Career or just a job?
Talking to an old friend after almost 4-5 years a couple days ago, while explaining him about the thought process for college and how I look at the job market, career, learning, how to start liking the idea of learning and just life in general.
While trying to put my thoughts in order and form sentences out of them to tell my friend, One of the biggest realisations that made me gasp, was not something that I did not know before and something mind boggling. It was as simple as thinking about my career not in the short-term but as a long ass marathon that I have to run for a long long time, possibly and hopefully 50 years from now as well, I mean that's the dream right?
Being a domain expert at the age of some 70, with 50 years of experience is something that is so weird, almost feels perverse salivating over that place in life.
Hopes and dreams aside, this approach seems more practical and might I say more pragmatic cause relives the need to get things quick and move past topics as quickly as possible, looking for shortcuts, and the whole idea of getting X job in some multiple of 3 number of months time, is firstly too much pressure and secondly at least for a person with my learning speed and capacity, it's too much of information to rush through in such an small and definitive time period, more importantly it's about the actual understanding that needs to be gained to take up a JOB.
I feel the word job has lost quite a lot of it's weight, it's supposed to mean much much more than something that pays for your livelihood and lifestyle. I'm still trying to find an adept meaning to the word cause even the textbook definition from my professional communication course "adding value to the organisation" does not seem all encompassing. it's something has to be something more.
In an ideal world, my ideal job would lie right in the intersection of mechanical engineering and software engineering, right in the middle of that venn diagram.
Computer Science engineering is not just about web development/saas/the tech giants, but it's about understanding how these machines work, talking to them and leveraging them in our said job to be better at it, but aspiring to be just better is an injustice to these machines, using it to reach unexplored domains would be a more apt use of these machines is what I feel right now, but hey, maybe I am wrong.