What happened to work?

Nobody wants to go to work anymore.  Ok, maybe not nobody, but it sure feels that way.  It's one of the great ironies of our technology-fueled modern life that, while what we do for our livelihood ("work") has come to occupy more and more of our time and attention, it has simultaneously become less and less attractive and meaningful to many of us.  This is largely anecdotal, but it recently occurred to me that nobody I knew spoke positively about their work. It was always about insensitive bosses, incompetent co-workers, impossible schedules, politics, and on and on.  Perhaps cynicism is in fashion and at least some people may just be taking this stance because are afraid of seeming naive by expressing satisfaction in their jobs. I certainly allow for that and my trained coach's ear does register this undercurrent in a few people but, in my experience, they are in the minority.  The vast majority seems to go to work each day with a sense of futility - with no expectation of being fulfilled or enjoying what they are about to do.

A clarification is in order before I continue on - while I talk in general terms about work, I am really thinking of the modern day technology and service sectors. It stands to reason that almost every industry is feeling the impact of high tech (& in particular the efficiencies wrought by the internet), but I have limited exposure to many of those fields. 

OK, back to my main thesis.  Of course, there are numerous reasons for this state of affairs.  One prominent one is that many people are engaged in jobs that they themselves feel are useless - i.e, not really contributing to the company or indeed, society at large.  People engaged in such jobs are convinced that nobody would be able to tell the difference if they or the job disappeared overnight. David Graeber, a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, went so far as to formally define such jobs and propose a theory around it. Eschewing normal academic restraint, he somewhat provocatively terms them "Bullshit Jobs." He originally proposed this theory in a 2013 article for the online magazine Strike! and then developed it into a book length treatise in 2018.  The motivation for the book was additional "research" that the author did since the original essay (which caused a minor international stir when it came out).  I haven't made it through the entire book yet, but I can safely say that you will get the essence of the argument from the essay. Graeber presents some startling survey numbers. Somewhere between 37-50% of respondents in various western nations felt that their jobs did not make any meaningful contribution to the world! The bare number is eye-popping enough, but then consider that the vast majority of doctors, nurses, policemen, teachers, fire fighters, sanitation workers, etc are unlikely to think of their jobs as "pointless." This then suggests that the percentage of people engaged in other jobs who don't believe their work has any value is much higher than the overall average.  Declaring your job to be a "Bullshit" one is rather definitive, but even without that, workers report that an increasing part of their jobs are not related to their primary responsibility (& hence, lacking purpose).  The author quotes from the US edition of the 2016-2017 State of Enterprise Work Report:  American workers reported that from 2015 to 2016, the amount of time that they spent on their primary work responsibility fell from 46% to 39%. Admittedly, some of this is probably just bellyaching about some process that the employees do not want to follow and indeed, it is impossible to be a 100% efficient in the allocation of time when the team is large enough.  However, a number like 39% ought to cause everybody to take notice.

Prof Graeber clearly has labor-friendly views, but even dedicated capitalists shouldn't really be surprised by his thesis.  Human beings are intrinsically driven to create value, to have an impact. The march of science and technology have ensured that mere survival is not the driving force for humankind at large.  It's not enough for us to just get through each day - we all want to know that we are making a difference.  Daniel Pink summarized this very ably in his 2010 book - Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. There he coins the acronym, "MAP" - "Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose" for what motivates workers.  In our context here, the key is the last one - "Purpose." Pink's claim (bolstered with various studies) is that we are not going to be motivated if there isn't a strong sense of purpose behind our job.  It only gets worse if we harbor the conviction that our job is essentially pointless, let alone merely lacking a strong purpose.

