reflections « Simple Living in Suffolk

26 Feb 2013, 12:24pm
reflections: homeworking Marissa Meyer Yahoo
by ermine

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In praise of meatspace

There’s a new trend in the world of work. Meatspace. Presentee-ism. Being there, in the flesh. Bums on seats.

The fragrant Marissa Meyer is into meatspace – she’s all for yahoos getting up close and personal

I haven’t been able to trace the MBA paper that started off this management fad, but I saw the beginnings of it in the last few months at work, where the same thing was being said. Not with quite the same panache as Yahoo’s Meyer, who hit Yahoos straight between the eyes with having following edict issued from Yahoo HR:

Yahoos,

Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of great benefits and tools to make us more productive, efficient and fun. With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J ¹, we want everyone to participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum. From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing — I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices. [Don'tcha love the poetic alliteration, Yahoos?]

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. [The slack way of life all you lot have gotten used to is about to end, numbskullz] That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. [Repetition to Re-educate any Recalcitrant Refuseniks that Resistance! Is! Futile!]

Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices.

In other words, Yahoos, your cushy lifestyle and childcare arrangement Have! Just! Ended! Because we own your time and We Can. Pretty much the same was said at The Firm. The keening noise from homeworkers far and wide was pretty similar. I admit that I simply suspected it was to encourage some people to take up the voluntary redundancy scheme the next time it came around. Yahoo may feel itself similarly overstaffed. However, in the US it seems much easier simply to issue pink slips all round, so I conclude that I was being over cynical as this explanation doesn’t apply in the case of Yahoo.

On a side note, imagine the feeling of Power you get issuing an edict like that? All of a sudden, you can turn over the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of your fellow human beings and make them follow your whim. Sometimes you have to look sideways in the mirror, and acknowledge the heart of darkness with its swishy arrowed tail Gordon Gekko was a wimp compared to Meyer.

Is she right – is homeworking detrimental to the working environment?

It depends on the work. There are some things that are fiercely individually creative and individualistic – writing a book, creating great art, that sort of thing. These things tend to be done by people acting as individual agents, not cube farm workers.So we can probably discount that sort of thing. It’s also not cut out for anything involving Stuff, usually. It’s about knowledge work – ideas, not things. And to be honest, the ‘knowledge worker’ office environment also used to be better in many ways than the typical open plan office/ hot-desking sty.

I saw a gradual degradation of the office environment over my three decades of working, but it is hard to separate the variables. Some of my early work was done where we had a group office of about ten of us, and a group lab where we could work on the development of electronics. This was a great working environment, which I saw both at BBC designs and at The Firm, but it was of its time – an expensive work environment where companies focused design talent and supported them for both the reflective design work (in the office) and the hands on lab work, which was a different sort of thing. There was also secretarial support – other people set the printers, made sure office supplies were replenished, all that sort of thing.

There was clear interplay between the staff- I learned an awful lot from more experienced hands, both by observation and by asking. Homeworking would have sucked here – the resources of my own electronics lab at home are a pale reflection of what was available thirty years ago at industrial research facilities despite three decades of technical development.

Even if I could replicate that, I would be at a disadvantage without the meatspace interaction with other people of a similar level or greater experience – Internet based discussion and email doesn’t go anywhere near compensating for that. Even thirty years of experience doesn’t entirely make up for that – if I haven’t experienced a particular design rathole I’d fall into it without the benefit of others around, the experience just helps me realise this faster.

Many people don’t interact with Stuff at work, they interact with thoughts or ideas. If they do interact with Stuff, homeworking is usually out. Not many people build aircraft commercially at home. So we are talking about knowledge workers.

Knowledge work and better communications – a match made in heaven

I recall the first time I came across the power of computer communications. I was working on an international collaborative project, and every so often I’d have to fax over a document to about ten groups of people in different companies. A fax machine has all the evils of a computer printer together with some pathologies all of its own, this was an early 1990s world without Internet email. Not only is a fax machine a ropey reproduction, it does a bad job of reproducing technical diagrams due to a nasty habit of not bothering to display fine lines. I spent about £500 of The Firm’s money (about £900 now) on a full-length fax card for my Dell 386 computer. All of a sudden people could read the diagrams right, and I could send the 10 lengthy faxes over lunchtime rather than take all afternoon at the fax machine feeding a multipage document in 10 times. And so it went on, with email, scanners and better computers, till we could share the results of our work with other people, from almost wherever we were.

Somewhere we jumped the tracks, and imagined that if we could share the results we could share our ideas. Yes, if it is just us who have the ideas. Yes if the ideas have been crystallised into a presentation. But compared to a bunch of interested and motivated people in a room together actually creating and swapping ideas – no. Even Cisco Telepresence which is HDTV videoconferencing is but a pale shadow of being there – the small time lags, the whole booking in advance thing, it’s crap compared to meatspace, though it’s great compared to an audio conference, or nothing. A lot better than nothing, but crap all the same compared with the best.

I also suspect sound and vision are not the only signals used between people. I was a techy sidekick in a high level business meeting between a CEO who was putting one over an opponent in a weaker position, and smelled the sharp metallic smell of anger/fear in the adversary. The CEO picked that up a couple of seconds later and went for the kill – he was just a little bit further way and must have subliminally reacted to the cue as the aircon wafted the smell to him.

The open – plan office was a step down in the working environment IMO

In the late 1990s companies were all for saving money and the open-plan office was a way to save an awful lot of money associated with physically moving infrastructure and reorganising work groups. For me it was an unmitigated disaster because of the noise problem, and this was aggravated by the advent of the mobile phone. Voice quality on mobiles is poorer than on landlines so people tend to HOLLER AT THE TOP OF THEIR VOICES in an attempt to make up for the impaired signal quality. Most natural audio path impairments are helped by shouting but the problem with mobile phones is the inherent infidelity of the GSM codecs, which is particularly bad when the wanted signal is polluted by background noise. Like in an open-plan office, a train, a public space, indeed anywhere you find shouty mobile phone users. The transmission path can just about get speech through, add junk to that and there’s less left over for the wanted signal.

I’ve been in small (ten man) offices where one of the occupants was involved in long landline phone altercations with their divorcing spouse, and while that was distracting, it was infrequent. An open plan office increases the statistical chance of serious disturbance far more, because there are far more people in earshot. I’d go as far as to say the use of mobiles for speech should be banned in open plan offices. Texting and non-voice communication started to alleviate this problem towards the end of my career.

I’m also written code and part-benefited from being in a colocated group, though the interruption and noise problem is an issue for that kind of work. I have seen a different approach to the open-pan office in American IT offices, where high partitions are used, creating cubicles – the classic Dilbert cube farm. I’ve never actually worked in a cube open plan office so I don’t know if it helps with the noise problem.

Unassigned hot-desking in an open-plan office

One of the problems for companies is that while open plan offices make changes easier, it didn’t address the problem of utilisation, so, fortunately just before I retired, there was a move to unassigned desk allocation (hot-desking). There are some things that educate a drone that he’s no longer in tune with the world of work and needs to surrender it to younger folk, and hot-desking was one of these things for me. I did this in Canary Wharf, where you’re roll up with a laptop and log into your desk phone. The desk phone was an IP telephony device, which introduces half a second’s worth of lag into the conversation. Most people nowadays have learned to live with that because of the similar lag in a mobile phone but I always struggled, particularly when another participant in a phone conference was next to me on a mobile and I heard his speech through the air a full second before it came back from the conference bridge, which added its own half-second latency to the inbound mobile call.

However, the main problems with hot desking were the simple things. Like where the hell is the bog on the floor I am today? How do people do coffee in this building? Where are the printers today – both physically, and having recognized them, how do I get connectivity to the suckers? Then if you’re trying to print something commercial in confidence you have to run a test print first. And so on. I found hot desking is a barrel of minor frustrations and time-wasting just-jobs, before you can actually start anything simply because it takes time to acquire situational knowledge in an unfamiliar work environment. Oh and office planners, allocating just four 8-seat meeting rooms for 300 people on a floor just sucks, okay?

Homeworking

I never did much homeworking, but observation of the reasons for people sending in an email WFH (working from home) showed me the most common reasons had to do with their children, though that wasn’t to say that in the case of some child-free colleagues I wouldn’t also reassign WFH to SFH (skiving from home). There was an increasing trend towards the telephone conference and I am all for people going home to do those so they don’t disturb other people who are actually trying to work in the office.

The telephone conference has the advantage of being cheap. It has no other advantages IMO. In a meatspace meeting at least you have to look people in the eye while you are wasting their time, and in a video conference you can observe the sleeping participants, and it’s expensive enough to discourage excessive meetings. Indeed the only thing worse than a telephone conference is a telephone conference with shared powerpoint presentation, because of the waste of the first 15 minutes while everyone tries to connect to livemeeting and agrees that they have a common view of the presentation, which will then be read out to them anyway

Teleconferencing, virtual working, road warrioring, homeworking – form over function

As communications got better interactions got worse, IMO. I spent a few years of my former life in videoconferencing – great big room setups like Cisco Telepresence as well as the sort of crummy video chat applications exemplified by Skype. All of these methods have a problem, they are a pale imitation of really being there. They work very well with a bunch of people who already know each other, are greatly motivated, and really want to be there. Skype is great for lovers and grandparents/children separated by continents despite it’s multisecond lag and inherent skankiness. These people really want to be in touch. But the impairments of the medium get more significant as more people are involved and the motivation is less. Do you really want to be thinking about work when your child is learning ABC or watching a sparrow? I’m been in enough meetings where Tom and Jerry would be a positive enhancement

This

or this? no contest, IMO

In the early days of virtual working people had to be really motivated to overcome the limitations of the technology, so though it was pretty crap it worked well in the world of work, because a) few people were using it and b) those people really wanted to use it. They were also usually smart enough to use the technology to share the results of their work, rather than to work together with people.

Then technology became cheaper, bandwidth became cheaper and more ubiquitous, and companies concluded that if some is good more was better, and so it was rolled out more widely. At the same time it began to blur the personal space and work space part of people’s lives.

What companies didn’t appreciate was that there was the risk of blowback. If they placed a greater claim on people’s time and commitment with an always on Crackberry virtual office, then they would start to find people’s childcare requirements encroaching on work time. Observation should have warmed them up to that – I’ve been in numerous phone conferences that had to have a break in transmission while a vocal child needed to be attended to, until it became possible for the conference chairperson to mute individual participants remotely. But that’s going to be the cost if people schedule phone conferences at 8am or 7:30 pm and demand people show up. They spread the working day, but received less commitment in those hours. It appears that we have lost the years of industrial analysis that indicate you can’t run people at > 40 hours a week without productivity falling.

