From Face it: you’re a crazy person, about the importance of “unpacking” a job to understand your relationship to a potential career:
High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority.
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Making matters worse, people are happy to talk about themselves and their jobs, but they do it at this unhelpful, abstract level where they say things like, “oh, I’m the liaison between development and sales”. So when you’re unpacking someone’s job, you really gotta push: what did you do this morning? What will you do after talking to me? Is that what you usually do? If you’re sitting at your computer all day, what’s on your computer? What programs are you using? Wow, that sounds really boring, do you like doing that, or do you endure it?
How important and yet almost impossible does that sound?There are wide chasms between expectation, perception, and reality. I’m not sure most people are truly psychologically willing to confront unpacking themselves, let alone comprehensively do it for others.