In the practice of criminal law, of course, the winning (and losing!) was obviously a key component of work. Trials were won or lost, and even the process of securing a good deal might be a win, although it resulted in a guilty plea to some charge.
In my current line of work, there’s winning and losing as well, although at a bit of a remove. As a government contractor, we compete with other firms for government work. We win contracts, which necessarily means that when we do, others have lost the opportunity for that same work. So it’s there, but we never interact directly with our opponents, as I did as a criminal attorney.
My wife’s job, on the other hand, doesn’t involve competition all. Obviously there are difficulties she must overcome, but they’re not in the nature of, “I have to do better than someone else to succeed;” they’re more implacable constraints of the nature of the work.
How much competition, how much winning and losing, is there in your work?
Almost none. I index books. The only competition involved in my job is in landing the contracts in the first place, and my competition is only the faceless other contractors out there trying to get the same work. Once I have the job, I complete the index as required and ship it off, no fuss, no muss.
Financial journalist here, and in my case the answer is a lot. We’re going up against [del]those bastards[/del] our esteemed competitors at Reuters every day, and I assure you there are people over there and at my company monitoring how we do against each other down to the second.
When you say “down to the second,” do you mean that the competition between you and the other guys is a function of time, i.e., whoever gets the story first, wins?
Because it seems to me that, while breaking the news is a key part of journalism, much modern journalism suffers from thinking that being first is better than being good, that breaking the story is better journalism than covering the story properly.
My job was structuring the transactions so as to avoid future litigation between any of the parties. All the winning and losing involved in the process (which bank is going to give that deal to which law firm) had already happened by the time it got to my desk. This usually isn’t the case for lawyers working on transactions but these were 3 party deals and I was working for the guarantor, so as such, we weren’t involved in the competition and had considerable leverage over every other party.
On the pre-litigation/dispute resolution work I used to do, more often than not I was more involved in judging the merits the dispute between the parties that used to come to us and advising my client (my agency) on how to handle it to avoid being sued in the future or further the agency’s mission. All the decisions I, or my coworker and I made were always held up in court. But by that point we had handed it over to the DOJ because they litigated for us.
The strange thing about news organizations being so obsessed with being first or getting “exclusives,” is that no one outside the industry cares. By and large, the general public does not pay attention to or give a shit about who broke a story, or who got an “exclusive interview” with Kate Plus Eight. I’ve never heard of anyone basing thir decision on what news outlet to consume on whether or not they once broke a story first.
Yup. I get irritated watching the local news and how they boast about exclusives and breaking stories. News10 has an exclusive interview with so and so. Who cares? All that tells me is that the other channels didn’t give a shit about that story and sent their reporter off to do something else.
Our company does courtroom graphics and trial/jury consutling. I’m on the graphics side. Often we need to create graphics or select samples from previous cases for pitches to potential clients (law firms) looking for support in a big upcoming case. There are usually a couple other competitors. If the firm likes our work, then we get the case (win). If the firm likes our work, but thinks we’re too expensive, then we don’t get the case (lose), but understand that our competitors provide inferior work, and the likelihood of getting future work because of this is higher (win).
When work begins on a case, the overtime hours really add up, therefore so does my pay (personal win), but other familial and social obligations suffer greatly (personal lose).
If the verdict goes our way, our clients win, so we win. If they lose, we lose, but not always. Sometimes it’s an unwinnable case, and the client understands that. If we have had any role in minimizing damages, the it’s sometimes considered a win. We recently had a case in which we were defendants, where plaintiffs asked for several million dollars in damages. We were able to help convince the jury to award no more than $5,000 or so. That’s very much win and we will definitely be working with those clients again.
The general public does not hire newspeople, sponsor newscasts, or keep stations on the air. If you want to succeed in the industry, your first priority must be to please the industry. (This is not just true of news, either, of course.)
95% of my work is either engineering studies or engineering design. There’s not much “winning and losing” in the projects themselves; but in order to maintain competitiveness my work must be of high quality, reasonable price and completed in a timely manner.
In the 5% of expert witnessing I do, it’s all about winning.
I work for a sports team. I don’t do the winning or the losing, but my happiness depends on other people’s ability to be competitive. I also tend to earn more money if they can win into the post season.
I’m a chef. There’s no real competition, except the general male macho bullshit that comes with the territory. I have to compete with my co-workers for ‘status’, working the hardest, cleanest, fastest, while preparing everything to the highest quality, to ensure that my opinion carries weight. But I don’t think that’s very different from most jobs.
I’m a software engineer. There’s no real competition in my day to day work, but overall our industry is very competitive so we have to work hard to win contracts with our customers. I am very involved with some of our core development so much of our company’s success is dependent on my work.