Entry 2423, on 2025-12-19 at 22:16:32 (Rating 3, Activities)
About 7 years ago I wrote a post called "End of an Error" about how my wife and I sold our cafe. When I say "my wife and I", it was mainly her, because she was the owner/manager and did most of the work, but I did help out, and I suffered financially through it not being a great money maker despite it taking about 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
So the second end of an era (or "error" if you prefer) I am announcing today is that I am leaving my job at the University of Otago. I was a computer consultant there for almost 40 years, but when I was offered voluntary redundancy during the latest restructure I decided the time was right to go now.
I have lost count of how many restructures I have endured during my time, but this one was just one too many. Occasionally these changes do produce some positive benefits, but in most cases things just get worse. Additionally, it takes years to adapt to these changes and sort out the inevitable problems, and guess what happens just as you reach the point where things are working as efficiently as could be expected: that's right, you get another restructure and have to start all over again.
I have go to say that this is both a happy and sad milestone in my life. There are many great things about the university, and most of the academic and general staff are really nice people and fun to work with. But the changes in how the place is managed just don't suit my personality. Standardisation, policies for everything, massive numbers of managers at many different levels, and just general oppressive bureaucracy might be what I should expect in a large organisation, but they don't really suit me.
Because, as I have said in many posts in the past, I prefer to use rules and regulations as a guideline rather than an absolute prescription of how things must be done. I like to have informal work relationships rather than take on work through a complex and sometimes inefficient set of procedures, and I think of my clients as the ultimate source of what needs to be done rather than have that come from a management structure.
I should say at this point that I am not necessarily right. You can make a case to say that strong policies and formal procedures are the best way to run a large and complex organistion, but you can also make a case to say they aren't!
As I said, I worked at Otago for almost 40 years, and I saw a lot of changes over that time. When I first started I was a mainframe (remember those) programmer and also wrote software for PCs. Note that I was not a Mac fanatic initially, even though my previous job was at an Apple dealer. As time passed I specialised in Macs as the mainframes all went away. The internet became more and more critical (when I started we didn't even really have an internet as we know it today, because the web was in its infancy), and serious software became available making the computer the most important tool people used in their work.
So there have been a lot of IT related technical changes I have experienced, and no matter how bad you think computers are now, they are utterly amazing compared with what we used to have. Sometimes I fire up one of my vintage computers just to enjoy the nostalgia of using one, and then I realise those happy memories from the past are not really what they seemed!
Of course, it is not all good, because while the computers got better, the work environment got worse. Again, I have to say that these are my opinions and I know that other perspectives exist, but the biggest change I have seen is the destruction of autonomy. People today are expected to work more like robots than humans, everything is standardised, there is close supervision, and rules come from a very top-down approach.
And apart from the lesser individual freedom there is also the scourge of the modern work environment: the open plan office and hot-desking. Sure those might seem to be a cheaper and more efficient way to have people work, but I have to wonder about the bigger picture and whether there is any genuine benefit when all things are considered. For example, I know of open plan work spaces which are at least as big as individual offices would be, plus there are rooms (such as so-called breakout spaces, and specialised rooms for confidential meetings) which appear to use far more space than a set of individual offices ever would.
Considering management spend so much time talking about cost-benefit analyses, I really do have to wonder whether they ever do any, or if they actually do an analysis like that, whether they just specify the paramaters in a way that will get the result they want. Of course, confidentiality rules stop the results of any analysis like that being made available to people like me who might be a bit credulous of them.
So that was then and this is now. What is next in my life? Well, I am at retirement age, so I could just stop working, but instead I plan to be self-employed as an Apple specialist. Dunedin has a lot of Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc users, and even though Apple stuff is generally very reliable and easy to use, there is still a need for people to get help with their Apple devices, software, and peripherals, so that's what I will be doing.
If you live in Dunedin (or in surrounding areas if you don't mind paying a bit extra for my travel) and need help with your Apple gear then you know who to call. You also know who to refer your friends and family to if they need help: Owen Baxter, Apple Specialist and Consultant. Email ojb@mac.com, or text/call 021 251 2910.
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