A Culture of Hard Work I: Your Job is Boring .

To paraphrase a popular MMO, “Work is everywhere”. You can't walk out of home without coming across someone working. The bored waitress, the disgruntled public servant, the angry police officer, the disgusted office worker, the jealous nurse. They all spend at least 8 hours of their day at work.

And they all equally hate it.

There is something deeply unfulfilling about the type of work we do. Our working lives are boring and irrelevant. We spend hours moaning about it. We keep changing jobs trying to fit in. We re-train for different careers. Finally, after a couple of years, when all the original romanticism is gone, we accept our burden with a bizarre sense of pride. On the other hand we are constantly bombarded with images of happy workers. Politicians, doctors, artists of all kinds, parade daily in the media, obviously enjoying their line of work. We all have the occasional friend who is happily working. There are definitely people having a good time at work out there. What differentiates them from the rest of us?

Well, they like theirs jobs because their profession's model is in harmony with the free market, the dominant economic model. They also sometimes belong to groups that are not subject to market pressures (ex. academics, public sector doctors).

There are jobs however that are inherently incompatible with the market. This incompatibility demands inefficiency (and thus boredom, cruelty and indifference) from the work force.

Suppose doctors didn't have to swear the Hippocratic oath. Suppose their only interest was to make money, and suppose they are getting paid by the time they spend treating patients. As an obvious consequence, they would have to have as many clients (i.e patients) as possible and treat them for as long as possible. Any improved therapy could disrupt their business model, as the number of patients would decrease or they might lose precious session time.

In a smooth market model, doctors with new and improved cures would gain an advantage, by being more effective and potentially cheaper.

The above would work fine if the new doctors had enough time in their hands to establish a practice. If another set of doctors came in a years time and ravaged the now old regime before they were able to make money, their innovation would have no value financial value.

In reality however, because most doctors carry a sense of duty and because technological pace is not that fast in medicine, this never almost never happens.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as the Hippocratic oath for businesses. When the pace of innovation becomes greater then the ability of the market/manager to profit from it, we simply stop progress. Standard oil could not have existed if the world stopped using oil a few days after Rockefeller monopolised oil production. In a software project, the contractors need to ensure the project proceeds in a controlled fashion, as they might end up losing the job for going faster than expected. Managers have to create a circle of mediocrity around them, as it helps them consolidate power against new and unpredictable productivity gains from inquisitive personnel.

Bottom line, what would happen to all those police officers if we actually adopted effective crime fighting policies?

Most IT jobs are unfulfilling because that's what they aspire to be . Your tasks have to be menial, trivial and uninspiring because you are required to do a half-baked job. The quality of your deliverables has to be mediocre, as to generate support revenue. There is vested interest from all stakeholders to keep the means of production stable, because their business models can no longer keep pace with innovation in your respective field. You have to be in the office 24/7 because it's the time you spend at the office that creates revenue, not your ideas. Novel ideas, if allowed at all, have to be confined and restricted to such an extend as to allow the dominant players to absorb them without much fuss.

I have concentrated more on skilled professionals for the moment, as the subject is dear to me. Not all jobs are like that I will come back to unskilled labour(cleaners, builders), slavery and why they are still there around circa 2008 (cleaning robots anyone ?) on my next post.

For those of you who haven't yet seen it, the movie office space is a fantastic depiction of modern office life.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/

Life since the 60s

Something has gone eerily wrong since the 60's. A number of technological innovations resulted in massive productivity gains, yet those gains never manifested in better working conditions. Our working days get longer and longer, our salaries stagnate and our work ethic is getting increasingly aligned to the old German dictum “Arbeit macht frei ”.

In this blog I intend to run a weekly series of short articles on how we got ourselves into this mess and what can be done to get away from it.

Much of the discussion will be based around Bertrand Russell's “In Pursuit of Idleness”. Anyone out there interested in this should get a copy of the book. It's cheap, small, easy to read, and provides the reader with a fascinating ride into the thoughts of one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers this world has ever known.

I will try concluding every article with a relevant link/title to a comic, movie, song, film or book.

For this week, let's have a look at one of xkcd's best.

http://www.xkcd.com/137/