发信人: oceanfrog (jeremy), 信区: Biology
标 题: Know your talents and amplify your talents -5
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Feb 11 17:19:30 2008)

When you choose a career, you want to pick the industry that your
experiences count.

When we are young, we rely heavily on our raw talents and learning abilities
, and tend to look down experiences. When we grow older, things start to
change. We are gradually losing our talents, but gaining experiences and
knowledge.

This trend is inevitable and irreversible, no matter what industry we are at
, no matter how hard we work. Time always favors the younger generations
with regard to raw talents.

With this respect, if your current job is helping you to gain experiences
and the experiences you gain can help you to do your job better in the
future, you are in a good career.

Imagine you are carrying bags for people in the hotel. What experiences are
you going to get? Almost zero. (You might learn a lot of stuff other than
how to carry bags more elegantly, which moves you to the hotel manager
position, but that's directly from carrying bags.) We can almost be sure to
say, there is no career in carrying bags.

I have mentioned that (pure) IT is not the ideal career simply due to the
fact that experience level (in technology itself) peaked in 5-15
years after beginning to work in IT, but the requirements for knowledge refreshment
is too fast. The diminishing talents will start to drag down job
performance.
However, IT is certainly not rsthe wot since experiences still play a
somewhat big role, that's why experienced engineers are well paid.

I have friends who had real hard time to locate a good job in the down turns
of IT back in 01 and 02. Some struggled to survive at a 30K job. But almost
everyone got into great positions making several times higher salaries
after 5 years of experiences.


Some industries reward experiences even greater: Finance, Accountancy,
Business, and lots of engineering fields.

Now back to biology. If people can manage to get a tenure faculty position,
everything is great. Faculty greatly rewards experiences. A 60 year-old
professor will always get respect no matter how little actual work he is
doing.

The problem is if you cannot get to tenured position, you are toast. How
important is the experiences that you acquired to do perfect DNA sequencing,
or PCR, or anything you name it? Your boss can always find a young student
working 60 hours+ a week to replace your job. And the experience you gain is
totally useless outside biology, or even in another closely related field.
The DNA sequencing experience could be totally useless in a protein lab.
Your experiences are not rewarding you, but punishing you. You'll get into
40s, when you boss feels you are useless and wants to dump you.

I hope you all realize this before you reach that stage.





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※ 修改:·oceanfrog 於 Feb 11 17:23:53 2008 修改本文·[FROM: 38.117.]