In The Zeitgeist

In my life I’ve had many jobs and moved around a lot. The Nomad life course. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and have mostly worked as a contractor. For fun, and because I like categorizing, I wrote down every company I’ve worked at and the year the company was founded. Some interesting patterns emerged.

The majority of companies where I have worked were founded in the 2T or 3T of this saeculum. Many of these were startups that failed or got bought out. Not surprising since I am a software engineer but too old to be in on the ground floor of any 4T unicorns.

These jobs were all in the first half of my career, pretty much coinciding with the 3T of this saeculum. The other places I worked in this time period were two venerable public institutions founded in the 1T of the Great Power saeculum: Virginia Tech where I went to school and the United States Geological Survey where I interned.

Then in the second half of my career, starting just at the tail end of the 3T, I started getting contracts at more established companies, founded in the 3T or 4T of the Great Power saeculum (IBM for example). This reflects both my increased work experience and a life course related desire for greater work stability. This is my Nomad settling down in the 4T phase.

Here is a complete chart:

Saeculum	Turning
	First	Second	Third	Fourth
Revolutionary		o		x
Great Power	xxo	x	o	xo
Millennial	o	xo	xxxxxxxx

The cell is the turning in which a company where I worked was founded. An ‘x’ marks a company where I worked in the Third Turning, and an ‘o’ marks a company where I worked in the Fourth Turning.

You can see my flurry of positions at dot com startups (sadly I did not get rich from any of them) and how later in life I was working for more established organizations. And yes, that is a company founded way back in the Second Turning of the Revolutionary Saeculum, which is where I work now.

I thought it was a fun exercise and you might want to try it yourself!

Edit: updated in May 2023 with more recent positions. As of that date I’ve changed jobs twice since this post was originally published.

Last week there was a retirement party at work, for a man in his sixties who had been with the company for about a decade. There was some nattering from other employees conveying wonder that someone would actually have the opportunity to retire. It felt like an expression of the anxiety of younger workers about their future. My generation in particular is notoriously pessimistic about its retirement prospects.

I have some notebook papers on which I have been tracking my computer career since it began when I was a college student. I write down where I worked, when, and what skills I developed. Each paper covers about 14 years, and I am now a quarter of the way through the third page. When I reach the end of the page, I will be in my sixties.

One career, easily compressed onto college-ruled notebook paper. Will I need a fourth page?