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by mhurron
4913 days ago
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> bringing through this transition in the workplace God I hope not. I hope that we can as a society, move beyond the idea that if it doesn't have an application in the workplace or if you can't make money from it, it is not worth while. There is no real difference to asking for more grunt work and spending your free time to be able to do different grunt work for someone else somewhere down the line. I do Udacity and Coursera courses for my self, for my own benefit. I'm a system administrator. I do programming courses for fun, I'm doing Introduction to Astronomy for fun. The astronomy won't help in my job, ever. The vast majority of the programming ones, though tangentially related to my job, by and large won't help there either. It doesn't matter, I didn't do them to be a better worker. I did them to enrich myself. Work, your job, is something you do to enable you to enjoy life. Don't make it your life. |
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However, work is a fact of life. It can be enjoyable, or it can be drudgery. Generally, the more skills you have, the more leverage you have to push it toward the "enjoyable" end of the spectrum. If I'm going to be spending 45 hours, or even 20 hours, per week on something, I'd rather push the situation to one in which I can enjoy that time and have some autonomy. I don't mind working hard, but I don't like being subordinate, and that's what happens when you have no leverage.
Much of what inspires me to study advanced CS at 5:30 am is workplace-agnostic intellectual interest, but part of it is also the intention of qualifying myself for much better work than what I've been doing for the past few years.
I also think that there's an defeatist attitude that a lot of people take that Work Sucks because, in most jobs, it does. It doesn't have to be that way, though, and if the disproportionate leverage held by top-tier technologists continues to grow, we'll be able to build a dramatically better world-- one in which most people will be able to work 500 hours (or less) per year instead of 2000, and have 1500 more to enjoy.
If Work is going to be with us for the near future, we might as well do what we can to improve it.