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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

The article already mentions this:

> The concept recognises that working without the bother of deadlines or micromanagement can be a lot of fun.

And they're right: building things is indeed fun, it's the pressure of deadlines and handling your boss/clients/etc that can make it stressful. But I don't think you can take that out of a "job" situation; other people paying for your work is the entire point of jobs.

If you are just doing things because you like it without anyone paying you for it, that's called a hobby even if you do the exact same things that you can also get paid for. (There is an obvious parallel here with the "getting paid for FOSS" discussion that pops up regularly on HN)

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Until there's decisive evidence all the pressure, lack of transparency and politics is in fact necessary, there is no reason to believe it is. We've made impressive things and done impressive things without them for the entire history of our species.

Most people really just want "do X, get Y" type of deals. Those deals are becoming increasingly more rare except for minimum wage jobs working you to the bone. Not having to deal with politics has become a luxury instead of rewarding a few individuals to deal with all the politics. Even something as simple as getting a salary indication is already a hassle for Average Joe.

The job market can learn a lot from game design and gamification, but the guys at the top seem insistent on believing they know better than decades of research.

It seems relevant that all the "chore" games mentioned seem to be single player games where at most you compete against a few computer players that don't mind losing. In almost every job you will be playing multiplayer, and competing for scarce resources like promotions, money and power. The pressure, lack of transparency and politics stem from the fact that people in the workplace are usually interested in furthering their career over time and (except for the most rockety of rocket ships) can only get that if some of their colleagues don't.

Even "do X, get Y" type of deals are a threat, since the amount of Y is finite and the more that goes to others, the less that goes to you. It gets even worse when you take into account that people can lie. Someone might only be pretending to be happy "doing X" for the rest of their lives and will actually stab their coworkers in the back for a promotion. The guys at the top are definitely not unaware of this dynamic.

I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology in general but if we think about prehistory a lot of work was doing stuff that had deadlines but you could easily understand what needed to be done. You have to go out and collect a bunch of nuts and berries, and there's a deadline because you'll starve if you don't get the food, but you know the food is out there and it's just a matter of getting it. Your ancestors have lived off food from this land for thousands of years, you know you will too. Similarly for simple crafting, you need to make the clothing or the clay pot but there's no barrier to doing it, you just have to do it. In these cases you could also have a boss, that is, some person with authority directing and judging you, but it's someone you know and someone whose role you will inevitably fill.

I think the key difference in the modern world is that success is not guaranteed, for reasons that may be well out of your control, and failure is scary with unknown consequences. We can imagine a world with pretty much the same jobs and the same work, but with more security removing the intense stress people feel.

Success wasn't guaranteed in the ancient world either. Even if you were cultivating crops, a drought you couldn't control could wipe out your crops. Or baddies could invade and steal your stuff and kill your people en masse.

Overall, we have way more security than the ancient world did. Droughts are still a problem as the western US has been seeing, but at least we're at a point today where it just means food prices go up rather than food vanishing entirely and requiring migration to other countries or something.

As for stress, largely European workers don't seem to feel the pressures that American workers do, which probably boils down to in part a mix of higher taxes leading to better safety nets as well as generally much more vacation time from work. Also politics in European countries generally isn't as polarized, though by no means is it perfect.

Farming as a necessity didn't happen until late prehistory and early history. Before that people hunted, fished or foraged for their daily food. They had nothing worth stealing or killing for or that couldn't be rebuilt quickly after an earthquake or other disaster. In the worst case they could just move a few miles away. Dying from a drought wiping out your crops or from being attacked by raiders from the mountains or from a warlord or pharaoh that claimed to rule over you didn't happen until later. Even then your own life was still simple to understand: being a farmer or shepherd or what have you.

I don't mean to say this was all perfect, but instead that when we talk about the stress of modern jobs, we should go beyond saying no one likes deadlines or bosses, because the real problem is the, for some people literally daily, uncertainty.

Oh, you might notice that I never mentioned a "job", only "work". Perhaps the concept of "job" is the friction that needs to be eliminated.

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