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Most people don't have "fulfilling" jobs. They have a paycheck. A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of an

Most people don't have "fulfilling" jobs. They have a paycheck. A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of analyzing how their job makes them feel. I get paid great money to play with computers. My father was an elementary school janitor.

deleted 2y ago
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marginalia_nu 2y ago
Big part of the problem is arguably alienation. A janitorial job can be rewarding because you can see that you are making a difference in the world. You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day. Filling out spreadsheets, it can be hard to tell what the purpose of what you are doing, whom it benefits, and how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up.
- GiorgioG 2y ago
  At least in software it's not alienation, it's never-ending hamster-wheel of sprint after sprint of delivering features by cutting corners atop of existing cut corners.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Why do you think that isn't alienating? What you describe makes it almost impossible not to be alienated from your work output (and your company).
- drewcoo 2y ago
  Do you say that as someone who's been a janitor or is this only fantasy janitoring?
- twojacobtwo 2y ago
  This is a large part of my experience of burnout. Perhaps not so much alienation, as i understand it, but what you say in your last paragraph resonates with what really sticks in my mind when I'm starting to feel burnout. I end up having to endlessly push the idea of the pointlessness of my work out of my mind and that becomes a form of additional mental 'overhead', so to speak.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  In either case, the purpose of what you are doing is earning a salary to pay your bills. Workers would do well to always keep it in mind.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    If the only purpose of your life truly is to pay bills, that would cause anyone to burn out.
    - surgical_fire 2y ago
      Nah. You cab find happiness and purpose elsewhere. From family to hobbies. Work is merely a means to an end.
    - sodality2 2y ago
      Not the only purpose of your life. Just the only purpose of working.
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        With a full time job, you're spending most of your waking hours preparing to work, commuting to work, working, and commuting from work. There's not really much time and energy remaining to do something meaningful. Like it or not, your work is to a good approximation your life, the rest is a rounding error.
        sodality2 2y ago
        I don’t think that’s always true. With remote work, flexible schedules, etc, you can reduce the costs of working. In the worst cases, you might have a long commute making your 8 hour work day into 10+. But you still have weekends and probably at least 6-8 waking hours outside of work. (I’m imagining an 8-6 with commute, so assuming 8 hours of sleep, 6-9pm and 5-8am) Best case, you remove a commute and gain a whole day back with a 4x8 schedule
- yetihehe 2y ago
  It can be even worse. When you do a stellar level job, no one complains. When yu slip a little, you have thousands of users complaining about some minor setting showing wrong values: "This crap is useless, they can't even implement one value properly". And you get this after sitting three weeks chasing some obscure bug deep in some library from your hardware vendor.
- brightball 2y ago
  There are a lot of other outlets to turn that job into something more fulfilling. - People do their job to make money to provide for their families. For some, that's all the justification you need. - If it pays well, donate a portion of your income to a charity that you believe in AND get involved with that charity. There are tons of great options out there like Habitat for Humanity, literacy programs, Shriner's, Boy Scouts or a local church just off the cuff. This turns your job into a way that you are helping your community through a organization with a greater purpose. It can shift your perspective. Just providing some ideas. To each their own.
- dfvnbggfg 2y ago
  > You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day. dude have you ever been to high school?
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Have you ever been to a high school that didn't have janitors? Peoples' lives are improved by what janitors do, even in high school.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    I have been to high school, and I am very grateful for all the adults that put up with me, even though I was not at the time.
- moooo99 2y ago
  This is it! People have a little bit of a screwed perception of what is „fulfilling“. Yes, there are people whose only kind of fulfilling may be working for a NGO that is trying to fight climate change, save kids in poor countries of the world or clean up the ocean from plastic waste. While all of those are certainly noble goals, the vast majority of people doesn’t even shoot that high to find any kind of purpose. Most people are already satisfied and feel a sense of accomplishment when their job creates something of value for *someone*. I had a job with a great paycheck, but spent 40 hours a week doing barely anything. It was fun at first, but it became physically exhausting. I have now a job with similar pay but I build apps that people actually use in their day to day work and quite enjoy, it’s significantly more stressful and demanding than not doing anything, but I don’t feel nearly as exhausted as I did with the previous job. I’ve felt it myself and have heard others talk about it, but there is an increasing number of jobs that is either objectively useless or perceived as such (by the people employed in that job). Either way, it’s not surprising to me that burnout continues to be on the rise.
