Large Organizations

I have always preferred smaller organizations over larger ones.  I chose the smaller boy scout troop in my home town, the smaller high school in the area, a small college instead of a large university, and deliberately sought work at a smaller company instead of a large corporation.  One of the reasons I dislike the government is that it is an excessively large organization.  Part of this is because I don't like larger organization is that I don't like dealing with strangers.  It's not that I don't like people who are strangers to me, its that I don't like the awkward process of interacting with them before I know them.  And there is less of that in smaller organizations.

If I go work somewhere with 10 employees, I will likely know them all by the end of the first day, and importantly, they will know who I am.  If I go work at a company or facility with thousands of employees, I will likely be interacting with people I don't know, on a regular basis throughout my work day.  There is also the aspect of excelling in one's environment, and while I have been the top student of every school I attended, I was not as confident that would have been true if I had reached higher and bigger.  There is nothing wrong with not being the absolutely top performer, but I have been told that likely would still have been true in a larger university, and at the very least I could have benefited from having real peers.  But maybe I lacked the ambition to take on the larger challenge, and was stressed about all of the strangers I would have to deal with.

While most of my professional work has been with small teams, I have done work for large companies on a number of occasions, but it was always more stressful than smaller environments.  Same with working onset, which always involves large numbers of people.  But having just successfully completed my second project with the world's largest company, an having found that to have been a largely positive experience, I have been re-examining that idea.

The first time I ever applied for a job in a large company was a couple months ago, and while I did not envision taking the position if it was offered to me, I was at least considering the idea, and wanted to explore the process.  I didn't get past the first round of interviews, which was bit surprising to me, but it was a good reality check.  I recently discovered that I (loosely) know the guy who got that job, and he more closely fits the corporate mold, and has held similar positions in the past, while I have not.  It was interesting to come upon that piece of information, and process the various implications.  If I had gotten (and accepted) the position, it would have been a huge boost career wise, but would have likely come at the cost of my variety of other ongoing roles.  It would have been challenging to adapt to certain responsibilities in that role, but I believe I could have done that very successfully.  But more importantly, it presumably would have provided me with a steady stream of technical problems to solve, which would be fulfilling in its own way.  And it probably would have connected me with a lot of other things that are going on in the world of media and workflows.

Maybe having that job would have turned me into a corporate guy, with a very different perspective on things.  While it would have boosted my career path, that is never something I have been overly concerned with.  And it seems at odds with other changes I am looking at making in life.  My current flexibility allows me to do a variety of different things, take summer off for ropes course trips, and volunteer to help various ministries.  That flexibility doesn't matter if I don't take advantage of it to help others when I can, but I have been getting better at that, and feel called to lean farther into that process.  Working for a large company would remove a lot of my current distractions, but would put some solid boundaries around what I could be doing in other faucets of life.

So while I would be willing to make some major sacrifices to accommodate working on The Chosen or something similar, because I believe God is calling me in the direction, that doesn't mean I need to be willing to make those sacrifices to fill another role.  But I also need to learn not to discount the idea of being part of a larger organization out of hand, because maybe that is what God will be leading my towards at some point in the future,

The Supreme Court

I have rarely been a huge fan of contemporary Supreme Court decisions.  I suppose the Bush election one was positive, but a bit sketchy, and the Hobby Lobby win was great, but it has mostly been bad news coming from the court as far back as I can recall.  But there have been a string of positive developments, and nearly a daily basis recently, that are worth noting.

It started with the decision against New York's overly restrictive gun laws, which had been rescinded in an attempt to prevent a ruling against them, but the Supreme Court acted anyway, to strengthen protections for the 2nd Amendment.  While this seems very tone deaf given the media's current narrative about gun violence, I am confident that it will be positive in the long run,  If the statistics about 10K gun related homicides annually are accurate, it would still take 1000s of years to at that rate to see the number of deaths we see in China in the 50s or Russia in the 40s, after they disarmed their populations.  While each of those deaths is a tragedy, I would choose the current hundreds or thousands of deaths over millions of deaths at the hands of tyrannical governments every time I have the opportunity.

Next came the historic overturning of Roe vs Wade.  Now while many would act like this decision was a ban on abortion, all it did was remove a previous ban on legislation limiting or restricting abortion.  And trigger laws that did go into effect as a result of that decision were the result of the legislative process, which is how laws and rules are supposed to be made.  The existing "rules" were not laws, just legal precedent set by previous cases, which had been determined not be interpreting existing laws, but creating new rules from scratch.  The Gay Marriage decision was similar, not base on any existing legislation, just making up something new.  The court is charged with "interpreting" law, and the one thing an interpreter can not do, is change the definition of a word.  (Imagine how that would affect a financial negotiation taking place across a language barrier.  To 'interpret' is to accurately translate and communicate the speaker or author's intent into a different context or language.)

Lastly, there is the case of the coach who was fired for praying on the field after a game.  I have read some theological views again the value of public prayer, which I can get behind.  But that doesn't negate the "freedom" to do so in a free country.  I would truly be opposed to the coach requiring his players to join him, but even his opponents don't accuse him of that.  Their closest claim is basically that peer pressure encourages the players to get on that bandwagon, which might be true.  But no one had a constitutional right to be protected from peer pressure, each is still free to make their own decision in those situations, and be judged by their "peers" as a consequence of their actions.  And that also leads us into the question of what constitutes religion?  Is basic theism religion?  If so, "In God we trust" would be unconstitutional.  But, if so, logically it would also follow that atheism must be treated as a religion, and that would prevent government, and therefore public schools, from teaching or promoting atheism, or anything that stems from it.  Which is a change I believe many liberals would be opposed to.  So they might be better off accepting a narrower view of what constitutes "religion."

Anyhow, seeing positive news coming from the Supreme Court is a nice change of pace, but it will be interesting to see the long term results of those decisions.  But I will take the good news while I can get it.