Sunday, June 9, 2013

This one's going to be a doozy

So...a LOT has happened over a very short period of time, and I think it's about time I get it all down somewhere. Gird your loins, my friends - this is going to be a pretty long update post.

In my last post, I dropped my "I'm going to move to San Francisco come hell or high water!" bomb. This, as so many "sure" things in life do, has changed. San Francisco is still on the menu for me down the road, but a really fantastic, enlightening experience I had at the end of February made me think a little harder about that decision.

Bursting with enthusiasm at my new decision to pack up my entire life and head 800 miles south to the Bay Area, I applied for a couple jobs and promptly got extremely busy with school and other side projects. A couple weeks went by without applying for anything else, then out of the blue, I got a request for a phone interview for the first position - a Social Media and Marketing position with WibiData, a super cool big data start-up located in the Mission.

After bouncing off the walls with excitement for a few days, I snuck into a conference room at work for what felt like the worst phone interview I have ever given in my entire life. I tend to hate talking on the phone no matter who it's with, and adding the pressure of a job interview in an entirely different state for a position I had little to no relevant experience with definitely didn't help that any. After feeling kind of terrible about how I'd done for a couple hours, I threw it to the back of my mind and resolved I'd do better next time, and it was a great learning experience in the meantime. A few days later, to my eternal shock, I got an email from Wibi asking me to come down to SF for a day of in-person interviews with the team.

Even though I obviously was woefully underqualified for the position, and am pretty thankful they saw the same and decided to spare me that particular trial by fire, I can't say enough good things about this whole experience from beginning to end. Everyone at WibiData was so kind to me the entire day - I interviewed with six or seven different people, including their CEO, and I've never felt more challenged and intrigued by a company in my life. As silly as this may sound, the sense I got from everyone there was that they were all at least 3-4 years smarter than I currently am, and rather than coming home super discouraged by that fact, all that experience did was motivate me to give myself the kind of experience I will need to work with people that intelligent in the future. And getting to spend a long weekend in SF (ironically enough, I interviewed on my one-year anniversary with Google) with one of my best friends was a hell of a lot of fun as well.

After I got the phone call saying I might not quite be ready for that kind of position yet, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and started brainstorming how I could give myself the kind of experience employers like WibiData and other tech start-ups would be looking for in team candidates. I remembered completely randomly one day that I'd seen a friend from high school posting about her boyfriend's new brewery on Facebook, so I did a little digging and found the name of the brewery. Googling brought up their website, and when I saw its initial state, I decided to email my friend and ask if the brewery could use any help getting their site and social media into better shape. And thus, my involvement with Seapine Brewing Company was born!

I've had an absolute blast helping out with the brewery so far. I got my Class 12 so I could pour at summer brewfest events, as well as in their taproom when it finally opens on June 15th. With a ton of help from a friend, I migrated the entire site away from GoDaddy to a better hosting provider after the site started experiencing significant server-side lag issues. I've cleaned up the site a bunch from its original state, and although it still looks pretty amateur, I'm looking forward to having some time this summer to teach myself how to do a lot more with it than what I'm currently capable of. In addition to the site, I've taken over all social media channels for the brewery - they had a Facebook page already, but I set them up on Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr as well. Finding ways to grow their following on those pages while not being super established throughout the city just yet has been a really interesting challenge, and one that I'll be carrying on for another company soon, because...

I was just offered a new position last week as the Sales and Marketing Coordinator at Spectrum Networks! Their situation is so strangely parallel to where Seapine was at when I came on board that I'm still a little shocked at how perfect the timing for all of this has been. I have a friend who works at CondoInternet (Spectrum is the more business-centric parent company of CondoInternet, which focuses on gigabit internet in residential buildings), and her and I worked really well together while we were both at Google, so I'm very optimistic as to how things will go with our teamwork at Spectrum. My job will be two-fold - I'll be helping organize their back-end operations, and will be helping them develop their industry presence and reputation through various social media and other marketing outlets.

