
Rethinking Work - dnt404-1
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/sunday/rethinking-work.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=MostPopularFB&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article&_r=0
======
robotkilla
I am a professional web developer (edit: actually i'm selling myself short
with this title as I speak multiple programming languages, do UI and a host of
other things) and haven't had a fulltime job in over 4 years. I try to get
remote contracts that last from 1 to 6 months (3 months is the norm) and then
I spend a month or two off self educating and making video games (trying to
transition to indie game dev). I'm exponentially happier than when I had to
wake up and head to a 9 to 5 even though I have less money and live much more
sparsely.

~~~
wslh
The challenging question is: do you have kids?

~~~
tspike
FWIW, I do, and I do essentially the same thing as OP. Your comment implies
that the two are incompatible: why do you think that is the case?

~~~
wslh
I also have kids and a company but I can recognize the risk I am/was taking.
Without kids I can live in 2 square meters, eat cheap, be healthy, etc. With
kids I pay the best education, the best health plans, etc. Not the same.

~~~
tspike
Yeah, I certainly understand the drive to provide the "best X, Y, and Z" for
kids, but I'm pretty satisfied with reducing expenses and providing "good
enough X, Y, and Z" for my son in exchange for not being stressed out and
being able to spend more high-quality time with him.

~~~
robotkilla
I feel the same way - and that's no judgement on the other end. If a person is
capable of dealing with the high stress and feels that quality time is less
important, or is able to maintain a good balance and can provide that quality
time regardless of FT employment, then I think it's an excellent choice for
their life. I don't think there's a one size fits all option for this sort of
thing.

------
quadrangle
As per the famous Ghana postal workers recording (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc)
and
[http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Wo...](http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Workers.html)
), it's perfectly possible to _enjoy_ even tedious work if you have a good
attitude. It helps to have a healthy culture.

In the U.S. we are culturally _taught_ that we are supposed to dislike our
work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have _fun_
at work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such
thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time.

This is on top of the various other points they make in the article and
related stuff…

~~~
dropit_sphere
>In the U.S. we are culturally taught that we are supposed to dislike our
work, especially if it isn't prestigious. If you dance around and have fun at
work in the U.S. people look at you weird and generally discourage any such
thing. But there's no reason not to bother enjoying your time.

I can think of one: the same reason Steve Jobs paid himself $1 a year.

Managing incentives is tough. If you try and reward someone for a task, you
may find the incentives at some point misaligned.

Let work be fun, and you open yourself to work being sacrificed to protect the
fun.

Therefore: abolish fun.

I haven't made an eloquent case for it, but I think that's the reasoning, and
I'm not sure it's wrong, frankly.

~~~
beeboop
The only reason Steve Jobs and any other executive pays themselves $1 on a W4
is because their income from other means of compensation gets taxed less than
regular income. They aren't doing it as some sort of show of "look how much I
love my job!"

------
1024core
We don't have to look far: almost the entire OSS movement is driven by
purpose, not money. Sure, money _can_ be made afterwards if one so desires (cf
RedHat), but it's not the primary motivator (in most cases). I wonder if any
academics have done studies on the OSS movement and what drives the
contributors.

~~~
mhale
Actually, this was the topic of my thesis for my Master's degree.

Link: [http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-
source/](http://flowdelic.com/2005/03/03/learning-from-open-source/)

Abstract:

In this paper, I study the workings of several successful Internet-based
collaborative communities to identify what it is that enables them to succeed,
even thrive, despite the highly-dispersed nature of their collaboration. This
research reveals that while the practices and tools used by the referenced
communities are important to their success, the most critical difference lies
much deeper, in the economic-basis of their organizational structure. This
economic mode of production, described by Yochai Benkler as “commons-based
peer-production”, is studied to answer two key questions: First, does this
economic model, in itself, encourage more successful virtual teamwork? Second,
is the peer-production model of collaboration fundamentally tied to the open
source model or can it also be applied in a commercial context to create
proprietary products?

A key source for the paper was "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of
the Firm" by Yochai Benkler.

Link:
[http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html](http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html)

In this paper Benkler describes a mathematical model for human motivation,
which accounts for influence of money. Highly recommended read.

