What Makes Work Meaningful or Meaningless
sloanreview.mit.edu
sloanreview.mit.edu
Spolsky:
> Administrators [code name for managers] aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions.
http://avc.com/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-from-j...
Using your system, as a manager, if you're not above 1 you should work hard to never ever go below 1.
That's the point Spolsky is making, I think. It's a fair point and rooted in a lot of evidence, but somewhat limited, because as you say, there can be great managers whose experience and insight multiply their potential.
And only at 1.2 for short periods of time until the higher-ups are able to reign such out-of-control efficiency in.
And as funny as it sounds in contrast to the 'Murican Movie Manager, from that kind of attitude even shy people can gain power. When you work for others well being they are more eager to consider your opinion and follow your guidance as well. (That just because of that second quote making it sound like the manager should be the engineers "bXXch", it's not the case)
That's why I hate things like hackathons. We need people to think of us as engineers rather than tinkerers, and the labels we accept aren't helping.
All they see is a lightswitch that works and a phone that runs apps and makes calls.
They don't know anything about distributing power across a national power grid while minimising losses and keeping phases synchronised, metallurgy, ceramics, plastics and organic chemistry, industrial injection moulding and machining, data compression and coding, compiler design, radio frequency and microwave circuit design, microprocessor manufacture, automated assembly, adaptive digital signal processing, optoelectronics and display technologies, networking protocols - and so on.
For them it all just works, even if the software is often a bit crap.
99% of the complexity is invisible, so they have no clue it's there - and you can't value something you don't know about.
The only way I found to handle that is trying to be very careful when I feel 100% sure something is as I think it is. But sometimes you are so sure of yourself that you don't even realise that.
For the former quote I've found there to be hope, since you can engage the "it's so easy, I see how you can do it" the same way _we_ engage ourselves, making them deconstruct the problem to the end of running them into a common design issue (in my sample it was asking the PM to reason about long-horizon backfill and replay logic); it can even have a positive outcome if you explain it such that the PM gains trust in your insight, and may help to build some of that respect.
In the latter, when there is simply as you say a LACK of respect, and not just a... shall we say communication gap? Those are the situations I've seen some of the more painful PM/dev interactions and I have far less helpful advice, unfortunately, since I'll admit that the problem then resonates, as eng loses respect for PMs who don't respect them and etc etc.
Sorry for the ramble, this has been a topic I've thought about a lot WRT "implicit problems in scaling a company past a certain size"
That's my experience too. But your parenthetical remark is a very important point!
I've been in plenty of situations where an engineer cared too much about delivering 'good' work by their own definition of good, when clearly it clearly wasn't 'good' for the company/team/product. In fact, I've been that engineer myself a few times, where only in hindsight I realized that I didn't see the bigger picture.
e.g.: "cache:http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-makes-work-meaningfu... (without the quotes)
They don't stick around and dig for it. That's why you want people who have other options to work for you, and when you work for others, you want to know you could be doing something else. Meaning is defined from the choices we exercise. Why here instead of there is what is meaningful.
No one can tell you how to live your life. Similarly, no one can tell you why you're doing your job. You need to figure that out yourself, and seeking it should involve finding other jobs, not just repeatedly digging at the same spot.
Good teachers and good managers alike can help you immensely if you already have your reasons. They provide a synergy. And for that, they need you to be inspired and be passionate. Synergy fails if either is void. So if you show up inspired to a boss who isn't, that's a sign you may need to revisit your choices also.
Eventually meaning always comes. Maybe it finds us. But if you want to make the most of it, never wait and never settle. All one needs is the courage to move on.
I would attribute blame to a manager who is a void however.
And then I feel sad, because all the effort to seek that personal connect with work at my current workplace, have been taken away by a disconnected and immature middle management, which only works for meeting the goals and deadlines given to them...
People in power almost always try to increase their level of control, essentially centralizing the power structure of the entity. At some point of time the entity is completely inefficient and collapses under its own weight (rules, bureaucracy).
You can see this everywhere where power can be centralized: companies, organizations, nation states.
Ironically, successful leaders these days often do the opposite of leading, they decentralize, making the company much more efficient (assuming there are still sub-entities that can/want to be efficient).
It is quite analogue to how code becomes bloated - this might be an effect of some programmers believing that this is their work security - but more often than that the programmers hate it. Bureaucratic rules are quite literally the code that the administration runs - and we need them, it is just very hard to understand them all.
A study that interviews 135 people? And this is seen as significant? It seems to me saying something like "we tried this on 150 people, and we saw that 60% of them X" proves nothing because of how small the sample size is.
what I am missing?
The sample size you need depends on the strength of the effect in the population. For instance you wouldn't need a sample size of thousands to conclude cyanide capsules were not a safe, effective remedy for tooth ache. Or that people don't like being bullied at work.
