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Aristotle, Dilbert And The Working Life
Decisions about work may be the biggest ones many of us ever make, And though career decisions are perhaps the biggest ones we face, we often make them unthinkingly, ignoring or perhaps unaware of the enormous consequences for our happiness, our peace of mind, the meaningfulness of our lives.
Our paradoxical culture -- particularly the tech part -- both celebrates work and continually strives to eliminate it. While this employers value efficiency above all other work traits, workers seek creativity -- interesting jobs that are lucrative and satisfying, that offer fulfullment and identify.
So Joanne B. Ciulla's very fine book The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, tackles a timely and nearly universal conundrum: Ciulla argues that many people have moved beyond a simple work ethic to let work engulf them and deprive them of a lot of the good things in life. It's dangerous, she says, that so many contemporary workers depend on their jobs as the primary wellsprings of individual self-esteem, when all the job asks of them is more work with less security.
This profound emphasis on work, says Ciulla, who has taught at Harvard and Oxford and is now an ethicist at the University of Richmond, is dangerous.
Companies have no qualms laying off, downsizing or exploiting thousands of workers but, contrary to popular belief, have not generally cut their management ranks. While companies savagely root out low and mid-level workers in order to stay lean and mean, executive salaries have shot through the roof. Ciulla cites research showing that U.S. managerial staffs have grown without interruption despite the loss of employment for millions of workers. What drives many workers to be more productive, Ciulla argues, isn't loyalty, a fierce work ethos or new tools of the booming hi-tech economy, but fear. They know they are vulnerable.
Commitment, loyalty and trust as bonds between employers and employees have nearly vanished. General cynicism about work permeates culture -- that's why "Dilbert" appears in 1,700 newspapers in 51 countries. The strip makes its way onto bulletin boards and refrigerator doors around the country; it's the voice and spirit of contemporary tech and office workers.
The reality is less amusing. Many workers feel exploited by their employers, writes Ciulla -- overworked, subject to dismissal or reductions, forced to work for idiots who are overpaid and perform too little. They face fundamental new issues about work and life. If the old social contracts of corporate America have been obliterated by the competitive demands of the new economy, where does that leave workers like Ciulla's character, identified only as Mary, whose company forces her to choose between putting in more time at work with no guarantee of reward, or working nine-to-five and having time to spend on things like her children and her church. "To do the latter may mean risking her job. More and more people find themselves in this bind," says Ciulla. And Mary's lucky she's not working for a Net start-up. "Such choices require reflection on what is important and how one wants to live his or her life."
In the tech world, as in others, these choices prove particularly tricky. Industries offer lots of jobs, many high-paying, so people tend to plunge into high-intensity employment before they even have a chance to consider life's other dimensions or the alternatives they might want to explore. Once employed, workers are tethered as never before to brutally competitive work environments and all sorts of techno-devices which keep them bound to their desks or jobs much of the time. Ciulla says many will come to regret not having considered their work choices more deliberately or seriously.
But they may not have had much time. Technology links people to their jobs more than was possible before. People are expected to remain constantly available via e-mail, cellphone and wireless gadgetry. The lines between work and "other things" people like Mary want to do grows blurrier over time, which means the consequences of choosing work poorly get bigger.
The Working Life looks at workplace innovations like flex time programs, which Ciulla calls the most radical management innovations of the century. Most management initiatives have been geared towards helping people fit their lives into work. Flextime promises some opportunity to shape work around one's life, if that's what workers want to do -- some opportunity.
The machines that Aristotle fantasized about have become the commonplace tools of everyday life in industrial society, Ciulla points out. Among other changes, technology means that work no longer involves being at a particular place at a regular time. Theoretically, we can be where we choose, although few companies trust their workers to do that.
Companies have betrayed their workers by making efficiency their paramount concerns. Workers can alter that reality by getting pickier about the the work they do and valuing non-work related activities more highly. We can, if we wish, choose to consume less and be less dependent on salaries. We can choose work that gives us mobility and independence. We can pursue other interests as intensely as we pursue job success.
