[satvikpendem]

Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.

[majormajor]

> ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is

The average person on a residential job site I've talked to has looked and sounded like they're having as much fun as the average software dev. And none of them have said stuff like "people on my team have confided that they cry every night because the higher-level management keeps screaming about the project not being done" like I've heard at from folks, say, certain big social media places...

[KirinDave]

That's because Software as a job has become a joyless death march to poop out casino flavored adware for 99% of the industry? Go launch the Temu app and imagine being on the team that builds it.

I could imagine a desperate person with a family writing that app. I can't imagine anyone else with light behind their eyes doing it.

This has even been the startup world (even downstream of LLMs!) for some time.

The people in deep morning tend to be the people who have managed to avoid this outcome, or deceive themselves about its inevitability.

[nine_k]

Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty. Now imagine replacing ice cream, or steak, or fresh berries, or whatever you enjoyed eating, with something like Soylent or Huel with a side of puréed kale. Your nutrition may actually improve, but something would be lost, won't it?

[echoangle]

> Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty.

Im pretty sure the taste is an evolutionary indicator of nutritional value (we now know how to cheat to make food that tastes really good but isn’t really healthy). But it’s not really an accident that some food tastes good.

[nine_k]

The fact that certain aspects of work feel enjoyable is also not random. It usually indicates an elevated level of fitness for the job, a higher chance of success for a given phenotype / genotype. I can imagine that Mr Ludd had been enjoying the process of forming a complex pattern on fabric before Mr Jacquard's automatic loom made his skill irrelevant.

[jibal]

You said that food is not meant to be enjoyable and that it's coincidental that it's tasty -- this is flat out wrong, so your attempt to argue by analogy (always a suspect process) was bogus. And your "something would be lost" is a strawman from left field that actually undermines your argument. (BTW, I enjoy Huel and they make an effort to make the taste and texture pleasurable. And people often combine kale with fruit to make tasty shakes.)

Work, unlike food, is a social construct, and while it's no doubt a bit more complex, the statement that "Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done" is factually correct. Because work generally is "work, not fun", people get paid to do it, with competitive salaries and perks.

I won't respond further to your very bad arguments (or the absurdly out of touch elitist arguments from others here that miners enjoy their work as much as software developers do ... I'm retired and still do software development for fun; no miner does the same).

[boinkboink78912]

Don't many blue collar workers (miners & house builders) do actually take immense pride in their work? There are woodworkers out there whose hobby is also woodworking.

[vouaobrasil]

So does that mean we should make work even less enjoyable still?

[soulofmischief]

Then they should take up less of our lives.