[bartread]

> This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be pretty terrible in the past too.

I think this is the nub of it: we think things have changed, but they really haven't. Whilst the content/descriptions may have changed, grim jobs have always existed and have always been the majority.

I spent the summer of 1998 working in a wines and spirits bottling plant. I'd either be loading bottles on to the beginning of the line, or stacking boxes at the end - as a university student, and a temp, I wasn't trusted with the machines in the middle. Doesn't really matter: the work was beyond mind-numbing.

The first couple of hours I was checking my watch incessantly. Then I realised I was driving myself slowly (or, quite quickly) insane and limited myself to checking every N palettes of bottles, where N was a suitably large number. After a week or two got to the point where I'd check my watch once during the morning and it would be nearly lunchtime. Oh yeah: winning at life!

And this was a job that had some tangible output: thousands of gallons of some beverage started out in a massive tank and ended up in neatly labelled and packaged bottles ready for sale. Didn't change the fact that the job was boring as #### and that I hated every minute. But the money was essential to me at the time, and I was and am grateful to the childhood friend who offered me that job.

I have no end of respect for people who do these kinds of jobs their entire working lives for the simple reason that they have to in order to survive. I know exactly how fortunate I am to have other options open to me.

Perhaps a wider point: over the span of an entire career almost everyone has at least one, and often several, terrible jobs. E.g., including contracts, since graduating I've had two great jobs, one good, one that started great and remained that way for quite a while but became terrible during my final years, a couple that were all right but nothing special, one that was bloody awful from start to finish, and one that was entirely bipolar (sometimes from day to day).

Work isn't always enjoyable, and doesn't always (perhaps not even often) use you to your full potential. Yes, you may be better than that job, but so are lots of people, and you still have to eat. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try to find something better, but sometimes - and possibly for quite a long time - we have to do things we don't enjoy in order to live.

Sorry, I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.

[bloudermilk]

I think we have to look pre-industrialization to see fundamentally different ways of organizing production and work. The digital age has certainly sped things up, but the 20th century was full of bullshit too.

[notahacker]

And before industrialisation the tendency was for everyone to inefficiently cultivate their own food whilst most semi-skilled tasks were carried out by small numbers of artisans typically organised around protectionist guilds, whilst the largest employers (preferring unpaid labour where possible) were religious orders and landowners conspicuously consuming and fighting their neighbours. I'm not convinced this arrangement involved less bullshit, but it certainly entailed less production.

[rleigh]

One perspective is that while the job you were doing wasn't particularly fulfilling or exciting, it was just a summer job, not a career. The interesting and demanding part is the bit in the middle you weren't trusted with; that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience.

If you put yourself in the position of this not being a summer job, but a real job, then it would likely not be a career either. It would be a stepping stone to working on areas with more responsibility, allowing you to pick up expertise with the full operation of the production line. You would have to have zero ambition to do it for your entire life, and I've not seen many people who did; there's always progression and more responsibility even for those who don't have a good education, but do have a desire to improve themselves and show they are capable.

I used to work in a brewery, as an analytical chemist, but this also involved some time on the bottling and canning lines taking samples and calibrating the equipment, so I did see a lot of what went on, from the depalletisers loading the empty cans and bottles onto the conveyors, to the fillers, pasteurisers, labellers and the packaging and warehousing. They did employ a number of temporary workers to do some of the simpler stuff, like what you were doing. But since each line was several million pounds worth of state of the art German engineering, the people operating and maintaining it were well compensated for their expertise. If you'd stayed, then you could have worked your way up the ladder to do that, perhaps including part time study for an engineering degree or industry-specific qualifications.

A lot of industries like this do have good prospects for career progression. But they do require time to be served at the bottom before working up the ladder. And even the bosses have to do the menial stuff when required from time to time; I've seen the production site manager doing your job when they were caught short-handed. One of the great things about this environment is that you have everyone working across a whole site in synchrony to make the whole process work; and on the site I worked at, it was a great place to work.

[bartread]

> that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience.

Not in this place it didn't: nobody had a degree, and even the permanent staff weren't on particularly good money. For sure, better money than I was on, but not by a wide margin in most cases, and I'm talking here about people who in some cases had worked their for decades. As for the chemists, my degree was half biochem and half chemistry and I'd just finished my third year so I was probably "better qualified" than they were. They absolutely knew their jobs but, again, no degrees.