At my age

I am soon turning 20 years of age and while not a "ripe, gold age", it is still significant, as it marks about what the average lifespan of a human in this region will have, assuming medicine gets a little better within the next 40 years. Yet, even though I am some distance away from retirement, today I became a junior.

A junior training specialist.

My team has some employee restructuring changes happening currently, and while that normally means people losing their jobs, it is actually all internal moves, promotions and new hires - which is a good sign in my opinion, especially considering the last year we have had.

My supervisor is one of the transfers heading to another team and she decided that before she goes, she would give me a title change and a tiny payrise, which is more of a token gesture, than anything else. It is kind of funny as while I am one of the newest to the team and have only been there two years, I think I have the most direct training experience, even though I am not the oldest in the team, but not, not the oldest by much.

It is nice to get a little recognition however, as while I lack a lot of the technical skills that others in the team have, I am a pretty good trainer overall and my training feedback is very good. While I have quite enjoyed my time at this company so far, something I was unsure of after working solo for 15 years straight, is that they do actually think about acknowledging skills and career path of employees.

This is something I knew before joining, as I was recommended for the position by a friend of mine, even though I was not looking for a job at all. I don't think I would have taken the position if it hadn't been for him recommending the company itself as a good place to work as he and I were colleagues years earlier and the company we worked for was the antithesis of a good place to work.

As I have said many, many times in the past, relationships are very important to me and I see them as vital to building the trust required for collaboration. While I understand that I also support the trustless nature of blockchain, I think that it will eventually result in a web of trust network that leverages real relationships in a kind of six degrees of separation process, where verifications can be applied across multiple points and rated, with verifications affected by those of the past to build the confidence level in the present.

This means that quite distant relationships could add to the confidence level of any individual in the system, through millions of data points across many domains. This could potentially be used poorly, but it could also be used well and if there is value in it, it is going to be created anyway, so the best thing to do is create it in a way where the least harm can be done, which is likely in a decentralized process. The data collectors already have a lot of this data, which the organize, utilize and sell for profit.

But, that can be for another post, for now, I am trying to enjoy getting this token gesture, which is hard, because I don't care about titles at all. Never have never will. Since I was a kid I have said, "call me what you want, as long as I get paid". I think that this might be because as a young kid, I had already been called the worst of it.

Some people see titles as a sign of respect or skill, but in my experience, that comes through behavior. The problem with titles is that they can give the audience a sense of a person's worth, without there being any visibility on how they got the title in the first place. A lot of companies use title changes as a reward so often, that there is title inflation, making them increasingly worthless.

While I don't care much about the title, it is nice to get a little bump in pay, although it seems quite insignificant at the end of the day, as it is a little less than 3% of my salary. However, I also have enough experience to understand that it isn't the size that matters as much as, how it is used. Many people absorb any extra "lifestyle creep" without recognizing it is even gone. A lot of my earnings over the years have been misused and I am slowly changing my ways.

It is about time I started learning though, as at my age, I shouldn't just know better, I should be doing better. Something many seniors seem to forget.