32
votes
How has your career changed you?
Most everyone will spend a significant portion of their life working in some way shape or form. Our jobs can cause us to learn new skills or see the world in a different light after gaining new experiences.
I was thinking about my own career and how it has caused changes in my own life, and it got me thinking how other Tilders might view their work and their life through that lens.
Have you noticed your career has changed you, and if there are any changes you can think of, do any of them surprise you?
Do you look at things differently after working a particular job?
How has your job impacted you?
I'm a medical Claims Denial Specialist in the US.
Nothing will make you scream for Medicare for All more than working this job. Yes, it would put me out of a job. That's okay. The amount of patients insurance companies would rather let lose life or limb than pay money to get treatment is disgusting.
Limb saving surgeries delayed because they're refusing to authorize it until the day comes and it's too late and necrotic. Payment refused for emergency cardiovascular stents because we didn't get prior auth while the patient had 100% occluded coronary arteries. Medications that could give the patient their quality of life back denied because the cheaper one with worse outcomes needs to be attempted for a year first. Patients spending months in pain, losing the ability to walk, calling us every day to see if insurance has agreed to let us unblock the plaque in their legs.
I've never had this happen to a patient of Traditional Medicare. The death panels have been here all along and they go by the names United Healthcare, Aetna, Cigna, and Humana. Screw our system. Medicare for All.
If you have any loved ones approaching 65, please implore them to keep traditional Medicare and get a Medicare supplement. Yes it's more expensive than an advantage plan, but what's their life worth to them?
Maybe over sharing?
The first ten years of my professional life I was a firefighter/paramedic in a fairly busy 911 system. I got to see a lot working that job. It changed how I view life, more specifically, the fragility of it. It inspired me to make a will, to write up a virtual deadmans switch for some of my tech projects, and really changed the way I process and respond to grief and trauma. There's a couple calls I ran in my career that really stuck with me, one in particular that I think about near daily. As a result, I've become pretty desensitized to grief, which can unfortunately come across as apathetic at times. When my wife and I lost what would have been our third kid to a fetal defect in 2023, the physician taking care of her expressed concern over my quick acceptance of what had happened.
But more than anything, it taught me to enjoy life and not leave anything on the table. I hope to live a long and fulfilling life, but every night when I lay down to sleep, I hit the pillow knowing that if it was my last day, I can feel good about where I am and what I've done.
I think spending time close to death will do this. I've worked a job before where people died frequently and I also have just watched a lot of people I know die young or be hit by unforeseen life changing health emergencies. Similar to you I tend to be pretty quick to accept death and I think fairly comfortable with it.
One real take away that I have from it is I always tell the people I love that I love them and I try never to leave an interaction saying something I'll regret. You just never know when those will be your last words to someone.
I appreciate you sharing this is a good reminder to get my will written here, and to make sure I have a reminder in place to get a will created in the US the next time I'm back in the country. I'll also be taking inspiration from your deadman's switch, at least a more analog form of creating an emergency sheet, so my wife can get into our Bitwarden vault if needed.
BitWarden is way ahead of you: https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/
I would use that feature, but the problem I run in to is that my wife doesn't remember her password which is a thing. She's a permutation of an older password type of person and I had her create a strong and unique one of her account. I'll log in to her account for her and then configure the biometric unlock on her phone, and she just uses that until Bitwarden eventually logs her out with an update and I repeat the process.
Mildly frustrating, but it keeps her using it and has made my push for her to create long and unique passwords for her sensitive accounts painless. I also don't need to worry about her setting a password for a shared thing and having the password not recorded there.
Working as a veterinary technician made me incapable of continuing to eat meat. We had to do a lot of odd jobs at the animal hospital where I first worked, and one of those jobs was to raise a clutch of newborn chickens to young adulthood for their owner.
They're just cats, or dogs. They have personalities, and visibly experience happiness and sadness, love and fear, etc. Me and those birds knew each other. There is literally no difference between a McChicken and a McFido, as convenient as it would be if there were.
This only became clearer as I took future jobs at a farm, a zoo, etc. You learn that there isn't a single damn creature out there who isn't just, like, a guy, who likes stuff and has opinions and wants to be happy.
Not that this is a view that necessarily follows from animal care, though. I've actually only met one other fellow vegetarian in all my years in the field, so it doesn't actually seem common at all.
I think most people know that deep inside but it’s easier to look the other way and society also makes it feel like it’s a-okay. It takes guts to see things for what they are and take a stand.
I was somewhat shy, a little quiet, bad at making conversation. Then I worked a year and a half at a call centre. Permanently changed an until-then fundamental part of my personality.
Working as an emt had the same effect on me, I was never shy, but I didn’t have strong social skills and the only role I could play was manic pixie dream adhd and thats not really helpful to anyone.
