The Riddle of the Well-Paying, Pointless Job (2019)
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This is where the article breaks down for me. This is definitely not what corporations do outside of the executive class.
The norm is attempting to drive pay and wages down as much as possible, sans a few exceptions. I think this is actually how it used to be until sometime in the mid 1980s when financialization took off in earnest and union power started to significantly decline.
EDIT: Here's an anecdote I experienced. When I was younger in college I got a job working nights at a FedEx Office. I did really well there, working full time and it accommodated my hours, and leadership took notice. One day, they pull me aside, and ask how they can help incentivize things. Before I could answer they said "The only rule is it can't be about money. Money is off the table". I told them that if money is off the table, then what are we talking about exactly? They didn't give me a straight answer, only they couldn't increase my wage. This to me is further evidence of how untrue this statement is.
FWIW, to complete the story, I left a short while later, and started working at Apple which lead to one of the most amazing lucky breaks I've ever had in my career
Them: "We want you to be the Global Head of X given how well you've done as the Regional Head"
Me: "Great! Is there more money involved?"
Them: "No, sorry. Budget is tight this year"
Me: "Ok. How about having more people? Someone needs to replace me regionally while I do the Global role."
Them: "Sorry, no additional head count this year."
Me: "Ok. How about more title? I'm a VP and this sounds like Senior VP level."
Them: "Sorry, Senior VP needs minimum 5 direct reports and you will only have 3."
Me: "Then: no, I don't want the role"
Them: "But why not??"
I eventually did take the role farther down the line as I wanted a better title for the resume.
There is no amount of neoliberal salad dressing that you can douse that with to make it more palatable to anyone.
Doing shit because you have no choice but to do it sucks, period.
A friend of mine retired early and spends a lot of time in his workshop building fun things for himself. That is work, but it's not "work" in the way people think of the term.
One project I want to do some time is design and 3D print a model roller coaster, including building a train to travel over it. That's work, but it's not employment.
I used to believe that when I was young, and that's pretty much the argument I made to my dad, who responded that most people would rather stay home, drink beer, have sex, and watch tv.
As I've grown older, I've come over to my dad's side, as I learned that most people don't have a creative bone in their body, have no desire to be productive in any way, and would rather spend their time entertaining themselves and consuming above almost anything else.
At least that's the case in much of the US, which is heading relentlessly towards the world predicted by the movie Idiocracy. Maybe in some other countries it's better.
Plenty of people dream of doing these sinful, consumerist—not manly, Hacker News-productive—things because they are the rewind from work pasttimes; they’re the off-time-from-work things that many people just plain need in order to be able to must the energy for another workday. But the fallacy here is to assume that a reality without work is the same. It clearly isn’t though if these things are used to recuperate from work. What if there was no work to recuperate from? I don’t know if they would do manly HN things like implement yet another JS framework, but they would probably do other things than whatever they do in order to recreate themselves right now.
> most people work stupid jobs because they can't afford there risk of doing what they actually want
Again this projects some kind of strong desire for a specialized low-demand sort of work on the greater population. This is a fantasy.
Work is a vector for people to contribute to society and participate in it, allows them to find validation, to compete (if they so choose). Whether a job is "stupid" is a rationalization that betrays the fact that there is demand for it. At best, it can be unenjoyable, but most people don't "hate" their job. Arguably people have stronger feelings about commute time, which is a greater reflection of faults in city planning.
What a vacuous side-point to make.
But anyway, that is not relevant in the world we have today. Today people are required to work, no other option is given, and if this doesn't satisfy their need of feeling useful, they are just forced to go without and face the desperation that deprivation from a basic need leads to.
Just this revolt of people against pointless job is evidence enough that if people could choose, they would do something different from "work" as we have today. You can argue this is a good thing, but you can't argue it's business as usual.
Isn't life composed almost entirely of this? Cooking, eating, sleeping, using the toilet, taking care of love ones... If every responsibility you have in life is automatically absolutely horrible by nature of being a responsibility, why live?
Secondly, the typical natural pace for the items on your list has peaks and troughs, natural downtime. Many jobs demand full effort for extended periods with not much downtime either on a daily cycle or a longer yearly one. That too we are not very well adapted for, I think.
So you agree that needing to do something doesn't automatically make it unenjoyable then?
