
The Meaning of Work - uladzislau
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/18/AR2006111801189_pf.html
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lwhalen
So... what's the point of this article? Young man who:

* quits HS early, has multiple opportunities to get equivalent degree but doesn't

* quits his first job without another lined up

* 'hangs around' for a couple of years, but somehow...

* lands a steady (albeit crappy) job at Jiffy Lube, yet...

* doesn't bother showing up for his first or second day because 'reasons',

is discovering that life, in fact, is hard. How is this a societal problem, or
anything other than 'lazy kid can't keep a job because of his own personal
problems'?

<actually read the final section after posting this>

just to update, it appears that by the end of the article, our 'hero'
discovers that showing up to an interview early, dressed in suit and tie, with
a warm smile and firm handshake, does indeed stack the deck in your favor.
Continuing to show up early and do the job you've been hired for means they'll
continue to pay you. Shocking expose by WaPo right there.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the guy found work by the end of the article, and
I hope his attitude changes and he reaps nothing but success. However, up
until that point it appears that the majority of his troubles are of his own
making. I still fail to see how the above bullet points are society's problem,
which seems to be the point the WaPo article dances around.

~~~
abraham_s
1)"his neighborhood's unemployment rate 16.3 percent"

2)Chris began his new job. Eight dollars an hour, 40 hours a week, $16,640 a
year.<> An income of $11,490 for a person is defined a the poverty threshold.

3) She is 52 years old, and after 10 years of working as an attendant at a
nursing home, a job that paid her $7 an hour when she began and $9.75 an hour
when she was let go, she wonders if she will ever work again.

4)He thought he had a job as a stocker at K-mart, but on the day he was to
start training, he didn't have bus fare, and that was that.

I see multiple things which are "societal problem" in the article.

"lazy kid can't keep a job because of his own personal problems"

Unless you have gone through a long bout of unemployment, where you get
rejected on a daily basis, I would say you are not qualified to comment on the
effect of such a episode on a persons morale and psychological well-being of
this person. What you see as laziness just might be depression.

I am not completely justifying the person in the article. But I tend to view
these things through a more compassionate eye after I went through a brief
period of unemployment.

edit: Formatting

~~~
a3n
"What you see as laziness just might be depression."

Man, I've been there, and that was exactly what I was feeling when I read the
article. The hopelessness. It's a vicious, killing cycle.

Just about everything in this kid's environment and experience was negative.
Yes, we can rise above, but it's really hard to see that there's even
somewhere to go when you haven't seen it in your life.

Unemployment of 16.3 percent. Does that mean that "they" are lazy? Or are
there other more fundamental factors?

~~~
lwhalen
I'd ask what the other 83.7 percent are doing right, and seek to emulate them
rather than just sit on my duff and whine.

edit: maybe I'm predisposed to being 'less compassionate' about stuff like
this because I have indirect experience seeing a similar pattern with... close
family members. $family_member had all the same or very similar 'chances' as I
did in life vis a vis education, upbringing, etc, but instead chose a drug-
based lifestyle leeching off parents, friends, etc. Said family member, in
their mid 20s, is unemployed, living with parents, indulging in all sorts of
recreational chemistry, and is predisposed to whine about 'how unfair' it all
is, 'how depressed the job market is', and so forth as the reason they can't
find a job, can't keep steady work when they do find one, etc. In this
personal, anecdotal case, the problem isn't their environment, it's them. I
see similar patterns in the WaPo story: even if your girlfriend breaks up with
you, you still get your butt into work the next day. No whining, no excuses.
It might not be the Greatest Job Ever (tm), but it's better (IMHO) than
sitting around leeching off family.

~~~
abraham_s
@lwhalen

I am not really disagreeing with you. I have also met a lot of people like
this.

I was trying to point out 1) How it has become really hard to work your way
out of poverty with an entry level job these days. 2) How a life of constant
failure and lack of guidance leads to personality trait which seems to almost
predisposed towards failure.

"even if your girlfriend breaks up with you, you still get your butt into work
the next day. No whining, no excuses. It might not be the Greatest Job Ever
(tm), but it's better (IMHO) than sitting around leeching off family."

This shows a good work ethic in you, a strong sense of values and I agree with
it and admire it. But having raised in a tightly-knit family with no financial
issues, I wonder how I would have turned out if I had grown up in the a family
like the one mentioned in the article.

------
pjdorrell
It seems that we have constructed a world of jobs where consistency is the
primary value, even though the end goal is just to get some work done.

On the Internet we have constructed systems that accept contributions from
people that can be as little or as much as they want to contribute - like
Wikipedia, or newsy sites like Hacker News, or Github. These websites succeed
where those that require too much up-front commitment fail. Like Nupedia (or
even SourceForge, in the old days, when it was the "go-to" place for open-
source development).

Out in the real world we still demand (mostly), mandatory minimum levels of
commitment. Or, where work can be casual, it gets paid much less than the
"regular" jobs.

There are opportunities for any company that can work out how to make use of
those who want to work, at least some of the time, but who are unable or
unwilling to commit to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.

We could blame the contributors of Nupedia for the failure of that website.
And we could blame all those open-source programmers who were too lazy to jump
through the minimal set of hoops that SourceForge required for contributors,
for the demise of that website. But we know that better alternatives exist,
which are more tolerant of slackness and lack of commitment from their
contributors. So we can see that those older websites were not the best
possible way to organise how to get people to contribute their efforts.