  - art-not 2y ago
    I’ve had the same experience. I actually took a 40% pay cut to work somewhere where I had to actually do something, because of exhausting and depressing doing nothing was
    - alan-hn 2y ago
      This is the reason I think its crazy how some people claim that UBI would cause everyone to become lazy and do nothing Nobody likes doing nothing
      - moooo99 2y ago
        I have never heard that being brought up in a (serious) conversation about UBI tbh. I've had quite a few discussions about this, the most common things people were happy about would be - Having a financial safety net and removing some degree of existential fear (note, this is in a country with an existing social safety net) - Switching into a career with less pay but better interest alignment. Interestingly, most of the women I've talked to would strongly prefer a switch into more social careers while basically all men I've talked to (claim) they'd switch into trades. - Having the option to obtain educational credentials one couldn't get earlier in life for a plethora of reasons, without too much financial concerns (that is in a country with publicly funded free universities) Certainly there are people who would see not doing anything as a godsend, but I think we generally over estimate our intrinsic desire to do something by working and tend to assume this desire doesn't exist in other people.
- boilerupnc 2y ago
  This! I enjoy my work in tech, but it mostly never seems to have a beginning nor an end. There’s always the next iteration of work waiting on the horizon. Even though I could afford to hire out, I relished the opportunity to do a repetitive home task like mowing the yard. The mental satisfaction of seeing an unkept yard transform into clean edges, clipped blade mulch islands and more order than chaos - all as a result of the sweat from my brow - provided an internal joy that is hard to describe. There was a beginning, middle and end which soothed my soul and reminded me of what I miss during my regular work in tech.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    This is a deliberate mindset that software companies (their leadership) adopt willingly: That their software is never "done". In software, nobody wants to build a new house. They just want to add another floor to the existing building. There are companies who have an end state for their software, at which time they set it down and work on something else, but they are hard to find.
- drawkward 2y ago
  Unless you have had a career as a janitor, it is extremely patronizing to tell the janitors of the world how fulfilling they should find their jobs.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    Why is that?
    - bartonfink 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        You're free to make judgements about my work all day. Now come on, give me an argument for why it is patronizing. Stop implying it.
        wtetzner 2y ago
        I guess because if you haven't done it, how would you know if it's fulfilling?
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
        I'm not claiming it is though, only comparing relative degrees of alienation from the outcome of your work.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    It's less about personal views, and more about the fact that janitor's job is time and location bounded, and the result is immediate and readily assessable. Our jobs can be the polar opposite of all of that.
  - agnoster 2y ago
    Didn't say "should", just said "can"?
- jordanb 2y ago
  People think that the worst part of being a janitor is cleaning toilets. In reality the worst part of being a janitor is living in poverty. This is true about a lot of jobs in our economy.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- emptyfile 2y ago
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- flakeoil 2y ago
  But isn't part of taking a job in the first place to earn money so that you can eat, live and enjoy it with your family and friends. Maybe the issue is more that we earn so much and have no life outside of work so the "earning money to live" is not there anymore. We try to find meaning in the work itself instead of in the after-work part.
- everdrive 2y ago
  I think the low status and the low pay of a janitorial job makes it pretty hard for a lot of people. Higher-paying, higher-status IT work has a different set of problems: meaninglessness, drudgery, and cognitive-dissonance.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    Worth noting the comment is specifically about alienation, not which job is better across all axes.
- adolph 2y ago
  > Big part of the problem is arguably alienation. I’ve heard said (don’t recall the specifics) Maslov’s hierarchy is upside down, that with sufficient meaning/purpose, many deprivations of lower elements can be handled. Not certain if I’d go that far, esp at extremes, but that the pieces of the “hierarchy” are more like eqalish puzzle pieces than a stacked pyramid.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    I think in general, if you arrange needs into a hierarchy, people will arrange them roughly in reverse of the degree to which they are being satisfied for the person you're asking.
- KineticLensman 2y ago
