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I'm sorry if I'm taking this the wrong way but that sounds like settling for mediocrity to me. Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

by oliv__ 6y ago

rini17 6y ago
Who said they must be?
- chownie 6y ago
  You spend around half of your wakeful hours at your job, if it's unfulfilling you're trading misery in addition to time for money.
  - WJW 6y ago
    That's why they pay you money for it. If it was fun, people would do it for free (see the FOSS world and its endless discussions on how to monetize).
    - pharke 6y ago
      If it was fun, it would be a sole proprietorship.
    - throwaway98797 6y ago
      Got to believe that it’s possible before you can find it.
    - underdeserver 6y ago
      They pay you money because you bring them value. Not because it's fulfilling or not for you in any way.
      - foldr 6y ago
        They pay because you wouldn't bring them value if they didn't pay. Otherwise Facebook would be paying the developers of every open source project that they use.
      - benhurmarcel 6y ago
        > They pay you money because you bring them value Not at all. They pay what it would cost to replace you. If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.
        ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        Do you not agree that value creation is correlated with salary?
        x0x0 6y ago
        Not particularly strongly. Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee. For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of the house, but used to be an engineer. So I think primarily in terms of business value. Or think of CSMs. They get paid a lot less, on average, than engineers. Are they less valuable / do they create less value? It's quite hard to make that argument: No CSMs, no customers and no upsells.
        ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand. CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact. If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.
        x0x0 6y ago
        I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact. I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.
      - JSavageOne 6y ago
        Not value, money. Every job centers around money because we're working for businesses. "Value" is just a side effect (and not a necessary one at that). Some people find making money meaningful and fulfilling, many of us don't.
    - chownie 6y ago
      That answers a point I didn't make. Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.
      - WJW 6y ago
        The company might still win in that exchange, since they get the labor they paid for anyway. Whether you are happy or not is only important insomuch as it alters your productivity. Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.
        chownie 6y ago
        > Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees. Don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone posting on HN comes from a similar background. I work for a non-profit who go to great lengths to make the workplace comfortable.
        WJW 6y ago
        Don't get me wrong, I think that's great and I'm happy you have a nice workplace. My comments were in the greater context of the thread, which is about working for FAANG companies.
        Sodman 6y ago
        I'm not saying big companies deeply care about you as a person, but their interests are at least partially aligned with yours on this. Happier employees are more engaged, work harder, work longer hours. In many cases the things that make employees "happier" are a lot cheaper for employers than increasing someone's salary by x%.
      - rini17 6y ago
        Well, you adapt yourself to find some fun/fullfillment in the work that is available. To approach work with the mindset "it must be fun or else!" can lead to a lifetime of misery.
    - andrewaylett 6y ago
      My job brings me opportunities of scale that I'm unlikely to find elsewhere, and I genuinely enjoy the challenges, but I'd work on something else if they didn't pay me to do it. It's not that it's not fun, but fun doesn't pay the bills. If it didn't _have_ to pay the bills, I'd probably still develop software but with a very different focus.
  - itsmeamario 6y ago
    welcome to the workforce! Where you receive money for doing a task you don't care to do.
wolfgke 6y ago
> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling? Life experience. ;-)
- oliv__ 6y ago
  Yours maybe
  - chasd00 6y ago
    bookmark this and come back in 20 years. your life should be fulfilling not your job.
    - oliv__ 6y ago
      I honestly don't see how a life could be fulfilling if you hate or even just don't care for what you spend most of your time on (work)
      - ninkendo 6y ago
        You're not always in control of whether your job is fulfilling. Maybe you've been lucky so far, but it's unlikely to last forever. A piece of advice: The moment it stops being fulfilling for you, you may get the urge to change jobs to something that you think will make you happier. You may change jobs several times trying to rediscover that initial feeling that made you satisfied with your work. But it may never come back. And if it's anything like my situation, in the end, the first job you left may have been the best of the bunch, and you come to the realization that the original satisfaction you had was a fluke and you may never find it again. There's two ways you could go about fixing this. One is to keep job hopping until you get something that was as good as the first job. The other is to accept that it's just a job, and to try and not derive too much of your happiness purely from work. (Or, more generally, try to not derive too much of your happiness from anything you can't control.)
        supahfly_remix 6y ago
jasonmp85 6y ago
Marx?
- jfengel 6y ago
  Marx was big on getting people to the place where they don't feel like their work is pointless. But in order to get there, you have to get rid of the social stratification of the current system, where some people do their labor and give it to somebody else to sell. That seller not only gets to keep the majority of the profit, but it also keeps the work from being very fulfilling since you're disconnected from the end product of your effort. So Marx didn't say it was impossible. He just said that getting from here to there was going to require changes -- changes that could easily be unpleasant.
Aeolun 6y ago
Of course they can be, but the problem is finding one that has some overlap between: - Fulfilling - Stable - Decent salary I find that it’s hard to get all of them in the same position.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling? As a worker, a job will always have elements that are inherently stacked against you and are unfair, and those elements are enforced by the same laws that force you to accept such an arrangement otherwise you won't eat and your kid will never be able to see a doctor. You give part a part of yourself you cannot get back, your time, a limited resource that you can't regain once spent. You often do this for little to no equity in the business you spend the majority of your waking time advancing, and you often have little to no say in how or where your time is spent. For the vast majority of people, they will never be paid enough to be able to live off of their assets, and their time will be spent building wealth for those whose income is derived from their assets. Unsurprisingly, there are some people who aren't happy with such arrangements and have a lot to say about them.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling? The person you're responding to did not claim that jobs can't be fulfilling. They merely said that people shouldn't expect to work a fulfilling job. And they're totally right. In fact, I'd argue that the extreme majority of jobs are not fulfilling for the majority of the people working them. Retail, fast food, call centers...nobody enjoys those jobs. And yet people work them because they have to, because they pay so little that trying to get out of them takes an incredible amount of work, which is hard to find the motivation to do when you're so beat down by how incredibly shit your job is combined with constantly being stressed about lack of money.

