8 ms·

Yes, that's a very good point. Work has always been part of the human condition, and middle class people in the first world are enjoying much, much more comfort

Yes, that's a very good point. Work has always been part of the human condition, and middle class people in the first world are enjoying much, much more comfortable working conditions than their ancestors did. I think we should all be very grateful for that. But it's also a very modern thing for people to suffer from alienating, despair-inducing work. I think this alienation, which Marx speaks of in much detail, is the root of many modern complaints. When you do manual work outdoors, there is a sort of physical element that allows you to get "in the zone" and it really feels like true work. But for white collar tasks like accounting, programming, and filing papers, there's not as often a moment for meditation or getting "in the zone". And there's something much more alienating about doing comfortable work that is held up, not because of the winter frost, but because of some corporate inefficiency. Likewise, blue collar assembly-line labor, in which your entire day is spent building a single part for a huge machine, is much the same. The carpenter can feel delighted from finishing an entire chair, and a weaver might enjoy seeing many completed baskets, but the factory worker never knows rest, never knows any satisfaction, because the modern species of work never ends. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." (Genesis 3:18-19)

mathgladiator 9y ago
You captured a core reason that I picked up wood working: projects finish. An annoying aspect of software is that it takes a life of its own. It is never done, but there are feature requests, bugs, and updates. You make a table, and that is it. It's done. Sure, you have to clean it, but mostly it will last a while until it breaks down.
- smattiso 9y ago
  This is why I wish I had gotten into video game development rather than app development. Once the game is finished it is (for the most part) complete.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    I read that's a rough industry.
  - some_account 9y ago
    Are you being sarcastic? The game industry is the hardest and most miserable. Surely you haven't missed that.
    - gerbilly 9y ago
      The worst games to work on are the sports franchises, they have to be out before the next season starts because the team lineups might change next season.
    - gambiting 9y ago
      I guess, if you pick badly then it probably is. I've been working in video games for 4 years now(as a C++ engine programmer) and I'm still enjoying it a lot. We ship a project, millions of people enjoy it, it feels great. The last time I had to do overtime was 2 years ago I think, I'm usually home by 5pm and get to do other stuff I really enjoy. The pay could be a bit better, but seriously, the superb job satisfaction and good work-life balance is worth the slight reduction in pay compared to companies where you hate every second of being there.
      - some_account 9y ago
        Alright, nice to hear there are still decent companies out there. Its easy to get the image that the entire industry is really bad.
  - justinhj 9y ago
    I got into video game development. It is mostly fun and interesting work and I have never regretted it. Sometimes when I was younger I was exploited for my passion with long hours or poor pay but the game industry largely grew out of that. It can still be tough especially on triple A games with huge marketing budgets... nothing puts pressure on managers and a team like a 7-8 figure marketing spend or a launch deadline that cannot be moved (sports seasons, movie releases, thanksgiving) Video games are software and software does not like to be told to finish in the next N weeks no matter how many bugs or how complex they are, or new features that have been dreamed up and must be implemted. This is where tales of long death marches come from. Even those are not ubiquitous. Anyway finally I get to your point: games are online now and they often don’t finish at launch. You can now continue to fix bugs and tweak gameplay after launch and have users update. Not only that but work begins on downloadable expansions and some games have live stores and other online services like leaderboards. I switched to the mobile game industry which is a lot less punishing on staff because you rarely have hard deadlines and games ramp up more slowly. They tend to run for 3-5 years so there is no final release. This means more career stability because AAA teams tend to have layoffs after launch and sometimes disband entirely.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  I think many software projects should be called “done”, but startups hire lots of people and add tons of new features in the name of growth. I’m working on a SaaS service that does one thing really well, and I think it’s pretty close to being done. The code is very solid, and I rarely see any bugs or error reports (thanks to React, Immutable.js, and Flow.) The infrastructure is autoscaling and requires very little maintenance (thanks to convox.) There’s always more features and integrations I could add, but I’m getting enough customers without them. It will require some ongoing work (e.g. updates for security vulnerabilities), but I’m not too interesting in trying to turn my table into a house. I'd rather follow the Unix philosophy and build a lot of very nice tables.
