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When I was at that age where one is forced to deal with guidance counselors and predictions of the popular professions of the future, communications and computers where both high up on the list.  We were also told to expect many more service jobs to be created, but your guidance counselors surely weren't telling you that you should prepare for a career at McDonalds[1].

Anyway, they were right about that.  But somehow I keep landing at companies where I don't quite fit in.  It's very hard to move up at telcos because all the upper management is the age of my parents, and the nearer management is made up of boomers.  The workforce at GiantMediaCo is all of Generation Y.  The Xers have either joined the boomers in lower management or have fled elsewhere for a better salary (GiantMediaCo was not actually VERY COMPETITIVE[2] until the recession really kicked in this summer).

I feel that I'm old enough to be in charge of *something* now, and the boomers just won't get out of the way.  All this is just my attempt to generalize of my own experience at GiantMediaCo and other places, but I'm too old to be treated like a child.  GiantMediaCo is better than most, and they still treat us like children who they can just stick in the cube farm playpen and expect us to be good little cogs and stay out of the way.

Can you tell I hate working for someone else?

The irony here is that the one new media company that can be held out as a model of success is GiantMediaCo.  While they did one thing right in paying the employees poorly in cash and largely in stock, in order to make that work, they jiggered their financial reports for years.  Lucky for them, acquiring the cash cow of another GiantMediaCo as well as it's debt service allowed them to take one giant charge and catch up to proper accounting methods without really paying for it.

Add this to the fact that they were able to time this with the dot.com blow up.  Analysts didn't get too upset because other new media companies were imploding, and we could be seen to be preparing for the future.

What the hell am I saying here?  That GiantMediaCo's success was a fluke, but that they have managed to turn a fluke into gold.  I certainly didn't expect them to make it.  They did have a good product at the root of things, but I think that the current structure of the company is far from ideal for continuing to innovate.

If they are lucky, they will turn in to AT&T.  Based on their mission statement[3], I think that's what our famously tennis shoe-wearing Founder had in mind all along.