I like stability.
I also like coding and learning and research and trees and dogs and ewoks.
But really, above all else I like stability.
Honestly, my mind races about 80,000 miles per second, examining every past and future
conversation, interaction, sensation, expression, misstep, thought,
opinion, and breath, over and over, forming a never-ending noisy and
complex sonata in my mind that doesn't give me any time to worry about
instability in my life.
So yes, I like stability.
What's shitty about the tech industry nowadays is that I can't expect to have stability. In fact, I'm expected to switch companies every few years. The one field I am passionate about, the one field I want to spend the rest of my life exploring, the one field that can give me an unexplicable calm whilst also sparking a fire in my mind, is basically pushing me into the one environment that catalyzes the downward spiral of my well-being.
every. few. years.
If anything has ever made me want to curl up in a dark, cold hole and anxiously wish upon a star that my interests would magically change, this is it. I would be lying if I said that stability wasn't a very highly weighted factor in my decision to go into academia. It wasn't ranked as highly as my actual interests, but it sure proposed a huge pro or con.
So in which direction do I want my career to go?
I want to go to graduate school, to get a PhD in some mix of
systems and programming language theory, which produces a life plan for
at least the next half-decade. After that, I can't predict
what will happen. I can plan all I want, but no matter what, I can almost
guarantee that it will not work out the way I anticipate. I could get married,
I could get pregnant, I could need to move back to California for some reason,
I could decide I want to go into industrial research (again),
I could've had it all wrong and decide I want to go into frontend web
development (jk not likely). Regardless of what happens, I am confident that
I'll still feel the same way about stability, unless all of a sudden the plague
that is anxiety resting on my shoulders and slowly gaining control of my mind
is miraculously lifted. I am not the type of person
who can handle switching jobs every few years, and I also don't have that desire.
What I desire is to change workplaces only a handful of times in my career, to come home to the same place every night, to go to the same place for work every morning, but manage to consistently have enough intellectual stimulation to give me the happiness to maintain a predictable life. Call me naive, but I think that's feasible for a career in research or academia. One way or another, I'll make it happen.
The one good thing I can see from this forced instability of the tech industry is that company loyalty is less prominent now, as well. If I love a company and my workplace feels like a home to me, I am all for company loyalty. But companies are just as mysterious as the inner-workings of the mind: you could spend years completely satisfied until one day, something dark is illuminated and you no longer find yourself at home. I don't think I should be expected to be loyal to a company, because there is no way for me to predict the future and see that my company will be loyal back. Even with this doubt, I will support my company until they give me a reason not to. Beyond that, I don't think expectations of loyalty are fair.