I was a student for many years (5 years of undergrad, 2.5 years of grad school), and I became very comfortable with always being able to look at the syllabus and my grade and know what I needed to do and how well I was performing. Work isn’t like that. Like I think is normal, I get a performance review once a year. I find this unsettling, because even though I come in and do decent work, I still often feel like I’m doing something “wrong” and worry that I’m secretly on the cusp of being fired. Folks who have maybe been working for longer than I have, how do you feel and stay confident in your work?
It’s really hard to get fired once you’ve been hired.
Imagine having to talk to a bunch of people, read a ton of resumes, train people, and then at least a fifty fifty chance they are worse than you at your worst and they need to start all over.
You either need to be a personality that people who can fire you just hate and don’t want to be around, or be so bad at your job that people will volunteer for one of the tasks they least like doing over the course of their job just to get rid of you.
Or, money just dries up and they need to make cuts, in which case it doesn’t matter how good you are unless it’s between you and someone else, and even then it’s going to be weird shit like who has a family or who made them laugh at the Christmas party that’s the deciding factor because it’s actually really hard for most people to correctly gauge the capacity and skill of others.
The secret to being seen as a great value to the company is to just do work you feel like is pretty good, and not give any fucks beyond that.