Rethinking Work
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My daughter is already in a much better place than i was at her age. I was homeschooled until college (yes, my family are a bunch of hicks) and I didn't have insurance until I was 22. I was also raised in an incredibly restrictive religion which I have since abandoned for science and reality.
I'm not saying I don't want a better education and better insurance for my daughter than she currently has, but she's on a better path than I was on by a long shot (she gets As in science for starters... hell, she has a science class!).
Edit: She's at my house more than her mother's because her mother works full time.
I'm guessing that the implication is that a kid makes things too difficult in terms of money or perhaps time.
On money: I just don't buy a lot of stuff.
On time: I'm awake by 4am and asleep by 9 or 10pm every night. I don't watch much TV / play many games (Netflix and bf4 / gta5 binges do happen though). I try to read myself to sleep each night. The vast majority of my free time is spent working on my games (of which I have yet to finish one, though I've only been going hard at the game development as of late... the last couple of years were spent more on learning and less on producing).
Meanwhile, the more money I made, the more I / my ex-wife spent. By the time I quit that job (and jobs in general) I had almost nothing to show for myself outside of knowledge and experience (which is very valuable in its own right of course). I had very little in savings - and yes this was due to my own money management problems and not with being an employee (my daughter's old school was almost $20k per year, rent was the same), but that's irrelevant when life is staring you in the face.
Also, I had been bouncing between jobs and job titles for nearly a decade - this was prior to anyone really using the term "fullstack" to describe what I was doing (I can't even count the number of conversations I had where I was told to choose either frontend or backend work), and I was constantly struggling with management who wanted to pigeonhole me and push me towards a specific career path... that of me becoming a manager. More of my time was wasted on office politics, water cooler talk and socializing at bars with my coworkers than I care to admit as well.
I came to realize that I hated the lifestyle associated with being a fulltime tech employee. I hated the free meals in the kitchen, random mid-afternoon beer breaks, and all the other "perks" that I now view as carrots on a stick.
As a contractor I can easily make $12k+ per month if I find the right client (I've done this multiple times). In the last 9 months I made $90k (reduced my prices in order to get clients easier)... but that's only if I'm working 8 hours a day with steady contracts which almost never happens (like I mentioned, I don't bother looking for steady contracts)... and these types of contracts are typically for very demanding clients so they're very stressful.
I value variety more than stability, and frankly I don't want to die with the realization that I only helped upper management and owners pursue their dreams while mine died a quiet death.
I too want my daughter to have the best opportunity and life possible, but I'm not sure how working for $110k per year for 10 hours a day in an office with people I hate is going to give her better opportunities than what I'm doing now. She's still getting an education, she has all the tech she could possibly want (minus a cellphone), and she's a smart kid. I would prefer to get her out of the public education system, but it actually seems to be working better for her than her private school did.
side note: i only went to college for 2 years and it was to get a graphic design degree. i taught myself how to program when i was 8 years old on qbasic - video games was always the motivating factor, I fell into webdev by mistake and then got good at it.
In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time.
This is on top of the various other points they make in the article and related stuff…
Generalize much? While I don't doubt your experience, I don't think this is a very accurate characterization of the culture distribution across the US.
Do you have the anomalous U.S. experience of working in a place where people dance around and sing and have fun while working? You could share that with the rest of us who mostly do not have that experience.
I can think of one: the same reason Steve Jobs paid himself $1 a year.
Managing incentives is tough. If you try and reward someone for a task, you may find the incentives at some point misaligned.
Let work be fun, and you open yourself to work being sacrificed to protect the fun.
Therefore: abolish fun.
I haven't made an eloquent case for it, but I think that's the reasoning, and I'm not sure it's wrong, frankly.
Link: http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-source/
Abstract:
In this paper, I study the workings of several successful Internet-based collaborative communities to identify what it is that enables them to succeed, even thrive, despite the highly-dispersed nature of their collaboration. This research reveals that while the practices and tools used by the referenced communities are important to their success, the most critical difference lies much deeper, in the economic-basis of their organizational structure. This economic mode of production, described by Yochai Benkler as “commons-based peer-production”, is studied to answer two key questions: First, does this economic model, in itself, encourage more successful virtual teamwork? Second, is the peer-production model of collaboration fundamentally tied to the open source model or can it also be applied in a commercial context to create proprietary products?
A key source for the paper was "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm" by Yochai Benkler.
Link: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
In this paper Benkler describes a mathematical model for human motivation, which accounts for influence of money. Highly recommended read.
Edit: fixed name typo
It's hard to get used to an abundance mindset but we're definitely at that point where we absolutely must. It's like pre-AWS and post-AWS: in the former we have to worry about provisioning more hardware and virtual machines and worrying about running out of space (I'm in that situation now where we have a private cloud and maybe 2 more VMs can be spun up and that's it). In the latter situation we would be able to provision as many VMs as needed. Sure your costs increase because you went overboard and provisioned one too many VMs but at least you got to worry about over-abundance rather than scarcity!
