>This has come to be known as principal-agent theory (or incentives theory), and is the foundational structure that most corporations are built upon today. Pay people more, and motivation should follow naturally.
This is where the article breaks down for me. This is definitely not what corporations do outside of the executive class.
The norm is attempting to drive pay and wages down as much as possible, sans a few exceptions. I think this is actually how it used to be until sometime in the mid 1980s when financialization took off in earnest and union power started to significantly decline.
EDIT: Here's an anecdote I experienced. When I was younger in college I got a job working nights at a FedEx Office. I did really well there, working full time and it accommodated my hours, and leadership took notice. One day, they pull me aside, and ask how they can help incentivize things. Before I could answer they said "The only rule is it can't be about money. Money is off the table". I told them that if money is off the table, then what are we talking about exactly? They didn't give me a straight answer, only they couldn't increase my wage. This to me is further evidence of how untrue this statement is.
FWIW, to complete the story, I left a short while later, and started working at Apple which lead to one of the most amazing lucky breaks I've ever had in my career
I hate to say it, but in my (many years) of doing unskilled jobs, I have found that the management is very often just as, uh, "skilless" as the employees.
I'd argue that the overwhelming amount of people would choose to work on something, even if they didn't have to. they would choose the arts, or work on inventing some new thing they want, etc. most people work stupid jobs because they can't afford there risk of doing what they actually want
Yes, what you're describing isn't Work. We may have been conditioned to use the same word for both things, as you did, to make it appear they are the same thing, but they're very different.
Eh, you have to work for yourself too. It comes down to who are you working for... who's "will" are you sustaining? This is about willpower and using it for your own ends instead of others whether that is work or some other activity.
I know this is Hacker News, and so someone "working on something" on their own is typically interpreted to mean "building a startup", which I would still call "work" in the more classic meaning of employment, but "work" doesn't have to mean that.
A friend of mine retired early and spends a lot of time in his workshop building fun things for himself. That is work, but it's not "work" in the way people think of the term.
One project I want to do some time is design and 3D print a model roller coaster, including building a train to travel over it. That's work, but it's not employment.
I think this reflects your social bubble. I seriously doubt "most people" are interested laboring as artisans hours every day. Left to their devices without the need to work, they would just consume.
> most people work stupid jobs because they can't afford there risk of doing what they actually want
Again this projects some kind of strong desire for a specialized low-demand sort of work on the greater population. This is a fantasy.
Work is a vector for people to contribute to society and participate in it, allows them to find validation, to compete (if they so choose). Whether a job is "stupid" is a rationalization that betrays the fact that there is demand for it. At best, it can be unenjoyable, but most people don't "hate" their job. Arguably people have stronger feelings about commute time, which is a greater reflection of faults in city planning.
"the overwhelming amount of people would choose to work on something, even if they didn't have to. they would choose the arts, or work on inventing some new thing they want, etc."
I used to believe that when I was young, and that's pretty much the argument I made to my dad, who responded that most people would rather stay home, drink beer, have sex, and watch tv.
As I've grown older, I've come over to my dad's side, as I learned that most people don't have a creative bone in their body, have no desire to be productive in any way, and would rather spend their time entertaining themselves and consuming above almost anything else.
At least that's the case in much of the US, which is heading relentlessly towards the world predicted by the movie Idiocracy. Maybe in some other countries it's better.
Then you’ve become the jaded HN poster stereotype. Congrats?
Plenty of people dream of doing these sinful, consumerist—not manly, Hacker News-productive—things because they are the rewind from work pasttimes; they’re the off-time-from-work things that many people just plain need in order to be able to must the energy for another workday. But the fallacy here is to assume that a reality without work is the same. It clearly isn’t though if these things are used to recuperate from work. What if there was no work to recuperate from? I don’t know if they would do manly HN things like implement yet another JS framework, but they would probably do other things than whatever they do in order to recreate themselves right now.
I do believe that healthy people need to feel useful. But notice that for that to mean they want to work, you need people to be healthy (and addiction is are really troublesome thing here) and that feeling useful is strongly correlated with whatever "work" is.
But anyway, that is not relevant in the world we have today. Today people are required to work, no other option is given, and if this doesn't satisfy their need of feeling useful, they are just forced to go without and face the desperation that deprivation from a basic need leads to.
Just this revolt of people against pointless job is evidence enough that if people could choose, they would do something different from "work" as we have today. You can argue this is a good thing, but you can't argue it's business as usual.
