I am deeply impressed; after two decades of career experience, what you wrote seems to me both correct and very important.
The obvious missing part is money; I know people who have meaningful and enjoyable jobs, but can only afford them because their partner pays most of the bills. I am not sure about the exact relationship between “enjoyable” and “well paid”; on one hand, it would make sense to be a tradeoff, on the other hand, there are many jobs that suck and pay little. Still, we should pay attention to make the tradeoff consciously (taking a better paid job that sucks but has a perspective of early retirement; or taking a worse paid but enjoyable job because those eight hours a workday actually contribute a lot to the total quality of life) rather than by mistake taking a job that pays less, has an attractive topic, but the content mostly sucks (the video game industry seems to be a popular example).
I wonder whether there is a job out there that would be enjoyable for me and is actually paid well, but I will never figure it out, either because I have never heard about it (or never considered it seriously), or because I am deeply mistaken about its content. This sounds horrifying, and not completely unlikely. I wonder if there are some “job content advisors” that could help me with this.
One complication is that the job content can change significantly over years, both within the company, and within the entire industry. My experience is with software development. In the same company, at nominally the same position, my job content has in few years changed from “develops new features in one project, together with other experienced developers, learns new stuff” (enjoyable) to “does maintenance and plumbing in multiple projects, working alone but reporting to multiple managers, attends lots of meetings” (not enjoyable). Also—not sure whether this is true about the industry in general, or just my bubble, -- the job content in general seems to be moving away from “works on a well-defined project, mostly undisturbed” (enjoyable) towards “does whatever managers decide is the highest priority today, with tight deadlines but lots of interruptions” (not enjoyable). So the career that felt like the right choice 20 years ago, does not feel so now.
I am deeply impressed; after two decades of career experience, what you wrote seems to me both correct and very important.
The obvious missing part is money; I know people who have meaningful and enjoyable jobs, but can only afford them because their partner pays most of the bills. I am not sure about the exact relationship between “enjoyable” and “well paid”; on one hand, it would make sense to be a tradeoff, on the other hand, there are many jobs that suck and pay little. Still, we should pay attention to make the tradeoff consciously (taking a better paid job that sucks but has a perspective of early retirement; or taking a worse paid but enjoyable job because those eight hours a workday actually contribute a lot to the total quality of life) rather than by mistake taking a job that pays less, has an attractive topic, but the content mostly sucks (the video game industry seems to be a popular example).
I wonder whether there is a job out there that would be enjoyable for me and is actually paid well, but I will never figure it out, either because I have never heard about it (or never considered it seriously), or because I am deeply mistaken about its content. This sounds horrifying, and not completely unlikely. I wonder if there are some “job content advisors” that could help me with this.
One complication is that the job content can change significantly over years, both within the company, and within the entire industry. My experience is with software development. In the same company, at nominally the same position, my job content has in few years changed from “develops new features in one project, together with other experienced developers, learns new stuff” (enjoyable) to “does maintenance and plumbing in multiple projects, working alone but reporting to multiple managers, attends lots of meetings” (not enjoyable). Also—not sure whether this is true about the industry in general, or just my bubble, -- the job content in general seems to be moving away from “works on a well-defined project, mostly undisturbed” (enjoyable) towards “does whatever managers decide is the highest priority today, with tight deadlines but lots of interruptions” (not enjoyable). So the career that felt like the right choice 20 years ago, does not feel so now.