

Don’t worry that your job is pointless - jshakes
http://jshakespeare.com/dont-worry-that-your-job-is-pointless/

======
RTigger
One of my favorite stories told by our software consultants (the people we
send to client sites to train how to use our software effectively):

One day he went to a customer's site to train them on the new version of our
software, and met with one of the bookkeepers of the company. He showed her a
report that we recently added a column to as part of a feature request from
our clients, and she started crying. He was asking her what was wrong, worried
that we did something terrible. She replied: "You just saved me 3 hours a day.
Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper".

Just because we're not saving babies doesn't mean we're not making people's
lives better.

~~~
michaelochurch
_You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from
school instead of after supper._

The ugly part of this is that we rarely know whether we're saving time or
cutting jobs (and depriving people of income). Between our low level of access
to the relevant information, and the execrable leadership the world currently
has, we can rarely know that.

When the world has good leadership, technological progress (even small
victories) save time and create wealth. When it has bad leadership, it ends
jobs (that are never replaced) and helps the working world shut itself down.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"whether we're saving time or cutting jobs"_

Those two things are basically the same.

In a shop with only one accountant, you're saving her three hours a day.

In a shop with 100 accountants, 30 of them just lost their jobs.

The trouble with our work is not that we don't know whether or not it's doing
good or bad, it's that it's _almost always_ doing both at the same time.
Determining whether the good outweighs the bad is both subjective, highly
fraught with egotism, and treads uncomfortably close to rationalization and
playing god.

~~~
michaelochurch
If the 100 accountants are smart, they'll spend half the day studying for
their CFA exams and not let management know that they're overstaffed.

You're right, though. That's the fundamental problem. I can always get on
board with automating (and thus "killing") undesirable work. I can't get on
board with depriving regular people (below $100,000 per year) of an income if
I can help it. I am aware that society needs to cut jobs and that that's a
really good thing; I just wish it would train up before trading up.

------
soneca
When I began college my carreer plan was this Bill Gates "be rich or powerful,
than do good for the world" path. Well, it doesn't work like that. Actually,
now I see this as kind of selfish, a pretentious delusion of self-importance.
When I thought like this I wanted to be a hero, not make the world a better
place. I realized my mistake in time, changed my major, started a carreer on
the non-profit sector and I was cool with doing something adjuvant as part of
something that was trying to do some good.

But that doesn't mean the more important conclusion of the OP, that is "Just
because optimising Javascript isn’t making the world a better place right this
second doesn’t mean you’re destined to a life of misanthropic selfishness" is
wrong. This has something to do with Steve Jobs connecting dots, with Gandhi
being a lawyer before being Mahatma, with Muhammad Yunus being a humble
professor of Economics in his native country before a Nobel laureate (Peace
Nobel prize, not Economics).

I just quit my job on a non-profit startup, after 8 years in the field, and
now I am a founder of a regular, for-profit startup. This is not my final
carreer path, this is teaching me a lot about disrupting things. I mean, A
LOT. The paradigm shift emerging through startups is very powerful.

On a final note, all this "I want to change the world" mantra that I often
listen applied to tech startups is, 99% of the times, BS. Facebook indeed
changed the world. For better? Not necessarily. Twitter did? Not in my
opinion. "But what about the Arab Spring??". Listen, _people_ , empowered by
technology change the world. So you may say that technology change the world.
Not brands. SMS technology is changing the world in many ways all over Africa,
internet changed the world, not Twitte, or Facebook. Some startups disrupted
some technology use so strongly, that they became monopolists in their use.
But still, don't confuse technology and brands.

