spending too much time blogging, meaning both reading and writing (yes, even as a “problogger”). I used to often have huge chunks of free time at work that I could spend reading blogs, sometimes the full eight hours. But now, I have to always be asking myself, “Is this the most important thing I could be doing?” Blogging will still be a very important part of my day, but I want to do a lot more.

I’ve always had a hard time justifying mini-retirements because the mathematician in me would think about compound interest, and all the money I’d really be losing by not working. On the other hand, I’ve always been putting aside money for retirement, and now I’m going to be doing exactly what I’m saving for. There will always be jobs available, but I think I have to take this time to enjoy life now.

Here I am writing this on a Sunday night, and for the first time in a long while, I’m not dreading tomorrow.

P.S. Assuming FeedBurner is working correctly, I hit 600 subscribers yesterday. I guess I’m like John Chow: “I gain subscribers by telling people how many subscribers I gain.”

Photo by -bast-

The year was 1998, and we were at the peak of the tech boom. I was about to graduate from Virginia Tech with a master’s degree in computer science, and I had a 4.0 GPA. It was a good time to look for a job.

One company was flying in a few Virginia Tech students for interviews. We flew in to Raleigh-Durham, NC the day before, spent the night in a hotel, and a car was sent for us in the morning. We showed up at the office, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

They showed us around the building and pointed out all the groundbreaking work they were doing. Then they put on a fantastic presentation, and I was completely sold. During my interviews, I easily answered all the questions they threw at me, and I had a great feeling about everything. At the end, I smiled, shook the guy’s hand, and waited outside with the rest of the candidates. Pretty soon I would be told that I had taken one giant leap towards the American Dream.

Except that I didn’t get the job.

“What do you mean I didn’t get the job?” I shouted, with little concern for how I sounded. The lady just said “Unfortunately, the interviewers didn’t think you were a good match for the positions they had available.” Today, I know that that’s a euphemism for “You suck.” Back then, I thought they really meant that somehow my skills didn’t fit anything they had available.

I couldn’t stop trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I replayed my interviews over and over in my head, and I didn’t really see what I could have done better. I guess I could have answered some of the questions faster, instead of taking some time to remember the syntax of certain Unix commands, but I didn’t think that was it.

I decided that I had to email them and find out. So I wrote up a polite but direct email, saying I really wanted to work there, I was confused about why I didn’t get an offer, and I was wondering if they could tell me why.

The answer really surprised me. It was right then that I learned the most important question to answer in a job interview is one that doesn’t get asked. And that question is “Do you want the job?”

The lady said that the interviewers liked me, and they were impressed with my technical knowledge, but they thought I was just job shopping, and didn’t seem to have any real interest in the company at all. They said I didn’t ask many questions, or even say that I wanted the job.

Wait a minute, time out here–I have to tell them that I want the job? Why the hell would I fly in and interview for a job I didn’t want? And no real interest in the company? I had spent days reading their website and they were one of my top two choices. I didn’t ask many questions because I already knew what I needed to know. Why didn’t they ask me why I wanted to work there, if there was any doubt?

I thought that an interview was like a test: they ask questions, you answer them correctly, and you get the job. But actually, you pass the test by asking questions, not answering them. You ask questions to show interest in the company and convince them that you want the job.

I didn’t get my dream job, but I had a second chance. Right before I had hopped on the plane for the first interview, I had gotten a message from another person in that company, inviting me in for an interview in a different division. So when I returned, I set up that interview and got on another plane, this time to New Jersey. Time to test out my new interviewing skills.

I knew the company’s drill by now, so I was a little impatient with seeing the tour and the presentation again. I wanted to get to the interview. While I thought I’d do better in the interview this time, there was something going against me. At the first interview, I was competing against other Virginia Tech students. This time, I was competing against people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon. Would asking a few questions be enough to stand out against them?