  - girvo 9y ago
    Flow is fantastic. But nowadays I eschew Immutable for flow-static-land Lenses, with the amazing “decoders” library for handling JSON. That lets me use standard raw objects in a type-safe way with real runtime validation, and with cleaner types than you get with Immutable and Flow!
keyle 9y ago
Excellent write up. You've put into words what I felt like but couldn't really express.
bambax 9y ago
There's no doubt that working outside is infinitely better than working in an office. In my street, garbage collectors, arguably, for some people, one of the least attractive and least qualified jobs in the world, sing every morning. They're happy and they're singing! If you hear someone sing in an office it's because they're either crazy or have been fired. But there is also something to be said in favor of repetitive, low-qualification work. It frees the mind while you're doing it: you can think about something else, or even, yes, sing -- and most importantly, it doesn't follow you home. Modern mid-level office jobs where you're constantly tethered to the company, at all hours and even during "holidays" (if you can get any) are the worst of the worst.
- dmurthy 9y ago
  Well said. Often people forget the mental stress modern work places on us. I remember my Dad working hours but he was tired from physical exhaustion and not mental. He didn't have email or messaging that would distract him from a weekend of relaxation. I was addicted to checking my email every once in a while and found my mind switching to thinking about work instead of enjoying the moment. Thankfully I broke that habit. Today, I try and impress this upon other people who do this.
- slfnflctd 9y ago
  I've mostly worked in offices. Most of them involved unreasonable time pressure-- someone will be mad if you're even 2 minutes 'late', and your time spent available for incoming work can be tracked to the second (and commented on in employee reviews). Involved managers who build healthy teams are too often punished rather than rewarded for it. You are also surrounded by people who, despite these conditions, apparently have sufficient free time to try to pull you into whatever local politics, gossip or sidechannel recruiting they feel like. Between all that garbage and a commute which was a little too long & dangerous for my mental health, I quit. To make ends meet, I ended up cleaning offices much like the ones I previously worked in. No one cares if I'm a few minutes late, as long as the work gets done. My goals are literally visible and easily measurable. When I'm done, I'm done, and as you say, I don't take my work home. People universally appreciate what I'm doing and tend to smile at me. I can confirm I have spare brain cycles for new ideas, as well. I definitely think people benefit from having some kind of tangible, repetitive work like this in their lives. Yeah, the pay sucks, and I'm still trying to find that holy grail of a 'good developer job', but I am doing it on my terms now. In the mean time, my day to day life is significantly happier and more manageable. Sometimes, if the office is empty, I even sing.
gerbilly 9y ago
>When you do manual work outdoors, there is a sort of physical element that allows you to get "in the zone" and it really feels like true work. The mind and the body are meant to be worked together. I think that jobs like programming which minimize physical movement and maximize mental work are unnatural. I've worked as a programmer, but before that I worked farm labour. My meals and my sleep have never been as good as those days when I did a full day on the farm, feeding animals, milking cows and taking in the hay.
tokai 9y ago
This comment made me think of Tolstoy. His portrayal of the noble Konstantin Levin's experience with manual labour, mirrored my own modern white-collar experiences with outdoor labour. The passage can be read her for anyone interested. http://www.bartleby.com/316/304.html http://www.bartleby.com/316/304.html
zrobotics 9y ago
I think you may be over-romanticizing the value of outdoor work here. Let's take agriculture as an example of doing manual work outdoors. How is it more alienating to have a project held up by corporate inefficiency than by freak variances of weather? How is it not just as stressful to see a crop ruined by a hailstorm, or a chance summer shower at the wrong time destroy the value of hay that is ready to bale? Speaking as someone who grew up with this, and has also worked an assembly-line job in the past, it was actually easier to get into a meditative 'in the zone' state doing that than tilling a field or constructing a fence. And isn't having to milk the same cows twice a day, every single day the embodiment of the "species of work that never ends"? This isn't strictly due to modern agriculture, either. Poor timing/freak weather events in the past wouldn't just cause farmers to lose their livelihood, it would also mean there was a very real risk of starvation. While losing your job and comfortable livelihood can certainly be stressful, there seem to be quite a few people who believe that work in the past wasn't just as, if not more, stressful.