Summarizing, optimizing Javascript may not be making the world a better place
right this second, but if you are improving your knowledge, and - another good
advice from OP - don't let yourself be defined by your job and is trying hard
to create a big picture for yourself, than optimizing Javascript may be a very
important dot that you will connect to make a difference in the future.

~~~
jdotjdot
Absolutely agreed. I would take it a step further and say that you can't
"plan" to be rich and powerful, or have huge social impact, or be disruptive.
It doesn't really make sense and it sidesteps the actual goal you should have,
which is doing what you want to do and making the small differences you want
to make daily, monthly, yearly. xkcd's alt text here (<http://xkcd.com/874/>)
says something very powerful: "I don't trust anyone who's more excited about
success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at."

You pursue what it is you want to pursue, like, and has meaning for you--non-
profit work, lawyering, javascript debugging--and the impact comes later, if
it does at all. "Get rich, then change the world with it" is betting your
future on the resources you might have tomorrow, whereas you should be pushing
forward with the resources that you DO have today.

------
qompiler
Without doctors people would consult each other on what to do about their
illness. Without nurses people close to each other will help out. Without
firemen people would be passing the water bucket.

Any job can be made to be useless, the difference is that when someone tries
to specialize he/she becomes good at it. It's how the world works. You
optimize JavaScript, which in turn helps someone else be more productive.

This Disney song should give you better feeling of yourself after reading this
dark and depressing blog post. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDr4MJbIhs>
:-D

~~~
sturadnidge
I agree. Without demeaning medicine, clean water and hospital sanitation have
had the biggest impact on health by far in the course of human history.

Almost any job you can think of is as critical or pointless as you make it.

~~~
ttflee
Oh, I thought it would be antibiotics and immunology.

~~~
Domenic_S
Check out these stats:
<http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html>

_Water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of
the global disease burden and 6.3% of all deaths_.

And that's _today._ I can't even figure what that number would be when poo-
tainted sludge was the default drinking water worldwide.

I assume you mean vaccinations when you say immunology. Vaccines make life
better, but the impact is pretty small -- look at the outcomes for the
diseases we vaccinate against. Take polio for example. Even if you do manage
to contract polio, 90-95% of cases are asymptomatic and a further 4-8% are
minor.

What's the biggest way people got polio? Fecal transmission in water/food,
which brings us back full circle to clean water.

~~~
ttflee
According to Wikipedia, smallpox 'killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans
annually during the closing years of the 18th century (including five reigning
monarchs), and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Of all those
infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease.
Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the
20th century.'

Of course, this disease was contained by vaccines. And immunology is
definitely more broad than mere vaccines. In fact the modern immunology plays
a quite central role in today's research of physiology, virology, microbiology
and pathology.

Back in 2003, when SARS broke out in Beijing, the streets were emptied. Nobody
wanted to meet each other, nobody dared. If immunology had not existed, such
scenario might not be just one incidence, but incidence after incidence.

------
crusso
I always find these self-flagellation articles interesting, but feel like I'm
observing a phenomenon from an outside perspective.

Do most people agonize over the supposed "importance" of what they do? Do they
feel so insecure when comparing what they do to what others do? Do they feel
that what they do really is going to change the world or matter in some
spiritual context?

I don't really worry about it. I figure that if I'm content doing what I do,
with my work-life balance, with the money I make... then why worry about it.
Whenever little thoughts or concerns of self-importance come to mind, I always
think of Ozymandias.

~~~
zoba
For some, the concern stems from this line of thought: "This is my one life,
and after its gone I'll never get it back. I need to make the best of it."

So then we imagine what the best life could be. We don't even have to try hard
to imagine the best life - examples of people who had a better life are
constantly made apparent. Whether a life more noble, more enriched, more fun,
more profound, or any other adjective, it doesn't matter because we see them
all.

Then we see that elements of our life are not notable and we regret that
others may have done something better than ourselves. And then we feel guilty,
sad, upset, or angry that our ONE CHANCE, our life, isn't what it ought to be
in order to be the best.

So, we trudge on making the best moves we know how. Its sometimes a bit of
relief to see articles like this which, for a few minutes, give a sense of
relief that maybe we don't have to cram every ounce of our lives with
greatness... I don't buy it though.

This is my one chance, and I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours
of the day on something that doesn't matter.

~~~
crusso
_This is my one chance_

That's the thing. Your one chance for what?

 _I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something
that doesn't matter._

Do you have some notion of an afterlife where that even matters?

Really, I'm not that nihilistic in the way I live my life, but intellectually
I don't really fight it.

