There is the minor detail that it really helps not to hate each and every individual second of your working life in the process. A goal will only pull you along to a certain degree.
(Computer types know all the money is in the City. I did six months of it. I found the people I worked with and the people whose benefit I worked for to be excellent arguments for an unnecessarily bloody socialist revolution.)
Curious, why did it bother you that you disliked the people you worked with? Couldn’t you just be polite to them and take part in their jokes/socialgames/whatever? They’re paying you handsomely to be there, after all?
One of my brother’s co-workers at Goldman Sachs has actively tried to sabotage his work. (Goldman Sachs runs on a highly competitive “up or out” system; you either get promoted or fired, and most people don’t get promoted. If my brother lost his job, his coworker would be more likely to keep his.)
Sounds a heck of a lot easier than doing an equivalent amount of status grabbing within academic circles over the same time.
Money is a lot easier to game and status easier to buy.
There is the minor detail that it really helps not to hate each and every individual second of your working life in the process. A goal will only pull you along to a certain degree.
(Computer types know all the money is in the City. I did six months of it. I found the people I worked with and the people whose benefit I worked for to be excellent arguments for an unnecessarily bloody socialist revolution.)
For many people that is about half way between the Masters and PhD degrees. ;)
If only being in a university was a guarantee of an enjoyable working experience.
Curious, why did it bother you that you disliked the people you worked with? Couldn’t you just be polite to them and take part in their jokes/socialgames/whatever? They’re paying you handsomely to be there, after all?
Or was it a case of them being mean to you?
No, just loathsome. And the end product of what I did and finding the people I was doing it for loathsome.
I dunno, “loathsome” sounds a bit theoretical to me. Can you be specific?
One of my brother’s co-workers at Goldman Sachs has actively tried to sabotage his work. (Goldman Sachs runs on a highly competitive “up or out” system; you either get promoted or fired, and most people don’t get promoted. If my brother lost his job, his coworker would be more likely to keep his.)
I don’t understand: he tried to sabotage his cowerker’s work, or his own?
CronoDAS’s Brother’s Co-worker tried to sabotage CronoDAS’s Brother’s work.
“Hamlet, in love with the old man’s daughter, the old man thinks.”
Not without getting political. Fundamentally, I didn’t feel good about what I was doing. And I was just a Unix sysadmin.
This was just a job to live, not a job taken on in the furtherance of a larger goal.
Agreed. Average Prof is a nobody at 40, average financier is a millionaire. shrugs
The average financier is a millionaire at 40?! What job is this, exactly?
Thank you for this. This was a profound revelation for me.