[spinlock]

My first impression of OP’s post was that it’s not going to be supported by corporate culture. Optimizing for quarterly profit isn’t going to align with an employee optimizing for personal excellence.

Seems to me that the most important step will be to find a vocation where your goals a few allignrd with the bottom line.

[agumonkey]

I really doubt it[0]. Not your point but the fact that having employees sharp and excited about mastery is probably gonna push everything up to 11 (granted people are mature enough not to go rockstar). When you rise above a certain skill level on a topic, things become playful, creative, quality gets regularly high. What's not to like for a short termist corp ?

[0] I only pushed high perf in small jobs, not in programming so I can't speak with a lot of confidence. But in some clerk duties, what took 3 weeks became 3 days and a half (2 days the next time because it took me 1 day to converge on high speed layouts).

[spinlock]

This reminds me of a job I had while starting my first business after college. I was a bar-tender for a catering company. We did a lot of fancy parties so a big part of my job was pouring Champaign and putting it on a tray for the servers to pass around. After a few months, I could pop a bottle and pour six flutes that were all exactly the same height without leaving a drop in the bottle.

[kevin_vanilla]

Thanks both for the interesting discussion! I think this cuts both ways - yes, I believe it is possible to strive for improvement in any job, and most jobs would welcome this. That being said, alignment with the impact you want to have and what the company cares about is also very important. You can be the best children's tobacco salesman (?) in the world, but I imagine you'll always feel like you're missing something.

> Seems to me that the most important step will be to find a vocation where your goals a few allignrd with the bottom line. I agree with this, I actually spent a lot of time making this happen and am happy with how it turned out :)

[spoonfeeder006]

> Seems to me that the most important step will be to find a vocation where your goals a few allignrd with the bottom line.

Freelancing?