  > You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day Yes! When I retired I started volunteering at a raptor conservation centre, and got given loads of simple mundane tasks. Some were really tedious (cleaning the birds' water bowls, removing poop, getting rid of nettles that blocked a view, etc etc) but at the end of the day my minder could see that the tasks had been done and that I wasn't a flake. They also demonstrated commitment, which helped me move up to helping with the birds themselves, and now I help fly them in experience days, showing them to paying members of the public, and bringing in funds that resource critical conservation projects (nest boxes, anti-poacher campaigns, etc).
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  "... how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up" I've been reflecting on this recently and I think in the context of a job, it operates at both a macro and micro level, and ultimately to feel fulfilled in the long term you need to feel like you matter on both levels. Macro contributions are the stuff upper management sees— the new products and features, the deals closed, the systems you designed and maintained, the technical directions to advocate for and staff you mentor, the conference presentations you give. These are highly visible contributions are are "easy" to recognize you for, but on the other hand they're also relatively easy to succinctly describe, for example, on a job req, which will be necessary if you do indeed stop showing up. In contrast to this, the micro contributions are what your close colleagues see. They're who recognize your taste, your care and attention to detail, the thoughtfulness with which you lay out code, balance requirements, utilize tools, and maintain hard-to-measure things like interface boundaries and testability. It's these contributions that quietly keep technical debt under control, save time by preventing problems from ever occurring, and push systems toward ever greater reliability and observability. If you disappear tomorrow, none of this stuff will fall apart overnight; it will degrade in more subtle ways that take much longer to manifest as an actual "problems". I think for me at least, I sometimes feel a disconnect where I have lots of acknowledgment at the macro level, but still feel burnt out and unappreciated due to gaps at the micro level. The Q12 question about having a "best friend at work" [1] I think is also really tied into all of this, since that's likely to be a person who will see you and what you have to offer much more than a busy manager hustling between meetings all week and rubber-stamping your code reviews. [1]: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importanc...
GiorgioG 2y ago
I think Office Space summed up the problem nicely: "Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. Bob Porter: Don't... don't care? Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now. Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon? Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses. Bob Slydell: Eight? Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  > Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches. Or next round of funding. > Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches. Ditto on working in a startup.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." This is literally my company. 8 bosses - all of who spending their entire existence in monitoring and PIPing engineers instead of using their authority to deliver constructive outcomes for the business. There is zero growth mentality among them (except headcount growth for their empires). Can't even imagine how to steer their org to produce value. Why the f will a IC care more about the success of the business than the 8 destructive bosses above them?
- mlinhares 2y ago
  The lack of "another dime" when you work extra is also something that prevents most people from going above and beyond. If there's nothing else out there, why would you care? Working with my wife now to get her to start a business so we can keep my salary to pay the bills but focus on the business so our effort can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.
rtpg 2y ago
I don't want to exotisize "blue collar" labor. That being said, I've always wondered if burnout ends up being more likely in roles where you feel like you're suppose to care. Being bored all the time is annoying and sucks, but being in a thing where you feel like you _shouldn't_ be bored and yet are also sucks. Does it suck more? Not sure!
- mrits 2y ago
  Value usually comes out of blue collar labor. Almost no value comes out of lucrative tech jobs. The tech that is making the world a better place usually has so many alternatives it wouldn't matter if you closed up shop or not.
  - sandwitches 2y ago
    [dead]
- vector_spaces 2y ago
  I'm in tech after a decade working blue collar, most of my friends are still working blue collar, and they're all burned out Blue collar doesn't just pay you poorly -- it's also tedious, and there's a pervasive sense that nobody gives a damn about you, your safety, or really anything about you. "nobody" being managers, but also your white collar coworkers who "work upstairs", customers, security, etc. You have very little autonomy: you'll tend to have to ask permission to go for a bathroom break, or to step outside for a minute to get a breath of fresh air, or if anything is going to cause you to be more than 5 minutes late for your shift. Yes, you'll have to beg and might not even be allowed to attend funerals of close family members. You may or may not have to help the customer who keeps sexually harassing you. You probably will be asked to speak to customers with a certain tone and facial expression regardless of how awful you're feeling. Nobody cares that you just went through a breakup RE safety: you'll have employers doing everything from getting you to work with wiring that isn't up to code when you're not an electrician, to lifting things alone that nobody should lift alone, to working at an unsafe pace, to working during small disasters where half the business is underwater. You might not even be a full employee -- you'd be surprised how many dishwashers, waiters and cooks in San Francisco restaurants are employed as independent contractors but are effectively employees You aren't making much money, so commuting will tend to be a long slog. You might even be working more than one of these jobs. Yes, I've had "cool" low wage jobs with nice managers that tried to treat me like a human being. I know those exist. They are exceptional and often don't last Also I am not writing this to single out the parent, just want to affirm that your boring white collar job is better in ways you probably can't fathom and confirm that blue collar jobs are very much prone to burnout
