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Comment by truelson | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Boring work needs meaning, not tension. Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.

But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.

Most importantly, boredom, irritation, and anxiety are temporary. They are emotions. They do not define us or the work. It was a joy when I realized that all these emotions will pass. They really do. You can sit with it. You really can. You can't make it go away, but it will pass.

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I think that "Boring work needs meaning, not tension" is a great explanation of bad bosses.

Any work will go a little faster when your boss puts an arbitrary deadline on it and screams "We need this by Friday, we're gonna tell the VP that it's late and it's your fault!!" But it's hugely demoralizing and stressful.

But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.

Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.

Most people already aware of the meaning of their work though, it's not something you can deliver updates on.

Whereas tension is easy to manufacture

Regarding updates: at your all-hands meetings, show inside customer success stories, and the real impact it had, or how your product/service is being used for great things?

(Different than a marketing testimonial, big sales landed, or charts showing financial growth.)

I worked for awhile in flight safety, almost entirely in software that I only ever ran on my laptop, and on servers seen through my laptop. I found that even little, but relatively concrete, reminders that I fit into this larger system of aviation, where great things are done, by very dedicated people, were nice occasional refreshers of inspiration.

> Most people already aware of the meaning of their work though, it's not something you can deliver updates on.

It isn't always. I did use to write health care software. It was used by "SLPs" and dozens of other acronyms I barely understood what they meant. Their clients had "FASD" and abuse victims and all sorts of things.

I was given a spec, we need this, it needs to have these fields, and these words, and I made it happen.

I never saw our software used in the wild. I never spoke with the clients that used our software, I never saw the difference that they made in childrens lives.

The more time we could save the clinicians and therapists and others, the more time they could spend helping their clients.

It was meaningful, but I never saw any of that. Maybe once or twice a year our boss would come in and explain some of that stuff to us. It was nice to hear.

>But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.

The problem is that the smart ones will easily figure out that 'this next version will save lives' is a total lie. If your monitoring product doesn't work, it gets dumped and replaced. In developed countries, if your code has the potential of harming someone you're in a heavily regulated industry. The software in those industries is speced out in enormous detail to avoid this problem.

>Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.

I disagree. Financial goals are the easiest to understand for people, and also easiest to communicate, and personally for me easiest to reason about how to achieve them. Just hit a number and you're done, collect your bonus and go do something you enjoy. As they say, the best way to ruin something you love doing is by making it your job. IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.

> As they say, the best way to ruin something you love doing is by making it your job.

As someone who made a job and career out of what I always loved, it's far from ruined. Your relationship with the thing changes, and like anything that changes, sometimes it will go well and sometimes it will go bad, often both in succession like a rollercoaster.

> IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.

I can 100% agree about people like that being forever emotional and passionate at their job. But to label it as unhappy is terribly reductive. "Unhappy" is a part of it, but there are plenty of other emotions you will go through: happy, scared, hopeful, dubious, frustrated, satisfied, elated, etc. Much like emotions that play out for us in "real" life events and relationships.

First and foremost, good for you! Its a guess, but it seems you have a lot of control over your work, schedule, terms, etc than most people, or are in a very high position where you're in the drivers seat, creatively. We all would like greater agency, but that ain't the case for the overwhelming majority of working professionals.

> IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.

This is only because we’re ok with billionaires dictating what we have to do to earn money. We’ve absolutely got the technical mastery over our environment needed so that most people don’t need to work. The majority of jobs done today are performative. Have a kid and you’ll realize pretty quick that awful, boring work can still be 100% fulfilling.

Not to be personal but your attitude is disgustingly complacent. Nobody should be ok with being a waste of space so one human can have billions of dollars.

Not to be personal, but you sound quite naive. The world is ugly and runs on money/power/leverage/arm-twisting. The "nice" people who lay down their arms get invaded and conquered, and thats the end of that gene pool.

Side note: For Americans, the ability to stay blissfully unaware of all of this is due to the 76 US Navy Destroyers and 11 aircraft carriers that are ready and willing to enforce/maintain/defend the current way of life for the civilian population.

