Love the work, hate the job?
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Forgive the self-indulgence, but the 'The Dear Self' discussion about following your passion got me thinking, and I know we've had these discussions before. Still.....
When I started doing my current job back in 1989 (oh God), I actually really liked it, and thought I'd found something that I could really get to grips with. It turned out I was pretty good at it. It was stressful, as are most jobs with direct customer contact, but the engineering was challenging and really quite interesting, and it was such a niche-skill that so far (touch-wood) I've never been laid off, and have somehow managed to wangle getting jobs in three different countries.
Something has happened in the last 20-odd years, almost all of it brought on by the "improvements" in technology. The actual job, the bit that used to take up about 80% of what I did, now takes up about 20%. The rest of it consists of wrestling with increasingly unfriendly and complicated software tools, and I use the word 'tool' in it's loosest possible term.
I've heard medical folks having similar feelings.
Are all jobs like this now? It feels like the tech that was supposed to help us is slowly stifling all the joy.
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Love the work, hate the job?:
I've heard medical folks having similar feelings.
In our case, it became a situation where there were more and more silly burdens placed on how things were done. If we didn't ask a totally irrelevant question during pre-op evaluation, and tik a box, Medicare would ding us a certain percentage.
It became much less about taking care of people and more about making sure the forms were filled out correctly.
I haven't set foot in an operating room in 8 years, 3 months, and I miss it not at all. I can only imagine how bad it is now.
I have nothing to suggest, other than to urge you to get out when you can.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Probably. It's why I didn't want to program for the rest of my life. I just hate learning the helpful tools and systems to track projects and code and requirements and work, and I hated learning new, more powerful, simpler languages and their associated environments and libraries. I know a lot of people get into that.
Among my luckiest moments was when Epic Systems (creators of much maligned but extremely widespread medical software) rejected my application after I graduated. I'd have been working for that monstrosity probably to this day, and I'm sure miserably so. My grades were mediocre though, and they don't like that... guess I'm glad I never put much effort into school.
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We were promised Skynet. What we got was Workday and Microsoft Dynamics.
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As long as we're bitchin'....
Anesthesia practices are increasingly becoming either 100% hospital employees, or being managed by some huge business that buys up practices. When you don't own the business, when you don't have a stake, you just don't care. I'm lucky I bailed when I did.
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When I was at Credit Suisse I hired an administrator, separate from my secretary (this being the aughts the former was called my ‘COO’ and the latter my ‘admin’.)
Her job, as I described it to her, was to ‘feed the machine’ - basically to respond to information requests from on high. For a 200 person department it kept her busy full time.
“Don’t make me repeat myself”
- history
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@jon-nyc said in Love the work, hate the job?:
When I was at Credit Suisse I hired an administrator, separate from my secretary (this being the aughts the former was called my ‘COO’ and the latter my ‘admin’.)
Her job, as I described it to her, was to ‘feed the machine’ - For a 200 person department it kept her busy full time.
Finally—The Aqua’s Sister Origin Story
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@George-K said in Love the work, hate the job?:
@Doctor-Phibes said in Love the work, hate the job?:
I've heard medical folks having similar feelings.
I haven't set foot in an operating room in 8 years, 3 months, and I miss it not at all. I can only imagine how bad it is now.
Worse
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Love the work, hate the job?:
Are all jobs like this now? It feels like the tech that was supposed to help us is slowly stifling all the joy.
First of all, sorry this is going on in your neck of the woods. It's tough to be in the middle; not at the start of a career, not right at the end. (But hey, I'm in the same boat, hooray!)
I had a decent job around 2008 or so. Then weird shit started happening. I had a meeting with my designer, and her desk was cleared out. A couple weeks later I had to speak to my marketing person and the same thing happened. Huh. Okay, well, I was thinking about getting a Master's anyway; suppose I might as well get on that. I helped my employers hire my replacement, who along with the rest of the company was laid off after a merger 4 months later.
Awhile later, I worked in a small town that was completely propped up by the industry I moved to work for. My co-workers started out their lives in the day care across the street that was run by the business. The sports teams and pretty much the leagues were funded by them, too.