Edit: fixed name typo

------
omouse
This is similar to what Lewis Mumford has said in Technics and Civilization.
Basically, more abundance means everything gets cheaper. Unfortunately the
wealth created is locked up within a few classes and barely trickles down.
Like the farmer who only produces cash crops and has no food to feed their
family or the shoe maker whose children have no shoes. Mumford suggests that
with such abundance we need "basic" communism which goes further than a
guaranteed basic income. People will still have an incentive to work but
they'll be spared the starvation and homelessness.

It's hard to get used to an abundance mindset but we're definitely at that
point where we absolutely must. It's like pre-AWS and post-AWS: in the former
we have to worry about provisioning more hardware and virtual machines and
worrying about running out of space (I'm in that situation now where we have a
private cloud and maybe 2 more VMs can be spun up and that's it). In the
latter situation we would be able to provision as many VMs as needed. Sure
your costs increase because you went overboard and provisioned one too many
VMs but at least you got to worry about over-abundance rather than scarcity!

~~~
ohthehugemanate
Does the improved quality of life get locked up? Americans have developed
pretty staggering wealth inequality in the last 3 or 4 decades, for example,
but the material quality of life has greatly improved in the same period of
time. More people own homes, more people have more and better cars, everyone
has access to more entertainment outlets, etc. Yeah, Steve Jobs gets a diamond
studded speedboat, but everyone else gets Iphones. It's not equal, but it does
represent a significant improvement in material quality of life.

~~~
tomp
> More people own homes

Source? My guess would be that in fact, more people are homeless, jobless,
living on food stamps and/or without health insurance.

~~~
ceejayoz
[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/home-ownership-rates-drop-
to-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/home-ownership-rates-drop-to-lowest-
since-1967.html)

> The U.S. homeownership rate fell to 63.4 percent in the second quarter of
> 2015, according to the U.S. Census. That is down from 63.7 percent in the
> first quarter and from 64.7 percent in the same quarter of 2014. It marks
> the lowest homeownership rate since 1967.

> Homeownership peaked at 69.2 percent at the end of 2004, when the housing
> market was in the midst of an epic boom. The 50-year average is 65.3
> percent.

------
ojbyrne
When I took a Human Resources course, there were 3 theories:

Theory X (The oldest): People won't work unless you force them to, and without
constant supervision, they'll slack off.

Theory Y: People are looking for self-actualization, and you need to find what
gets them excited, get them to do that, and get out of their way.

Theory Z (currently the most popular): Both Theory X and Theory Y apply.

~~~
Numberwang
I wish Swedish schools would stop basing all education on Y and reintroduce X
as the main driver.

For the last 15 years (Since Y became popular) the school system has done
nothing but deliver absolutely worthless human beings.

~~~
anon4
Can you elaborate on that?

~~~
jkyle
Most Swedish educational experts feel the stark decline the OP is speaking of
is a direct result of decentralization and the funneling of public funds into
private, for profit, institutions. [1]

Generally, conservative elements in Sweden discount educational experts
assessment saying that kids are allowed to be 'too free' in the class (e.g.
blaming it on the declining moral fiber of children or immigrants or what
not).

It served as a lab for what proponents of the voucher system in the U.S. are
looking to do.

1\. [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-
schools-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-
crisis-political-failure-education)

~~~
Numberwang
No need to politicize it. I think both decentralization and the banishment of
X for the benefit of Y have ruined the schools.

Mostly I'm upset about them making everything social. Not allowing humans to
wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and make their own
connections have created shallow and empty workers.

I wish what A.C. Grayling is doing would be taken more seriously before it is
too late.

~~~
digi_owl
> Not allowing humans to wander amongst ideas on their own uninterruptedly and
> make their own connections have created shallow and empty workers.

Huh, is that not exactly what Y is about?

As for turning everything social, welcome to the modern work environment. If
you can do social you are out of a job, as the non-social jobs have been
automated away.

------
danharaj
Related: [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-
interview...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/21/books-interview-
david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules)

The traditional capitalist view of human productivity is misanthropic and
authoritarian. It makes sense if you want to justify hierarchical
relationships and reduce the autonomy of the masses.

There ought to be plenty of engineers and programmers on HN. They should know
how valuable autonomy and meaning is to our productivity. This is universal:
Everyone likes doing good work and doing exactly the right amount of work. No
one likes working too little or working needlessly much. Yet, we live in a
society where the politicians start honking like geese when there 'aren't
enough jobs'. That's like saying there aren't enough bugs for me to fix. When
the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to something
new. Not so in our system. When the work's done, you better find more work or
you will fall into calamity and you will have deserved it. When you tie all
human existence to producing value for your boss, work becomes a slavish
social contract and not the means by which human beings improve the world for
ourselves and each other.