It was. I got the job. In fact, I had multiple people fighting over me, and I got an offer for about 50% more money than my next best offer.

What made this moment even better is that I recognized one of the people there from the first interview. She was the one I had emailed to find out why I didn’t get the job before. She came up to me, smiled, and said “I’ll pass this news on to your friends from the other office.” (Incidentally, I’ve sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out if I had gotten the job in North Carolina instead of New Jersey.)

So my tricks worked, but I didn’t know why. All I did was ask questions that weren’t really important, or which I already knew the answer to. My natural inclination is to ask questions to obtain information, not to impress people. But apparently, asking questions is an effective way to show that you want a job.

Here are some of my favorite interview questions to ask:

• How long have you worked here?
• What is your favorite thing about working here?
• If you had to pick something as your least favorite thing about working here, what would that be?
• What kind of person are you looking for?
• Can you talk about what would make someone a good match, or not a good match?
• Can you describe a typical day here?

I’ve heard several times that at the end of the interview, you should explicitly state that you want the job. If you can find a natural way to say that, fine, but I like to ask “Is there any reason you wouldn’t hire me?” This makes it clear that you want the job, and it has the added benefit of possibly giving you a chance to address any perceived weaknesses.

There are other questions that will implant the idea of you working there, such as “Can I meet some of the people I’d be working with?” or “Where are the good places to have lunch around here?”

You should send an email after the fact as a thank you, and you can use this to clarify that you really want to work there. I sent one thank you email where I said that I was wearing the temporary tattoo they had given me. Later, they said they hired me specifically because of that. (Their second reason for hiring me: because they were in Virginia and I was in New Jersey, they wanted to know if I could be available for an interview in the next couple of weeks. I said I could be there in 4 hours.)

In a logical world, these dumb tricks wouldn’t work. But most people aren’t logical. So if someone is going to give more weight to your temporary tattoo than to your ability to get the job done, slapping on a tattoo is an easy way to game the system.

I made the mistake of thinking that you aced an interview by answering the questions they asked. I had no idea that you also have to answer the hidden question of “Do you want the job?” Once I learned that, interviewing became much easier.

Have you ever made a mistake? Catherine Lawson will link to you if you fess up by July 22nd (see that link for details).

This post appeared in The 7th Edition Of The Carnival Of Careers, hosted by Erik Folgate.

Photo by SqueakyMarmot

Well, it’s that time–the end of the 365-day period ending June 30, 2008. Why am I writing a year-end review in July? One, because everyone else does it in December, and for me it gets a little tiring to read a bunch of posts like this at the same time. Two, because I’ve never seen the need to wait until New Year’s to reassess your situation.

When I say “the year in review,” I mean regarding this blog and my life. A bit self-centered, yes, but this post will definitely apply to you if you’re trying to escape the rat race or you’re interested in making money online.

When I look at my life, the only major challenge I care about is escaping the rat race. What I mean by that is making a living (and preferably a good living) from an occupation I enjoy and have control over. This means everything to me. If I have any other problems, they’re so small that I’m not even noticing them.

I recently worked with a career coach who had the insight and the guts to say that I’ll never be happy in any job. Of course, I already knew that, but it’s good to have professional confirmation so I know for sure what I’m looking at. So what will I do about that? Well first, here’s my situation:

- I make a moderate salary as a software developer. It pays the bills and lets me save some money, but it’s certainly not going to let me retire tomorrow. Most importantly, I really don’t enjoy it. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, but employment just isn’t for me.

- Thanks to years of somewhat extreme frugality and compound interest, I make decent passive income from stock mutual funds. In the long run, this will be by far my favorite income stream, because given enough time it will result in a lot of income with basically no work. But for now, it’s not really that much. Furthermore, it comes mostly in the form of unrealized capital gains, so I can’t get the money out without selling and paying taxes (and I don’t like paying taxes).

