This must have happened around twenty years ago: I was listening to my dad chatting with a bunch of relatives on the growth of opportunities in nursing. Upon hearing that, I expressed my interest in the profession — not necessarily about the practice itself, but the idea of providing medical care for people in need. I got a sneer in exchange, followed by this response:
What a disgrace. Don’t you care about losing face?
I was left speechless. What is there to be ashamed of to work in the nursing field? If it’s such a noble and in demand profession that offers a decent income, why does he (and plenty of Asian men) look down upon nursing?
Aside from the stereotypical view that nursing is women’s work, the lack of prestige is apparently the other half of the reason — this perception also seem to extend to all service jobs — whereas white-collar professions that require advanced degrees, like lawyers, are deemed as appropriate and respectable. (Partly because they can also serve as bragging rights for the parents.)
All that nonsense aside, given that most of us will be a part of the workforce for decades to come, it’s natural that people have strong opinions when it comes this topic. This is also the first time ever that we hear the unmediated opinions of a generation coming to terms with major decisions, such as choosing a career, that will have significant influences on how the rest of their life plays out.
The Career Dilemma
Do you remember what you wanted to do when you grow up? I aspired to become a comic artist myself. It’s obvious by now that it didn’t pan out, so I became a user experience designer instead. (And no, these two professions have barely anything in common.)
I’m going to guess you most likely didn’t end up in the profession that you had dreamt about either — the same is likely true for many others in this world. Statistically speaking, there must be only small percentage of people who are fortunate enough to be making a living doing what they love.
Growing up in different backgrounds, locations, and time periods allow for equally different options in life: Just like I won’t sit around everyday hoping that I can score a jackpot from lottery tickets, I’d be hard pressed to bet that a child of farmers would become a rocket scientist; plenty of studies have shown that children do tend take after their parents’ occupation.
Interestingly, we do live in a period of time where there are more disruptions across industries than ever. For instance: Programming jobs that previously require at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science are now open to candidates who received alternative education.
The mental struggle of deciding on a career choice have something to do with these three questions:
If I must do something for work, what’s my most preferred (or least undesirable) option, given my lifestyle and financial goals?
How much time, energy, and resources am I willing to invest to get there?
What compromises have to happen between now and then?
These questions aren’t complicated, but they are quite hard to answer (it’s unintuitive to even be able to formulate these questions in the first place) for a person who has just transitioned into adulthood. We often don’t have enough wisdom and experiences to back up our decision-making at that stage of our life.
The career choice is one of the harder questions that young adults has to answer, especially for those who didn’t come from a privileged background. But they are somehow expected to commit three to four years of expensive studies to settle down on a particular path, with or without exposure to the practice itself outside of the classroom. Naturally, it can be frustrating to then realize that there’s a large gap between the circumstances depicted in the textbooks versus the actuality:
Computer science graduates finding themselves stuck in a rut when being throw into fix an actual software bug; young educators realize that teaching a class is mostly about keeping the children from starting a riot; junior business managers find out that actual corporate finance is as clear as mud as they are digging through the financial records archive...
(Don’t even get me started on why a bachelor’s degree is supposed to be a job requirement for entry-level positions that don’t require specialized knowledge.)
This expectation of having to “choose” a career fundamentally clashes with the reality in America today: People switch jobs more often than ever, across industries and sometimes even across disciplines, knowing that there are fewer upsides to commit to a single organization.
Coupled that with the volatile economic events in the past two decades and the most recent pandemic, it’s no wonder that plenty of the current generation are opting for choices that are most ideal for short term goals in order to become less dependent on employment contracts; the rise of gig economy and service or content subscription platforms is just the ripples of this larger wave.
As I haven’t looked deep enough into the situation of other countries, I can’t say how people are responding to their local economic trends in recent years. What I do know, however, is that there’s indeed an increasing apathy towards a toxic culture of competition and work-life imbalance in many parts of the world.
A Career in Tech
I’m lucky to have chosen a low stress career path that compensates well. Even though I had other preferences, I can’t really complain about where I have landed — considering my humble upbringing. All of my college friends that pursued a career in tech have also fared quite well. And the ones who pursued traditional professions outside of high income fields such as medicine, law, or finance? Only few have managed to find success.
(A notable case is a musician who abandoned her dream, due to stress and inadequate income, to become a social media marketer of alternative health care products. I’m not surprised by the switch. If anything, I quite sympathize with this person.)
Here’s a fact for the American job market: In terms of compensation, tech careers are currently the best bet without the need for years of advanced education and training. As shown in this list of average highest-paying jobs — while the top of the list is filled with medical professionals, more than a third of the rest are IT job titles, ranging from interface designers to server administrators.
