I did a few things early career, I’m mid career now, and not particularly successful, but I did learn a lot.
spend the $ price of a semester of college annually on professional development in the form of learning, bias towards things without a credential and with built in tests, use all vacation time to pursue this.
whenever you have a chance to interact with someone who knows something about a field you don’t, get book suggestions, and put together a bibliography. Who knows when or if you’ll get to it, but between scihub and libgen, you’ll at least be able to access it.
I chose work that would challenge me, sometimes getting thrown in the deep end helps, sometimes you drown. Good luck! If I could go back, in time, I’d probably have picked different subjects, and gone with ‘full years tuition’ per year rather than semester.
I understand your point, however on the other hand isn’t this unhealthy? It’s actually an interesting question; ‘workaholism’ is usually looked down upon, and this could be classified similarly, but what about situations when the persons really enjoys the ‘work’? But then, don’t alcoholics also enjoy drinking?
That’s wildly off-topic, though. Thanks for your viewpoint, I think in general it’s important to realise that it’s good to invest both time and money in learning, even outside of school and work.
I found it fun, in some cases it wasn’t ‘recharging’, in others it was. All in all, ‘take a vacation and learn something new that’s only vaguely related to my day to day routine’ was pretty great.
I still take vacations like this, and have now reached a point where I am running out of ideas for them
There are people who like to spend extra time at work, in order to avoid their families. This would presumably not be your case.
Doing voluntary overtime is frowned upon by colleagues, because you are defecting in a Prisonner’s Dilemma. By sacrificing your free time to Moloch you may make a better impression than they, but if everyone followed your example, you would all be worse off (except for your boss, who would get a lot of extra work for free). Also, some colleagues would not be able to follow your example, e.g. because they need to take care of their families. The company would be tempted to fire them, and replace them by more people like you. (Only to fire them when they get older, and replace them by another fresh wave.) Please, do not defect against the social norm of 40-hour work-week! -- This again would not apply to you, if you do the extra work outside your job.
Then, there is also a question of alternative things you could have been doing in your free time.
I did a few things early career, I’m mid career now, and not particularly successful, but I did learn a lot.
spend the $ price of a semester of college annually on professional development in the form of learning, bias towards things without a credential and with built in tests, use all vacation time to pursue this.
whenever you have a chance to interact with someone who knows something about a field you don’t, get book suggestions, and put together a bibliography. Who knows when or if you’ll get to it, but between scihub and libgen, you’ll at least be able to access it.
I chose work that would challenge me, sometimes getting thrown in the deep end helps, sometimes you drown. Good luck! If I could go back, in time, I’d probably have picked different subjects, and gone with ‘full years tuition’ per year rather than semester.
I understand your point, however on the other hand isn’t this unhealthy? It’s actually an interesting question; ‘workaholism’ is usually looked down upon, and this could be classified similarly, but what about situations when the persons really enjoys the ‘work’? But then, don’t alcoholics also enjoy drinking?
That’s wildly off-topic, though. Thanks for your viewpoint, I think in general it’s important to realise that it’s good to invest both time and money in learning, even outside of school and work.
I found it fun, in some cases it wasn’t ‘recharging’, in others it was. All in all, ‘take a vacation and learn something new that’s only vaguely related to my day to day routine’ was pretty great.
I still take vacations like this, and have now reached a point where I am running out of ideas for them
There are people who like to spend extra time at work, in order to avoid their families. This would presumably not be your case.
Doing voluntary overtime is frowned upon by colleagues, because you are defecting in a Prisonner’s Dilemma. By sacrificing your free time to Moloch you may make a better impression than they, but if everyone followed your example, you would all be worse off (except for your boss, who would get a lot of extra work for free). Also, some colleagues would not be able to follow your example, e.g. because they need to take care of their families. The company would be tempted to fire them, and replace them by more people like you. (Only to fire them when they get older, and replace them by another fresh wave.) Please, do not defect against the social norm of 40-hour work-week! -- This again would not apply to you, if you do the extra work outside your job.
Then, there is also a question of alternative things you could have been doing in your free time.