~~~
zoba
Thats the thing: I don't know what the most important thing for me to be doing
is. So the best thing I can do is figure it out. Putting myself in a position
of wealth and power opens more doors so that I have more opportunities to
figure out just what the hell I'm supposed to be doing here. If I were to
"give up" and not strive to grow, I'd have less access to the variety of
things which can be done. Therefore, I _must_ work hard and must get better
and must do things that matter so that I have a better chance at figuring out
what I'm here for. If it turns out that I'm not actually here for anything at
all, then I really haven't lost anything because there was nothing to win in
the first place. But, giving up before you even know the answer? Thats a sad
story.

~~~
crusso
Okay, I like that answer. Just asking out of curiosity. Personally, I've never
found a greater purpose to my life. I don't really think I'm looking for one
any more. I have my family, my work, my hobbies, etc. I never feel like I must
have some higher purpose to get up in the morning and do my thing... but I
know that everyone is different.

------
tomp
I'm not smart enough to make a Nobel-price-worthy contribution to science, to
cure an epidemic disease or to invent a new way of producing energy. I don't
have a physics degree to help build rockets nor a biochemistry degree to
design better food. I didn't choose to study to be a doctor, and even as I
somewhat regret that choice, it's too late now. I also don't own any land, so
I can't be a farmer.

The only way I can change the world for the better is to earn a huge amount of
money and then spend it on other people that actually _can_ do one of the
above. Like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. So even if my career
pursuits are totally focused on money, that's not a bad thing!

~~~
dsego
Maybe us "not so smart individuals" could be a small cog in some bigger
picture, like a world interdisciplinary project to cure cancer (think
Manhattan project, or NASA). But in capitalism it's more important to work on
SEO and sell stuff to people. All of the advances of modern computing boil
down to advertising, such a shame.

~~~
Domenic_S
Selling stuff to people isn't a bad thing. My own personal example:

I work for eBay Inc., so my job is to be a cog in a bigger picture like you
said. That bigger picture is game-changing commerce. I don't know the numbers,
but some large amount of people have found a way to make a full-time living
selling on eBay, or Magento, or some other platform using PayPal to take
payments. They feed their families by selling stuff in our marketplaces. On
the buyer's side, we help people get what they want for the best price. That
makes people's lives better, too.

Maybe it's just rationalization. :) But I do think that many capitalist
companies create a net positive for the world.

~~~
solistice
I think you could deduce the net positive from comparing capitalist companies
to communist combinats. Somehow they churn out more, cheaper and better.
They're people who spout that that's materialism and bad, and then they say we
should help the poor. But more, cheaper, better helps the poor. So no matter
how you turn it, it's a net plus.

------
rco8786
> The fact is that if all the web developers (or investment bankers)
> disappeared tomorrow the world wouldn’t change much – at least not compared
> to doctors or nurses or firemen. There wouldn’t be a global meltdown.

I really beg to differ.

~~~
mikegioia
I think if all programmers disappeared the world actually might shut down.

Just think of all the places in the global infrastructure that require
software to work: financial trading, military, flight control, all modern
business accounting and financial reporting, medical systems, etc.

~~~
krapp
All that software already exists and is running though, and I suppose it
depends on what you mean by 'shut down.' These industries might no longer be
able to update, but I think it's possible to run just about any industry
without IT, or on legacy code, just on a smaller, slower scale. You could
predict some level of catastrophe for the disappearance of any large sector
that affects commerce -- from truck drivers to sewer workers to even maybe
interns. I think this implies the tenuous nature of our economy more than the
relative importance of programmers.

------
zekenie
I wholeheartedly believe you can save lives (including babies) with
javascript. <http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/> The way healthcare professionals
use computers is slowing down r & d and ultimately costing lives. I worked at
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last summer. They claim that they are the
leader in healthcare IT. Yet my job was to copy clinical data from one
computer system to another _by hand._ They had a developer doing manual data
entry at a Harvard teaching hospital! Today, healthcare needs programmers as
much as they need doctors (maybe not in the same quantities).