Work – it’s not just about the results, It’s about the process, too, and Marissa has a point – homeworking stiffs collaborative processes

I think I’ve got a sneaking respect for Meyer’s angle on this. There’s a lot to be said for meatspace when it comes to working with people. Humans are terrible multitaskers – we time-slice, but don’t have the information architecture that makes this virtually cost-free to a computer. Meatspace supports focus, and thins distractions. Being there shows commitment, and the bandwidth of face to face beats that of remote anything hands down.

A valid counter to that is that real time interaction is usually only a small part of any knowledge job, and homeworkers often play this card in opposition to meatspacers. The problem is that it’s hellaciously difficult to predict when that face to face meatspace interaction needs to take place - few creative projects have a regimented time flow. One fellow at work who was big on homeworking though he lived only five minutes on foot from the office (he was in his fifties but had a young daughter) did actually master this. If on a phone conference something wasn’t working clearly enough, then nine times out of ten he would put on his coat and start walking to the office, and be there face to face in 10 minutes.

However, most home workers want to work at home because they want to live at a cheaper or better house further from the office, or they have childcare commitments, or both. They need advance warning – if only for the reason that they would need two hours to get to a face to face meeting!.

There is a darker corollary to this. If you are in a job where meatspace really doesn’t offer an edge, then the logical conclusion of virtualisation ends in India, not the Home Counties. Homeworker employees may not want to press the point too hard, and consider how well you can accommodate the meatspacing zeitgeist in the years to come.

Notes:

apparently that’s Process, Bureaucracy and Jams, not Peanut Butter and Jelly ↩

17 Jan 2013, 11:16am
economy living intentionally reflections shares: glastonbury GM oxford
by ermine

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The wheel of the year turns, and a pause for reflection

The Ermine household took itself to the West country at the beginning of the year, for a time of rest, and reflection on the year passed and the year to come. The culturally preferred way of doing that in the UK is to get hammered on the last day of the old year and welcome in the new with a humdinger of a headache and hazy recollections of indiscretions. Nothing wrong in that in itself, but it gets tougher on the constitution as you get older So happy new year to y’all if you’re still here!

It so happened that Mrs Ermine wanted to go the the Oxford Real Farming conference. That’s an alternative to the conventional Oxford Farming Conference, where Owen Paterson told the assembled mass of agri-business that he was going to pay for PR to convince the recalcitrant refuseniks of the Great British Public that GM food is good for them. Really it is. I’ve offed the GM rant to later as it isn’t the main topic here.

So we stayed at a lovely campsite near Oxford for a couple of days. Oxford looked pretty much like it did three-and-a-half decades ago when I went up there for an interview, only the tourists have changed,

old-worlde building graced by asian lady

old-worlde building graced by pretty Asian girl wrapped up against the British weather. Time moves slowly in Oxford; Photoshop her out, fade to grainy black and white and it could be the same as my 1978 photo

Wandering around the city you can practically smell the old money oozing from the stones

old money keeping this gilded gate nice. It would be shabby if paid for by an Austerity Britain council

Then it was time to move on, to Glastonbury in Somerset, for a period of reflection on the year past and the years to come. The weather was kind to us – we were prepared to eat the cost of a lost booking if the weather had turned all snowy, since our FWD camper van is back-heavy and handles poorly in the snow. We had a lovely few days in a magical environment, though I fear a 1970s revival seems on its way by some of the garb on show.

on the tor, I’m sure there’s a 1970′s revival in there somewhere

We stayed at a self-catering cottage near the town, and ate well from the slightly off the beaten track greengrocer and the fine town butcher, both near the market cross.

alrternative shopfitting for this greencrocer, but their stuff was good

alternative shopfitting for this greencrocer, but their stuff was good

Although it’s ringed by the usual rash of out of town shopping and supermarkets, the people in the town have enough non-clone-town concerns to support a decent number of shops, and not the usual rash of casinos (not one I recall) and charity shops that infest the hollowed-out High streets of many market towns.

Yup. Think we get the message of what’s important to some folk round these parts

Recession? What recession? We don’t do that round here

I love city streets in the rain, okay so it's cheesy and Thomas Kincade but so what

I love city streets in the rain, okay so it’s cheesy and Thomas Kinkade but so what, it’s kind of magical. And no chain stores, no clone – town Britain

You can’t really talk about Glastonbury without a reference to the eponymous Tor so here it is. It’s still a right grunt to get up it, though it is easier now than it has been for me in the past.

Glastonbury Tor

One of the joys of this holiday is we rented a really characterful stone cottage in nearby Butleigh that dated from the 1500s, though we had the advantages of modern plumbing and electric heating. There was a wood stove in an enormous inglenook, but this was more for the atmosphere than a useful source of heat as it was leaky as hell and tiny. It made me appreciate the quality of my own wood stove, but hell, it added character and we had electric heating to do the real work

So where’s the personal finance angle? Well, it was also a good time to look back at six months since leaving work, what happened, what is likely to happen, where I want to go.

what happened since leaving work

I lost some weight. That is not a bad thing. I haven’t consciously tackled this, it seems that the stress while working had negative physical effects.
I drink less coffee – often just in the morning. Hell, I can even code without it, despite it being the software writer’s legal drug of choice.
I drink a little bit less booze. Okay a lot less compared with the immediate end of my working life. That stress thing again I guess

One of the things that became clear, is that I started my journey unprepared, particularly psychologically. I had expected to get to 60, retire normally and get on with life. In 2009 I discovered I needed to do that 8-11 years short. In times of need the Ermine will fight, and so I chose to fly into the storm, accept the rotten work environment but save madly.

Unwisely I assumed that the primary risks were financial, that I would be kicked out. In retrospect this was not the case. I had already accumulated significant capital, unlike everybody else in Britain is seems I paid down my mortgage rather than going on holidays and buying cars with the increased house prices. And indeed lived significantly below my means, accumulating capital in terms of housing and some shareholdings, as well as the usual rainy day fund. I measured this against income, but in fact it makes more sense to measure it against outgoings, which made it bigger in effect.

The financial risks were overblown. I could probably have made it bailing in 2010, because I had projected my outgoings to be the same as while at work. A life retired is one where you can take joy in things that are free and low cost, those which take an investment of time, or improving skills, becoming self-critical and honing one’s art rather than searching for the technological quick fix or having to pay over the odds to pack everything into the weekend.

One of the gifts that not working has done for me is that I can aim to do things with respect, or not do them at all. When I was working I had to do all sorts of things ‘just because’. I couldn’t respect anything to do with the stupid performance management system. WTF is the point of a performance management system – my performance showed in what I did. The back of house guys in the Olympics could see what was going on in real time, because of the efforts of me in high-level design and the subcontractors in mid and low-level and getting boots on the ground. I didn’t need some stupid prick ticking boxes or not. And indeed all due respect to my last and final line manager who got the balance on this right, it was the previous one who was the box-ticking prick. But I had to do PM, ‘just because’ some management consultant twits on an MBA said that was the way to do things. Where the hell were these guys when the West was built, funny how they only showed up as it is being lost!

There are very few things I have to do just because somebody says so now. So when I do something, I try and take time, to address the job in hand, reflect a few moments, and then engage properly, indeed to live intentionally. Whether it’s roasting a chicken, cutting a piece of wood or designing a piece of kit. While working I sleepwalked like an automaton through stuff that needed to be sleepwalked through, but also through things that needed to be done with respect.

I missed two risks. No man is an island, entire of itself. In flying into the storm of organisational values that had become so disconnected from mine, the Ermine’s brilliant white pelt was tainted as I had to run with some of the stupidity and pretend to agree with what I believed to be arrant rubbish. I paid for being so at odds with the values New Lean and Mean Firm. Overtly, by nearly being ejected for struggling after parting the ways with DxGF. And covertly, because in retrospect pretending to be something I wasn’t for so long seriously damaged my physical and mental health.

In 2007 I came to Glastonbury with a couple of pals. And failed to climb the Tor, I got too out of breath and abandoned the attempt. Which is piss poor, the path rises 80m in about 400m linear distance. Now I can’t say that I raced up it this time but I was okay, stopped a few times to gather strength but the recovery was a couple of minutes, not tens of minutes then fail as it was five years ago. And not too many people overetook me . I am sure that Mr Money Mustache would consider that a really low grade performance but I’m not him, I’m probably twenty years older. And I don’t have the physical fitness fetish. Decent for my age is what I want. His original weight target is what I’d like, it’s roughly what I weighed at 21, and at least it isn’t so bad I’d have to lose half my body weight to get there. I have absolutely no comprehension of why he wants to become heavier. Good luck to him, I’m sure he’ll get there by the end of the year!

I want to be able to cycle up the grade from Tuddenham on an ordinary road bike at more than walking speed without feeling like shit for fifty yards afterwards. I’d like to be able to cycle from Ipswich to Minsmere and back again. Pumping iron and being able to lift cars single handed – nah. Life’s too short for that, even if doing that makes it a little bit longer. Each to their own.

So much for physical health, but not living my values cost me mental health too, it robbed me of hope and fire to illuminate my world, to choose life and direction. When I left, I gained by the removal of much of what was wrong. It looked good, and for some time I did not miss the hole – the absence of agency and direction that should have been there but wasn’t. I followed the originally designed financial plan, but the greatest fear was running out of money. So, like an unconscious pilot slumped at the controls, the plane to run on autopilot, and it did well ,the original flight plan was sound. I tried to wrestle against my net worth falling, but that was a fight I can’t win. By various synchronicities events conspired to make it look as if I could win, but it won’t be possible in the medium term. It doesn’t need to be, I don’t need to satisfy Micawber’s rule over the next few years, and my original plan did not demand that. It had two requirements – that I should not run out of cash, and that I allocate my ISA allowance each and every year for several years to come.

Hope is a fragile thing. DW played for time, and guided the inspirationless ermine across the gap until the spark of the internal flame could strike and hold again. There are times in life when one must be prepared to fall back and fall back until somewhere, like Albert Camus in Return to Tipasa, in the midst of winter you learn of the invincible summer that lies within. Somewhere in Glastonbury this happened. It is time to ease back into the pilot’s seat and survey the controls. Not necessarily time to do anything yet, but to look and see if anything has changed that the flight plan needs to take into account.

