The website in the OP made me think of 'Mr Waturi' in the film 'Joe vs The Volcano' :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUB3tQs80
(Can be good film to watch after a shit day at the office...)
People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#12What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
Dull, tedious, repetitive work is also typically work that is subject to high error rates due to priming effects, normalization of non-errors / errors, and other psychological factors. A good example is TSA’s effectiveness at finding guns
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#13>"It seems that people have a natural view that putting together a group of highly repetitive and similar tasks into a job is the most efficient way to organise work, but previous research suggests this view is rarely correct," Professor Parker said.
Spot on. Stop ignoring human psychology. There is a big importance in specialization and separation of tasks. We know that since the industrial revolution. But especially in knowledge jobs boredom can lead to less than stellar quality, which again brings down efficiency.
Humans are animals that evolved in a highly complex environment. To keep people engaged their task should be varied and contain some newness every now and then.
Specialization has driven us into these niches where most people don't perform as well as they could. Jack of all trades master of none is the usual adage. I see the people in software who know something about the OS, something about drivers, something about application software, something about web design, usually designing the best software. They are masters of a lot of categories, because they are jacks of all trades. Because a lot of knowledge in one category leads you to be better in another category.
In management speak synergy.
Each task doesn't even have to be particularly exciting. But let people choose from your boring tasks. Maybe something you find boring they find exciting. And even if they do, don't say they have to do this forever. Maybe they find it exciting because they didn't do it before.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#14Is this the contrapositive:
People who don't practice being fun and having fun at work won't make work that's fun.
Sounds reasonable.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#15What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
Isn't the dull, repetitive work the kind that AI and automation will liberate us from?
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#16What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
Liking what you do for at least half of your waking hours is a pretty significant input to happiness. You may as well ask why people try to find jobs that pay them well, or partners whose company they enjoy.
Software engineers with the right personality have a better chance of genuinely enjoying our work than the average person, so it’s on our minds. Coding isn’t something you automatically have to drag yourself through kicking and screaming like some other jobs.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#17What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
Liking what you do for at least half of your waking hours is a pretty significant input to happiness. You may as well ask why people try to find jobs that pay them well, or partners whose company they enjoy. Software engineers with the right personality have a better chance of genuinely enjoying our work than the average person, so it’s on our minds. Coding isn’t something you automatically have to drag yourself thro…
And as part of building the life you want, you're going to have to do things you don't like a lot of the time. Sacrifice is almost always necessary to achieve one's goals, that's just part of how the universe works.
I guess what I'm saying is that, just because you don't like doing it doesn't mean it isn't contributing to your satisfaction with life in the aggregate.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#18What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.
Conversely, why does every job have to be dull and repetitive? Somebody has to do the brilliant stuff too. You'd think that you could spread out the brilliant stuff so that every worker gets a little bit of it, but that doesn't seem to happen. Instead, the fun work ends up concentrating itself among a tiny handful of workers.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#19My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology: If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues. Dunno…
> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!
I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting and unknown ending in a flop.
Re: People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues
#20My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology: If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues. Dunno…
> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting and unknown ending in a flop.
Thinking about it, same here. If there's some tedious but critical 10-min sysops task, I'll usually just do it rather than try to pawn it off on a junior coworker. But if we want to do something exciting, such as set up a new piece of flashy tech for evaluation, that will usually fall to a junior resource to 1) help them grow and learn and 2) because if they fail spectacularly there was nothing important riding on it.