I may have said it before here but even if I have it bears repeating: in some ways I am very, very lucky when it comes to my work life.
I know what my dream job would be.
I would love to be able to stay at home, make about $40,000 a year, and do nothing but slice up comps (front end designs created in Photoshop or some other program and presented to a client), and create CSS and XHTML for templates for web sites. I’d need about another five to seven thousand dollars a year to come into the office to do the same thing (it depends on the dress code and the holidays and the distance traveled; I get to show up in jeans and tennis shoes, $3,000 to $5,000; I have to dress like a grown up, I want $7,000).
Despite this self knowledge said job is, sadly not available. But thinking about this has led me to some conclusions about my work life, and one of them is that the Peter Principle is incomplete.
Posited by Dr. Laurence J. Peter in 1969, The Peter Principle states that “successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not competent.”
Such promotion is often a result of an employee showing superb skill at the job in which she is in and, thereby, showing “potential” for rising to the challenge of a position at a level above in the organization’s hierarchy. Often the incompetence shown by thusly promoted workers isn’t because the workers are actually incapable but is merely a result of them being asked to do things that call on abilities outside the ones they used to excel in their previous positions.
The Principle goes on to discuss how successful companies don’t promote to higher levels, ones that require different skill sets, until a worker has shown that she already has the additional skills needed for the higher level job. What the Principle fails to discuss, or at least what is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article nor held in “common knowledge” among business types, is worker satisfaction.
I was promoted in January to a job that I’m totally and utterly capable of doing, and doing quite well. With the exception of a few minor mistakes, which are a result of working with a human being instead of with a machine, my performance in my job as been pretty good. Some things are falling by the wayside because I have too much work; some things are falling by the wayside because there aren’t enough resources in my organization to accomplish them.
But even though I’m doing my job pretty well, I’m totally and utterly miserable. I leave work angry or sick to my stomach every single day. I can’t stand the sight of some of my coworkers because I know that the only time they’ll speak to me is when they want me to do something. And even though I have a huge number of responsibilities, with some of my work goals attainable only if I have blocks of uninterrupted time in which to do my work, I’m constantly interrupted (5 times in 20 minutes on Friday; that was a record).
Given all that, and given the realization I’ve come to about what I’d prefer to be doing, I think I’m going to quit and take a little piece of my retirement early.
I’ve got enough in the bank to take a month or two off before I start to worry about money. There are a couple of jobs out there that are right in line with the kind of thing I want to be doing with my skill set.
Not exactly conventional, but who said waiting until we were old to retire and “enjoy life” was the smartest path? After all, there’s no guarantee we will get old enough to retire, is there?
How’re those for thoughts that come unbidden and slam you awake at 3am?