GM rant

My personal objection to GM food isn’t that it’s bad for you. I mean, some variants will no doubt turn out to be bad for you and/or the environment in general. But there’s plenty of regular millennia old stuff out there that’s bad for you. Try making wine out of ivy or eating foxglove, or most fungi. Plants are aggressive bastards, out to kill you with strong poisons ¹ in the fight for Darwinian supremacy. Vegetables have feelings too and don’t actually want to be eaten by great hairy apes. Fortunately a whole host of humanity has gone before to ID or learn how to cook the nasty stuff. We didn’t need GM to make a mess of the environment – DDT, the non-decaying plastics waste choking the oceans, there’s more than enough mess made perfectly conventionally. more »

Notes:

if you have ever tried eating red kidney beans without boiling the suckers for ten minutes you get to know this up close and personal. I saw the results in a student flat when one guy sampled a couple of red kidney beans on the stove. The results were dramatic, he didn’t make it to the bog before chundering violently ↩

21 Dec 2012, 1:00pm
reflections: Gore Vidal promotion
by ermine

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The Art of Getting Promoted

Drew over at Objective Wealth has a nice article on Do You Deserve a Promotion Next Year? I took a look and it’s all sensible stuff. In particular, I wholeheartedly agree with Drew’s critique of common wrong ways to look at this

However, do you deserve a promotion next year? And if so, on what basis? If your answer is either: “because I need it for the money,” or “because I’ve been there longest,” or even “I don’t want <whoever> to get promoted and become my boss,” then you might like to check your premises…

Don’t get me wrong, I have great admiration for Gore Vidal’s pithy summary of the human condition

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail ¹

The problem is that being jealous of other people dries you up inside and makes you a bitter and twisted sourpuss that isn’t pleasant to work with, so you don’t get promoted for that reason alone. Life’s a bitch, n’est’ce pas? It’s a common problem. It’s based on two bad assumptions, or maybe premises in Ayn Rand’s parlance -

Life is fair
The world is as you see it

I should make clear I’m talking about jobs and promotion in the permanent staff of an organisation, for the simple reason that I’ve never worked in any other way. Contractor applications are probably a bit different, but I don’t know what promotion means in that context.

First, a little history aside

There’s also a third cultural assumption, which held for many jobs until the early 1990s. That is that pay and grade are directly and closely linked. In the past this was the case – at the BBC I was a grade 2N5P and I’d know what anybody else on the grade was earning, subject to variations in overtime and London Weighting where applicable, again, the latter was on a standard scale. Similar principles held when I moved to The Firm until the mid 1990s.

In any marketplace information is the key to power, and companies rediscovered this in the 1990s. By splitting base pay into pay ranges and an elective ‘bonus’ they were able to reduce the information available to their workforce, and the general demise of collective bargaining meant that grade and pay were no longer closely coupled. Your pay now becomes the integrated sum of incremental payrises and any bonus – firms have various byzantine rules on pay bands but certainly for The Firm the pay bands overlapped so it was perfectly possible for an old hand on a lower grade to earn more than a new starter on a higher grade. It also reduced pensionable pay as bonuses crept up to be about 5% of typical pay – thus reducing the pension liability by 5% too Of course, this wasn’t presented as a way of screwing down pay, but as ‘rewarding outperformance and managing underperformance’.

Anyway, back to the main thread. Let’s take a look at those assumptions

Life isn’t fair

The evidence is all around you. All too often the good guys are crushed under the wheels of the bad guys’ steamrollers, the bad guys often get the girls, and in general the meek don’t inherit the earth, they get carved up and ground into the dust. Your Momma lied when she insinuated into you that life was fair, and you still can’t get over the betrayal…

The world isn’t necessarily as you see it

Tough one, this. I was that sourpuss for too long, because dammit, my world was all about me. Well it is, isn’t it – if you say your world isn’t about you then you are probably being economical with the truth. However, the world isn’t all about me, and a wise and experienced engineer took me to one side and said basically ‘this isn’t about your technical skils. You have two choices in front of you. One is you can be all pissed off about not getting a promotion and you will be right, you do deserve better, but it shows in that sour puss of yours and cynical demanour ². The alternative is you can get on with doing a good job, and here is a hot tip in your shell-like.

Your greatest chances of influencing your pay upwards are in times of transition

Whereas all I was seeing is ‘I’m not getting what I deserve, those other guys weren’t as smart as I was, S’not fair’. I was smart enough to listen up, ask myself if his view of the world was not more accurate than mine, and having done that I sought self-knowledge. As an INTJ I am self-referenced so not a team player, and for various other reasons a primadonna to boot. I was able to get away with that because I had talent, and in particular I was a generalist which is good in a research facility that is full of specialists. But it wasn’t cost-free.

I made one particular mistake when I joined The Firm from the BBC. I told the truth when they asked me what my previous salary had been. Don’t ever do that. Unless it is a fixed scale payment independently verifiable, consider inflating it by a believeable amount, up to about 20% (how much probably depends on the type of job). [ed you should probably take into account Paul's comment below on the information carried in your previous P45] I would have started at the Firm on the next pay grade had I done that, and this tactical mistake cost me an awful lot of money, because it took me a while to learn the art of getting a promotion. A third of my career there was on the first pay grade, then I learned some of the following, getting promoted three times, without moving department either

So, what do you need to know about getting promoted?

In the case of the first interview on entry (or to shift department to one where few people know you), remember that it isn’t about the facts, it’s also about the feeling. A company is a political machine. It’s about people. Yes, companies have tied themselves all up in knots with competency based interviewing and all that bullshit, so you need to learn about the STAR technique, but as this site acknowledges tacitly ‘Indeed, if an interviewer likes you, he may be more tempted to prompt you and push you along than if he has bad vibes about you‘.

People hire people, not competencies, and the unwritten questions they ask themselves are

do I like this person?
Can I get on with then?
Can I imagine working alongside them?
how will they fit into the team and get along with others?

They’re looking for reassurance and upbeat positivity. Tell them it’s a wonderful world, any problems were surmountable etc etc. Remember, everybody pretends that it is all about the facts and an interview is evidence based. They are lying shitbags, because the politics is just as important. Fit in. Share their values as well as bringing some of your own. If you are an awkward bastard, a maverick or exceptionally talented then be careful – people find it harder to hire people who are extremely different from their own view of themselves, even if that is exactly who they need. This obviously applies to your putative line management – the personnel droid if any will be there to curb any obvious departures from the script.

Once you’re in, if you want promotion it looks to me that your best bet is to shift department or line manager. Although I have never got promotion that way, other than moving company, I saw enough other people do it in the early part of my career with The Firm. However, I liked what I did, and was working on other aspects of life so though I observed it, I didn’t use the information. Although I didn’t get promoted over this period, I observed some interesting techniques for those that did. Names have been slightly changed to protect the guilty

The Bob Rainer Doctrine.

This guy was a very talented guy in his own right, but he identified early on that how you are thought of at work isn’t all about the facts. It’s about the performance – performance as in circus performance, not performance management He’s drive through an ambitious project with a major deadline, and occasionally there would be some great crisis just before the deadline. He’d pull an all-nighter, often solving the problem just before the major demonstration of the project to some important Big Cheese. This does two things for his image in front of the Big Boss -

He is seen as talented, proactive, and a problem-solver who does whatever it takes to deliver. As a side benefit the rest of his team who made the project happen fade to grey in the background. He is the knight in shining armour, and also an key person they could never dispense with.

The key thing to note is that not all problems are unforeseen It took me a long time to realise this. This one is sheer genius. It does require a talent in a narrow and essential niche, but once you have it then you have the boss eating out of your hand and a rep for brilliance and dedication to the cause. It’s all about the politics and the performance… You need drama – Bob was talented enough to get most of these projects out on time without the histrionics. But a bit of drama now and again did no end of good for his image, and because the problems he’d ‘fix’ were deep in the technicalities it was hard for observers to work out what was happening.

The Boss sees the dedication and the fix – once it’s fixed the fault doesn’t matter, and they’re not smart enough to trace it anyway

The John Beckers Doctrine

Another showman, this fellow had a talent to sparking up high-profile projects and promising the earth. He also had a particular personal magnetism for many people, though the Ermine wasn’t susceptible, and embraced the latest management fads because he had done an MBA in night school so he knew the lingo in the early 1990s when this sort of this was all the rage. The Firm had been an industrial research facility where technical and scientific knowledge had been prized. Anybody who has mixed with suchlike knows that geeks are not showmen, and Beckers who had a pretty decent technical awareness but as a showman was a lion among pussycats.

He kicked off many of these projects probably knowing they wouldn’t come to anything in the long run, but had a fantastic talent for moving on while the project was still in its ascendancy and passing it on to a newly promoted sucker who would try and move heaven and earth to make it work. Very occasionally they’s succeed, but generally wouldn’t.

Success has many fathers but failure is a bastard. Always put at least one neck between yourself and a cratering project

So how did I get promoted? Well, the dot-com boom happened in the late 1990s and The Firm was a TMT ³ behemoth – well in the UK at least. Every so often it gets its tail up and tries to take over the world, usually in some random collection of acquisitions. However, genuinely exciting things were happening in the TMT space at that time. A key thing to know about getting promoted is

It is a lot easier to get a raise or taken on with a good salary in economic booms

After the talk from the old boy I had become far less of a sourpuss, plus it didn’t matter so much. It was the dotcom boom I was going to be earning more from trading shares than working, like every other bugger from the shoeshine guy at Liverpool Street Station onwards ⁴. I went through the application system a couple of times, got knocked back, and then my then boss pretty much created an opening requiring exactly my skills, after I applied for a job in a different department, making use of the observations. He pretty much insisted I apply for the other job even though I didn’t have the right skills because it allowed him to apply pressure to the bigger cheese. You have to play the game, y’know.

The other two promotions were also as a result of roiling change. A deeply nasty piece of work started at a high level in The Firm and began to outsource a lot of work to cheaper areas, funnily enough to a firm I believe his wife had a stake in. In the upheaval a divide opened up between technical talent and project management, which was being expanded to manage the highly increased outsourcing. I came out on the technical talent side and once again it was all about who you know. Everything was up in the air and I had cause to be very grateful to my then line manager, who faced with a choice of two grades to place me figured the higher one was a no-brainer as it didn’t cost him anything. There was no interview for that job

Then, in a stroke of luck a couple of years on, the nasty piece of work decided that there should only be six levels between the lowest management grade and his level, so it was time to de-layer. I still recall the haunted faces of some of the departmental managers who he made apply for the reduced number of their own jobs. Rumour had it his selection criterion was based on asking them to cite the weakest points of their peers he was going to interview next, kind of like a new twist on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The guy was a genius, and showman in his own way too, he talked a great game, and haired an awful lot of new people who had coincidentally worked with him in a previous stint at an investment bank. I got another promotion out of that delayering, because I had enough critical experience and the Firm had paid off many of the people with technical skills through voluntary redundancy schemes. You don’t need technical skills if you are going to outsource all of it Until you do need it…

Nowhere have I addressed the issues raised in Drew’s description of how you should go about getting a promotion

The correct motivation, and justification, for achieving a promotion needs to be based on your desire to continue your upward journey of achieving your values; by using your mind to engage in creative work, develop your character and sustain a productive purpose over a long period of time.