Trust people, and they act trustworthy. Respect people, and they act
respectable. Give people the trust and respect required to give them autonomy
in their work, and they will do amazing things for themselves and you. The
most lovely software I work with is produced for _free_ , and it tends to be
amazingly good work, done from a position of respect, trust, and generosity.

I'm sure many people are tired of my lefty whinging about capitalism, but the
longer I live, the more it doesn't make sense for my personal productivity or
fulfillment. I'm pretty tired of having a sword hanging by a thread over my
head in a cynical attempt to make me 'be a productive member of society'. It
makes me _less_ productive! It makes me _less_ happy! I'm tired of having to
see everyone whose labor goes into the comfort of my life as a greedy
adversary who would destroy me if this system weren't around to 'protect me'.

~~~
tariqali34
"When the work's done right, there's no work to be done and we move on to
something new."

The work is never done right. You talk about engineers and programmers right?
Well they should know that their work never ends; there's always the need to
continually improve the product so that you don't "fall behind", fix the
rampant bugs that occur when you add in new features, fix the bugs that were
caused by you fixing the previous bugs, realize that the customers actually
wanted something different, need to refactor the code properly to match the
latest design fad, have to rewrite the program in a brand new language...

And all this work has to be done. Because if you don't continually upgrade
your product, then your product will quickly become old-fashioned and
obsolete.

So, when we say "there's no work to be done", it's a blatant lie. Either it is
an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate
doing, or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to
be done. Lying may make you happy, but it makes me _less_ happy. I prefer
misanthropy over delusion.

~~~
danharaj
Open Source software survives without needing masters with whips above or the
ruin of poverty below. When there's work to be done _the people who do the
work know there 's work to be done_ and they will do the work.

> Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we
> obviously hate doing

Don't force people to do things they hate doing in order to survive when the
amount of work it requires to feed and keep everyone comfortable is a far
smaller quantity.

> or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be
> done.

Don't have a system where work is only done at the whim and for the benefit of
property owners.

If the work is never done, then people will keep working. They will do that
because they want to work. It does not follow that we need bosses, hierarchy,
management, government, property, militaries, and police forces to make us do
the work just because there is work to be done.

So where did I lie?

P.S. I'm sorry for being aggressive. I am emphatic about this; I am not doing
the work I want to do because I need to do the work someone with money wants
me to do. Because people will toss me into the garbage disposal if I am not
working for money. This article indicates that I am not alone; I am part of a
majority.

~~~
tariqali34
I accept your apology about being aggressive, especially since I may have been
a bit too empathic myself (about work). The "lie" is about you saying that
when work is done, people move on. I think the truth is that people say work
is done so that they can move on, but work can never be done.

We do seem to agree on that point though, so I should probably retract your
comment "lies". You're fine with people leaving 'projects' incomplete if they
hate it...and I'm fine with that too. But work is indeed left incomplete, and
that's why I made my comment.

If it makes you feel better, replace "employers" with "the open source
community", and redefine pay to mean code/maintenance instead of money. I
think my point still holds.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
> I accept your apology about being aggressive, especially since I may have
> been a bit too empathic myself (about work). The "lie" is about you saying
> that when work is done, people move on. I think the truth is that people say
> work is done so that they can move on, but work can never be done.

Sure, but the perfect has _always_ been the enemy of the good. If we _actually
applied_ this advice, we'd never ship anything. At some point, things are good
enough to send them off and go home.

------
copsarebastards
This article is basically a diluted version of Bob Black's _The Abolition of
Work_ [1].

I'm not sure how possible Black's vision is _now_ because I think there's
still scarcity, but it needs to be considered because it's a much better
future than the one we're heading toward if we keep pretending that the
capitalist work/ownership model is meritocratic. In the future, _all_ jobs can
be automated, and we're going to run into very deep issues long before even
half are automated.

[1]
[http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm](http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm)

------
unabst
Any labor with love is a privilege. Any labor without love is sacrifice. It's
safe to say people are more than capable of being content with sacrifice.
Foxconn workers protesting the enforcement of US labor restrictions is a good
example. They're there to make a sacrifice, not live their lives.

In the west, resistance towards sacrifice is appears to be mounting. But what
is work but an activity that generates value for which you receive a kickback?
And there are plenty of activities that are lovable and that generate value.
Hence, the movement towards lifestyle jobs and placing passion first is only
natural. Entrepreneurs could hold the key here, because they have proven
they're capable of generating those jobs, beginning with themselves.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

― Confucius

~~~
groutexpectatio
Confucius didn't say that

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-
love/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/02/job-love/)

------
bceagle
I have found people that are often the most satisfied at work are the ones
that have figured out the best way to play a game with their own emotions and
instincts. They understand when they are tired and what makes them tired. The
know how to dangle the carrot in front of themselves to get to the next level.
Sure, they may dislike work at some instinctual level just like everyone else,
but they control that along with everything else in their lives.

