What is a “Good Job?”
conversableeconomist.blogspot.com
conversableeconomist.blogspot.com
Training speaks to what employers are 'buying' when they hire someone and engages with other trending topics in econ research: the changing skills-mix of jobs (i.e. the weakness in the middle), the employability of college grads as the metric for the worth of a degree.
A positive take on this is that free resources make it easier for people to self-train so jobs don't have to train you. The negative take is that 'labor alone' is of declining value and we're increasingly employing people for their 'information content', not their rote performance.
http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...
In contrast doctors and lawyers don't even have this kind of memory load. For example, medical records are mostly sufficient; we often understand if a doctor has to look things up; however, if a programmer doesn't remember how a program is structured, things get difficult quickly.
Lawyers take their work home with them every day. They never have any rest at all, because they have to respect certain deadlines and they have multiple clients breathing down their neck. Next to that, there's also the question of morality: Sometimes a lawyer has to make immoral decisions to get the right outcome. This is especially true in penal law.
Doctors have to face the consequences of wrong diagnoses. If one of the patients dies because of an error the doctor made, you can be damn sure he'll carry that mistake with him for the rest of his life. Not only morally, but also legally and it could be a possible career killer.
Programmers have it the easiest, they only have computational problems to worry about. While programming is without a doubt strenuous on the mind, it is by no means affected by morality and therefore incomparable to practicing law or medicine.
His paraphrased response:
I appreciate it, but I'm in the office regardless so I'd rather keep on top of all my clients' correspondence at the same time.
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I occasionally have a cigar with a coworker of his in another department (how we got the referral originally), and his plans the last time we were out at approximately 4 PM on a Sunday was to head back for the office "for a quick 5 or 6 hours."
They're both newish associates so I'm sure they're trying to make an impression, but the hours attorneys put in is often staggering, especially at the lower end of the corporate ladder.
The mental burden of knowing there's an opportunity cost for going to the bathroom or taking a 15 minute break during the day looks so terribly draining.
Our associate billed $185/hr. His boss (Partner and in charge of the biz group) billed $345/hr.
The firm is not going into the red because the associate goes #2 and doesn't bill the time. And at 90+ hours a week their future at the firm is not going to hinge on that amount of billed time.
Part of doing tough complex things is worrying if you are making the right decisions. If a patient dies inappropriately, that can be career ending. If my server crumbles or leaks private information, that too can be career ending.
But if you had a database of 1000s of people with STDs, how many lives might get destroyed if that got hacked?
an immediate family member is a prosecutor. as a software engineer who loves hard problems and agree that few professions rival the mental strain of holding that problem in memory, but i can attest as to just how strong the parallels are between trial prep and architecting complex technical solutions. I can't speak for doctors, but the mental models required for non-trivial jury trails could rival those i've encountered during my career as a software engineer. one could probably even argue the analogy the lead prosecutor is a backed developer building system of arguments for logic meeting definition of law, ensuring redundancy and failover in event of error condition (new evidence, evidence struck, motions, etc), all while playing role of pm+designer creating the interface delivering accessible content in a way meaningful to the user (jury). again, i can't comment on other professions, but capital cases were the closest thing i've seen to hours/stress/effort of early stage start ups--with the difference being failure meant you live knowing a murder/rapist walked free, instead of a shitty exit or returning to a "boring" enterprise job.
and then there's the imprint left once the project/trial is over. over the years, i've noticed that interesting/hard problems (the ones we dream about) tend to leave an imprint on my thought process on how i view complexity (e.g. the world). except for us developers/engineers, we just carry some vignette of organizing complexity, instead of being haunted by nauseatingly detailed accounts of how some asshole murdered his wife and children, or other sickening acts that prosecutors, cops, journalists, etc are required to become immersed into the details of.
now that i think about this, it's almost funny how easy we engineers/developers/designers have it.
It wasn't that I wanted to do it, but I had to have a job to support my family. Needless to say, I quickly found another job.
But how long does each case take?
> Doctors have to face the consequences of wrong diagnoses.
I found this:
> Medical misconduct is defined as behavior that deviates from duty by a healthcare professional. Examples of medical misconduct include, but are not limited to the following: practicing as a healthcare professional fraudulently, practicing with gross incompetence or medical negligence, practicing while impaired by alcohol, drugs, physical or mental disability, being convicted of a crime, filing a false report; guaranteeing that treatment will result in a cure, refusing to provide services because of race, creed, color or national origin, performing services that are not authorized by the patient, harassing, abusing or intimidating a patient, ordering excessive tests, and/or abandoning or neglecting a patient in need of immediate care.
It is a bit more subtle, but it seems that if doctors just follow the book, they will be fine.
My personal experience with doctors is that they always have to look my data up. Every time I visit one, I hear: "let's see what case we have here" (and looks at computer screen).
2. Medical misconduct as defined by law, with some examples included (a non-exhaustive list). What is your point with this? That article is purportedly vague so that medical accidents could be judged on a case by case basis. In other words, if the opposition has a good lawyer, you're screwed.
And you're forgetting the point of my post. Even if the doctor didn't do anything wrong legally, he'll still be haunted by the loss of a patient if he could have prevented it somehow.
If a doctor doesn't feel event the slightest twinge of regret or "what if..." when a patient dies, even if they did everything perfect, they very well may be a sociopath.
I don't think they should be wracked with guilt for years, not at all. But we're not just talking about legal repercussions. The cognitive load of someone dying while directly under your care has to be staggering.