I’d actually be narrower than that. The reason a company takes someone on is just the same as any other asset, though there is a lot of baggage that comes with employees that doesn’t come with, say a milling machine or a logic analyser.

A company takes you on because it believes that getting you do do their job will enable them to make more money in the long run that if they didn’t employ you ⁵.

As it is, they don’t really give a shit about your desire for self-actualisation and whatnot. Tesco don’t really care about the love poetry of their shelf stackers, they want those tins of beans moved and stacked on the shelves ASAP. Companies pretend to care about their employees because unlike the milling machine humans are complicated beasts and you sometimes get better performance out of them by addressing their non-work issues. In the very distant past I recall The Firm doing some elements of this, it was a fun place to work in the early days and the BBC’s Television centre also had its own esprit de corps.

When I started work thirty years ago companies were also a lot smaller and more paternalistic, and even FTSE100 firms were often run by skilled individuals who knew the firm and may have risen within rather than the transient career CEOs we have now, whose allegiance is often first to their bank balance and then to the company. The earlier sort of organisations were far more fun to to work for than the rapacious vessels for the career CEO’s ego that we have now. How we as shareholders stayed asleep at the switch for so long as to let this dreadful state of affairs happen I don’t know, as it wasn’t just the fun for the employees that disappeared. A significant amount of the value made in a firm seems to be getting thieved in CEO pay looking at stock market performance since the dotcom bust. Anyway, the upshot of it is that a company employing you is all about the money.

And your performance at making money, unfortunately is usually only visible in hindsight. Take my career. If I double my pay on leaving and multiply by the 23 years I worked for the Firm ⁶ that is probably a reasonable estimate for how much The Firm would have been better off it it hadn’t had an Ermine on the books. Did I deliver?

It’s hard to say. On about two occasions, I can say that I’ve saved The Firm about a million pounds, but what I can’t say is whether someone else might have stepped up to the plate instead. The most recent was the Olympics – in the end if you are going to negotiate with suppliers you have to have some knowedge of what you are buying else you risk paying over the odds. It was a surprise to at least one supplier that The Firm still had any CATV engineering experience left, despite one of their guys telling them – he used to work for me

There was another occasion where I got a payrise that was bigger than the payrise from any promotion. It was where a bunch of guys were going to do some project in Asia and I was called in to share some CATV knowedge. I was overcommitted at the time so I tried to duck out a few times, but was eventually nailed. I listened at the meeting, and this didn’t have a hope of flying. So I stood up, said so, and pointed them in the direction fo another bunch of people in The Firm that were doing a well-trumpeted project in a similar space. I pretty much said for God’s sake talk to these guys – my experience on this is stale but they are doing it right now and you might be able to hitch a ride. I thought I’d get hammered for that but the line manager thought it was fantastic. Mind you he was the same guy that tried to run me out of the Firm the year later when it had a near-death experience so you can’t count on glory lasting. Oh yeah, the year. FY 2006/2007. Even coal shines like gold in an economic boom. And I probably did save them a shedload of money by telling them where to go…

Earlier projects – well industrial research doesn’t always make you money, though sometimes it stops you diving down ratholes. It is harder to split my contribution off in those earlier days because I was part of a team. More importantly, however, at no point was it so clear that I could have said -

you should promote me so that I can make/save you £££££

because an Ermine is an opportunistic hunter… That’s the whole problem of the dreary competency based blah blah blather. Opportunity makes the man. I am not a sound designer, but in my time at the BBC I created several sounds for TV games shows of the time. Why was it me, a lowly engineer, surrounded by a citadel of far superior musical talent? It’s because I saw the opportunity to program the A/D converter of a BBC microcomputer and thus kick off a sound automatically at the press of a button on the set ⁷. Obviously the first demo was a 1kHz tone like a censor bleep but then I offered production something a bit better. I did it just mucking around with the program, since I didn’t know anything about granular synthesis or other stuff. I did make a convincing bell by modelling the physics but it’s easy in that case Nowhere in a competency based interview would I have been able to say

“I can make your shows better by sonfiying your show objects so you don’t have to drop those FX in during post”

though that’s probably the most lasting effect of my time there And that is why a rationalist approach to getting promoted may be sub-optimal. The opportunities of the future are voiceless in the here and now. If I were hiring, I would hire a good, adaptable individual and give him the tools, and the basic instruction ‘have at it’ and let’s party on the spoils of war. I wouldn’t look for competencies, I would look for originality and lateral thinking.

I don’t think it is a total coincidence that with the procedural bullshit that we have ended up with as a hiring rationale, firms are finding it harder and harder to recruit good people and are increasingly going the contractor way. Accepted there are other good reasons that make contractors and consultants more attractive in today’s business environment, but the way interviewing is meant to work sucks now. You cannot achieve good by eliminating anything that might be bad.

So, to summarize

It’s about politics as much as facts and capabilities
Points of change (job, department, company) are the opportunities to better yourself
a nice booming and overheating economy makes it a lot easier. Sorry about that…
Showmanship matters – the world loves a performance. Peo0ple believe in people, not facts. How it’s done matters as much as what is done.
Don’t stand out too much. People hire people that look a bit like their own image of themselves

So that’s my thoughts for the Winter Solstice at the darkest night. Looks like an epic fail on the end of the world, too

Notes:

Quoted by Gerard Irvine, “Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg,” [memorial service for Driberg] (8 December 1976) ↩
I have paid this gift forward a few times at The Firm since then. In at least one case the signal was heeded ↩
Technology, Media, Telecoms ↩
As you may guess, it didn’t turn out that way. Through a combination of good luck and hopefully some better judgement, I have probably clawed back that loss now ↩
remember the cost to a company of employing you on the permanent staff is about two to three times your gross salary, in terms of employer taxation and providing facilities ↩
That’s not tripling it but then I experienced career progression so I didn’t enter on the same pay scale ↩
I know this is trivially easy nowadays, but in those analogue days you’d have had to run up a tape deck or a cart machine and that’s just not quick enough to respond for a game show. There were no Arduinos, MP3 players and even CD was a rarity ↩

19 Dec 2012, 4:16pm
reflections: 21 12 2012 apocalypse winter solstice
by ermine

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What part of the End of the World do preppers not get?

So some weird guys and half of Russia have concluded the world’s gonna end on Friday. That’s all well and dandy, indeed it gives me a chance to get into the fortune telling business here.

The Ermine can categorically state the world will NOT end on December 21st 2012

And if it does, well, bite me afterwards Which brings me on to what’s puzzling me about preppers who think the world is going to end. Why are they putting so much effort into surviving it? I mean, it’s THE END OF THE WORLD for heaven’s sake, not just some run of the mill zombie attack.

Bugarach, France,apparently a good place to survive the Mayan apocalypse

At least there’s some rationale for people piling into Bugarach because they hope to hitch a ride on a UFO that’s going to arrive in the nick of time. Hopefully they’ll bring back the missing top of the mountain.

Wonder how you hitch a ride on a UFO, somehow just sticking a thumb out doesn’t seem quite enough. Perhaps the good people of Bugarach can update their website with some of the hot news about it all, since the tourist website seems to studiously avoid any mention of the end of the world while talking of the numerous walks in the rural birdsong. Along with the usual delightful Gallic insouciance to the fact that French missed out on being a widely spoken language among the potential tourists of the world… I wonder if kids still learn French at school, my 40-year-old school French was up to the birdsong but not much more. ¹

Joanna Fuertes-Knight’s Apocalyptic Dinner for One. Help the lady out with all that Spam, people. (language slightly though not very NSFW, well, whaddya expect on a site called vice.com)

There may be plenty of reasons to stockpile Spam and tinned food. Surviving the end of the world doesn’t seem to be one of them. Gatecrashing Joanna Fuertes-Knight’s Apocalyptic Dinner for One might be a reason, that’s far too much Spam for one girl to eat even if the world has ended

There are some things worth prepping for. Unexpected redundancy, yes. Tolerating the world of work less as you get older, yes. Collapse of the welfare state, hyperinflation, or the value of money becoming destroyed by the inherent inconsistencies in the assumptions we make about it, maybe. Zombie attacks, not so sure about that, nuclear war, have to think about that, probably a lack of fun afterwards y’know. The end of the world? You can’t prep for that ‘cos it’s the End of The World, dammit You’ve already missed the last flight to Mars.

Me, I’m already prepped for Friday. Along with the world ending you’ve also got to prep for the winter solstice, when the shortening of the days is arrested and begins to turn towards the returning of the light. It’s traditionally a time of coming together and celebrating. A bit of this

End of the world? Bring it on!

augmented by some mulled wine is the way to celebrate the Winter Solstice, and if the world ends then I’ll take it straight between the eyes

Someone ought to tell those Mayan guys they need to run out to the shops buy a new calendar, too.

Notes:

Have to take that back, I’ve just looked at VisitIpswich and they’ve achieved a similar fail I was spoiled by the cosmopolitan Carnac tourist site. Even VisitLondon settles for the cheesy Google translation, though at least it’s a hat tip to trying to be customer-friendly. ↩

20 Nov 2012, 10:31pm
economy fixing things frugality reflections: allorments complainypants growing
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where did we lose the basic skills of self-reliance to cope with financial austerity?

The Grauniad’s had a series called Breadline Britain about how dreadful life is for our increasingly financially challenged nation. Now I just about experienced Britain in the 1960s, as it was pulling itself out of the post-war austerity, and one of the things that strikes me about the difference between the Britain I saw as a child and that of now is that adults have become far less self-reliant. We have lost many basic skills that soften the issues of having less money, and it appears that many adults just don’t seem interested in learning. The second thing that strikes me is the appalling incompetence at household financial management. Perhaps it was easier for my parents’ generation because borrowing money was much harder in the past, so people had to live within their means or just lump it. And the last thing that is obviously wrong is people don’t seem to be asking themselves whether they can afford to have children before doing so. This lady has four children – on a family income of £44k. It isn’t hard to see why she is struggling.