mathgladiator 9y ago

You captured a core reason that I picked up wood working: projects finish. An annoying aspect of software is that it takes a life of its own. It is never done, but there are feature requests, bugs, and updates. You make a table, and that is it. It's done. Sure, you have to clean it, but mostly it will last a while until it breaks down.

smattiso 9y ago
This is why I wish I had gotten into video game development rather than app development. Once the game is finished it is (for the most part) complete.
- Clubber 9y ago
  I read that's a rough industry.
- some_account 9y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? The game industry is the hardest and most miserable. Surely you haven't missed that.
  - gerbilly 9y ago
    The worst games to work on are the sports franchises, they have to be out before the next season starts because the team lineups might change next season.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    I guess, if you pick badly then it probably is. I've been working in video games for 4 years now(as a C++ engine programmer) and I'm still enjoying it a lot. We ship a project, millions of people enjoy it, it feels great. The last time I had to do overtime was 2 years ago I think, I'm usually home by 5pm and get to do other stuff I really enjoy. The pay could be a bit better, but seriously, the superb job satisfaction and good work-life balance is worth the slight reduction in pay compared to companies where you hate every second of being there.
    - some_account 9y ago
      Alright, nice to hear there are still decent companies out there. Its easy to get the image that the entire industry is really bad.
- justinhj 9y ago
  I got into video game development. It is mostly fun and interesting work and I have never regretted it. Sometimes when I was younger I was exploited for my passion with long hours or poor pay but the game industry largely grew out of that. It can still be tough especially on triple A games with huge marketing budgets... nothing puts pressure on managers and a team like a 7-8 figure marketing spend or a launch deadline that cannot be moved (sports seasons, movie releases, thanksgiving) Video games are software and software does not like to be told to finish in the next N weeks no matter how many bugs or how complex they are, or new features that have been dreamed up and must be implemted. This is where tales of long death marches come from. Even those are not ubiquitous. Anyway finally I get to your point: games are online now and they often don’t finish at launch. You can now continue to fix bugs and tweak gameplay after launch and have users update. Not only that but work begins on downloadable expansions and some games have live stores and other online services like leaderboards. I switched to the mobile game industry which is a lot less punishing on staff because you rarely have hard deadlines and games ramp up more slowly. They tend to run for 3-5 years so there is no final release. This means more career stability because AAA teams tend to have layoffs after launch and sometimes disband entirely.
nathan_f77 9y ago
I think many software projects should be called “done”, but startups hire lots of people and add tons of new features in the name of growth. I’m working on a SaaS service that does one thing really well, and I think it’s pretty close to being done. The code is very solid, and I rarely see any bugs or error reports (thanks to React, Immutable.js, and Flow.) The infrastructure is autoscaling and requires very little maintenance (thanks to convox.) There’s always more features and integrations I could add, but I’m getting enough customers without them. It will require some ongoing work (e.g. updates for security vulnerabilities), but I’m not too interesting in trying to turn my table into a house. I'd rather follow the Unix philosophy and build a lot of very nice tables.
- girvo 9y ago
  Flow is fantastic. But nowadays I eschew Immutable for flow-static-land Lenses, with the amazing “decoders” library for handling JSON. That lets me use standard raw objects in a type-safe way with real runtime validation, and with cleaner types than you get with Immutable and Flow!

