Getting value out of work

I had a day scheduled to do nothing but data analysis, but it seems that my work went faster than anticipated and I finished about 4 hours early... leaving me the entire afternoon to myself. I could, of course notify my boss that I am done, but 1) he isn't around right now and 2) I have some internship reports that I need to work on.

So what happens when the boss isn't around? People fall asleep. 2~3 people in the group have already fallen asleep for the last 20 minutes. Kind of funny, but not really.

Actually, when I get back to the office after lunch, I see atleast 3-5 people either sleeping on their desk or playing the most popular PC game in the world "solitare". Really, if you find yourself playing solitare or sleeping at your place of work then I have the feeling that you don't really enjoy your work.

For a place like Japan, where most people today intend on working at the company they are at for life; I find this to be exceptionally freightening-- why would you want to be stuck to a job that you might not find particularly interesting for 40 years!? I personally could not fathom the thought. Actually, I should rephrase that argument with a little more detail.

You see, the place where I work, does research on materials for integrated circuit packaging. The experiments they run involve making samples, heating them up and taking data on how these samples expand or how their stiffness changes with temperature. After getting the data, people like me spend days hacking at Excel calculating and graphing data (Excel graphing is a real pain in the rear, because I haven't found a nice way of making batches of graphs all at once). It's fine to do this work for a little while but to do it for a few months or so and I'm going to have to take a hard look at it and ask myself, "what am I getting out of it?" And seriously, this is a question that you should *always* be asking yourself when you work... and I am not talking about the money (and in my case, I am getting nearly none).

What I realized, that to the success to anyone's personal carrer, is that you have to be getting something valuable out of your job. If not money then what else is there? Plenty.

It might not necessairly be obvious to you at first, but in general, we all extract something of tangible or intangible value when we do something whether if its playing a computer game for fun, exercising for fitness, helping that little old lady across the street because its nice, et cetra. Now when it comes to work, if you're working just for the (average) money and getting by on it, you're not getting any value; you're on life support--you are dead in the water if or when that job gets cut.

What do I mean by that? Suppose that you're an engineer or a person with a science degree working in a lab somewhere as a technician. It's a job that you have to do repetitive work but it need a little bit of special knowledge you picked up along the way through University. Unfortunately the work is kind of boring because you're doing the same thing over and over again, but it gets the bills paid. You might not realize it, but you are already in deep trouble and it's time to get out.

The problem working in jobs where you do not get prehipreal personal benetfits in term of skills, connections, resources or in general "anything that you can use" is that when you get cut, you're really left with nothing. If you leave your job and then realized that you left your job without anything worth noting, then you've really got nothing to say at your next interview for your next job or perhaps, promotion. When you get into a situtaion like that, you're going to be thinking like a union worker that needs job stability. Personally, I don't like relying on unions to keep me treated fairly-- if you got a skill that people need, then you will be able to find someone that will. Relyance comes from yourself in this case.

How do you get value out of work? It's a matter for you to find it. It could be finding efficient ways of getting work done, whether it be writing programs to do things or clever ways of speeding things up. Maybe you'll learn a few things along the way, maybe the company you'll work for will find value in what you do and get other people to do what you do. Maybe they won't but you can use the time you save to find other things to do.

There are lots of possibilities... and when you decide to go into a new field or job, you'll be a bag of ideas that someone will want to get their hands on. Now that's value.