People design in fixed costs into their lives without giving them enough thought. It first struck me when I reflected on a colleague who lived 25 miles away from work, where I was 6.5 miles from work. We were both higher rate taxpayers, and I calculated that he needed to earn ~£5k more than me, just to have the same disposable income. How’s that? Well, design in a 50 mile round trip instead of a 13 mile round trip. That’s an extra 37 miles he needs to drive, each and every day. That’s about £1300 a year in fuel alone. He’s putting 8100 extra miles a year on his car, with all the wear and tear that entails. I could keep my cars for 10 years and buy them well secondhand; he bought his cars new – in the service life of one of mine, he’d have put 80,000 miles on the clock, so that just wasn’t an option for him. I could bike to work when the weather was congenial. Taken in the round he was taking a hit that was probably equivalent to a salary cut of £5000 a year. And of course he was losing about an hour of his time each day.

Every time you pay someone to do something you can do yourself, you have to earn enough to be able to pay tax on the money you are paying out. If that person is employed, you have to cover the overheads, sick pay, employer’s contributions, the lot, whereas if you are doing it yourself, you do not have to earn the money and pay the tax and NI on it.

It is always much more expensive in cash terms to pay someone else to do something that you can do yourself.

Now that isn’t a reason to insource everything, because there’s the opportunity cost to the money you could be earning at the same time If you are hiring someone on minimum wage and you’re on minimum wage yourself, that is barmy – do your own cleaning. If you’re earning £50k then knock yourself out and hire the cleaner if it means you can earn £20 an hour net and paying them £6.19.

The cleaner on minimum wage is the obvious example, but there are more subtle costs. For instance, it’s more expensive to get Tesco to prepare your meals for you rather than do it yourself, which is why ready meals are more expensive than the ingredients, and if the cost is the same then the ready meal will contain ropey ingredients

I was staggered at this bunch of Guardianistas who are struggling to feed two children and two adults on the meagre income of… £35,000 if you please, and they’re living with his parents! Let’s take a closer look. They were on a combined household income of £75,000. Now I have never lived in a household that had this much income – ever! I haven’t been in a household with two incomes for most of my life. The Ermine is not one of the 1%. So I ask myself how the hell these good people managed to get made bankrupt. She lost her job when they had twins. Now I appreciate that it’s not meant to happen that way but in general many mums leave the workforce for a few years after having kids, so the loss of that income was to be expected. Have they never heard of savings? Now they are complaining of not being able to afford decent food, and having to use ready meals. Mrs Ermine has examined that fallacy in this post and found it wanting – the problem there is food preparation skills, or the lack thereof, as well as a shocking lack of imagination and general get-off-your-backside-and-do-something smarts.

Now eating is one of those fundamental things that everybody needs to do. If you’re rich enough to afford ready meals, then have at it, but if you’re not, or you have the temerity to want your food to taste of something other than sugar. vegetable fats and monosodium glutamate, or maybe you are rude enough to want vitamins, then you have to re-acquaint yourself with the food prep skills that humanity has preserved across generations – until now. Sometimes I wonder if people realise that food doesn’t only come from supermarkets – it’s actually possible to grow some things yourself I particularly like the line

I’m not stupid: I know this is going to have a detrimental effect on my children’s health.

For God’s sake, woman, you’re running on £35,000 a year, and have more time, being unemployed. And yet you see fit to switch from cooking yourself to using ready meals? Where’s the rest of that £35k going, on the horses?

It is the loss of skills that will hurt people in future. In the past people grew food on allotments and in gardens, which saves a lot of money – Mrs Ermine qualifies that at about £2000 a year saved; for a basic rate taxpayer that’s equivalent to needing to earn about £3000 less every year! As an added bonus, although your veg will look gnarlier that Tesco’s, it will actually taste of something and be good for you, as well as filling you up.

Food does this – it just sprouts from the ground, despite what Tesco would have you believe, and here some citizens of Ipswich are taking advantage of that fact

There are other skills that could save people money. When I bought my first house, I had a problem with a stuck main intake stopcock under the kitchen sink. Now I could have called in a plumber, but because I had seen my Dad do plumbing, I figured I’d change this myself. I had ambitions of using a blowtorch and Yorkshire fittings but couldn’t reduce the seepage from the Water board stopcock enough to get enough heat into this, so once I got within 5cm of the inlet with some abortive attempts I sucked it up and used a compression stopcock. Job done. I replaced the guttering myself on that house – for the cost of an aluminium ladder and the materials, which was a lot cheaper than when I had that job done on this house; I was time-poor and wanted the soffit and bargeboads changed to uPVC which wasn’t within my capability. I fixed my heating system when the timer/programmer died and again when one of the motorised diverter valves died. I changed my own cold water tank, taking the opportunity to relocate the bugger to the apex of the roof to give a decent head of water to the shower, rather than run a power shower. I changed the water pump on my car, and replaced brake pads in the past. I did this because I grew up with the expectation that any halfway competent person who wasn’t rich would be able to do those – people just couldn’t afford not to.

More work, yes. More money, no – I can’t save any more money on heating

Mrs Ermine asked me recently if I was going to run the wood stove in the day. I don’t generally, because the heat is preserved in the house from the evening before. I said no, because I didn’t want to spend the money. She looked at me as if I was crazy. “How’s that going to cost us more then?”. She was right – we don’t pay for heating, because we are prepared to chop up wood and pallets. I did some of that today. Heating less doesn’t save us money. But we need to chop up more wood.

In Britain we need to become more self-reliant. We need to learn how to cook decent food from ingredients that our grandmothers would recognise. We need to learn to fix some of the basics ourselves. We need to learn to go without if we haven’t got the money, rather than borrow money and have our future selves pay even more back. In the last decade or so we have outsourced a lot of these basics to outside agencies and to the welfare and benefits system, to try and buy our way out of needing to tackle the gritty basics of life. It’s time to roll up our sleeves, spit on our hands, and get to work relearning some of the basic skills our grandparents used to take for granted.

Where’d they print the instructions on this darn thing?

Knowing how to feed yourself and your children from food not sourced from supermarkets and food that doesn’t come with instructions printed on the back is a skill we seem to have lost somewhere. My mother’s opinion of supermarket veg was unprintable – she got that from Lewisham market stallholders who would get it from Covent Garden market in the early morning. Even as a student supermarket veg was tired and low-grade. Fortunately students don’t need veg The supermarkets have found how to make veg last longer by chicanery like de-oxygenated atmospheres in plastic packaging and the like, but they can’t get round the problem that the flavour of food fades with time, and most of it seems to fade in the first day or two. It’s why those stallholders got their produce from Covent Garden barrow-boys in the early morning – because they’d have got an earful from their customers if their produce tasted as poor as Tesco’s finest. But it was more faff, and somewhere between the 1970s and now we collectively decided that all the adults in a household should go to work, so we don’t have time to buy decent fruit and veg, or grow it, or cook our own food, or fix our own plumbing or any of those things that our grandparents took for granted.

We could afford the luxury of losing those skills in the last couple of decades. From the Guardian’s Breadline Britain series it looks to me that these skills are now being very sorely missed. We need to stop borrowing so much money and start living within our means. We need to think about whether we can afford to have as many children because it looks like some of the freebies there are drying up. And all in all we need to man up and start to take responsibility for the choices we make in our lives and skill up to be able to do more with less. The Guardian’s we never had it so bad is absolute bullshit. I grew up in a London of coal fires where only a single room in a house was heated in general, where most people didn’t have cars, and where people grew their own food and cooked it themselves.

Fridges had no freezer compartment – I recall the excitement when we got the first one with a two-star icebox – you could store frozen food in that but couldn’t freeze it I think. Respiratory ailments were widespread, because the damp and condensation were endless problems; I got bronchitis nearly every year until we moved to a house with central heating. That was not poverty in a Guardianista sense of the word – nearly everybody was like that. But what we did have was a broad base of basic skills, and good and reasonably stable communities. The move to paying for everything and having both adults working has atomised those communities and we have surrendered some basic skills for the blandishments of advertising. It would make the Guardianistas wring their hands in horror.

And yet there was some satisfaction and camaraderie there. People had hobbies other than watching television, and often these were creative, in quite eccentric ways. There may not be so much money about in future, but we have enormous advantages over those times, communications are far cheaper, the relative level of wealth in much higher.

The essential difference is that Britain in the 1960s, though it was far poorer than the Britain of 2012, was improving. It was better than Britain in the 1950s, and immeasurably better than the Britain that had endured its darkest hour standing alone against the Axis. The Britain of 2012 stands wanting compared to the Britain of 2006/7, and the Britain of 2015 will probably be wanting in material terms compared to today never mind 2007, for many people.

We probably can’t dodge that, but we can soften the blow by taking our lives back from the endless messages of spend spend spend. There is a certain reward in taking control of some of the variables, and pulling back from the money economy to improve our quality of life, rather than our standard of living. In a previous life, I used my meagre skills to grow tomatoes in the back garden. The crop was variable because I didn’t really know what I was doing, but for a lot of the time they were far better than Tesco’s Finest vine-ripened tomatoes- because they had experienced th sun until the day they were eaten. Some simple pleasures can’t easily be bought, and perhaps we will find pursuing these more rewarding than chasing the admen’s plastic dreams. There’s something peculiarly short-lived about the enjoyment derived from satisfying a want that is created by marketing, because it is always a hostage to the next updated version. The stillness when the treadmill stops is a silence that is valuable in itself…

27 Sep 2012, 11:02am
reflections: Cameron letterman Magna Carta
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General Education fail with Magna Carta on Letterman, Dave

I didn’t think Cameron did too badly on Letterman, all things considered. The quality of an Eton education showed in that he knew Magna Carta was signed at Runnymede in 1215, although my grammar school education achieved the same result at a cheaper cost.

David Cameron on David Letterman. Magna Carta? Search me, guv…

However, I was disappointed in Cameron’s failure to wing it when asked to say what Magna Carta meant in English. His general edukayshun was obviously lacking. Magna is in many English place names, such as Minterne Magna and Dave is more widely travelled than I am. Sheer observation will show that the Magnas are usually bigger than the Parvas so large or great would be a good guess.

Minterne Magna and Parva. Not so hard to infer Magna might be great, eh, Dave?