keyle 9y ago

Excellent write up. You've put into words what I felt like but couldn't really express.

bambax 9y ago

There's no doubt that working outside is infinitely better than working in an office. In my street, garbage collectors, arguably, for some people, one of the least attractive and least qualified jobs in the world, sing every morning. They're happy and they're singing! If you hear someone sing in an office it's because they're either crazy or have been fired. But there is also something to be said in favor of repetitive, low-qualification work. It frees the mind while you're doing it: you can think about something else, or even, yes, sing -- and most importantly, it doesn't follow you home. Modern mid-level office jobs where you're constantly tethered to the company, at all hours and even during "holidays" (if you can get any) are the worst of the worst.

dmurthy 9y ago
Well said. Often people forget the mental stress modern work places on us. I remember my Dad working hours but he was tired from physical exhaustion and not mental. He didn't have email or messaging that would distract him from a weekend of relaxation. I was addicted to checking my email every once in a while and found my mind switching to thinking about work instead of enjoying the moment. Thankfully I broke that habit. Today, I try and impress this upon other people who do this.
slfnflctd 9y ago
I've mostly worked in offices. Most of them involved unreasonable time pressure-- someone will be mad if you're even 2 minutes 'late', and your time spent available for incoming work can be tracked to the second (and commented on in employee reviews). Involved managers who build healthy teams are too often punished rather than rewarded for it. You are also surrounded by people who, despite these conditions, apparently have sufficient free time to try to pull you into whatever local politics, gossip or sidechannel recruiting they feel like. Between all that garbage and a commute which was a little too long & dangerous for my mental health, I quit. To make ends meet, I ended up cleaning offices much like the ones I previously worked in. No one cares if I'm a few minutes late, as long as the work gets done. My goals are literally visible and easily measurable. When I'm done, I'm done, and as you say, I don't take my work home. People universally appreciate what I'm doing and tend to smile at me. I can confirm I have spare brain cycles for new ideas, as well. I definitely think people benefit from having some kind of tangible, repetitive work like this in their lives. Yeah, the pay sucks, and I'm still trying to find that holy grail of a 'good developer job', but I am doing it on my terms now. In the mean time, my day to day life is significantly happier and more manageable. Sometimes, if the office is empty, I even sing.

gerbilly 9y ago

>When you do manual work outdoors, there is a sort of physical element that allows you to get "in the zone" and it really feels like true work. The mind and the body are meant to be worked together. I think that jobs like programming which minimize physical movement and maximize mental work are unnatural. I've worked as a programmer, but before that I worked farm labour. My meals and my sleep have never been as good as those days when I did a full day on the farm, feeding animals, milking cows and taking in the hay.

tokai 9y ago

This comment made me think of Tolstoy. His portrayal of the noble Konstantin Levin's experience with manual labour, mirrored my own modern white-collar experiences with outdoor labour. The passage can be read her for anyone interested. http://www.bartleby.com/316/304.html http://www.bartleby.com/316/304.html

zrobotics 9y ago

I think you may be over-romanticizing the value of outdoor work here. Let's take agriculture as an example of doing manual work outdoors. How is it more alienating to have a project held up by corporate inefficiency than by freak variances of weather? How is it not just as stressful to see a crop ruined by a hailstorm, or a chance summer shower at the wrong time destroy the value of hay that is ready to bale? Speaking as someone who grew up with this, and has also worked an assembly-line job in the past, it was actually easier to get into a meditative 'in the zone' state doing that than tilling a field or constructing a fence. And isn't having to milk the same cows twice a day, every single day the embodiment of the "species of work that never ends"? This isn't strictly due to modern agriculture, either. Poor timing/freak weather events in the past wouldn't just cause farmers to lose their livelihood, it would also mean there was a very real risk of starvation. While losing your job and comfortable livelihood can certainly be stressful, there seem to be quite a few people who believe that work in the past wasn't just as, if not more, stressful.