It is time to recognize the major issue of 'boreout' at work | Hacker News Reader

It is time to recognize the major issue of 'boreout' at work

westerninvestor.com

29 pointsvoisin8 comments

This is unsurprising

> Other studies, notably a study of Swiss workers done in 2021, found that worker boredom was worse in situations where job autonomy was lower

I have had plenty of jobs where my tasks were mostly working through the red tape. When your job isn't to solve business problems but to fill out other people's forms it does demotivate.

What does red tape have to do with autonomy? Lack of autonomy means you work at the kind of place where you'll get a dressing down for fixing a GitHub issue that wasn't specifically assigned to you by your product manager. That's the only way someone could possibly get bored on the job. When every action has to be dictated and the dictator is lazy.

You appear to be conflating an example with the only example of lacking autonomy.

> the right or condition of self-government.

I agree that getting a dressing down for not having a ticket assigned is an example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tape

> Red tape is an idiom referring to regulations or conformity to formal rules or standards which are claimed to be excessive, rigid or redundant, or to bureaucracy claimed to hinder or prevent action or decision-making.

I believe red tape also falls into that definition. It's fine if you disagree.

Majority of agile setups feature lack of autonomy.

Then you see it often on here how therefore Agile sucks.

When people then point out that autonomy is a requirement they throw the "no true Scotsman" argument around, rather than see the flaws in their process.

That feels like the alienation of labour that Marx wrote about.

The hardest part of my previous jobs were what you describe. Either a lack of autonomy, or work whose output is so abstract as to seem pointless. I had a job where I literally couldn't explain what I was doing. Another had me pretend to work on a project that was already cancelled.

Now I'm self-employed and my job feels a lot more meaningful. It moves a needle somewhere.

> Another had me pretend to work on a project that was already cancelled.

I've had to do that in the past, knowing that a projects cancelled but having to continue. In my case it was because we were doing work for a vendor, so we had to wrap everything up to reach the checkpoint and get paid.

Soul sucking knowing that it is just getting it to a state that it can get shelved rather than everyone agreeing to just stop.

Once again it turns out that good management is important. Give people direction and the tools they need to do their work well and you get a lot more productivity!

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