It’s not too much of a stretch to get from Carta to Charter, particularly given the context. Great Charter would have done, and our Dave should have paid attention at school more. After all, he got to copy out 500 lines of Latin text as a bollocking for smoking cannabis at Eton. Since even an Ermine could infer Magna Carta would be Great Charter with his low-grade education I would have though our Eton-educated and Oxford PPE first class honours Dave might have been up to it. Okay I mightn’t manage under the TV cameras but then I’m not hired to run the country. It’s the failure to act imaginatively and resourcefully under pressure I find disturbing.

24 Sep 2012, 3:50pm
reflections: blog-up leeds
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What I learned at the Blog-Up Meet in Leeds

Karen from Help Me To Save organised the first meet-up of UK personal finance bloggers in Leeds this weekend. I went along and learned a lot about the UK personal finance scene, about blogging, and Leeds and its student population, since it was Freshers week and lots of lovely people were getting thoroughly ratarsed, in a good humoured way

Leeds Fresher’s Week

The decision to go was made a lot easier because Karen awarded me a prize of a free hotel stay in Leeds for being runner-up in the competition with this 5 tips to retire early post. and DW was up for a visit to the Harrogate Turkish Baths so we could both get something out of driving up north.

When you’ve been doing something for a while it is a good idea to take some time to orient yourself, where you’re going, where you have come from and how the landscape has changed. it seemed a good time to take a look at what was happening in the world of UK personal finance blogging.

infer the general from the particular…

I never intended to start a personal finance blog, starting this as a narrative of my journey to early retirement, but personal finance was a means to the end. One of the discoveries was that finance is not enough – it is living intentionally by your own lights and values that matters just as much. So far, this blog is the narrative of my particular path across the minefield. To be more useful I need to distil the principles and techniques that I used, in order to make things more user-friendly. Although you shouldn’t normally infer the general from the particular, I plotted my route from the general principles. Sharing some of those principles might give someone some hope at a low-water mark, that with a lot of effort they could switch and reroute their path. I would be misleading them if I said retiring early is easy.

Early retirement involves different tradeoffs from ERE or regular retirement

Early retirement before you are 40 is all about income diversity, savings from post-tax income as well as ruthlessly controlling living costs. Regular retirement from 65/67 is all about savings from pre-tax income for most people, as well as Government assistance. Early retirement between 50 and 60 is a mix of pre and post-tax savings because of the regulatory issue of not having access to a pension before 55, as well as having longer to live off your savings.

Frugality – Fight the Fire, not the Flames of consumerism

Some topics covered gave me a double-take – ‘bloggers and brands working together’. Uh?. Initially I felt that I don’t fit in there at all, since in my view an awful lot of what is written in personal finance, particularly on the frugality aspect of things, is attacking the flames not the fire. If you are going to put out a fire with a fire extinguisher, you have to aim it at the base of the fire, where the trouble starts. In personal finance, that trouble starts as soon as you pay for anything. If you have ever tried to use an extinguisher under pressure of a real fire, you will know that’s hard to do – the temptation to aim at the flames that are licking up at you is almost irresistible, because dammit, that’s the bit you see and is nearest! So it is with frugality, we aim at the cost, not the cause.

There’s no point is saving 10% at Tesco when you shouldn’t be getting that at Tesco at all ¹, you should be growing it or getting it from a local store servicing a group of people who still know how to cook from scratch.There’s little point in getting cashback off a new TV when the question you should be asking yourself is do you need that TV new? Do you need it at all, what’s wrong with secondhand? In general, I take the line ‘if in doubt cut it out’

Many personal finance bloggers seem to buy an awful lot more Stuff than I do, so they can recommend places to get it cheaper from personal experience. Something else I realised from the Write on Finance Blog-up was that I am older than most PF bloggers, so this stands to reason. If I look at my spending, it has less Stuff and more experiences, this shift was dramatic from 2009 onwards.

I once read that there is no point in brands chasing people over 40, because they have made most of their decisions on brands and are set in their ways.

Recall of more ‘creative’ advertising is inversely related to their socio-economic group.

As people get older they get more cynical and harder to impress – the ability of ads to create a positive reaction declines with age, in particular more ‘creative’ advertising.

source: AQR The 50+ market: bother or wither

When you combine this with someone who has deliberately shifted the focus to trying to make things and experiences rather than buy or hire them in and to focus to nature and reading rather than buying I could see there’s going to be little connection with brands.

Martin Lewis’s curent moneysaving tips. Sky TV and an iPhone are never about saving money, at best it’s about being fleeced less. Think vampire squids and blood funnels inserted into anything that smells of money

However, my thinking was narrow. Two of the brands I did favour, and not just because the sponsored my hotel stay at Leeds ². Moneysupermarket served me well for single trip travel insurance to Carnac. They recently bought out Martin Lewis’s moneysavingexpert site. Although once again Martin seems to expect us to buy far too much Stuff the forums have been a mine of information. There apparently infographics which would help explain the early retirement issues but I’d damned if I can find them at the moment. Things like that are the devil’s own job to code and test.

ING’s Ezonomics gives a different perspective from both the PF blogosphere and the newspaper financial sites. Plus I learned from Ezonomics’ Ian Bright that while I had to raise about 20% deposit on my first house in 1989, the way I did it would be considered financial fraud in today’s world. I borrowed half the deposit on interest-free balance transfer on an MBNA credit card, apparently this sort of thing is frowned on these days. Everybody got their money back on or ahead of time; I paid that credit card back over the first year, getting the loan interest free, and answered any forms truthfully, they simply didn’t ask about extra credit card debt in those days. This is more a source of off-the-wall bits and pieces and perspective. Part of the problem with trying to get a handle on personal finance is that the whole issue of finance and how the financial system works is in turmoil, because some of the underlying hidden assumptions have failed. Getting a chance to stand back and look at as many possible reasons for this is hard, because of the fog of war.

Politicians offering voters more than the voters’ productive capabilites deserve? Who’d have thought that would happen

There seems to be a general sense of too much capital chasing too low-quality investment opportunities. Some of this is because the amount of demand in the economy has dropped, the failure of animal spirits. However, it could be due to peak oil challenging the assumptions of industrial capitalism, in particular its need for growth.

Perhaps lazy politicians buying easy votes with lifestyle giveaways rather than showing voters the fact that their desires outstrip their productive capacity. Maybe plutocrats are co-opting governments and increasingly taking for themselves the spoils of war

I found their article on how to plan for early retirement interesting. I managed a fail on a lot of the topics (1,2,4,6,10) My biggest wins were with 3, 5, 7 and 8. In particular I used windfalls to firstly pay down the mortgage and then pay up my AVC savings, and I didn’t buy too much house. In the years when people thought property only goes up, the mantra was to stretch yourself as much as possible for a bigger house, because it was a leveraged investment bought with other people’s money but the increase accrued to you. I had an experience of negative equity early in my house-owning career, so I only bought as much as I needed. There area lot of parasitic costs in owning a house bigger than you need, and these parasitic costs are likely to rise in future (energy being one of them – heating a big house is alot more expensive). More strategically, you don’t want to stick out too much from the crowd.

Nick Clegg is currently targeting homes of > £ 2 million for his wealth tax but this sort of thing tends to suffer from mission creep. The advantage of living in an average sized semidetached house is that by the time the forthcoming tax comes down to me, there will be an awful lot of other average house owners who will be kicking up a stink.

Adjust your seatbelts, adopt the brace position, ready for a stock-market crash

It’s very unusual that I find myself among the more optimistic of a bunch of people about finance, but the general feeling about the economy seemed to be that it’s doing down, the stock market in particular is overdue for a jolly good crash probably some time in the next four years. Counterintuitively, there’s something exhilarating about that though I don’t subscribe to the expectation. Last year’s summer flash crash did me some good, and it seems ambulance chasing is one of the few ways to improve things. This worked for me in 2009, and again in 2011. Against that, the feeling people seemed to have about the economy were that it was deep-seated and structurally damaged. I share some of that view but seem to come to different conclusions. One of the advantages of having been round the block a few times is that I have seen the sky fall in before. It isn’t always as unsurvivable as it looks.

I am not a Digital Native

The most practically useful part of the session was the litany of tyro errors I perpetrated because I was writing a narrative without looking at the setting. I don’t use social media that much, because heck, I didn’t grow up with it. I only tolerate Facebook despite its inherent evilness because if you don’t use SMS or a smartphone there are some people that only have a common presence there.

I’m not a digital native, far from it. However, other people seem to set store by social media, so facilitating its use seems to help some readers. If it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t cost much real-estate.

Other errors include not having a contact form and indeed no picture and real world name. I like being an ermine, but it’s not actually that hard to identify me. The initial reason for this was that I didn’t want to end up getting dooced over the three-year savings period. All this doesn’t really matter now, and I don’t really think I was hugely controversial. However, I’ve become used to a sinuous body and brilliant white fur…

Hasta La Vista Ad-Sense

I use Google Ad-Sense on a few other websites, and it works well for me there. Particularly for anything technical, it’s useful to readers because it picks up ads where you can buy the spare parts or tools I am talking about.

I personally use Ad-Block-Plus with Firefox. For the simple reason I don’t want to be marketed to, and I want simplicity on my screen. ABP eats adsense as a matter of course, so I never really appreciated that in terms of personal finance it seems to concentrate the evil. Now I personally think if you take out a payday loan you’d pretty much got it coming to you, and while I’m not a dedicated follower of Ayn Rand I do think personal responsibility and agency are important. And it’s inescapable that in on this website Adsense doesn’t square with my values because it concentrates services targeted at losers. I am happy to report that you, dear readers, are clearly not losers because Ad-sense doesn’t make that much on here (presumably it does sometimes throw up useful ads). So hasta la vista Adsense – if it doesn’t square with my values it can go and spin.

Curious that going to a conference which has at its heart a focus on monetizing your blog cause me to de-monetise mine, go figure as our US friends say

Some new reads

I admire Ash’s from Sterling Effort’s chutzpah in packing in his job. I have some 30 years on him. I felt fine about my job for the first 20 years, but I recognised his feelings in me efter 2006. He’s got more energy than I, so I took three eyars about it, but then I don’t have the courage to strike out into the unknown with £50k behind me

Miss Thrifty gave an engaging talk, although I am not sure I am the same wavelength. Fabulous writing style though, she develops the story and narrative well. Guess that shows the value of experience as a press journalist! However, if I ever get to the stage where a 10% voucher on Cath Kidston looks attractive to me I need to step carefully and ask myself what happened to the principle of trying to avoid shops, and indeed favouring secondhand…

Moneysavingprinciple’s ebullient Maria underscored the value of being opinionated. It’s one of the great things about blogging. Being opinionated is frowned at in a work environment – indeed modern management seems to prioritize the pliant at the expense of mavericks. It lends colour to your writing. Her post Money for all seasons picks up on how we just don’t seem to design our financial lives, but firefight the money one season at a time. No wonder we often don’t end up with the results we want, imagine trying to grow crops in such a scattergun way.