gryzzly 2y ago
Taking care of a school building could be way more fulfilling than working on ad-tech or some mobile-game funnels tricking people with black patterns (no reflection on you specifically).
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I would say even most computer jobs aren’t fulfilling. It’s always funny when companies want to almost bully employees into caring about their “mission”. Maybe if you’re flying to Mars, the mission is genuinely exciting. But it’s hard to care about some database tech or payments or ads or whatever in the same way. And yet people pretend because if they don’t it may negatively affect their job.
phil21 2y ago
> My father was an elementary school janitor. If you paid me the same to be a janitor, I'd take that trade any day of the week. I've been a janitor before and while the job is not fun and has some shitty (pun intended) days - overall I was a better human being not being stuck behind a desk for 10+ hours a day. Unfortunately our economy is what it is, so you can only really be paid for non-physical work these days. Thus a lot of folks who are doing quite well on paper are struggling internally living a life that simply does not suit them. It's weird to live your entire life knowing you were not built to do what you do day in and day out to pay the bills. Gilded cages are rampant in our industry.
- lqet 2y ago
  The janitor in my school was a relaxed guy in his late 50s. He was always joking and seemed to be quite satisfied with his job. All the children respected him - he was the guy you turned to when something was not working right, and he fixed it. He and his family lived on the school campus in a nice bungalow with a nice garden. His children also went to my school. While his salary certainly wasn't great, he did not have to pay any rent (the bungalow was owned by the city and came with the job), and the job was super secure. He was also the person who worked for the school the longest (since the school opened in the early 70ies), and was a walking history book. In my previous job, we would regularly see a guy with a small truck delivering vegetables door-to-door during our lunch breaks. We all envied him. He was always smiling and whistling, while we were sitting miserably before our food, counting the minutes remaining before we had to go back into a hell of customer tickets and technical debt.
  - hindsightbias 2y ago
    One of my job sites had an isle window overview of a couple acres of grassland. Whenever the grounds guy was mowing and rocking with his headphones guys would stop and watch him do a couple of rows. I don't think people who never mowed yards as a kid would get it. When people asked what I do in tech, I'd say "tech janitor".
    - ryandrake 2y ago
harimau777 2y ago
I'm not sure that I think that burnout is directly related to a job being fulfilling. It seems to me that it is more related to having a lot of responsibility but very little power. Or somewhat equivalently, being in a position where other people can make your work much more difficult without you having much control over it. In software at least, I think it could also be related to the pace of modern development. Agile sprints mean that you are constantly in a situation where things are down to the wire.
- tonypace 2y ago
  That's it, a very clear formulation. As a teacher, that describes my experience precisely. I am willing to bet it describes all other high-burnout professions.
jmyeet 2y ago
People don't need fulfilling jobs. They need fulfilling lives. That means it should be relatively easy to earn enough to comfortably live, having enough time to have a family, spend time wiht that family, socialize, have hobbies, go on vacation, help out in their communities, etc. What's happened in the last 40-50 years is that productivity skyrocketed but real wages remained relatively stagnant to the point where you need 2 people each with a full-time job and each having a "side hustle" or second job just to make ends meet. And you'll still have a lower standard of living than someone working a basic job 50 years ago. Some turn this conversation, much like homelessness, into a "personal moral failure", meaning it's your fault if you don't have a fulfilling job. Not all jobs can be fulfilling. But if people earn a decent income they don't really care. We should instead talk about why the demand for greater and greater profits have concentrated the value created by workers into the hands of the very few and why the workers who create that value don't their fair share of those profits.
ghusto 2y ago
> A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of analyzing how their job makes them feel From my interactions with Americans, I'd have to say that there are way more people around the world have that luxury than Americans. Exhibit A: The French.
intended 2y ago
The survey covered multiple countries, shockingly even India, 11k responses. Everyone, by default, knows how they feel. Burnout is something that happens to you no matter what you care about.

