career-confusion

So this blog was started to keep you up to date on my recovery and winding path through life (if you can call a line with a giant "kink" in it a path) so let's get back to that. Welcome to the inside of my head-- thinking out loud here. Man oh man am I confused about what path ahead looks good. What do you get when you apply a lot of heat and pressure and merge two careers into one? Career-confusion. (ignore the fact that that really should be career-fusion... I don't pay my joke writer... since that's me) What's compounding the confusion is my history of being career-confused at the time of my wreck.

See, my problem is that I see the vocational world split into two categories: chef & artisan.
CHEF: in order to make this recipe, you need to do these steps IN THIS EXACT ORDER each time. Sure, you might make different foods, but each food has it's own recipe. And I'm figuring that 10 years down the line, your 492,836th exact same chicken con penne pasta might be about 492,834 too many. And it's not that a "chef" job is a bad thing at all, since it might be cooking up things that help people (Brad), it just MAY not provide the intellectual diversity I'm looking for.
ARTISAN: your boss tells you to paint a bull, so you do. It might be impressionist, modernist, abstract, classical, realist or a million other styles, but no matter which style you use, you can argue to your boss that you painted a bull. (If you were smart, you'd slop some paint ON a real bull, but that's neither here nor there)
The difference here is based around if it matters -HOW- you accomplish your goal; in the chef case, it makes a big difference if you baste that chicken -after- it's entirely cooked (I pretty much only cook Healthy Choice, so that example may not have made any sense). In the artisan case, you most probably get some artistic freedom about how you accomplish your goal.

The real bear is that the job I had, software developer, apparently was fairly rare in that it was both artisan AND chef (as well as being precise like your math professor, which I see as a good thing). Your boss wants software that accomplishes some specific goal but the nitty-gritty details of how you achieve that is pretty much up to you, with a desire of making the final product out of smaller pieces (which may get used elsewhere). There may be constraints, such as "it's gotta be done in THIS programming language" or more, but there's still a fair amount of wiggle room after those.

And if I was gonna take any summer classes, college registration is in 6 days, 2 of which may be spent almost entirely at the Keowee Cup regatta. No pressure, nooo pressure at all.

I just had the realization that right now I am career-confused, but right before the wreck, I was wicked career-confused. So this might actually be a good thing that I've got a chance to start all over. We shall see.