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Three Things I Want From My Job

I’ve been off for a while and I apologize for that. The beginning of the year has been crazy and I am just now getting my feet back under me. The short version is I recently changed jobs and have started working for UpSearch(@UpSearchSQL) as a SQL Server Consultant. This is an exciting change for me, full of new challenges and opportunities.

Blah blah blah blah, right?

Without making light of the change, I know you all hear this every time someone starts a new gig. This post is not about that, but about some reflections I had about why I changed jobs, what satisfies me at work, and the reasons we do this stuff in the first place. I want to share these thoughts with you to hopefully help you broaden your perspective on why you are at your job and what it is that keeps you going back (besides the obvious paycheck).

Three Things

When it comes to our jobs, whether we’re interviewing for something new or looking back on our current position, we should have a list of what keeps us happy. After all, we measure and track statistics around our databases and compare them to a baseline. It should be no different for our careers. This list can be as detailed or broad as suits you, but you should have something. My list is actually pretty simple, consisting of three questions that I ask myself:

  • Am I compensated fairly?
  • Am I working on cool s#!t?
  • Am I respected?

These questions do not have simple answers, but they do have answers. As we go over each question, hopefully you start to see how they might apply to you.

Compensation

This probably seems the simplest. After all, we all get paid and we want to make sure our salary is competitive to the market, right? This definitely is something we should be thinking about and reviewing. It also takes a bit of self honesty about our capabilities and how they match to what is being paid for. Are we senior or mid-level talent? How much do we drive value for our employer? Salary is very much a two way street.  If we want to be paid fairly, we need to demonstrate our worth.

Of course, we also need to keep in mind that compensation is far more than just salary. I’ve worked jobs where I got paid pretty well, but had to fight to go to conferences like the PASS Summit. Some jobs had liberal vacation policies while others offered the minimum. When you consider your compensation, you have to ask yourself what keeps you happy from a larger perspective.

Coolness Factor

I’m the kind of guy that needs to be challenged. It is why I spend time blogging and presenting, as well as playing with different kinds of technology. This is how my work fulfills me. I could simply punch the clock, work from 8 to 5, and collect my check, but this wears thin pretty quickly. I need more in a job than just going through tasks by rote so I can go home at the end of the day.

This is why it is important that I get interesting work. I need problems to solve and challenges to overcome.  To be clear, I understand that I will have to do the tedious stuff as part of any job. Work like this needs to be balanced out, though. Heck, sometimes the challenge of managing the tedious stuff in a more efficient manner is engaging in and of itself. The key is that I want my job to help me grow, not allow me to tread water. Job satisfaction is measured on this growth.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This last item is the linchpin. For the longest time, I was happy with the first two items on this list. Then one day, I sat up and realized that I was getting worn down by my job. I couldn’t quite place my finger on why, because I was getting what I wanted out of compensation and the work was definitely cool and challenging. The problem was I was struggling with going into work every day and my motivation was rapidly draining.

The key, I realized, was a matter of respect. Whether it is peers, team members, or management, I need the people I work with to respect my time and my knowledge. This may seem a little arrogant, but it is important to recognize your own value. Companies hire me to be a database expert, and an expensive one when you boil it down. This means my time and opinion carry a certain amount of cost, and when that cost is being wasted because others in the company do not recognize that value, it becomes wearing.

Without trying to sound too negative, we need to understand our professional value. As with the compensation question, it takes a lot of self honesty to value ourselves appropriately. It is important to recognize that within ourselves. This is because it is an important factor for job satisfaction, because not only should we recognize that value in ourselves, we need others to realize it and respect it.

Can I get a little satisfaction over here?

Job satisfaction, while ultimately a binary yes or no answer, has a lot of degrees of measurement. After all, I can think of jobs I’ve had where the pay was fantastic but the environment sucked. Or where the entire team thought I was a rock star, but I was not working on interesting or engaging work. When I felt my job satisfaction going down, I could always track it back to one of these three items.

What is important here is that by understanding what satisfies you at a job, it gives you a tangible item to resolve. It might simply be a matter of going to your boss and telling him what the problem is. This gives you something tangible to work on with your employer and is fair to them, because chances are they don’t want to lose you and will work with you. It also may mean you need to find another job that fills that gap. In this case, when you sit down in an interview, you can have a conversation with the person across the table about what fulfills you.

Whatever your reasons are, it is important that you know why you get up in the morning (or other time) and go to work. Your reasons are probably different than mine, as these tend to be pretty personal. I hope that by giving you some insight into what job satisfaction means to me, it can help you build your own list of questions. Measure your job satisfaction, know what makes you happy, and then figure out how to get it.

2 Comments

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