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> All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are g

> All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are getting more full on. Exactly. The problem is that more and more of the "easy tasks" that high-skilled jobs are automated/moved to computers. 30-50 years ago, an Engineer still would find to make some copies, sharpen a pencil or get fresh paper from storage, check his mailbox etc. So even high-skilled jobs had a lot of repetetive, simple work parts that gave the brain room to relax. Nowadays the easy tasks are removed, and we mostly deal with hard problemes 8h+ a day.

neutronicus 5y ago
Not Child, Elder, or Medical care, though Those things are mostly "easy" in that they're monotonous and no individual task has much risk of failure, but in aggregate it's demanding enough that it's super-hard
deleted 5y ago
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martindbp 5y ago
I'm not sure it's so much about dealing with hard problems 8h a day, I don't think most people do. But like you say, there's no slack left in the workplace, which makes it ever harder to go into "diffuse" mode thinking. Scrum, standups, email, Slack, open office floor plans and other interruptions of all kind prevents the brain from ever relaxing. Unfortunately, besides just being unhealthy it's also quite unproductive because we need to switch between focused and diffuse modes of thinking many times during a day to effectively solve problems and see the bigger picture.
hef19898 5y ago
Oh, I would love to work on hard problems 8h a day. Or with people that do that. Reality is, and basically was since I started my career 15+ years ago, that we have north of 6 h per day in pointless meetings and politics. With some admin work for documentation thrown in for good measure.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  With "hard" problems I didn't mean challenging, fun problems to solve. I meant "hard" in a way that there is no simple automation solution to it and it feels "hard".
  - hef19898 5y ago
    I understood hard in that way as well.
bamboozled 5y ago
Honestly, we've solved them, but we've solved them with unsustainable methods. For example, modern large scale farming is pretty harmful and is destroying top soil and striping soil of important nutrients. But we all like to run around saying, "automated", and it mostly is, but it comes at a cost.
- adrianN 5y ago
  I think that's orthogonal. We could have about the same level of automation with more sustainable farming methods. Planting monocrop fields from horizon to horizon is just a little cheaper.

neutronicus 5y ago

Not Child, Elder, or Medical care, though Those things are mostly "easy" in that they're monotonous and no individual task has much risk of failure, but in aggregate it's demanding enough that it's super-hard

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martindbp 5y ago

I'm not sure it's so much about dealing with hard problems 8h a day, I don't think most people do. But like you say, there's no slack left in the workplace, which makes it ever harder to go into "diffuse" mode thinking. Scrum, standups, email, Slack, open office floor plans and other interruptions of all kind prevents the brain from ever relaxing. Unfortunately, besides just being unhealthy it's also quite unproductive because we need to switch between focused and diffuse modes of thinking many times during a day to effectively solve problems and see the bigger picture.

hef19898 5y ago

Oh, I would love to work on hard problems 8h a day. Or with people that do that. Reality is, and basically was since I started my career 15+ years ago, that we have north of 6 h per day in pointless meetings and politics. With some admin work for documentation thrown in for good measure.

littlecranky67 5y ago
With "hard" problems I didn't mean challenging, fun problems to solve. I meant "hard" in a way that there is no simple automation solution to it and it feels "hard".
- hef19898 5y ago
  I understood hard in that way as well.

bamboozled 5y ago

Honestly, we've solved them, but we've solved them with unsustainable methods. For example, modern large scale farming is pretty harmful and is destroying top soil and striping soil of important nutrients. But we all like to run around saying, "automated", and it mostly is, but it comes at a cost.

adrianN 5y ago
I think that's orthogonal. We could have about the same level of automation with more sustainable farming methods. Planting monocrop fields from horizon to horizon is just a little cheaper.