I'm sorry if I'm taking this the wrong way but that sounds like settling for mediocrity to me. Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

by oliv__ 6y ago

I'm sorry if I'm taking this the wrong way but that sounds like settling for mediocrity to me. Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

rini17 6y ago

Who said they must be?

chownie 6y ago
You spend around half of your wakeful hours at your job, if it's unfulfilling you're trading misery in addition to time for money.
- WJW 6y ago
  That's why they pay you money for it. If it was fun, people would do it for free (see the FOSS world and its endless discussions on how to monetize).
  - pharke 6y ago
    If it was fun, it would be a sole proprietorship.
  - throwaway98797 6y ago
    Got to believe that it’s possible before you can find it.
  - underdeserver 6y ago
    They pay you money because you bring them value. Not because it's fulfilling or not for you in any way.
    - foldr 6y ago
      They pay because you wouldn't bring them value if they didn't pay. Otherwise Facebook would be paying the developers of every open source project that they use.
    - benhurmarcel 6y ago
      > They pay you money because you bring them value Not at all. They pay what it would cost to replace you. If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        Do you not agree that value creation is correlated with salary?
        x0x0 6y ago
        Not particularly strongly. Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee. For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of the house, but used to be an engineer. So I think primarily in terms of business value. Or think of CSMs. They get paid a lot less, on average, than engineers. Are they less valuable / do they create less value? It's quite hard to make that argument: No CSMs, no customers and no upsells.
        ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand. CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact. If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.
        x0x0 6y ago
        I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact. I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      Not value, money. Every job centers around money because we're working for businesses. "Value" is just a side effect (and not a necessary one at that). Some people find making money meaningful and fulfilling, many of us don't.
  - chownie 6y ago
    That answers a point I didn't make. Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.
    - WJW 6y ago
      The company might still win in that exchange, since they get the labor they paid for anyway. Whether you are happy or not is only important insomuch as it alters your productivity. Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.
      - chownie 6y ago
        > Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees. Don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone posting on HN comes from a similar background. I work for a non-profit who go to great lengths to make the workplace comfortable.
        WJW 6y ago
        Don't get me wrong, I think that's great and I'm happy you have a nice workplace. My comments were in the greater context of the thread, which is about working for FAANG companies.
      - Sodman 6y ago
        I'm not saying big companies deeply care about you as a person, but their interests are at least partially aligned with yours on this. Happier employees are more engaged, work harder, work longer hours. In many cases the things that make employees "happier" are a lot cheaper for employers than increasing someone's salary by x%.
    - rini17 6y ago
      Well, you adapt yourself to find some fun/fullfillment in the work that is available. To approach work with the mindset "it must be fun or else!" can lead to a lifetime of misery.
  - andrewaylett 6y ago
    My job brings me opportunities of scale that I'm unlikely to find elsewhere, and I genuinely enjoy the challenges, but I'd work on something else if they didn't pay me to do it. It's not that it's not fun, but fun doesn't pay the bills. If it didn't _have_ to pay the bills, I'd probably still develop software but with a very different focus.
- itsmeamario 6y ago
  welcome to the workforce! Where you receive money for doing a task you don't care to do.