------
randomdrake
Great article. It looks to be down at the moment, however.

Here's a link to a mirror/cache of it:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu4rOMJ:jshakespeare.com/dont-
worry-that-your-job-is-pointless/)

------
kranner
> In reality, we do what we do because we’re good at it and doing it makes
> money.

Speak for yourself. I work because I enjoy both making things and the act of
working.

~~~
joonix
Donate your salary to charity, then.

~~~
hermannj314
I'm not sure that follows. He was saying that enjoying the work and building
things is sufficient to get him to work, but that doesn't mean he would prefer
earning $0 than some number bigger than $0. It just means that if the 2nd
option wasn't available, he would still work.

~~~
kranner
Thanks. All I meant was that to me my work is not a means to pay the bills,
and perhaps I'm not even particularly good at it. I just enjoy doing it. OP is
being offensively presumptuous with that statement.

------
kenkam
I agree with the OP's general point. Career aspirations? What I give back to
the world? To me, I just want to be happy in my life, I guess some can argue
it's Utilitarianism. This is my big picture. So if I can pay my bills, live
the lifestyle I have (not very lavish btw), go to work and be happy working
there (above average, you're always gonna have bad days), have a healthy
relationship with parents, friends and the other half, and be able to save
some money to ensure my and my family's future happiness, then I'm happy.

So whether I am a graphic designer, charity worker, investment banker, even a
saint, if I can continue to be happy and do the stuff I said above, then I
couldn't care less if the job was 'pointless' or not. Who is to judge? It's
worth something to me!

Disclaimer: I work at a bank as a developer. Perhaps not the 'coolest' job out
there, but if it means I can go home and be happy, then I consider myself a
success. Don't get me wrong, if anyone asks wouldn't you want to be a
millionaire, of course I would, but sacrificing my happiness? It'll require
more thought.

Final thought: maybe I'm only 27 and I haven't hit the mid life part yet. I am
keeping an open mind as to how my thoughts will change...

------
smky80
This is an important idea. Several years back I quit a well-paying job in
finance because I wanted to work on meaningful problems. What I realized
fairly recently is that most problems are social problems. It's not like some
demon is draining the world of natural resources and polluting it, creating
antibiotic resistant bacteria, or starting wars all over the world. We're
doing that.

You want to save the world? Start with being a good parent.

~~~
HNaTTY
...Or don't have any kids at all, since kids turn into adults and adults are
the cause of pretty much all the social problems we have, such as pollution
and depletion of natural resources.

------
michaelochurch
A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that
_most_ humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists,
perceive a natural conflict between what we want (whether it's to live for
1000+ years, to fly to Japan for $50 on a non-polluting electric airplane, to
have all of the world's information accessible at a computer terminal, or just
to have more interesting jobs) and the actual state of the world, which we see
as dismally primitive. We don't need a human enemy to have conflict and to
inspire us to greatness; primordial entropy _is_ our enemy. Most people don't
think this way. It takes a fight to unlock their energies. This is especially
true at the complacent top of society. The best way to create social mobility
for smart people is to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In
1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to exploration and trade and
new theories about politics, culminating in rational government and modern
capitalism. (Henry VIII was no saint, but one of the reasons for his horrible
reputation is that he promoted smart commoners to work out his split from the
church, angering nobility of the time.) In 1965, it was the Cold War,
resulting in incredible technical progress, including the space program and
the Internet. Neither of these rifts was free of harm or pain, but ultimately,
humanity is better off with its elite cleft in two halves that hate each
other's fucking guts (and will therefore promote smart people from without in
order to win their existential struggle) than it is with one elite that can
singularly focus on keeping itself established and the "without" outside. When
there's harmony in the elite, there is no progress.

Most of our jobs are based on conflict. Hedge fund traders are trying to
outsmart other hedge funds in a winner-take-all market. In VC-istan, it's all
about ad dollars (hence, I call it "ad-banking"). Most of the great
technologies we use (e.g. the Internet) were funded by military projects:
people wanting to out-innovate and out-technologize the Russians. It'd be
better if we could do great things _without_ all the negative side effects of
conflict, but human organizations are lethargic and no elite has been immune
to the temptation of parasitism.