Our office was on the third floor. One particular morning, I was taking the stairs—I always took the stairs, it had a far better view than the elevators—and there was no second floor. 150 people lost their jobs overnight. Today, the company no longer exists. Some of my former co-workers started making the 2.5-hour commute into the city where their new corporate overlords were located.
Every day in which I'm employed is a day in which I'm amazed. That being said, I'm neck deep with problems related to AI. But I use it frequently in a shitload of capacities. I know exactly what its capabilities are and are not. Not my job, or even my career, but the very concept of what I know how to do is under threat. Not really by the technology, but by what people ignorant of the technology think it's able to do. They honestly think a $15 a month subscription makes them gods. It's perverse.
This is just a natural progression of the path we've been on since I've been alive, maybe since ever. It's like what George Carlin said about cocaine. At first it's all pleasure with no pain; over time, it switches on you.
As an example, when the iPod first came out, it seemed extraordinary. “1,000 songs in my pocket? Hell yes, sign me up!” What the commercials didn’t say was that my friends and I would stop swapping albums like we did with tapes and CDs. That I would I stop going to music stores. That Spotify would go to work putting those stores out of business. That it would then start leveraging AI against musicians to put them out of business, too. That my friends would no longer see the point in seeing each other in person because we have Facebook now. That the rare times we do see each other, we don't go to shows anymore, and they're either on their phones or instead of telling me a funny story, act exasperated that I didn't see their reel made of said story.
In my opinion, in both our work and personal lives, technology has brought us to peak choice and convenience. We have too much of it now. We're addicted, but it's no longer doing us any favors.
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@Doctor-Phibes said
feels like the tech that was supposed to help us is slowly stifling all the joy.
It started in the 80's and is still getting worse in every way. My recent solution is literally to laugh at the ineptitude of tech when it fails, and celebrate when real people efficiently solve things.
So I need to dispose of 5 bags of asbestos (actually 1962 bathroom lino tiles, with brown, less than 1% in lining).
"Easy" said the woman in the recycling centre, go online, you'll get an email with permission for tomorrow.
Four days later in a loop of an old/new email, no working password and no way to rejoin, I call the council and after 1min20 of blah-blah get a "please say
what you want"
Hazardous waste" say I,
Transferred to garden waste automatic payments (which I was told later wasn't actually working today)
Hang up.Redial, wait 1.20, say "help help help", getting through to customer services.
Person hears me laughing at my problem, tells me her woes that the system is going slow etc...
then solves everything in 2 minutes.But tech can be really wonderful, freeing up our time so we can be creative
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Love the work, hate the job?:
Are all jobs like this now? It feels like the tech that was supposed to help us is slowly stifling all the joy.
There seems to be a relentless pursuit of making things faster and faster. To quote shawshank... the world got itself in one big damn hurry. A byproduct of this seems to be more technology and less human input (the joy).
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@Aqua-Letifer said in Love the work, hate the job?:
@Doctor-Phibes said in Love the work, hate the job?:
Are all jobs like this now? It feels like the tech that was supposed to help us is slowly stifling all the joy.
First of all, sorry this is going on in your neck of the woods. It's tough to be in the middle; not at the start of a career, not right at the end. (But hey, I'm in the same boat, hooray!)
I had a decent job around 2008 or so. Then weird shit started happening. I had a meeting with my designer, and her desk was cleared out. A couple weeks later I had to speak to my marketing person and the same thing happened. Huh. Okay, well, I was thinking about getting a Master's anyway; suppose I might as well get on that. I helped my employers hire my replacement, who along with the rest of the company was laid off after a merger 4 months later.
Awhile later, I worked in a small town that was completely propped up by the industry I moved to work for. My co-workers started out their lives in the day care across the street that was run by the business. The sports teams and pretty much the leagues were funded by them, too.
Our office was on the third floor. One particular morning, I was taking the stairs—I always took the stairs, it had a far better view than the elevators—and there was no second floor. 150 people lost their jobs overnight. Today, the company no longer exists. Some of my former co-workers started making the 2.5-hour commute into the city where their new corporate overlords were located.
