I get paid great money to play with computers. My father was an elementary school janitor.
"Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
Or next round of funding.
> Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
Ditto on working in a startup.
This is literally my company. 8 bosses - all of who spending their entire existence in monitoring and PIPing engineers instead of using their authority to deliver constructive outcomes for the business.
There is zero growth mentality among them (except headcount growth for their empires). Can't even imagine how to steer their org to produce value.
Why the f will a IC care more about the success of the business than the 8 destructive bosses above them?
Working with my wife now to get her to start a business so we can keep my salary to pay the bills but focus on the business so our effort can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.
If you, however, had any unaccounted for blocks (i.e. not 8h per day), it'd be brought up in your appraisal, and on one occasion when we were told we had to work overtime one evening (about 4 hours) but wouldn't be paid for it, that's when my feelings towards their policy really shifted. From that point on, even if I'd worked late to get the work done for the customer, I made sure that the timesheet only listed the 8 hours so that the company wasn't going to profit from my misfortune. They picked up on that too, and weren't happy, but there was nothing they could do about it.
That culture was truly toxic as an employee. If you were a couple of minutes late for the start of the day, you were hauled into your manager's office for a 10 minute shouting at about the importance of time keeping. There was an unofficial "flexitime" working policy - "you can start any time you like before 9 and end any time you like after 5:30". Obviously, anyone who'd been there more than a year grew tired of this, and at 5:30 every day there was a stampede to leave the office. Nobody left even a minute early because we had timestamped entry/exit logs and we knew the consequences, but equally almost nobody was prepared to stay a minute longer than they had to.
Workers, always thinking they make the value.
Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.
Samir: So what did you say?
Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.
Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
On a good day, on an unimportant project, I still have three bosses. I have my team lead, my PM, and my actual manager. Currently I'm on a cross-team project of critical importance, so you can add on my manager's manager, his manager, the other team's manager, and his manager. I've got seven goddamn people breathing down my neck on this.
I used to work at a place where I had one manager, even for critically important projects. He was the only one breathing down my neck (and that wasn't often). No PM constantly hassling me to groom my backlog[0], the managers above my immediate manager all had enough trust to not directly meddle. Most productive I've ever been in my career. Ended up leaving because I just didn't give a shit about the project, but sometimes I dream of going back...
[0] I need to rant about this. How am I supposed to be agile if I have to have my backlog completely planned out for the whole project? And I can't just estimate it or backlog the big chunks, because when we start making progress and I update the backlog to reflect things we've learned, I have to justify every single change to my PM who will grumble that we are going off plan. If I don't update the backlog, I get grilled about how accurate it is at the next too many cooks/status update meeting.
We can either do agile or try to plan out the next six months of work at the start. Stop trying to make me do both.
A janitorial job can be rewarding because you can see that you are making a difference in the world. You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day.
Filling out spreadsheets, it can be hard to tell what the purpose of what you are doing, whom it benefits, and how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up.
Workers would do well to always keep it in mind.
Work is merely a means to an end.
Best case, you remove a commute and gain a whole day back with a 4x8 schedule
If not, it looks like a growth industry, and it might be a good idea to monetize the things that burn other people out.
But when I was working in medical instruments, and they brought in a doctor who explained how our instrument turned a surgery that had a 50/50 survival rate into one that had better than a 99% survival rate... I was more motivated to work there, and to work well there, and not because I was getting more money. My work had a purpose. It wasn't just a job.
- People do their job to make money to provide for their families. For some, that's all the justification you need.
- If it pays well, donate a portion of your income to a charity that you believe in AND get involved with that charity. There are tons of great options out there like Habitat for Humanity, literacy programs, Shriner's, Boy Scouts or a local church just off the cuff. This turns your job into a way that you are helping your community through a organization with a greater purpose. It can shift your perspective.
Just providing some ideas. To each their own.
dude have you ever been to high school?
Peoples' lives are improved by what janitors do, even in high school.
While all of those are certainly noble goals, the vast majority of people doesn’t even shoot that high to find any kind of purpose. Most people are already satisfied and feel a sense of accomplishment when their job creates something of value for *someone*.
I had a job with a great paycheck, but spent 40 hours a week doing barely anything. It was fun at first, but it became physically exhausting. I have now a job with similar pay but I build apps that people actually use in their day to day work and quite enjoy, it’s significantly more stressful and demanding than not doing anything, but I don’t feel nearly as exhausted as I did with the previous job.
I’ve felt it myself and have heard others talk about it, but there is an increasing number of jobs that is either objectively useless or perceived as such (by the people employed in that job). Either way, it’s not surprising to me that burnout continues to be on the rise.
Nobody likes doing nothing
- Having a financial safety net and removing some degree of existential fear (note, this is in a country with an existing social safety net)
- Switching into a career with less pay but better interest alignment. Interestingly, most of the women I've talked to would strongly prefer a switch into more social careers while basically all men I've talked to (claim) they'd switch into trades.
- Having the option to obtain educational credentials one couldn't get earlier in life for a plethora of reasons, without too much financial concerns (that is in a country with publicly funded free universities)
Certainly there are people who would see not doing anything as a godsend, but I think we generally over estimate our intrinsic desire to do something by working and tend to assume this desire doesn't exist in other people.
Now come on, give me an argument for why it is patronizing. Stop implying it.
Our jobs can be the polar opposite of all of that.
Maybe the issue is more that we earn so much and have no life outside of work so the "earning money to live" is not there anymore.
We try to find meaning in the work itself instead of in the after-work part.
I’ve heard said (don’t recall the specifics) Maslov’s hierarchy is upside down, that with sufficient meaning/purpose, many deprivations of lower elements can be handled.
