February was a weird month for me personally. Not much actually happened, but a lot of things have started picking up steam so things might be happening soon™. Or they’ll just fizzle out, who knows. That’s… not ideal for looking back at the past month, but let’s make it work somehow.

Apathy?

Kicking off the things that are in the making now took a while, and it certainly wasn’t because they were too complex or difficult. I just had trouble getting out of the figurative bed to get them started properly.

The freelancing project is on a good trajectory. Due to resources, development was paused for a month, which gave me time to work on the foundation of the entire application. Maybe too much time, because I didn’t get very far except for pondering whether certain abstractions should exist, even if they make sense per se but nobody uses them. What should be the common denominator?

Here: Should we continue sticking to the repository pattern, or should we just drop it and use Eloquent functionality directly? If we do continue with the repository pattern, how do I get everyone to follow it instead of sprinkling in Eloquent as an easy way out of a given problem? If we don’t, is that like pointing a gun at our feet and waiting for it to go off sooner or later?

Nothing’s really been done here, for I still haven’t found a satisfying answer. My gut feeling is telling me that I should care less – things are going okay, after all –, but my brain still says I should figure out what the right thing to do is especially with regard to the foreseeable future.

Greed?

It’s definitely not helping that I’m fighting another fight in my main hustle: getting more money for doing a good job. Given the economic situation of my employer, it’s not entirely straightforward, and the huge information asymmetry between my employer and me with regard to practically everything remuneration doesn’t make it any easier, either. Combine that with a somewhat cold job market, and it’s not exactly a good position to be in.

Maybe I’m rationalising hard here, but I don’t think I’m asking for too much when I want something that is…

• an increase in real wages that
• reflects the praise for my work both absolutely and relatively, i. e.
• I end up in the right end of whatever the range for increases is across the company,
• and that is implemented in a timely manner.

I’ve seen “raises” that didn’t even manage to keep up with inflation, because the range just wouldn’t allow for that to happen, especially if it doesn’t happen on an annual basis. I’ve also seen the entire process taking so long that by the time you get what you asked for, a lot of time has passed that it’s almost time for another round.

As nice as those words of praise are in my ears, they don’t buy me anything now, let alone in the future. There’s a good chance I won’t be thinking “I’m short x amount of money now, but that’s fine, because I got to hear heart-warming words 25 years ago” in 25 years from now. That’s even truer in a world where I can’t be certain, at all, if the social system is going to – or even can – do anything remotely sufficient when it’s my time.

The “solution” here might very well be to do exactly as much as whatever is required to meet expectations and not go beyond that. I’d hate it if that were the only feasible thing I could do, because I want to believe that doing my best and then being rewarded for doing so is a win-win situation for both sides. Even if work is just transactional, you need two parties for a transaction, right?

Patience?

Fortunately, it probably won’t be long before I will have an outcome for each of those two “issues”, especially as I have full agency over whether to get rid of repositories or finding a way to enforce them harder. As for getting more money… the ball is in their court and I think they’re aware of the risks of trying to drag this out for too long. I myself haven’t made the – explicit or implicit – threat of just leaving for another job that pays me better; but I don’t think I have to do so, at all. It’s the mutual understanding of the situation that gives me the upper hand in this instance of information asymmetry.

Damn, that feels good. I see why you’d want to be on this side of the asymmetry more often than not.