Now I can be accommodating, in charge, and lead meetings at my desk job. Its great!
I worked with seniors at a bank during my early 20s as well. My views on how helpful and effective good small talk can be at building trust were amplified tenfold.
Same here, except add neurodivergency in the mix.
Call center work helped me get past my avoidance of talking to people, I now feel comfortable reaching out and starting conversation (provided there is a practical reason, I still can't get into small talk or just chatting with a random person on the train, for example).
But call center work also taught me how to mask even better. In times of emotional distress I just put on a cheery face and act like everything's okay, even in situations where it is acceptable or even encouraged to show that emotional distress. And that is very very bad. (also I quit call center work when my mask broke and I had a panic attack at my desk, fun!)
I also learned that the average person is stupid. We're all stupid in here but some people certainly are stupider than others.
I worked at a call center for four long years. It took me another couple of roles to truly get out of my own head.
Man, my career has had a big impact on me, and it's difficult to imagine who I'd be if I'd gone into a different career or even just worked at different companies within this career. I'm a staff+ software engineer, which means my job is both technical and very people/soft-skill focused.
Overall I'm very thankful for the challenges I've had and the exposure and growth I've gotten through those challenges. I'm naturally a person who tends towards perfectionism and going slow so that I can deeply and confidently understand something. My career has really helped me shake that tendency and learn to constantly think about outcomes and the impact of everything, including the impact of the time it takes to go deep. Stopping at "good enough" has become second nature to me now in daily life, and that helps me to actually be able to get anything done. I also appreciate how my career has drilled into me the concepts of problem space vs solution space and not jumping to solutions before really understanding the problem.
I don't have kids myself, but I've heard people say that having kids has taught them that they can handle much more stress than they thought they could. I feel like that with my job. It's taught me that I can handle more ambiguity and pressure than I ever imagined, and I can learn to get comfortable in discomfort.
I don't think I've ever been bored at work -- I'm almost always feeling some form of "oh shit, how am I supposed to do this?" and throughout 15+ years of constantly feeling that way, I'm finally starting to learn to trust myself and my team that we'll probably figure something out, even though I can't imagine how right now. (Again with the "comfort in discomfort")
...which reminds me of another way I've grown. I used to hate group projects in school. I really prefer (or have an illusion of preferring) to figure things out on my own and have a complete solution ready before I engage with others and get their input. My career has taught me how important it is to be able to make space and truly be open to other people's ideas. If I come to a discussion with everything already figured out, I'm missing the chance to engage minds that are different than mine and will come up with things I couldn't have. I've gotten a lot better at learning how to just bring one piece of the puzzle to the table and encourage others to bring the rest. Not only does it take the pressure off me, but I've seen again and again how a team can come up with way better ideas than any one individual.
My career has also really impressed upon me how absolutely everything in society is a system, and feedback loops and incentives guide everything we see around us. I've worked for large companies and been in situations where the general public has some assumptions about the evil intent behind some decision, when I know it's so much more complicated than that, and it's often people trying their best in face of needing to juggle tricky competing priorities.
I could go on, but overall I've grown a lot from my career, and while on one hand I feel desperate at times to retire as soon as I can financially manage it, on the other I appreciate how this career has made me a stronger, more confident, and more nuanced person, and I worry about what would happen to me if I left.
Heh, your response approximates a lot of my own sentiments.
For me, when I was younger I'd say it wasn't so much that I was a perfectionist but rather I'd taken a bit too much to heart the idea "it's the journey not the destination". A good sentiment in life overall, but not great when shit needs to get done. Through first a piece-rate manual labour job and then freelancing knowledge work, I realllly learned how important it was to keep focus on achieving an outcome, or risk going through the motions without getting anywhere.
In my more recent career shift, I found myself working a very collaborative office-type job. If you'd asked me when I was 20 if I'd like group work, I'd have scoffed, but now most of my job does involve collaboration/group work and I love it, for the same reasons you outline: it's so much more likely to achieve a robust outcome when multiple minds share their different perspectives. Plus, I get to learn so much by listening to others' ideas and expertises in this type of environment.
I think we like to deny that we have changed at all until we realize that we have.
Today just happens to be my 8 year anniversary at the same company. I got a big promotion to District Manager one month ago, but otherwise was effectively in the same role that entire time.
My confidence has increased significantly. I had no idea what I was doing 8 years ago. I spent a lot of time early on just bullshitting my way through my day to day. Now I really enjoy the fine tuning and constant feedback and growth that sales leadership can provide.
I used to take everything personal and try to fix everything. Now I pick and choose the hills I want to die on.
Before I would demur and avoid having to make tough choices and decisions. Now I enjoy solving tough challenges and making big decisions.