> Secondly, the typical natural pace for the items on your list has peaks and troughs, natural downtime. Many jobs demand full effort for extended periods with not much downtime either on a daily cycle or a longer yearly one. That too we are not very well adapted for, I think.
I didn't say all jobs were fun. Most aren't, but not because they need doing. Needing to be done has almost nothing to do with how horrible a job is.
I’m not GP, but I’d say the things we need to do not being enjoyable is a deficiency and problem of the technological system, and not necessarily a solvable one. In a pre-tech world (e.g. 15th century), our needs were directly tied to our happiness due to biological reward circuits.
Ted Kaczynski argues about this point extensively in his books, I recommend esp. Technological Slavery, available free online.
Just because life is bad in absolute terms (?) doesn’t mean that it would not be better without having to work in the modern sense of the word.
Why not? If your argument relies on life being a near uniformly horrible experience, yet you choose to live, aren't you in essence invalidating your own argument?
> Just because life is bad in absolute terms (?) doesn’t mean that it would not be better without having to work in the modern sense of the word.
This isn't a point I tried to make. My point was invalidating the premise that anything that needs doing is automatically bad. That's entirely separate from the idea that more free time might be enjoyable.
So you’re being “Socratic”, to put it politely.
"Work sucks" is great as a relatively common shared experience. It is not, however, a great presumption to carry around as if it's a natural law.
Viable. Thinking that most things in life (that you have to do) sucks is perfectly viable. Plenty of people could be of that opinion.
> "Work sucks" is great as a relatively common shared experience. It is not, however, a great presumption to carry around as if it's a natural law.
The great danger of proposing that something universally sucks is that the chronically happy will get upset. Maybe even unhappy.
I share this opinion. This, again, isn't what I'm arguing against.
I'm arguing against the notion that having to do something means doing it sucks.
Even if I take the most generous possible meaning of the parent be: "If you're being forced to do something, it's because it sucks, otherwise you wouldn't need to be forced."
That's still not true. I had to be forced to exercise, but then I enjoyed exercising. When I was little, I had to be forced to bathe, but once I was in it was hard to get me out because I enjoyed it. I was effectively forced into my current career, but I also enjoy that.
> The great danger of proposing that something universally sucks is that the chronically happy will get upset. Maybe even unhappy.
And the flaw is most often that it does not universally suck. Some people are into getting their testicles stomped on, so be careful throwing around your experiences as a base truth.
No no no. This isn’t what you said.
> > Isn't life composed almost entirely of this? Cooking, eating, sleeping, using the toilet, taking care of love ones... If every responsibility you have in life is automatically absolutely horrible by nature of being a responsibility, why live?
An answer to that could easily be “no reason”. Then where does your argument go? Nowhere.
And could you find a person who has always hated having to take a bath, or their careeer (lol)? Probably.
> And the flaw is most often that it does not universally suck.
Your reply to someone who says that something universally something has the same problem! Yeah, of course things could be all-bad for someone. No kidding. So the “why live” question is useless.
> An answer to that could easily be “no reason”. Then where does your argument go? Nowhere.
Well yeah. Generally, when people's reason for holding a belief or performing and action is "lol idk", that isn't conducive to a continuing discussion. Not because it invalidates anything, but because it's the vocal equivalent of saying nothing at all.
It's fine if you think everything that needs doing is awful by definition. I disagree, and have a counterfactual experience. If that means nothing to you, that's totally fine.
That’s not what I meant. I didn’t explain it properly.
You could easily have no reason to live and yet continue living. I guess I’m gonna be forced to say the s-word: living is something that happens while not living (your question: why live?) takes deliberate action, i.e. suicide. But someone could be terrified of killing themselves.
Thus they have no reason to live, and yet no way to end existence as they know it.
Which is again different from “idk”. They know that they have no reason to live. It’s not a mystery.
If you sit down and do nothing at all for a week you will die, no work required. To continue living takes work. I believe that was my original point. To do anything more than nothing at all requires some reason, be it reptilian drive, fear of death broadly, or otherwise.
In any case, I don't see much value in this line of conversation because it's so far from common reality as to be useless in support of the central claim I disagree with. Most well adjusted people will plainly agree that a lot of necessary things are enjoyable. Some people will say their jobs, which they need to do for money, are enjoyable.
It's really not some crazy deep philosophical idea that necessity equals suffering. We don't need to go ten layers down into some core of human experience to say yes or no. It's just inaccurate, and somewhat hyperbolic, on the face of it.