Another contributing factor to the sense of malaise that many people feel about work is the impact of, for want of a better phrase, Silicon Valley.  While the actual geographical location and its most recognizable denizens are very much a part of what this phrase captures - it is quite a bit more than that. It's the internet, it's ubiquitous wireless connectivity, it's the hyper pace of technology startups that have done away with the traditional sense of what means to build up a successful business.  What this has done is to strip away the sense of family and community that companies had tried to foster.  We were all in it together - if one family member was in trouble, we would take care of them.  Now, it is almost entirely about yourself and doing whatever it takes to advance, or failing that, protect what you already have.  Because, that's what everybody else is doing, isn't it?

 

Lab Rats is an entertaining and irreverent take on the management culture promoted by various Silicon Valley oligarchs.  This is a follow-up to the author, Dan Lyons’, previous book about working in a internet-era start-up: Disrupted. Dan admittedly goes on a bit of rant and he pulls no punches in describing the “profits-first” and “people-last” philosophy of the Silicon Valley types.  He draws a sharp contrast between the approach taken by the entrepreneurs of the past – the likes that ran HP, IBM, Ford, and indeed, my erstwhile employer, Qualcomm, and those of the darlings of today – Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc.  Being familiar with this sector, his stories were not a total surprise, but the audacity and sheer hubris displayed by these new age business experts is still breathtaking in scope.  Lyons reserves particular ire for certain management techniques such as "Agile" and "Lean Startup" and gives multiple examples of how these (and other such) techniques have come to literally destroy the lives of many employees.  Agile, for instance, was developed as way to get better predictability for software projects, but instead has evolved into one of the hottest management fads (particularly in Silicon Valley), applied to every aspect of a business. My own experience with Agile, is that, for software projects, it is indeed a better approach than the traditional ones.  However, even within that, blind adherence to "rules" and "process" is counter-productive and as with everything else in engineering, the tool has to be adjusted to the needs of the team and project (& not the other way around). For anybody who still thinks the Silicon Valley approach is the way to go, this book is mandatory reading. There is a chapter on the "Holocracy" methodology that is over-the-top funny.  As part of his reporting, Dan attended an Holocracy workshop run by its founder, Brian Robertson. He calls it the "closest thing to pure madness that I have experienced."  I literally burst out laughing many times and this chapter alone is worth the price of admission. 

Entertaining though the book is, it is hard not to feel depressed about the situation that Lyons describes.  He may be cherry-picking, but these are real people with real lives to lead and real families to support. 

What is one to do?  Some will simply quit the rat race.  Some may take the second option that Hamlet so famously grappled with and take up “arms against a sea of troubles”.  Occupy Wall Street and its sister protest movements come to mind.  The grand gesture though, is not for everyone.  Most of will just soldier on and hope for the best.  

I don't purport to have the answers, but I do believe there is a way to deal with this. Many of our identities are tied up in our work and therein lies the cause of most of this angst. This may sound counter-intuitive, but putting some distance between ourselves and our jobs is the first step to recognizing what it is about the job that is still meaningful to us. Even if we question the value of the job itself, the satisfaction of a job well done is hard to deny.  Taking the time to clearly understand what our personal values are and making sure that we stay true to those (as much as we can) is a fundamental step.  While it may sound grandiose, each of us has a purpose in life - it could be something monumental like "cure cancer" or it could something like "take care of my kids."  For some, it could be something as simple as brightening up the days of the people around them by simply smiling at them and having a positive attitude.  You would be surprised how much of an impact such a person can have. Whatever be it for you, the key is that it is your life purpose, and it will be your North Star to a more fulfilled life.

What I describe above is not easy - we have to be willing to break out of the same stories we have told ourselves time and again. The hard truth is that the answers we seek lie within and not in the world around us or the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in. It may feel self-indulgent, but it is OK to ask for help.  Many people seek out a coach to help them through this, but you may be somebody who can do it on your own.

It has been ingrained in all of us (Ayn Rand followers excepted, of course) that being selfless is the highest moral code. But in fact, when we are not in right state – physically or mentally – we are not of much use to anybody else.  You have heard this in the safety advisory of every flight you have taken: “First put on your mask before helping those around you.”  There is much wisdom in that.