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.
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.
When I was a youngster, the eight bosses line made me laugh because it was absurd. Deeper into my career, it makes me laugh because it's true.
On a good day, on an unimportant project, I still have three bosses. I have my team lead, my PM, and my actual manager. Currently I'm on a cross-team project of critical importance, so you can add on my manager's manager, his manager, the other team's manager, and his manager. I've got seven goddamn people breathing down my neck on this.
I used to work at a place where I had one manager, even for critically important projects. He was the only one breathing down my neck (and that wasn't often). No PM constantly hassling me to groom my backlog[0], the managers above my immediate manager all had enough trust to not directly meddle. Most productive I've ever been in my career. Ended up leaving because I just didn't give a shit about the project, but sometimes I dream of going back...
[0] I need to rant about this. How am I supposed to be agile if I have to have my backlog completely planned out for the whole project? And I can't just estimate it or backlog the big chunks, because when we start making progress and I update the backlog to reflect things we've learned, I have to justify every single change to my PM who will grumble that we are going off plan. If I don't update the backlog, I get grilled about how accurate it is at the next too many cooks/status update meeting.
We can either do agile or try to plan out the next six months of work at the start. Stop trying to make me do both.
> 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?
> 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.
I watched Office Space for the first time when I was a teenager many years ago. It's funny how much my perception of the movie changed and how much it resonates with my work now, specially since the last years. One difference is that I have 10 different managers, which makes me dissociate enough from work without the need of any hypnotist.
Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.
Samir: So what did you say?
Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.
Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
But if they don't only care about the next quarter how is Gerald Q. Public, born 1958, going to retire to Florida after buying three McMansions (and selling them all at a loss), a sports car, and paying for three divorce settlements? Who are we to deny him the experience of moving down to Boca so he can get his maintenance-provided house on a golf course wiped off its slab by a hurricane before being rebuilt so that he can play golf and wife swap until the dementia sets in?
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.
I have one that's even worse than that. The company I worked at once insisted on you keeping a timesheet for work done and which clients should be billed for each 15 minute block. They charged the clients according to that. They even went as far as charging other internal teams for your time if you had a chat with a colleague in another team!
If you, however, had any unaccounted for blocks (i.e. not 8h per day), it'd be brought up in your appraisal, and on one occasion when we were told we had to work overtime one evening (about 4 hours) but wouldn't be paid for it, that's when my feelings towards their policy really shifted. From that point on, even if I'd worked late to get the work done for the customer, I made sure that the timesheet only listed the 8 hours so that the company wasn't going to profit from my misfortune. They picked up on that too, and weren't happy, but there was nothing they could do about it.
That culture was truly toxic as an employee. If you were a couple of minutes late for the start of the day, you were hauled into your manager's office for a 10 minute shouting at about the importance of time keeping. There was an unofficial "flexitime" working policy - "you can start any time you like before 9 and end any time you like after 5:30". Obviously, anyone who'd been there more than a year grew tired of this, and at 5:30 every day there was a stampede to leave the office. Nobody left even a minute early because we had timestamped entry/exit logs and we knew the consequences, but equally almost nobody was prepared to stay a minute longer than they had to.
There’s a great Dilbert about that… he turns in his timesheet to Carol the secretary and then she says why are you still standing there and he says I still have 14 minutes scheduled for this.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"... 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.
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.
> 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).
The problem is some need to work to burnout or else they can't pay bills. This is especially true in places like the USA where so many social benefits are tied to employment. Employers understand this. They know a lapse in employment could be devastating, so they can put the screws to employees.
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.
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
Those additional 6-8 hours dwindle down to 1-2 hours real quick when you consider you still have housework to do on top of work, cooking, cleaning, washing, you also need to eat and buy groceries. Also can't do anything exciting immediately before going to sleep.
Of course I'm doing it for the money. I don't like my work that much. (When I was younger, I used to say "Don't they realize that I'd do this for free?" But even then, I'm not sure it was really true...)
But when I was working in medical instruments, and they brought in a doctor who explained how our instrument turned a surgery that had a 50/50 survival rate into one that had better than a 99% survival rate... I was more motivated to work there, and to work well there, and not because I was getting more money. My work had a purpose. It wasn't just a job.
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.
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.
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".
I've always called myself a "cyber janitor." Same deal. I clean up tech messes that people higher than me make, so that they can take credit for how clean they are.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Thanks for confirming this, I appreciate the blunt perspective here.
The idea of even having to think about your own safety in that way is something I have never had to experience. I have stressed out a lot about money before, but I have never been in a situation at that level, and I will remember to appreciate that.
Yes and on top of all this the physical exertion that you are doing in a bluecollar job is really useless for health and that's the most positive way to describe it. I'd say that it's probably always very detrimental.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
I get paid great money to play with computers. My father was an elementary school janitor.