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He's not wrong though.

 Vulcan wrote:
I'm starting to think my problem is my upbringing. "Working hard is the first step to success." "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right." "Do it right the first time so you won't have to do it over."

While modern business seems to operate on 'It doesn't matter what you do IF ANYTHING, all that matters is blowing your own horn and stomping down anyone who might threaten your position and/or advancement.' My parents, teachers, and other role-models seem to have missed telling me about that part...

Also makes me wonder if succeeding at anything DOING something is actually worth bothering with anymore. If business thrives on backstabbing and boasting instead of actual accomplishment... well, that explains quite a bit about America and it's governmental and corporate culture.

This is why I have worked for myself for the last 15 years. Working hard for someone else makes them rich. The salvers slaver and the slavers slave. That's the world. So long as you're in a situation in which you're selling your labor to somebody else trying to turn it into profit, you're going to be over a barrel regardless of what particular form that takes.

In the corporate world it's more evident than anywhere else. Chances are if you're good at what you do but not a squeaky wheel you'll simply wind up pulling someone else's weight. Management doesn't care how it gets value, only that it does.

That’s depressingly true. It’s why I’m aiming to go self employed too.

 Vulcan wrote:
I'm starting to think my problem is my upbringing. "Working hard is the first step to success." "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right." "Do it right the first time so you won't have to do it over."

While modern business seems to operate on 'It doesn't matter what you do IF ANYTHING, all that matters is blowing your own horn and stomping down anyone who might threaten your position and/or advancement.' My parents, teachers, and other role-models seem to have missed telling me about that part...

Also makes me wonder if succeeding at anything DOING something is actually worth bothering with anymore. If business thrives on backstabbing and boasting instead of actual accomplishment... well, that explains quite a bit about America and it's governmental and corporate culture.

I wouldn’t describe that attitude as problematic in the least.

But, do take time to schmooze when you can! It’s a silly, dirty word, but Networking is a thing. Get your face out there. Rooty toot toot you’re own trumpet, because sadly, ain’t no other bugger gonna do it for you.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
That’s depressingly true. It’s why I’m aiming to go self employed too.

Keep your eyes on the prize. The feeling of being financially stable and overlord free is indescribable and, like time, has a value far greater than money.

Roberts84 wrote:
Keep your eyes on the prize. The feeling of being financially stable and overlord free is indescribable and, like time, has a value far greater than money.

Amen.

I’m not really cut out for the world of work anyway...not good at taking orders...

Whereas I’m very happy being a salary man.

Very happy to take orders, provided my overlord understands I’m of a creative enough bent that they need to be incredibly precise, lest I interpret other than intended.

Which again, with a Fair and Reasonable mandate, is why I’m so happy in my current job! Provided I can justify my choices, I’m golden, even if it gets overturned at the second and final level!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It really is all about chancing your hand though,

Me? I’d never considered or imagined I’d be good at this job. Yes, I’m an argumentative sod (look back at my posts from a few years back, and wince as I do now!). But had always assumed I was doomed to dead endery.

Landed a job in insurance, and found a way to better channel my argumentative nature. Learnt the minutiae and nuance, and proved highly competent.

Sadly, in that role ‘face didn’t fit’. Decided to chance my hand by applying to the industry Big Boy (biggest boy as it happens), got accepted, and the rest is 8 years of history.

If you’re thinking of going self employed, it’s definitely worth looking into the practicalities. Being in the U.K., I find the legal protections of being an employee too appealing. Yes, I could go Contractor where I am, and near double my wage, but I like annual leave, private pension etc which I’d lose in doing so.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
That’s depressingly true. It’s why I’m aiming to go self employed too.

As an Entrepreneur (Owned two small businesses) and a Corporate Wage Slave, they both have advantages and disadvantages.


Wage Slave:
1. Benefits
2. Less risk
3. Greater stability
4. Corporate BS

Self-Employed
1. Your work is for you (and your employees)
2. Need to be an expert in everything
3. Be prepared to lose all your friends, family, and money
4. Get to be a "pillar of the community"

Yeah I reckon it takes a particular kind of person to make it in self employment. I respect it, I think it is very difficult. My uncle built his refridgeration company up from pretty much nothing, and he employs a few people now, but it is a tonne of work and he has to be pretty confrontational and dogged in getting people to pay up for work sometimes and that sort of thing.

I am happy when I can get on with my core job of teaching and looking after my students. I am also a pretty good "second" to a manager if I think that manager is ethical and sensible (as my direct boss is). I think I would be a poor leader, as I dislike making judgements of colleagues and am not very well organised. I am glad when other people take on thsoe roles as long as they are ethical and competent.

