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Changing Jobs for Job Satisfaction?
I-love-my-work, who is considering rejoining the IT world after a stint in business, asks: "A molecular biologist with a PhD at University of
Birmingham, in the UK, quits his lab position to become a plumber, since a plumber apparently earns twice what he currently makes (~US$42K).
How many of you would change careers if given a chance? What factors would influence the decision (money, hours, upper management, a chance to enjoy more of your life)?" What factors would make you seriously consider leaving your current career for another?
"...it's the old 'cut our way to profitability' trick!!!"
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Here.
If you mean the part about the integral, here it is really quickly.
An integral is a way of finding the area under a curve between two points. These two points are called limits. If you evaluate the integral with the limits accidentally reversed, your answer will be negative.
An integral is used in calculus and is basically the same thing as multiplication in algebra. Here's an example of the punch line using algebra. If you have a long piece of wood that is 10-cm tall and you need to cut a piece out of the middle, say from the 3-cm point to the 13-cm point, the area of that piece would be:
area = width * length = 10 * (13 - 3) = 100.
The cut points, 3 cm and 13 cm, are exactly the same as the limits in calculus. If you reverse them you get the negative answer:
10 * (3 - 13) = -100.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
I was in very much the same boat as you in my first job. Four pretty miserable years working on financial software at a nasty company. I was bored, drained of energy, frustrated, and I had completely lost all love of programming. I actually dreaded coding-when I did get a chance to code, instead of dealing with all kinds of political crap. I changed jobs a short while ago, and its made a world of difference. Here I'm working almost 100% of my time on code, the work is challenging as hell, the coworkers are sharp, and I don't have to deal with all kinds of political crap. On top of that, I'm actually coding in my spare time again-something I stopped doing over two years ago.
What I'm saying is, there are jobs out there which are much better in this industry. Some suck, some are much better. The good jobs are always rare, in any industry, but they *are* out there. Don't lose hope.
I am a graduate student; my student funding covers tuition and provides a stipend, and I can buy into the university health care. My stipend, from which health care fees are deducted. I live in Pittsburgh, which is a very affordable city, and I pay $400 a month for my apartment-- about half of my take-home, monthly. But in Pittsburgh, this affords me the top floor and finished attic of a house; I live alone, and it's a very spacious, with big rooms, lots of windows, a balcony, and I use the attic as an office instead of the second bedroom it was marketed as. Of course, I spent a couple of months looking for a deal-- not all apartments are so nice for the price, but I did find one. I have my car that I bought and paid off before I quit the cushy job. I don't buy new clothes often, and I can use busses free with my student ID. I love to cook so don't eat out much. I am lucky, but the luck partly is of my making-- I spent a long time researching my options before quitting my job, and spent a lot of time making sure I had an apartment that I could afford and would like to stay in; I can't afford to move right now, or in the near future, without a team of friends with trucks and some scrimping to deal with overlapping security deposits. I don't have cable, but I have a cell phone I use carefully to conserve daytime minutes, and have people over to my house instead of going out all the time. I can afford wine and cheese, roadtrips and concerts, and that amazing dress I saw in the window at Express, but I can't afford to do them every week. That's fine with me. I spend four months a year on beaches and in the jungle, and I'm happy with my 15 year old television and no landline. I have scraped together savings in case of things like car trouble, family emergencies, and those "necessary" spur-of-the-moment trips I take when I see that there's an airline having a sale with round-trip tickets for $75 to San Diego. I have some money in long-term savings that I add to slowly, and as I said, I don't plan to be living below the poverty line forever. I have no problem working "odd" teaching jobs and programming or analyzing data for extra money, I just don't like having a boss giving me deadlines to do them on a weekly basis. Many of my neighbors are also living on what I make, and while they aren't students and so don't have the university health care, they do have government health care to help them out; most of them, however, have things like cable and take fewer trips. It's all about the choices you make; it costs very little to live from day to day in most of the U.S.; the things that cost more are the luxuries-- living in big cities, amenities, the different shoes that match every outfit you own, detailing your car, getting the newest graphics card. (My vaio laptop, that I'm using with Pittsburgh's fantastic free wireless access is six years old. My desktop is built from used parts.) Yeah, it takes more work. It takes better planning. But I'm loving it.
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