Every day in which I'm employed is a day in which I'm amazed. That being said, I'm neck deep with problems related to AI. But I use it frequently in a shitload of capacities. I know exactly what its capabilities are and are not. Not my job, or even my career, but the very concept of what I know how to do is under threat. Not really by the technology, but by what people ignorant of the technology think it's able to do. They honestly think a $15 a month subscription makes them gods. It's perverse.
This is just a natural progression of the path we've been on since I've been alive, maybe since ever. It's like what George Carlin said about cocaine. At first it's all pleasure with no pain; over time, it switches on you.
As an example, when the iPod first came out, it seemed extraordinary. “1,000 songs in my pocket? Hell yes, sign me up!” What the commercials didn’t say was that my friends and I would stop swapping albums like we did with tapes and CDs. That I would I stop going to music stores. That Spotify would go to work putting those stores out of business. That it would then start leveraging AI against musicians to put them out of business, too. That my friends would no longer see the point in seeing each other in person because we have Facebook now. That the rare times we do see each other, we don't go to shows anymore, and they're either on their phones or instead of telling me a funny story, act exasperated that I didn't see their reel made of said story.
In my opinion, in both our work and personal lives, technology has brought us to peak choice and convenience. We have too much of it now. We're addicted, but it's no longer doing us any favors.
Good post man. It's almost like the ability to unplug, or go analog, or just slow down and sit without looking at a screen...watch raindrops race on a window. All of it seems to be almost like a new workout routine, but mentally. It's hard. It take discipline now to just sit, and wait, or do something the long way.
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@AndyD said in Love the work, hate the job?:
@Doctor-Phibes said
feels like the tech that was supposed to help us is slowly stifling all the joy.
It started in the 80's and is still getting worse in every way. My recent solution is literally to laugh at the ineptitude of tech when it fails
Obviously I'm online, but there is a reason I never got a twitter or truth social or bluesky or linkedin or other accounts. I try (try...) to keep the "noise" to a minimum. I'm also a "rapid unsubscriber" from email lists, so I only get a few emails per day, which is nice. My tech routine is basically TNCR, CNBC, a very local news website (https://ccxmedia.org/). At night when the kids are in bed I open up my HOA's facebook thread (right now the only active discussion is someone replacing a light fixture they can't find a match for), and the top stories on reddit. It drives my wife nuts sometimes but I also don't reply to texts right away if I'm doing something... it's not a damn walky talky. It's a somewhat futile attempt at keeping things simple-ish.
But tech can be really wonderful, freeing up our time so we can be creative
Ha... tech can be great, too. Last night I threw on the VR goggles after everyone went to sleep and I was fixing the ISS in space with the earth below me. It was marvelous.
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The social aspects of tech are concerning, but there are good sides to that. Our phone bill is a lot lower than it was 25 years ago, and I get to see my family via video link.
What I'm really complaining about is the fact that the great tech revolution has actually made things less efficient, at least for me. The job revolves around a bunch of software 'solutions', whose purpose seems to be other than to make my job easier.
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Well some lady accidentally broke a glass lampshade and asked if anyone had a spare. Luckily some guy just replaced his light fixtures so he had one... how lucky!
Today I'm actually replacing all of our recessed lights (cans with flood bulbs) throughout the house. I'm installing flat LED lights that provide the same lighting but less energy, heat, and replacements. Plus they look sleeker. As a result I'll have dozens of flood bulbs available I'll tell the facebook group about, and I'm sure they'll be gobbled up within an hour. Lots of "freecycling" in this neighborhood...toys, strollers, bikes, etc.
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@89th said in Love the work, hate the job?:
Well some lady accidentally broke a glass lampshade and asked if anyone had a spare. Luckily some guy just replaced his light fixtures so he had one... how lucky!
Today I'm actually replacing all of our recessed lights (cans with flood bulbs) throughout the house. I'm installing flat LED lights that provide the same lighting but less energy, heat, and replacements. Plus they look sleeker. As a result I'll have dozens of flood bulbs available I'll tell the facebook group about, and I'm sure they'll be gobbled up within an hour. Lots of "freecycling" in this neighborhood...toys, strollers, bikes, etc.
Thank you. Good luck with the light replacements. I dread doing to when it comes time. So far so good, two years in. I have some lights that are 20' up.
