First of all, isn't it a bit dramatic to say "your entire being opposes" your task? It's not like you're out committing genocide or something. You're programming, and you have to work on a crappy programming task. Every programmer who ever worked a professional job has had to do this at some point. If the very fiber of your soul is wrapped up in your employer's MegaAccounting Client V3.0 REST API, I'd recommend re-thinking your emotional attachment to your job.
That money you get every two weeks is called "compensation" because it is compensating you for your time, which you would probably otherwise spend doing something more pleasant. This is the realistic world of grown-up work life.
If your company's Marketing bone-head says the customers want a green oval button instead of a system-standard button, well, it's stupid, but I'd laugh at how much they're paying to get this ridiculous code written and just write the damn code. It's really not worth losing sleep or sanity over. Not being emotionally attached to your work allows you to shrug off the stupid stuff that Really Doesn't Matter.
The code you write for work and the code you write for you are two entirely different things. I am so much happier with my work when I assume everything is stupid and nonsensical (it almost always is, I work for a marketing company); I do it with a smile on my face because they pay me and experience is valuable. Not to mention having this kind of job when you're a 22y/o college dropout is improbable, to say the least, and complaining is stupid.
Who says your job can't be something you enjoy? What if programming is what you'd be doing if you weren't at work? I know that's certainly the case for a lot of programmers I know.
This is unrealistic. Do you think an economy can survive with everyone doing what they enjoy? Do we have enough people who enjoy cleaning toilets, stocking shelves, and all the other menial, labor intensive jobs? This notion is a utopian, post currency (Star Trek Economy) fantasy.
Nobody is saying that we should expect our jobs to fill us with orgasmic ecstasy every minute we're on the clock; we're saying that if every day you come home from your job and think about ramming an icepick up your nose, then this is just possibly a sign it's a time to get a resume together.
I'm tired of the argument made implicitly all the time -- and explicitly on occasion -- that even if a job fills you with suicidal misery every day, if you're making enough to cover all your living expenses plus pay for the alcohol and pills to numb the pain, then by God you should just count yourself lucky, sit down and shut up. A given percentage of the workforce may indeed always hate their job -- but no, in fact, I do not believe that the economy will collapse if that percentage decreases.
I'll chime in because I always hear this argument and I don't see it as a particularly good one.
Take cleaning toilets, for example. If no one wants to do it then it will become more expensive to find people to do it. That will drive others to come up with an automated solution to the problem that, while expensive, will be cheaper than paying someone to do it. Eventually someone will come up with a solution that maybe wasn't even considered before, like self-cleaning toilets or something.
Now everyone is better off (toilets are clean and no one needs to clean them), because people were free to do what they enjoy.
This is why I believe in basic income, where people don't need to clean toilets for a living, and the actual issue of "how do we, as a society, get clean toilets, without submitting anyone to the awful task of cleaning them?" comes up for debate. Right now we don't talk about it because our system makes some people's livelihoods depend on their cleaning toilets, so they have to do it for the benefit of others, even though they'd rather do something else. Basic income is a very efficient way to force those problems to be solved, via the ingenuity of those that like problem-solving (entrepreneurs), because it makes it so that it's less likely that you can force someone to work doing something they'd rather not do.
> people don't need to clean toilets for a living,
I swear to you, our janitor is the happiest, hardest working person in the building. Everyone looks up to him. But I can totally see where he couldn't work at McDonald's, let alone do QA runs on lab systems (a lab tech's job), or diagnose disease. And I think a genuine source of his happiness is having a job. Basic income doesn't solve the problem of feeling valued.
>Take cleaning toilets, for example. If no one wants to do it then it will become more expensive to find people to do it.
IMO Here is the problem with what you are saying. Who actually cleans toilets today? Immigrants (largely illegal ones). This is just like the goods we import from China. There is a slave class of people who clean toilets and work in Chinese factories. I agree with the economic principles where innovation will drive improvement, but illegal immigration and free trade interfere with this.
I hope that basic income passes in Norway. It would be quite interesting to see what happens.
you come pretty close to invoking godwin's law, here.
if you depend on a place for compensation, then you should be interested in its' success, and if some bonehead (let's not pick on marketing, since it's not always them) has a stupid idea, and money is being wasted on you doing that, it's actually your responsibility to do something about it.
per the law of supply and demand, it's also completely reasonable to leave them behind. a lot of companies with good ideas fail because they can't retain talent enough to get any cogent work completed.
"This is the realistic world of grown-up work life."
^^ This is the statement of an unimaginative individual with no creative juices. I wouldn't employ you to sweep the floors.
> "This is the realistic world of grown-up work life."
Actually this sounds like a statement from someone who is fulfilled outside of work, or on different projects within work. I'm of the same opinion. Most people can't have ann interesting workload, so why does this guy have to be "unimaginative" and "uncreative"? Why attack anyone for a statement like that? I'd much rather not work with someone like you.
First of all, isn't it a bit dramatic to say "your entire being opposes" your task? It's not like you're out committing genocide or something. You're programming, and you have to work on a crappy programming task. Every programmer who ever worked a professional job has had to do this at some point. If the very fiber of your soul is wrapped up in your employer's MegaAccounting Client V3.0 REST API, I'd recommend re-thinking your emotional attachment to your job.
That money you get every two weeks is called "compensation" because it is compensating you for your time, which you would probably otherwise spend doing something more pleasant. This is the realistic world of grown-up work life.
If your company's Marketing bone-head says the customers want a green oval button instead of a system-standard button, well, it's stupid, but I'd laugh at how much they're paying to get this ridiculous code written and just write the damn code. It's really not worth losing sleep or sanity over. Not being emotionally attached to your work allows you to shrug off the stupid stuff that Really Doesn't Matter.