Hmmm, interesting topic for me this. Some of the following may be surprising given my 'reputation'(?) on here.

Though technically I've had more than 3 jobs, I've had 3 main job roles throughout my lifetime;

1. Lifeguard. I used to be a very good swimmer so this was a natural fit for a young'n still in education. Basically a glorified cleaner that sometimes watched people swim. It was often boring, though the various teams I worked in were all entertaining for different reasons and it paid very well for my age. Though I didn't enjoy the cleaning, I did enjoy the banter.

2. Teacher(ish). After leaving uni I went to work for a charity that effectively led "enterprise" (business studies) days in schools. My remit was a bit of a hodge podge of selling the enterprise days to various schools in the county, organising volunteers from corporate organisations and delivering the teaching sessions to groups of 10-200 students. The age range varied from primary school up to university students. I loved the teaching elements of the job where I engaged with students. I hated the office side of the job that consisted of various menial tasks and administration. I learnt a TON during this role, not just about the workplace in general, but also about what I enjoyed in terms of my own worklife. I was thinking about becoming a proper teacher full time but instead went into...

3. Sales. And here I stayed. I now work for a large multinational corporate group selling medical equipment to organisations that provide care. I. Love. This. Job. And the weird thing is that I've always loved it. I started as a "consultative" (support) type role and have progressed to my current role of Senior Manager. What I love about it is the freedom. I work from home and I'm responsible for my own diary. I decide what I work on on any given day. It's also easy to see how successful (or not) I am (based on my figures). For me the job is all about building relationships and, though some of you may find this hard to believe, IRL I don't find this very hard at all. I'm currently responsible for bringing in approximately £1.5m for the company I work for. That's not to say there aren't elements about the job that I dislike, or that things couldn't be better, but I couldn't see myself doing, or enjoying many other roles. Of course this is all down to dumb luck, I needed a career change when I left the charity mentioned earlier and this happened to come up. The intention was to "get some real world experience" before going back into teaching. Obviously that never happened and it looks like it won't any time soon.

Some interesting reads.
For me, my current job is a recent (of two years) job, that I don’t dislike, but am not in love with necessarily.
It’s the situation that having this job brings with it, that I do love.

Basically I work nights now, just a couple a night, in the care industry.
This allows me to spend my life at home, with the kids (and games and hobbies all mixed in if they are occupied for a moment or two )


It is sure a far cry from my original work. For 15 years since leaving school I worked in retail. Starting at a weekend and part time role, right up to an Area Manager.
It was Long hours at the end, with quite a bit of travel to other stores, and many a phone call and email on my days off or in the evenings.
Now the wife didn’t like so much not seeing me when I was off work, and I felt I was missing out on a lot of time with our then 6 month old boy.
So when the opportunity arose to be an almost stay at home dad came up, I was pretty happy for the opportunity.
Now he’s almost 3 and our second is coming up 4 months, and I’m always there (almost like a job itself ha).

I do miss it a bit, but the of pressure and targets and conference calls and everything it all entailed, I am happy without those for sure.

I recently changed jobs so that, for the first time in my life, I'm not working first line or shifts and, for the first time in a very long time, I don't have anyone beneath me in the chain of command.

I miss the buzz of activity of first line, I miss the convenience of having weekday mornings to do house work and head into town, and I definitely miss the mind blowingly stupid stories that the young folks tell of what they got up to last weekend.

On the other hand, for the first time in forever, I have a regular sleeping pattern. I'm losing weight without having changed anything else. I'm more alert in work and less grumpy outside of it. I'm no longer tired all the time. When my new colleagues complain about how bad they think things are I just sit and grin and laugh to myself.

I've gone from fighting fires all day, worrying about my subordinates and being exhausted all the time. Now, I'm thoroughly de-stressed and happy. A little bit bored at times, but I'm happy again.

I'm an archaeologist. I teach in a university and do some freelance survey and map-production stuff (because I only have a zero-hours teaching contract).

I enjoy parts a lot. A fair bit of my year is spent on excavation in Israel or Iraq. It's fun but living in excavation accommodation and the 4am-9pm work days aren't. They're quite varied experiences, too. Because I'm a surveyor I deal with everything on a site through all periods so it's more interesting than being confined to one area. Also, excavations are quite different across countries - so in Israel it's all academics, students, and some volunteers, whereas in Iraq we have a small team of academics and everyone else is hired from local villages.

