
People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues - NPV_Computers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-people-jobs-tend-dull-colleagues.html
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claudiulodro
My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology:

If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring
jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first
and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!
Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs
will design interesting jobs for their colleagues.

Dunno. Just musing.

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Humdeee
> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff
> sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more
junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most
important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting
and unknown ending in a flop.

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mfoy_
Thinking about it, same here. If there's some tedious but critical 10-min
sysops task, I'll usually just do it rather than try to pawn it off on a
junior coworker. But if we want to do something exciting, such as set up a new
piece of flashy tech for evaluation, that will usually fall to a junior
resource to 1) help them grow and learn and 2) because if they fail
spectacularly there was nothing important riding on it.

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maccio92
What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging?
There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to
make many things possible. That's why it's called work.

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noitsnot
"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher
quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which
employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker
said.

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kbutler
That begs the question - it assumes that the work in the world needs
innovative, agile, and high-performing employees, when maybe the world needs a
bunch of people that will dig in and do the stuff that needs to be done.

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closeparen
Such work can exist only because sufficiently innovative/agile/high-performing
software engineers have not yet been tasked with automating it.

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kbutler
Laundry.

~~~
closeparen
The washing machine is the canonical labor-saving device that changed society
by freeing women from a large chunk of their tedious manual work.

~~~
kbutler
Laundry is still a repetitive and mind-numbing task - how are _software_
engineers going to improve it further? Currently it's mostly outsourcing
(commercially or to a spouse or parent)

And regarding the time savings of the washing machine - yes, and no. The
washing machine has allowed us to use much more and much cleaner clothing. See
[https://genevahistoricalsociety.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/...](https://genevahistoricalsociety.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/03/clothing.pdf)

"Most ordinary people had only a few clothes: an everyday outfit or two—a
dress for women/girls and a suit or coat and trousers for boys and men—and a
Sunday “best” outfit. Wealthy people might have a few more outfits, but not as
many as most people today.  Washing clothes was very hard work and dresses
and coats would not be washed very often. Instead, undergarments would be
washed regularly. Collars and cuffs for both shirts and dresses were
removable, so they could be changed for fashion or for cleanliness. Girls and
little children wore large aprons or pinafores that covered their dresses to
keep them clean. Men’s shirts and women’s chemises or shifts were washed
regularly." Even the pieces that were washed "regularly" were not washed
"daily" \- much less multiple sets of clothing per day (e.g., gym clothes,
work clothes, evening wear, pajamas, ...)

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carlmr
>"It seems that people have a natural view that putting together a group of
highly repetitive and similar tasks into a job is the most efficient way to
organise work, but previous research suggests this view is rarely correct,"
Professor Parker said.

Spot on. Stop ignoring human psychology. There is a big importance in
specialization and separation of tasks. We know that since the industrial
revolution. But especially in knowledge jobs boredom can lead to less than
stellar quality, which again brings down efficiency.

Humans are animals that evolved in a highly complex environment. To keep
people engaged their task should be varied and contain some newness every now
and then.

Specialization has driven us into these niches where most people don't perform
as well as they could. Jack of all trades master of none is the usual adage. I
see the people in software who know something about the OS, something about
drivers, something about application software, something about web design,
usually designing the best software. They are masters of a lot of categories,
because they are jacks of all trades. Because a lot of knowledge in one
category leads you to be better in another category.

In management speak _synergy_.

Each task doesn't even have to be particularly exciting. But let people choose
from your boring tasks. Maybe something you find boring they find exciting.
And even if they do, don't say they have to do this forever. Maybe they find
it exciting because they didn't do it before.

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kaibee
Alternative Title: Most jobs, even newly created jobs, aren't exciting.

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smileypete
The website in the OP made me think of 'Mr Waturi' in the film 'Joe vs The
Volcano' :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUB3tQs80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUB3tQs80)

(Can be good film to watch after a shit day at the office...)

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crawfordcomeaux
Is this the contrapositive:

People who don't practice being fun and having fun at work won't make work
that's fun.

Sounds reasonable.

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proc0
Explains exactly why I think managers who don't code have no business telling
a capable coder what to do. So many software companies underestimate the
amount of creativity that is needed for a successful programmer, and they
insist on structuring their hierarchy with the top people not knowing how to
code but have learned how to navigate the hierarchical structure. This
obviously leads to work flowing down from those who don't have the knowledge
to create what it is that they are commanding others to do. tl;dr: if you
can't code you shouldn't be in a leadership position (in a software company)
that affects the project directly. Who would that person be leading? Like a
head chef that doesn't know how to cook.