- My next biggest income stream is from being a part-time network marketing consultant. This was doing well and growing for a while, but lately I’ve been struggling as new competitors have flooded the pay-per-click market, eager to set money on fire. I won’t bid more than 35 cents max for a click, but top bids for one important keyword are over $11! That can’t be profitable for them unless they’re really ripping off their customers, but it’s shutting out those of us who won’t play that game. I’ll have to see how this plays out. I have a more or less neutral feeling about the work; it’s way better than a job, but I can’t say that I actually like it for reasons other than generating income without having a boss.

- One income stream that I started 7 months ago is this blog. The income is extremely low, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking that blogging is an easy way to make 6 figures. But though the income is low, it’s growing steadily so far (with the exception that my blog income was down in June after being way up in May because of the 28,000 visitors to 10 Reasons Japan Is Better Than America). And it’s so much fun. I’d be incredibly happy if I could do it full time.

So back to what to do about the rat race. Here are some possibilities:

1. Do nothing.

Just do what “everyone” does and stay in the rat race. I believe that some people honestly like their jobs, but that’s sure not me. For me, taking the normal route isn’t an option. Even if I don’t succeed in any of the alternatives, I couldn’t forgive myself for not trying.

2. Find a higher paying job.

The idea with this strategy is that if more money is coming in, I can save more and retire earlier. Better than option 1, but far from ideal. I’d like to do a little more work for a little more money, or a lot more work for a lot more money, but in my experience, climbing the ladder means doing a lot more work for a little more money. And I want to enjoy the journey, not just the destination.

3. Find a part time job.

This is similar to #2. More money for more work, only the extra work is with a different company. But I haven’t been able to find any part time jobs in software development. I’m not necessarily restricting myself to that, but I sure don’t want a minimum wage job.

I did come close to getting this to work when a company I worked at went out of business. Someone started a company to service the clients that were left behind, and they wanted to pay developers $70 – $90 an hour for working nights and weekends. It would have been great, except they didn’t get as many clients as they wanted, and they ended up needing only one developer (who wasn’t me).

4. Make a decent income outside of a job.

Now things start getting interesting. I think making a modest income without a job is way better than making a high income with a job. This blog is a perfect example of a way to make money without a job, but I’m a long way from making any real money, let alone something to live on.

So far, I haven’t done much monetization. I put some AdSense ads up, but AdSense doesn’t pay much, and I’m making even less than other blogs with the same amount of traffic. I think this is for three reasons:

- I got most of my subscribers when ProBlogger linked to The Zen of Blogging. They’re likely to be bloggers themselves, and bloggers tend to show ad blindness.

- Search engine visitors like to click ads, but I’ve only recently emerged from the Google sandbox, so my search traffic has been essentially nil so far. And I still seem to be sandboxed for some keywords that I know I should rank well for (and in fact, I do rank well for them on Yahoo).

- I’ve refrained from putting ads in the best hotspot: the upper left corner of the content. Many successful AdSense publishers do that because it gets the most clicks, but I figured that since I don’t have search traffic yet, there’s no need for it. Besides, when I use an image, I want that to appear at the top, not an ad.

But to have a good chance of making money from a blog, you need to look beyond AdSense.

Consulting

In Skellie’s post A Practical Guide to Earning Six Figures: Re-inventing What You Have, she presents an idea that I found interesting:

“Consulting carries a high per-hour rate and is highly customizable. Aside from traditional types of consulting (SEO consulting, branding consultations, etc.), there’s nothing to stop a talented World of Warcraft player offering consulting to players who want to increase their skills…”

This caught my eye because my research project for my master’s degree in computer science was on Warcraft! I guess I have a master’s degree in Warcraft, if you will. So, does anyone out there need a Warcraft consultant? However, I’d need to update my knowledge, since my project was on Warcraft and Warcraft II, and I know nothing about the latest release.

This particular angle might not work, but the whole coaching/consulting/freelancing deal is certainly worth considering when you realize that a small blogger can make more money from one hour of consulting than they could from a year of AdSense.

