Category Archives: working in Italy

bio, working in Italy

Light at the End of the Tunnel

5 Comments

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. I’ve just been through a dark period, but… here comes the sun! (In more ways than one, as will shortly become clear.)

I’ve been stressed and depressed since well before Christmas. Money (lack of) was becoming a problem. TVBLOB is a privately-financed start-up, and my salary there is low – working for so little has been my investment in the company, at my personal risk: there are no guarantees that what we’re doing will fly and, if it doesn’t, I will have practically thrown away all these years (financially – experience, of course, is always valuable).

I don’t care about being wealthy by anyone else’s standards. Thanks to my husband and his family, I have a very nice roof over my head. But I don’t like feeling that I’m not pulling my financial weight in the family (though we have the basics covered, my salary is needed). Worse, feeling that I’m losing my financial independence eats away at me.

Furthermore, my daughter wants to go away to school next year, to Woodstock, my alma mater – which has become a great deal more expensive since I attended it: $16,000 for tuition and boarding, plus airfares, a new laptop, and other sundries that a teenager abroad will need. This adds up to approximately my annual salary at TVBLOB. <wince>

So, I have to somehow at least double my current salary. I’m not in a hurry to leave TVBLOB: although, after four years, start-up mode is getting very old, the project is still absolutely fascinating and potentially world-changing. That, plus colleagues whom I like and respect very much, is hard to walk away from.

But, financially, I wasn’t sure I had any other option. I started looking around for other full-time jobs in high tech in Italy (Google? hmm), but – am I actually employable by any “normal” Italian company? I have no personal experience to go on, but I have heard that most Italian companies are more gerontocracies than meritocracies (and chauvinist, to boot).

Job ads in the Italian papers specify that they want someone young (yes, this is legal in Italy), so they can pay them miserably and keep them low on the totem pole. Many entry-level jobs across all industries are being done by low- or un-paid interns with the excuse: “you can afford to work for us just for the experience – you live at home with your parents anyway.”

I fear that a middle-aged foreign woman who’s inclined to speak her mind and wants to be paid what she’s worth is not likely to do well in such a context. The crowd I saw at Cisco Expo the other day confirmed my (possibly mistaken) prejudice that even high-tech companies in Italy tend to favor hierarchy and conformity – I would love to be wrong about this, but am I? I don’t want to find out the hard way.

Where else to look for work, and what kind of work? There’s always the small stuff, like translation, but globalization has depressed prices in that arena as well – most companies are not willing to pay fairly for a really good translation by someone who actually knows how to write in English. I put in a bid here and there, with no immediate result.

Because I have a director title at TVBLOB, I felt uncomfortable at the idea of explicitly advertising that I was seeking additional work. So I brushed up my resumé, trawled LinkedIn for connections and recommendations, and quietly told a few friends that I was in the market.

This has brought results far greater and faster than I ever hoped for. Next Tuesday I’m flying to Colorado to start part-time, freelance work (one quarter budgeted so far) with Sun Microsystems, as a web producer for one section of their vast online empire, among other tasks. After this initial visit, I’ll be able to work from home (though I won’t mind travel as needed – I’m generally happy to go places and see people).

I’m slightly terrified. I know all about building and sustaining online communities, and writing, managing and editing web content – in fact, I was one of the pioneers in corporate online communication. But the subject matter of the Sun storage site I’ll be supervising is hardly an area of expertise for me.

On the other hand, I didn’t know anything about CD-ROMs when I set out to write a book on them: I am very good at learning what I need to know (and enjoying doing so), when I need to know it. And there’s more than one former colleague in the group I’ll be working with – a bonus to the whole situation. It won’t be easy but, if it was, I’d get bored!

I’ll keep my TVBLOB job, four days a week instead of five (in lieu of the raise that they can’t afford to give me right now, the lack of which started all this), so I have the remaining hours in the week to work for Sun, maintain my site, and, oh, yes, have a personal life from time to time. I’m heading into a very busy period now, but I’m happier than I have been in months. Turns out there was Sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

You might also like:

Deirdré and Robyn toasting at a restaurant in ParisOpenStack Summit 2014 cover of "The Naked Truth" by Margaret HeffernanFuck-you money Default ThumbnailToxic Things I Once Believed Default ThumbnailAirport “Security”: Reflections on Our Times
bio, living in Italy, working in Italy

Pursuing a Dream of Italy

Leave a comment

(The earlier part of this story is here.)

