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I have things to add to it, but nothing to cut into it, so read the
following as a corollary.
I and several other members of my generation (early 1970s births) are
early adopters of this viewpoint, in part because of our experiences in
the startups and corporate load when we graduated from college in the
early 1990s.
I think in the hands of competent people, it goes the other way around:
we like to work on skills, but we do not like to sit at jobs for 40
hours a week waiting on the incompetence of management, the slowness of
others, or other "grind" processes. We see it as soul-killing.
There will be fools who see any job as like any other, but I think they
will find that gets boring after a while. Specialization may be bad
news, but having skills sure is not.
In this way, I think we're like some of the members of this list, both
the freelancers and the consummate serial monogamous job professionals.
We have our own agenda, and that starts with doing the job right, and
secondarily comes all the Bravo Sierra of corporate life. We want to
get in, do a good job, avoid the unnecessary window-dressing, and then
go get on with life.
At least for me, this seems to fit. My first paid gig was at age 15,
and I've been doing it ever since in different forms. Technical
writing, and the management of technical projects to make smoother, so
we can all get done with the job and go home early.
I had always thought I would be more attracted to sticking with a job
for the long-term, but I've found that good situations like that are
rare. I'm not against it. I end up being more of a cowboy because
everytime I get a department working smoothly, or find a place in a
smoothly running department, they hire some idiot with an MBA who comes
in with some "progressive changes" that amount to more grind and less
effective documentation.
I'm in this profession to write effective documentation, because I
believe it's like well-written software: it makes lives better.
I'm considering getting an MBA so I can start fixing departments for
the long term, and busting heads when some idiot walks in the door with
a trend that will make everyone miserable.
> In other words, hardly anybody will be willing to work 40-hour weeks
> at
> the same job, for years at a time, becoming intimately familiar with
> a
> particular industry and company and all the peripheral stuff that we
> boomers do almost unconsciously while devoting our faculties to the
> "real" part of the job.
> In other words, jobs will need to become plug'n'play because the
> worker
> who is doing a job today wasn't here yesterday, and might not be here
> tomorrow.
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