People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues | Hacker News Reader

People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues

medicalxpress.com

65 pointsNPV_Computers28 comments

My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology:

If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues.

Dunno. Just musing.

It's only a tautology if "creating work" is all about delegating part of my own work, and there's limited amounts of interesting, engaging work to go around.

However, if I am in a managerial position, my own work can be quite different from my reports'. What this article is saying is that, if my work as a manager is boring and not very engaging, I'll give my engineers boring, unengaging work too, irrespectively of how interesting their work could be.

> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting and unknown ending in a flop.

Thinking about it, same here. If there's some tedious but critical 10-min sysops task, I'll usually just do it rather than try to pawn it off on a junior coworker. But if we want to do something exciting, such as set up a new piece of flashy tech for evaluation, that will usually fall to a junior resource to 1) help them grow and learn and 2) because if they fail spectacularly there was nothing important riding on it.

>If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

This assumes the work available for those with boring jobs to dispense to others is of the same kind those with boring jobs do. There's absolutely no reason that this should be the case.

There could be tons of "interesting work available" at a job people with boring jobs work, just not in their specialty. And they can still create boring tasks for others, even if those others work in departments that allow for interesting work available.

Second, some people like boring tasks and hate change, excitement, anything unpredictable, etc. So it's not even a rule that "nobody is going to do the boring work first".

I think I'd need more concrete examples to understand this study. What kind of dull work? What dull work was created and what could have changed to make it better?

If the available work is to dig a hole or file papers into a cabinet, how can you possibly make that better?

What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.

"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker said.

That begs the question - it assumes that the work in the world needs innovative, agile, and high-performing employees, when maybe the world needs a bunch of people that will dig in and do the stuff that needs to be done.

> Discipline: The ability to repeat a boring thing over and over again.

The source is somewhat amusingly The Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness but it's true.

The things I have to be disciplined about are the things that are boring, if they aren't boring then I don't have to make myself do them/remember to do them.

Trend-line wise there is a point - the boringness is often a symptom of repetitiveness which hints at a task that is easier to automate.

If you try to beat automation at repetitive tasks chances are you are going to die with a hammer in your hand.

Such work can exist only because sufficiently innovative/agile/high-performing software engineers have not yet been tasked with automating it.

Laundry.

The washing machine is the canonical labor-saving device that changed society by freeing women from a large chunk of their tedious manual work.

Laundry is still a repetitive and mind-numbing task - how are software engineers going to improve it further? Currently it's mostly outsourcing (commercially or to a spouse or parent)

And regarding the time savings of the washing machine - yes, and no. The washing machine has allowed us to use much more and much cleaner clothing. See https://genevahistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

"Most ordinary people had only a few clothes: an everyday outfit or two—a dress for women/girls and a suit or coat and trousers for boys and men—and a Sunday “best” outfit. Wealthy people might have a few more outfits, but not as many as most people today.  Washing clothes was very hard work and dresses and coats would not be washed very often. Instead, undergarments would be washed regularly. Collars and cuffs for both shirts and dresses were removable, so they could be changed for fashion or for cleanliness. Girls and little children wore large aprons or pinafores that covered their dresses to keep them clean. Men’s shirts and women’s chemises or shifts were washed regularly." Even the pieces that were washed "regularly" were not washed "daily" - much less multiple sets of clothing per day (e.g., gym clothes, work clothes, evening wear, pajamas, ...)

More often than not, it's cleaning up someone else's mess.

Dull, tedious, repetitive work is also typically work that is subject to high error rates due to priming effects, normalization of non-errors / errors, and other psychological factors. A good example is TSA’s effectiveness at finding guns

Isn't the dull, repetitive work the kind that AI and automation will liberate us from?

That viewpoint just sounds like martyr complex to me. Yes, boring stuff exists and must get done, but that doesn't mean we can't strive to reduce it, and hopefully make it a small part of our lives and even our jobs.

Liking what you do for at least half of your waking hours is a pretty significant input to happiness. You may as well ask why people try to find jobs that pay them well, or partners whose company they enjoy.

Software engineers with the right personality have a better chance of genuinely enjoying our work than the average person, so it’s on our minds. Coding isn’t something you automatically have to drag yourself through kicking and screaming like some other jobs.

And as part of building the life you want, you're going to have to do things you don't like a lot of the time. Sacrifice is almost always necessary to achieve one's goals, that's just part of how the universe works.

I guess what I'm saying is that, just because you don't like doing it doesn't mean it isn't contributing to your satisfaction with life in the aggregate.

For a lot of people in Silicon Valley, the sacrifice was working one's ass off in school to become a competitive candidate. The BigCo job is the reward.

Or for people in startups, the sacrifice is mediocre cash compensation and long hours, with the reward being a higher-than-usual probability of striking it rich.

Those of us who grow up with an affinity for software development have won the game, so to speak: we don't really have to sacrifice just to make a living.

Conversely, why does every job have to be dull and repetitive? Somebody has to do the brilliant stuff too. You'd think that you could spread out the brilliant stuff so that every worker gets a little bit of it, but that doesn't seem to happen. Instead, the fun work ends up concentrating itself among a tiny handful of workers.

>"It seems that people have a natural view that putting together a group of highly repetitive and similar tasks into a job is the most efficient way to organise work, but previous research suggests this view is rarely correct," Professor Parker said.

Spot on. Stop ignoring human psychology. There is a big importance in specialization and separation of tasks. We know that since the industrial revolution. But especially in knowledge jobs boredom can lead to less than stellar quality, which again brings down efficiency.

Humans are animals that evolved in a highly complex environment. To keep people engaged their task should be varied and contain some newness every now and then.

Specialization has driven us into these niches where most people don't perform as well as they could. Jack of all trades master of none is the usual adage. I see the people in software who know something about the OS, something about drivers, something about application software, something about web design, usually designing the best software. They are masters of a lot of categories, because they are jacks of all trades. Because a lot of knowledge in one category leads you to be better in another category.

In management speak synergy.

Each task doesn't even have to be particularly exciting. But let people choose from your boring tasks. Maybe something you find boring they find exciting. And even if they do, don't say they have to do this forever. Maybe they find it exciting because they didn't do it before.

Alternative Title: Most jobs, even newly created jobs, aren't exciting.

The website in the OP made me think of 'Mr Waturi' in the film 'Joe vs The Volcano' :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUB3tQs80

(Can be good film to watch after a shit day at the office...)

Is this the contrapositive:

People who don't practice being fun and having fun at work won't make work that's fun.

Sounds reasonable.

Explains exactly why I think managers who don't code have no business telling a capable coder what to do. So many software companies underestimate the amount of creativity that is needed for a successful programmer, and they insist on structuring their hierarchy with the top people not knowing how to code but have learned how to navigate the hierarchical structure. This obviously leads to work flowing down from those who don't have the knowledge to create what it is that they are commanding others to do. tl;dr: if you can't code you shouldn't be in a leadership position (in a software company) that affects the project directly. Who would that person be leading? Like a head chef that doesn't know how to cook.

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