do you like your job or at least where your career is headed?

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: Engineer
Currently...no.

Heh....I've worked 86 hours in the last 7 days (with ZERO pay other than 40 hours) and my boss threatened to fire me because I left early (was pissed off because a change occured on the machinery that we are building on Jan. 30th and was just notified today - one day before it's due - and I said fuck it).

Fuck em.

 

[Modelworks]

Love my job , wouldn't do anything else.

I quit being an EE to work in CG VFX, less pay but well worth the change.
Sometimes its all about where you are happier.

 

[duragezic]

I like my job and my career. Other than I hate waking up early, I have realized for the time I've worked so far (9 months) that I absolutely do not mind coming into work. You always hear "oh man, I don't want to work today...!" but I do not feel that way at all. I stay late a good amount nearly every day as well. I am in a software engineer in embedded systems.

I did apply to another position in the company this week that I believe will be better for my career.

 

[jjzelinski]

From a rant in another thread about an enlisted careers in the AF:

The disparity between pay structures of enlisted and commissioned folks is enormous. An O-3 makes more than a CMSgt and only 1% are authorized, by law, to ascend to that rank. an O-1 makes more than a MSgt whose average time in service is ~14 years. This disparity in pay is still predicated on a 4 year college degree, but more precisely, when it's obtained. Plenty of enlisted folks have Bachelor's degrees or higher, however they attained them once they had already enlisted. The good news is that if you've completely busted your ass to earn that eighth stripe, you might be allowed to fetch a cup of coffee for some Major at some point in your 16 hour day.

The biggest issue with military pay is the total absence of monetary incentive. No matter how hard you work and no matter the results of your efforts, you will remain pigeon-holed on a very, very narrow path as your career progresses.

In the case of the Air Force, there is quite literally one route for career progression; memorize a bunch of arbitrary air force/military trivia and do well on your WAPS (promotion) test. Since the performance rating system is utterly broken, mediocrity is rewarded identically to outstanding performance which neuters this filtration element of the promotion system. As far as incentive goes, even if you do make rank you can expect ~$150/mo increase in pay from one rank to the next.

The moral of this story is "if you're interested in a career that entails placing yourself at great bodily risk, separating yourself from your family for at least 6-12 months out of every 20, being treated as culturally inferior to those that finished their college degrees a year or two earlier than you did while earning half as much as them, having no opportunity to meritoriously set yourself apart from your peers in way that can actually benefit you, being subject to a pervasive style of management that entirely consists of do 'everything yesterday with a fraction of the resources these activities have been performed with a decade ago or else' that suits the lowest common denominator of human aptitude especially well, quite literally being treated as a child for the first 3-4 years of your career (after all, you lack that critical developmental milestone of college where you learned to hold your liquor in class), all with a growing sense of spinning your wheels throughout the entirety of your squandered career, then it sounds like the enlisted career path is right up your alley."

 

[Krynj]

If I'm taking tech support calls for Westinghouse in..even 2 years, I want somebody to kill me.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

fuck no.

 

[kt]

Originally posted by: rh71

Originally posted by: BoberFett

Originally posted by: rh71
why anyone would want to be management at any level or capacity (even PMs) is beyond me.

Some people enjoy working on the big picture more than they do grinding away at the details. I enjoy software development or network administration (I've done both) in small doses but at this point in life I'm far more interested in using my past experience to turn an IT department into an important part of a profitable company than I am writing SQL queries all day. I actually find a lot of joy in exposing non-techies in other departments to IT in ways they didn't know existed, in order to make their lives easier and/or their department more profitable.

That's all well and good (really it is), but you also have to manage people who don't do in a timely manner what you request of them (even simple clerical stuff) and essentially you're hounding them to complete tasks like a babysitter. What percentage of their time is used to come up with big ideas [which aren't always theirs anyway] and what percentage is used to "oversee" that the real guys who do the work get it done? Essentially if you have great workers then the typical manager is pretty unnecessary... except for the clerical or liason roles they play.

I suppose if there were more prestige and pay [in comparison] for the guy in the trenches then management wouldn't look so hot anymore. The role is a necessity because there are fvckups, but I don't believe there's much of a skillset required for it. Well, is stress-management a required course? Generally speaking - do you honestly want to deal with that or do you just suck it up and take the money/status?

I am actually in this very same position, but I find it more difficult dealing with other management than my direct reports. The worst is my direct manager who seems to have nothing else better to do but have me provide weekly status reports. After a while, I just send her the same one but I mix it up a bit every week. You're right about one thing though, you do spend more time dealing with people than doing the actual work.