This work wasn't statistically focussed, so it's not as crucial, but if you interview 135 people under a good sampling scheme and get very consistent responses about what matters to them it can't be dismissed as meaningless out of hand.
I would expect plenty of room for change in our understanding of meaningfulness as more work is done though...
When you're building an app, a good way to spot problems is to run a user experience test. Sit down at the side of random potential users for half an hour each. Observe how they're using the product, and let them walk you through what they were thinking when you find it interesting.
Past a certain number of users, major UI problems will surface again and again from test to test, alongside marginal - and arguably less important - tidbits of information that let you identify new UI issues. When you reach that stage you know you should stop. It kicks in at around a half dozen users in my experience - and is very rarely over a dozen.
As small as the sample was, I think it was quite relatable.
Also a large amount of studies are done to show a potential area for further research which will involve larger populations when they are approved.
This is where lay and academic understandings of statistics diverge dramatically. There's far more discussion of how to ensure an appropriate sample size (determined generally by the independent variables you're tracking and how you plan on subsetting the sample) and tests for randomness. Which is why the time to call a statistician into your study isn't when you want to run algos over your data but before you even begin collecting data.
Oh, and large sample statistics is a thing. You need to have a minimum number of observations before large-sample methods are generally considered accurate, described by n.
n = 30.
If (and that's a crucial if) your sampling is random, you can draw tremendous inferences from small datasets. This is why many national-level polls rely on samples of about 300 individuals. The key isn't the size, it's making sure those 300 are really, really random. Goof that and you end up with a "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline. Or Trump as the GOP candidate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman
(Both owe a lot to how phones are used -- in 1948, landline phones were still a sufficient luxury item that it skewed phone-polling methods. In 2016, cord-cutting is having similar effects.)
I had the interesting experience a while ago of looking at data as it came in generating an estimate of a population of 2.2 billion individuals, based on a sample of 50,000 (Google+ activity, relying on a sitemap file of profiles, where sitemaps are restricted to 50,000 entries per). Well within the first 100 records, the long-term trend of ~8-10% (my final value was 9%) of profiles showing any public activity was established. Given web polling and delays introduced (I tried, and succeeded, to avoid tripping any bot-denial mechanisms), the data rolled in slowly, so I simply set my stats script to loop over the incoming files every minute or so.
Somewhere in my testing I also ran a set of resamplings based on the data I'd ingested -- taking small sets of data from within the larger one and looking for any wildly anomolous trends. This would have suggested that the sitemap file itself wasn't randomly constructed, but eyeball tests of various aspects (including account age, region, and activity) strongly suggested it was. This spared me some more complex sample-generation.
(My conclusions were independently verified from a much larger sample of 500k profiles by Stone Temple Consulting and Eric Enge, a pretty heartening validation.)
________
Edit to add: another crucial point is that statistical error is governed by sqrt(n) -- SE = 1/sqrt(n). To halve your error, you've got to square your sample size. So if 30 doesn't work for you, you're looking at 900, not 60. Assuming sampling costs increase with n, reducing error gets expensive fast.
And for the pedants, SE is "standard error", as I'm aware.
Yup.
> To halve your error, you've got to square your sample size.
Nope. You've got to multiply it by 4. (It's the 2 that gets squared.) The square root of 1/120 is half that of 1/30.
Doubling (and repeatedly doubling) occurs through doubled powers of 2. So halving = 2^2, quartering = 2^4, reduce to 1/8, 2^6.
So insteady of n = 30, 60, 120, 240 (initial, halve, quarter, eighth), you end up with 30, 120, 480, 1920.
Amazon is a place where intelligent ambition is rewarded with plenty of money, but never used for anything but implementing other people's ideas.
Ideally, your work should fall in the center. If only it was so easy though
[1] http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/61282/1/What%20makes%20work%20meanin...
Does this apply to the feelings about what someone is doing that day, or does it apply to the job as a whole?
Good jobs and good treatment are the exception.
Hierarchies are poor organizational structures.
In Latin there isn't even a word for work, it's just "non leisure" (neg-otium) (I think... it's been a while since I've studied any Latin...)
Work isn't supposed to be fun or meaningful.
Can this be applied to art as well? Isn't the meaning of a work of art the greatest to the artists themselves?
It does give a flutter when other people see meaning in my otherwise meaningless work, though, and I still get giddy when I happen to sell a piece, as I don't sell often. There is some sort of encouragement to be had from others finding meaning in it. Much like getting a better than expected review at work. But I'd do it regardless of outside encouragement.
Like, they won't say, "I found a lot of meaning that time my hard work, blood, sweat, and tears were actually meritocratically rewarded with that large bonus" because it makes them sound near-mode, greedy, overly materialistic, etc.
Instead, they'll say something far-mode, about how they related to the human element of an experience or a coworker or a client, or how their family finally appreciated the deeper meaning in their work.
