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I'm grateful to be working, but I don't like my job. I didn't like the one before it and the one before that. I realized one day I just don't like working for other people. Currently I'm saving up my money to invest in my passion. The best part about it is that it involves working for myself. I could care less about making enough money to afford mortgages and car leases and retirement funds. Hell, I don't even care if I live to retirement. I just want to do what I love.
Maybe you should have gone for that library degree, after all?
Most jobs suck, and the backstabbing people who take credit for your work or ideas, and blame things on you when something goes wrong even though you had nothing to do with it, or pass the buck, all that BS is everywhere. Incompetent managers too, they rise to the level of their incompetence (peter principle).
I've come to realize that what matters is whether you make a good living, have good health benefits, work life balance, and a tolerable work environment. A colleague and I were talking about this very thing the other day: we job hop on average every two years when things get intolerable enough. We are making good money too, and even at high pay, it's still intolerable sometimes.
So we've literally become resigned to changing jobs every couple of years, give or take a little, depending on how much BS there is.
I also don't share anything with anyone where I work, and do the minimum. After a while, you get tired of training people or doing great things only to watch people take credit for them and get promoted over you. Yeah, I'm bitter. Corporate has killed my sould.
i don't hate work, i love it but the work i love doesn't pay much (video editing, photo editing, all post production). anything in creative or art is a joke for pay. i also love sports but i couldn't grow up to be a talented athlete. some people luck out like alex rodriguez, lebron james, michael jordan, kobe bryant, etc. they were given exceptional talent and opportunity. of course they are willing to work for $20 million a year. wouldn't you? knowing that i will be in my ferrari in a few hours after practice and "playing" sports is my actual job, i will work very hard. there are exceptions like kwame brown who is lazy in general. i also know i work half the year. i mean come on. doesn't get better than that. but for $10 an hour with inflation at nearly 300% from 1980, you are still making the same as you did back in the 80s. in other words, no hope or progress for the common man. this is what makes people hate their jobs, not work period. the reward is pathetic and their line of work is not what suits their passions or dreams.
myself i have always envied the person that loves thier work, not exactly the millionare (though I assume the millionare must love his/her line of work), I have just envied the guy that is able to do what he loves- not as a hobby but as a true job. It did not matter if he was making 100k a year doing what he loves or 30k a year, just the fact that he was able to do what he loves.
I realize now that not everyone is going to be able to follow their passion, for many a job is just a "job" they do it well and are good at it, and the true passion becomes a hobby, something we do on the weekends etc... And you know what that is fine, just because your job may not be your "dream job" does not mean you give up on life and sit on the couch until retirment. We just have to endure the "suck" or the mediorcity, the boredom etc... we endure and we live for the weekends
Again, all that matters to me now is income, performance and work/life balance.
Does anyone share my philosophy on these matters?
Yes, I sincerely share that philosophy. The cost of living must be balanced with income. Although the job is not ideal, a worker should have skills that reasonably give acceptable performance. A very good assertion is "work/life balance".
I recently quit a job in Florida. I have over 17 years of experience on many different short-term, long-term projects throughout the southwest (AZ, NM, CO, CA) and Florida. On a scale of 1-10 were 10 is excellent, I have never found a job to be at a pure "10" or even a "9". There is always something wrong: corporate politics, gossip, poor communication, mismatch of skills versus positions. One of the common patterns on a software project is that someone with poor technical skills is made the manager. In the field of medical devices, there is usually someone who slips up on FDA compliance badly. There are other "people" factors to make a job environment lame: work-place romance, inner social circles and related promotions/job evaluations, etc. For example, if programmer A wrote 1000 lines of code to complete 4 requirements in a development cycle and programmer B also did the same but programmer A is in the inner circle of friendship with the technical leads and gets "invited" to lunch many times, then programmer B will probably get a very bad evaluation. There is also the reality of subtle racism (strong enough for a minority to feel it but not strong enough for white management to admit ) and there is still gender discrimination in engineering. But to be fair, I have also seen white women who exhibit subtle racism or promoted to lead positions without qualifications.
So I have never seen a job at a "10". Honestly, as long as the job is at a "6-7" and my skills are reasonably successful for the day-to-day tasks and performance evaluations, then I am fine.
The real key is work/life balance. I can decompose quality of life into three categories: (1) quality of work life, (2) quality of social/community lifestyle and (3) inner circle of friends and family (wife, children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc). In Florida, (1) was at at a 6-7 for my job. But (2) and (3) were essentially "0" for me in Tallahassee especially after my relationship with my girlfriend faded out. I had no immediate relatives or long-standing social ties with the community. So I returned to Arizona. Here (2) and (3) are at a 10. I have a very large family. My new job is still at a "6-7" but the other two categories are great. I love being home in AZ.
The key is to use the "Mixed Martial Arts" approach to a job and excessively diversity your skills. You never know if there might a layoff around the corner. A multi-disciplinary background allows survival in a cold working world where evaluations can be unfair. I have multiple graduate degrees and right now am using data warehousing to thrive and get out of Tallahassee. But I also have skills in mechanical engineering, test automation, FDA compliance, technical writing, and public health.
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