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.
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.