I believe that people should work in a field that’s more aligned with their aspiration, but there’s no denying that IT jobs offer far more advantages relative to other options in the current job market (and for the foreseeable future), especially when it comes to flexibility and availability. All of these add up to make possible for a lifestyle that’s hard to achieve otherwise.
2022 and Beyond
And now, here we are, roughly two years after the beginning of the COVID pandemic. If you haven’t been living under a rock, I guarantee that you must have already seen these two phrases: “anti-work” and “great resignation”. And this isn’t just a phenomenon within the US — their prevalence speaks volume to the controversial labor conditions around the world.
In the past twenty years alone, the American public has had to endure the dot-com bubble, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and most recently the economic impact of COVID-19 — with each wave larger than the last.
Is it that surprising then... That workers in their prime working years, who are also subjected to abusive conditions with inadequate pay, are quitting in masses? And more people than ever are starting to contemplate how their choice of employment affect their outlook? If anything, I’m surprised it took this long, because COVID-19 wasn’t the underlying cause — the problem has been lurking in the shadow for many years, steadily expanding its size, and we are just seeing the breakdown of collective stress that accumulated over time.
(During the pandemic, many more people have caught onto the benefits of tech jobs that I described above: There has been a significant increase in the enrollment count of online IT curriculum since the beginning of 2020. Anecdotally, I have had a handful of friends reached out to ask for help with career development and job switch in the past year or so, all within the span of a few months.
While many companies hesitated to invest in new systems and to allow remote work, they did eventually concede after a few weeks, knowing that inaction would only further employee turnover rates. In comparison, key workers haven’t been as lucky: Traditional businesses are slow to adopt to modern work infrastructure, and this disadvantage only exacerbates during periods of instability, which introduces more frustrations to its employees and becomes the catalyst that push out people who were already on the verge of departure.)
This comment perfectly encapsulates my sentiment on this topic:
The lie that work is the road to success is perpetuated by those who are able to anti-work, to maximise their own success on the backs of those who can’t.
Most people are aware that a life of carefree luxury is unattainable, so they have chosen to work towards a job that can provide for a modest lifestyle and to not have to work more than what’s needed; for them, it’s important to have a life outside of work hours.
But the reality is disappointing: It’s hard to achieve that goal without years of hard work. This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem — either the desired lifestyle demand much of one’s time and health in exchange, or people have to lower their expectations to achieve a better work-life balance. That’s not even accounting for the effort needed to maintain the lifestyle for the long run.
When I was in college, I would occasionally get into arguments with friends (few of which are workaholics lacking self-awareness) about the value of work and the financial return of our labor, and we would banter about back and forth, never coming to a conclusion. It was only after I joined the workforce that I realized the answer couldn’t be any simpler: If there were alternatives, nobody wants to work extra hours just to have food and shelter for another week.
Yet, a substantial amount of people in this world have no other choice but to do just that, especially outside of developed countries, while receiving a pitiful amount of compensation for their labor — the actual work that keeps the society afloat.
For those of us in more fortunate positions, we should not shy away from this reality just because it’s bleak. If there’s not much we can do to improve the immediate well-being of our neighbors, we could at least begin to empathize with their circumstances. Solidarity is the first step towards a meaningful change.
What to Make of All This
Well, that took a depressing turn — why did I even make you read that for‽
Regardless of whether you think I was intentionally being pessimistic, we do have to agree on some facts, which are:
We live in a time of great sociopolitical uncertainty: In addition to the on-going pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had just began as I’m wrapping up this final draft, and not to speak of the climate crisis that’s looming over us. All of this has and will continue to impact the global economy...
This is the prospect that the current generation is presented with, one that’s arguably most complicated and challenging in the last few decades. They have to grow up and mature while grappling with a whole slew of issues beyond their control...
With all that’s happening, they still have to decide what they want to do with their life. It would’ve been an easy way out to just tell everyone to pursue an IT career for all of its advantages, but the concentration of lucrative opportunities within a single industry is not ideal for the well-being of the overall society — it’s imperative that people can achieve financial safety and a comfortable lifestyle while working in a variety of professions.
There you go, that’s what this long babble has been about. Since this is a systemic phenomenon, I had to take a bird’s-eye view of this topic in order to get my point across, but I hope you see where I’m coming from.
With the rapid innovation of modern technology, we have yet to scratch the surface of what future really holds. I am, however, fairly confident that conventional employments will continue to decline as innovations like artificial intelligence further advances. We will only witness more disruptions in the years to come.
The best time to have this conversation was yesterday — if nothing else, it’s worthwhile to just take this as an opportunity to stop and think about where your career will eventually take you.