The Last Semester
It's the final semester of college. You're melancholic, the era's coming to an end. You're gonna miss these fuckers and the awful diet. Everyone is trying to squeeze in as much fun as possible. It's like breakup sex: there's almost a desperation out of fear that it may never happen again. You've got a vague vision for what the future holds. The optimist that you are, you've got yourself excited about the future. You'll have a couple of 4k monitors. Earphones plugged in, energized, one keystroke at a time, you'll make art. You'll exchange vim configs with your teammates. You'll earn heaps about engineering from all the super smart people around you. You'll have whimsical conversations with Sneha near the coffee machine. Yes, Sneha, the dorky girl with a sharp wit, who shares some of your interests but gracefully challenges you on your dumber inclinations (you'll defend yourself 'cause you like the vibe). And when your social battery runs out - work from home baby. Oh and the side projects - godalmighty - all the things you could take up with the newfound capital, sky's the limit, the possibilities are endless (definitely gonna buy an arduino and a couple of raspi's). Letsfuckinggoooo.
FUCK NO.
That's not what happened to me (mostly). I entered the real world. There was no Sneha. Heck, I didn't even find my vim homies. This is my attempt at aggregating my thoughts on the differences between college and work, while I can still recollect. By nature, this is subjective, and I see wildly varying trajectories among my friends.
Incentive
In college, any efforts made were purely for my own benefit and of my own will; heck, I paid to do this stuff. The more work I did, the better I felt - everything added to my skills. It's easy to think it'd be the same with work, but it absolutely is not for me. Yes, a lot of the times, more work would mean upskilling, but I don't work for myself, and someone else tells me what to do. And the saying rings true, 'the more work I do, the more work I get'. This line doesn't make the real issue clear though - expectations. If I push myself once to deliver something outrageous on time, not only am I not rewarded for it, but it is expected of me the next time (no, higher quality work will not lead to rewards by itself). If the management hopes for extraordinary efforts, that would be one thing, but it's more like demand. The guy beside me that does 5x what I do gets paid the same as me (yes, we've gone through a hike cycle). I don't feel like the trade is being made in good faith - work for pay - I don't really get anything in return for the extra efforts. I have the shittier end of the deal here; I work, I lose; I don't, I lose - half my waking hours are spent at work, and I like doing stuff. This whole line of reasoning only applies when the nature of work is good.
Goals
Metrics are better defined in college. At the very least, you want your grades to be decent. After college, everything is a little bit hazy. What should your baseline metric be? As far as I can tell, there are none. You must evaluate yourself constantly, and this takes a lot of conscious effort, especially when your grades are bad. You run the risk of going astray. It's always nice to have some guardrails in place.
Growth
There's comfort in the idea that you've got potential. Yes, right now you might not be doing anything worthwhile, but who cares? Soon you'll solve cancer or capture carbon. In college, you're always a ball of potential, but there's a point of inflection, where it's clear you're at the point in life where the kinetic to potential ratio should be >1.
At work, the ceiling for growth feels suffocating. No matter how good you are (okay, not literally) or your efforts and outcomes, the rate of growth/promotions can only be sped up to an extent. This is disincentivizing. In essence, everything boils down to incentives.
Bureaucracy
But there's got to be a way to hack the system, right? How did the Gates and Jobs move up? Were they just born rich? What even are the characteristics of this system? The system is an inefficient, inertial clusterfuck of a juggernaut that's alive only because it grew to be what it is. No one would have designed it to be this way, I hope not. Something made sense to someone when the company was say <20, then they scaled and made some tweaks along the way and not enough. Inefficiencies remained, but they were acceptable. Then things kept on scaling and escalating, as did the issues. Now we're here; it's not in short-term economic interest to fix these issues (it's called stock price, kids), and you must deal with it (or not‽).
There's a plethora of issues with dealing with these systems. The most pressing for me is the cognitive drain. Say you are good at playing the system: you figure out who you should be sitting with at lunch, who you should invite out for a drink, and who to avoid - you cruise along just fine. The problem still remains: you're spending expensive braincycles on dealing with bureaucracy. Personally, this is taxing for me, and it spills into other areas of my life.
You've got options:
- Say fuck it and not play the game - you'll get frustrated soon enough and forced to participate to some degree.
- Play the game - soul drain.
- Avoid the game.
How do you avoid the game? You carefully choose who you work with and ensure they value their braincycles as much as you do yours and vice versa. This can maybe offset the storm of shit that gets flung in your direction right out of college. Working with a small, like-minded team at a startup (not necessarily) (bureaucracy), on a problem you are personally driven by (incentive), should help to an extent.