1. Na, some wealthy people would totally do that. It's their hard earned money and they're entitled to spend it however they want, after all. Get a job and stop looking for handouts!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-c...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/17/ro...
2. Who says they even have excess wealth to begin with? I may make a billion dollars a year, but I'm living in this cramped mansion, and I've still got payments on my super-yacht. Living this lavish lifestyle is expensive!
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...
It's because there's excess surplus from productivity gains. If you work 1 hour a day you can be far more productive than just a few years ago. Either wages should increase to match that gain or hours should decrease to match that gain. In both cases, wealth would be unlocked.
If you work fewer hours you get more time for hobbies and side projects and other wealth-creation ideas.
If you work the same amount of hours but for a higher salary, you get money to shift into investments or to be able to take time off to invest in yourself and your family.
The current surplus wealth goes to the top and to the company itself.
Source? My guess would be that in fact, more people are homeless, jobless, living on food stamps and/or without health insurance.
> The U.S. homeownership rate fell to 63.4 percent in the second quarter of 2015, according to the U.S. Census. That is down from 63.7 percent in the first quarter and from 64.7 percent in the same quarter of 2014. It marks the lowest homeownership rate since 1967.
> Homeownership peaked at 69.2 percent at the end of 2004, when the housing market was in the midst of an epic boom. The 50-year average is 65.3 percent.
There can be arbitrary amounts of psychological suffering that we trade for this material benefit and these are typically just discounted.
Mumford actually argues for more automation; and it makes sense. Why are there still cleaning crews and construction crews that work insane hours for not the best pay in the world? Why haven't we automated that so those people can pursue happiness? Giving them more TVs or iPhones won't improve their quality of life substantially. My favourite example is computers in the classroom; they haven't really increased the education of students, only made certain things more convenient; we still have classroom sizes that are too large to teach effectively, we don't cover the material properly, we teach to the standardized tests, etc. Those are all quality problems that can't be fixed with quantity of material goods.
It's "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness", not "life and the pursuit of wealth". Materially we're doing great and we could be going further with more automation, but in the mind, we have huge issues that have been swept under the rug and are only seriously looked at by academics.
Theory X (The oldest): People won't work unless you force them to, and without constant supervision, they'll slack off.
Theory Y: People are looking for self-actualization, and you need to find what gets them excited, get them to do that, and get out of their way.
Theory Z (currently the most popular): Both Theory X and Theory Y apply.
For the last 15 years (Since Y became popular) the school system has done nothing but deliver absolutely worthless human beings.
Generally, conservative elements in Sweden discount educational experts assessment saying that kids are allowed to be 'too free' in the class (e.g. blaming it on the declining moral fiber of children or immigrants or what not).
It served as a lab for what proponents of the voucher system in the U.S. are looking to do.
1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-...
Mostly I'm upset about them making everything social. Not allowing humans to wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and make their own connections have created shallow and empty workers.
I wish what A.C. Grayling is doing would be taken more seriously before it is too late.
Huh, is that not exactly what Y is about?
As for turning everything social, welcome to the modern work environment. If you can do social you are out of a job, as the non-social jobs have been automated away.
I was summarizing the linked reference which covered the politicized nature of the debate and quoted positions from both parties.
In my current workplace it's mostly theory Y. But it far more easy to get excited about the work.
The traditional capitalist view of human productivity is misanthropic and authoritarian. It makes sense if you want to justify hierarchical relationships and reduce the autonomy of the masses.
There ought to be plenty of engineers and programmers on HN. They should know how valuable autonomy and meaning is to our productivity. This is universal: Everyone likes doing good work and doing exactly the right amount of work. No one likes working too little or working needlessly much. Yet, we live in a society where the politicians start honking like geese when there 'aren't enough jobs'. That's like saying there aren't enough bugs for me to fix. When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something new. Not so in our system. When the work's done, you better find more work or you will fall into calamity and you will have deserved it. When you tie all human existence to producing value for your boss, work becomes a slavish social contract and not the means by which human beings improve the world for ourselves and each other.
Trust people, and they act trustworthy. Respect people, and they act respectable. Give people the trust and respect required to give them autonomy in their work, and they will do amazing things for themselves and you. The most lovely software I work with is produced for free, and it tends to be amazingly good work, done from a position of respect, trust, and generosity.
I'm sure many people are tired of my lefty whinging about capitalism, but the longer I live, the more it doesn't make sense for my personal productivity or fulfillment. I'm pretty tired of having a sword hanging by a thread over my head in a cynical attempt to make me 'be a productive member of society'. It makes me less productive! It makes me less happy! I'm tired of having to see everyone whose labor goes into the comfort of my life as a greedy adversary who would destroy me if this system weren't around to 'protect me'.