Now you’re changing the goalpost to “reason”. My god. There’s a reason for everything. But it might still suck. You might try to kill yourself by “doing nothing” (very hard and difficult but okay), and yet (as you say) that survival instinct part of you might kick in and “save yourself”. So does that counter any claims about everything you have to do sucking? Not at all.
Say you get to the point where you are about to starve to death. Then the Survival Instinct kicks in and you get something to eat. Does this prove that, actually, you like living? Not at all! It probably sucked to almost starve to death, it probably sucked to get that sudden fear of dying, and things probably suck now (not close to dying) just like they did before you tried that arduous suicide attempt.
> In any case, I don't see much value in this line of conversation because it's so far from common reality as to be useless in support of the central claim I disagree with. Most well adjusted people will plainly agree that a lot of necessary things are enjoyable. Some people will say their jobs, which they need to do for money, are enjoyable.
I guess suicidal people are famously well-adjusted? Well, some are and yet they didn’t think that life was worth living despite that.
Who cares what “well-adjusted” people think? The only claim that I care about is if it is possible to think that basically everything that you have to do sucks. And it seems like there is.
> It's really not some crazy deep philosophical idea that necessity equals suffering. We don't need to go ten layers down into some core of human experience to say yes or no. It's just inaccurate, and somewhat hyperbolic, on the face of it.
No it is not.
Didn’t Schopenhauer claim that life sucked and that we only lived because of a kind of “will to live”? Maybe our old pal “survival instinct” as well as some others?
If Schopenhauer’s philosophy is so easily refuted, why is he one of the more famous philosophers? Just as a beginner refutation practice.
Come to think of it. Don’t people claim that Schopenhaur was inspired by one of the major world religions?
What goalpost?
> Who cares what “well-adjusted” people think?
I imagine the person claiming universal knowledge of the human condition would care. If well adjusted people are an exception to your rule, it's not a great rule.
> The only claim that I care about is if it is possible to think that basically everything that you have to do suck
Oh, if that's the claim then sure. I thought the claim was "everything you have to do sucks", not "it's possible to believe everything you had to do sucks."
Totally agree then. I've met lots of unhappy people that believe that. 100% true.
Life isn’t worth living, if that’s what you are asking. But there could be reasons to, you know, not intentionally die. Maybe you’re a Catholic for example. Or maybe you just have small children.
I have known one fellow who was given a job as a sort of fake project manager. He was perplexed over why he would be given work and then told not to do much of it, while the real decisions and administration remained with others.
Then he realized it was because this was a consulting company that made its profit from every billable hour he worked.
So, yeah, it happens, but it’s not some grand phenomenon.
What happened during that time is that the gemini twins of technology and bureaucracy continued to layer their shit on top of each other, creating more problems in need of more solutions with more administration to satisfy with each new layer.
The software engineer is one example of a high paying bullshit jobs. No really. As much as you love the job of SWE it is a bullshit job. The problem you are solving is mostly in the hands of gravity, local politics, insane financial machinery, the hubris of a few powerful people. It doesn't mean you can't get good at your job and find it fulfilling along with the other aspects of your life. This is the architecture of your reality and you've basically mastered it, not unlike a level 60 MMO player. Good job!
Most people who read this website are doing bullshit jobs.
That's why, above all else, probably the most important thing you can do is look outside what you do for a living and do some good in the world.
Of course, because software has never been useful to anyone.
Since then, most SWEs doing the automation have moved on to other jobs too, such as the gaming industry. Naturally, offices still need a couple of SWEs to adapt software to changing requirements, but only a fraction of the peak.
The shape of labor is not the same, today, as it was 50 years ago, and the project of technology is not to automate things we were doing 50 years ago. Let's see. 50 years ago my family had a black and white television and a rotary phone. Has telecommunications and media changed at all in the last 50 years which might have created not just new work but dozens and dozens of new industries? Why, yes. Yes that has happened.
You must be pretty sad that the Unabomber is dead, because, like him, you don't see the value of new technology. Okay, that's fine. But it seems like your arugment falls apart for anyone who does appreciate the value of DNA testing, MRI scans (which identified my wife's life threatening condition), the Davinci robotic surgery system (which saved my wife's life), etc.
We are having this conversation on Hacker News. If you read Hacker News, then you are already undermining your back-to-nature street cred, pal.
