on having no ambition

[kirkcudbright]

Commenting on another post crystalized something for me.

I do not have, nor have I ever had, any career goals, just job goals. I want to work with smart and interesting people, on cool and useful stuff. But that describes the sort of company I want to work for, and the environment I want to work in. I don't have a particular technology area that I want to advance. Nor do I have a particular role I want to fill in a company. I'm not like "I want to be the Chief Robot Officer of the Robot company." No, I'll do scut work if it's useful, I'll work on stuff that bores the snot out of me if I don't have to pretend to care, and I'll re-implement the sockets library for the third or fourth time if there's a plausible business reason for it (DO-178B certification).

This makes the annual goal setting exercise seem especially pointless. I'll participate in product and project planning, and I'll work towards those goals, and in absence of that I'll work on whatever management thinks would be a good use of my time. But career goals, I do not grok them.

(And in all my working years, I can't think of a single time that I, my manager, HR, or anyone else has looked at last year's goals to see how I did against them.)

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i never have job goals, aside from "don't get fired" and "don't drown in politics" and similar negative ones.

i do have life goals, like "don't be homeless again" and "fight the war for medicine" and "make the world better for horses", and sometimes i get to combine them, and sometimes it even pays.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

My job goals are "work with people who respect me and like me" and "do a good job doing good things." They are actually more life/personal goals -- working at Raytheon or Lincoln Labs on government contracts wouldn't make me feel good about what I do, and working with people who don't appreciate me is not a good scene for me.

My company doesn't have yearly goals, but if they did, they'd be similar to lyo's - "Don't get fired". Although "help others at my company" is a big one....mostly "continue to do what I'm doing, and do it well."

I never really had career goals and I'm happy where I am (managing a small team, 3-4 people incl. myself, small enough so I still do a lot of technical work).

Mostly, if you're happy, your goal is to stay there. If you're not, your goal is to change that :)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

hm, i'm not sure i fight the war for medicine for my happiness. my sense of rectitude seems maybe more the thing?

[awfief.livejournal.com]

I would think that in a general sense, you are happier because you fight the war for medicine -- maybe not day-to-day, but it may fulfill things like "having a purpose" and "trying to change things so many folks can have an easier life" and such.....

*shrug* It makes me happy to help people with their database problems.

(...and when I have a righteous attitude, I feel happier than if I'm indignant *and* wrong....so on some level your sense of rectitude is part of the happiness, maybe? My point is that you get something that is ultimately positive out of it....feeding your ego, not just your wallet).

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i don't think it's my ego (i really wish someone *else* were doing this!) and it's totally not my wallet. but i do think that the sense of rectitude is a drive unto itself, and a positive one, so i completely agree with you there :)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

ps and having done a ton of tech support, i will say it *does* make me happy to help people with their dns/printing/email/nat/networking problems :)

[chocorua.livejournal.com]

I didn't do it with forms, meetings or other particularly visible rituals, but I had goals for everybody who reported to me.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i'll bite; what were mine?

[chocorua.livejournal.com]

1. I wanted your programming fundamentals to improve.
2. I wanted to engage your curiosity and energy toward the product's goals.

[gosling.livejournal.com]

There are certainly ambitious people I admire, but I consistently seem to increasingly feel ambition is overrated and often the key to misery. It sounds like you just want to live a happy life, where you enjoy being wheresoever you are while you are there. Sounds good to me. :-)

Once, long ago, I had a real goal of doing something lasting and useful in the world. Now it's more just about being useful, adding to the good in the world. (The lasting piece feels more like vanity these days, a bit too much about wanting to be important and remembered.) I think my sense of possibility has shrunk over the years, which is perhaps sad.

I never really had career goals though, and when I tried they led me into dead ends, often expensive ones in terms of time and money. (I do still maybe want to train to be a child therapist though. I think it really would be something I would do well that would benefit a lot of kids. I'm not doing this soon though, maybe in six or seven years I will start if it seems financially feasible and I still really want to do it.)

The one constant is I have always wanted to work with kids and been happiest when I was. I guess I could say my one ongoing career goal is to always be surrounded by kids, being a positive force in their lives.

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

Making the world a better place for kids is making the world a better place, period. And that is both lasting and useful. Happy, well-adjusted kids grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults, and isn't that a breath of fresh air. Besides, working with kids makes you happy, so just on that basis alone, you should surround yourself with kids.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

For some people, work defines who they are. For others, their outside-of-work life defines who they are. I bet you're not in the camp of "I live to work" but you're in the camp of "I work so I can make the money to do what I want to when I'm not working". Since you might as well like what you're working on, since that does take about 40 hours a week from your life, your "work goals" reflect taking jobs that are acceptible, as opposed to job that consume the majority of waking hours when you aren't "at work".

Imagine if someone walked up to you, and asked you "Who are you?" would you state your job title, or would you say "a father, owner of a horse, etc".

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

A while back, I was at a school picnic, making small talk with one of the other dads, and I asked him, "So, what do you do...for fun?" He looked startled for a second, as I derailed his elevator pitch, and then we spent the next half hour talking about cricket.

To a large degree, we let work define who we are. "What do you do?" is a much more socially acceptable and less invasive question than "Who are you?" It's like jobs are a matter of public record, and so we're all prepared with the elevator pitch.

It's not that I don't care about the work I do; even the bore-the-snot-out-of-me projects have had at least some aspects of utility and craftsmanship. I enjoy being useful. I'll work for the advancement of the product, the technology, the company, etc. But I don't see any of this as a personal stepping-stone, and I'll leave it at the door if possible.

[noeltheone.livejournal.com]

To a large degree, we let work define who we are. "What do you do?" is a much more socially acceptable and less invasive question than "Who are you?"

That is actually cultural. I think it would be more precise to say, "In the U.S. (and possibly not the entire U.S.), we let work define who we are." I have seen other cultures where that is not the case, and who get confused when asked "So, what do you do?"

[docorion.livejournal.com]

For me, work related goals are expansions of other, bigger goals. I work on campaigns because I want good people to be in office to do the things I think need doing, like, say, health care reform. (I note for the record that this may eventually lead to the end-game of that particular craziness, running for office myself). I moved to health policy because I could tell from my work as a physician that health care was run in possibly the most inefficient and error-prone way possible, and I wanted to change that. None of these goals, I note, involve making more money; they do involve having, and using, certain kinds of power to get things done. If that's ambition, I'll cop to it, but it's not the having of power that interests me as much as the using of power to get useful things done.

[gosling.livejournal.com]

That's the socially useful kind of ambition. :-)

[catness.livejournal.com]

I have one career goal: play music for a living, making enough that I'm not stressing every minute about it (and I've found that actually has a pretty specific dollar amount). I have never hit it. :/

When I do corporate work, I have no career goals, but I always have a vague sense of job goals, which are essentially "move to the place where I am most useful" and "kick ass at that". Being useful works for me. If I don't have to move to be most useful, that's okay, too, although staying "junior" forever when you're an able and necessary contributer is an unfortunate side-effect of being useful at grunt work. (Actually, maybe that works differently for guys. A lot of stuff like that does.)

Anyway, yeah... I feel the same as you on this... I don't need to be The Boss of anything, I'm as happy being a cog as I am a manager, and I'm good at seeing what needs to get done and getting it done, in lots of different roles. Annual reviews for me are particularly arduous because I don't care about them or about what HR thinks is measurable (and in my current job that's largely not applicable, even though we still have to go through the motions). I actually like the review process a lot better when it involves people who work for me. I care about their goals a lot more than my own.