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Comment by s73ver_ | Hacker News Reader

This narrative that only engineers deserve to have interesting and fulfilling jobs needs to end. It's nothing but elitism, and adding the "#firstworldproblems" doesn't do anything to help your cause.

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Non-engineers deserve fulfilling work as well, but their skillset - and hence their ability to find such work - is being automated away.

In this specific case - was it even possible to find fulfilling work in HR in the first place? It's hard to sympathize with the author holding Google to an impossible standard.

>>This narrative that only engineers deserve to have interesting and fulfilling jobs needs to end.

You are largely limited by what scope your professions ecosystem has to offer. If you are an accountant, the last time you have learned anything exciting or read something serious about your area of academic training is way back in college. Beyond this your job essentially is a ritual, much of which is automated incrementally every few months.

Programmers are in many ways lucky, that we are in an ecosystem that offers chances for continuous learning, making incremental steps in success and failures, and by the sheer volume of it offering a degree of success. All rapidly growing fields are that way. At one point it was Electronics, and before that and for a few centuries it was mechanical engineering. Tomorrow it might be something else, the trick is to know in time and move on.

You will be surprised that even professions like Medicine get very boring, monotonous and don't pay well over time. I know a doctor among my extended family, who was a very brilliant dynamic man, also very creative. But over years has seems to seen enormous erosion in overall perception in life. It gets very hard to keep your spark alive if for several hours per day in your life you have to be in an ecosystem that tries to purge it.

I read the OP post as "not everyone deserves an interesting and fulfilling job" rather than "only engineers deserve an interesting job"

Neither, I wasn't saying what people deserve, only that so many in this country suffer in far worse jobs, and don't get editorials in the Washington Post about it. My mother worked for decades as a Cashier at Safeway, and before that, as a telephone operator connecting calls at AT&T. Her actual talent: singing, she wanted to be a singer.

By comparison, this HR job was orders of magnitude better. My mom didn't have healthcare provided by her job when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, she had almost no vacation, we lived paycheck to paycheck.

There's no voice given to these people, the truly suffering masses, in the news media. Instead, we hear the suffering of the upper middle class, who has a cushy deskjob, free gourmet food, massages, vacations, bonuses, stock, but finds their job boring. Why are we reading this story in the Washington Post and not the story of the person working 60 hours a week and living at the poverty line?

It's a question of priorities for me, not who deserves what. Every human deserves a fulfilling life, but in the grand scheme of things, the suffering visited on the author of that editorial is one of angst, not basic survival, and he's being given a microphone for grievances of being pampered with benefits.

If a trust fund baby complained he's bored with life because he still has to show up for boring meetings with his trustees, I'm sure we can find some sympathy for his ennui, but first I have to work my way through all the headlines of Puerto Ricans suffering, or those who make my iPhone.

Me too, but they definitely skewed toward "those that deserve an interesting and fulfilling job are engineers".

It's impossible for every job task that needs to be done to always be interesting and fulfilling, even engineering jobs. Sometimes there's dirty work that had to be done that just sucks, and someone has to be paid to do it. My point is, if I advertise a job to clean toilets, don't show up and complain that cleaning toilets is boring. I know its boring, but I have to paid someone to do it, or buy self-cleaning Japanese toilets. I've had coding jobs before that were metaphorical equivalent of toilet cleaning, and I hated them, but sometimes you need to make rent. I did the work, hated it, and then went on to other more interesting things (founded a startup). I didn't bother submitting an editorial to a newspaper on the experience. It just seems self indulgent to me.

Right, but you specifically called out someone as "not having the skills as a SWE."

I didn't mean it in the sense "he is inferior to SWEs", I mean it from the sense that Google is a tech company, and at tech companies, the interesting jobs where new product development happens generally goes to engineers, PMs, product and UI designers.

It would be no different than if I went to work at a Hospital, I'd end up in claims processing or administration probably, and someone could say "he's not a doctor or nurse or medically trained, so of course, he's pushing paper"

To some extent, it's up to you to make your job interesting and fulfilling. If this guy spent 2 years doing HR and it was a grind, then he knew all the pain points and probably how to improve the workflow. Why didn't he take the initiative, get some coworkers together, and try to design a better system rather than wear earplugs eating alone in the cafe?

Google expects and depends on people to take initiative. If my project is not interesting, either I find another team that has a more interesting project, or I invent a project for myself and shop it to cosigners. I'm not supposed to sit here stewing in unhappiness for years waiting for my manager to say "oh, I noticed you aren't being fulfilled. Here's a new project to fulfill you."

It's not that only SWEs matter. Most startups have a technical founder and a non-technical founder. Non-technical skills often matter more than technical ones.

"I didn't mean it in the sense "he is inferior to SWEs","

That may not have been your intent, but that was how it came across.

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