8
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?
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.
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.