By the time I finished my third year of University, I had obtained a general degree; many of my contemporaries went overseas on Erasmus and carried on with at least another year to get an honours degree, but I wasn’t interested in the least.
I wanted to earn.
So I started to apply for jobs.
And I kid you not, apply and interview I did.
If memory serves me right, I applied for over 80 jobs, and interviewed for at least a dozen.
And I was lucky.
From all of those jobs I applied to and all of the posts I interviewed for, I got the one, the ONLY one I really, truly wanted.
The interview there was, let’s say, interesting, and my hiring manager was a fantastic guy I immediately realised I’d get along with as he seemed to be a fellow misanthrope.
And so it came to pass that my very first full time job straight out of university was a rarity in the country at the time – a job with a fully digitally focused company, in a focused role rather than a generalist one, and that paid well.
I learnt so much and so fast because I learned on other people’s dime, and because I was a cog in a well oiled, well honed marketing machine.
I didn’t get “a marketing role”.
I got a PPC specialist role, one of 4 PPC specialists in a company with a headcount of around 90.
So being forced to be an all rounder and a generalist wasn’t what was gonna happen here for sure.
This was a company that, on paper, sold software, but the marketing department was quite a bit larger than engineering and development; a company where we had a 6 person advertising team, a 4 person affiliates and partners team, 2 people focused only on email marketing, and even one person in charge of coordinating creative and banner optimisation across the entire marketing department.
And this was back in 2010!
There are companies out there *today* who still don’t have anyone doing this kind of optimisation, but where I worked, it was understood that optimisation meant efficiency which meant more sales, and much, much more profit.
So boy oh boy did I learn.
I learned more in a week there than I did in a year of university lectures, and by the time a year was out, I had gained a very, very solid understanding of all digital marketing channels that existed back then.
The problem, however, was twofold.
- I wasn’t Scandinavian, so I would likely never go past my current rank. Sure, they’d make me senior, and then geriatric thereafter, and sure, they’d pay me more, but they would always bring a Dane or a Swede to be the person atop me, and that didn’t sit well with me. Young and arrogant thought processes, I know, but hey, we’re baring our cards here, and that’s what I felt.
- We were selling air, and that got very boring very quickly, and it didn’t feel quite right. I guess you could say that the software we sold was vapourware, and you could certainly say the company placed little value on solid engineering (I have a wonderful story about one of my colleagues and what he was made to do, which from a dev standpoint was so offensive, but that’s for another time), but mostly, you could just say we were selling air, and making the company’s owners very rich indeed, but resulting in zero benefit to the user, or the planet at large. It was exactly as my colleague Simon said, “Mate, we’re selling air.” I miss you so much Simon, and you taught me so much.
If you’re me, day by day, month by month, that starts to chip at you, knowing that you sell air, and that what you do creates no benefit for anyone, at all, and knowing that if you weren’t paid quite handsomely to do it every day, you just wouldn’t.
So I quit, and misguidedly chose to go work for a government agency (where I didn’t last very long), even taking a pay cut to do so, with the naive and altruistic thinking that I have had a good run and I should now give back some of the incredible stuff I’ve learned so that it can be put to good use in building proper digital systems for the people.
Power to the people and all that.
Spoiler alert: the government wasn’t the least bit interested in letting me or anyone do meaningful things and build proper digital systems for the people. We’ve touched on this already, but boy oh boy is there more to say.
