Does work have value beyond meeting financial needs?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Does work have value beyond meeting financial needs?

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Liquid Communism posted:

We are so far from post-scarcity that it is shockingly naive to even consider the concept as likely to develop any time soon. We can't even manage to reliably feed and house the entire population of any first world country you care to name. I suppose it might look like-post scarcity if you believe that the perspective of a middle-class American in a good city working a job that pays well is a universal experience shared by everyone.

I don't think we need to know pain at all, so much as there being a deep-seated human need to not have the things we do be futile. There's a reason craftsmen take pride in and find accomplishment in creating. The same reason I am, to give an example, a lot more enthusiastic about and proud of the shelves I built in my basement last weekend than absolutely anything I did in the 200+ hours I spent at work this month, being what amounts to a remote pair of hands. A major problem in a lot of modern work is that much of it is futile at the end of the day. There's no appreciable progress to look at and feel as if your work has mattered, just another slog tomorrow to seem busy (in the white collar world) or keep up production quotas (for the blue collar side).

Given assurance that their basic needs would be taken care of, people would opt to do what they find to be meaningful and constructive. For some, this is creative arts. For others, it is service. For many of them the worthwhile thing about work is that showing off something they've built gets notice and reactions from others, and this is the value that they're really after.

This is exactly right in my view. I myself am experiencing this right now. I get paid pretty good money writing documentation for a software company, and it's tedious as hell and I know flat out that most of our users don't bother reading it. I hate it. All of my coworkers hate it. I have programming experience and coded up some tools to automate some of the more tedious documentation we produce. What shocked me was that, even though I was working, I was having fun doing it and I actually lost track of time programming these utilities. And I still get a little thrill every time I use one of them or a coworker mentions using it. As a result, I talked to HR at my company and they are paying for me to finish my CS major so I can shift to software development full time. I feel happy to be working for the first time in my life, and I've been working since I was 14. There is a lot of importance in your work being tangible and in people appreciating it.

Our world has a huge loving problem with fake makework paper jobs that nobody takes any pride in. And people do them because they pay better than mcdonald's but all these paper pushers are loving miserable and then they just take it out on the income class below them.

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The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

Midnight Moth posted:

I do software documentation (technical specs, feature requests, etc) and I don't think that work is bullshit busy work at all. Whenever a conflict comes up with what the software was supposed to do or how it was built you can bet we're digging up the documentation for it. There's also potentially a lot of money on the line on those documents because it shows what we agreed to build and support.

Can't say I really envy any of the developers I work with.

To clarify, I don't work on the technical specs, feature requests, etc here. Our developers are responsible for that. I produce the actual documentation our customers' system administrators use to configure and maintain the software. Like the big fat book that used to come with boxed copies of Windows 95, but 500x more content.

The documentation absolutely serves a vital purpose in the abstract sense, but that purpose is never fulfilled in real life. What I mean is that many of our customers make it very clear that they won't bother to read the documentation and will just call our technical support to explain everything to them. We provide a really robust online documentation portal with a good search feature, so hypothetically very few questions are unanswered. Nevertheless, our technical support staff are constantly inundated with questions whose answers can be found by searching the documentation for that question.

It can feel really pointless when you see that day in and day out. Obviously our tech support guys just refer to the documents I write, but they also know our code well enough that they wouldn't be helpless without my documents. As a result, I feel way more fulfilled by developing the software, because I get to see people use it and hear about how it improved something in their work or life. I go through all the same crunchtimes and such as our developers do, but I come out feeling way less accomplished at the end.

But then again, our difference of opinion on this just demonstrates how there's not really an objective way to quantify the meaning or value of work. A similar type of work is able to fulfill you because how your work is used and valuated by others gives it meaning. A similar type of work on my part is used and valuated differently by others and drains it of meaning. Ultimately I think this points out that the only "value" of work for an individual beyond the compensation they get for it is whether they themselves feel as though they are accomplishing something by doing it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 20:46

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Does work have value beyond meeting financial needs?