The pointlessness we perceive in our jobs comes from the fact that most of
what we do isn't about civilization's advancement, but about helping one party
compete against the other. Web development is mostly about making one business
more _attractive_ than the other guys, which has a zero-sum, arms-race feel to
it. All of this conflict leads to multiplicity of efforts, left-against-right
work, and weird indirections that sap our efficiency. It _seems_ like this
renders 95% of what we do pointless.

The problem is that, in reality, without the business conflicts that waste 95%
of our work, most of us wouldn't have jobs or money at all, so the wastage
would be 100%. The only thing that will allow transfer of wealth out of an
elite and into new talent is some kind of severe conflict within that elite.
The ideal of capitalism (until a parasitic, socially-connected corporate elite
hijacks it and subverts whatever mechanisms it uses to force competition) is
that business elites in competition with each other will always perform better
than single monopolistic powers.

This is also why VC-istan sucks Hitler's necrotic scrotum. VCs collude and
decide, as a group, who's hot and who's not. They don't compete with each
other. They'd rather get invited to each others' parties and in on each
others' deals. The lack of competition within that elite leads to downright
awful terms for the people actually doing the fucking work.

~~~
oinksoft
Your assertion that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for renaissance
exploration and trade is extremely dubious.

By all accounts, Spanish and Italian monarchs were behind the push for
exploration, this occurring before the reformation. They wanted trade, and it
didn't take a religious schism to provoke that. Rather, this happened in the
thirteenth century when the Arabs lost their stranglehold of the Silk Road,
and the Mongols opened it up (hence Marco Polo's travels).

Advances in naval technology made the travels of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries possible. These trips were simply not feasible beforehand, it was
not a matter of some nebulous cabal of "elites" suppressing the merchants and
scientists.

I find your interpretation of this history revisionist, framed to support your
"VC-istan" thesis, which probably doesn't need historical evidence from the
renaissance. You'll find plenty of suitable fodder in the past fifty years.

~~~
zeteo
>Your assertion that the Protestant Reformation was responsible for
renaissance exploration and trade is extremely dubious.

You've misread michaelochurch's comment. He wasn't asserting the Reformation
came before the Renaissance. His point was that the states newly energized by
the Reformation became very active in exploration and trade and ultimately
created the economic and political institutions that define the modern world.
And, while he is correct about England (which, despite insularity, was never a
great naval power before it began being ruled by Protestants), his best
example would have been the Northern Netherlands, which featured: the first
modern republic, religious toleration, the first stock exchange, extensive
civil engineering, the revival of drill-based military techniques etc. Unlike
earlier mercantile republics (say, Venice), the Dutch model also found ready
imitators in many of its aspects (Sweden in its golden age, England especially
after 1688, the North American colonies) and developed directly into the
capitalist / parliamentarian society that many of us live in today.

~~~
oinksoft
The kernel of his thesis is

    
    
      The best way to create social mobility for smart people is
      to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In
      1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to
      exploration and trade and new theories about politics,
      culminating in rational government and modern capitalism.
    

That is entirely backward and has little grounding in history.

The points you make are sound and accurate, and had they been his, I would
have had no reason to criticize.

~~~
michaelochurch
The way I might be wrong is in the assertion that the Protestant Reformation
was responsible for creating cleavages within the European elites that might
have formed in other ways and for other reasons.

Did society _need_ the Protestant Reformation, at that specific point in time,
to get those advances? Possibly not. Did we need a Cold War with the Soviet
Union, rather than some other kind of conflict, to get the Internet? Again,
no.

It's not _specific conflicts_ that humanity has needed to advance, insofar as
history could have played out in a million of other different ways. However,
it has been the case throughout most of humanity's history that social health
(rather than slow degeneracy due to a parasitic elite) requires some kind of
intractable enmity to exist within the elite.

------
robheaton
“if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard
Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary”

Awesome quote.

------
bjhoops1
But what about my deep-seated need to feel like I'm fundamentally better than
investment bankers?