Actually, we didn’t spend the weekend together as a family. Ross stayed in Lecco because she had parties to attend. Enrico and I left Friday morning for Tuscany, to join a large gathering of people from the Expats in Italy online forum, a few of whom we had met last November at a local GTG (get-together) on Lake Como. We stayed with Rita and Lino, who’ve been friends since I did Rita’s website (tartarugatours.com) a couple of years ago. They’re now getting ready to move to the US where their daughters are/will be going to college, and are looking for renters for their home in Chianti.

The GTG was fun; it was interesting to meet in person some folks I only knew from their online writings, and some I didn’t know at all.

Most of the people on the Expats board are “dreaming or living the dream” of living in Italy – in other words, they made an explicit decision to be here because they love the idea of Italy, and/or wanted to get out of the United States (or other home country), and were prepared to just pack up and move, leaving behind the lives they’ve always known.

I stand in awe of these people; I don’t know if I could make a decision like that. Most of my living overseas (and practically everything else about my life) has not occurred by my choice. I grew up in Thailand, Bangladesh, and India (and Pittsburgh) because that’s where my dad’s career took us. When I decided to marry an Italian, I accepted as a consequence that we’d be living in Italy. Not that I was unhappy about it, but it was a decision that followed from my decision to marry Enrico, not a decision to follow a dream of living in Italy. (One might argue that my dream was to have a stable marriage, but that’s a topic for another time.)

When you pursue a dream, you’re willing to make sacrifices. To live in Italy, what foreigners most often sacrifice is their careers. As I wrote some time ago:

“… many Italians don’t have much choice about their work… They may choose their field of study, but even that is often strongly influenced by the family. When seeking a job, most are heavily constrained by the tight job market and their need, both economic and psychological, to stay close to home – job satisfaction is a very secondary consideration.”

Most foreigners in Italy, unless independently wealthy, are similarly constrained. We must adapt to local conditions, sometimes very local – e.g., if we have married someone who comes from and intends to remain in a small town.

It’s a startling change for anyone who valued their career in the US. America is all about choices, or so we like to think. It’s easy to pick up and move wherever opportunity beckons, and many Americans do indeed “live to work.”

The other half of that truism is that “Italians work to live,” and so do foreigners living in Italy – just like Italians, we rarely have much choice. We have the advantage of “mother tongue” command of English, and (often) a predisposition to freelance work. This means that many English-speaking expats in Italy end up teaching English and/or translating, or in some other job that relies heavily on their English.

I was aware of this before I moved to Italy, but I vowed to myself that I would not “fall back on” teaching English. The opportunity to contribute something unique to the world is very important to me – teaching English just isn’t dazzling enough! I was lucky, early on, to fall in with Fabrizio Caffarelli, a high-tech entrepreneur (a rare breed in Italy), who gave me opportunities to develop my career in new directions. It’s true that I took those opportunities and ran with them: my life’s successes have mostly been about coping extremely well with the circumstances in which other people place me – almost never about choosing to put myself in the right place at the right time.

So my hat’s off to the foreigners who actually decided to move to Italy. It was a braver decision than perhaps you realize.

You might also like:

Mitchell, Mayor Jack Boyd, myself, and Brendan - post ceremony picI’m an Australian Citizen! cover of "The Naked Truth" by Margaret HeffernanFuck-you money Default ThumbnailToxic Things I Once Believed Sharon and Robin through an arch, Pecos PuebloPecos Pueblo and Santa Fe, New Mexico
bio, working in Italy

Workplace Safety in Italy

Leave a comment

I’m learning some new things about workers’ rights in Italy. At TVBLOB we have to elect (or, more likely, dragoon) a Rappresentante dei Lavoratori per la Sicurezza (Workers’ Safety Representative), who must take a 32-hour course (during working hours, paid for by the company) on how to keep us all safe on the job.