> Doing shit because you have no choice but to do it sucks, period.
Isn't life composed almost entirely of this? Cooking, eating, sleeping, using the toilet, taking care of love ones... If every responsibility you have in life is automatically absolutely horrible by nature of being a responsibility, why live?
The items in your list are largely ones which evolution has tied into feeling naturally good to most people, because it helps that we have an incentive to do them. (Cooking less so, but it is at least clearly and directly tied to the pleasant outcome of eating.) The sort of tasks we must to at work are usually not those which we're adapted to find innately enjoyable, and the link between them and outcomes we do want is often indirect enough that we know it only intellectually.
Secondly, the typical natural pace for the items on your list has peaks and troughs, natural downtime. Many jobs demand full effort for extended periods with not much downtime either on a daily cycle or a longer yearly one. That too we are not very well adapted for, I think.
> The sort of tasks we must to at work are usually not those which we're adapted to find innately enjoyable, and the link between them and outcomes we do want is often indirect enough that we know it only intellectually.
So you agree that needing to do something doesn't automatically make it unenjoyable then?
> Secondly, the typical natural pace for the items on your list has peaks and troughs, natural downtime. Many jobs demand full effort for extended periods with not much downtime either on a daily cycle or a longer yearly one. That too we are not very well adapted for, I think.
I didn't say all jobs were fun. Most aren't, but not because they need doing. Needing to be done has almost nothing to do with how horrible a job is.
> So you agree that needing to do something doesn't automatically make it unenjoyable then?
I’m not GP, but I’d say the things we need to do not being enjoyable is a deficiency and problem of the technological system, and not necessarily a solvable one. In a pre-tech world (e.g. 15th century), our needs were directly tied to our happiness due to biological reward circuits.
Ted Kaczynski argues about this point extensively in his books, I recommend esp. Technological Slavery, available free online.
> If every responsibility you have in life is automatically absolutely horrible by nature of being a responsibility, why live?
Life isn’t worth living, if that’s what you are asking. But there could be reasons to, you know, not intentionally die. Maybe you’re a Catholic for example. Or maybe you just have small children.
Why not? If your argument relies on life being a near uniformly horrible experience, yet you choose to live, aren't you in essence invalidating your own argument?
> Just because life is bad in absolute terms (?) doesn’t mean that it would not be better without having to work in the modern sense of the word.
This isn't a point I tried to make. My point was invalidating the premise that anything that needs doing is automatically bad. That's entirely separate from the idea that more free time might be enjoyable.
> This isn't a point I tried to make. My point was invalidating the premise that anything that needs doing is automatically bad. That's entirely separate from the idea that more free time might be enjoyable.
I didn’t see any actual examples of a high paying bullshit job cited. I don’t think they are common.
I have known one fellow who was given a job as a sort of fake project manager. He was perplexed over why he would be given work and then told not to do much of it, while the real decisions and administration remained with others.
Then he realized it was because this was a consulting company that made its profit from every billable hour he worked.
So, yeah, it happens, but it’s not some grand phenomenon.
Let's assume the point of technology is to automate routine labor and software engineers have been hard at work automating routine labor for 50ish years. Why are we still hiring software engineers? Shouldn't 50 years be enough time to automate most of what needs to get done in an office?
What happened during that time is that the gemini twins of technology and bureaucracy continued to layer their shit on top of each other, creating more problems in need of more solutions with more administration to satisfy with each new layer.
The software engineer is one example of a high paying bullshit jobs. No really. As much as you love the job of SWE it is a bullshit job. The problem you are solving is mostly in the hands of gravity, local politics, insane financial machinery, the hubris of a few powerful people. It doesn't mean you can't get good at your job and find it fulfilling along with the other aspects of your life. This is the architecture of your reality and you've basically mastered it, not unlike a level 60 MMO player. Good job!
Most people who read this website are doing bullshit jobs.
That's why, above all else, probably the most important thing you can do is look outside what you do for a living and do some good in the world.
I don't understand this comment. If you picture a company with a few 100MM dollars in sales per year, that manufactures or retails physical products, without software how many people work in Accounting? Inventory control? Do you have paper order records, that you use to process returns? Switching to electronic systems for these and many other areas has resulted in huge efficiencies of labor (not always to the benefit of employees, I should be clear). Obviously not all change in hardware and software over the last 50 years has been improvement, and certainly some of the difficulty in these areas is due to inefficient policy (either by the business or by government), but claiming that the work should be complete seems to vastly underestimate the complexity of the problems being addressed - whether by software or through more manual solutions.