Ciulla points out that this involves asking fundamental questions:
Do we know what kind of life we want? Are we willing to give up something for it? Is the life we have now worth what we are sacrificing for it?
Meaningful work is rare, says Ciulla, but it's there for people who really want to find it. A work-dominated life is perfectly acceptable, she says, if it satisfies the worker. But if it doesn't, "Then we should start thinking of how to fit work into our lives instead of fitting our lives into our work."
I dunno - I just got an email that is offering me $50,000 / week working part time at home. Hey, I can't wait to get started!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Nonsense. People work longer hours due to stupidity not technology. They need to work longer because they're not doing anything useful anymore - they're sitting in meetings discussing mission statements or ISO9000 compliance tests or a million other worthless activities. Dilbert is entirely accurate. The more extreme useless people use technology to generate anti-work more efficiently than ever before, but the root cause is addiction to ritual, not technology (www.reciprocality.org). In fact it's only technology that prevents the whole edifice from disintegrating and snapping people out of their stupors through economic collapse and eventual starvation. Left to their own devices the majority of humnity will slump into an eternal ritual where every moment of their lives is entirely predictable from the greetings that their co-workers give as they walk into the office to the format, outcomes and even dialog of their favorite shows. As it is, the economic surplus provided by increasing mechanisation nicely matches the increasing stupidity and worthlessness of humanity. We're already living in a post-scarcity world (in the west at least), the wheels would keep turning just fine if only 10% of the population worked. People don't want more leisure time though, they want to keep their minds in a state of minimum utilization, so everyone spends more time at work performing pointless rituals and spends the rest of their lives watching predicatable television. Anything unpredictable must be destoyed - such as children who don't follow the rules - that's OK though, there are drugs to cure that (ritalin).
And here endeth the rant, for today anyway.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I've always thought that most so-called knowledge workers have about 4 or 5 hours of good concentration in them each day. The rest is spent farting about, not out of laziness, but because you need the social stimulation and distraction for your own well-being and to let your unconscious mind process stuff.
:-)
If you read books on software engineering (Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, Death March Projects) you'll see that the more people work, the less benefit to the company in terms of output there is - more than 1 60 hour week in a row, and you'll be LESS productive than you used to be with 40.
So most overtime, or early arrival and late departure, is in fact symbolic: it acheives nothing for the company. It only proves the devotion of the worker to the company. Worker devotion is not a tradable asset
Everybody recognises this, but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. (Just as managers will sagely nod when someone says "adding more programmers will make a late project later", and then go ahead and put more on anyway.)
The best thing that the young and nerdy audience of Slashdot could do is excercise its collective discretion not to work stupid hours for little benefit. (See http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/13813.html for another "High tech labour is scarce" story). Refuse to worship at the altar of the company: take a rational attitude to your life. Unless it's enormous fun, in which case knock yourself out.
I hate this sort of drivel about how things are 'especially difficult' for tech workers. Bull SH*T! Try spending 10-15 years in almost any NON technical career (except, perhaps, for lawyers and psychologists) to get up to 40 or 50 thou a year, and then try to stomach the sniveling of the 'poor techie' who gets 40-50 grand on his first, entry-level position!
I'm on the Hi-Tek Gravy Train and I'm NOT COMPLAINING! My job is blast compared to pretty much anything else I've done.
Try working at McJob for 7 or 8 bux an hour, with a trashy boss who fumes and threatens whenever you're 5 minutes late. There's plenty of folks who, for a variety of reasons, HAVE to rely on those jobs to survive, and have to say 'yes sir' to all the crap that gets thrown about them.
Nobody writes books or articles about THEM because they're not a good market. They don't make enough to buy books in the first place.
We 'poor techies' are a great market; trumpet one of our pet concerns on the cover of a hastily-thrown-together book or article and maybe now you'll cash in! Them techies got money and them techies buy books!
