Most hated jobs: further comments

[Walter Mitty]

I've been mulling over our recent discussion, and I realize that I have an ambivalent attitude towards "control".  I have a generally negative attitude towards managers that I would call "control freaks", and who engage in micromanagement, and extreme status games:  "Make coffee for me or your fired".

Some of the worst offenders are not clueless PHBs, but rather former techies who earned their stripes by brilliant analysis of aberrant systems, whether hardware systems, or software systems or business systems, and who brought them under control using sheer will power and intellectual strength.  They get promoted into management, and the result is a disaster.

That's one of the reasons I opted out of the management track for myself. 

At the same time, the people who want to organize a software project like a counterculture movement make me look for the exit.  You know the kind,  "let's all sit down and sing Kumbaya until we are comfortable with each other and suddenly all the hard decisions will become easy ones."  Man, I'd rather deal with a top-down IBM style hierarchy.  (That's your fathers' IBM for you young 'uns). 

But when you talk about gaining more control over your own life,  that's a completely different topic.  It's not "control" like management cotntrol.  And it's not "control" like engineering control.  If I get into life control topics,  I'm going to start saying stupid things again.  I don't need to do that.

[The Gorn]

At that time, the counterculture was taking the children of the middle class and trying to make them more like Andean villagers.  Meanwhile I was at work in the Peace Corps, trying to make Andean villagers more like middle class Americans.  That's a gross oversimplification, but it should be good enough to get you in touch with the irony of the situation. 

To this day, when I see some aging former hippie raising llamas in Vermont, the emotions I feel are ones I am not even going to try to verbalize.

Lol. I get your point -

"This is progress."

"It IS?"

"Yes, it is. I think."

[The Gorn]

That's one of the reasons I opted out of the management track for myself. 

From your narrative it's apparent that good management is a skill unto itself, which I agree with.

Yes, technocrats who are promoted into management without much grooming are usually not a happy recipe for project success. We techies talk about wanting management "that knows what we do" but we really don't in many cases if we just knew how it would turn out.

[choppedwood]

My attitude towards the counterculture has been profoundly ambivalent for a long time now, going back to at least 1968.  At that time, the counterculture was taking the children of the middle class and trying to make them more like Andean villagers.  Meanwhile I was at work in the Peace Corps, trying to make Andean villagers more like middle class Americans.

I knew a guy who swore that if we ALL, and I mean everyone, just followed our bliss the world would be a better place.  I asked him something to the effect of "so whose bliss is it to clean the toilets?" 

[Walter Mitty]

I knew a guy who swore that if we ALL, and I mean everyone, just followed our bliss the world would be a better place.  I asked him something to the effect of "so whose bliss is it to clean the toilets?"

Back in the mid 1970s, I met a guy  who was cleaning the toilets at DEC.  He was working for the company that did facility maintenance.  It turn out he was a university graduate in Colombia, but this was the best job he could get in the US. 

He was enrolled in the local community college, and taking a course in programming.  It was all FORTRAN and punched cards.  Batch jobs with one day turn around time.  I was managing a training machine at the time, so I gave him an account on that machine, and trained him how to enter and debug  FORTRAN programs interactively.  After that, he did all his assignments on my machine first,  then  prepared the punched cards just once at the school.

Within a year's time, he had gotten a job as a SW specialist for DEC, making maybe five times what he had been making before.  I didn't do any of his work form him.  He did it all.  The only thing I did was open a door for him that everybody else was slamming in his face.

[David Randolph]

I don't need control. I need my needs to be considered in the scope of things. Companies that operate on a "win - win" basis, trying to meet the needs of their employees so that the needs of the customers are taken care of , generally are much better places to work. One reason that I work for myself is that I have worked for people who did not consider my needs...

It is surprising how simple my actual "needs" are compared to all my wants. But I still have to clean the toilets as I live by my self.

Here is an interesting idea by a person in the "servant outreach" movement on cleaning toilets
http://www.stevesjogren.com/index.php/2010/05/29/cleaning-toilets/

[The Gorn]

I don't need control. I need my needs to be considered in the scope of things. Companies that operate on a "win - win" basis, trying to meet the needs of their employees so that the needs of the customers are taken care of , generally are much better places to work. One reason that I work for myself is that I have worked for people who did not consider my needs...

A few years ago I would have written something like this. Today here's how I see it.

My challenge is to see that my needs are met within the context of the situations that I am dealing with.

An employer's priority is on making a profit to stay in business. They really aren't looking for anyone's interests except those of the shareholders and owners.

It is true that when the employer or client is reasonable and "kind" the entire relationship tends to go well from my viewpoint. However,  all that is necessary for me to stay involved is a good outcome for me.

So I am looking for ways to satisfy the self interest of the prospect. If they know what's good for them in terms of an outcome that they find desirable, they will not abuse me. But it can happen.

"Servant outreach" - years ago I heard about Vineyard churches in my area that would go to bars and offer to clean out toilets. Personally, I think servant outreach is a stupid idea and the church would be far better advised to stick with helping the hurting rather than giving away janitorial services. But, hey, that's just me. 

[I D Shukhov]

I don't need control. I need my needs to be considered in the scope of things. Companies that operate on a "win - win" basis, trying to meet the needs of their employees so that the needs of the customers are taken care of , generally are much better places to work. One reason that I work for myself is that I have worked for people who did not consider my needs...

This is why I'd like to work in a worker cooperative.  Of course a company of any sort has to fulfill a customer's needs, but life is way too short to work in a place which is organized to  meet the need of managers to keep their jobs.

[unix]

I was in a computer science department and when I left and joined IT in the 90's, I could not believe how different it was.  I was actually profoundly shocked due to naivete.  It was the exactly opposite of "creative or original" work. There was no "computer" and no "science".  I could cut it skills-wise, but could not deal with stupid meetings or filling out useless paperwork.   There was maybe 10% work and 90% utter BS as I thought at the time. I was shocked they didn't see my IT genius. 

So my downfall in IT began the minute I entered the field, it just took me 15 years to realize it.

Money is a highly relative concept. I got spoiled in the late 90's and considered anything less than 60/hour insulting. So when the dot-com bubble crashed and I went without work for 2 years (mostly due to isolating myself in a rural area) and then found a gig making almost 20/hour.... *that* was the sweetest coin I ever made. Seriously. Because it entailed a 10/hour raise from where I was, doubling the rate.  You go thirsty in a desert, then will drink from a puddle and think it's Perrier.

[Walter Mitty]

In the early 1970s, I got bored with academic work in a CS research environment, and went and joined a little job-shop that was cobbling together applications to run under DEC timesharing.  What a culture shock!

The technology was so primitive compared to what I'd been exposed to that I could scarcely understand it.  Applications were built that treated disk files like they were big magnetic tapes.   When I built a little engine that did direct access to disk, and location via hashing,  they looked at me like I was from another planet. 

But I did learn a lot about client relationships, about working under stress, about market directed endeavors, and that kind of thing.  Maybe more than I bargained for.  At the time, I was glad for the change.  After forty years,  I kinda wish I'd stayed in academe.