Not certain if I’d go that far, esp at extremes, but that the pieces of the “hierarchy” are more like eqalish puzzle pieces than a stacked pyramid.
Yes! When I retired I started volunteering at a raptor conservation centre, and got given loads of simple mundane tasks. Some were really tedious (cleaning the birds' water bowls, removing poop, getting rid of nettles that blocked a view, etc etc) but at the end of the day my minder could see that the tasks had been done and that I wasn't a flake. They also demonstrated commitment, which helped me move up to helping with the birds themselves, and now I help fly them in experience days, showing them to paying members of the public, and bringing in funds that resource critical conservation projects (nest boxes, anti-poacher campaigns, etc).
I've been reflecting on this recently and I think in the context of a job, it operates at both a macro and micro level, and ultimately to feel fulfilled in the long term you need to feel like you matter on both levels.
Macro contributions are the stuff upper management sees— the new products and features, the deals closed, the systems you designed and maintained, the technical directions to advocate for and staff you mentor, the conference presentations you give. These are highly visible contributions are are "easy" to recognize you for, but on the other hand they're also relatively easy to succinctly describe, for example, on a job req, which will be necessary if you do indeed stop showing up.
In contrast to this, the micro contributions are what your close colleagues see. They're who recognize your taste, your care and attention to detail, the thoughtfulness with which you lay out code, balance requirements, utilize tools, and maintain hard-to-measure things like interface boundaries and testability. It's these contributions that quietly keep technical debt under control, save time by preventing problems from ever occurring, and push systems toward ever greater reliability and observability. If you disappear tomorrow, none of this stuff will fall apart overnight; it will degrade in more subtle ways that take much longer to manifest as an actual "problems".
I think for me at least, I sometimes feel a disconnect where I have lots of acknowledgment at the macro level, but still feel burnt out and unappreciated due to gaps at the micro level. The Q12 question about having a "best friend at work" [1] I think is also really tied into all of this, since that's likely to be a person who will see you and what you have to offer much more than a busy manager hustling between meetings all week and rubber-stamping your code reviews.
[1]: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importanc...
If you paid me the same to be a janitor, I'd take that trade any day of the week. I've been a janitor before and while the job is not fun and has some shitty (pun intended) days - overall I was a better human being not being stuck behind a desk for 10+ hours a day.
Unfortunately our economy is what it is, so you can only really be paid for non-physical work these days. Thus a lot of folks who are doing quite well on paper are struggling internally living a life that simply does not suit them.
It's weird to live your entire life knowing you were not built to do what you do day in and day out to pay the bills.
Gilded cages are rampant in our industry.
In my previous job, we would regularly see a guy with a small truck delivering vegetables door-to-door during our lunch breaks. We all envied him. He was always smiling and whistling, while we were sitting miserably before our food, counting the minutes remaining before we had to go back into a hell of customer tickets and technical debt.
I don't think people who never mowed yards as a kid would get it.
When people asked what I do in tech, I'd say "tech janitor".
What's happened in the last 40-50 years is that productivity skyrocketed but real wages remained relatively stagnant to the point where you need 2 people each with a full-time job and each having a "side hustle" or second job just to make ends meet. And you'll still have a lower standard of living than someone working a basic job 50 years ago.
Some turn this conversation, much like homelessness, into a "personal moral failure", meaning it's your fault if you don't have a fulfilling job. Not all jobs can be fulfilling. But if people earn a decent income they don't really care.
We should instead talk about why the demand for greater and greater profits have concentrated the value created by workers into the hands of the very few and why the workers who create that value don't their fair share of those profits.
In software at least, I think it could also be related to the pace of modern development. Agile sprints mean that you are constantly in a situation where things are down to the wire.
Being bored all the time is annoying and sucks, but being in a thing where you feel like you _shouldn't_ be bored and yet are also sucks. Does it suck more? Not sure!
Blue collar doesn't just pay you poorly -- it's also tedious, and there's a pervasive sense that nobody gives a damn about you, your safety, or really anything about you. "nobody" being managers, but also your white collar coworkers who "work upstairs", customers, security, etc.
You have very little autonomy: you'll tend to have to ask permission to go for a bathroom break, or to step outside for a minute to get a breath of fresh air, or if anything is going to cause you to be more than 5 minutes late for your shift. Yes, you'll have to beg and might not even be allowed to attend funerals of close family members. You may or may not have to help the customer who keeps sexually harassing you. You probably will be asked to speak to customers with a certain tone and facial expression regardless of how awful you're feeling. Nobody cares that you just went through a breakup
RE safety: you'll have employers doing everything from getting you to work with wiring that isn't up to code when you're not an electrician, to lifting things alone that nobody should lift alone, to working at an unsafe pace, to working during small disasters where half the business is underwater. You might not even be a full employee -- you'd be surprised how many dishwashers, waiters and cooks in San Francisco restaurants are employed as independent contractors but are effectively employees
You aren't making much money, so commuting will tend to be a long slog. You might even be working more than one of these jobs.
Yes, I've had "cool" low wage jobs with nice managers that tried to treat me like a human being. I know those exist. They are exceptional and often don't last
Also I am not writing this to single out the parent, just want to affirm that your boring white collar job is better in ways you probably can't fathom and confirm that blue collar jobs are very much prone to burnout
The idea of even having to think about your own safety in that way is something I have never had to experience. I have stressed out a lot about money before, but I have never been in a situation at that level, and I will remember to appreciate that.
From my interactions with Americans, I'd have to say that there are way more people around the world have that luxury than Americans. Exhibit A: The French.