------
ilaksh
Left out of these discussions is the division between worker and owner.
Classism and elitism are main problems for our society.

That is not to suggest everyone start quoting Marx, give up money, and assume
some kind of techno-communist utopia will just fall out.

I think technology and decentralization are key, but we have to do quite a lot
more thinking and engineering and integration of viewpoints than most people
assume.

------
hackuser
It's clear that people will work hard for many things besides money; to
suggest otherwise is absurd. The evidence is right in front of our noses,
every day: Consider artists, scientists, scholars, soldiers (some of whom risk
their lives in the worst working environment you can imagine, and need food
stamps), teachers, FOSS software developers, explorers, parents, political and
social movement leaders and members, etc.

(I wonder how much Adam Smith made? I also wonder if he really said the things
he represents to us now.)

------
vowelless
> Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either
> “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs.

Is this true? That seems like an very high number.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
I presume the the survey saw "very engaged" as always on at all times, which
is rather misleading as I love my programming job but when encountering the
many frustrating and complicated problems that come across my path I'll often
reach for my phone and go on HN. But I wouldn't say I'm "not engaged." I
suspect many here would feel the same.

------
HCIdivision17
Just a note that the article (perhaps inadvertently) confuses a little:
industrial manufacturing _must_ be highly routinized and boring if it's
working well. Tolerances are very tight for well made manufactured goods,
since they have to be to be assembled into larger, more complex goods. Let an
operator get creative with a running process, and all bets are off [0].

Besides! People are also _terrible_ at that sort of work, so it's better to
automate the job and have the people supervise machines. The machines do the
terrible soul-crushing tedious work and the worker oversees the hiccups and
glitches. (Machines are pretty lousy supervisors, and are difficult to program
supervisory roles in the messy situations a lot of manufacturing happens in.)

And keep in mind that's for a _running_ line or process. I don't think there's
room for creativity on carrying out the line's program, but there's endless
opportunities for planning and improving the process off-line. People are
great at deliberation, planning, and brainstorming. ( _Too_ good, some may
cynically say :) I.e., you'll never get a better ROI than buying a group of
operators lunch and let them rail at you about something that irritates them
about a line. And include them in planning/upgrade meetings; they own the
line, after all!

And there's the exception of those times where it just makes economic sense to
plop a person down for something boring and lonely. For example, the cost of
vision control tech is getting ever more affordable and powerful, but it still
takes a substantial amount of engineering work to actually install and tune
the system for the specific situation it's in; by contrast, people are cheaper
in the short-run and can be reasonably effective very quickly. (It's mind
boggling when you see a failure that you think, "I could have paid a guy a
year's salary to sit in a chair and watch for that one obvious, uncommon
failure mode event.")

[0] This is an interesting dichotomy: the workers _must_ own the process
they're working on, but they also need to not constantly fiddle with settings.
If they're not _actively_ tweaking stuff, then they feel disenfranchised, and
if they are constantly messing with stuff then the operator is simulating a
randomly tuned PID loop on whatever dials happen to be nearby. The root is
that people are generally terrible at figuring out the difference between
"normal variation" and "exceptional variation", and tune both. So when Deming
talks of _knowledge of variation_ , this has to be balanced by _knowledge of
psychology_.

And that balancing act brings us to this article's contention.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles)

------
hencq
I'm a great fan of Sociotechnical systems [1] for exactly the reasons
mentioned in this article. A lot of focus is put on making jobs more
meaningful and giving workers more responsibilities. The theory is that this
will ultimately lead to higher productivity.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system)

------
dunkelheit
The article contains a charming contradiction which really shows how in the
end "scientific management" gets its dues: it tries to show that scientific
management is so much worse than so-called "enligtened management" using...
methods of scientific management! (e.g. hard metrics like sales growth).