Paul Piotrowski is a newcomer to making money online, making only $7 in March. But he made a whopping $1,528 in June! What I found most interesting about his June 2008 blog income report is that he made $600 from blog coaching. This shows that you can make money from consulting even before you’ve built up a reputation. Because of his posts, I believed that Paul was knowledgeable about making money online even before he had actually done it himself (just like I think I’m knowledgeable even though I haven’t done it yet). And because other people believed he could help them, he got some clients. Because of those clients, he has made what I would consider the start of good money online. And now that he’s done it, he has a reputation that will bring him more clients with less effort.

Ebooks

I’ve written two ebooks so far: The Zen of Blogging and Memoirs of a Gaijin. Both of these were free, and while I think I could have charged something for Memoirs, I felt better about doing it for free, even though it was a lot of work. But now I think it’s time to move on to paid ebooks. They take a lot of effort to write, but I think that when shared with the right person, they can be far more valuable than free posts or even real books. And in return for providing that value, you can be paid. Furthermore, by offering an affiliate program, you give your readers a chance to make money from recommending your ebooks. This is definitely something I want to pursue.

Freelancing

Freelancing is not really something I’ve considered. People call it a business, but I’m not sure how it’s that different from a job. You can work from home on your own schedule, but you still have a boss (or many bosses), and you might have limited control over what you do. It can also be hard to find work.

Let’s use freelance blogging as an example. When Skellie said in Freelance Blogging for Side Income: My Top 10 Tips that even a newbie freelance blogger should never write for less than $50 for a 500 word post, some people thought that rate was much too high to be realistic. Professional freelance writer Monika Mundell said “Prospective clients get shifty at the thought of paying $15 for 200 words and I’m only dreaming of being paid these rates.” (However, it wasn’t long before Monika reported being paid $50 for a post.)

Let’s say that you manage to snag what some people consider a fantastic rate of $50 for a 500 word post (which is supposed to take 2 hours to write). Even if you get that rate, that’s only $25 per hour, or $50,000 a year. And that’s only if you’re able to find enough work (4 posts a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year), and you’re able to write enough on whatever topics you’re given, and you’re able to write these posts in 2 hours. This post I’m writing now is going to take way longer than 2 hours. Of course, it’s way longer than 500 words, and I’m watching Jurassic Park in the background, but still…

In spite of these potential problems, I was considering doing some freelance blogging. But I couldn’t commit to any kind of schedule, like 5 posts per week. At this point, it would have to be a “write whenever you like” kind of deal. As I was wondering how to find someone who would pay $50 per post whenever I could come up with something, I noticed that one of the Anywired commenters gave the name “Michael Martin.” I clicked through for no other reason than because I thought maybe it was Michael Martine and he had just misspelled his name. Well, it was actually a guy named Michael Martin, and you wouldn’t believe what post came up: Hiring Blog Design Writers, $50 per post! I’m not sure how many posts I can write about blog design, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Being a programmer, I’ve looked into freelance programming, but I haven’t found anything. On RentACoder, I saw a lot of people with tons of skills trying to underbid each other for tiny jobs. I sure don’t want to spend hours searching for a 30-minute job at a low rate. If I were going to do this, I’d want something more permanent, like a long-term contract or a part-time job, and I haven’t been able to find one.

In A Practical Guide to Earning Six Figures: Reboot Your Career, Skellie said a friend of a friend earns over $200,000 by working 3 months a year in a difficult and obscure programming language with little competition. Sounds like an amazing deal, but I don’t suppose you happen to know what that language might be, do you?

Here’s to 2009!

As we begin the 365-day period ending June 30, 2009, I’m renewing my efforts to make a living online. Are you trying to do this too, or are you already doing it? Leave a comment and let us know how things are going for you!