I see that roll over into my personal life. My wife will occasionally accuse me of trying to coach her.
So I guess I have changed over the past 8 years.
Congrats on the milestone! I also feel my work has made me more confident in myself and my capabilities. Though, for me, I think it comes down quite a bit to lucking into excellent managers who've made sure to share praise whenever deserved and whove supported my professional growth.
I came into my current job (a number of years ago) an odd mix of feeling capable in some skills but also having a deep underlying underappreciation for my value (my master's a few years prior was extremely difficult and unsupported, and left me feeling deeply imposter-ish), so having leadership who helped me and told me when I was doing well was critical.
In that respect, they've helped teach me how important it is to likewise support those around me, and to be vocal and consistent in sharing (genuine) praise and compliments, which I think has had a big impact on how I approach all my interactions/relationships, not just at work.
I'm a teacher in high school. I teach 12-13 years old children.
I went into the profession thinking I had a good life story and earned good enough life skills that I could give back to them and help society. I wanted to make a difference in the world and figured that it was the job that fulfilled this desire the best.
I'm now on my 6th year and the reality is those children have taught me SO MUCH about myself, humans and the world. Way more than I have taught them.
Every day, I learn something new. Every day, I fail at something. Every day, I succeed. Being around people can be hard, exhausting, but seeing progress every day makes me so happy and hopeful.
It would be impossible to list everything that changed in me. The job is an insane mix of sociology, politics, economics, psychology and culture that you just always learn. I'm better in everything, and I also realize how much there is still to learn.
Presently, I work for a health insurance company (sort of) and have for the past 11 years, before that I worked 6 years at hospitals and providers.
You will get a sense here that health insurance are always the bad guys, that really isn't true. There are bad guys everywhere, and nowhere, in the US health apparatus. One of the biggest changes over my career is being involved in something everyone both cares about, has opinions of, is highly political, and everyone knows someone who has a story. To a certain extent, I am empathetic and try to convey and assist where I can, but it also makes me jaded when people don't want to learn or accept reality of the situation, or are quick to point blame or expect solutions that aren't realistic (financially or politically or practically).
I really can't even begin to describe all my thoughts on my career. I started out and still abide by trying to help people. I saw the waste and cost disease at hospitals and providers, and I see it as well here. It's also very...complex, I have held 7 different positions in 6 departments, which has been across medicaid pharmacy, medicare care delivery, finance, state health plan, and now I'm in our consultancy wing, working with providers once more. Genuinely, the people working at a health insurance company spreads a pretty broad spectrum, and most people are not evil or malicious, but the US system and literal financial reality means that there's always some ghoulish scenario someone has encountered. And it's always the fault of the insurance. Despite the majority of cost drivers being from the provider side, which is increasing with AI tools.
It just feels mostly hopeless that I'll ever see any meaningful change in my lifetime to how healthcare in the US is structured so I just do what I can to at least push things in a positive direction. Sometimes that's expanding programs to populations that need it, sometimes it's cutting off vendors that aren't actually helping, sometimes it's reducing fraud. Right now I'm working on a cancer project as well as some provider scoring pieces. Nobody here wants a patient to have a bad time, but it's almost impossible to have nuanced discussions about it in any online space, since as I mentioned it's such an inflammatory topic.
Curious since you have insider's perspective: if there's one change you could make to improve the system, what would it be?
Realistic pricing and a shift away from networks and charge masters that change on a contract to contract basis. I think patients should know what they (or their insurance) is paying for up front.
Someone else in that thread is a medical claims denial specialist and they have a rather different take.
It's not surprising, if you're only working on denials then you'd expect to be on the cases where it occurred not because it wasn't or isn't medically necessary but that either administrative or prior authorization or utilization management or some other reason occurred. The point I always try to make, and what that commenter doesn't say: hospitals could always treat if they wanted to, they could out of the goodness of their hearts deliver care on these denials. An insurance company doesn't stop a medical treatment from happening, it only stops payment. There's an underlying thought that insurance companies should be financially liable for all of this but none of that financial burden should fall on the providers, who are equally money seeking. There's no way to cheat the economics on this.
When I worked for a Medicaid plan, the goal of CM/UM all of this was to save money, yes, but it's because if you don't save money you will have to cut services, it's a misconception that every health plan runs in the black. There's also significant work (this is my domain really) around patient outcomes. The patient is not actually better served being at acute care for 20+ days, they have better outcomes if you moved them to a SNF or an LTC or an AIR...so you deny the extension of the LOS for acute care, it isn't going to help the patient but then you're the bad guy, and the hospital loves to paint you as the bad guy. All the while if you're the patient your risk of adverse outcomes might be increasing despite it costing more.
