6 ms·

Maybe it's just me, but I find work to only suck when there is a long commute time and it's 2015 and our stupid company is still running Ruby 1.8 on rails 2.3,

by ffn 11y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I find work to only suck when there is a long commute time and it's 2015 and our stupid company is still running Ruby 1.8 on rails 2.3, there is no automated testing, the javascript is an unreadable pile or .rjs mess, and literally every bug is some variant of "undefined is not a function" happening at run-time (for which I get yelled at). In other words, work sucks primarily because it has been made to suck by a combination of extremely expensive real-estate in a down-town office and inattention toward the subject of how to make work fun. The article calls this "the realities of work" and that the inherent difficulties and uncertainties are natural to the problems of the "real world" and must be accepted. But I beg to differ, there are tons of games that are extremely hard to play well (e.g. Sim City, Devil May Cry, etc.), yet still incredibly fun and addictive. And if you consider online games where interacting with other player can produce just as much uncertainty as real life, games are no less "real" than reality... yet they are fun while real work isn't. Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and analyze their own employees work flows and design it to be a more fun process.

asgard1024 11y ago
> Maybe it's just me, but I find work to only suck when there is a long commute time and it's 2015 and our stupid company is still running Ruby 1.8 on rails 2.3, there is no automated testing, the javascript is an unreadable pile or .rjs mess, and literally every bug is some variant of "undefined is not a function" happening at run-time (for which I get yelled at). That's why you come home and program in a perfect world of Haskell (or some other toy), just like the farmer chooses the virtual farm over the real one. > The article calls this "the realities of work" and that the inherent difficulties and uncertainties are natural to the problems of the "real world" and must be accepted. In a certain sense, you're correct - the challenges to overcome in a game can have the same magnitude. In other sense, you're not. At the end of the day, game is still a game. Maybe it is the responsibility that you feel that makes the difference. In the real world, the stakes are higher; cannot that be the ultimate reason why the work sucks?
- lmm 11y ago
  > In the real world, the stakes are higher; cannot that be the ultimate reason why the work sucks? It could be, but I don't think it is. Doing something that's actually important feels awesome.
  - dagw 11y ago
    When you succeed. When you drop the ball and it all goes to shit, it can literally drive people to suicide.
    - VLM 11y ago
      This is insightful in that games are engineered so everyone wins. The participation trophy effect has become stronger over time... in the 80s you could actually lose computer and video games, but now all you do is grind up a little slower, which is pretty lame. Aside from subcultural experiments like roguelike games which most participation trophy participants don't like. The real world success rate is extremely low and on a long scale approaches 0 unless you're in the 1% in which case the rate approaches 1 of course, because they rig the rules, and their quislings get REALLY angry when anyone points it out.
      - Fargren 11y ago
        Every time I hear a variant of the "games did X when I was younger, they don't anymore", I have to wonder what do they mean by "games". There is a ridiculous amount and variety of games made today, specially when compared to the eighties. All genres, difficulties and philosophies of design that existed back then still exist today. Most of them in the same amount, even. But when the pie gets very big, as it has, slices that don't grow start looking smaller. Both the "just grind some more" and "you lose you die" games existed in the eighties, and both exist today.
        lmm 11y ago
        I think there is a real shift though. People talk about "nintendo hard" because most of the games of that era were that hard. Five or ten years ago health was a carefully managed resource in any "AAA" FPS; nowadays regenerating health is very much the norm.
chipsy 11y ago
As it so happens, I'm thinking about consulting on exactly this. I have plenty of game design experience; last weekend I stumbled into a hackathon where I ended up giving an early-stage founder some ideas to radically improve an experience that everyone agrees sucks right now(consumer medicine). Based on that data point there's plenty of room to make this work, above and beyond the existing gamification tropes of putting badges and rewards on things. (Badges are an easy sell, but in essence, it was already there - recall "employee of the month" or "reward coupons.") My pitch would be to make play - not just "fun" or compulsion loops, but the whole dynamic of playful activity - an organizational improvement process. The best results, as with most things, would need deep structural commitment, but there would be room even for a limited engagement to make some progress.
lewisl9029 11y ago
I too consider working in software to be fun. But a vast majority of "work" out there is nothing like working in software. So yes, it is probably just you (or us rather).
rifung 11y ago
While I completely agree with your list of things that make work less fun, I think there's one important thing missing: the fact that you have to do it. It's strange but I like to program in my spare time, and I love to learn more about CS in general. But, when it's a job.. it kind of takes the fun out of it, because you have to do even when you no longer feel like it. Just my opinion though!
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  100% agree. Just the change from "can" to "have to" instantly damages my motivation, obliterating it completely over longer time scales. This makes it incredibly difficult to be a decent employee even though I'm a quite good developer (having spent over 10 years programming, which was my hobby since childhood). It's soul-sucking and destroys self-confidence.
  - deepvibrations 11y ago
    It's good to hear from others who think in the same way- I moved to a new job last year where there were no fixed hours (my previous job required that I should be in at 9am). This alone made me feel like I was going into the office because i 'wanted' to, not because I HAD to... Ironically I still end up going in for just after 9am everyday anyway, but that sense of freedom leaves me feeling so much happier on a day to day basis!
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      I used to work at a company that had no fixed hours... I usually spent at least 10 hours a day on the weekdays and often stopped in on the weekends and there was usually at least a smattering of people there, and collaboration and morale were both high. They really got it right on that one. Then investors started courting the company, and management started telling people they wanted butts in seats at 9:30am. Well as soon as 5:30 rolls around it became a ghost town.
- ashark 11y ago
  Indeed. You have to do it 40+ hours a week, 50ish weeks a year. I'm not sure there's anything I'd voluntarily spend that much time on with such consistency. I know some people can lose themselves in video games for whole weeks, my experience from the couple of times my wife and kids have left me home alone for a few days is that I have about 16 total hours of pent-up video game binging in me at any given time, and once that's satisfied I'm totally done with video games for the next several days and would rather fix things around the house or catch up on my reading or get outside. Anything but play video games. If I had to wake up early to go play video games 40 hours a week every. single. week. (with another 5+ hours lost to commute) I doubt I'd make it through the second week before I started to dread it. And that's if I got to choose the games and didn't have to do anything work-ish related to them, just play, so 100% ideal conditions (not like the notoriously-crappy jobs of video game testers)
majani 11y ago
Trying to make work fun is a naive fool's errand. The nature of most work is to be repetitive, and repetition takes the fun out of anything.
- bandrami 11y ago
  You should try being a sysadmin. It's very rare that you'll do the same thing on any given two days.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    As a programmer I never do the same thing every day. But dear god does it often feel like I'm stuck doing the same class of thing. Get ticket. Reproduce bug. Fix bug. Close ticket. Repeat.
    - bandrami 11y ago
      Fair point. The "task diversity" of systems administration is a different world, particularly in non-tech industries (most sysadmins are working in companies that do things other than technology). Low-voltage cabling, basic plumbing (yes, really -- got to get the condensing water out from the air mover somehow...), finding the fault lines between hardware and software. I also really love hiring sysadmins, because it really is entirely about finding people who are good at isolating and solving problems, and surprisingly little specific platform knowledge is needed going in (my first sysadmin job way back in 1999 involved managing a 24-node sendmail cluster sending cough cough totally legitimate email to large numbers of people. My supervisor handed me the Bat Book and said "you'll probably need this. Have fun.").
      - Swizec 11y ago
        Ah yes, 1999, when to paraphrase Jason Calahanis in that one documentary "You'd get hired as an engineer for owning a keyboard and knowing how to type".
    - FLUX-YOU 11y ago
pjc50 11y ago
Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and analyze their own employees work flows and design it That would be nice, yes. Most organisations are tremendously bad at this kind of introspection. And like introspection of the individual, it's painful and time-consuming. Especially when a process doesn't work well and you get into the eternal battle of "we need better employees" vs "better training" vs "change the process". Not to mention that plenty of managers are Calvinist enough to design the fun out of work; employee fun is presumed to be a cost to the company that must be minimised.