deleted 2y ago

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marginalia_nu 2y ago

Big part of the problem is arguably alienation. A janitorial job can be rewarding because you can see that you are making a difference in the world. You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day. Filling out spreadsheets, it can be hard to tell what the purpose of what you are doing, whom it benefits, and how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up.

GiorgioG 2y ago
At least in software it's not alienation, it's never-ending hamster-wheel of sprint after sprint of delivering features by cutting corners atop of existing cut corners.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Why do you think that isn't alienating? What you describe makes it almost impossible not to be alienated from your work output (and your company).
drewcoo 2y ago
Do you say that as someone who's been a janitor or is this only fantasy janitoring?
twojacobtwo 2y ago
This is a large part of my experience of burnout. Perhaps not so much alienation, as i understand it, but what you say in your last paragraph resonates with what really sticks in my mind when I'm starting to feel burnout. I end up having to endlessly push the idea of the pointlessness of my work out of my mind and that becomes a form of additional mental 'overhead', so to speak.
surgical_fire 2y ago
In either case, the purpose of what you are doing is earning a salary to pay your bills. Workers would do well to always keep it in mind.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  If the only purpose of your life truly is to pay bills, that would cause anyone to burn out.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    Nah. You cab find happiness and purpose elsewhere. From family to hobbies. Work is merely a means to an end.
  - sodality2 2y ago
    Not the only purpose of your life. Just the only purpose of working.
    - marginalia_nu 2y ago
      With a full time job, you're spending most of your waking hours preparing to work, commuting to work, working, and commuting from work. There's not really much time and energy remaining to do something meaningful. Like it or not, your work is to a good approximation your life, the rest is a rounding error.
      - sodality2 2y ago
        I don’t think that’s always true. With remote work, flexible schedules, etc, you can reduce the costs of working. In the worst cases, you might have a long commute making your 8 hour work day into 10+. But you still have weekends and probably at least 6-8 waking hours outside of work. (I’m imagining an 8-6 with commute, so assuming 8 hours of sleep, 6-9pm and 5-8am) Best case, you remove a commute and gain a whole day back with a 4x8 schedule
yetihehe 2y ago
It can be even worse. When you do a stellar level job, no one complains. When yu slip a little, you have thousands of users complaining about some minor setting showing wrong values: "This crap is useless, they can't even implement one value properly". And you get this after sitting three weeks chasing some obscure bug deep in some library from your hardware vendor.
brightball 2y ago
There are a lot of other outlets to turn that job into something more fulfilling. - People do their job to make money to provide for their families. For some, that's all the justification you need. - If it pays well, donate a portion of your income to a charity that you believe in AND get involved with that charity. There are tons of great options out there like Habitat for Humanity, literacy programs, Shriner's, Boy Scouts or a local church just off the cuff. This turns your job into a way that you are helping your community through a organization with a greater purpose. It can shift your perspective. Just providing some ideas. To each their own.
dfvnbggfg 2y ago
> You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day. dude have you ever been to high school?
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Have you ever been to a high school that didn't have janitors? Peoples' lives are improved by what janitors do, even in high school.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  I have been to high school, and I am very grateful for all the adults that put up with me, even though I was not at the time.
moooo99 2y ago
This is it! People have a little bit of a screwed perception of what is „fulfilling“. Yes, there are people whose only kind of fulfilling may be working for a NGO that is trying to fight climate change, save kids in poor countries of the world or clean up the ocean from plastic waste. While all of those are certainly noble goals, the vast majority of people doesn’t even shoot that high to find any kind of purpose. Most people are already satisfied and feel a sense of accomplishment when their job creates something of value for *someone*. I had a job with a great paycheck, but spent 40 hours a week doing barely anything. It was fun at first, but it became physically exhausting. I have now a job with similar pay but I build apps that people actually use in their day to day work and quite enjoy, it’s significantly more stressful and demanding than not doing anything, but I don’t feel nearly as exhausted as I did with the previous job. I’ve felt it myself and have heard others talk about it, but there is an increasing number of jobs that is either objectively useless or perceived as such (by the people employed in that job). Either way, it’s not surprising to me that burnout continues to be on the rise.
- art-not 2y ago
  I’ve had the same experience. I actually took a 40% pay cut to work somewhere where I had to actually do something, because of exhausting and depressing doing nothing was
  - alan-hn 2y ago
    This is the reason I think its crazy how some people claim that UBI would cause everyone to become lazy and do nothing Nobody likes doing nothing
    - moooo99 2y ago
      I have never heard that being brought up in a (serious) conversation about UBI tbh. I've had quite a few discussions about this, the most common things people were happy about would be - Having a financial safety net and removing some degree of existential fear (note, this is in a country with an existing social safety net) - Switching into a career with less pay but better interest alignment. Interestingly, most of the women I've talked to would strongly prefer a switch into more social careers while basically all men I've talked to (claim) they'd switch into trades. - Having the option to obtain educational credentials one couldn't get earlier in life for a plethora of reasons, without too much financial concerns (that is in a country with publicly funded free universities) Certainly there are people who would see not doing anything as a godsend, but I think we generally over estimate our intrinsic desire to do something by working and tend to assume this desire doesn't exist in other people.
