Love the opening. I have always been interested in what people actually do hour-to-hour at their jobs and have always found it frustrating that a) they don't teach you about this in school AT ALL, b) people don't talk about it socially either. Even with social media I don't think we have a very good public repository of information of this kind. It would be a very interesting project to interview a few hundred people about what they actually do at work.
Alain de Botton wrote a book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work where he describes ten different people and their jobs in detail. I enjoyed the book because I like de Botton's writing, but it turns out most jobs sound a little dull.
> people don't talk about it socially either
Yeah totally, and I'd say that's exactly because of "status", which is mentioned:
High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack
Status is the thing people tend to communicate socially, not what they actually do day to day
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I remember a pg line that cuts to the core of this:
It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
How To Do What You Love - https://paulgraham.com/love.html
It seems like a good rule to me ...
sometimes its the power that makes the prestige though.
Power is often just an alternative method of paying people.
Then it’s a job you will struggle to keep your soul doing.
Two things that the article neglects:
1. People grow into jobs and start to like stuff they didn't expect to like when they imagined doing them before.
2. The hour-to-hour things at a job like going to a meeting depends heavily on the people you're with. The same person might hate meetings at company 1, but like them at company 2, just because of other people and the atmosphere. The people-aspect is probably very important and impossible to unpack before you tried the job.
> people don't talk about it socially either
I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them. Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.
The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.
Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
I’ve worked in technology roles for 20 years. If you told me 20 years ago that my career was going to evolve the way it did, I never would have believed it. I’ve worked at 8 companies in that time, had 12 different roles, and managed people for the last 7 years. Every role I’ve had has been wildly different than the one before it. Passion and interest comes and goes, and the biggest factor is usually other people. In the last decade or so, most of my disinterest in my career has stemmed from collective shiny object syndrome from everyone I work with. People who want to adopt and build new things no matter the cost (or need). People trying desperately to pad their resumes, rather than truly improve things. Some of the more successful people I’ve seen in my career have been those that are truly curious, make sound decisions, constantly dig into solving difficult problems, teach others around them effectively, and can manage their own ego (not an exhaustive list by any means). What I do on a daily basis changes with every different team I’ve managed. Every team has been at a different stage, has different dynamics and challenges, needs different input and oversight, and needs more or less hands on leadership. I’ve played the role of a thought leader, salesman, mediator, therapist, project manager, etc. If you’re hands off (no technical contributions), it can be boring. You need to find a balance of being prepared for meetings (meaningful ones, with actual decisions and team driven outcomes), for your team members (1-1’s, performance management, mentorship, venting, etc.), following up on their asks (servant leader), keeping a backlog of work, addressing HR tasks, digging into PRs, planning execution around people possibly disappearing for a week or 12, etc, etc. Think about and answer the questions “What does the next month look like? What about 3? 12?” Hire, coach, fire, and everything that goes into all 3. Oh, and surprise Prod is down - now you’re behind on something, and you’re interrupting the business. Oh, the adult toddlers who are all the smartest person in the room are angry at each other? That was expectedly unexpected. The thing someone asked to work on suddenly isn’t as fun as they thought it would be? Couldn’t have predicted that since the last time it happened. If you’re working people too hard and they can’t self-regulate, you’re burning them out. If you’re not working them hard enough, they’re not growing and they’re bored. But everyone has different thresholds and skills and interests, and you need to figure these all out to make sure you can put them on tasks that keep them engaged, and challenge them, otherwise supplement with other work that will. What does this all look like at the end of the day? Click. Type, type. Click. Talk. Write (yes, on paper). Type type. Click. Talk talk talk.
Nice illustration that it's a real skill to be able to describe this stuff. At the "type, type, click, talk" level of abstraction, every white collar job is exactly the same.