7 ms·

When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to

by rfnslyr 13y ago

When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Now I get to wake up at 12, smoke a joint, have a beer, take a shower, go for a walk with my dog, and then work on whatever the hell interests me that particular day. I dictate my own hours, rates, and clients. Meanwhile my friends in law firms and other similar disciplines talk about how much and how hard they work. I don't get it. Congrats busting your ass for a year doing 60 hour work weeks for $20/hr? They haven't gone out in weeks. They have nearly no friends beyond their immediate work circle. No interests. Nothing. I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. Work has consumed life. I don't know too many people with external interests beyond work. You get the odd hardcore cyclist, the casual musician, the nerd etc, but most people just go home, crack open a beer and watch some TV. Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. The moment I finished my work, it left my head entirely. The way it should be. My goal has always been to leave the office as early as humanly possible while still completing the work I had to do that day. We've grown into a culture where the following happens: do decently in highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care about -> office life. It's saddening. Our lives are WAY too goddamn short to be spending 1/3rd of it sleeping, and another 2/3rds working with the occasional weekend.

jmduke 13y ago
See, I think there's an ideal that lies in between "work the bare minimum to support yourself" and "work your entire life to the exclusion of other activities." If I was in your position, I would have tried to get a raise instead of lingering in my mainly automated position -- ideally into another position I can automate. I don't want work to vanish from my head as soon as I leave my office, because that means it didn't particularly affect me in any way. I don't think this is a particularly 'right' way to handle this. Some people want different things out of their work, and I think that's normal. You mentioned you're freelancing now -- are you doing stuff based off of what you were working on earlier, or did you switch paths?
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  The work I did does not even remotely tie into what I am doing now nor did it warrant a second thought beyond the office. It was a contractor position. I had to import data sets into excel from other documents. All I did was export the previous doc into a CSV file and write a script to import it into excel. It was piss easy. Then I shipped off that data set to whatever team needed it. That's all I did. It was menial. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Freelancer is the new bohemian. In all honesty though, that job instilled severe depression in me. Did about 6 months there and literally almost killed myself until I seeked help and my contract was up.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    I'm honestly fascinated by that kind of work -- not that its interesting, but the fact that it exists is just strange to me. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Sounds like you're living the dream. Good luck with your continued success!
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Nah I'm not making any money at all. I'm using the money from the job I just finished to fund 2 years of development time, rent, and food. I don't spend much so I get to live a fairly risk free lifestyle. I just work and read whatever is interesting that day/week/month. Worst case scenario: I get a stupid amount of experience and land a sweet job at a startup once my time is up. Loving it. My minimum goal is to become an awesome full stack engineer. My max goal is to live lavishly as a freelancer/consultant. Thanks, I hope I succeed as well.
    - recursive 13y ago
      From the viewpoint of someone who has seen the inside of BigCo, that sounds pretty naive. I'd guess most "software" jobs are not too far from spreadsheet automation.
muratmutlu 13y ago
Have you ever read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh? Sounds very similar to your story, he automated his work using a script, I think he even stopped going into the office
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  I have not but I'll add it to my reading list. Funny you should say that. The way it worked at my place, is we had a few managers on each floor. Each floor has over 300 people. A lot of people had no idea who they report to, what they're supposed to do, they just kind of asked random people for work. One of the contractors was hired shortly before the hiring manager quit. He had an office. He came in every day, opened his macbook and worked on his own projects for three months before somebody finally asked him who he was. Nobody questioned him because nobody had an idea who to even talk to about such issues, nor did they care. We have armies of developers that essentially do nothing.
  - infinite8s 13y ago
    Wow,how does that the even happen? And how could that contractor in good conscience bill your company for his own personal work.
- canvia 13y ago
  Great book. Highly recommend reading it.
npsimons 13y ago
There's a difference between an obsession, your life's work, and something you do to make a living. It can be nice if they cross paths, but as you say, far too many people confuse working long hours with being "productive" or "responsible" or "hard-working". I think a big test is: how do you feel after a day of work? If you just feel like vegging in front of the TV, you might want to reconsider how you spent the day.
cowsandmilk 13y ago
your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an doing it manually with the mv command. I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. [1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202585496232 http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  A few of my friends who are aspiring lawyers are terribly depressed because of their current work. They honestly thought they were going to walk straight into 100,000k/year jobs. Now they're pushing paperwork all day for a third of that salary :\