Teaching, similarly, is varied. I really enjoy teaching honours, but MA and levels 1 and 2 can be frustrating. I mostly teach archaeological theory and ethics, or social theory in Ancient Near Eastern contexts, which I find far more interesting than just teaching ancient events and cultures. I also, unusually, quite enjoy marking.

The parts that frustrate me are the being obliged to run at the speed of the those who do the least work, and having to deal with the variability of educational backgrounds. For instance, at tge start of underground, students arriving from the US are leagues ahead of most of those from Europe - especially the UK. By the time of honours, things are pretty balanced by honours, and the at everyone who's done a European undergrad is generally miles ahead of those from the US and Europe is a big ol' mix. Germany and France seem to produce people with immense factual knowledge but that really struggle to process material (actually a common characteristic of Oxford students, too). On the other hand, UK-trained students are usually really good at applying knowledge but their factual basics are shaky. It's interesting but a teaching challenge.

Meanwhile, I teach a lot of ancient texts which everyone with a cursory knowledge of thinks they're an expert in. Especially Hebrew Bible. Resisting eye-rolling spills legit be bonus money.

Obviously, the most frustrating bit is that there are so few jobs. There are two Near Eastern archaeology lecturing jobs in Scotland.

nfe wrote:

Obviously, the most frustrating bit is that there are so few jobs. There are two Near Eastern archaeology lecturing jobs in Scotland.

I know what you mean. A friend of mine was hunting for a job in the US a few years ago; and there was exactly -one- tenure track post for a Professor of Modern British History in the whole US.

He ended up with a job as a historian for the US airforce despite having specialised in nineteenth century military stuff.

I feel like my life taught me really early on that brown nosing is an important life skill, however much some people might knock it. You get more understanding, cooperation, and help when you need it when you engage in some low level sycophanting. Schmoozing is an important skill.

But I feel like a system that functions that way is an inherently broken system more naturally navigated by sycophants and sociopaths (which I think does explain a lot) than people who just want to live their lives. The only way to get past that is to just stop worrying about it and prioritize your goals, but that's bs in itself. Broke systems should be fixed, not accepted as 'this is just what you have to do.' But that's an easy mentality for people who don't have student loans and bills to pay, which is probably why the system stays broken.

I also think my experience is that pretty much every workplace is inherently dysfunctional. Maybe not completely non-functional, but I've never seen a workplace where I didn't go 'wtf' about something and how little sense it made.

NVM

The thread you mentioned is from 3 years ago, but the topic of career satisfaction and challenges remains relevant over time. It's great to hear that you were able to overcome a difficult period in your job and are now enjoying your career.

Yeah not sure if it is necromancy but it was interesting to me to read my posts from that time with where I am now. In some ways I followed Fifty's example from earlier in the thread, which at the time I remember feeling downhearted about because I felt I couldn't drop my hours as he'd done.

I basically lobbied to teach another high level subject with a small class size, which allowed me to trade 60 students for 4 for the same number of teaching hours. This dramatically decreased my workload because it cut the marking I had to do by a factor of 15.

I've now started to evaluate my job partially on "students per hours taught" and try to get myself in a position where I'm minimising that number to keep my workload manageable while still being paid the same as I was for being responsible for far more students.

So, Ouze and Polonius if you're still around, you guys were kinda right and I DID have more agency than I thought at the time. Part of my issue was seeing this as "wrong" because managing my workflow was "not my job", but ultimately that really does not matter, what matters is that I can cope and keep going.

I dunno. Being able to look back on old threads is one of the cool things about fora. I hope others that were having a tough time in work also found a way through.

I also looked back on my old post here despite the necro. I switched teams at my job, no longer billing for radiology, but doing dental billing now. Phones still suck. The promise of less incoming patient calls turned out to be a lie (not entirely their fault). I have a lot more hours taking calls, but less volume. More waiting for it to ring, which does not help with my anxiety. Less feeling of helping people. It’s still a basic office job, and cooperate America is loves its micromanagement. It’s a grind, but an easy job I can step away from at the end of the day and not worry about.

My current "job": Retired. So generally yes, I'm enjoying it. I've found that his time of year ("Christmas Season") though I'm a bit bored sitting on the sidelines.

My previous job: Yes, very much so everyday.
I spent 30 years in big toy retail doing everything from lowly cashier on up through district/regional duties. Multiple jobs/positions for the same company over the years.

Still where I am, still enjoying it. There are some grumbles, by the High Heedyins finally feel like they’re more or less in gear and have remembered there’s an awful lot of very clever people who haven’t been treated all that fairly over the past few years.