The work is never done right. You talk about engineers and programmers right? Well they should know that their work never ends; there's always the need to continually improve the product so that you don't "fall behind", fix the rampant bugs that occur when you add in new features, fix the bugs that were caused by you fixing the previous bugs, realize that the customers actually wanted something different, need to refactor the code properly to match the latest design fad, have to rewrite the program in a brand new language...
And all this work has to be done. Because if you don't continually upgrade your product, then your product will quickly become old-fashioned and obsolete.
So, when we say "there's no work to be done", it's a blatant lie. Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate doing, or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be done. Lying may make you happy, but it makes me less happy. I prefer misanthropy over delusion.
> Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate doing
Don't force people to do things they hate doing in order to survive when the amount of work it requires to feed and keep everyone comfortable is a far smaller quantity.
> or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be done.
Don't have a system where work is only done at the whim and for the benefit of property owners.
If the work is never done, then people will keep working. They will do that because they want to work. It does not follow that we need bosses, hierarchy, management, government, property, militaries, and police forces to make us do the work just because there is work to be done.
So where did I lie?
P.S. I'm sorry for being aggressive. I am emphatic about this; I am not doing the work I want to do because I need to do the work someone with money wants me to do. Because people will toss me into the garbage disposal if I am not working for money. This article indicates that I am not alone; I am part of a majority.
We do seem to agree on that point though, so I should probably retract your comment "lies". You're fine with people leaving 'projects' incomplete if they hate it...and I'm fine with that too. But work is indeed left incomplete, and that's why I made my comment.
If it makes you feel better, replace "employers" with "the open source community", and redefine pay to mean code/maintenance instead of money. I think my point still holds.
Sure, but the perfect has always been the enemy of the good. If we actually applied this advice, we'd never ship anything. At some point, things are good enough to send them off and go home.
If that's only ever a small fraction of people at a time, then giving them food/shelter and letting them "freeload" is fine. But the worry is that by taking away any incentive to produce, that group will grow without bound and end up consuming non-neglible output from the people who do.
I'm not arguing to diminish your main point, but to strengthen it by adding nuance. The way I see it, our current system basically pushes people into burn out mode a priori, and only a lucky few escape to make money while still fully engaged. Which is why eg you visit the hospital and everyone there acts like what they're doing/saying actually makes sense, but when looking at the big picture it's obviously horribly broken. The Programmer's Stone (which I need to reread sometime) explores this phenomenon in depth while proposing a theory to explain it.
My take is that basic economics predicts that as people become more productive they should become wealthier. So their marginal utility of keeping their time goes up, their rate should go up (assuming they're worth it), and they should also start demanding to work less. But this is clearly not happening on a societal scale. IMHO because debt is the gradient version of slavery, and advances in surveillance technology have made debt such a prominent part of our society.
> there's always the need to continually improve the product so that you don't "fall behind",
That's not real. There are downright ancient products that work better than current stuff because they don't suffer from this curse. That's a business concern, not a problem that engineers need to solve, and when engineers are solving that problem they're wasting their time (and everyone else's).
> fix the rampant bugs that occur when you add in new features,
This is part of the problem: at some point if you've done your job, you don't have to add more features and you can actually finish the product.
Look at the chat client market: chat of this kind has been a solved problem for at least a decade, but people have to work on something so they decide to reinvent chat. HipChat did it, now they're losing market to Slack because they keep making pointless changes that don't improve HipChat which makes it harder to use. And Slack is basically just a shiny reimplementation of an IRC client: there are still IRC clients that have been doing more than what Slack does for years. In another decade we won't be using Slack, we'll be using some other shitty chat client, and the 90s IRC clients will still work just fine.
Again, this is business for the sake of money, not for the sake of actually improving anything, and it's a waste of everyone's time.
> realize that the customers actually wanted something different
There's certainly lots of iteration needed to solve a problem, but that doesn't mean it's unsolvable. If you've never actually experienced a problem solved, it's not because it's not something that's possible, it's because you've been working on making money rather than solving the problem, and only making progress on the problem tangentially.
> need to refactor the code properly to match the latest design fad
That's just stupid. Not only does it not solve problems, it usually isn't even good for business.
> have to rewrite the program in a brand new language...
This is rarely necessary and if it is, the job wasn't done right the first time.
> So, when we say "there's no work to be done", it's a blatant lie.
I get that you disagree, but you should really learn the meaning of the world "lie". And also the meaning of the word "misstatement".
And no, I don't see problems ever being solved, simply because they just expand. I've worked on a couple of free open source projects, showed them off to people, and have got feedback from users of "Hey, it would be cool if [insert-feature-here]". And if I implement that feature, "Ah, thanks...oh, and add this feature too." More and more 'suggestions' pile up, which means more work.