Maria voiced a usually unspoken observation that usually dares not say its name. I find myself mainly reading PF blogs written by guys, because it is investment and to some extent ways of making money that draw me. The lady writers tend to have a strong bias towards the frugality axis. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the reporter here Take look at MoneySaving Challenge’s UK taxonomy where I saw a similar thing.

All in all a thank-you to Karen from helpmetosave for organising it all and I’m chuffed to be introduced to some more great sites. As far as monetisation goes I’ve gone backwards, though the ideas are applicable to other sites I operate. I probably just don’t consume enough Stuff to be able to give personal frugal recommendations, perhaps I have achieved the Zen of frugality without noticing. As Thoreau said

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Notes:

I hold Tesco shares, so please don’t all do this at once ↩
for the record I’ve mentioned them here by choice as a hat tip – in no way was this a condition. ↩

5 Sep 2012, 2:01pm
living intentionally personal finance reflections: carnac know thyself thoreau
by ermine

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getting perspective at some ancient stones

I’ve been on holiday, visiting an old friend in France and seeing the prehistoric standing stones at Carnac. It’s been the first holiday for a long time. A week has been enough to achieve a shift in perspective.

seeing something this old gives a new light to the world

Personal finance should be about living intentionally, deploying our crystallised claims on future work in a way that accords with our values. All too often it becomes a search for certainty in an uncertain world. Self-knowledge is a necessary part of doing something well. It is easy to lose sight of this in the figures on the screen, and it’s great to see people looking for understanding of themselves in the search to put the personal into finance. Rob is also looking within to do better without. As investments go, knowing thyself must rank high for ROI.

Taking a break also meant I returned to a pile of mail, which included a deferred pension statement, which unlike all the calculators and estimators I had to use while at work is a definitive statement that applies specifically to me.

The amount is about a third of my gross salary while working, which isn’t hopelessly surprising given I worked for The Firm for 23 years. What is surprising is that I’m not sure I’ve ever lived on that much in real terms.

While working my annual spend was of course much more than I’d get as a pension, but a lot of that spending went into either things that were written off in financial terms or that I don’t spend much on anymore. Some of it was accumulating assets (housing post 1999, share investment post 2004), some of it was pure waste (housing pre-1999, share investment pre 2004) and much was trashed in taxation.

I have eight years to go to the original retirement age at The Firm, and yet I’ve fallen into the same thinking that dominates a lot of the PF blogosphere when people think about retirement. Paralysed by the fear of running out of money, we try and think like the Rothschilds. We don’t ever want to run out of money, damn it, even if we live to 500!

Hat tip to Monevator for pointing me at Can I Retire Yet‘s How Do You Know if You’re Running out of Money In Retirement. The digested read seems to be that CIRY feels that unless you’re withdrawal rate is < 3% of your total net worth you run the risk of ending up in deep shit.

The usual reckoning is drawing down between 4 and 5% of your net worth. At 5% you need to save up 20 times your desired annual income; go with 4% and you need to save 25 times your annual retirement income.

Take a step back and think what that means. A typical final salary pension targeted an income of 50% of final salary, so I’ll shoot for that as a target retirement income. Let’s say you have a flat career arc – that means you need to save 10 years’ gross salary (working salary*0.5*20 = 10). Okay so compound interest might give you some leg-up, but it’s still a big ask.

That shift to 3% is a big deal, you now have to save 33 times your annual income to be out of the woods, and if CIRY is right on the low end that you need 2% you have to save 50 times your annual retirement income. In my case, I’d have had to live 30 years, buy a house, go to work and pay 30 years of taxes on the gross pay from five years of my 30 year working life, and save 100% of the remaining 25 years gross. Let’s allow the boosters of compound interest the possibility of compensating for the fact that my pay rose in real terms over my working life. Even after that, I’d say saving 50 times just ain’t going to happen.

What we all seem to miss here is that you’ve only got one life. It’s a balance – saving more for later means living less now for most of us. To be sure, most people get this wrong in saving not enough, and CIRY does a great job in highlighting that stock market variations place a great big noise signal on your net worth that swamps your withdrawals.

Face it. It isn’t just money you’re running out of, even if you are Nathan Rothschild.

There’s a general ramping up of the requirements for security in the retirement blogosphere, a trend towards stipulating that we must achieve a safe withdrawal rate such that we never run out of money. It’s bollocks, because we are missing one of the other things we’re running out of at the same time as we’re running out of money.

We’re running out of life. Each and every one of us, one day at a time.

The requirement to save 50 times my annual retirement income is clearly nuts in my case, even if I had no company pension. Heck, I could totally forget about the stock market, save in a ladder of index-linked cash savings for each of the next 50 years, and kick back by the pool. I’m just not going to see another fifty summers turn to autumn!

Too many people treat their retirement savings as an Ivy-League college endowment fund, wanting to design things so they never run out of money. There’s no point in doing that. If the elixir of eternal life is discovered or we all suddenly start living to 500 like Methuselah, the changes this will wreak upon the environment we invest in will be so stupendous the assumptions will have broken down completely. You probably just won’t live beyond 100. If that elixir of extended life becomes available at Tesco you’re just going to have to spit on your hands and go back to work.

There is another implication of running out of life. Don’t be so fearful of running out of money that you retire too late, either. For the vast majority of people wage slavery is doing something they don’t want to do for the fear of the consequences. As MMM pointed out a while back, one of the great things about the modern era is that it is possible to retire, and even retire early.

Today we have a unique opportunity to hit financial independence after only 10 or 15 years of work. Retiring in one’s mid-30s sounds crazy, but it is the unprecedented times we live in that makes it possible.

When I was at school in the 1970s people really believed that the future would be a future of leisure and 2 day work weeks. This expectation had even been anticipated by JM Keynes a generation before, in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

It didn’t turn out that way. Some of it can be blamed on the 1% half-inching the spoils of war over the intervening forty years. Some of it did turn up in the possibility of a shorter working life, rather than in terms of the same length working life with fewer daily hours. Firms really hate employing more people even if they have to pay less for them individually, because managing more people is not scalable. Anybody who’s ever tried to interact professionally with a job-share team knows only too well that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. As MMM continues

The actual fact is, due to productivity and technology improvements, wages have risen faster than the cost of goods in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.

Younger readers may not believe this, because these are changes that happen slowly, you need a couple of decades of observation to see the changes in aggregate. And you always see the exception. Looking back over half a lifetime, the poster child for the hard-done by priced-out generation, the house, has adversely changed in relative value since the late 70s/early 80s. They forget that before the late 1970s most middle class families rented – indeed more than half my class lived in council houses when I was at school.

Other essentials of life were much more expensive relative to wages. I recall my parents used to put sixpences in a tin after they used the phone, trying to track the costs and save as they used it. Many will think nothing of paying £50 a month for mobile phone service. Food was more expensive. Power was more expensive, cars were shockingly expensive and unreliable to boot.

better products but poorer services

One class of thing that has become a lot worse and dearer is services. Higher average wages relative to needs means that people were cheaper to hire in the past, and many services were better, because for all our technological innovations we have never really managed to approach the adaptability of a properly paid human at unpredictable and non-repetitive tasks. The quality of advice you’d get from an owner-run TV shop was streets ahead of the Dixons teenager of today. Having said that Woolworth’s shop assistants and the like weren’t always the pinnacle of intelligent life…

Early on in my career I could ring up companies and get somebody who a) worked for the firm and b) actually knew the products and their quirks. There’s hardly any point in calling a company for aftersales support these days, particularly for technology – you either get a soldering iron out and fix the damn thing yourself or you junk it and get a new one. I’m 100% with James Kunstler in his entertaining heartfelt plea for the AFTA Act of 2012.

we’ve spent four decades and untold billions of dollars to computerize every phone system in America.

[...] The net result of all this effort and investment is that it is now just about impossible to get a live human being on the phone at any company, agency, or institution in our land. [...]

By computerizing all the phone systems we allowed every company, agency, and institution to dump all of their transactional inconveniences onto us, the customers, clients, and citizens.

Why is there so much fear and loathing about saving enough for retirement then?

We spend less on needs and more on wants. Companies are getting better at increasing our wants, and unlike our needs there is no natural limit to wants. This is an arms race the consumers of the world are losing

There is less certainty about work, and employers slyly reduced wages without cutting headline salaries by cutting deferred pay – getting out of pensions as much as they can. When I graduated, a typical professional engineer would start at a company and work there until 60. I was an awkward bastard and job-switched several times in the first seven years of my working life, then worked for The Firm for the next 23 years. Compared to other people at The Firm retiring or leaving at a similar age to me I was a fly-by-night – I have seen many40 year long service presentations in my time worked with a lot of people who were with The Firm man and boy from 16!

Uncertain career paths make saving for retirement less clear than it was for previous generations. You need some reserve to be able to handle the unpredictable. How much reserve? Enough to cope with our darkest fears – so we demand huge levels of security, which then leads us to file retirement saving into the too hard self-inflating ball of worry category. However, MMM’s point still stands; although the path is less clear than for the last generation, the capacity to save now is higher than it has been, as long as you don’t chuck more and more of your disposable income down the bottomless pit of increasing Wants.

How would Sir like to cut his retirement planning? Quality of Life or Security?

This hidden security assumption harmed my plans too. According to the pension statement I have retired 8 years before the design retirement date for my pension. In 8 years’ time the deferred amount is one I’d be perfectly happy to live on, indeed I wasn’t living on that much for most of my working life, what with the depredations of mortgage payments, pension payments, tax and NI.

So I designed my stock portfolio to live off the dividend income alone over the interim. Although it isn’t obvious, doing that is an attempt to avoid one of the hazards CIRY warns against as a major red alert, selling shares at a loss. You simply don’t sell There are second order effects that make things not so simple in a HYP. For a start you are investing in a smaller universe than a straight index tracker. I do end up with plodders, none of the racy sort of ten- and twenty-baggers that Rob is hunting over at Self Employed Investor.

