Comment by truelson

I think that "Boring work needs meaning, not tension" is a great explanation of bad bosses.

Any work will go a little faster when your boss puts an arbitrary deadline on it and screams "We need this by Friday, we're gonna tell the VP that it's late and it's your fault!!" But it's hugely demoralizing and stressful.

But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.

Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.

Different people are motivated differently. My work is meaningful but it's not enough to feel like I'm having fun every day. Some dopamine is basically critical for me to function. It's always a bit wild when people feel they can generalize their own experience and assume it must be the case for everyone else. This needs more I statements.

> Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off logic! There were hundreds of bug reports. You name it, we had it.

Debugging everything was just wild, especially with the constant tension of "What if it's our fault?" In the end, it wasn't! We got paid for our time, and we were able to close a massive number of tickets. It was one of the best weeks of my professional life.

> Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.

A lot of bad can come from this, especially if you're working on farming these loops from others and that's where you get your kick/money. But if there's no dopamine loop, ideally in addition to having some meaning, then there's just burnout.

> But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.

Ya, but it's easy to get too caught up in meaning. Meaningful meaning is scarce, and it's a bit naive to couple your paycheck to it. Most times work is just work and it needs to keep going as long as you need money. Meaning is fleeting by comparison, even for nurses and people actually doing something useful for society. When you can get it, great, but when you can't, don't go quitting your job impulsively, not in this market.

Personally, I find how I spend my time outside of work has a big impact on how motivated and productive I am at work, regardless of how meaningful my work tasks are. Obviously basic things like sleep, diet, exercise are important, but I have also found that spending too much time on things like video games, streaming shows/movies or social media really leaves me feeling depleted and unfocused during work hours. The more I avoid screens outside of work hours, the more productive I am during work hours when I have to look at a screen.

I disagree because I think boring work needs discipline. The expectation that everything should be exciting or fulfilling is also false. You can't expect meaning in everything, and your response of wading through discomfort is best.

Or perhaps we should all be taoists, and find find joy in the taste of vinegar because it is pure life that we are tasting, by being alive and breathing and choosing to take on a task that is always new, because even if the work hasn't changed we have.

Or maybe just to quote the dwarves in Majesty: Hard work is its own reward.

Or perhaps the omnissiah demands it and it is not ours to question his will, only ours to ensure the machine spirits thrive.

There's a million reasons to get out of bed and do the work. Maybe the most noble is Meditations-esque "we work because we are humans" and the work must be done.

Very well said!