Are you good at your job?

Quite good, I think. I am good at relationship management - appearing likeable, sincere, serious and trustworthy - so I have a strong bond with clients. I am not particularly well organised and definitely not very proactive though. I am fairly good at selling without being salesy, less so at dealing with lackadaisical people in other departments of my company who mean the services we provide are frequently terrible.

I just got a promotion, so I assume I'm pretty good.

i'm great at about half of my job

I don't match up to my own idea of what being good at my job means but I am good at my job when compared to other people who do the same job - many of them are just terrible at it.

I just got a promotion, so I assume I'm pretty good.

You probably are...But when I was working in a large dysfunctional organisation, it was almost impossible to prove your worth - so promotions were an unreliable measure of performance.

I'm good at about two-thirds of my job. The third I can't do is the bit where I have to try to get other people to do things they might not want to - fronting, and negotiation strategy, more or less. In those situations I find people behave in unpredictable and bewildering ways - I cannot get used to lying, bullshitting, the things I wouldn't do myself.

I am bad at my job but I'm still there after 7 years so maybe I'm basically adequate?

but I find it more likely that in the cosy non-profit world I work in it's just that nobody else is any good at knowing if anyone else is any good, nobody has the determination or legal muscle to do anything about those who aren't, and there are one or two people who make their not-goodness more obvious by making a lot of noise all the time who are hiding me, for now

another year of this. happy new year

i really resent some of the pressure to be ever higher performing tbh. here's to a world where we're allowed to just bumble along in peace.

okay, maybe not surgeons.

Heh

I dont get to determine how my job goes so i try to minimize the damage done by feckless superiors, often by doing v little indeed.

I don't know anyone else who has my job, so it's hard to judge relative to others. I am also still relatively unsure of my place within the organization after two and a half years, partly due to the whole nobody-else-has-my-exact-job thing. But I feel like I'm pretty good at what I do - my ideas and input are welcome, indeed solicited, and I get along with almost everybody almost all the time. I just need to figure out how to get them to give me more money.

I am coming up for six years in my job and I'm pretty sure I'm bad at it, I think I just about manage to hit a standard where it would be slightly more effort to get rid of me than to clean up after my incompetence, I have the constant fear this calculation could change at any second, though.

i really resent some of the pressure to be ever higher performing tbh. here's to a world where we're allowed to just bumble along in peace.

otm

i just kicked ass in the 2nd year at my day job, which was good because the first year was full of rookie mistakes and general awkward acclimation to something pretty different than any of my previous jobs, and i also continue to kick ass in my freelancing life (although i voted for 'quite good' and not 'excellent' because it doesn't feel right to put myself in the very top bracket, kicking ass should be the baseline imo). and i'm happy to say that, because i've had a couple 9-5 gigs that could've lasted much longer if i wasn't kind of lousy and half-assed at them.

okay, maybe not surgeons

I can't get my head around the thought processes of the people who do this kind of job, being bad at my extremely inconsequential job makes me feel like running off and hiding in a cloakroom most days, I think I'd go insane if I was doing something that had a huge impact on people's lives. That kind of self belief just seems incomprehensible to me?

though it might just be that I'm bad at my job and they're good at their jobs

that dude who branded his initials on somebody's liver seems pretty self-confident

here's to a world where we're allowed to just bumble along in peace.

I just looked at some job ads for towns with fewer memories attached and, yeeaahhhh, this.

I just want to survive (maybe) and have somewhere warm and dry I can sleep and waste my evenings away without having to see any other humans unless I feel up to it, but just being alive is so expensive and all these job ads seem to expect you to know what you're doing, even the ones which would barely pay the rent.

soref otm.

i went with quite good because i'm pretty self-critical of my performance and think there's plenty of room for improvement. that said, i've been reviewed for two years running as a top 15% employee and a lot of really nice feedback from upper management types, so i guess i'll just keep doing my thing.

I'm excellent b

ut I don't really fin it my top life priority so I end up being very good at it rather than killin it.

I'm somewhere between adequate and quite good. The work is easy; I know what it would take to improve, but have a bad case of idgaf about everything in my life, so I skate by.

all these job ads seem to expect you to know what you're doing

The thing to remember is that the people who write these ads (personnel/HR/recruitment people mainly) don't know much about the jobs they're writing ads for.

http://i1.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1491243.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/Stoke-City-v-Everton--Premier-League-1491243.jpg

I'd say I'm pretty good to excellent at my job. Well, I probably don't have the most natural talent, but I'm well organized and prepared.

This is my 9th year there and I've always gotten outstanding reviews. I got employee of the year one year. Helps that I really enjoy my job most of the time. It can be busy and stressful, but also rewarding.

i am somewhere between p. good to quite good at my job but since i am an un/under-employed academic i am beset on all sides by parties that cause me to doubt my basic competency or worth as a human being, like indifferent search committees, hyper-professionalized job market specifications that exclude me from even initial consideration, a flood of backlogged ivy league elites condescending to take jobs i would be happy to have, mistrustful disciplinary peers and colleagues harboring agendas, over-performing rat-racers, sullen or aggrieved students who don't want educations, administrators to whom i am probably literally nothing more than a name in a spreadsheet cell and an opportunity for budgetary reduction, and a widely circulating sense that teachers are probably useless parasites.

so, work, yeah. sometimes at some point after the semester has ended, a student writes me and says 'that was the best class i ever took, thanks'.

vg at my job but also v lazy so it balances to an average output.

