François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

What Jeremy Zawodny wrote in Job Specialization and Why it's hard to explain what I do resonates a lot with me. For a lot of people at work, I'm the "Internet guy". And internet equals techie. And techie equals specialist. And for some, internet equals IT, and they stop there (especially those who see me logged in via a terminal to one of our servers). Then they discover that I write rather decently (surprise), that I can advise them on a whole lot more than just "the web" (big surprise), that the internet is a lot bigger than what they thought (panic! ;-)). When come questions about what my job is, I've been joking for years saying that my officious titles are "webmonkey, chaos manager and corporate emergency hologram", which is my way of not answering the question.

The reality is that I'm a generalist in my specialty, and I've always been digging into high-tech fields with a nasty habit of trying to look at the bigger picture. I feel like a lion in a cage when being labeled, and corporations tend to have a lot of standard labels. Like Jeremy I tend to get bored if I stagnate for a long time because I'm a change agent who keeps looking at which status quo to attack next. Corporations are filled with people who dislike change agents, because they're threatening the status quo that they are mistaking for their job. I've been a startup guy, and I might still be. Despite all of this, I've been working for the past seven years for a big corporation. But one that still allows someone like me to go against status quo and change things, profoundly. And one that allows me to change myself.

I'm now looking forward to attacking my own status quo.