Though you don’t ever sell with a HYP, you can eat a loss if a company goes bust. This hasn’t happened to me yet and is inherently less likely with HYP shares if you guard against yield traps. None of mine have even skipped a dividend, indeed it is dividend performance alone that may well redeem my worst performer in terms of SP, hello RSA, many month winner of the wooden spoon award on SP. It is slowly approaching neutrality on total return with divis. Once it passes that point this firm might actually start working for me. I never realised the sheer power of just sitting on your hands to redeem what was clearly a mistake in hindsight!

The trouble is that I wasn’t able to build a portfolio I can live on in three years from a standing start. More than two thirds of my savings are in pension AVCs so they aren’t part of my portfolio at all. However, I have been tremendously lucky with some sharesave schemes which doubled my portfolio, though getting them into my ISA was beyond me. If you get the opportunity, join sharesave, to the max. JFDI – it’s like the Lottery, except the odds are better and you get your money back if you don’t win

A time for all things

I don’t need to live off my portfolio divis alone. I have a finite amount of time, and as the old Byrds song says,

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

with a hat tip to Ecclesiastes. Life is a journey, it is not a framed picture on the wall like Dorian Gray. I managed to force down my outgoings down enough that I could live off the income from the portfolio, adding it all together both in and out of the ISA. I am short a little income, but I have more than enough free cash to address the years of shortage. In practice I accumulate in the ISA and run down the cash rather than draw, to preserve the tax wrapper. Unlike some, or perhaps many, I really don’t like cash as an investment class, which of course is why I’ve ended up with more of it than any other class

As I wandered around the old stones, and reflected on how I got here, I realised that I had lost perspective in the fear associated with trying to bail early. I saved enough outside the pension system to nearly live on. But there’s something a little bit barmy about it, because saving 20x my income needs to bridge an 8 year gap at the outside prioritises security beyond the logical. I could save 10x the income needs and run it down over the 8 years, leaving me some in hand. What I feared was the feeling of a slow decline in networth.

My greatest regret is that I didn’t start thinking about this earlier. In retrospect I worked too long. I endangered both my physical and mental health fighting in the endgame. Don’t be paralysed by the fear of demanding total security – work out what your balance of priorities is. Then navigate your way towards it. Learning about investment management, what the hidden agendas of the other players are, what the risks are and what your own foibles are is a long project – a decade at least, if not a lifetime’s work; indeed people who are both far more interested in investing and more talented than I are still trying to work this out for themselves.

It took me ten years to learn enough about investment to become clever enough to be dangerous in the dotcom bust. I then quit and got on with other aspects of life for many years. I lost balance, focusing narrowly on some kinds of life success at the expense of self-development and individuation, until the imbalance destabilised enough to force change.

Part of that change required me to find a way to retire early, and I focused on the money, with more skill in action as a result of experience, and the guidance of people who showed me I could take charge of finance and shift my path. In doing so I lost balance in a different way. Fear dominated my field of perception, and I became rigid and narrow in vision.

It is not absolute security that I needed. It was freedom of action. Security was a prison that built walls around me. Insufficient freedom of action quenched the fire within, and I had to fall back, and fall back, hoping that one day the fire would restart in the draft of the endless fall. It needed a shift in consciousness, to cease shoring up the walls, and to listen for the sound of Thoreau’s distant drum -

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The signal from that distant drum is faint, and all too easy to lose in the noise and hum of life. It carries a valuable message, to be cherished, despite it’s faintness. Live intentionally, or live not at all…

13 Aug 2012, 8:46am
reflections: bullying Cameron competitive sports might is right Olympics
by ermine

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The Olympics was a fantastic show, Well done Britain, Well done London – let’s not extrapolate about competitive sports, Dave

It was a fantastic show, and it turned Brits from a bunch of cynical curmudgeonly gits to cheerful folk for a while. Well done everybody – the athletes, the crowds, Danny Boyle, even Zippy BoJo in his own curious style. The Ermine has his own reasons for being grateful for London 2012 as it allowed me to run my exit plan, a great swansong project to work on as a small piece for The Firm and to save enough to retire early. It’s good to go out on a high

Something to also be thankful for is that no bunch of idiotic sociopathic zealots managed to kill people or otherwise bugger things up.

What I wouldn’t like to see is for politicians to take the wrong message away though. There is probably a legacy to be taken away from the success, but it needs care and nuance to derive it. Not everything is as it seems.

No, Dave. Some is good. More is not always better

Our Dave has decided to hitch a wagon to the moment, and is calling for More. Competitive. Sport. In. Schools. Now.

The ermine says NO. I went to a grammar school, that did a lot of things right, in hindsight. However, in the frenetic anti-grammar school ethos of 1970s Labour, they were also a wannabe independent school, and actually became one later on as they were forced out of the LEA unless they became a comprehensive school. One of the things people associate with independent schools in Britain is some sort of Calvinist concept that competitive sports is character building.

Dave is half right. I’d agree with him that the ethos of not failing needs to be canned. Not convinced about team sports at all. My experience of compulsory-for-all competitive sports in schools is that it is character building – just that it builds the wrong sort of character. Competitive sports doesn’t, in general, teach schoolkids to be sporting and to play the game and have respect for your fellow man and win or lose well. It pumps up those with more physical prowess, tells them they are great. That turns them into nasty bullies. I ended up on the wrong end of that. I am of average build but physically nothing special. I didn’t see the point of sports. And got hassle all the time in competitive sports, until one day I came to the conclusion that though it wasn’t considered sporting and cricket, when the lead of the rugby team decided to pick on me for the n’th time that a good hefty knee in the nuts would improve this psychopath’s attitude no end. It did. It also improved the attitude of his mates; they realised that the Ermine was capable of totally unpredictable and dangerous behaviour, even though he was a weakling.

Before then I had been knocked out cold and generally harassed, all in the name of sport. School children are nasty and immature – the whole point of school is to mould them until they can function in a human society. Competitve psorts are great for those good at it, and this goes to their head, so they despise and pick on the uncoordinated or the weak, or the different. I was different, and poorly coordinated.

Now it may be at Eton they actually take the time to teach the weak and uncoordinated how to use their physical capabilities to better effect. The different they probably deal with by not accepting them in the first place

I had to get to work and go through safety training before I learned I had more upper body strength than typical, because I was shown how to apply it properly. Teenagers are often poorly coordinated because their bodies are growing, perhaps I had a worse case of that than normal. Becoming an adult fixed that for me.

Unlike Eton, at a State school there probably isn’t enough time to teach the less able, and there isn’t the time to teach those good at competitive sports some social compassion either. My experience of competitive sports is that it is a bullies’ charter. There’s not enough money in the education system in my view to avoid that, and in the end school is also about giving people the skills to be productive workers in an industrial society, and we probably need improvement in that area which is also a call on resources.

No, Dave. More competitive sports at school is not an answer until you can find a way to stop it being a bullies’ charter. I was lucky enough to be self-aware enough to see that exceptional circumstances needed exceptional solutions and realise that going outside socially accepted norms was a reasonably response to a pumped up thug high on praise. Not every picked on kid is lucky enough to have an insight like that, or to have the grit to execute such a risky plan.

It also had a knock-on effect. I hate and loathe all sorts of team sports in all their manifestations. I probably am physically lazy by nature, but school gave me a specific loathing for sport. I’ve never set foot in a gym since leaving school. It does show

I’m not rabidly anti-exercise, but I do demand it does something for me. Cycling is okay because it gets me from one place to another without running costs. I am prepared to hike to see interesting stuff. But team sports, no. I am extremely happy that they are not part of my life, as a participant or a spectator, ever since the experiences of school. At least there’s an upside – Sky is never going to sell me an expensive sports package

So, Dave, the Olympics was magic and showed the best of British on the fields of play and off them. This was the pinnacle of human physical achievements. You can’t just infer the general from the particular to say that therefore more competitive sports is needed in schools until you have the answer to the side-effects of encouraging nasty little pieces of work to bully the less physically competent. Competitive sports teaches kids might is right as a byproduct. That’s not necessarily a good thing to do…

10 Jul 2012, 10:48pm
economy reflections
by ermine

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10 comments

The Guardian is telling me I’m living in poverty. Oh and a family needs £36k to get by these days

Cripes. According to the Grauniad’s new campaign on Breadline Britain, the Ermine is living in abject poverty. Not only that, they appear to be in some confusion between the notions of income and wealth -

Using key data from the Institute of Fiscal Studies [...] you can see exactly how wealthy you really are.

Really? The reason, dear Guardianistas, that you will never get rich is because you are stuck in a poor person’s mindset. You think only of selling your time for money, and therefore you assess how wealthy readers are by exclusively focusing on their incomes. So just to set you guys right, wealth is accumulated income that hasn’t been spent. Geddit? Although no doubt the Ermine is lacking many of the baubles and gewgaws that the IFS consider to be essential to a life well lived these days, like Sky TV and a smartphone, the reason the Grauniad decides I am subsisting below the poverty line is because my income is low. I am in the lowest 5% by taxable income, though in the upper 5% by net worth. That doesn’t quite set me into Monevator’s millionaire bracket ambitions, it simply shows how little accumulated wealth most Britons have. Presumably because they’re spending it on cars and childcare…

In another article, the Graun shares with us the fact that a family of four need a combined income of £36k for a decent standard of living - a third more than before the recession.

A large part of this seems to be due to rising expectations – said family needs to run a car and have broadband which it didn’t in 2008. I’m not sure if those nice chaps at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are au fait with what the word recession means. It means living standards taking a hit. So those rising expectations had better be packed away in a dark place until the recession ends, if and when that happens. Old Mervyn King, while he’s not occupied giving brash American banksters the order of the boot, isn’t chipper about that happening any time real soon now. So, JRF, just put away those rising expectations for the moment, OK? Then we had this corker

With the cost of bus travel doubling compared with the cost of owning and running a car, families said that having a car was now essential in urban areas outside London.These rising costs come as government cuts deeply into the subsidies paid to modern middle-class Britain.

Well, colour me a cynical old so and so, but exactly why was the government subsidising the middle class in Britain? Did somebody discover the money tree in the last decade? Surely it is the very definition of middle class that you can basically pay your own way in the world…

Now I’m probably going to get some hate for this, but apparently childcare is now these two child families’ biggest weekly outgoing. Which sort of begs the question of why the parents are spending time they’s probably like to spend with their kids in earning money so that … they can pay other people to spend the time with their kids rather than doing the job themselves. Seems a rum old situation, that.

← Government Guarantee against Stock Market falls – Mis-Selling Scandal ahoy Thank you DVLA – sometimes an Ermine needs a kick to live intentionally →

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