Quite good, a couple promotions this year including moving into team management starting tomorrow. Could be excellent if I were more motivated, but I actively avoid things like pulling long hours and business travel because I don't want to take away from time with my family.

i would say quite good. but i spent years and years just being adequate. i would say the change occured when i started working for myself.

I was never any good at my job, because that would have required me to care about several things I didn't care about at all and have a much higher tolerance for boredom. But it's hard to find a job I am good at, because I don't know what that would look like.

After a long apprenticeship and a good start I slowly became wilfully shit at most aspects of my job and I developed a lazy, rotten attitude and a strong loathing of management structure type pricks. After they already got the best out of me I started stealing off them with impunity for my own private jobs and have never give a rat's arse about being 'useful' to an employer since the early days.

Am bad

dmac making me lol

I don't actually know any more. It used to be a point of pride with me, that I was very good at the technical aspects of my job. I still seem to have the ability to make both immediate and higher-up superiors believe that I am extremely good at my job. But my confidence has been so completely and thoroughly undermined by non-performance aspects of my last job, that I no longer seem to have the ability to believe that I am capable of doing "a good job".

The fact that I voted in this poll (on the basis of my last job) despite not having a job just confirms that I really miss having a job, and specifically my last job :/ Anyway, I was good at the people parts, I was highly motivated, I got loads and loads of positive things moving and happening, but I got too hung up on doing a good job for absolutely everybody which meant I let some of the more important stuff slide. And I don't think I'm very good at the big picture, strategize-for-the-next-5-years thing.

I was really quite good at my previous job - which was as a retail supervisor so y'know, nothing special - but my current job bores me so much that my initial enthusiasm and desire to take on more work has been replaced by a sapping sense of apathy.

As far as my employers go being good at my job p much entails showing up on time and not having sick days. This I manage to do.

I'm 30 and I have never had a promotion in any of my crappy jobs

Was asleep at work while you wrote that, balls. Badly needed it was too. Doin college work now.

The middle of the middle, like splitting the difference between two numbers to find the mean--better than "basically adequate" but not "quite good." (That's a bit of a leap between those two.) After 20+ years, I think I'm realistic about my strengths and weaknesses. Always expected I'd come back one year to find everything had fallen into place and suddenly I'd be Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love, sagacious and wise at every turn. Never happened, and with only a few years left to go, it evidently never will.

pretty bad, i think, but it's such an overwhelming job the first few years that i think i'm getting graded on a curve (by my bosses, not myself).

i think a case of idgaf can be kind of helpful on a job? part of my problem seems to be getting paralyzed by anxiety about the ways in which my job is important.

my immediate supervisor is always citing the fact that i care as part of what makes me good and i always think, isn't that kind of a low bar?

Not ime!

maybe not, but my job is teaching. it's pretty easy to care about the well-being and future success of children. seems like the easiest part of the job.

I would say I am "quite good." I'm "excellent" at a lot of the big picture stuff, but mediocre at the organizational/detail stuff so it evens out.

xp to hs -- yeah but that well can run dry pretty quickly if you don't look out for yourself and, i dunno, pace your caring.
at least that's what happened to me after 4 years or so

i think i'm good at my job but i could def be better. i just have other interests that i need in order round out my life because i don't like to get too tied up in one thing, esp if that thing makes me feel emotionally sapped

yeah when i posted caring is easy i kind of meant initially and vaguely. caring on a day to day, micro level is challenging and draining for sure. i am suspicious of the all you have to do is care! model of teaching for various reasons.

because it's wrong!
it also takes soft skills for granted

my immediate supervisor is always citing the fact that i care as part of what makes me good and i always think, isn't that kind of a low bar?

― horseshoe, Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:04 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A lead organizer of a v effective community group said recently, "I can put in touch with the active, concerned principals (of local public schools)--you know, the ones who answer their phones." She knew how ridic that sounded but was resigned to the fact that that's what they have to work with. So that's all it takes to be active and concerned even at high administrative levels, just answer your phone.

true of many jobs in many venues imo

i work in a very large very functionalized company and it's amazing how much love i have for the people who just take an interest in whatever problem i've reached out to them about, even if they don't know me or exactly what i'm working on.

otm and also increased/increasing numbers of people relying on ppl who care --> burnout of ppl who care ime

This is obv a very different context, but I work in a call centre and about half of my job consists of demonstrating that I care to customers I have zero ability to help in any way, expressing regret that the company fucked up their order and that we realise what an inconvenience this is for them etc.

Customer service isn't a department, it's an attitude. Makes u think.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

don't feel that good at my job except for once in a while, too high stress, causing me mental health problems, want a new one

demonstrating that I care to customers I have zero ability to help in any way

this is only a small part of my job but today I got an email forwarded from someone in ~another country~ asking about something on our website and I had to tell them, actually the website is wrong and we don't have this thing, but I still hoped that they would appreciate the degree of sleuthing I went to to determine this, and the speed with which I replied

and then I realised that they sent their query to a generic help address three weeks ago and it had only just been forwarded on

oh well

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

64 ilxors in denial