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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

I didn't like this article. Felt the author gave no thought to what work has been throughout human history: dull, physically demanding, etc.

He says work is meant to be interesting engaging and meaningful... It would be great if that were true... But that is written nowhere. Work is simply things that need to be completed that someone else is willing to pay for. Any other definition is you projecting your ideals onto what the task really is.

So to answer the question: why are so many jobs crappy? Because that is the way things have always been.

If you enjoy your work (like I do), count yourself lucky.

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People who read Hacker News are naturally biased about what work is or should be. If everyone did work that was interesting, engaging, and meaningful, society couldn't function. There are plenty of jobs that are neither interesting nor engaging but are necessary. How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work?

How many garbage men or laundromat employees really enjoy and are stimulated by their work?

I think you can live two kinds of life. One where your job is your passion, and takes over your life. A lot of startup folk are in this bracket. I'd argue that if you aren't, then you shouldn't be doing a startup.

On the other side, people work to earn the money they need to pursue the interests outside of work. I really don't think there's anything wrong with that, and it annoys me when people in communities like HN get snobby about it. The garbage worker is even getting a physical workout every shift- meanwhile, the rest of us slowly get less fit sat at a desk, and end up sacrificing our free time to go to the gym.

One thing I liked about my time as "dog-collar labor" is that all my co-workers had interesting non-work pursuits, and there was no penalty for leaving work behind to engage in them. None of us mistook our stints as cashiers, food servers, or book store clerks for our passions, nor did our employers.

There was refreshing frankness that the whole thing was just business, nothing personal: no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime.

>no, we weren't enticed with company-paid meals, but we also weren't required to work limitless overtime.

I.e exchange your little precious time in this world for some token BS "handout", that's pre-calculated in your pay expenses anyway.

I prefer company meals since it saves my time. I don't have to go out and get food or bring my own. This is assuming the food is good and healthy, which it happens to be.

Being served lunch at the office is certainly convenient, and takes less time, but I wouldn't say it saves me time.

We have catered lunches 2-3 times per week. On those days, I will usually take about 30 minutes for lunch, and get right back to work. On other days, I'll take 45-90 minutes for lunch, and I'll get to take a walk, go outside, possibly see some of my non-work friends, and have different food.

The bottom line is that I'm going to leave the office at the end of the day at roughly the same time, regardless of the length of my lunch. That's almost certainly not the case for everyone, but, as a data point, it is for me. Lunch at the office only "saves" me time to get more work done that day. Don't get my wrong: I love my job, but I also love being outside and seeing friends too.

IF you own a laundromat and not just look after it I can see how it can be attractive.

Same with garbage. Especially if the competition isn't killing.

If everyone did work that was interesting, engaging, and meaningful, society couldn't function.

I've seen many, many people cite this as some kind of provable, immovable fact -- a way to shut off the mind towards that line of thinking.

I'm not so sure. I see no inherent reason why some people should need to suffer merely to stay alive, why some people, or perhaps many people, should live lives of futility and meaningless work.

Frankly, I'd like to think that human ingenuity can overcome even that. Slavery was considered normal until a few hundred years ago, why should crappy work be any different?

Yes, many work towards a more advanced society where we'd try to automate away unpleasant labor; and whatever residue of unpleasant jobs remain would be shared equally. (As opposed to bosses using tech to deskill and commoditize workers, as alluded to in the article.)

I don't know if that is necessarily true. There is a different kind of joy that comes out of jobs like that. I worked at LensCrafters making glasses in college. Making glasses is not that much different from flipping burgers or picking up garbage cans. After a finite amount of time there's nothing more to be learned and it's just a matter of cranking them out. But I found the job very enjoyable. It was a rather zen-like experience, and the shifts would just fly by.

Agreed. I found manual labor jobs in many ways to be more rewarding than software.

When you bake pies, at the end of the day you're tired, covered in flour, and your feet ache, but you can point to a rack full of cooling pies and say "I did that today. 600 people are going to enjoy delicious pie today because I put in the work" - more than I can say most days working on software for a living.

Actually, work hasn't been like that at all throughout human history. Work as we know it comes with civilization. And civilization started 5000-8000 years ago. Homo sapiens have existed for 200,000 years.

Before civilization, it wasn't something to be completed that someone else was willing to pay for. You can't really think life as a hunter gatherer would be dull? And there was no boss.

Quote from wikipedia: Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures.

This article was clearly written by someone who has not had the experience of trying to hire and later fire someone. When you try to look at it from the other side, things start to make sense.

At the end of the day somebody has to muck the horse stalls. (That somebody was me for a while)

And yet my mother does it for free, because she likes her horses and the stall is across the trail from her house.

Point being: for every "crappy job", there are people who legitimately are willing and able to do it for free, and already do.

She doesn't do it because she loves to muck stalls though, does she? She does it because it is part of owning horses.

I think she'd say she does, because it's part of (for her) the experience of owning a horse. She also did that for pay as a teenager, so maybe it helps her feel young, too.

I think what you mean is that no on would miss it if horses didn't shit, and I think you're right about that.

I think we underestimate, though, the value to people of belonging and participating, socially. Many activities people don't like, on their own, become neutral or even enjoyable as part of something else, like mucking stalls.

Everything is contextual, and there's no objective, independent-of-context answer to the value or worth some thing or activity is going to have to someone.

An anecdote is not a general "point".

And your mother doing something she enjoys (and involves cute animals) doesn't mean that as many people as needed are "willing" to do a crappy job for free.

In this modern era, probably no. Someone doesn't need to. Go build a manure shoveling Roomba and never muck the stall again.

Isn't that the whole reason of why jobs need to be done?

Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved (but don't want to do it themselves) so they pay someone else to do it for them.

That's the reason work is called work – it's work.

You're disregarding specialization. Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved - but they can't do it themselves, so they pay someone else to do it for them.

Things get outsourced for this as much as "I don't want to do it myself". And therein lies the space for interesting work.

They could do it themselves but it's more valuable for them to pay you (or someone who already knows how) to do it than it is to learn & do it themselves.

It's that gap - that allows value to be extracted from the job.

If an employer has 20 employees, the biggest reason for that is that she can't do labour the equivalent of 21 persons herself. Work is simply things that need to be done; whether your boss finds your type of work fulfilling, or you find it fulfilling, is coincidental to that fact.

It doesn't help that our western culture largely connotes any kind of work with drudgery and pain. I had a task to play a certain computer game in order to get myself acquainted with the mechanics and the feel of the game. It's a fun game; I assumed beforehand because I've played similar games before. But I didn't get around to doing it until two weeks later. Why? Because it was work.

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