Basically, this job promises to be the first job I've held as an adult where I'll actually be trusted with things of greater importance. My first "grown-up job", if you will. Working at the firm taught me a lot in the way of navigating office politics and not only holding down a professional position, but doing it very well, and moving upwards in terms of trust and responsibility. My position at Google started well - for the first 8 or 9 months, I was writing policy and procedure, sandboxing new workflows, offering recommendations for future provider/Google interactions, training and mentoring people on my team, and basically buzzing around in a happy, frenetic flurry of activity. For the last 5 or 6 months, however, the team hasn't needed someone who can wear a lot of different hats. My ability to have any kind of dramatic impact on what the team is doing has shrunk down to arguing policy minutiae, and my days have filled up with drone work even more mindless than most of the basic filing and data entry I did at the firm. If I'm not continually engaged with what I'm doing for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I tend to sink into a pretty unhappy apathy, and spending the last several months in such a state made my experiences with WibiData and Seapine have been incredible for my sanity.

And so, as I sit here in Zoka in Greenlake typing away, facing my last week of work at Google, my new start at Spectrum, and only one quarter (this fall) to go before I'm finally holding my master's degree, I think things are finally starting to really look bright in my future. Next time I post it probably won't be as full of feelings as this one, but for now, all these feelings are more than okay with me.

Monday, February 4, 2013

New Directions

As I write this, I'm occupying a spare desk in the offices of Artfire.com in Tucson, drinking french press and contemplating how to begin to describe the past year or so of my life. Most of this blog so far has been about the trials and tribulations of a library school student whose perceptions of the library world have undergone significant change since the beginning of my time at the iSchool. This change kicked into high gear over the last year as I began working for Google, escaping a stagnant position and moving to one that couldn't possibly be more opposite dynamically, and as a result, this last year turned into the major crisis of identity and purpose that I've been expecting since my first day of classes. I'm happy to report I'm on much more solid ground nowadays in terms of what I actually want to be doing with my life, and while I've still got a lot to figure out, here's what I've discovered so far!

Firstly, and most importantly, while I still very much subscribe to the idealistic view of the future of libraries I discussed in the post I wrote almost 2 years ago now (What Being a Librarianarchist Means to Me), I've come to realize that this future won't be in place for a very long time, and it's going to be an uphill battle all the way. There has been some incredible innovation in libraries over the last few years, and I'm still optimistic that they will eventually evolve into these "local nerve centers for information" discussed by Godin in his article, but I've realized that for me personally, my interests now lie somewhere outside of fighting this good fight.

One of the most alienating things about my degree experience has been that the vast majority of my classmates are looking forward to inhabiting existing roles in the library sphere. While this is a perfectly understandable and normal direction to take, I find I'm less and less interested in walking into a job where I'd have to operate within the rigid confines of a long-established job description. My job at Google has completely opened my eyes to how much more satisfied I feel with my work when I'm working on multiple projects/products at once in every possible capacity -- I've had days where I'm pulled aside for 2-3 completely separate projects in the span of 8 hours. I've grown to love and embrace variety, and people demanding things of me that I've never done before in a professional capacity. I like walking into the office and not knowing what I'll wind up doing by the end of the day. This is not something I'd be able to do in the library sphere, at least not until I've "done my time" working low-level, static jobs in places I don't want to live for a couple decades and crossing my fingers that the Great Librarian Retirement that was promised to us all when we started our degrees back in 2010 will someday come to pass.

This has been the main impetus for my professional interests swinging firmly into the tech start-up camp, and I don't see them changing anytime soon. I made the decision to move to San Francisco months ago, and my move date (come employment or a leap of faith) is rapidly approaching. Seattle has been a wonderful place to live, and it will always be home base for me, but it's time for something different. Something bigger, and something more risky. The more job announcements I see for tech start-ups in the Bay Area, the more excited I get that I've finally found the work environment I've so desperately been searching for. These jobs demand that you wear many different hats every single day -- you are expected to learn on the job to fill existing gaps, and to learn quickly and well. Much of the time I've spent at Google has been doing exactly this, and it's hard not to go into gush mode whenever I try and describe how liberating and enlightening that experience has been for me. I can't wait to continue it in the more intimate atmosphere of a start-up, as working for a company whose name has become one of the most commonly used verbs in modern times understandably has its limitations.

Since this is already getting pretty long, I'll just call this Part One of my giant update and save the rest for another post down the road! Feels great to be writing again. :)

Monday, January 7, 2013

A Quick Hello!

Hey everybody! It's definitely been quite a while since I've posted anything in this blog, but I'm hoping now that the mid-degree crisis is over and I'm a bit more refocused, I'll find the time to write a bit more on the new direction things will be taking for me. Both career-wise, and personally. :) Tonight's going to be dedicated to homework and recovering from the brutality I visited on my hands and forearms at Stone Gardens earlier, but I'll be writing again soon! Promise!