by ffn 11y ago

asgard1024 11y ago

> Maybe it's just me, but I find work to only suck when there is a long commute time and it's 2015 and our stupid company is still running Ruby 1.8 on rails 2.3, there is no automated testing, the javascript is an unreadable pile or .rjs mess, and literally every bug is some variant of "undefined is not a function" happening at run-time (for which I get yelled at). That's why you come home and program in a perfect world of Haskell (or some other toy), just like the farmer chooses the virtual farm over the real one. > The article calls this "the realities of work" and that the inherent difficulties and uncertainties are natural to the problems of the "real world" and must be accepted. In a certain sense, you're correct - the challenges to overcome in a game can have the same magnitude. In other sense, you're not. At the end of the day, game is still a game. Maybe it is the responsibility that you feel that makes the difference. In the real world, the stakes are higher; cannot that be the ultimate reason why the work sucks?

lmm 11y ago
> In the real world, the stakes are higher; cannot that be the ultimate reason why the work sucks? It could be, but I don't think it is. Doing something that's actually important feels awesome.
- dagw 11y ago
  When you succeed. When you drop the ball and it all goes to shit, it can literally drive people to suicide.
  - VLM 11y ago
    This is insightful in that games are engineered so everyone wins. The participation trophy effect has become stronger over time... in the 80s you could actually lose computer and video games, but now all you do is grind up a little slower, which is pretty lame. Aside from subcultural experiments like roguelike games which most participation trophy participants don't like. The real world success rate is extremely low and on a long scale approaches 0 unless you're in the 1% in which case the rate approaches 1 of course, because they rig the rules, and their quislings get REALLY angry when anyone points it out.
    - Fargren 11y ago
      Every time I hear a variant of the "games did X when I was younger, they don't anymore", I have to wonder what do they mean by "games". There is a ridiculous amount and variety of games made today, specially when compared to the eighties. All genres, difficulties and philosophies of design that existed back then still exist today. Most of them in the same amount, even. But when the pie gets very big, as it has, slices that don't grow start looking smaller. Both the "just grind some more" and "you lose you die" games existed in the eighties, and both exist today.
      - lmm 11y ago
        I think there is a real shift though. People talk about "nintendo hard" because most of the games of that era were that hard. Five or ten years ago health was a carefully managed resource in any "AAA" FPS; nowadays regenerating health is very much the norm.

