[michaelochurch]

For my parents' generation, the way you showed ambition and competence at work was, after you finished your assigned stuff, to go to your boss and ask for more. If you were good, you were always asking for more things to do. This was inefficient, because it usually meant you were putting 100% CPU into grunt work for 4 years, and if the company turned on you and fired you mid-climb, you would have gained no real skills in that time.

Ambitious people don't do that anymore. They don't give their surplus time back to the boss and ask for more work. It's the mediocre, clueless ones who do that. The ambitious people use surplus time to learn the skills that will help them advance. Having a Library of Alexandria at every desk means that ambitious people can get a high-quality education and no one has to know.

I don't believe that MOOCs will obsolete the traditional liberal arts education, which is about a lot more than lecture, but MOOCs are another step, and a powerful one, in bringing through this transition in the workplace. More on this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs-disrupt...

[mhurron]

> bringing through this transition in the workplace

God I hope not. I hope that we can as a society, move beyond the idea that if it doesn't have an application in the workplace or if you can't make money from it, it is not worth while. There is no real difference to asking for more grunt work and spending your free time to be able to do different grunt work for someone else somewhere down the line.

I do Udacity and Coursera courses for my self, for my own benefit. I'm a system administrator. I do programming courses for fun, I'm doing Introduction to Astronomy for fun. The astronomy won't help in my job, ever. The vast majority of the programming ones, though tangentially related to my job, by and large won't help there either. It doesn't matter, I didn't do them to be a better worker. I did them to enrich myself.

Work, your job, is something you do to enable you to enjoy life. Don't make it your life.

[michaelochurch]

I am with you most of the way on this.

However, work is a fact of life. It can be enjoyable, or it can be drudgery. Generally, the more skills you have, the more leverage you have to push it toward the "enjoyable" end of the spectrum. If I'm going to be spending 45 hours, or even 20 hours, per week on something, I'd rather push the situation to one in which I can enjoy that time and have some autonomy. I don't mind working hard, but I don't like being subordinate, and that's what happens when you have no leverage.

Much of what inspires me to study advanced CS at 5:30 am is workplace-agnostic intellectual interest, but part of it is also the intention of qualifying myself for much better work than what I've been doing for the past few years.

I also think that there's an defeatist attitude that a lot of people take that Work Sucks because, in most jobs, it does. It doesn't have to be that way, though, and if the disproportionate leverage held by top-tier technologists continues to grow, we'll be able to build a dramatically better world-- one in which most people will be able to work 500 hours (or less) per year instead of 2000, and have 1500 more to enjoy.

If Work is going to be with us for the near future, we might as well do what we can to improve it.

[Mvandenbergh]

It's still the case that it's a good career move to ask for more work, the key is asking for the right work. I'm not going to volunteer for photocopying duty, but any opportunity to do mentoring, supervising, or other managerial activities I'll take because those are the strengths I'm currently looking to reinforce.

Essentially you want to maneuvre your boss into assigning you to work on things which are on-the-job training for the work you want to do.

[michaelochurch]

Right. Open-ended asking for more work is bad. Looking for better projects is good.