I'm not sure I really believe that people find work meaning mostly in these far-mode, idealistic things. Rather, I think they want to be seen as someone who values these things because then people will associate good stereotypes with them.
This also helps explain why it's more reflective, episodic, and after-the-fact rationalized to be meaningful, rather than being tied to concrete properties of the work itself.
I think for myself, I do have some moral and ethical baselines that I don't want the byproducts of my labor to violate, like harming others, perpetuating government oppression, wasting resources.
But beyond these things, I don't actually get more or less meaning out of any different topical type of work than some other type.
What does make me feel like work is meaningful is to experience lots and lots of autonomy in my workplace decision making and my approach to solving problems. I also like to feel that I have the freedom to pursue whatever quality standards are pragmatic for the problem, and am not constrained by bureaucracy to pursue inelegant solutions when there's no pragmatic reasons why they actually need to be inelegant (this happens all the time).
After that, I feel meaning at work most when I am given adequate quiet and private physical space and can reach a state of psychological flow.
I could be writing code to process ATM transactions or to cure cancer and I'll feel the same amount of meaning if (a) I can mostly do it my own way within some loose context of the broader team's needs, and (b) I am left alone to actually get work done and I am not interrupted or inundated with an unhealthy, oppressively wide open working space.
For me, these resonated more with the comment in the article that good managers are rarely even mentioned in the context of meaningful work, whereas bad managers are often to blame for work that is not meaningful.
Good managers are invisible geniuses who know how to fade into the backdrop, get out of your way, allow you to make decisions, and do not feel fear that they have to micromanage or create empty superficial artifacts to justify that they are working. They are so, so hard to find, and when you find one, you are so happy that you will give so much loyalty to working for that manager, and forgive so much other crap the company might pull.
I mentioned that in my previous role I'd been in a unique position to work with both customers AND development, and as a result had built a rich toolset for solving customers' problems. Note that this was a company with a small number of high-paying customers, so losing anyone was a big problem. At least enough customers had specifically stated they stayed with my employer as a result of these tools to show that I earned my keep.
I mentioned that making the tools had been my favourite part of that work, and being told by my manager (after making them) that it was a poor use of time the worst. Mind you, I'd been mentioning these things to him for some time and getting "mmhmmm ok" in response. I asked the interviewer "is this a company where somebody with an idea can develop a prototype and try it out without getting approval from three different people?"
The interviewer hemmed and hawed and we got to an awkward silence. I was actually relieved not to have to worry about an offer.
What a fantastic question to ask as a candidate!!
This is true in academia, law, medicine, start-ups, finance, defense research, food innovation, climate science, optimal philanthropy, policy analysis, media, advertising, education, consulting, urban planning, and design.
For most humans, they have near zero chance of earning a living in any way in which this isn't true.
So even though many of us desire the bulk of our labor (the huge chunk utilized to earn a living via a job) to contribute to "something that matters" the option literally fails to exist.
Worse is that some of the areas that are bad on the low-risk, incremental bullshit projects and politics, such as working for NGOs or non-profits that supposedly "have an impact," often rob you of everything. Not only do you end up having the same non-impact as if you had worked at that marketing job, but also you are paid far less, and the other working conditions are worse.
I haven't yet heard of anything apart from some rare, niche aspects of things like professional athletics, professional music, professional acting, etc., that offer someone the chance to explore work that they believe is meaningful. And even then you have to usually hoof it doing bullshit and/or low-paying stuff for decades before reaching a point in which you can explore what you find meaningful.
I'm not saying anyone else should see it like I do, but my feeling is that in terms of a constructive impact on the world at large, I need to first recognize that I'm just one of 7 billion and pretty much nothing I do will matter. Heck, pretty much nothing Bill Gates does will matter in even just 50-100 years. So then I should look for tiny, marginal ways to explore meaning, and probably if I let my mode of employment just be about gaining capital, then outside of work I might be able to do more that at least feels meaningful to me.
That's just how I see it though. I am certain others have found many different approaches that work for different people.
I feel like this book discusses exactly the kind of Good Manager you are talking about: https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp...
On a less serious note, I really hope that for Turn the Ship Around! they went on a multi-city lecture tour and got Gloria Estefan to perform "Turn the Beat Around" but with "Ship" inserted, as the book's author ran up and down the aisles wearing chinos and a button down and high-fiving attendees. Then, slightly out of breath, he gets to the stage and the music awkwardly and abruptly cuts out, and he's like "Woo! Hello Peoria!! Are you ready to turn the ship around!!"
I think for myself, I do have some moral and ethical baselines that I don't want the byproducts of my labor to violate, like harming others, perpetuating government oppression, wasting resources.
I'm only a few years into my career but I can envision that being a more realistic baseline for jobs than trying to find something world-changing in vain. I think I also want the domain to also be interesting, and that's a loose enough criterion not to be impossible to find.