TED: Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs and innovation
ted.com
ted.com
We're told we should work as little as possible in a job thats as physically undemanding as possible and believe we should be paid more for it.
The best days work for me was when I had to knock down a wall. I had a 10 lb sledge hammer, a wall I'd wrongly presumed to be cinder block, but was in fact reinforced concrete blocks they used for bomb shelters in WW2. It took me about 6 hours to finally get the wall down and that night I slept like a baby and for like 3 days I don't think it was even physically possible to get annoyed.
I don't know why, but when I work with my hands I always seem to be in a much happier mood, and I think it helps that demolition is just downright stress relieving. IIRC there's a demolition company in the UK where you can pay them to let you rip down a part of an apartment or office building before they tear it down. Apparently they made a lot of money with the idea.
That's purely work, that's not including the things I've done as favors to people. Helping to build a dock was the most fun, but a weekend of drink and power tools is hard to beat.
I think I need a DNA test, I think I've got some hillbilly in me.
If that's not valuable, I don't know what is.
The important distinction is "job that pays me to do what I love and totally fulfills me" vs "job that is in demand, pays well and I can tolerate". The former is a meme that the baby boomers invented and indoctrinated into their children, resulting in a generation of highly educated barristas. The few that make it into the cushy jobs are the ones who end up complaining constantly, a symptom of inhibiting their natural productive instinct.
We need to get shit done. It's primal. And nothing feels more like getting shit done than something disgusting and dangerous. That's why you feel great after you clean the bathroom.
The tech industry is an anomoly in that the productive jobs are often also deeply fulfilling. There are a few other jobs like that, but not enough for everyone and they set a bad example for the rest of the working world.
Mike Rowe specifically mentioned the concept of infrastructure; something that societies need to be good places to live but whose construction and upkeep are not occupations encouraged by the media. Well, there is informational infrastructure too, and it's programmers who build it, mostly unsung outside our own narrow circles.
A dirty job, despite your narrow reading of the show's name, does not just mean you literally get dirty doing it. It means an unglamourous job where you just ignore everything else and go in and do what needs to be done. Hyett & co. might be micro-celebrities now, but that came after a long stretch of very unglamorous hacking - sitting on their asses staring at a tiny screen at all hours of the day and night, getting shit done. When was the last time you saw that kind of occupation celebrated in, say, an ad? And yet the product is the infrastructure we all rely on.
That's what I meant, sorry for being ambiguous. And if you still disagree, I'll show you some of the code I just wrote, I promise you'll feel dirty for weeks ; )
I watch dirty jobs every now and then and love the show, but I think it is very clear that he is talking about the literally dirty jobs. Any job can be considered to have 'dirty' parts, depending on how far you want to stretch the definition. To think that even celebrated jobs like doctors and lawyers don't have, by your loose definition, dirty parts is very naive.
I am not really attacking you, I just always roll my eyes when people start complaining about their jobs. I guess growing up blue collar has made me very cynical when people working 8 hour days in air conditioned offices complain about doing dirty work. Hard, intense, difficult, exhausting? Sure. Dirty? No
Just because most people feel that they are under-appreciated in their professions doesn't mean that that feeling is less legitimate. Everyone has the right to complain about their job, regardless of how cushy it seems to others.
In a way, complaining about your job is proof to yourself that you aren't where you want to be yet. That's the essence of a lot of startups.
I don't understand what any of this has to do with "dirty"? So now we just stretch the definition of dirty to mean anything one can complain about at work? Then there is no point to it, by that definition there are dirty parts to every single job in the world.
Personally I cant think of any other job that is further from dirty then most programming jobs (literal definition). Why is that tech people have to hijack everything with the me too talk? Next we will read about strong men competitions and all the tech people will chime in with how deployment is such a heavy weight to lift... but hey its just figurative! Or how the programming is like cleaning toilets, because you have to look at other peoples code... on your monitor!
And if you really think your job is dirty, go find an electrician and pull wire through a steel mill, or work with a nurse, or a truck driver, go pull up well pumps, or drain septic tanks... or any other legitimately dirty job.
Or just stop trying to jack the little bit of pride a blue collar worker can have because he actually knows what dirty work is everyday.
I don't think anyone is trying to hijack the phrase "dirty job" to lessen those who do literal dirty work in any way. I'm not attacking you.
hell yes!
Mike Rowe is not necessarily the world's expert on job-related happiness, but he does have a unique and extraordinarily well-traveled perspective. I am not entirely inclined to agree with him either (because of my own personal experience; I am very happy as a programmer, but I note that even many of my coworkers aren't, in the very same environment), but I can't dismiss what he says entirely either, because the man has me creamed on the experience front.
"...namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."
http://briancooley.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/17/
For the tl;dr crowd: People that choose dirty jobs are often passionate about something auxiliary to the job.
Unlike Obama, Mike Rowe isn't trying to tell people what to do and never has to deal with anyone who wants to thwart his goals.