When you are 20 it’s a comedy
40
A tragedy.
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I think that the people who find purpose in their work tend to get there by identifying the value that their own contributions make, in the most concrete terms possible. It’s nice if your enterprise has some highfalutin Grand Purpose that lives in your heart and motivates you to every day to leap out of bed and rush to the office (or Zoom I guess), but that’s pretty rare. Most people need to find meaning in their work at the end of their fingertips, not written in clouds in the sky. The reports you fill out may not Change The World, but they probably make someone’s life easier somewhere. Figure that out and you’re half way to building purpose in your work. It’s a lot easier to feel like you are making valuable contributions if you know that Sally in Accounting or Vidit in Finance or Emelia is Legal are using your work to get something done, and the more you engage with them the more you are likely to create some kind of positive feedback loop of prosocial connection with them where there is some appreciation and respect. You may never write an email that saves a poor child from hunger or stops pollution, but you can probably help someone more concretely and that’s where you’ll find meaning at work. That foundation of feeling that your work helps your team is probably a necessary first step before you can feel like your work is valuable to clients and more broadly valuable to society. If you send an email to a colleague and then try to figure out how it made the world better you’re probably not going to get anywhere.
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I work on audits and reviews that no one ever looks at. 50 hours of work for the client to take the report and put it in a drawer.
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Working in IT is just satisfying enough I guess in this respect, I mean knowing I did things and fixed problems that allowed other people to do their jobs is concrete enough that I at least occasionally feel a sense of satisfaction and don’t hate my life when I go home at the end of the day.
Of course there are moments where it feels pointless, like when I spend way too long getting something working after an upgrade whose only point was to fix some security issues that you never really quite know how realistically vulnerable you were to it, and end users get zero benefit from it.
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Why does the client need the report in the drawer?
This is a pretty classic case of overthinking it. If you needed to “get something to work after an upgrade” somebody somewhere must need it to work. Problem solved, high fives all around, away we go. Worrying about whether the original upgrade was even necessary seems like kind of wasted energy. It’s perfectly rational, but like lots of behavioral stuff unlocking the success story actually involves just having the habits to avoid over thinking and over analyzing.
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Banks require a yearly review
No one looks at it.
Who gives a shit if they “look at” it? They require it. You made their problem go away. By definition the report serves it’s purpose by existing.
No one looks at it or no one looks at it unless there is a problem?
No one looks at anything we do
I fill out excel boxes for cash.
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Judge really understands the pointlessness of this type of work. See above. Its basically the entire premise of that show.
Have you had a client that later went bankrupt?
Here in the inner sphere everything is a show. Wealth gets funnelled in algorithmically from the periphery where the actual extraction and exploitation happens and we create stories about how to divide that wealth up. That’s why entertainment is the biggest business going because they are the ones who have done away with the pretence that anyone above shop floor level is doing anything of tangible value and focused fully on the goal of creating content.
Everything is a poker game without cards. A zero sum round table where being able to bullshit and make people laugh or like you (be it colleagues, bosses, investors, or voters) is the only true metric of success. I create content that is utterly worthless except as a tool for other people to create content in their useless jobs to pretend to their bosses they are doing something so that their boss can pretend to his or her boss that they are doing something. It’s performative all the way down or up I guess.
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No
Reviews don’t do anything.
Does the threat of a review encourage your clients to not do stupid things?
https://twitter.com/mjrobbins/status/1556356736151322626?s=20&t=ZtWf95oXUSXFT8zEgKH1zA
https://twitter.com/OG_McDuck/status/1556323308479680514?s=20&t=ZtWf95oXUSXFT8zEgKH1zA
https://twitter.com/fireflynoble/status/1556318397989781505?s=20&t=ZtWf95oXUSXFT8zEgKH1zA
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The way I think of it is a social VORP.
What is the net outcome of you doing your job vs an average replacement.
Any actual social impact is of course best. Best improving the lives of customer or your colleagues or your team also has value.
Weirdly. I guess the highest value person out there might be a really incompetent arms dealer or tobacco company CEO.
There’s a movement called effective altruism that uses this logic to argue you should take the highest paying gig you can find, even if it’s working for a company that does something bad. The logic is that if you don’t take the job, the company will hire someone else who can do the job about as good as you. But that person will probably spend their money on personal gratification, and you can spend the money making the world a better place.
I came up with this one all by myself many years ago. I just call it rationalization.
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