Yes arbitrary tension is one of the most infuriating things that some agile people and bosses do. It's like they treat you as an unthinking machine that merely needs to constantly be prodded and poked to perform. Of course if you have any ability to think you will instantly figure out that it was fake pressure and who doesn't love it? I don't know why they think that this is going to work out for them. Well I do know actually, it's because many people do very little without being poked and asked constantly. That's the other side of the coin but frankly, that's a hiring problem. Such people shouldn't even be in the company.

Different people are motivated differently. My work is meaningful but it's not enough to feel like I'm having fun every day. Some dopamine is basically critical for me to function. It's always a bit wild when people feel they can generalize their own experience and assume it must be the case for everyone else. This needs more I statements.

> This needs more I statements.

This is one statement that’s true of an overwhelming number of stories.

> Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off logic! There were hundreds of bug reports. You name it, we had it.

Debugging everything was just wild, especially with the constant tension of "What if it's our fault?" In the end, it wasn't! We got paid for our time, and we were able to close a massive number of tickets. It was one of the best weeks of my professional life.

Hell yes, sometimes fighting a figurative wildfire successfully is what carries you for a year

i too strive in such a situation, but it still makes a difference whether the work is meaningful or not. especially when you get to sleepless nights. it makes difference if that customer is a hospital or some other meaningful industry, or it is something meaningless like an online game, other entertainment or worse, gambling. i wouldn't work overtime for the latter (unless the pay is worth it or the team is good)

i can definitely confirm that meaningless work is more boring.

So it is essentially all about money, and meaningfulness of the job is just another bonus, along with medical insurance, prolonged vacation period and anything else that might make you choose less paying job.

That said, I can imagine people taking pride and joy in building an online game and making sure it works reliable even as audience grows way past anticipated level.

There's a huge difference though between short bursts of intense activity – which are thrilling, and in my experience can forge longlasting team bonds – and an ongoing, constant sense of pressure. The latter you can't maintain excitement about indefinitely, and inevitably the continual stress just leads to burnout. Or apathy: after all, if everything's urgent then nothing feels urgent or special after a while.

> Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.

A lot of bad can come from this, especially if you're working on farming these loops from others and that's where you get your kick/money. But if there's no dopamine loop, ideally in addition to having some meaning, then there's just burnout.

> But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.

Ya, but it's easy to get too caught up in meaning. Meaningful meaning is scarce, and it's a bit naive to couple your paycheck to it. Most times work is just work and it needs to keep going as long as you need money. Meaning is fleeting by comparison, even for nurses and people actually doing something useful for society. When you can get it, great, but when you can't, don't go quitting your job impulsively, not in this market.

Personally, I find how I spend my time outside of work has a big impact on how motivated and productive I am at work, regardless of how meaningful my work tasks are. Obviously basic things like sleep, diet, exercise are important, but I have also found that spending too much time on things like video games, streaming shows/movies or social media really leaves me feeling depleted and unfocused during work hours. The more I avoid screens outside of work hours, the more productive I am during work hours when I have to look at a screen.

I disagree because I think boring work needs discipline. The expectation that everything should be exciting or fulfilling is also false. You can't expect meaning in everything, and your response of wading through discomfort is best.

Or perhaps we should all be taoists, and find find joy in the taste of vinegar because it is pure life that we are tasting, by being alive and breathing and choosing to take on a task that is always new, because even if the work hasn't changed we have.

Or maybe just to quote the dwarves in Majesty: Hard work is its own reward.

Or perhaps the omnissiah demands it and it is not ours to question his will, only ours to ensure the machine spirits thrive.

There's a million reasons to get out of bed and do the work. Maybe the most noble is Meditations-esque "we work because we are humans" and the work must be done.

Loved this. Meditations/Taoism/omnissiah...

Just a great response. :)

He does sort of mention "story" several times. The story is the meaningful part. It's just that he says meaning follows tension. Maybe you don't agree with that either (not sure I do) but he does mention this.

Very well said!

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