In our case, the most likely hazards to our health (besides the boss’ cigars) are the hours we all spend in front of computers. A pair of employees of the Milan health agency (ASL – Azienda Sanitaria Locale) came to test everyone’s vision and have us fill out a questionnaire on repetitive stress injury. No one is going blind yet, though one person has been told he must take a visual break five minutes out of every hour (which fits in nicely with his outdoor cigarette breaks). I was admonished to make sure that I keep on top of my glaucoma with regular visual field tests, and of course do my eyedrops every night.

It’s nice to see a public health system so proactive about workers’ health; it’s far better and cheaper to prevent problems up front than to cure them later.

You might also like:

cover of "The Naked Truth" by Margaret HeffernanFuck-you money Default ThumbnailToxic Things I Once Believed Default ThumbnailSchool Cheating in Italy Default ThumbnailAirport “Security”: Reflections on Our Times
bio, Italian culture, working in Italy

“What Do You Do?” Not Defining Oneself in Terms of Work in Italy

Leave a comment

“All societies throughout history have had work right at their center; but ours – particularly America’s – is the first to suggest that it could be something other than a punishment or penance. Ours is the first to imply that a sane human being would want to work even if he wasn’t under financial pressure to do so. We are unique, too, in allowing our choice of work to define who we are, so that the central question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents are but, rather, what it is they do – as though only this could effectively reveal what gives a human life its distinctive timbre.”

Alain de Botton “Workers of the World, Relax”- New York Times, September 6, 2004

An American meeting another American for the first time usually asks: “What do you do [for a living]?” As Botton suggests, this may be because, to an American, what you do for a living is a choice that reveals much about who you are. The question may also (consciously or un-) be intended to establish relative economic status. Personally, I like to know what people do simply to find some connection on which to hang a conversation.

In Italy, the question is so unusual that I’ve stopped asking. For most Italians, most of the time, there’s simply no need to ask: you hang out mostly with your paesani (hometown folks), about whom you already know everything. When you do meet new people, it’s often in the context of work, so again there’s no need to ask.

Italians more often define themselves in terms of where they come from (paese) and who their family is. No one has a choice about these things, but many Italians don’t have much choice about their work, either. They may choose their field of study, but even that is often strongly influenced by the family. When seeking a job, most are heavily constrained by the tight job market and their need, both economic and psychological, to stay close to home – job satisfaction is a very secondary consideration.

You might also like:

Default ThumbnailToxic Things I Once Believed Chemo Roundup: April Default ThumbnailAirport “Security”: Reflections on Our Times Default ThumbnailLearn Italian in Song: Translations of Lyrics for Italian Songs
bio, what I do, working in Italy

How I Got My (First) Job in Italy

Leave a comment

I don’t claim to be a comprehensive resource on any aspect of living in Italy; my reasons for being here are different from some others’: I married into it, which made getting a visa (permesso di soggiorno) and permission to work relatively easy. And that was years ago, so what little I remember about the process is probably out of date. There are sites with expertise to offer about the law and other technicalities; you’ll find some listed here.

When I first arrived here, I had been a mostly stay-at-home mom (in New Haven) since Rossella’s birth, and I was ready to go back to work. I had very little experience in job hunting anywhere, let alone in Italy. One of my major saleable skills was desktop publishing, which in those days was still an arcane art that could be sold as a third-party service. The closest thing I could find in the Milan Yellow Pages was “editoria elettronica”. Neither Enrico nor I was sure what that meant, but I sent off a resumé and cover letter to each of the four or five companies listed. Deafening silence ensued.

I pounded the pavements, taking my resumé to computer firms that might need someone who knew how to put systems together and train people to use them. Showing up with a resumé at an office where no one knows you is not the done thing in Italy; people stared at me uncomprehendingly, and at one place they literally laughed in my face.

I didn’t know what else to do to find computer work. Contacts are all-important in Italy, and I had none in the high-tech field. I did get a few translation jobs, thanks to my father-in-law. This was also the period in which I accidentally became a computer journalist. I could have taught English, but the idea didn’t attract me, and I didn’t want to fall into teaching as a career when I had other skills that ought to be far more valuable.

