EDIT: To give a vague privacy friendly answer as to what I do, it’s a particular kind of IT, and it involves highly specialized purpose-built server clusters that spend most of their time on the backdeck of ships.
Thankfully, yes. I grew to hate my previous job because of shitty leadership. I was cut when there were two rounds of downsizing because I was the best-paid on my team. They did me a favor. I was only half-heartedly looking for a new job because doing so is challenging when your morale is blasted from working a shit job.
The new job is far higher stakes, but also far easier 95% of the time. I’m reading books during my downtime between putting out fires. I’m uniquely qualified for the role. I can also walk to work in ten minutes. And I absolutely love my boss. It’ll be six months tomorrow. Wooooha!
Sort of? I’m on Peace Corps service for now and in some ways it’s really awesome, but at the end of the day the actual work is with the government and it feels like actually doing anything out here is like trying to run with a ball and chain.
Eh, I’m trying to travel. Don’t get me wrong I give my best effort to PC’s missions but we’re not really set up to do that which the general public might imagine we do.
Meanwhile I have about 7 months before I return to the US and the idea of finding a real job is so terrifying I thought to turn to askLemmy for inspiration lol
It has the potential to be meaningful in the right time and in the right place but generally it’s just a transaction of skills to survive, and have some means to have a fulfilling life outside of work.
No, I don’t feel like my job is full filling. Would I switch though? No. Why?
The people I work with are awesome
The companies culture is overall great
I feel valued and supported
So why is the job not full filling? Because I dislike and borderline hate the industry we are in: Marketing/Ads. Probably only next to fossil fuels the reason why the world we live in today sucks.
Could I go elsewhere with my skillset? Certainly. But having had terrible employers with whos’ products I could somewhat identify with before, I came to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily most important what you do but with who.
I really appreciate this take. Sounds like you’ve found a good situation. I’m sure there’s not really a perfect job so you’ll always have to compromise on something.
I would encourage anyone who is interested in this concept to do a little more reading on the concept. Ikigai is a lot more than just fulfillment with employment- which is closer to the concept known as hatarakigai. I appreciate you sharing this meme though- it was how I was first introduced to the concept.
I'm between jobs for the first time in my adult life at the moment. My last gig lasted nearly 10 years and it was a wild ride. I found it fulfilling for a time, but I eventually got promoted to a position I wasn't wholly satisfied with.
I started off at the very bottom rung, doing tech support for customers on the phone/chat/email. I was great at it and got promoted quickly to higher ranks of support, and eventually wound up managing the floor of tech support agents. Those were some of the best days of my life. Halcyon days.
Every day was like a really low-stakes episode of House, where in the course of helping agents solve technical issues for customers, eventually we'd encounter one really inexplicable, difficult, borderline impossible problem that nobody had ever seen before, so me and my team's brightest would walk and talk while hypothesizing and figuring out our next move.
After a year or two of managing the floor, I got promoted to a position where I was ultimately a code monkey. Then Covid happened, and my job became fully remote for 4 years straight. Which was great! It allowed me to do my work and also spend way, way more time with my infant son during his early formative years. I got incredibly lucky in spite of the pandemic. But over time, the burnout grew to the point where I knew I needed to find something else to do with my career.
I'm lucky enough to have enough in savings that I can take a bit of time to reflect and think about what I might want to do going forward with my admittedly limited credentials.
I get paid well doing something I enjoy while also helping millions of people. The hardest part is really the stress. It can cause big issues if I misplaced a single character on a line of code that can have real consequences and it’s with small amounts of oversight.
At the moment I am intensely bored at work. The job is not challenging and most of my stress comes from dealing with broken software, useless vendors or a few business units that vacillate on requirements. But:
Most of my internal customers are very nice
My team is eccentric but tolerable.
I am compensated well.
But I’m still looking for a new position because I feel my brain is melting by staying here.
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