[claudiulodro]

My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology:

If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues.

Dunno. Just musing.

[pdpi]

It's only a tautology if "creating work" is all about delegating part of my own work, and there's limited amounts of interesting, engaging work to go around.

However, if I am in a managerial position, my own work can be quite different from my reports'. What this article is saying is that, if my work as a manager is boring and not very engaging, I'll give my engineers boring, unengaging work too, irrespectively of how interesting their work could be.

[Humdeee]

> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting and unknown ending in a flop.

[mfoy_]

Thinking about it, same here. If there's some tedious but critical 10-min sysops task, I'll usually just do it rather than try to pawn it off on a junior coworker. But if we want to do something exciting, such as set up a new piece of flashy tech for evaluation, that will usually fall to a junior resource to 1) help them grow and learn and 2) because if they fail spectacularly there was nothing important riding on it.

[coldtea]

>If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

This assumes the work available for those with boring jobs to dispense to others is of the same kind those with boring jobs do. There's absolutely no reason that this should be the case.

There could be tons of "interesting work available" at a job people with boring jobs work, just not in their specialty. And they can still create boring tasks for others, even if those others work in departments that allow for interesting work available.

Second, some people like boring tasks and hate change, excitement, anything unpredictable, etc. So it's not even a rule that "nobody is going to do the boring work first".

[darkstar999]

I think I'd need more concrete examples to understand this study. What kind of dull work? What dull work was created and what could have changed to make it better?

If the available work is to dig a hole or file papers into a cabinet, how can you possibly make that better?