solarwind gmail.com> writes: > Anyone can be a crappy doctor. To be good at something, you have to > have a passion for it (as someone already pointed out. 99% of work is perspiration. The 1% that is missing is original creative genius, and few have it. Passion is what makes many trundle on on a path they have no business trundling on even when they don't show any sign of the 1% alluded to above in the first 30 years of their careers, often making less money and much less of their lives than they could have in another occupation. Work is about statistics, not passion, applied to patients, microcontrollers, cars, children etc., thousands of them over decades of work. Unless you are born into money you will have to sustain your creativity and its enormous cost in money, time and missed opportunities, and *passion*, with those 99% perspiration you will get paid for (if you have a job). Creativity is about genius. The growth rate in any industry will likely be a single digit number, or lower than that. Then, at most one product in ten will be 'new', and in reality, the rate is much lower, even in electronics, a very dynamic manufacturing branch. Creativity is important, it is at the origin of that growth, but look at its size and at its relative proportion in the larger scheme of things. Fewer than 1 in 100 new ideas ever get out to be seen by the public, maybe one in 20 will make it to some fellow professionals, many of those which are seen are actually re-inventions of inventions that remained unrealized by others. 'Deja vu' is something creative people see a lot, get used to it. Like constraints and resources tend to lead to like solutions. The 'boring' IQ tests do not test for the 1%, they test for the 99% and the tie-breaker questions test for the 1%, if at all. Standard IQ tests are not designed to rate non-standard people, and in any case they are not *looking* for them. Putting a creative person with high standard IQ scores in a cubicle to do 100% of 99% 'sweat' tasks is a probably a form of punishment. High IQ people failing standard IQ tests by seeing too many solutions where they should only see one, just like seeing too *few* solutions to the question 2+2=?, is likely a sign that they are outside the target IQ range bracket for that test, and should take another one, join the Mensa club or somehow use their genius in another way. Managers who hire only genius alpha prima-donnas (or dons) and wonder about the attrition rate and about the discontent and the difficulty to get things done during endless meetings where the alphas try to assert themselves over the alphas whom they will have hired, sometimes with limited success, should wonder whether they *want* that many alphas on each team ? Betas are needed as listeners and do-ers, gammas must do the night shift and deltas should be hired to keep the premises clean, and the blind man is likely the best choice for the pbx and phone reception work. There is a certain structure in normally functioning organizations which are viable. Nothing I have read here so far suggests that any of the posters is aware of this, although they must be, many are experienced enough to make me look like a kid. Being a good doctor probably requires one to be able to kill as few or fewer than the acceptable 0.2% of his patients (defined by the risk of death of standard medical procedures which he has to perform nolens-volens - knowing that no matter how good the doctor would be, he could not lower it more, devices and medication being what they are). A really good one likely will spot some rare disease first and improve his success rate by 0.01% in that year. A genius one would likely develop one of the ten or so procedures he would devise along his career to an accepted standard. If he is also money-savvy or has a lawyer friend and some good luck, and the right connections, then he may even profit from it within his lifetime. The chances for an engineer to achieve the same success or notoriety are close to zero now, dot com bust, crisis, or not. Most medical procedures and devices bear the names of their creators. Can you say the same about the PC, a B747, the Shuttle, the tallest building in your town, the largest PBX serving 100,000 customers per rack row, a tool you use often, of a microprocessor ? At best, it bears the name of the architect or of the main founder, or of a nameless transnational corporation (and that changes when the building changes hands). If you want to know where you are headed ask someone who has been there before, or find the mantraps with your own feet. It is your choice. Most of my friends from school who went into CS and IT (not embedded) branched off into management and other golf-related well-paid janitorial jobs a long time ago, age-wise speaking. Good for them. They stopped liking what they were doing a few years out of school, mostly in cubicles or 'travelling' a lot as consultants for large companies. The money was good, but they chose their sanity instead, not being H1-B's or their equivalents, and thus not having that kind of *passion*. There are countless hobbyists who build microprocessor controlled projects all over the planet, some good, some bad, most average for that level. Very few would be commercially viable and extremely few of those who make them would like to do that job over and over and over again over 30 years of career. Do not confuse the spotlight success of a good implementation (by hobbyist standards) with the 99% sweat and cubicle politics you would be facing if you would be doing that for a living, guaranteed *without* the spotlight success, due to NDAs and fear of job sniping, or simply for lack of time and stamina after 9 hours of work and 2 more of commuting home to do house and children chores. Eager beavers always want to change the world and that is a good thing, unfortunately they want this when they do not have the experience, and, fortunately, when they lack the means to do it. By the time the realities of life and economy whittle them down to a handful, those few who can still muster some passion *and* genius eventually *do* change a little here and there, usually to the better (but not everyone agrees to that, the lynch mob strongly disagrees - fortunately the lynch mob often sits in a court of law nowadays, it is safer for *them* that way, since legitimate self defense against a mob is no longer politically correct). Meanwhile one has a life to live, have kids, own as opposed to owe things etc. Hard stuff, much harder than assembly programming. Some people can afford to drastically change direction a few times in life, but not too many times. Walk down a suburbia street in your end of the woods on a long week-end and look at the houses and cars of the people on it, try to tell who is in engineering, who is a doctor, who is a manager, and who is neither, then try to check your impressions against reality. Just as a game. See who 'wins'. $0.02 (and the last time I enter any kind of non-technical polemics with solarwind) Peter (paraphrasing T.A. Edison and a few others, I think) -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist