Yeah but at the same time making those kind of drastic and very helpful changes is how you catapult yourself ahead in a career. Most people just want to clock in and clock out though so they don't do this and are shocked that they spend year after year getting a measly 3% raise.
Fortune favors the bold.
This is becoming so godamn obvious to me. Outside of the survey department, pretty much everyone at work has a bachelors or masters (including the actual licensed surveyors). I'm trying to figure out how to take all of the tricks, tools and workflows that I've come up with and make them available for other people to use/do themselves. It's fucking impossible to find anyone that wants to take some of this and run with it because almost everyone wants to be spoon-fed the entire process and just follow a step by step. They're not interested in actually learning or figuring anything out.
We have a technology advancement & strategic planning group forming that my boss is in charge of and I've shot down half of the people he's proposed to bring in because they have zero interest in any of this stuff on a personal level.
Type of people I've recommended - A CAD drafter that watches youtube videos every night about CAD tips and tricks and also spends his weekends making "CAD Art" and selling it at art shows. A landscape architect that's obsessed with learning Unity so he "....can step up my conceptual rendering and presentation game". A geologist that (frequently) tricks his wife into going on geocaching hikes at project sites for opportunities that we're pursuing so that he can do some quick and dirty terrestrial photogrammetry with his iPhone while they're out there. An industrial hygienist that's trying to learn how to create an IOT methane sensor with a raspberry pi and $20 worth of parts so he can test it out on a fucking landfill project we have coming up that he's excited about.
I feel like these types of people are so rare nowadays, but maybe it's always been like that. It seems like everyone else is just going through the motions on autopilot. I think they all care about doing "good work", but there's a real attitude of just finding a groove and settling down into it. And ESPECIALLY the younger generation has absolutely fucking zero interest in spending any of their personal/off-duty learning for personal and professional growth. If they're not on the clock and being spoon-fed instructions, fuck learning about anything work-related I guess.
The main one that bugs me was getting our Industrial Hygiene group going with a Matterport setup I bought myself ($300 camera, $100 tripod, $10/mo subscription). Easiest piece of technology I've ever used in my life and it took me about 2 hours to figure out how to use the whole thing. Very thorough support documentation. Half of them call me every time they go out with stuff that can be solved in a 10 second google search.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that I spent a lot of my adult life working low-skill jobs with a bunch of other poor boys (zipline guide, lumber mill, shipping facility, etc). I had an epiphany one night at the shipping facility while I was sweeping the warehouse at the end of the day, a few days after getting an unsolicited ~30% raise. "When you work with an abundance of retards, it takes a minimal amount of effort to look like a rockstar. Minimal effort like sweeping the floor after work every day".
I thought that was something unique to the type of jobs I was working. Now, I just think I was mistaken in thinking it's because my coworkers were stupid (some were). It's more like willful ignorance/indifference and a lack of ambition or drive. Most of my coworkers now are very bright people, but a lot of them just don't have any further ambitions.
Sorry, that turned into a ranting ramble.
I wish I could bump thess 10 more times. I don't think we have many young people here anymore, but if you are - take this shit ^^^^ to heart.
I went through a divorce and had a lot of life changes in a very small amount of time, and for all intents and purposes was starting my life over - including my career. I took a low level entry position just to get some solid ground under my feet from which to relaunch myself. I had zero intention of it being a long term thing. I grew to hate the position in no time, so I used what little free time I had at work to assist in another department. And I did everything I could to learn as much as possible and make myself as knowledgeable and capable as possible in that department, to the point I was doing better work than people who actually worked in that department. I did this so I could get out of my shit position - and it worked.
Once I was full time in this new department, I really dug in. This new department had essentially one job - continually fix a recurring, never ending problem. No one seemed particularly interested in WHY we had this problem or what was causing it. They thought they knew, and this surface-level explanation was good enough, whatever, just do the work in front of you. But I need to know why everything works the way it does. So I dug into the root cause of our issue and figured it out. Not a one-time fix where you just flip a switch, but I knew the cause. Problem #1. Not only that, I bumped into a completely different but connected issue that while people knew about it, had no concept of how big the problem was. Problem #2. On a 1 - 10 scale, everyone assumed it was a level 1 issue, but the reality is it was a level 12 issue. But the company was growing so fast, it hadn't yet outpaced growth to scream how bad it was. But I could see it coming down the road.
Long story short, I was put in charge of mitigating #1 to the extent possible, while I also spent time trying to mitigate problem #2 as best I could. Like standing in front of a dam trying to plug holes with your fingers, but I was learning a ton at the same time. Two years later problem #2 eventually burst the dam and a new department was created to help mitigate it. They offered the department to me (since no one else really understood the problem) and let me (mostly) handpick my own team.
Now after having run that team for 2 years and setting up my successor, I've moved up into another department. I now make over 3x what I started at with an unbelievable benefits package.
I'm not saying this to be like "look at how awesome I am!" but rather to show you how mediocre most people are. Not in their intelligence per se, but in their ambition. I wanted to understand the hows and whys of things to make it easier to do my job, and be a better problem solver, and it paid off in spades. I have co-workers who do things by rote with zero thinking, because "that's the way it's done" even to the point they will do blatantly stupid shit "because that's the way it's done". They have zero drive to question anything they do or gain any more understanding than is needed to follow the most basic steps to do their job. It's actually maddening that some of these folks retain their jobs, but that's a whole other issue.
In hindsight I wish I could go back to my younger self who just did whatever job was in front of him so he could go home and play EQ, and say "give a fuck and be even a little ambitious". Who knows where I'd be if I had.
Anyway, that's enough dear diary for today.