boilerupnc 2y ago
This! I enjoy my work in tech, but it mostly never seems to have a beginning nor an end. There’s always the next iteration of work waiting on the horizon. Even though I could afford to hire out, I relished the opportunity to do a repetitive home task like mowing the yard. The mental satisfaction of seeing an unkept yard transform into clean edges, clipped blade mulch islands and more order than chaos - all as a result of the sweat from my brow - provided an internal joy that is hard to describe. There was a beginning, middle and end which soothed my soul and reminded me of what I miss during my regular work in tech.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  This is a deliberate mindset that software companies (their leadership) adopt willingly: That their software is never "done". In software, nobody wants to build a new house. They just want to add another floor to the existing building. There are companies who have an end state for their software, at which time they set it down and work on something else, but they are hard to find.
drawkward 2y ago
Unless you have had a career as a janitor, it is extremely patronizing to tell the janitors of the world how fulfilling they should find their jobs.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  Why is that?
  - bartonfink 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - marginalia_nu 2y ago
      You're free to make judgements about my work all day. Now come on, give me an argument for why it is patronizing. Stop implying it.
      - wtetzner 2y ago
        I guess because if you haven't done it, how would you know if it's fulfilling?
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
        I'm not claiming it is though, only comparing relative degrees of alienation from the outcome of your work.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  It's less about personal views, and more about the fact that janitor's job is time and location bounded, and the result is immediate and readily assessable. Our jobs can be the polar opposite of all of that.
- agnoster 2y ago
  Didn't say "should", just said "can"?
jordanb 2y ago
People think that the worst part of being a janitor is cleaning toilets. In reality the worst part of being a janitor is living in poverty. This is true about a lot of jobs in our economy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
emptyfile 2y ago
[dead]
flakeoil 2y ago
But isn't part of taking a job in the first place to earn money so that you can eat, live and enjoy it with your family and friends. Maybe the issue is more that we earn so much and have no life outside of work so the "earning money to live" is not there anymore. We try to find meaning in the work itself instead of in the after-work part.
everdrive 2y ago
I think the low status and the low pay of a janitorial job makes it pretty hard for a lot of people. Higher-paying, higher-status IT work has a different set of problems: meaninglessness, drudgery, and cognitive-dissonance.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  Worth noting the comment is specifically about alienation, not which job is better across all axes.
adolph 2y ago
> Big part of the problem is arguably alienation. I’ve heard said (don’t recall the specifics) Maslov’s hierarchy is upside down, that with sufficient meaning/purpose, many deprivations of lower elements can be handled. Not certain if I’d go that far, esp at extremes, but that the pieces of the “hierarchy” are more like eqalish puzzle pieces than a stacked pyramid.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  I think in general, if you arrange needs into a hierarchy, people will arrange them roughly in reverse of the degree to which they are being satisfied for the person you're asking.
KineticLensman 2y ago
> You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day Yes! When I retired I started volunteering at a raptor conservation centre, and got given loads of simple mundane tasks. Some were really tedious (cleaning the birds' water bowls, removing poop, getting rid of nettles that blocked a view, etc etc) but at the end of the day my minder could see that the tasks had been done and that I wasn't a flake. They also demonstrated commitment, which helped me move up to helping with the birds themselves, and now I help fly them in experience days, showing them to paying members of the public, and bringing in funds that resource critical conservation projects (nest boxes, anti-poacher campaigns, etc).
mikepurvis 2y ago
"... how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up" I've been reflecting on this recently and I think in the context of a job, it operates at both a macro and micro level, and ultimately to feel fulfilled in the long term you need to feel like you matter on both levels. Macro contributions are the stuff upper management sees— the new products and features, the deals closed, the systems you designed and maintained, the technical directions to advocate for and staff you mentor, the conference presentations you give. These are highly visible contributions are are "easy" to recognize you for, but on the other hand they're also relatively easy to succinctly describe, for example, on a job req, which will be necessary if you do indeed stop showing up. In contrast to this, the micro contributions are what your close colleagues see. They're who recognize your taste, your care and attention to detail, the thoughtfulness with which you lay out code, balance requirements, utilize tools, and maintain hard-to-measure things like interface boundaries and testability. It's these contributions that quietly keep technical debt under control, save time by preventing problems from ever occurring, and push systems toward ever greater reliability and observability. If you disappear tomorrow, none of this stuff will fall apart overnight; it will degrade in more subtle ways that take much longer to manifest as an actual "problems". I think for me at least, I sometimes feel a disconnect where I have lots of acknowledgment at the macro level, but still feel burnt out and unappreciated due to gaps at the micro level. The Q12 question about having a "best friend at work" [1] I think is also really tied into all of this, since that's likely to be a person who will see you and what you have to offer much more than a busy manager hustling between meetings all week and rubber-stamping your code reviews. [1]: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importanc...