I saw this clip on IttyBiz, but it wasn’t working for me at first. I later tried it on a different computer and it worked. I’m really glad I tried it again, because it’s priceless.

Security Cam Footage of Cubicle Rage to the Extreme is Every Cube Dweller’s Fantasy

These videos show a guy who just couldn’t take any more of his cubicle paradise. Watch him fight coworkers, throw monitors, swing an axe, and just cause general destruction before finally being brought down with a taser.

Some people are saying it’s fake, and it might be. I’m not going to run it through my fraud filter, because deep down every employee wants it to be real. I just hope that no one got hurt.

Have you ever wanted to destroy an office? What would it take to make you lose it?

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I’m going out of town for a bit, coming back Tuesday night. Play nice.

I took a day off from work today. Or rather, HR sent me home after a coworker found me lying comatose in my chair. I really needed the day off, as my head, chest, nose, throat, and stomach just aren’t cooperating at all, and I’m feeling chills that aren’t warranted by the 75 degree temperature.

Of course, I wouldn’t have come in to work in the first place if I could have afforded to take the day off. But being a new employee means you start with no vacation. I spent a week in Colorado this summer, and I had to go into a negative vacation balance to do it. Now I’m planning a trip to Japan in the spring, and I want to save up enough vacation time to cover that.

So yesterday when I was having trouble staying awake at work, I just closed my eyes for a bit. Today I made it in OK, but quickly realized that I was completely non-functional, and would have to more or less sleep the whole time. So when a thoughtful coworker noticed, he tried to work something out with HR. The HR lady is very nice, and said I could work from home without using my vacation time, and got a network guy to verify that my laptop had VPN access. I do consider this a favor though instead of just common courtesy, because my group typically doesn’t work from home, and she knows that I didn’t have much chance of actually getting any work done.

I thought that I had caught something from the guy next to me, who sounded like he was coughing up a lung yesterday (I’m sure he wanted to take a day off, but he’s newer than I am, so he has even less vacation time). But then the network guy said he thought I had what one of the other network guys had, and was surprised I was still standing (I might not be tomorrow). Why are all these people forced to work at a fraction of their normal capacity and get the rest of the office sick, instead of just going home?

How about this as a new global HR policy: when you’re sick, you go home. You don’t need to use any vacation time or PTO, you just go home. You work from home if you’re able to, or otherwise you just see a doctor and get some sleep. I’m sure that overall output and morale would increase under this system, and anyone abusing the system would quickly be found out. Everyone wins.

As for me, I might have to take another day off tomorrow, but I won’t know until the morning. But I’m going to remember this experience, and especially the experience I would have had if HR hadn’t been so accommodating. This is part of the “why” for many would-be entrepreneurs, people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired!

[Update 12/15/07 - I did have to stay home the next day. I went to work the following day and people said I sounded like I was going to die. All four people on my team ended up getting sick.]

Photo by wili_hybrid

This is a follow-up to my earlier post Top 10 Reasons Not To Have A Job. While I think that having a job is something that should generally be avoided if at all possible, I wanted to offer some balance and acknowledge that it’s sometimes a necessary evil, and indeed is sometimes preferred.

1. Guaranteed income.

When you start a job, you just show up, and as long as you avoid getting fired, you get paid. No if, ands, or buts about it. Cold, hard cash in your bank account within a month, tops. I’ve never once heard of an employee who wasn’t running a profit in their job. No business can compete with that.

2. Stability.

Of course, people can lose their job at any time, but it doesn’t happen very often. We’ve all heard stories of people getting laid off and having to go through a very difficult period, but keep it in perspective—how many times does any one person get laid off in their lifetime? Not many. By contrast, entrepreneurs typically have to go through many different ventures, starting over each time one doesn’t work out.

3. Simplicity.

There’s always a learning curve when you start a new job, and it might take a few months to fully get up to speed. But once you’re there, you can just put yourself on cruise control. The road may bend a little, but you never have to change directions, look at a map, overhaul your car, or question whether you really know how to drive.

