“Chill” and “grow“ don’t often go together. You get complacent and fall into routine. You grow when you’re pushed and do uncomfortable things.
“Chill” and “grow“ don’t often go together. You get complacent and fall into routine. You grow when you’re pushed and do uncomfortable things.
That’s not necessarily true. I went from a sys admin role to swe through a rather chill process with no one really pushing.
The sys admin job had a lot of downtime, so I started automating some stuff to make my life easier. Then improved upon that stuff to make it more robust to share with the team. Then at some point my boss told me to just work on whatever I thought would help the team, and do that (officially ending the sys admin work that I had largely stopped doing on my own many months earlier). He didn’t really talk to me for 2 years after that. By that time, I had so many projects that I couldn’t do them all myself and he ended up building a whole team around me. Everything went at my pace. Since it was all value-add of stuff that otherwise wouldn’t exist, there were no timelines or pressure. However, I enjoyed it, so I was working 60 hour weeks most of the time, but it all felt very chill. No one was asking me to put in those hours and a good deal of it was more social. As a result, I saw the biggest jumps in salary in my career, while at the same time having the lowest stress, and most enjoyment from my job. But all this started in an office after I had a good deal of time with the company. I didn’t walk into it as a new hire.
These days I feel like I have more stress, but don’t feel like I’m growing at all, because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
For me, growth happens when I’m bored. It’s a way to avoid the boredom. When I’m pushed too hard, I tend not to grow, I shutdown. The best way for a company to get the most out of me is to stick me in a room and let me get bored, as counterintuitive as that sounds.
> because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
It's that yea.
I'm working at a job where I have a lot of time to explore. It's the first time I can tell that I'm growing.
That was a different era. I don’t think it’s applicable in today’s time. Knowing how to be productive with agents is becoming a must. So one can chill maybe if you’re great at context switching between 6 agents running in parallel :)
Exactly. This is a very low effort post. OP wants a chilled job but also wants autonomy, fully remote and are on a Visa. I would be doing the opposite of looking for a chill job if I am on a visa especially right now.
Growth = stress + rest
Non-chill means constant stress. Chill means you have the flexibility to do either, or at least the autonomy and trust to stress yourself as needed.
+1, though I'll add it doesn't need to be a completely "non-chill" job.
Your job should be manageable day-to-day with certain period of stress or extra work where you need to push yourself. This is where growth occurs.
Example: You need to learn a new language/framework and maybe spend some extra hours outside of work for a few weeks to ramp up for a new project. But once you have a handle on it, you go back to your regular schedule. And that might even mean now you can relax and work less than your regular schedule. It's all about managing when you grind and when you "coast".