The Case for Working With Your Hands - NYTimes.com
Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.
Although I like this article, and understand the source of Mr. Crawford's frustration with corporate culture, I have to take some exception with the categorization of all "knowledge work" as less honest than trade work. The quote above, for example, could just as easily apply to software as motorcycles.
I've spent the last several weeks at work completely refactoring a major aspect of our application because we had finally reached the end of the long blind alley the existing design lead us to follow (it lasted us 7 years, so it was more like a blind turnpike). As I worked my way back out onto the main road and found the right direction to take, I broke and re-fixed several ancillary features, wandered off path myself a few times, and spent a lot of time pondering the variables involved and how they interact.
The resulting design is proving to be more malleable and simpler to test, and as a result of both of those aspects it is vastly easier to maintain. That's a big win for us, since even though I didn't add any customer-visible features to it in this release, by making the code easier to modify I was able to find and fix a major race condition. The redesign also lays the groundwork for future planned enhancements.
That's all by way of saying that working with your hands is honorable, but so can be working with your mind. Just because companies like the abstracting service described in the article do a half-assed job of their work, that doesn't automatically mean all companies do.
4 comments:
I don't recall if Crawford mentioned what his undergraduate degree was in, but he did say that his PhD was in political philosophy. As an English major, Crawford's article and description of his mind-numbing jobs really resonated with me.
I think that degrees in hard sciences or something like computer software or programming are in a different category. In your work (correct me if I'm wrong..), you have concrete problems to solve and definite skills (cognitive and technical) to get there. Similar to a trade like automotive repair. And by concrete, I don't mean simple, but something for which there is a definite need...rather than something more vague, like "improving brand image." Jobs I have had are more about spin...and I can relate to the feeling of compromising intellectual and ethical standards.
It's worth taking the time to read the whole article. I hope gets all the attention it deserves and starts a larger discussion.
Brand expert John Tantillo published a post on his marketing blog a few months ago about the importance of focusing on one's personal brand in a weakened market. In it, he also republished a "30-second personal brand inventory." Not everyone's personal brand is going to mesh with a desk job... and not everyone is meant to work in a trade profession.
@elo, I think you touched on something with the type of training students in different majors receive. The "rush" you get when problem-solving can be as addictive as the need to create something new, whether physical or intangible.
I wonder if the problem is a personality issue (some people might need less re-enforcement through solving "concrete" problems) or if jobs that aren't "real" are truly less fulfilling? I do agree that no everyone is cut out for every job -- there's plenty of empirical evidence of it, and if it were otherwise the pay scales for different jobs would be closer to the same than they are.
I've certainly worked at places where, even with concrete goals, the product of my work seemed pointless. It's easy to say the answer is moving on to something more rewarding, but I know that's not always practical.
I do hope people read the whole article. I found it very thought provoking.
Engineering, including software, is a trade. Computers are tangible machines. I can see the result of a program immediately on the screen. It's not quite the same as turning a wrench, but I spend a lot of time thinking about it (and thinking about thinking about it). And I turn wrenches on weekends.
At my company we have a couple of junior mechanical engineers only a year or two out of college. They do real work, solve real problems, see their results, and management takes them seriously. Maybe we just hire good people.
I think the real difference is between working for a big corporation (or simply working for someone else) and working for yourself. I am a tax accountant working in my own business and largely on my own. What I do or do not do is the difference between making a living or not.
I get satisfaction from a client giving me their papers, normally when I make a home visit,and sorting out their affairs and giving them an end product - a complete tax return. I save my clients headaches over tax issues and have their gratitude, much as Mr. Crawford has fixing peoples bikes.
The issue is really about having some real influence over one's own destiny, making one's own decisions and deciding how to take the business forward. That is where we get the satisfaction.
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