Thank god I didn't have to encounter an actively hostile person yet, but my big discovery last year was indeed that not everyone at work is motivated by doing a good job. It obviously sounds obvious when put like this, but it is something I wasn't able to put together in my own life. I have since left this job (my immediate colleagues and most people I worked with were great, it takes just a few individuals to really disrupt and dismantle good engineering), and am now in a place where I slowly had to discover how amazingly efficient and productive things can be when I am given trust and enough autonomy. I think I have 2. pretty well figured out. What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.
Thank god I didn't have to encounter an actively hostile person yet, but my big discovery last year was indeed that not everyone at work is motivated by doing a good job. It obviously sounds obvious when put like this, but it is something I wasn't able to put together in my own life. I have since left this job (my immediate colleagues and most people I worked with were great, it takes just a few individuals to really disrupt and dismantle good engineering), and am now in a place where I slowly had to discover how amazingly efficient and productive things can be when I am given trust and enough autonomy. I think I have 2. pretty well figured out. What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.