My main point is you'll find very few people who have worked on all sides of it offering nuanced opinions, it's always black and white. I've mentioned in other threads that people fundamentally misunderstand why insurance exists and what the value add even is, again, why I'm so jaded about the whole thing
This is all very foreign to me, I’ve never experienced the US system and so just the idea that your insurance (rather than your doctor) decides about what gets done and whether they’ll pay for it is… bizarre.
The only time I was at the whim of health insurance was while traveling. I was agonizing while the insurance took for ever to come up with the 10k USD (equivalent) deposit for the foreign hospital to admit me. They wouldn’t touch me before then, and the insurance took hours to think about it. I don’t want to be in that position ever again and I’m glad the health insurance system here doesn’t work that way. Either the treatment demonstrably works and is covered or it’s not but that’s not up to each individual insurer.
This also tends to happen even with universal and single payer systems, unless the hospitals are also state owned, you just see less of it because it's more streamlined. I would be shocked if the NHS for example didn't have length of stay or levels of care standards complete with threats of non-payment if facilities are incapable of following them.
Treatments don't always have such a clear cut efficacy, especially in complex conditions, I assure you that someone, somewhere, is making an executive judgement on who gets what, whether that be a transplant, a knee or hip replacement, how long a patient should stay inpatient after surgery etc. You need standards otherwise cost overrun and over-utilization(to speak nothing of fraud) runs amok.
Also, doctors make mistakes, and if not mistakes they may have their own independent ideas of what treatment for a condition should look like, even if that doesn't align with current best practices, or there is a comorbidity or risk they didn't consider. I have myself, as the absolute last line, stopped a pediatric IV order that was egregiously wrong, when I was about to make it under the hood. The MD ordered it wrong, the pharmacist approved the order when they shouldn't have, the compounding pharmacist didn't notice grabbing the drugs and it came to me to say something was up. That was 16 years ago, and that was only one I'm aware that I caught. A single doctor shouldn't be (and often isn't) the sole point of failure for a patient.
There's no free lunch. A single payer system would save us money on administrative bloat and is the right solution, but it doesn't preclude the types of problems that people tend to have with insurance, and it won't stop there ever being a denial of care or a prior authorization or a preferred treatment or facility.
I'm more anxious than I ever was when hourly. So there is that. 😅
On the plus side, gaining competency/self-confidence in my work has made me feel more confident in myself outside of work.
I'm also noticing that the more I use AI at work, the more I'm using outside of work. Maybe not related? Hard to tell.
I work doing IT for a D1 college athletic program at a power 4 school. All things I loved when I started this job 20ish years ago. I don't really watch or pay attention sports anymore, I hate crowds, and have no passion for IT at all. Which isn't to say I hate my job, I have an incredible job. But even the cool jobs become just jobs eventually.
Working in IT for about two decades was a comfortable way to not really challenge my stereotypical introverted computer geek persona, but in the last handful of years moving into more management and team leader position has definitely reduced my shyness and opened up general social needs. Big social gatherings still drain me, but that is not the same as inherently anti-social. I like working close with people, I enjoy going to the office everyday rather than stay home in a quiet bubble. I can better appreciate and love the un-decidiability and illogical reasoning human beings possess, rather than being annoyed they don't fit into deterministic computer logic. If I should do a big career change, I might even make an attempt at HR.
Just a minor thing, but as a programmer I make ballpark estimates about everything. "Hmm, I wonder how (many inhabitants this town has|how long this canal is|how much water goes through there|...), what's your estimate?".
I've worked in IT for over a decade now. I've started leaning in to the somewhat trope of an IT person who doesn't want to deal with tech outside of work. Before working in IT or even early on if I ran in to a tech issue I'd spent hours of my time outside of work wanting to dive in, investigate, and fix it. Now if my personal laptop has some issues I'm much more likely to just turn it off and go do something else.
I also have slowly lost my desire to home lab, though that also has to deal with me not bringing homelabbing over from the US, which is something I definitely regret. I do plan on starting up again when my kids are a bit older as fun projects to do together and help them learn how computers/networking works. I don't want them to go into IT if they don't want to, but I figure that computers aren't going anywhere, and they'll be more than likely using them in their life for work so knowing the fundamentals will be helpful for them.
When I was a teenager I used to wonder why my Dad (who also worked in IT) didn't want to play games and stuff with me after work, but now I get it. Working with my computer for 8+ hours a day means I'd much rather read a book than sit in front of my computer after hours.
I've gotten very comfortable making and answering phone calls. It's to the point that my friends generally have me make phone calls for them, and I'm the emergency contact for most of my friends because I actually answer my phone. I know most people my age are anxious around phones, but I'm just so used to talking to people on the phone.