chipsy 11y ago

As it so happens, I'm thinking about consulting on exactly this. I have plenty of game design experience; last weekend I stumbled into a hackathon where I ended up giving an early-stage founder some ideas to radically improve an experience that everyone agrees sucks right now(consumer medicine). Based on that data point there's plenty of room to make this work, above and beyond the existing gamification tropes of putting badges and rewards on things. (Badges are an easy sell, but in essence, it was already there - recall "employee of the month" or "reward coupons.") My pitch would be to make play - not just "fun" or compulsion loops, but the whole dynamic of playful activity - an organizational improvement process. The best results, as with most things, would need deep structural commitment, but there would be room even for a limited engagement to make some progress.

lewisl9029 11y ago

I too consider working in software to be fun. But a vast majority of "work" out there is nothing like working in software. So yes, it is probably just you (or us rather).

rifung 11y ago

While I completely agree with your list of things that make work less fun, I think there's one important thing missing: the fact that you have to do it. It's strange but I like to program in my spare time, and I love to learn more about CS in general. But, when it's a job.. it kind of takes the fun out of it, because you have to do even when you no longer feel like it. Just my opinion though!

TeMPOraL 11y ago
100% agree. Just the change from "can" to "have to" instantly damages my motivation, obliterating it completely over longer time scales. This makes it incredibly difficult to be a decent employee even though I'm a quite good developer (having spent over 10 years programming, which was my hobby since childhood). It's soul-sucking and destroys self-confidence.
- deepvibrations 11y ago
  It's good to hear from others who think in the same way- I moved to a new job last year where there were no fixed hours (my previous job required that I should be in at 9am). This alone made me feel like I was going into the office because i 'wanted' to, not because I HAD to... Ironically I still end up going in for just after 9am everyday anyway, but that sense of freedom leaves me feeling so much happier on a day to day basis!
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    I used to work at a company that had no fixed hours... I usually spent at least 10 hours a day on the weekdays and often stopped in on the weekends and there was usually at least a smattering of people there, and collaboration and morale were both high. They really got it right on that one. Then investors started courting the company, and management started telling people they wanted butts in seats at 9:30am. Well as soon as 5:30 rolls around it became a ghost town.
ashark 11y ago
Indeed. You have to do it 40+ hours a week, 50ish weeks a year. I'm not sure there's anything I'd voluntarily spend that much time on with such consistency. I know some people can lose themselves in video games for whole weeks, my experience from the couple of times my wife and kids have left me home alone for a few days is that I have about 16 total hours of pent-up video game binging in me at any given time, and once that's satisfied I'm totally done with video games for the next several days and would rather fix things around the house or catch up on my reading or get outside. Anything but play video games. If I had to wake up early to go play video games 40 hours a week every. single. week. (with another 5+ hours lost to commute) I doubt I'd make it through the second week before I started to dread it. And that's if I got to choose the games and didn't have to do anything work-ish related to them, just play, so 100% ideal conditions (not like the notoriously-crappy jobs of video game testers)

majani 11y ago

Trying to make work fun is a naive fool's errand. The nature of most work is to be repetitive, and repetition takes the fun out of anything.

bandrami 11y ago
You should try being a sysadmin. It's very rare that you'll do the same thing on any given two days.
- Swizec 11y ago
  As a programmer I never do the same thing every day. But dear god does it often feel like I'm stuck doing the same class of thing. Get ticket. Reproduce bug. Fix bug. Close ticket. Repeat.
  - bandrami 11y ago
    Fair point. The "task diversity" of systems administration is a different world, particularly in non-tech industries (most sysadmins are working in companies that do things other than technology). Low-voltage cabling, basic plumbing (yes, really -- got to get the condensing water out from the air mover somehow...), finding the fault lines between hardware and software. I also really love hiring sysadmins, because it really is entirely about finding people who are good at isolating and solving problems, and surprisingly little specific platform knowledge is needed going in (my first sysadmin job way back in 1999 involved managing a 24-node sendmail cluster sending cough cough totally legitimate email to large numbers of people. My supervisor handed me the Bat Book and said "you'll probably need this. Have fun.").
    - Swizec 11y ago
      Ah yes, 1999, when to paraphrase Jason Calahanis in that one documentary "You'd get hired as an engineer for owning a keyboard and knowing how to type".
  - FLUX-YOU 11y ago

pjc50 11y ago

Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and analyze their own employees work flows and design it That would be nice, yes. Most organisations are tremendously bad at this kind of introspection. And like introspection of the individual, it's painful and time-consuming. Especially when a process doesn't work well and you get into the eternal battle of "we need better employees" vs "better training" vs "change the process". Not to mention that plenty of managers are Calvinist enough to design the fun out of work; employee fun is presumed to be a cost to the company that must be minimised.