{"id":146,"date":"2011-09-24T23:25:08","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T06:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/?p=146"},"modified":"2011-09-24T23:26:38","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T06:26:38","slug":"two-out-of-three-isnt-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/archives\/146","title":{"rendered":"Two Out of Three Isn&#8217;t Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When people (specifically, engineers) find out that I don&#8217;t plan on being a software engineer for the rest of my working life, that I don&#8217;t love engineering as much as they do, they usually tell me that I should find another job, one that I love doing. (Sometimes, they <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/archives\/24\">hurl nasty insults at me<\/a>, but usually people are more reasonable.) Sure, having a job doing something you love is ideal. But, the truth of the matter is, it&#8217;s not practical, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/archives\/131\">I&#8217;ve said before<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve come to realize that there are three major desirable qualities of a job:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Enjoyability<\/li>\n<li>Low stress<\/li>\n<li>High pay<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In reality, getting all three in a job is extremely difficult, if not impossible. You&#8217;d have to enjoy something that you can turn into a high-paying, but low-stress job, and also be lucky enough to land such a job. Getting two of the three, while not quite fulfilling the third quality, is, I think, pretty good.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I think I have two of the three: (fairly) low stress and (fairly) high pay, at least for the amount of work I do and the skill set that I have. And while I don&#8217;t enjoy my job enough to say that I love it, I also don&#8217;t hate my job. I&#8217;m pretty happy where I am, to have a job that pays me well to allow me the freedom to do things in my life I enjoy, which inevitably require money, but without giving me too much stress. It would be hard to find a job that paid better without stressing myself out or going through a lot more education.<\/p>\n<p>So it puzzles me when people seem to have an issue with this. I was at a happy hour with various people involved in tech startups recently, and when they discovered that I&#8217;m in my current job for reasons other than the love of the work, they seemed to feel the need to push me in a different direction. As if they were offended by the fact that I don&#8217;t enjoy building technology like they do. As if I were some sort of intruder in their society of people who do what they love for a living.<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s because people, in general, tend to take issue with others who make choices different from their own. The techies can&#8217;t understand why I&#8217;d stay in the industry when I don&#8217;t love it as much as they do. But how else am I supposed to pay the bills, while I figure out what it is I want to do for the rest of my life? To me, it doesn&#8217;t seem like such a bad place to be in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When people (specifically, engineers) find out that I don&#8217;t plan on being a software engineer for the rest of my working life, that I don&#8217;t love engineering as much as they do, they usually tell me that I should find &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/archives\/146\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7],"tags":[218],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-rants","tag-jobs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}