A musician I know wrote this some time ago:
Recently I was at a lovely party with lovely people, most of whom I didn’t know. Inevitably, the small-talk question came up: What do you do? And here I present the conversation that inevitably followed:
Me: “Until six months ago, I was a jazz musician….”
Party-goer: “Wow, that’s so amazing!” Showing obvious interest in me as a person….
Me: “And now I’m programming at a friend’s startup company. I love it!”
Party-goer: “Oh.” Change of topic, or party-goer turns to talk to someone else.
It reminds me how much pressure was on me to stay in music until long after it was clear that the lifestyle made me miserable. If I ever mentioned that I was thinking of changing careers, everyone I talked to would say “don’t give up” or “you’re so lucky to be doing something you love.” Many people lived vicariously through me, imagining that if I quit, I must be giving up something I love to do something I don’t like for the money.
Well here’s the deal. Imagine this job:
You are under house arrest 9-5.
For 3-4 of those hours, you have to take a piece of equipment and press your fingers down in a certain pattern. Many, many patterns. For three hours.
For the rest of the eight hours, your job is telemarketing and administration. Call people who don’t know you and try to convince them to hire you. And remember, you’re not selling a product, you’re selling yourself. The administration is colating pieces of paper, stickers, business cards and cds into a folder, printing up address labels and sticking them on, and driving over to the post office.
If you’re a good little telemarketer, you might have a gig once or twice a week where you get to play music. If you’re lucky, you are at a club where the manager pesters you about why there aren’t more people in the audience and the audience talks and clinks dishes while you play. If you are unlucky, you have to play Proud Mary or klesmer or disco. (Okay, this part was just cynical. I really did enjoy many of my gigs.)
If you have lots of extra money, you can go into the recording studio. Expect to spend $10,000 on a cd, and hope it’s not more than $15,000.
I’ll say it: I really love programming so far. It’s much more intellectually challenging than practicing or telemarketing (though not as much as I’d like, I really loved my math degree) and I get to work on solving problems all day. I still have neither an office to go to (a team) nor a paycheck, both of which I would LOVE to have, but the work itself is a BLAST! I feel like I can create something from nothing, which is what I’ve always loved about any project (the reason I arrange and compose).
I took the plunge. I left a dreary and unpleasant job that was making me miserable to do something that makes me happy regardless of the fact that I have no experience and no pay. I taught (am teaching) myself to do something really challenging in the hopes of having a fulfilling job for the first time in my life.
It’s too bad that people judge me as doing the opposite.
End rant
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