4. Less responsibility.

You just have a single role that you need to fit into, and that’s all you’re responsible for. That’s much less of a burden than having to determine all the roles that are needed and figure out how to fill them.

5. Easy to match your work with your field of study.

If you went to college, you probably majored in a field that was aligned with your interests. For example, maybe you majored in civil engineering because you’ve always had a knack for math, physics, design, and so forth. And then after spending four or more years honing your skills in that discipline, it makes sense that you’d want to put that degree to good use, say, by becoming a civil engineer. Most of the available majors have obvious careers that make use of them. This way you’re always moving forward along a single path, and never have to take a step backwards.

6. Routine.

After settling into a new job, you get used to a predictable routine. Every day you go to the same place, sit in the same chair, work the same hours, and do the same things. A life of no surprises means never having to worry about bad surprises.

7. Friends are included.

Many people say that coworkers don’t count as friends. But let’s face it, you do spend more time with these people than with your “real” friends, and sometimes even your family. You feel happy when they come back from vacation and you feel sad when they leave forever. And you get to socialize with them whenever you want, even if they don’t like you.

8. Being normal.

If you go with the flow, you don’t have to explain yourself when you need to do something out of the ordinary, like mail out packages at night or make phone calls on a Saturday. You don’t need to keep receipts or deal with Schedule C when you file your tax return. You know how much money you’re going to make for the year without having to make all kinds of crazy predictions.

9. Easier to introduce yourself at cocktail parties.

Job titles are often short and sweet, like “teacher” or “policeman” or “doctor.” Sometimes they’re more complicated, like “regional collections supervisor for a box company,” but you just say the words and you’re done, because people know what they mean. Even if the meaning of your title isn’t obvious, you can still quickly explain it. Having a business means needing a lot of words to explain what you do, or inviting a barrage of questions.

10. Frees you from the burden of having to decide your life purpose.

When you have a job, a lot of ethical, spiritual, and philosophical questions are answered for you. The answer to any question about why you do what you do is “because I have to.” You’re free from having to choose between right and wrong, and worrying about the consequences if you make a mistake. You can’t be blamed for anything you do, because it’s not your choice. No one can blame a pawn for protecting the king.

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If you’ve read this carefully, along with my Top 10 Reasons Not To Have A Job, no doubt you’ve detected my bias towards being an empowered entrepreneur instead of a lowly wage slave. However, most people aren’t going to just stumble into financial independence right out of school, and having a job is an easy way to pay the bills while you search for a way to call your own shots. Under the right conditions, it’s even possible for a job to be great.

1. Your life or your money.

In the original Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System (1987), there was a mean old man who would lock you in a room in a deadly underground labyrinth and demand that you “leave your life or money.” You had to give up either 50-100 rupees or a heart container in order to proceed.

That’s not so different from employment, is it? If you want to quit your job so you can have a life, you have to give up the money. If you want the money, you have to hand over control of your life. I don’t think either choice is acceptable.

Image from The Legend of Zelda (1987).

2. Who do you want to decide your life purpose?

Do you believe that your life is supposed to have a purpose? That you’re here for a reason and that the world will be better off with you doing what you’re supposed to do? If so, who do you want to decide your life purpose—you or your boss? Beyond the industry you choose, you don’t really have much influence on your life purpose. Every task your boss gives you advances their vision of your life purpose, not yours.

3. You’re a pet at best, and a slave at worst.

When your boss says “jump,” you say “how high?” Either that, or you later say “I’m here to file an unemployment claim.” They’re the one in control, make no mistake of that. So it’s really up to chance whether your boss wants to treat you as a slave, or has enough mercy to promote you to the rank of pet.