GiorgioG 2y ago

I think Office Space summed up the problem nicely: "Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. Bob Porter: Don't... don't care? Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now. Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon? Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses. Bob Slydell: Eight? Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.

bdcravens 2y ago
> Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches. Or next round of funding. > Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches. Ditto on working in a startup.
nine_zeros 2y ago
> Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." This is literally my company. 8 bosses - all of who spending their entire existence in monitoring and PIPing engineers instead of using their authority to deliver constructive outcomes for the business. There is zero growth mentality among them (except headcount growth for their empires). Can't even imagine how to steer their org to produce value. Why the f will a IC care more about the success of the business than the 8 destructive bosses above them?
mlinhares 2y ago
The lack of "another dime" when you work extra is also something that prevents most people from going above and beyond. If there's nothing else out there, why would you care? Working with my wife now to get her to start a business so we can keep my salary to pay the bills but focus on the business so our effort can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.

rtpg 2y ago

I don't want to exotisize "blue collar" labor. That being said, I've always wondered if burnout ends up being more likely in roles where you feel like you're suppose to care. Being bored all the time is annoying and sucks, but being in a thing where you feel like you _shouldn't_ be bored and yet are also sucks. Does it suck more? Not sure!

mrits 2y ago
Value usually comes out of blue collar labor. Almost no value comes out of lucrative tech jobs. The tech that is making the world a better place usually has so many alternatives it wouldn't matter if you closed up shop or not.
- sandwitches 2y ago
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vector_spaces 2y ago
I'm in tech after a decade working blue collar, most of my friends are still working blue collar, and they're all burned out Blue collar doesn't just pay you poorly -- it's also tedious, and there's a pervasive sense that nobody gives a damn about you, your safety, or really anything about you. "nobody" being managers, but also your white collar coworkers who "work upstairs", customers, security, etc. You have very little autonomy: you'll tend to have to ask permission to go for a bathroom break, or to step outside for a minute to get a breath of fresh air, or if anything is going to cause you to be more than 5 minutes late for your shift. Yes, you'll have to beg and might not even be allowed to attend funerals of close family members. You may or may not have to help the customer who keeps sexually harassing you. You probably will be asked to speak to customers with a certain tone and facial expression regardless of how awful you're feeling. Nobody cares that you just went through a breakup RE safety: you'll have employers doing everything from getting you to work with wiring that isn't up to code when you're not an electrician, to lifting things alone that nobody should lift alone, to working at an unsafe pace, to working during small disasters where half the business is underwater. You might not even be a full employee -- you'd be surprised how many dishwashers, waiters and cooks in San Francisco restaurants are employed as independent contractors but are effectively employees You aren't making much money, so commuting will tend to be a long slog. You might even be working more than one of these jobs. Yes, I've had "cool" low wage jobs with nice managers that tried to treat me like a human being. I know those exist. They are exceptional and often don't last Also I am not writing this to single out the parent, just want to affirm that your boring white collar job is better in ways you probably can't fathom and confirm that blue collar jobs are very much prone to burnout

gryzzly 2y ago

Taking care of a school building could be way more fulfilling than working on ad-tech or some mobile-game funnels tricking people with black patterns (no reflection on you specifically).

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I would say even most computer jobs aren’t fulfilling. It’s always funny when companies want to almost bully employees into caring about their “mission”. Maybe if you’re flying to Mars, the mission is genuinely exciting. But it’s hard to care about some database tech or payments or ads or whatever in the same way. And yet people pretend because if they don’t it may negatively affect their job.

phil21 2y ago

> My father was an elementary school janitor. If you paid me the same to be a janitor, I'd take that trade any day of the week. I've been a janitor before and while the job is not fun and has some shitty (pun intended) days - overall I was a better human being not being stuck behind a desk for 10+ hours a day. Unfortunately our economy is what it is, so you can only really be paid for non-physical work these days. Thus a lot of folks who are doing quite well on paper are struggling internally living a life that simply does not suit them. It's weird to live your entire life knowing you were not built to do what you do day in and day out to pay the bills. Gilded cages are rampant in our industry.

lqet 2y ago
The janitor in my school was a relaxed guy in his late 50s. He was always joking and seemed to be quite satisfied with his job. All the children respected him - he was the guy you turned to when something was not working right, and he fixed it. He and his family lived on the school campus in a nice bungalow with a nice garden. His children also went to my school. While his salary certainly wasn't great, he did not have to pay any rent (the bungalow was owned by the city and came with the job), and the job was super secure. He was also the person who worked for the school the longest (since the school opened in the early 70ies), and was a walking history book. In my previous job, we would regularly see a guy with a small truck delivering vegetables door-to-door during our lunch breaks. We all envied him. He was always smiling and whistling, while we were sitting miserably before our food, counting the minutes remaining before we had to go back into a hell of customer tickets and technical debt.
- hindsightbias 2y ago
  One of my job sites had an isle window overview of a couple acres of grassland. Whenever the grounds guy was mowing and rocking with his headphones guys would stop and watch him do a couple of rows. I don't think people who never mowed yards as a kid would get it. When people asked what I do in tech, I'd say "tech janitor".
  - ryandrake 2y ago

harimau777 2y ago

I'm not sure that I think that burnout is directly related to a job being fulfilling. It seems to me that it is more related to having a lot of responsibility but very little power. Or somewhat equivalently, being in a position where other people can make your work much more difficult without you having much control over it. In software at least, I think it could also be related to the pace of modern development. Agile sprints mean that you are constantly in a situation where things are down to the wire.

tonypace 2y ago
That's it, a very clear formulation. As a teacher, that describes my experience precisely. I am willing to bet it describes all other high-burnout professions.

jmyeet 2y ago

People don't need fulfilling jobs. They need fulfilling lives. That means it should be relatively easy to earn enough to comfortably live, having enough time to have a family, spend time wiht that family, socialize, have hobbies, go on vacation, help out in their communities, etc. What's happened in the last 40-50 years is that productivity skyrocketed but real wages remained relatively stagnant to the point where you need 2 people each with a full-time job and each having a "side hustle" or second job just to make ends meet. And you'll still have a lower standard of living than someone working a basic job 50 years ago. Some turn this conversation, much like homelessness, into a "personal moral failure", meaning it's your fault if you don't have a fulfilling job. Not all jobs can be fulfilling. But if people earn a decent income they don't really care. We should instead talk about why the demand for greater and greater profits have concentrated the value created by workers into the hands of the very few and why the workers who create that value don't their fair share of those profits.

ghusto 2y ago

> A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of analyzing how their job makes them feel From my interactions with Americans, I'd have to say that there are way more people around the world have that luxury than Americans. Exhibit A: The French.

intended 2y ago

The survey covered multiple countries, shockingly even India, 11k responses. Everyone, by default, knows how they feel. Burnout is something that happens to you no matter what you care about.