
Do you have a pointless job? [video] - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170420-do-you-have-a-pointless-job
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adtiustErn
In my experience, the more money I've made, the less I actually do. When I was
young and worked minimum wage jobs, the management squeezed every minute out
of us. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean," etc.

Now that I'm a mid-career software developer, I'm making my highest salary so
far and I do maybe two hours of work a week, so I agree with the "more
pointless the job, the higher the pay" comment. At least when I flipped
burgers, people were being fed.

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nulagrithom
> I do maybe two hours of work a week

This is what bothers me the most... in those 2 hours, I somehow save the
company 8 hours _a week_ because somebody was doing by hand what I did in a
few lines of code.

Is that "positive value"? Sure, I made the company more efficient, but what's
this person doing now? Did I make their job "more pointless"? I mean, I can't
see what I did as a _bad_ thing per se but... I just don't know how it plays
out in the end.

I feel like there's a huge piece of the "work" puzzle that's missing in our
culture.

~~~
adtiustErn
You are describing the paradox of our work as programmers: when we do our job
well, we are automating away tasks so they don't have to be done by hand, so
there isn't any more work to do.

When I was a consultant, I knew I was on track to provide positive value to a
client when I was working myself out of a job by automating everything that I
could and by writing thorough documentation so that the full-timers could
easily maintain what I had left behind.

And no, I don't think you made that person's job more pointless: you made it
more comfortable by eliminating waste. As the saying goes, "Machines should
work; people should think."

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goalieca
How many of us are coding projects that will never ship!?

Édit: bonus. How many have never shipped anything during their career?

~~~
jressey
Wow, this hits close to home. I have shipped exactly 1 feature that has helped
anyone, and it's only helped a few 10s of thousands of people. And the product
which uses the feature is probably going to shut down soon.

~~~
roflc0ptic
Speaking as a dev of 8 years who has shipped a fair amount, that... sounds
like a cool accomplishment. My work has been integral to the professional
lives of like, 40 people - extremely small scale applications for scientific
endeavors, mostly. I'm pretty proud of it. I'd be really proud of building
something that helped ~20k people.

~~~
jressey
If it makes you feel better this feature was an enhancement to an in-app
messaging system. So like, they could have just used email.

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Ocerge
My job is completely pointless; my company will make money no matter what I
do. I (and I imagine most other people in general) do their best to normalize
this in the name of having a stable life. Doing something meaningful is hard,
harder than most people would want to deal with. Or at least that's the case
for me.

~~~
jimmaswell
I've found meaningful work in contributing to two volunteer projects for fan-
games*. It's nice knowing the code I write gets used directly by the thousands
of people who go on the MMO/the people who download the demos of the other
(non MMO) game. If you're not involved in anything like that then just general
open source contribution can also work.

Finding equally meaningful employment would probably be pretty hard though,
and from what I've heard of the game dev industry, that route wouldn't likely
be worth it.

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TremendousJudge
>The more pointless the job, the higher the pay

This doesn't mean that the higher the pay the more pointless the job, even
though that's what they imply at the end

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Theodores
I checked my payslip - all is good, I am not pointless, yet!

However, there is a closely related topic: bullsh1tting!

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-bullshitters-just-
survive...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-bullshitters-just-survive-
thrive-until-atul-mathur)

P.S. my favourite scene from the video is the guy rolling his head up and down
the keyboard answering emails. Must try it.

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xyzzy4
All jobs are basically pointless except for agricultural jobs, which is all we
need to survive.

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metaphorm
construction, textiles, carpentry, blacksmithing, at minimum there's a lot of
other labor intensive jobs that are essential to civilized life.

then there's all the necessary jobs that exist because humans living in hives
creates many challenges of its own. police, fire fighters, medical jobs,
lawyers and judges, legislators, etc. are all necessary functions for city-
dwelling.

you might be noticing that most of these jobs are not things that have a whole
lot of venture funded software companies working on. no, most of our venture
funded software is fairly trivial and unimportant stuff in the grand scheme of
things.

for example, I just manage servers and shit for a company that, on a
fundamental level, is a hunger merchant. our product is hunger. we make people
want to consume more. it's certainly not a necessary thing. in fact, it is
probably harmful at least a little bit. there are worse things but what we do
isn't really a good thing, at least not in any obvious way.

so yeah, not all jobs are pointless. but a lot of software jobs are.

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js8
Is there a way to download the video? I found some copy on YT but with bad
english subtitles.

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unclenoriega
youtube-dl seems to work

[https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

