The week started out pretty rough. I tried not drinking coffee Monday morning in an attempt to get my stomach to stop self-eviscerating. I drank two cups of green tea (”for the active body — yogi tea brand”) but by 10:45 I was crashing really bad. So, I had a cup. I still felt miserable, so I rode home to have lunch and ride my bike back to work. I needed to feel the wind in my hair.

Then it rained like crazy in the afternoon. A fellow laborer in the house of drudgery gave me a ride home. Gee, that seems like years ago.

Tuesday I rode in and we had Nick’s going away happy hour at Rocket to Venus. I ate dinner to offset the beer and rode home around 7 or so. I was beat and feeling achey on the way home.

Wednesday, I went to the UPA Many Faces of User Experience conference downtown at the Marriott in Harbor East. 700 geeks like me! I felt like I was going home…

Highlights from Wednesday:

Katrina Alcorn from Hot Studio in San Francisco gave a talk called How to manage a UX team (without losing your mind!). It was awesome and made me feel better about myself. Some keys points:

• managing creatives is challenging
• creatives are often very opinionated
• many creatives go from being skilled labor to unskilled managers - I never took any classes in managment!
• external pressures make life even more frustrating: so many people don’t understand what creatives do.

I would add that since people don’t understand what creatives do, their contributions are often overlooked, misunderstood, and neglected.

Another incredibly eye-opening slide from her presentation focused on time management for managers of creative folks:

• admin. & financial matters (10%)
• billable work (10-20%)
• client relations (20-40%)
• managing team (30-60%)

Hmmm… In my current position, I’m asked to be 50% or more billable. It’s all about the money. How can I properly manage and inspire my team when I’m heads down working on an ActionScript problem? ActionScript being a language that gets re-written every two years (or so it would seem…) and a language I have to re-learn every nine months because I have to be a jack of all trades.

I’ve had to leave client relations to the PMs, and this hurts my internal image among the upper management. (”What does Matt do?”) (”Struggle…”)

Finally, I was really shocked and saddened by the statistics Katrina culled from a survey by FSU on “Bad Boss Behavior”:

• 39% said their supervisor failed to keep promises.
• 37% said their supervisor failed to give credit when due.
• 31% said their supervisor gave them the “silent treatment” in the past year.
• 27% said their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers.
• 24% said their supervisor invaded their privacy.
• 23% said their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment.

Incredible.

Well, I hope Katrina won’t be upset with me for referencing her slides so extensively. I was really impressed and the information both consoled me and made me feel like taking action. It helped conclude that working at a supposedly creative job where everything is a struggle is like laying your neck wide open for a vampire to drain you.

I want a more fulfilling environment, where I don’t have to fend off grade-school level jokes and antagonism. I want to work with other creative people who are not so filled with pessimism and doubt. It’s going to take time and hard work, but I know I can find something better. I have to.

Katrina’s workshop alone was worth going to the conference! I’ll write follow-up posts describing thursday and friday, and my sleepless night wednesday, but I wanted to go into detail on this one because I found it so powerful and liberating.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under cubelife . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.