As a pet, you jump through hoops in return for handouts that let you tread water until the next payday. You spend your days doing soulless work for a master who might be nice to you, but who assigns you tasks that are appropriate for the dog you are. You make plans and then have to tell people you’re canceling because you have to work late. You go through annual performance reviews to see if you jumped through all the red hoops, the white hoops, and the bonus blue hoops you didn’t even know about. If so, you might get a treat. If not, your master might decide to put you down.

As a slave, you have all the disadvantages of being a pet, plus you have to get used to saying “thank you sir, may I have another?” Your work is cruel and unusual punishment. You get to work way too early and stay way too late because the time you clock is all that matters. You get whatever vacation time you get, and disappoint your family when you don’t have enough time to do what you planned. When you get sick, you go to work while coughing up blood because you have no vacation time to spare. If you luck into a role that you find remotely tolerable, your master might end up selling you to a new master who has different plans for you. C’est la vie.

4. It’s way too communistic.

In a capitalist society, if two people are doing the same job, but one person’s performance is double that of the other’s, who gets paid more? The high performer, of course! They should get twice as much money for twice the output. An employee’s purpose is to help the company complete its work, and they should be paid in proportion to how well they do that.

Oh, if only it were so! In the real world, people are all widgets, and one is the same as another. Performance is often not a factor at all in your compensation. There are people like sales agents and athletes who do get paid based on performance, but most people get a fixed salary based on the position they hold and the number of candles on the cake. Do everything or do nothing, it doesn’t matter. A system like this rewards the weak and punishes the strong.

5. The rat race.

They call it the rat race for a reason. The next time you see a rat running around in its wheel, take a good hard look at it. Notice that it doesn’t look happy. Notice that it works as hard as it can but doesn’t actually go anywhere. Notice that it keeps running without really knowing why. Notice that it doesn’t have any plan for ever being able to stop. Now I ask you, do you think you’re better than a rat?

6. Your boss is an evil bovine master.

I’m going to borrow this one from Steve Pavlina’s 10 Reasons You Should Never Get A Job. It’s #6 on his list; just visit the link to look it up.

7. 9-5 was once a bad idea, and is now a fond memory.

I suppose the 9-5 workday once made sense…if you were an assembly line worker. During the Industrial Revolution, time and output were perfectly interchangeable. A worker would put in an hour of labor and produce a certain number of widgets. It was the same number of widgets in the first hour as it was in the last. Having everyone work the same schedule made sense because it was more efficient to run an assembly line that way, and besides, the workers really didn’t have anywhere else to be.

But what about nowadays? Does 9-5 make sense now? Most people work in jobs that don’t require their physical presence all the time, and perform work that can’t be done at peak capacity for eight hours straight, especially when they have errands that can only be run during the day. Doesn’t it make sense for people to be able to set their own schedules so they can work at their times of peak performance?

Another thing is that who works 9-5 anymore? Outside of the government, schedules like 9-6, 8-6, and 7-7 are much more common.

8. Sitting in traffic isn’t as much fun as you think.

How long is your commute? Maybe you’re currently very lucky and only have to spend twenty minutes each way burning gas, wearing down your brakes, and looking at all the smiling faces you see along the way. But that’s not too likely. In fact, Americans spend more time commuting than taking vacations. Are you sure you can’t think of anything you’d rather be doing than sitting in traffic?

9. The middle class is no class.

Most employees have no control over their income. If you want to make $100,000 a year but your boss decides the position will pay $70,000 a year, who do you think wins?

If a 3% raise is in your company’s budget, that’s what you get. It doesn’t matter if inflation is 4% so your “raise” is actually a pay cut. You get what you get.

The average savings rate in the U.S. has gone from low to very low to zero to negative. People are not only in debt, but their debt is increasing each month because they can’t make the payments. They’re in danger of losing their houses, and cringe every time the price of oil shoots up. They’re forced to spend less time with their families so they can work overtime in an attempt to keep up. It’s a vicious cycle, and they can only hope to break it before they’re working at Wal-Mart in their 70s.

