Money vs Position vs Skill

[conwy]

It seems like a lot of jobs - especially white collar and/or tech-sector jobs - fall into three groups (sometimes overlapping):

Money - the well, or at least, better-paid gigs. These can range from highly specialised contractors on 6-figures through to more generalised but higher-ranking middle and upper management on 6-7 figures, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs paid 7 figures and beyond.

Position - jobs that, money and skill aside, are essentially comfortable positions within a hierarchy or bureaucracy. Perhaps involving some occasional (or frequent if one is less lucky) political manoeuvring. Occasional heads rolling, people being caught in a bad position and fired, people copping blame, or other people having the opposite situation and climbing the ladder. Basically, some of these jobs are precarious, but most seem to be fairly stable and have the advantage of not requiring much effort once one has attained them. So "work" doesn't really feel a whole lot like real work, apart from having to show up at the office between certain hours, dressed a certain way.

Skill - jobs that, position and money aside, involve building and maintaining some skill or cluster of skills. The merit of these jobs is that the improve a person's own mental and/or physical capabilities. So that person will always have those skills, and can then apply the same skills to their own lives (e.g. a farm hand who ends up being able to run his own farm) or sell them to a higher bidder (a specialist whose skills are in demand in more than one country) or otherwise profit from them.

Some jobs seem to lean more to some of these dimensions and less to others.

For example, I feel that my current job as a software specialist leans slightly more toward money and skill, with a little position (due to industry contacts built up over the years) but nowhere near as much position as a good deal of even graduate-level white-collar permanent jobs (though those jobs might be less high on the skill and/or money side; e.g. a freshly graduated lawyer probably makes less than I do right now, but in future will make much more and have more job security).

All of this is really making my head tick over. Curious to see anyone's thoughts.

I think what I'm saying here might just be re-gurgitating stuff that Jacob already covered in his awesome book. Especially the analogy of the farm-hand.

[IlliniDave]

Mine is a pretty even blend (without all the drama in the second item). Skill got me the money which is the main reason I show up every day, and over the years I did sort of a sideways crab shuffle into a position that's a good fit for me in several ways. I don't know that any one dimension is better than the others, I think maybe people just adapt to the structure of their work environment according to the relative strength of their traits/appetites. There are definitely different paths, and some people seem distinctly drawn to certain ones. In my little work world, technical people that move up the chain fastest are the ones who compulsively attend meetings. In my gut I never understood why people would look for meeting to go to any time they didn't already have one scheduled. But most of them are now a couple rungs higher up the management ladder than I will ever go. Assuming that was their goal they've been every bit as successful as I have.

[daylen]

@Ponderosa Not just you, but virtually every introvert.