>Just because you've only worked with engineers at startups making shitty products or bloated companies doesn't mean there aren't people doing work right.
You make assumptions about me that you probably shouldn't.
After all, the point of the "application" is to enable a goal to be reached. We can engineer better pens, but that doesn't improve the quality of our writing; but a new tool like a typewriter or word processor does improve it by being more specific to the problem. Following the revolutionary improvement a logarithmic function takes hold; the newest Word only does a little more for most use cases than WordPerfect 5. So the next big leap would not be another word processor, but something that can automate away typing, like an AI-writer, or a cost lowering of other media that requires no typing, like voice and video capture.
I agree with this, but it's not really the point I'm making. I'm saying that the problem you're trying to solve matters. Most often people reinvent the wheel because they aren't trying to solve the problem wheels solve: they're just trying to make money, and if you're reinventing the wheel to make money you're no better than a cheap scammer. Your intentions might be better, because people think capitalism works, and that money means you must be solving a real problem, but that makes little difference to the people whose money you're taking while providing them no value.
I'm not sure that sentence makes any sense: if you find it worthless, that's a dismissal.
That said, the value might be value to them: understanding existing solutions to problems helps inform you for solving novel problems. Their product is worthless, but the experience they gained making it isn't.
> And no, I don't see problems ever being solved, simply because they just expand. I've worked on a couple of free open source projects, showed them off to people, and have got feedback from users of "Hey, it would be cool if [insert-feature-here]". And if I implement that feature, "Ah, thanks...oh, and add this feature too." More and more 'suggestions' pile up, which means more work.
Just because someone suggests something doesn't mean you have to or should do it. This is exactly what I'm talking about with making pointless changes: a lot of the changes people will suggest are pointless.
> You make assumptions about me that you probably shouldn't.
Okay, perhaps you'd rather I said: "I see no indication in what you're saying that you have ever worked with people creating a useful product." Is that any different?
Not to mention that even software developer work is not all that rosy. The open source ecosystem thrives where the work to be done is interesting and brings peer recognition (write a new sexy, fast, featureful framework XYZ), and sucks at the places that require more mundane and less esteemed effort (like QA, testing, documentation, integration).
I'm not sure how possible Black's vision is now because I think there's still scarcity, but it needs to be considered because it's a much better future than the one we're heading toward if we keep pretending that the capitalist work/ownership model is meritocratic. In the future, all jobs can be automated, and we're going to run into very deep issues long before even half are automated.
In the west, resistance towards sacrifice is appears to be mounting. But what is work but an activity that generates value for which you receive a kickback? And there are plenty of activities that are lovable and that generate value. Hence, the movement towards lifestyle jobs and placing passion first is only natural. Entrepreneurs could hold the key here, because they have proven they're capable of generating those jobs, beginning with themselves.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Confucius
That is not to suggest everyone start quoting Marx, give up money, and assume some kind of techno-communist utopia will just fall out.
I think technology and decentralization are key, but we have to do quite a lot more thinking and engineering and integration of viewpoints than most people assume.
(I wonder how much Adam Smith made? I also wonder if he really said the things he represents to us now.)
Is this true? That seems like an very high number.
Besides! People are also terrible at that sort of work, so it's better to automate the job and have the people supervise machines. The machines do the terrible soul-crushing tedious work and the worker oversees the hiccups and glitches. (Machines are pretty lousy supervisors, and are difficult to program supervisory roles in the messy situations a lot of manufacturing happens in.)
And keep in mind that's for a running line or process. I don't think there's room for creativity on carrying out the line's program, but there's endless opportunities for planning and improving the process off-line. People are great at deliberation, planning, and brainstorming. (Too good, some may cynically say :) I.e., you'll never get a better ROI than buying a group of operators lunch and let them rail at you about something that irritates them about a line. And include them in planning/upgrade meetings; they own the line, after all!
And there's the exception of those times where it just makes economic sense to plop a person down for something boring and lonely. For example, the cost of vision control tech is getting ever more affordable and powerful, but it still takes a substantial amount of engineering work to actually install and tune the system for the specific situation it's in; by contrast, people are cheaper in the short-run and can be reasonably effective very quickly. (It's mind boggling when you see a failure that you think, "I could have paid a guy a year's salary to sit in a chair and watch for that one obvious, uncommon failure mode event.")
[0] This is an interesting dichotomy: the workers must own the process they're working on, but they also need to not constantly fiddle with settings. If they're not actively tweaking stuff, then they feel disenfranchised, and if they are constantly messing with stuff then the operator is simulating a randomly tuned PID loop on whatever dials happen to be nearby. The root is that people are generally terrible at figuring out the difference between "normal variation" and "exceptional variation", and tune both. So when Deming talks of knowledge of variation, this has to be balanced by knowledge of psychology.
And that balancing act brings us to this article's contention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl...