4 ms·

I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local

I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones. At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you. The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined. This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.

MichaelZuo 5mo ago
Hmmm… when you put it that way it seems almost tautological. If complex work could be graspable to the common man, it would no longer be considered as such. Some new, even more sophisticated work would arise and take its place.
- zdragnar 5mo ago
  I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team. I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it. Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel. After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.
  - exitheone 5mo ago
    I don't think that's necessarily true. I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations. It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare. So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on. So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.
  - keiferski 5mo ago
    I work for a small startup and really enjoy my job, honestly. Definitely have a ton of autonomy. And yeah I do know our customers and how we help them, but again it’s a bit of a second-step thing. My point was more that white collar work is inherently less immediate and direct than some other professions, in the sense of doing an end thing for an actual human being, not a company. When you work as a cook, you make a meal and someone eats it (a really fundamental human activity) immediately. Compare to say, working on a software feature that a few people at a company on the other side of the world uses to decrease their monthly churn rate. Not quite the same level of directness.
generic92034 5mo ago
You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.
- keiferski 5mo ago
  It’s funny I actually initially got into tech from parlaying a food service job into a customer service one at a software company. You’re definitely right that it has more direct problem-solving satisfaction than a lot of other software adjacent tasks.
stiglitz 5mo ago
Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”
- rixed 5mo ago
  Rather by Graeber (with way too many words still) as "bullshit jobs".
  - CriticalRegion 5mo ago
    I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.
    - incr_me 5mo ago
      I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc. For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.
      - rng-concern 5mo ago
        I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.
    - diydsp 5mo ago
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
derangedHorse 5mo ago
If this is the case, maybe the solution is to understand more about the impact of one's work on the service being sold to customers. I find that having people reliant on my work to do something important, however abstract, scratches the itch on feeling useful. If a company is unable to connect the positive customer impact of an employee's work (and seeing that they're increasing the happiness/decreasing the unhappiness of another human), it makes sense that the employee would feel unsatisfied with what they're doing.
- port11 5mo ago
  Large companies break down the work into small pieces, many teams, many layers of abstraction. As a developer, I actually enjoyed doing some customer support calls with users, to connect with how they use the software, and what’s not working for them. Almost no large workplace will offer you this option.
fwipsy 5mo ago
Consuming goods and services created far away creates a similar problem. If you don't know where it's from or how it's made, it feels like magic, not quite real, and in some sense like it could go away at any time.
Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
Personally I believe a lot of entertainment, especially games, scratch this itch for a lot of people. But it's good to be aware whether you actually enjoy it, or if it's an escape from your day to day drudgery. Actually it's more complicated than that because for most people said day to day is essential to enable other objectives, like maintaining yourself and / or others.
aaarrm 5mo ago
If you don't mind me asking (this is unrelated to your post), but is your company hiring? My next position I'm hoping to work at an international remote company, so I'm just following up on any lead that I see, hah
LittleBox 5mo ago
In my family there are a lot of carpenters who build their own houses. I wonder what it’s like for them since building a house is also a project with a long loop and I could see that closing silently as well with all the “work you actually wanted to do but had to leave undone”. Those couple of licks of paint, that slightly-uneven flooring you made. I wonder.
- NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
  Well that is actually about the long term. If the labour of an international software company is like that, which depends on management is uo to debate. When you follow the discourse on this newsboard, it seems more like the craftsmen building software often struggle with the manifestation in their domain of the fact, that the way corporations are managed is often not in regard to long term goals but to shortcircuits in the service or quick profits incentiviced by the disfunctionalities of current late stage capitalism. (Not being allowed or unable to build the quality software they would like to build; instead having to ship fast building tech dept etc.)

MichaelZuo 5mo ago

Hmmm… when you put it that way it seems almost tautological. If complex work could be graspable to the common man, it would no longer be considered as such. Some new, even more sophisticated work would arise and take its place.

zdragnar 5mo ago
I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team. I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it. Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel. After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.
- exitheone 5mo ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations. It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare. So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on. So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.
- keiferski 5mo ago
  I work for a small startup and really enjoy my job, honestly. Definitely have a ton of autonomy. And yeah I do know our customers and how we help them, but again it’s a bit of a second-step thing. My point was more that white collar work is inherently less immediate and direct than some other professions, in the sense of doing an end thing for an actual human being, not a company. When you work as a cook, you make a meal and someone eats it (a really fundamental human activity) immediately. Compare to say, working on a software feature that a few people at a company on the other side of the world uses to decrease their monthly churn rate. Not quite the same level of directness.

generic92034 5mo ago

You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.

keiferski 5mo ago
It’s funny I actually initially got into tech from parlaying a food service job into a customer service one at a software company. You’re definitely right that it has more direct problem-solving satisfaction than a lot of other software adjacent tasks.

stiglitz 5mo ago

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

rixed 5mo ago
Rather by Graeber (with way too many words still) as "bullshit jobs".
- CriticalRegion 5mo ago
  I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.
  - incr_me 5mo ago
    I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc. For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.
    - rng-concern 5mo ago
      I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.
  - diydsp 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

derangedHorse 5mo ago

If this is the case, maybe the solution is to understand more about the impact of one's work on the service being sold to customers. I find that having people reliant on my work to do something important, however abstract, scratches the itch on feeling useful. If a company is unable to connect the positive customer impact of an employee's work (and seeing that they're increasing the happiness/decreasing the unhappiness of another human), it makes sense that the employee would feel unsatisfied with what they're doing.

port11 5mo ago
Large companies break down the work into small pieces, many teams, many layers of abstraction. As a developer, I actually enjoyed doing some customer support calls with users, to connect with how they use the software, and what’s not working for them. Almost no large workplace will offer you this option.

fwipsy 5mo ago

Consuming goods and services created far away creates a similar problem. If you don't know where it's from or how it's made, it feels like magic, not quite real, and in some sense like it could go away at any time.

Cthulhu_ 5mo ago

Personally I believe a lot of entertainment, especially games, scratch this itch for a lot of people. But it's good to be aware whether you actually enjoy it, or if it's an escape from your day to day drudgery. Actually it's more complicated than that because for most people said day to day is essential to enable other objectives, like maintaining yourself and / or others.

aaarrm 5mo ago

If you don't mind me asking (this is unrelated to your post), but is your company hiring? My next position I'm hoping to work at an international remote company, so I'm just following up on any lead that I see, hah

LittleBox 5mo ago

In my family there are a lot of carpenters who build their own houses. I wonder what it’s like for them since building a house is also a project with a long loop and I could see that closing silently as well with all the “work you actually wanted to do but had to leave undone”. Those couple of licks of paint, that slightly-uneven flooring you made. I wonder.

NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
Well that is actually about the long term. If the labour of an international software company is like that, which depends on management is uo to debate. When you follow the discourse on this newsboard, it seems more like the craftsmen building software often struggle with the manifestation in their domain of the fact, that the way corporations are managed is often not in regard to long term goals but to shortcircuits in the service or quick profits incentiviced by the disfunctionalities of current late stage capitalism. (Not being allowed or unable to build the quality software they would like to build; instead having to ship fast building tech dept etc.)