**>>BELCH
The problem with managers is not the fact that they don't hack the kernel, or can't even log into the network, but it's the fact that because they have NO idea what the people they're managing do, they make stupid management decisions.
:)
They give the upper management promises that are near impossible to keep, they take away budgets that are definately needed, they move people to where they don't belong (like moving your FreeBSD web site admin to administrating the NT servers, or taking a rookie VisualBasic programmer and trying to make him configure a Cisco router).. and because of things like that, the workplace becomes unorganized, hecktic, and even hellish.
Of course the REAL problem is not so much that the middle managers don't know what they're dealing with, but that they don't listen to their employees who are trying to politely(at least one would hope) show them what they're doing wrong.
They're so concerned about their advancement, and their newfound power, that they don't care if they're screwing over employees, or even the company itself... and those types of managers are bad.
In any case, if I just re-stated what Katz said, ignore me. I don't like reading Katz articles, just the comments.
The reason Dilbert is so funny is because it's true. I'd rather read that then a boring tome of how work sucks.
Yes, it's true. I worked at Microsoft for 2 years and left recently. And guess what? They don't put up with this Dilbertesque Crap. Why? Because the damn place was founded by a PROGRAMMER. I have met BillG and he convinced me that he is a programmer (please put your snickers aside. The MBAs who work at Microsoft work for a programmer, and everyone in my large group (500+ people) doesn't ever have to report to an MBA. Programmers rule the place. It's got it's downside too, but it is like paradise in many ways.
The only way you can advance at Microsoft (at least in my groups) is that if your team agrees you would be a good leader. Nepotism is shot down pretty fast. So, look at www.microsoft.com/jobs. Go up for an interview. I've heard things are changing, and I left because of the current DOJ problems to go to a startup, but it does have a nonbullshit feel to the place. It values results and results only. --BlueRain
No,
People invent things like Dilbert to caricature the following
I write database driven websites for a living, including e-commerce.
My boss does not know how to write website or database code.
My boss does not understand what the difference between http and https is and which should be used where.
My boss does not know what sorts of functions are done on the website side of things and what sort of things are done by the database
My boss does not understand what a database is for.
My boss has heard of Internet Explorer and Netscape but is incapable of installing them without my help.
My boss believes that the password field in a HTML form prevents anyone from intercepting your password.
My boss believes that if they change the password on the intranet administration website that the database developers will no longer be able to access and change their information without permission.
My boss does not realise that you must be connected to the internet to access a website.
My boss gets confused when his laptop stops working after a few hours, especially as I can fix it by plugging it in.
My boss believes that his first name is a great password for the company systems, it helps him to remember it (as does the post it note on his monitor).
My boss provides the client with an accurate estimate of how long a project will take and how much it will cost *without* consulting me - afterall my boss must know better than me - otherwise he wouldn't be my boss.
Now do you see why I have little confidence in my boss. The only reason that any money is made is because my boss multiplies the number of paragraphs in the specification by ten and quotes for that many hours, shows it to me for about ten seconds and if I don't yelp sends it to the client, afterall we must be a forward looking proactively leveraged organisation.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I've just entered the employment market in May and I'm already on my second job. Granted I like this one and will stick with it for a while, but I can't see myself working for just one company in my life. Used to be that companies took care of their employees, now it's part of their bottom line to screw them over (working more hours for less) and try and get them paid less with less benefits. Enter the independent contractors who work for less and don't need benefits, the modern mercenaries.
Instead of caring for our workforce, we make them compete against each other. No longer are we a goal-oriented work structure, everyone has their own agenda, fighting back and forth to gain points with the pointy-haired ones who operate on a separate plane of existence from the very real one that dominates the real office.
It seems like there are more people who focus of cohesing (is that a word?) teamwork than actually do any work. Take for example this guy I work with. He is a fantastic teacher, but not the best manager. He works too hard at managing, setting too many rules, too many requirements of his fellow teachers. When we try too hard, no one succeeds.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.