------
solistice
I find we're really bad at defining goals. Let's play a short question game.
You win if you read through these questions and you say "Nah, got this
covered" without feeling guilty. What are you working for? To better society?
To make an impact? Sure. That's a little vague though, isn't it?

Ok, maybe it's to better society. Define better (Well, uhmm...better, you
know?") and define society (Uhmm...the country? Ohh wait, the world? Maybe
those kids in africa?). You kinda see where I'm going with "this is way vague
for a life purpose"?

Ok, let's take the impact example. Which impact? Do you want to be remembered?
Just remembered, or positively remembered? Or do you want to make a lasting
change on the face of earth? How long should it last? How visible should it
be? Or do you want to change somebody? How do you want to change them? What
will you do to change them?

The gist is definition.

A lot of "career planning" is an improperly defined goal for an even larger
time period than the usual resolutions we make. Stop smoking, lose weight,
work out more. How often do you keep your new years resolutions? Proably not
that often. So why are you entrusting your life purpose to the same kind of
expectation making that you do for your new years resolution, to some goal
with quicksand consistency?

You know the feeling you get in mid february that you didn't keep up with your
resolutions, right? You feel guilty because you've wasted another year and
still haven't gotten these things done. Lack of willpower, right? Ok, imagine
you're 35, look at your life resolution, realize that you haven't lost weight
nor changed the world, and you feel guilty. Really guilty. Because your former
me is ashamed of what you've done. And it's not just a new years resolution,
it's your life goal you haven't gotten done.

Ok, fair enough. Figure out what exactly you are trying to do till when,
preferably with why you want to do these things. Name - date - reason. You
can't worry about the pointlessness of something if you got the point on a
paper in front of you, 12pt Times New Roman. Then factor that into
object(ive)s and method(ology)s, so you can whip up the source of your life
one task after another. You'll get there.

~~~
willismichael
> Ok, imagine you're 35

Did I read that right? Are you really using 35 as an arbitrary number meaning
"some distant point in the future"?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
More like 35 as that point when you realize you're not young anymore, this is
actually your real life, and you need to stop daydreaming and deal with it.

~~~
RougeFemme
Although there's nothing wrong with constantly wondering what you want to be
when you grow up. . .even when you're "old" - however you define that. . .as
long as it doesn't lead to unhappiness or obsessive navel-gazing.

~~~
krapp
As someone who's experienced both depression and obsessive navel-gazing at 35
I can attest to its counterproductive nature.

------
lukethomas
As someone who has the goal of "making enough money so I can give back", I've
realized that doing something NOW is important for a couple reasons:

1) I could die tomorrow and 2) Habits form, and if I plan on giving
services/time/money at a latter point in my life, I might as well start now
and get used to it (even if the amount is small).

------
clux
There's plenty of ways to make a difference in the world without having a job
that is immediately altruistic.

<http://80000hours.org/career-advice> has a lot of good information along
these lines.

------
jefe78
Seeing that your site is offline, I'm going to have to disagree with you.

-Sysadmin

------
touristtam
A job that can be automatized _is_ /unimportant/. Your finance wizard can just
be replaced by a few line of code _because_ his whole world is already part of
this technology world. Now try to automatize the one doing to the coding.

People losing jobs are a consequence of an economic decision, not because of
technological advancement. Knowledge is still power.

------
RTigger
I ended up blogging a response to this -
[http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-
sof...](http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-software/)

TL;DR - We change the world for the better in so many ways that we don't even
realize. Don't sell ourselves short.

------
adamman
I'm seeing a Cloudflare page that states that the site is offline and there is
no cached version available. I wonder if this is because they decided to set
up cloudflare right when their site was getting hammered by HN.

~~~
jng
That could be it. Still, the server is down, and Cloudflare is showing that it
can't really do anything. Even if reasonable, it's pretty bad publicity for
Cloudflare (at the very least, definitely not good).

------
generalpf
Fantastic article. Thank you for writing it.

------
oscargrouch
“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that
you do it”

Mahatma Gandhi

------
daSn0wie
thank you