My father was a career ER doctor. He would not do it again because of the toll it took on him. It was very hard and demanding work physically and mentally and spiritually. Treated patients did get brought home as a load on the memory in his mind.
Even now, over 10 years into retirement, there's a weight.
But the point I want to make is that while I agree that many software engineering jobs are like this, they don't have to be: A well-structured agile project where tasks are properly broken down into sufficiently small units, you can generally achieve a kind of closure at the end of the day (tests are green, code is pushed, task is marked complete) that would allow you to reduce the memory load significantly.
It's no small feat to successfully structure a process like this, and it definitely requires the support of the wider org, but know it can be done, because I worked on one. It was super-pleasant and rewarding.
plus think about how hard it is to program for edge cases (vs well-defined inputs). In a legal document, clauses are only 'executed' in edge cases.
wacky right?
This term is too broad and so is misleading.
There will indeed be programmers in the future but, more to the point, you will not be one owing to ageism.
For example, if you hire a guy that doesn't know your JavaScript framework and build system, is that distinguishable from hiring a guy that doesn't even know JavaScript? From what I've seen, introducing an experienced engineer to an alien framework is just as difficult as hopping languages (that being, specifically: measurable, but not terrible, and as such you shouldn't discount someone for one but not the other).
> I certainly don't expect that we will ever reach a future in which jobs will be all about deep internal fulfillment, with a few giggles and some comradeship tossed in. As my wife and I remind each other when one of us has an especially tough day at the office, there's a reason they call it "work," which is closely related to the reason that you get paid for doing it.
Good. So let's just get rid of work to the greatest degree we can. What is even the point of increasing productivity if it won't buy us more stuff for less work?
To your point, what can be done? On one hand, some argue that we've come a long way from Russel's era, and that work and life is much better off and closer to his philosophical goal than we credit. On the other hand, this discussion clearly shows a desire to look for the essense of what make a job "good."
[1]http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/?si...
- Can't even work as many hours as they want to
- Don't get benefits typically associated with full-time work (healthcare, retirement plans, etc.)
- Are stuck in low-end service jobs even though they are qualified for higher-end jobs
- Are doing contract work even though they want the stability of full-time work
Engagement in a job becomes important after a certain point, but we're still a long way from there outside of the SV employment bubble.
Which seem to be few and far between, and in the US completely dependent on having a good manager. Nothing else to say or add. This changes everything for me, my family life, my happiness and my productivity.
There's a good book about how to prevent managers from walking all over you: http://www.amazon.com/The-Clean-Coder-Professional-Programme...
The opening chapters describe programmers in crunch time, and compare them with the lawyers at the same company who leave promptly on time. The rest of the book discusses how to achieve that for yourself.
Usually the scenario that other people lay out is that you have to stay late and put in that time your first year or two. Then you can go back to being a 9-5 (though in many orgs this shifts from 11-7 or 10-6 to give the illusion you're working later rather than walking out at 5PM).
I disagree with this because then you set a standard that you'll stay late, but on the other hand you can't be let go if you have mouths to feed.
I'm more than strong enough to walk out the door, but the thing I think you're missing is that it's usually NOT the manager at fault here. It's the other employees. They encourage this culture, either brainwashed or hoping it will get them ahead.
American work culture is completely upside down. Bottom line is that the org and laws shouldn't force you to stand for yourself in this regard. Every 1 minute of overtime should result in severe penalties for anyone who has any employee go over. So much that they're hustling you out the door at 5PM. That's how it is in other places, like France. A place I've both lived and worked.
tbh it doesn't really matter to me who gets the blame....the only thing I care about is what I can do to fix the situation.
A job that doesn't reward you well or doesn't provide you with meaningful work will hardly ever be considered a long term "good job".
This does not motivate me at all. I actually always forget about it until I receive the amount each year.
This is seems counter intuitive but I work in such a big company that I don't even understand which profits are taken into account to calculate it. Is it the global profit of my division ? or all divisions for my country or region ? (I actually believe this is the latter).
So some year you deliver a project late and you get a big bonus and the next year, you are exceptionally on time and don't get anything.
I am sure it works for smaller company where you can measure very directly the effect of your contribution, but past a certain point, it is hard to measure or understand your impact.
Money is an extrinsic motivator. Interest and enjoyment are intrinsic motivators. There are healty benefits linked to working a job based on high intrinsic motivation. Using extrinsic motivators could actually harm intrinsic motivation in the long run too.
Long story short, rewards based on money may not increase but actually reduce work enjoyment. Though, if you enjoy making money in of itself...
Paternalist employers try to subvert this common sense idea and add cheap perks to motivate employees. Of course most times it doesn't work.
That is demonstrably false.
> The fact that there is little evidence to show that money motivates us, and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it actually demotivates us, supports the idea that that there may be hidden costs associated with rewards.
In contrast, my bonuses are on the order of 2-5%. I appreciate them, but they're so small overall and so removed from my actual efforts in the company that it mostly comes across as noise in my budget.
I do not necessarily have a direct impact on the global profits because the product I am working on is lost in a sea of other products, but for "my product" I definitely have an impact on the quality of device, and ultimately the patient.
if my situation changed and i didn't need it any longer, no way in hell would i keep my job. my job is good, in that the circumstances are such that the alternative is worse, but that's a pretty weak definition of good. it's a necessary evil. of course i'd rather keep the product of my own labor, and i'd rather have the freedom to use my time without suffering due to a lack of money. what's there to feel sorry for about that?
- The pay is in-line with industry standard. - Time seems to fly away when you are working (aka not bored). - When you leave the job, you leave the job as a better person and with better knowledge/skillset.