How satisfied are you with your career (1-10)? Why?

Just curious, wanted to take a poll. How satisfied with your career today? Both in terms of what you're doing but also position / pay as well

Personally I'm at a 5/10. Doing a job I like but not happy with the position / pay so actively looking to move. Hope the market improves soon

13 Comments
 

Thanks. This is gonna sound crazy but I'm trying to turn fringe hobby projects into a job/career and it is going poorly. Over the past 1.5 - 2 years I have been working on a music project pretty seriously, put out 82 songs so far I think and played 59 shows last year. I'm in a better place with it right now compared to where it was at last year but while I think my music is good it is also very fringe and may have limited commercial appeal. Over the past week or so I've started a 2nd fringe hobby project closely related to the main music project, which is a 'record label' basically where I'm going to find other people making fringe music who would be interested to contribute some original songs that will all be released under the 'record label' profile on the streaming platforms, it's also kind of a performance piece (this 'record label') that is supposed to reflect on how the music industry only sees art as a product, how society sees mental illness (the reason why a lot of people's music who are making fringe music is 'fringe' is not just cause it's technically bad or good it's also because they are mentally ill), society in general, I only started doing some outreach to find people to contribute to this project within the past couple of days and I already have like 5-6 people I'm talking to about releasing music with under the 'record label' which is kind of cool but yea I mean I only started working on this other project within the past week or so. My goal is to get to a point where I can play 100-150 shows per year (touring) for my own music project, and be able to not lose money from doing this touring. During the other time in the year I would seek to put out at least 50+ original songs, and then I would also work on this record label in the other time (assuming I still stay interested in it, I only just started this label project, but it is also the only other thing I've started working on in the past 1.5 - 2 years in terms of new projects so I think that I will stick to it to some degree especially cause the label branding and marketing will help me market my main music project. In terms of work I've just been working random part time jobs for the past 1.5 - 2 years, and plugging a ton of my money into my own music project. These projects I am working on are pretty fringe while I am extremely passionate about my own music project and I think the passion will maintain to some degree about this other project, these are very very hard things to make any kind of money off of and it may take years more of toiling to really see anything back in terms of money and I might also just keep plugging money into it and never substantially make that money back. Hopefully things will work out but we shall see.

 

8/10 I'm happy enough with pay although more would always be nice.  really like the people I work with, the problems I solve, the small team I manage, and coming up with ways to model stuff and being afforded the opportunity to pitch my ideas to top leadership is something that brings me a great deal of satisfaction.

I'm sure there are other careers I'd be happier in, or make more money in, but overall, I think I've found a place where there's reasonable growth opportunity, pay and WLB.  

 

7/10. Fairly interesting job with lots of international travel, decent autonomy, good work-life balance, pretty high status but only okay-ish pay. 

 

6/10. The pay is good and the WLB is acceptable. Working with mostly great people and the work is mostly interesting.

Career-wise, feeling like have been hopping from project to project but haven’t really dug deep into a particular domain and so have a feeling of not having advanced enough perhaps or “risen through the ranks” so to speak.

 
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