In June (1991), Enrico had a chance to return to Yale for an academic visit, and Alitalia happened to be offering two-for-one tickets. I figured that, if I couldn’t find work, I might as well go on vacation. So we left Rossella with her grandparents and prepared to take off for a week. This was on a Sunday morning. We were putting luggage into the elevator when the phone rang. I answered it, and the conversation went more or less like this:

“My name is Caffarelli. I received your resumé a while ago. Could you write a software manual?”

“Uh, yes, I guess so.”

I had never actually written a manual, but I had designed and written course materials to train people in using desktop publishing software, and had worked with a friend on a manual he had written for a deep-ocean exploration and recovery apparatus. I didn’t think I’d make a fool of myself in the attempt, at any rate.

When I returned from the trip, I went to meet Fabrizio Caffarelli, who had founded a software company in Milan a few years before. The software in question was for optical character recognition, which I actually knew something about – I had beta-tested some scanners and software, back when a 100 dpi black-and-white scanner cost $10,000. So I wrote the manual, in English, and it was “simultaneously” translated into Italian by Fabrizio’s niece Cristina. We had a great time doing it.

At the end of the six weeks or so that the project took, Fabrizio said to me: “I like the way you work but, unfortunately, I don’t have any more work for you right now.” We parted on good terms, and I recommenced the job hunt (well, not until September — no one does anything in Italy in August). I wrote a few more articles for computer magazines, and began to wonder whether I could write a book about something computer-related, perhaps in Italian. I was casting about for a topic when Fabrizio called, sometime in November. “Would you like to write a book with me?” he asked.

So we wrote Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, published (in English) by Random House. It was one of the first books in the world to include a CD. We didn’t get paid much for writing it (and Fabrizio took the lion’s share of what little there was), but I made some extra money on the deal by desktop-publishing it myself, using FrameMaker software. I also used FrameMaker to create a hypertext version of the book to go on the disc, a skill which was to come in handy later on. The disc mainly contained a demo version of Easy CD 1.0; Fabrizio’s reason for writing a book was to publicize the software by showing how easy it could be to make your own CDs – if you had our software, of course.

By the time the book was published (January, 1993), I was working full-time for Fabrizio, writing software manuals and other materials, and doing just about anything else that came up. (The small-company environment suits me precisely because I get to wear a lot of different hats, and people aren’t so territorial about their jobs.)

Fabrizio moved the engineering team to California in late 1993, and, having conquered the 75% of the worldwide Windows market for CD recording software, sold the company to Adaptec in August, 1995. I was hired by Adaptec and had a very good run with them, and later with the Roxio spin-off, until I quit in 2001. Along the way I helped a few other people find work (hired some myself), in Italy and elsewhere. Most of the freelance work I’ve had since has come through friends: good karma pays off, I guess.

In sum, it’s hard to advise anybody on how to find work in Italy, except in these very general terms: be flexible and patient, meet a lot of people, and when opportunity knocks, be ready to leap on it.

Multitasking

Feb 4, 2004

I said, “I developed a new skill with Fabrizio: simultaneous translation and transcription. If he wanted something written in English, he would dictate it to me in Italian, and I would type it straight out in English. I’m not sure I could do simultaneous translation if I had to speak, but I can do it typing, as fast as he can talk.”

Mike L. responded: “According to recent studies, this is something that (almost) only women can do. The explanation behind this is that the female brain is better capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, such as translating and writing. The experiments were quite funny to watch. One person would read a series of words, while the test person was asked to repeat after him. Most of the females managed to speak just a single syllable (sometimes even less) behind, while most of the males had to wait longer. My explanation is that males are equally well capable of multitasking, but one task is constantly allocated to thinking about sex – sex – sex…

You might also like:

cover of "The Naked Truth" by Margaret HeffernanFuck-you money Default ThumbnailToxic Things I Once Believed Default ThumbnailAirport “Security”: Reflections on Our Times Default ThumbnailThe End of an Era