Path to Success

Everyone has his own definition of success. No matter it is driven by external forces, or by internal desires, an engineer will face a question: which path is he going. One way is to go deep in the world of engineering, while the other is to deal with endless people problems. The answer to one's own question is not a simple A or B, but mostly what he has to do, probably.

Career policies are not unfamiliar to anyone who worked for years. The industry composed of numberless companies is like a big farm, farmers been there for long is inevitably carrying some smell of farms, more or less. Once one finished his school study, he will have to face the reality that he has to adjust himself to fit the society, where truth is most of the time not the most important, but what can help himself achieve his career goal is always the top priority.

Somehow this makes sense. No matter how one defines success, it is hardly possible to get there without working as a team. As long as one needs teamwork, he will have to deal with people problems, where "communication skills" can either be the secret sauce, or an evil excuse. In fact, there is one thing that is important to a manager: whether you are a helper to their success, or not. You might be a great helper for his company, but not a great helper to help him shine among the other peer managers. If you belong to this case, then do not feel surprised when they find whatever corner cases and say you are not good enough for his position, for very persuading reasons.

Personally, I do not like dealing with a lot of people problems, and again, just personally, I feel the ones dedicated in dealing with people problems are pathetic. But given the expected high salary one may totally disagree with my opinion, which I totally respect. I am still passionate on engineering technologies, rather than scratching my own hair and sighing behind the noisy crowd. I will need teamwork for sure, but if the team is not good enough for this purpose, find another one where there will be a good enough manager who takes care of all those shit for you. If you are good enough at technologies, and you can get along well enough with your teammates, in general, then you should not worry about missing one opportunity; trust yourself that better opportunities are always to come.

Nearest or Farthest

For a while I believed that, giving a working environment with a population of senior engineers surrounding me, I could gain the experiences that I would not be able to ask for elsewhere.

For the simplicity of this statement it seems plausible. The nearest distance sometimes can imply the shortest path. However, notice the "sometimes" in the above assumption.

Human societies are complicated. The nearest physical distance means differently to you and your surroundings, most of the time. Seniors are busy with their own business, and will treat all that block on their way as real threats to remove. If we say seniors are successful, then their success is believed to be due to their way of working things out always. A new employee getting into an organization is treated differently; in this regard, his distance between other seniors is farthest among the all. One cannot expect he gets exactly the same as other seniors are experiencing everyday with their other counterparts.

I would say that is the natural gap resulting in the unexpected disappointment.