wolfgke 6y ago

> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling? Life experience. ;-)

oliv__ 6y ago
Yours maybe
- chasd00 6y ago
  bookmark this and come back in 20 years. your life should be fulfilling not your job.
  - oliv__ 6y ago
    I honestly don't see how a life could be fulfilling if you hate or even just don't care for what you spend most of your time on (work)
    - ninkendo 6y ago
      You're not always in control of whether your job is fulfilling. Maybe you've been lucky so far, but it's unlikely to last forever. A piece of advice: The moment it stops being fulfilling for you, you may get the urge to change jobs to something that you think will make you happier. You may change jobs several times trying to rediscover that initial feeling that made you satisfied with your work. But it may never come back. And if it's anything like my situation, in the end, the first job you left may have been the best of the bunch, and you come to the realization that the original satisfaction you had was a fluke and you may never find it again. There's two ways you could go about fixing this. One is to keep job hopping until you get something that was as good as the first job. The other is to accept that it's just a job, and to try and not derive too much of your happiness purely from work. (Or, more generally, try to not derive too much of your happiness from anything you can't control.)
      - supahfly_remix 6y ago

jasonmp85 6y ago

Marx?

jfengel 6y ago
Marx was big on getting people to the place where they don't feel like their work is pointless. But in order to get there, you have to get rid of the social stratification of the current system, where some people do their labor and give it to somebody else to sell. That seller not only gets to keep the majority of the profit, but it also keeps the work from being very fulfilling since you're disconnected from the end product of your effort. So Marx didn't say it was impossible. He just said that getting from here to there was going to require changes -- changes that could easily be unpleasant.

Aeolun 6y ago

Of course they can be, but the problem is finding one that has some overlap between: - Fulfilling - Stable - Decent salary I find that it’s hard to get all of them in the same position.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling? As a worker, a job will always have elements that are inherently stacked against you and are unfair, and those elements are enforced by the same laws that force you to accept such an arrangement otherwise you won't eat and your kid will never be able to see a doctor. You give part a part of yourself you cannot get back, your time, a limited resource that you can't regain once spent. You often do this for little to no equity in the business you spend the majority of your waking time advancing, and you often have little to no say in how or where your time is spent. For the vast majority of people, they will never be paid enough to be able to live off of their assets, and their time will be spent building wealth for those whose income is derived from their assets. Unsurprisingly, there are some people who aren't happy with such arrangements and have a lot to say about them.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling? The person you're responding to did not claim that jobs can't be fulfilling. They merely said that people shouldn't expect to work a fulfilling job. And they're totally right. In fact, I'd argue that the extreme majority of jobs are not fulfilling for the majority of the people working them. Retail, fast food, call centers...nobody enjoys those jobs. And yet people work them because they have to, because they pay so little that trying to get out of them takes an incredible amount of work, which is hard to find the motivation to do when you're so beat down by how incredibly shit your job is combined with constantly being stressed about lack of money.