Did I take a wrong turn in my career?

I grew up with two great parents! Hold your horses now. Most posts start this way.

Conclusion: I mean, I was only six years old when they brought me the first "computer". I put that within citation marks, because most of the readers of this post will never consider a Commodore-64 (C64 for short) as something else than "a derelict and ominous artifact better stuffed and left alone in grandpa's attic". Now listen - however - that artifact got me into programming at the age of six. All thanks to a neighbor who will remain unnamed, and the fact that I found the bits and bytes (and soon to be heard of MEGA bytes) intriguing.

Then came the Amiga. With Amos and stuff. I never ever bought a game for that machine, except for a game made by two "game developers" down in Sk?ne. I remember the title as "Gravity Force". Spent several hundreds hours playing that one. Two joysticks and a my 'bestest!!1' friend. Joyful - and long gone - days!

That game, however set me off creating automatic (and of course non-randomized, but still randomized) character sheet creations for our role playing sessions. After that I made games. Then I grew up and I moved onto C and C++.

You should have seen the smile on my game master's face when I brought him something written in C++. This program, as it was called back then, could do anything from randomizing the MERPG weather to rolling dice. I think we used it for one session before it was discontinued. Also, I think the smile was because of something else, i.e. something else and more funny happened in the background. I wouldn't know, since my face was 3 inches in front of the screen - joyful - of my great achievements.

University studies! I still remember my "Java" teacher. Many of the students remained when I did my best to explain the "OutOfMemoryError exception" error. We spoke about the garbage collection - well not that much - but quite a lot about the difference between an 'int' and a 'double'. And, please don't cancel me if I got that wrong. I've stayed away from languages with GC's for more than 15 years now. I hate/strongly dislike them.

Anyways... I studied AI. It was at the early stages. I even ended up as a "tutor" for a Prolog course. I nailed every one of those early algorithms, and I did know my way around time and memory complexity. I tried to get girls to take an interest in me by using "local minimum" before most of you were even born. On top of that I also studied psychology, quite a lot. What better way to get your through your first job interview, right? Talking to you HR. Talking to you.

Then, as most of these "stories" about university goes, I broke up with my girlfriend. Got thrown out of the apartment (that her father paid for) and then I had to rent another place from someone who was already renting, from someone else I think it is called "close to sleeping in the street". I managed to nail the deal, thankfully. Time flew. I listened a lot to 'The Polyphonic Spree' during this time.

After about six month I had my own place close to campus. Please don't get me wrong. The rent-rent-rent deal was great! All the parties were thrown at that specific location! If you love 'Logh' you'd have loved it! I mean, we were all young and stupid at that time. Only missed Sir. E. John to wrap it up one more notch. Leaving it at 11 would have been better.

I got an apartment and I lived there while finishing off my studies. Back then I also had a keen interest for photography (a word that does not exist to the same extent today). I was the cashier. That also meant that I had most of the keys to the deep and dark labyrints. All placed 30 feet under the walkways where people - unknowingly - went to classes each and every day. Trust me - I had the keys.

I always found an interest in something called the World Wide Web or WWW for short. It is an abbreviation after all, isn't it? I got into CGI scripting quite early on. Way back before university. Back when Internet Explorer and Netscape couldn't find a common ground. Back when The World Consortium saw the light of day. Perl I tell you! Anyways. Trust me, CSS back then was not an easy thing to do. Some of you might remember the initial "Please select which browser you're on" with two (or perhaps) three options. Each one loading a different index.html page. Those were the days.

As I've probably already told you, I worked at the university for a while after finishing my studies. I wrote my thesis whilst doing so. Once I was done, it was time to move to the place where I'd heard that all the jobs were located. The capital city of Sweden.

Arriving at 2006 I started working for a great consultant company. They didn't trust me at first, but I soon got a permanent job there. I started off as a developer. Now for you who care about being nerdy, I spent quite a few years with Symbian-C! I really liked it! Especially the Panic-9 (at least that is what I remember it to have been; I might be wrong though). No memory is allowed to leak. Fantastic!

Then after a brief period of time I jumped on the new and "so cool" agile train. I became a Scrum Master, when people (and especially management) didn't know what the revolution was even about. Scrum Master turned into Team Manager (of course at another client). I moved on to Scrum-of-Scrum Master and onto project manager (again, at another company). Then - after a while - I fell down the product management hole. These were the days! Upper management confused, middle management - well - compliant. Developers, from where I had just risen, completely fed up.

That great place taught me a lot of stuff and skills. I think I left about 9 years later. Having started a "music festival" where all employees were welcome (or to some extent, obliged) to join. A great success which I then left to rot.

Moving on, I became a Development Manager at a small, but still big company. Six month later I was appointed the role as CTO. It was a blissful time working for said company. Again, feeling eager to drop the name (you can find it in my LinkedIn CV) I won't. It was a fun ride! Then I flew too close to the sun. Meetings...

Yeah, I dislike meetings! I was almost about to write "I hate meetings", but that would have been unfair you you all "meeting booking peeps/lovers" out there. I stand firm however: Never book me into a meeting that doesn't spawn any good results. And, honestly (and truthfully) I will never attend meta-meetings, i.e. meetings about how to set up more efficient meetings.

That downward spiral never ends. Don't get me started on meetings where you collect a whole department to rummage through some text to find "errors", i.e. which word should be bold, and which word that should be cursive. Meetings that has not got a clear agenda shouldn't be allowed to exist or even see daylight. All they do is to disrupt everyone's perfect day. If you're a top level manager, you're just throwing away money that could have been better spent.

Anyways; I decided to go back to what I remember loving. Being a consultant. I started my own business... And what a journey it has been!

Now, please let me tell you something about myself. I am a generalist, not a specialist. Or, to correct myself. I'm not a specialist in anything that is "the most sought after competence" today. I know my way around C/C++ and Symbian-C. I still outdo most of the people within C#.

I've been employed as as a salary setting boss, ignoring that fact, spending more of my time making my peers excel. I know my way around Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker etc. I know the difference between bare metal servers and running things in the cloud. I know my way around IAM/IGA and PAM. I know how to create 2D graphics, I know my way around Blender. I've created at least one game in Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot (I favor Godot since it is free). I do my best to solve all the daily challenges in Advent of Code once per year. I write music and spend money to great Fiverr producer to help produce something worthy of a Spotify release. I paint paintings... Sometimes in oil. I'm a non-renown fan-artist of some Youtube channels All at the same time as taking care of a border terrier, doing my best to keep up to date.

Still, I am unable to get a gig.

I'm starting to feel like I'm the "black hat wearing dog within the colourful origami". (Just put the 'u' there to cope with my British friends!).

Am I the black dog in a black hat? Is it time for me to call it quits and complete that game that I never completed, or is there still room on the market for a generalist like me?

(Thanks for reading! And hopefully - if you believe in me - you'll hit me up with a gig or two!)

Black hat tipped for you, seekers of consultants in this day and age! BR, Simon