Anyway, I've never been on a bullshit project. And the reason we hire engineers is because important work needs to be done. For instance, I'm working on a system that brings medical care to impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. No bullshit there. Another client is an insurance software company. You don't think people need insurance? You don't want them to be able to buy it online because "50 years ago" it was perfectly acceptable to use a telephone to call an insurance broker? Another client creates test tools. You think testing software is bullshit?
You have a fluid rhetorical style that speaks on some cleverness. Imagine if you put that cleverness to work on something other than bullshiting about this topic!
The bullshit is not in the fact that we use a web form to buy insurance instead of a rotary phone or telegram or passenger pigeon (RIP), it’s that such a construct exists as insurance. Humans should just be making food, clothing and shelter and spending the rest of the time dancing and making babies.
Of course, that chariot has already left the barn, along with the plow, roads, underfloor heating, glassware, steel, explosives, medicine, computers, networks, etc., etc.
Relative to life as a Serengetti hunter, most of modernity is bullshit. But none of us come from that point of reference. My point of reference tonight is that I'm writing code to automatically create all combinations of symptoms to help me brute force test a system that diagnoses illnesses. Relative to the fact that we want to release next week and we want it to work, this testing needs to be done and so this code needs to be written.
You’re thinking about it wrong. The trick is to do less and less of the shit you don’t like doing as you age, sorry I mean as you gain experience. Leverage your career capital into doing more of the work that fires you up and less of the work that doesn’t.
There’s always things you just “have to” do, but you’d be surprised how many of those are optional. A lot of the stuff that bores you to tears, is boring because nobody cares about it getting done. High chance that nobody will even notice if you don’t.
So this is why the people who've climbed the corporate ladder don't seem to jack shit?
Every time you ask someone a question, they answer. Great! Takes 5 minutes right? What you don’t see are the other 30 people doing the same thing.
I've reached a point now I feel drained after a work day, whether I concentrated a lot or found it boring. And controlling for sleep. For this reason, if something I'm interested requires more overhead, I try to do some early or at least plan and set it up, so that once work is done I can just go through the motions without thinking about it too much.
We all need to make a living, so pick something you're reasonably good at, absolutely do not invest yourself emotionally into it, and use the proceeds to do what you really want to do. Exploit your employer every chance you get, because that is their default approach towards you.
I don't take for granted that this is not common, but it is possible. I can earnestly say I like what I do
I certainly understand and can empathize with being jaded about corporate greed, but I don't follow your reasoning on this one. It implies the only jobs that are not pointless are those that don't generate profit?
If you pressed a red button all day knowing that it would provide value or save lives, it would still "feel" meaningless.
If anything, I see profit as a signal that what I'm doing isn't pointless, by virtue of people willingness to pay for it.
> “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
If work was enjoyable, and their bills were still getting paid.
Can we stop pretending that the overwhelming majority of people aren't working because they have to?
But really, money is motivation enough
It's like the musing of a drunken co-worker after too many post-work drinks.
More thinking and editing please, less keyboard-diarrhea!
sadly, in a long career, this never happened to me. most well-run companies are always looking at ways of getting rid of dead wood.
i thought this article was BS, and went on too long.
Your words.
So get a job at a badly run company. Find a huge multinational which works in a wide variety of fields and apply for a job in a department without clear deliverables. Send lots of emails, attend lots of meetings, be friendly to everybody and always look busy. If anybody asks, you're mostly working on a vaguely defined internal project being run out of the Singapore office at the moment.
Sounds like work, which kind of defeats the purpose here.
Glad I took a salary hit and went on to do something I truely enjoy....
I was on an Cloud and Application Security team that was almost essentially a skunk works, but we were a great team and got a lot of good shit done. But then the actual corporate cybersecurity team got their shit together, started enacting and enforcing policies, and took over all our job functions. During this transition, my direct manager quit, and so everyone on the team was reporting to his manager, who really didn't know what the team did.
At that point, there was basically nothing for us to do, working for a manager that didn't know what we should be doing either way. But we still had to appear to be doing something.
Shortly into this, our best two people left, and about a year later, I left as well. All of us for the same reason: Security often has interesting work to do, and we had none of it anymore. Our salaries were also wayyyy below market, but that's another thing entirely.
1 - When any job becomes truly pointless it ceases to exist.
2 - I look forward to what jobs we'll have when these service jobs have been mostly automated away