Reinventing relevance

Friend Liz recently wrote a piece, called what it's like now, in which she describes the difficulties that friends and former co-workers are encountering as their jobs go away. It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that companies generally don't care about workers as people, but we continue to be surprised. The managers, directors, VPs, and others with whom we worked had to see us as numbers on a payroll sheet a) to keep their own jobs and b) to keep their sanity. "It's just business."
But, to those who lose their jobs, it's oh, so personal. There are few things more personal than one's job. Yossarian, in Catch-22, observed that, just because they're shooting at everyone doesn't mean that they're not shooting at me.
No, it's very personal, even in the middle of a major societal event. September 11^th was a traumatic, milestone event for our nation. A former co-worker, Doug Gowell, was on the American Airlines flight out of Boston. He died in a public event, but he was also (and even more importantly) a husband, father, and friend who died. He was a fun and smart guy. I first learned about Gigabit Ethernet from a conversation with him.
These things are personal - job loss, death, breakups of relationships.
Job losses at this time are even more disorienting. Organizations are jettisoning employees, sometimes to shift workers overseas, sometimes just doing without, sometimes changing the very nature of the work. All this Web 2.0, virtual teaming, cloud computing, Buzzword Bingo scares the yogurt out of folks with even a few years of work experience.
For the graybeards among us, our sudden irrelevance feels like a deep betrayal. What got us here - our knowledge and talents - won't get us any further. Even if we pick up a contract gig, we're seen pretty much as a bag of keywords on resume, not a a person.

Recently, I had an email exchange with a former co-worker who landed a short-term contract assignment at a company that used an old hardware and software configuration (VAX/VMS) as a core part of its financial services computing environment. This guy was so happy. It was as though he'd wandered back in time to his grandmother's kitchen, sitting down to eat some of grandma's apple pie.
My reasons for being out of work are esoteric, discussed in this journal and elsewhere a few years back. Nevertheless, the effect is the same. I miss work. I miss the people, the smart, funny, full-tilt-Bozo-weird people who'd do hexadecimal multiplication in their heads. I miss the opportunity to work hard on hard stuff.
I hear the word 'reinvention' a lot. This is a time for me to reinvent myself. Yup, they're probably right. Invention, re- or first-time, is, by definition, a risky venture. For every innovation that makes a difference in our lives and the lives of those around us - sliced bread, the Les Paul guitar, Bunn coffee makers - there are lots of ideas and ambitions best left on the side of the road.
A couple of current best-sellers, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, make the point that success in the information economy (jobs where we don't make physical things such as cheeseburgers, brick walkways, or turbines) is far more random than we can comfortably accept. Tom Johnson offers a good analysis of Outliers and his own experience as a successful technical writer.
In sum, our chances for success, even modest ones, are unfair and random. We can do a lot to 'make our own luck' and still miss out. I've gone to the funerals of plenty of my contemporaries who were smarter, kinder, braver, and, well, better than me. It's unfair, deeply, profoundly, unfathomably, unspeakably unfair, and yet we keep going.

I burn down your cities--how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
You must all be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why i love mankind
You really need me
That's why i love mankind

God's Song, by Randy Newman