- dfc 13y ago
  Try this rename script if you really want to profit: http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.
- antitrust 13y ago
  > I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. On the other hand, they have job security that way. I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people. If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something? That, like, never happens.
noomerikal 13y ago
I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g., "I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else." "Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."
- antitrust 13y ago
  And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong. If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank." If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.
nether 13y ago
> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't). This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.
- hluska 13y ago
  That sounds like a horrible environment!! If you live within 500 km of me, I'll buy the first round...
- Arnor 13y ago
  It's time to leave that company. They don't deserve you.
  - antitrust 13y ago
    Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why? Team of manager salaries. They employee salaries. Contractor salaries. There over 500 people working on this thing. I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.
enraged_camel 13y ago
Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon. Like many other parts of American culture, it has to do with the country's Puritan roots. Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile. What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques). The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually. (Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)
- workhere-io 13y ago
  Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
  - glogla 13y ago
    I do have some experience with Germans, and I don't think so. Germans are pros. They expect you to be professionals, the expect you to be prepared, on time, and do a good work, and they expect you not to waste anyone's time. This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example. (I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.) EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.
wavesounds 13y ago
Amen Brutha! My last job I had coworkers who would complain to me that they got bored over the week we had off for Christmas vacation. I'm so much happier now that I'm away from that culture and am working with people who love what they do and love doing other things as well.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Same here. How could you possibly be bored with a week off? When I had a weekend off I basically planned all the fun shit by the hour that I was going to do. Shows, beers with friends, trips, bike riding, tons of stuff to do!
  - mhurron 13y ago
    I have this problem, usually on weekends and not weeks off, but not because I live to work. It's because I have a lot I would like to do, and many of these 'little projects' would take more then the time I have on a weekend. So I end up with a backlog of things I'd like to do but don't have the time to do them in. I get bored with lots of things to do but not enough time to start them in. I then curse the need to go to work. Thank god I don't have friends, bastards would be stealing even more of my time.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Exactly. Just need 2-5 close friends and thats all.
tdees40 13y ago
So every twenty-two year old I've ever met has told me how boring their entry-level corporate job was and how they just want to get out. Fine. But recognize that your job is boring because entry-level jobs are boring. They just exist to see if you're sane and you'll do work; once you prove yourself you get more interesting jobs. But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.
- rwallace 13y ago
  My job at age twenty-two wasn't boring. My entry-level job at age seventeen wasn't boring. Granted that I got lucky, it still disproves the notion that this is a cosmic necessity. That having been said, the relevant concept isn't boring, it's inefficient. Cleaning toilets is boring but someone has to do it anyway. What people are complaining about here isn't that they were doing boring but necessary grunt work, it's that they were doing unnecessary grunt work that could have been automated, that their time was being wasted. If your job can be automated, automate it. If your manager reacts negatively (and not by pointing out problems you weren't aware of), that means he's incompetent, dishonest or both. In that case, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for incompetent, dishonest people.
coldtea 13y ago
>I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. I think this book, light as it is, provides a lot of clues to that: http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/0345518780/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/...
Dewie 13y ago
> Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. I have a problem with the often-used word "recreation": it can be interpreted to mean that your job is your life, and anything you do to rest or unwind from work is just a way to come back to work more refreshed and productive.

by rfnslyr 13y ago

jmduke 13y ago

See, I think there's an ideal that lies in between "work the bare minimum to support yourself" and "work your entire life to the exclusion of other activities." If I was in your position, I would have tried to get a raise instead of lingering in my mainly automated position -- ideally into another position I can automate. I don't want work to vanish from my head as soon as I leave my office, because that means it didn't particularly affect me in any way. I don't think this is a particularly 'right' way to handle this. Some people want different things out of their work, and I think that's normal. You mentioned you're freelancing now -- are you doing stuff based off of what you were working on earlier, or did you switch paths?

