The Amateur Philosopher

This is the conclusion to my own Failure Seminars contribution. Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.

And then I came back, and started to look for a job. All I really had in mind at that point was “something in the tech industry”–and that, really, only because I had a (very modest–about the equivalent of an undergraduate minor, and that 6 years old) background in computer science and because I wanted to stay in the Silicon Valley. For a few months, I cast about wildly at various not-really-an-options, not helped by some of the advice I received. (I actually had somebody in the industry, of all things, telling me that I should look for an R&D job starting at about $40k/year, which was ridiculous in both directions at once–there was no way someone with my background at the time could have landed, let alone done, an IT R&D job, and on the other hand, $40k is a starvation wage in Silicon Valley–no full-time worker in IT, no matter how far down the totem pole they are, actually makes that little money).

Eventually, I did land a job, as a technical writer at Oracle. It was a great job for me at the time–I was writing about a product (Oracle JDeveloper) intended for computer programmers, but not actually expected to produce good code, so I had a gentle introduction to modern programming. But there was something that seriously got to me about the job, even from the beginning.

My first manager at Oracle had warned me, at my interview, that as a technical writer I’d be at “the bottom of the heap,” by which I assumed she’d meant I’d have trouble getting respect or assistance from the development, product management, and QA divisions of the JDeveloper team. If that was what she meant, she was wrong–I always found my colleagues (whether fellow technical writers or not) at Oracle to be friendly, helpful, and, once I had proven myself a bit, respectful. The problem with being at the “bottom of the heap” was when I talked to anyone else.

When you’re new in a job, of course, everyone asks you what you used to do. And telling people you used to be a university professor and are now a technical writer…well, you get reactions, and not really pleasant ones. The most common was the exact question, “Oh…do you like that?” accompanied by the same look I would have gotten if I’d just said, “By the way, my dog died this morning.” I didn’t, by the way, feel particularly unhappy with my job. I didn’t think I wanted to stay in technical writing forever, but honestly, it’s a fine job; most technical writers I’ve known have been intelligent and engaged people who are reasonably happy with their careers–and I don’t think academia can claim better than that. But still, that sort of thing gets annoying after a while. (Thankfully, it went away eventually, especially after I moved from technical writing to consulting.)

A lot of people in academia were kind of weird about it too. Responses ranged from those who told me–in a near whisper–that they’d always dreamed of doing the same thing and wished they’d had the courage to do so to, in by far the rudest response I got (from a near-stranger, thankfully), a prediction that I’d always spend the rest of my life “pressing [my] nose up against the window, whining and scratching to be let in.” My old dissertation advisor defied the trend by taking my decision completely in stride–disturbingly in stride, in fact; it made me wonder if he’d been expecting this all along.

Possibly the most dramatic reaction I got was from my mother, who for the longest time had trouble understanding that one could live a comfortable life except as a professor, doctor, or lawyer, and certainly had trouble understanding that one could live a fulfilled life in any career that was not also a passion. Even 11 years later, she occasionally brings up the possibility of another round of graduate school–or a round of law school–whenever I express dissatisfaction with my job (which everyone, or at least almost everyone, does from time to time).

And me? Well, that’s complicated. It took me a long time, a long time, before I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to be a “leading light” in any field. That hasn’t come up in a while now; I don’t know if that’s increased maturity or simply the passage of time. It’s a considerable weight off, to tell the truth.

Did I accomplish at least my stated goals? Well, for a while I did: technical writing involves a lot of collaboration, was located in a place I wanted to live, and is the sort of job that you can usually leave at the office door. IT involves a lot more job security than being an untenured professor (tenured professors are very secure, of course, but the trick is in getting there). In a number of those ways, consulting is a bit of a step backwards–except when I travel to a client site, I really don’t interact face-to-face with anyone at all, and even when I’m at such a site, I’m always something of an outsider (some clients treat consultants with indifference, some treat us extremely well, but everyone knows you’re temporary, and it’s a bit like being non-tenure-track faculty). It certainly is not the sort of job that turns off every day, or even most days, at 5. The relative isolation gets to me–it’s the one thing about my job I really don’t like–but the rest of it doesn’t bother me at all, which means either that I’ve changed or that my stated reasons for leaving had at best a grain of truth.

Have I missed philosophy? After a brief rebound, I missed it painfully. But with time and effort (and there was a lot of effort), that receded into the background. It occasionally popped out again, when I had a chance to talk about it–which didn’t occur all that often, but the charge I got out of it was so powerful that I would start questioning my decision for a week. By 2004 or so, I felt like I had finally entirely come to terms with my decision.

But about a month ago, something happened. I’d created a Facebook page over the summer, which I almost never used–just to talk with a couple of childhood friends. But in late October or early November, my ex-girlfriend (the one I dated when I was in Rochester), contacted me, in part to ask for any advice I could give about going on the job market in philosophy (which she’s doing this year). And of course, once you have one “Facebook friend” from a particular period of your life, you start discovering dozens of others. And wham, it was as if the previous 9 years had never happened–I found myself obsessing about philosophy and the career I left behind more than a decade ago.

So I’ve got to, once more, come to terms with my decision. And I think I have a strategy. I’ve told my old friend Jon Kaplan that I didn’t think there was a recognized role in society for a “serious amateur philosopher,” but honestly, who cares? I suppose that, over the last few weeks, I have in fact been doing some philosophy, and nobody paid me for it, and I did it because I enjoyed doing so. So I suppose I am, ipso facto, an amateur philosopher, and there’s no reason I can’t be a serious one.

I’m not talking about what we used to call “bar philosophy” here: The person beside you at a bar asks you what you do, and if you reply “I’m a philosopher,” half the time they say, in this very solemn voice, “Me too, man, me too.” (A fellow graduate student had, as the stock answer, “Yes, but I get paid for it.”) I’m not going to get paid for it, and I’m not going to be able to devote the time to it that professional philosophers do, but otherwise, I’m going to try to make what I do–the questions I look at, the methods I use to try to answer them–as much like what professional philosophers do as possible. I’m going to do most of it, at least for the time being, right here. And we’ll see how it goes.