This argument holds no water at all. You've modeled the situation incorrectly.
The shape of labor is not the same, today, as it was 50 years ago, and the project of technology is not to automate things we were doing 50 years ago. Let's see. 50 years ago my family had a black and white television and a rotary phone. Has telecommunications and media changed at all in the last 50 years which might have created not just new work but dozens and dozens of new industries? Why, yes. Yes that has happened.
You must be pretty sad that the Unabomber is dead, because, like him, you don't see the value of new technology. Okay, that's fine. But it seems like your arugment falls apart for anyone who does appreciate the value of DNA testing, MRI scans (which identified my wife's life threatening condition), the Davinci robotic surgery system (which saved my wife's life), etc.
We are having this conversation on Hacker News. If you read Hacker News, then you are already undermining your back-to-nature street cred, pal.
Anyway, I've never been on a bullshit project. And the reason we hire engineers is because important work needs to be done. For instance, I'm working on a system that brings medical care to impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. No bullshit there. Another client is an insurance software company. You don't think people need insurance? You don't want them to be able to buy it online because "50 years ago" it was perfectly acceptable to use a telephone to call an insurance broker? Another client creates test tools. You think testing software is bullshit?
You have a fluid rhetorical style that speaks on some cleverness. Imagine if you put that cleverness to work on something other than bullshiting about this topic!
I appreciate the compliment at the end. I like to deploy it especially when I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t want the replies to take me too seriously, but I gotta work on that obv.
The bullshit is not in the fact that we use a web form to buy insurance instead of a rotary phone or telegram or passenger pigeon (RIP), it’s that such a construct exists as insurance. Humans should just be making food, clothing and shelter and spending the rest of the time dancing and making babies.
Okay, this might sound sarcastic or something, but I'm perfectly serious: thank you for making your position clear. There's a lot to be said for living like the First Peoples of Earth, eschewing technology. If humans hadn't adopted city living and other trappings of civilization there would be no global warming and we would have a world population of a couple hundred million.
Of course, that chariot has already left the barn, along with the plow, roads, underfloor heating, glassware, steel, explosives, medicine, computers, networks, etc., etc.
Relative to life as a Serengetti hunter, most of modernity is bullshit. But none of us come from that point of reference. My point of reference tonight is that I'm writing code to automatically create all combinations of symptoms to help me brute force test a system that diagnoses illnesses. Relative to the fact that we want to release next week and we want it to work, this testing needs to be done and so this code needs to be written.
Office labor is indeed 95% automated. Companies used to hire armies of human accountants and calculators, most of whom are now laid off because Excel does it better. The industry is currently going further and automating customer service, copywriters and other human jobs too.
Since then, most SWEs doing the automation have moved on to other jobs too, such as the gaming industry. Naturally, offices still need a couple of SWEs to adapt software to changing requirements, but only a fraction of the peak.
The ending of this is great. If you've got a job that pays decently but offers no satisfaction, the solution is a SIDE HUSTLE. Not a fulfilling hobby, not volunteering to improve your community, not even raising a family - all things that have provided satisfaction to countless people with well-paying-but-meh jobs over the history of office work. None of these things exist in the world of Usagi Sararīman, only MORE WORK.
I used to think that the older I got, the easier it would be to knuckle down and get an hour or two of meaningless work done so I could move on to something more important or interesting. But actually the opposite has been the case, possibly due to overall declining energy levels.
Some people work around this by front-loading some hobbyism in their day, starting in the morning and getting up early.
I've reached a point now I feel drained after a work day, whether I concentrated a lot or found it boring. And controlling for sleep. For this reason, if something I'm interested requires more overhead, I try to do some early or at least plan and set it up, so that once work is done I can just go through the motions without thinking about it too much.
> I used to think that the older I got, the easier it would be to knuckle down and get an hour or two of meaningless work done
You’re thinking about it wrong. The trick is to do less and less of the shit you don’t like doing as you age, sorry I mean as you gain experience. Leverage your career capital into doing more of the work that fires you up and less of the work that doesn’t.
There’s always things you just “have to” do, but you’d be surprised how many of those are optional. A lot of the stuff that bores you to tears, is boring because nobody cares about it getting done. High chance that nobody will even notice if you don’t.
