6 ms·

Do you have a pointless job? [video]

61 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

Ocerge 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
TremendousJudge 10y ago
>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
Theodores 10y ago
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-thrive-until-atul-mathur https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-bullshitters-just-survive... P.S. my favourite scene from the video is the guy rolling his head up and down the keyboard answering emails. Must try it.
adtiustErn 10y ago
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.
- nsxwolf 10y ago
  Ha, I used to hear a similar phrase working in food service: "Meantime is clean time!"
- dageshi 10y ago
  Ahh but are you going to plenty of meetings? I think that's all that really counts.
  - adtiustErn 10y ago
    No, I do not attend any meetings.
- georgeecollins 10y ago
  I feel people are being excessively cynical about this. The most valuable people often do a small amount of work but make very good decisions. Example: you can have a manager with clear, attainable goals and an excellent staff. Or you can have a manager with a poor team and changing goals. The latter manager may work harder but to less effect. Sometimes people are really busy because they are doing a bad job.
  - adtiustErn 10y ago
    You make a good point. It reminds me of the Legend of the Handyman's Invoice as described on Snopes: Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice. The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.
js8 10y ago
Is there a way to download the video? I found some copy on YT but with bad english subtitles.
- bullen 10y ago
  saveclipbro... or anything like it.
- unclenoriega 10y ago
  youtube-dl seems to work https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
goalieca 10y ago
How many of us are coding projects that will never ship!? Édit: bonus. How many have never shipped anything during their career?
- jressey 10y ago
  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.
  - ashark 10y ago
    Yeah, solidly 80-90% of my time working has never really led to anything like enough benefit to anyone to justify it. Much of it's never benefitted anyone at all. There's a ton of stupid money in software right now. Enough to waste tons of our time on 9 things that don't work for the 1 that does. Doesn't make it feel good to be a part of such an impersonal and abstract process, especially when software's already kinda impersonal and abstract on the best days.
  - roflc0ptic 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
  - steven777400 10y ago
    10s of thousands is great, and much more than many developers will experience. A lot of developers (outside of tech companies especially) create software for "internal" or corporate use, often by one division. The various projects I supervise/work on have between 10 and 100 users. The total user count for all my projects together is less than 1000. On the other hand, there's a good segment of those users who basically "live" (w.r.t work) in the software; every time I walk by the customer users area I see it front and center on their screens, which is a good feeling.
xyzzy4 10y ago
All jobs are basically pointless except for agricultural jobs, which is all we need to survive.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- taway_1212 10y ago
  Protection from starvation is indeed our basic need, but according to Maslov's theory we have other needs as well. On the other hand, a field such as marketing exist only to extend your share of the market at the cost of others (and to defend against others who try to do the same to you). It's a zero sum game without any benefit to the society.
  - xyzzy4 10y ago
    >Maslov's theory we have other needs as well So you think every hunter-gatherer is extremely unhappy?

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 10y ago
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.

TremendousJudge 10y ago

>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

Theodores 10y ago

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-thrive-until-atul-mathur https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-bullshitters-just-survive... P.S. my favourite scene from the video is the guy rolling his head up and down the keyboard answering emails. Must try it.

adtiustErn 10y ago

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.

nsxwolf 10y ago
Ha, I used to hear a similar phrase working in food service: "Meantime is clean time!"
dageshi 10y ago
Ahh but are you going to plenty of meetings? I think that's all that really counts.
- adtiustErn 10y ago
  No, I do not attend any meetings.
georgeecollins 10y ago
I feel people are being excessively cynical about this. The most valuable people often do a small amount of work but make very good decisions. Example: you can have a manager with clear, attainable goals and an excellent staff. Or you can have a manager with a poor team and changing goals. The latter manager may work harder but to less effect. Sometimes people are really busy because they are doing a bad job.
- adtiustErn 10y ago
  You make a good point. It reminds me of the Legend of the Handyman's Invoice as described on Snopes: Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice. The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.

js8 10y ago

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

bullen 10y ago
saveclipbro... or anything like it.
unclenoriega 10y ago
youtube-dl seems to work https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

goalieca 10y ago

How many of us are coding projects that will never ship!? Édit: bonus. How many have never shipped anything during their career?

jressey 10y ago
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.
- ashark 10y ago
  Yeah, solidly 80-90% of my time working has never really led to anything like enough benefit to anyone to justify it. Much of it's never benefitted anyone at all. There's a ton of stupid money in software right now. Enough to waste tons of our time on 9 things that don't work for the 1 that does. Doesn't make it feel good to be a part of such an impersonal and abstract process, especially when software's already kinda impersonal and abstract on the best days.
- roflc0ptic 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
- steven777400 10y ago
  10s of thousands is great, and much more than many developers will experience. A lot of developers (outside of tech companies especially) create software for "internal" or corporate use, often by one division. The various projects I supervise/work on have between 10 and 100 users. The total user count for all my projects together is less than 1000. On the other hand, there's a good segment of those users who basically "live" (w.r.t work) in the software; every time I walk by the customer users area I see it front and center on their screens, which is a good feeling.

xyzzy4 10y ago

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

metaphorm 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
taway_1212 10y ago
Protection from starvation is indeed our basic need, but according to Maslov's theory we have other needs as well. On the other hand, a field such as marketing exist only to extend your share of the market at the cost of others (and to defend against others who try to do the same to you). It's a zero sum game without any benefit to the society.
- xyzzy4 10y ago
  >Maslov's theory we have other needs as well So you think every hunter-gatherer is extremely unhappy?