My role is getting a bit stale, but that is fine. Some of this is cultural to the company, and some of it is what the company is asking me to do. I have done that stuff before, several times; so it is more like getting people to buy in and apply the known solution.

The stability and security allow me to focus my energy on other things though. That's a plus.

It is interesting to look at my older post here and see how quickly things have progressed since I last worked in my previous company where I was laid off. I was able to complete my career development practitioner diploma during COVID, got a 3-month contract for full time work as an Employer Liaison in lieu of a unpaid practicum, my boss really liked me so she kept me on for another 6 months, transitioned to getting a full time job there in that role, and in less than a year's time I applied to a Program Coordinator role in the same program I was a part of and got promoted there, so I've had a lot of rapid growth in the career development field given that I've only been in the sector for little over 2 years so far. Very happy to be helping my client demographic of immigrants as well as our program is targeted to help them actually work in jobs of their field from their home country rather than them having to settle for survival jobs at Tim Hortons. Now more change is on the horizon as I've been attempted to be poached by a university and my boss just quit, so I might be applying for the manager role here instead.

Overall, pretty satisfied with my current position but I am still ambitious enough to keep an eye out for other roles (working 2 days in the office and having a 10 minute commute to the place is a lot of incentive to stay at the moment lol). Goes to show how quickly things can change and how far reaching God's plans can be in hindsight, as I wouldn't have gotten my current job without the position I was laid off from.

I'm primarily an at-home dad. For the past 7 years I've been working part time in various capacities at the same Community Development Corporation that I worked at 20 years ago when I was right out of college. At this point I've got over a decade with this organization, 15 years total (all my actively working years) if you count my time working for a Health Center started by the same church.

I like it here because I believe in the mission (affordable housing, community organizing, etc) and I like the people and I have near absolute flexibility in terms of hours, attendance, etc. It's also nice to have adult professional interactions throughout the week.

Even though I can't commit the time and regularity to take on substantial responsibilities/projects/etc I'm able to be pretty useful doing odd jobs, organizational stuff and often knowing the organization's history and location of documents far better than most other employees. The pay is laughable compared to what my breadwinner wife brings in, but it definitely does help out the family finances.

I guess I like being useful to the mission and being also able to do things on my terms, which I realize is a luxury. I've got several more years until both kids are in High School (no longer in need of daliy transportation from me) and then I'll be able to re-evaluate what a full-time job would work like.

I think I am suffering from a version or a variant of the 'Peter Principle'. Whilst I have not been promoted above my own competence level, I have been promoted to a position where I no longer enjoy my job due to the work load and the level of responsibility it entails. Unfortunately, I am somewhat painted into a corner now because of the related salary; if I want to change careers or change jobs, it would mean a large reduction in salary which is untenable. My wife doesn't work, we are a single income family so I am kind of stuck doing what I do whether I like it or not.

Oh man, this is interesting, so much for me has happened. around 2021 i was promised alot from my company, a path for a promotion, alot, but i was denied that due to a supervisor lying about his feth up, and blaming it on me.(Funny thing is, my partner in the job got the promotion as well, and it just as responsible for what my supervisor said I did, but because i brought it up, i was blamed)
early 2022 i got a big promotion and im doing that now, after a stint with a bad manager, i have a good one now that while he expects alot, he is VERY supportive.
That siad, im tired of times im expected to work, im expected to be available for 12 hours a week from 4-730 to accomadote children and family, which means less time for myself TBH. they never give me morning clients cause for some reasons kids are starting school at like, 2 now. I have had several talks with parents that due to us being a medical service, work is required to give you time off weekly for our meetings, per FMLA, but they always push back.

Wait wait wait.

I’m suspecting typo.

You said 12 hours a week. I’m suspecting you meant 12 hours a day?

Not quite
I need to be available for 30 hours direct for a week. No including all my other duties.
I'm also required to be available for a total of 12 hours a week from 4-730, due to those being peak hours. It can be in an combo of it. But that means most likely I'm starting at 9 or 930, and getting don't at 6-7.
It's a messed up field in terms of hours

 Da Boss wrote:

So, Ouze and Polonius if you're still around, you guys were kinda right and I DID have more agency than I thought at the time. Part of my issue was seeing this as "wrong" because managing my workflow was "not my job", but ultimately that really does not matter, what matters is that I can cope and keep going.

I'm glad things are looking up!

I got into machining in 2010 and have never looked back. Had you told me this would be my longest standing career outside of the military I would have laughed in your face. As it stands? I can't picture myself doing ANYTHING else for a living.