rfnslyr 13y ago
The work I did does not even remotely tie into what I am doing now nor did it warrant a second thought beyond the office. It was a contractor position. I had to import data sets into excel from other documents. All I did was export the previous doc into a CSV file and write a script to import it into excel. It was piss easy. Then I shipped off that data set to whatever team needed it. That's all I did. It was menial. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Freelancer is the new bohemian. In all honesty though, that job instilled severe depression in me. Did about 6 months there and literally almost killed myself until I seeked help and my contract was up.
- jmduke 13y ago
  I'm honestly fascinated by that kind of work -- not that its interesting, but the fact that it exists is just strange to me. Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest. Sounds like you're living the dream. Good luck with your continued success!
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Nah I'm not making any money at all. I'm using the money from the job I just finished to fund 2 years of development time, rent, and food. I don't spend much so I get to live a fairly risk free lifestyle. I just work and read whatever is interesting that day/week/month. Worst case scenario: I get a stupid amount of experience and land a sweet job at a startup once my time is up. Loving it. My minimum goal is to become an awesome full stack engineer. My max goal is to live lavishly as a freelancer/consultant. Thanks, I hope I succeed as well.
  - recursive 13y ago
    From the viewpoint of someone who has seen the inside of BigCo, that sounds pretty naive. I'd guess most "software" jobs are not too far from spreadsheet automation.

muratmutlu 13y ago

Have you ever read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh? Sounds very similar to your story, he automated his work using a script, I think he even stopped going into the office

rfnslyr 13y ago
I have not but I'll add it to my reading list. Funny you should say that. The way it worked at my place, is we had a few managers on each floor. Each floor has over 300 people. A lot of people had no idea who they report to, what they're supposed to do, they just kind of asked random people for work. One of the contractors was hired shortly before the hiring manager quit. He had an office. He came in every day, opened his macbook and worked on his own projects for three months before somebody finally asked him who he was. Nobody questioned him because nobody had an idea who to even talk to about such issues, nor did they care. We have armies of developers that essentially do nothing.
- infinite8s 13y ago
  Wow,how does that the even happen? And how could that contractor in good conscience bill your company for his own personal work.
canvia 13y ago
Great book. Highly recommend reading it.

npsimons 13y ago

There's a difference between an obsession, your life's work, and something you do to make a living. It can be nice if they cross paths, but as you say, far too many people confuse working long hours with being "productive" or "responsible" or "hard-working". I think a big test is: how do you feel after a day of work? If you just feel like vegging in front of the TV, you might want to reconsider how you spent the day.

cowsandmilk 13y ago

your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an doing it manually with the mv command. I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. [1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202585496232 http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename

rfnslyr 13y ago
A few of my friends who are aspiring lawyers are terribly depressed because of their current work. They honestly thought they were going to walk straight into 100,000k/year jobs. Now they're pushing paperwork all day for a third of that salary :\
dfc 13y ago
Try this rename script if you really want to profit: http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/ The -z flag is phenomenal. The only thing I wish it had was a -R for recursive.
antitrust 13y ago
> I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people. On the other hand, they have job security that way. I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people. If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something? That, like, never happens.

noomerikal 13y ago

I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g., "I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else." "Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."

antitrust 13y ago
And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong. If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank." If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.

nether 13y ago

> When I worked at a large corporation, I nearly automated all of my work and I was called lazy. I'd do about an hour work a day, customize an existing script to process new data, then read for the remaining 6 hours. Co-workers called me a lazy nerd and proceeded to copy paste words into excel for 8 hours. Oh my god, I'm dealing with this now. I made a Python program that automated a lot of our Excel work. It reduced hours of tedium to seconds. Showing it to my manager, the reception was chilly at best. There was some disbelief that a program could parse dozens of slightly inconsistent worksheets (that made it a bit harder, but recognizing the patterns wasn't complex) but mostly deep annoyance at taking on a project he would have never approved. He seemed to think the program needed more vetting even after I'd fed huge amounts of our past analysis into it and verified it reproduces the correct results. He didn't want to see the proof that it worked, he just insisted that the spreadsheets were too complex and that some of the numbering schemes we use were too subjective to define by logic (they weren't). This is at a workplace where a coworker likes to type in hundreds of sums from a hand calculator into Excel instead of dragging a row. I might have to wait a decade or two for them to retire if anything is to improve.