If you work at a for-profit corporation, your job will be pointless, because the only reason it exists is to generate profits. It's as simple as that.
We all need to make a living, so pick something you're reasonably good at, absolutely do not invest yourself emotionally into it, and use the proceeds to do what you really want to do. Exploit your employer every chance you get, because that is their default approach towards you.
I truly would be working on software in my spare time (and I do!) even if it was not my career. So it is possible to have both a job that is fulfilling and provides.
I don't take for granted that this is not common, but it is possible. I can earnestly say I like what I do
>"If you work at a for-profit corporation, your job will be pointless, because the only reason it exists is to generate profits. It's as simple as that."
I certainly understand and can empathize with being jaded about corporate greed, but I don't follow your reasoning on this one. It implies the only jobs that are not pointless are those that don't generate profit?
Profit being pointless is a weird take. You realize that generating profit generally means people are willing to forgo other things in order to obtain good or services you're providing, right?
If anything, I see profit as a signal that what I'm doing isn't pointless, by virtue of people willingness to pay for it.
I agree in most of your comment except that it's an overly pessimistic take, in my view. You can still get jobs outside the corporate/capitalism driven Sodom that aren't soul-crushingly pointless and boring.
> “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
He asks this rhetorically, but some people get something out of it - the hustle and bustle, and of course brushing alongside co-workers. If there's money to be made it's because people want something and buy it.
Who "has to"? The meth tweaker on the street still eats every day. But participating in society is a vector validation/belonging and cash for other niceties.
I know this is not what this article is chiefly about, but I have always found the bullsh!t jobs argument lame. Sure, I have met plenty of people who just spin their wheels for money, but to me that is always just bad management. In my experience even at a mature company, there is always a mountain of real work to do even if some people are avoiding it.
The answer is obvious: do the absolute minimum you need to do to not get fired while you find meaning outside of work, look for something else, or both.
This article a bad job of gluing together various ideas (Principal/agent problem, the motivational effects of money, so called Bullshit jobs etc) and does it via unfounded assertions (that people are paid more as they're promoted in order to motivate them for instance or that society actually considers teachers important).
It's like the musing of a drunken co-worker after too many post-work drinks.
More thinking and editing please, less keyboard-diarrhea!
This is not how it works... i have been there, and the thing is you have to pretend you are doing something extremely demanding which justifies your salary. This basically becomes your job, and comes with surprising stress, since you are essentially constantly faking something that may be uncovered.
Glad I took a salary hit and went on to do something I truely enjoy....
Yup. That was me ~2 years ago at a well-known Fortune 500 company.
I was on an Cloud and Application Security team that was almost essentially a skunk works, but we were a great team and got a lot of good shit done. But then the actual corporate cybersecurity team got their shit together, started enacting and enforcing policies, and took over all our job functions. During this transition, my direct manager quit, and so everyone on the team was reporting to his manager, who really didn't know what the team did.
At that point, there was basically nothing for us to do, working for a manager that didn't know what we should be doing either way. But we still had to appear to be doing something.
Shortly into this, our best two people left, and about a year later, I left as well. All of us for the same reason: Security often has interesting work to do, and we had none of it anymore. Our salaries were also wayyyy below market, but that's another thing entirely.
most well-run companies are always looking at ways of getting rid of dead wood
So get a job at a badly run company. Find a huge multinational which works in a wide variety of fields and apply for a job in a department without clear deliverables. Send lots of emails, attend lots of meetings, be friendly to everybody and always look busy. If anybody asks, you're mostly working on a vaguely defined internal project being run out of the Singapore office at the moment.
This is where the article breaks down for me. This is definitely not what corporations do outside of the executive class.
The norm is attempting to drive pay and wages down as much as possible, sans a few exceptions. I think this is actually how it used to be until sometime in the mid 1980s when financialization took off in earnest and union power started to significantly decline.
EDIT: Here's an anecdote I experienced. When I was younger in college I got a job working nights at a FedEx Office. I did really well there, working full time and it accommodated my hours, and leadership took notice. One day, they pull me aside, and ask how they can help incentivize things. Before I could answer they said "The only rule is it can't be about money. Money is off the table". I told them that if money is off the table, then what are we talking about exactly? They didn't give me a straight answer, only they couldn't increase my wage. This to me is further evidence of how untrue this statement is.
FWIW, to complete the story, I left a short while later, and started working at Apple which lead to one of the most amazing lucky breaks I've ever had in my career