10. “I’m lucky just to have a job.”

The harsh reality of employment is that even though you’re not the captain, you may still have to go down with the ship. During the dot-com bust, the rallying cry of those of us in software development was “I’m lucky just to have a job.” Does that sound like a fun way to go through life, considering yourself to be lucky because even your job that you hate is still better than none at all? I’d rather be in a situation where I consider myself lucky to have enough time, money, and purpose to enjoy life. What about you?

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This might be a little extreme. For one thing, there are people out there who love their jobs, such as many teachers. Also, even among people who hate the idea of employment, jobs are often necessary. To offer some balance, I’ll be following up with Top 10 Reasons To Have A Job.

Photo by fuzzcat

Caroline Middlebrook has written a very interesting post about making the decision to quit her day job to work full time on her business efforts. She analyzes the traditional advice given to would-be entrepreneurs with a job, and why this advice usually results in failure all around. She also explains how she was able to quit her job without being reckless about it.

While I believe Caroline’s decision was right for her, I’m taking the opposite approach: being an entrepreneur in my free time while keeping the day job. There’s no right or wrong here, as this is a highly individualized decision that needs to be considered from your own perspective. What’s important is that you decide based on careful evaluation of what makes sense for you.

In my case, I have a day job as a software developer that provides plenty of challenge. I also have a business that’s a significant part time effort, some miscellaneous income-producing activities, and now I have this blog, which I’m treating not as a hobby but as a personal development business. That’s quite a lot for me, and that’s just on the work front—obviously I have other things going on in my life too. I know that I ultimately don’t want to be an employee, so the question I had to ask myself was whether I should quit my day job in order to devote more time to the business activities that I eventually want to do full time (by which I mainly mean this blog, as that’s what currently suffers the most from my lack of time).

You always want to be true to yourself. In my case, I know that I’m very conservative, and that had to taken into account. Although I could quit my job and be fine for a few years, I know I would be very stressed by the thought of all the money I’d be losing. Not just the salary I’d be giving up, but all the money that could be generated as that money compounded in the stock market. Just to give you an idea, $100,000 compounded at 10% annually for 30 years is $1.7 million. Being 32 years old, I need to look that far ahead and consider what I’d be giving up for a blog-based business in which I have no track record and no basis on which to determine what the results might be.

On the other hand, I know that I would be vastly more productive with my blog if I didn’t have my job. Not only would I have much more time available, but I’d be able to work on it when inspiration strikes instead of when I’m drained. I can’t even begin to explain how much creative energy I’m wasting when I spend all this time entertaining ideas during the day that I can’t take action on until night. By then, the ideas are just phantoms that have lost their substance, if I even remember them at all, and if I even have time to try.

As I write this, my blog is in an early alpha version. This is only my second post, I have a huge backlog of posts in my head that I want to get out, I still have the default About page and the default theme, I don’t know how to use WordPress, and so forth. I know my blog’s growth is going to be greatly hampered by my decision to keep my day job. For that reason, and for the fantastic lifestyle that comes with being happily jobless, I do understand why some people would decide to quit their job and go for it. Like I said, it’s a highly individualized decision.

One thing I will caution against though, is being overly optimistic and quitting your day job without considering the consequences. Caroline ran the numbers and thought everything through. She brings some business experience to the table, knows what she’s working for, and takes consistent action. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen who get a business idea and think the money will start rolling in right away, despite their initial lack of skill, experience, and willingness to take action.

I’m fortunate to currently have the best job I’ve ever had, in that the people give me a great deal of flexibility and don’t micromanage me. However, if I were to lose that job for whatever reason, I think I would first take a quick vacation and then start blogging like a banshee. Then I could lay a foundation more quickly and get a better idea of how things would play out. Even if the money was only trickling in by the time I went back to work, having a track record to speak of would mean much less uncertainty about making projections into the future.

To quit or not to quit, that is the question. What is your answer?