hluska 13y ago
That sounds like a horrible environment!! If you live within 500 km of me, I'll buy the first round...
Arnor 13y ago
It's time to leave that company. They don't deserve you.
- antitrust 13y ago
  Or time to talk with the boss' boss and remind him that time is money, and you can save him money. The incompetence of the people around you isn't your moral responsibility.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    People don't care. I've tried. They want job security and nothing more. We have an $88 million dollar budget for a shitty mobile app at a bank. Yes. That's right. You read that. 88 MILLION for a mobile banking app. You know why? Team of manager salaries. They employee salaries. Contractor salaries. There over 500 people working on this thing. I suggested in a meeting "Why not hire an agency that will do this at a fraction of the cost?" I got a lot of angry glares. Why not? Because half our building worth of employees would be pointless.

enraged_camel 13y ago

Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon. Like many other parts of American culture, it has to do with the country's Puritan roots. Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile. What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques). The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually. (Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)

workhere-io 13y ago
Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
- glogla 13y ago
  I do have some experience with Germans, and I don't think so. Germans are pros. They expect you to be professionals, the expect you to be prepared, on time, and do a good work, and they expect you not to waste anyone's time. This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example. (I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.) EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.

wavesounds 13y ago

Amen Brutha! My last job I had coworkers who would complain to me that they got bored over the week we had off for Christmas vacation. I'm so much happier now that I'm away from that culture and am working with people who love what they do and love doing other things as well.

rfnslyr 13y ago
Same here. How could you possibly be bored with a week off? When I had a weekend off I basically planned all the fun shit by the hour that I was going to do. Shows, beers with friends, trips, bike riding, tons of stuff to do!
- mhurron 13y ago
  I have this problem, usually on weekends and not weeks off, but not because I live to work. It's because I have a lot I would like to do, and many of these 'little projects' would take more then the time I have on a weekend. So I end up with a backlog of things I'd like to do but don't have the time to do them in. I get bored with lots of things to do but not enough time to start them in. I then curse the need to go to work. Thank god I don't have friends, bastards would be stealing even more of my time.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Exactly. Just need 2-5 close friends and thats all.

tdees40 13y ago

So every twenty-two year old I've ever met has told me how boring their entry-level corporate job was and how they just want to get out. Fine. But recognize that your job is boring because entry-level jobs are boring. They just exist to see if you're sane and you'll do work; once you prove yourself you get more interesting jobs. But most twenty-two year olds check out long before that happens.

rwallace 13y ago
My job at age twenty-two wasn't boring. My entry-level job at age seventeen wasn't boring. Granted that I got lucky, it still disproves the notion that this is a cosmic necessity. That having been said, the relevant concept isn't boring, it's inefficient. Cleaning toilets is boring but someone has to do it anyway. What people are complaining about here isn't that they were doing boring but necessary grunt work, it's that they were doing unnecessary grunt work that could have been automated, that their time was being wasted. If your job can be automated, automate it. If your manager reacts negatively (and not by pointing out problems you weren't aware of), that means he's incompetent, dishonest or both. In that case, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for incompetent, dishonest people.

coldtea 13y ago

>I think somewhere down the line we got lost, or fucked by the previous generation, probably a combination of both. I think this book, light as it is, provides a lot of clues to that: http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/0345518780/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/...

Dewie 13y ago

> Work should be about providing a means for you to live your life. I have a problem with the often-used word "recreation": it can be interpreted to mean that your job is your life, and anything you do to rest or unwind from work is just a way to come back to work more refreshed and productive.