While I'm sure that the best employees make their entire lives about work skills, I just can't imagine that being a fulfilling life personally. If i have to spend my nights reading books about work, outside of work, then I don't want to be the best. I have other hobbies I'm more interested in than, "becoming a better employee".
Now, I do feel different about academia though. I could understand doing fundamental research and dedicating most of your living hours to those problems. But i guess I just feel like the research mission is infinitely more valuable than the corporate one. I say this having never had the chance to really contribute anything meaningful to any company I've worked for, and never having worked for a company who's mission felt personally fulfilling to me.
I'm glad that there are people who work their butts off for work in important places but I just can't imagine doing that myself and not just disintegrating with regret when I turned 65.
> I just can't imagine that being a fulfilling life personally. If i have to spend my nights reading books about work, outside of work, then I don't want to be the best. I have other hobbies I'm more interested in than, "becoming a better employee".
I'm the guy who reads books about my career (not about my work) outside of work (in my free-time) and during working hours as well. I love my career (computer science) and I love reading well-known tech/cs books. I don't do it to be the "best employee". I couldn't care less about what I do at work (I, like 99% of the people here, work for a totally useless tech company that nobody would care about if it disappeared tomorrow). What I do at work is stupid distributed systems in Go + Kafka + postgres + k8s (totally uninteresting stuff, but pays very well though). I genuinely enjoy readings books from Stevens, Kerrisk, Kleppmann, etc., just like I enjoy reading sci-fi/drama/etc. novels. I usually end up learning stuff that's actually useful at work, and once in a while I apply such knowledge at work, but I do it only for the raises and promotions.
There are people out there who doesn't give a fuck about tech companies, but care deeply about tech.
Now, I do feel different about academia though. I could understand doing fundamental research and dedicating most of your living hours to those problems. But i guess I just feel like the research mission is infinitely more valuable than the corporate one. I say this having never had the chance to really contribute anything meaningful to any company I've worked for, and never having worked for a company who's mission felt personally fulfilling to me.
I'm glad that there are people who work their butts off for work in important places but I just can't imagine doing that myself and not just disintegrating with regret when I turned 65.