People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues (opens in new tab)

(medicalxpress.com)

65 pointsNPV_Computers7y ago28 comments

28 comments

My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology:

If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues.

Dunno. Just musing.

pdpi7y ago

It's only a tautology if "creating work" is all about delegating part of my own work, and there's limited amounts of interesting, engaging work to go around.

However, if I am in a managerial position, my own work can be quite different from my reports'. What this article is saying is that, if my work as a manager is boring and not very engaging, I'll give my engineers boring, unengaging work too, irrespectively of how interesting their work could be.

Humdeee7y ago

> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting and unknown ending in a flop.

mfoy_7y ago

Thinking about it, same here. If there's some tedious but critical 10-min sysops task, I'll usually just do it rather than try to pawn it off on a junior coworker. But if we want to do something exciting, such as set up a new piece of flashy tech for evaluation, that will usually fall to a junior resource to 1) help them grow and learn and 2) because if they fail spectacularly there was nothing important riding on it.

coldtea7y ago

>If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

This assumes the work available for those with boring jobs to dispense to others is of the same kind those with boring jobs do. There's absolutely no reason that this should be the case.

There could be tons of "interesting work available" at a job people with boring jobs work, just not in their specialty. And they can still create boring tasks for others, even if those others work in departments that allow for interesting work available.

Second, some people like boring tasks and hate change, excitement, anything unpredictable, etc. So it's not even a rule that "nobody is going to do the boring work first".

darkstar9997y ago

I think I'd need more concrete examples to understand this study. What kind of dull work? What dull work was created and what could have changed to make it better?

If the available work is to dig a hole or file papers into a cabinet, how can you possibly make that better?

maccio927y ago

What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.

noitsnot7y ago

"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker said.

kbutler7y ago

That begs the question - it assumes that the work in the world needs innovative, agile, and high-performing employees, when maybe the world needs a bunch of people that will dig in and do the stuff that needs to be done.

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bg47y ago

More often than not, it's cleaning up someone else's mess.

devonkim7y ago

Dull, tedious, repetitive work is also typically work that is subject to high error rates due to priming effects, normalization of non-errors / errors, and other psychological factors. A good example is TSA’s effectiveness at finding guns

JoeDaDude7y ago

Isn't the dull, repetitive work the kind that AI and automation will liberate us from?

icebraining7y ago

That viewpoint just sounds like martyr complex to me. Yes, boring stuff exists and must get done, but that doesn't mean we can't strive to reduce it, and hopefully make it a small part of our lives and even our jobs.

closeparen7y ago

Liking what you do for at least half of your waking hours is a pretty significant input to happiness. You may as well ask why people try to find jobs that pay them well, or partners whose company they enjoy.

Software engineers with the right personality have a better chance of genuinely enjoying our work than the average person, so it’s on our minds. Coding isn’t something you automatically have to drag yourself through kicking and screaming like some other jobs.

AnIdiotOnTheNet7y ago

And as part of building the life you want, you're going to have to do things you don't like a lot of the time. Sacrifice is almost always necessary to achieve one's goals, that's just part of how the universe works.

I guess what I'm saying is that, just because you don't like doing it doesn't mean it isn't contributing to your satisfaction with life in the aggregate.

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analog317y ago

Conversely, why does every job have to be dull and repetitive? Somebody has to do the brilliant stuff too. You'd think that you could spread out the brilliant stuff so that every worker gets a little bit of it, but that doesn't seem to happen. Instead, the fun work ends up concentrating itself among a tiny handful of workers.

carlmr7y ago

>"It seems that people have a natural view that putting together a group of highly repetitive and similar tasks into a job is the most efficient way to organise work, but previous research suggests this view is rarely correct," Professor Parker said.

Spot on. Stop ignoring human psychology. There is a big importance in specialization and separation of tasks. We know that since the industrial revolution. But especially in knowledge jobs boredom can lead to less than stellar quality, which again brings down efficiency.

Humans are animals that evolved in a highly complex environment. To keep people engaged their task should be varied and contain some newness every now and then.

Specialization has driven us into these niches where most people don't perform as well as they could. Jack of all trades master of none is the usual adage. I see the people in software who know something about the OS, something about drivers, something about application software, something about web design, usually designing the best software. They are masters of a lot of categories, because they are jacks of all trades. Because a lot of knowledge in one category leads you to be better in another category.

In management speak synergy.

Each task doesn't even have to be particularly exciting. But let people choose from your boring tasks. Maybe something you find boring they find exciting. And even if they do, don't say they have to do this forever. Maybe they find it exciting because they didn't do it before.

kaibee7y ago

Alternative Title: Most jobs, even newly created jobs, aren't exciting.

smileypete7y ago

The website in the OP made me think of 'Mr Waturi' in the film 'Joe vs The Volcano' :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUB3tQs80

(Can be good film to watch after a shit day at the office...)

crawfordcomeaux7y ago

Is this the contrapositive:

People who don't practice being fun and having fun at work won't make work that's fun.

Sounds reasonable.

proc07y ago

Explains exactly why I think managers who don't code have no business telling a capable coder what to do. So many software companies underestimate the amount of creativity that is needed for a successful programmer, and they insist on structuring their hierarchy with the top people not knowing how to code but have learned how to navigate the hierarchical structure. This obviously leads to work flowing down from those who don't have the knowledge to create what it is that they are commanding others to do. tl;dr: if you can't code you shouldn't be in a leadership position (in a software company) that affects the project directly. Who would that person be leading? Like a head chef that doesn't know how to cook.

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