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Comment by maccio92 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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