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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I spend a lot of time with 'blue collar' tradespeople, and from everything I can see, they enjoy their jobs more than most 'white collar' people. There's far less decision fatigue, stress about long term decisions made with too little information, and feeling responsibility for things outside of your control. The emphasis is more on bite-sized, straightforward chunks of work that you can finish in a day or two and feel good about it.

I'm sure there are non-technical office jobs that lack the 'white collar' pitfalls I've listed above, but they all seem to involve dealing with far too many people.

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Matthew Crawford has some good thoughts on this subject. He posits that the agency afforded an individual by working with their hands is something that, by and large, has been lost. He also touches on the liberation of working on things where the result is easily measurable and not open for debate. For reference, he quit his white collar career to open a motorcycle repair shop and he offers the following as an archetypal example.

When you're repairing a motorcycle the end result speaks for itself, it either runs properly or it doesn't. This is often in stark contrast to the white collar world where, not only, long term decisions are made with too little information but most things are outside our outside your control.

Agency contrasted with lack of agency.

I don't think many white collar jobs have as much of that stress as you'd think. There are definitely some high stress jobs because of their effects on other people (doctors, lawyers, etc), but there are also some incredibly low stress white collar jobs that nearly put people into catatonic boredom. Getting a job that can be automated, but your boss doesn't realize it can be automated, is a good example. Automating some of these jobs can require as little effort as learning Python for 2-3 months and hacking together some scripts. Blue collar workers likely have a higher attention floor - due to safety reasons around large machines usually. Some white collar jobs can be slept through.

So your advice for low stress white collar work is... find one that you can automate easily so you don't have to do it?

The problem is then you still have to go there and pretend to work - sitting in front of a screen for 8 hours while doing nothing probably sucks the life right out of you.

You certainly wouldn't be the first one to do it!

I mean my job is a little bit like that. I have automated a lot of annoying stuff with VBA (but have yet to start with python, it's on my todo list). However, it's impossible to automate everything - so in the end a worker is necessary (but not the hours that were planned). I would assume it's the same for many white collar jobs. [since I'm paid by the hour the automatization is not really worth it monetarily by itself, but that's another discussion]

Another aspect regarding agency and happiness: I've noticed that I have some (kind of stupid/gameified) sense of accomplishment when I sort my mails, write down the current status of a project or something similarly "boring" but important stuff for ease of mind (similar to doing a todo-list to become organized). Just knowing (and accomplishing) that everything is in order is quite satisfying.

That’s the business proposition for lots of businesses, I don’t see why it’s invalid if an employee can figure it out.

I'd find that incredibly stressful. I need to have some sense of accomplishment and meaning in my work. In fact I'd guess most people in that sort of situation wouldn't be allowed to download Python and automate away their jobs, these roles rarely have any autonomy.

(Too late to edit, but:) Another thought is that while job security in any given job is often lower (a lot of blue collar work is casual or short fixed term contracts), job security in the sense of knowing you'll have a job six months from now is arguably higher. Blue collar work is far more fungible than knowledge work, but that increases job mobility more than it increases replaceability because replacing a good employee is always a pain. The net result is more freedom to move jobs if you find yourself in an unpleasant environment.

This is a good point. For me, the inertia around getting a job in the tech sector is a big impediment to happiness. I am not currently happy in my job but it takes so long to find a good company, filter out the chop shops, find a good cultural fit and then the actual interview process which will take a month just for one company. Multiply that by however many companies it takes to find a fit. All for a risky proposition that you may enjoy working at the new company more. I'm sure it's different in Silicon Valley but I don't and never want to live there.

My brother has a job in the U.S. Virgin Islands doing construction work on resorts. He has a house and cook paid for by his employer and goes fishing on a friends boat or has beach side barbecues in the evenings. He works 9-10 hour days but never brings work home and makes almost as much as I do when you factor in that he doesn't pay for housing or most of his food.

Yeah, as a white-collar I sometimes wish I had a job like that, doing welding or similar. Not that I don't like my job, but doing straightforward physical work like you describe sounds nice.

I think physical is the key point here. Physical activity creates endorphins which make us happier. The current state of office jobs is resulting in chronically sedentary people who don't benefit from this.

Well, it being physical is certainly part of it, but it's not all. There's also the point that most of the time, it's predictable.

For example, you come in and you have to weld up a particular structure. I think one would be able to foresee how the whole thing is going to go down, including details, and how long it's going to take.

Compare that to coming in and having to figure out some bugs on a software system. It's investigative work. You might figure them all out in an hour or you might get stuck in the first one for the whole day. You might end up staring into space wondering for who knows how long what kind of detail you're missing that would explain the behavior you're seeing. You have no idea how your day is going to pan out, and that is kind of fatiguing and/or stressful. There is no certainty in how much progress you'll make.

I am pretty sure that depends on the workplace. There are plenty of stories about Amazon warehouses that sound pretty bad.

>I'm sure there are non-technical office jobs that lack the 'white collar' pitfalls I've listed above,

Sure, but then we have our own issues.

Highly repetitive work, sharing desks, open offices where team leads are in the back of every row to watch our every move, paperwork for this, paperwork for that, gotta print this out and hand write this then have another person scan it in at some point so you can do this, this is on one doc in the case but it is marked wrong so you get to virtual print it back into the case as the appropriate doc and it's not the fault of whoever scanned it originally it's your fault for not noticing they did it wrong but they're gonna get penalized as much as you. When I mess something up it's quite literally like Office Space - I hear from my senior coordinator, I hear from my team lead, I'll get a file referral issued by someone I've never met in another state that my team lead then tells me about again and I have to review it and agree to it with whatever my team lead tells me to because God forbid I get to dispute it and explain my logic, then I get to hear about it again during my monthly meeting with my manager and then for our annual merit review I'll hear about it as a statistic "sorry, you only get a 2 out of 4 here because you had that mistake 9 months ago even though you look at hundreds to thousands of pages of paperwork a day while trying to make quota. You now get even less of a sub-inflation merit based increase for the next fiscal year!"

Don't have a degree like me? Congrats, All but two of the managers and all but one or two of the team leads have been here as little as half as long as you making considerably more than you. Oh, your friend that moved to 3rd shift, they now make at least 15% more than you because of shift differential for doing the same job and oh, they've been here half as long as you and... are a team lead.

Oh, and, we're going to stop funding the pension with a % of your income and instead we're going to add 2 more % of match range to the 401k even though you can't afford to even get the full match now!

Oh, and remember how you used to get all of your vacation June 1st each year (start of the fiscal year), well we know that's how we did it the first 12 years you were here but now for the 13th and beyond you have to earn your time weekly and oh, it still doesn't' roll over. Use it or lose it sucka.

Oh, yes, we haven't given a cost of living increase in a decade but it's ok our CEO took $15.96 million in total compensation in FY 2019, down from $16.67 million in FY 2018 so we're trying to save money! Don't feel so bad about only make 0.2% of what he did, everyone's struggling!

It's cool though, I only have to work here until I die since retirement isn't realistic. If sharing desks doesn't give me a potentially fatal bacteria or virus since we're highly discouraged from calling in sick and we work in an office where people urinate on the floor, defecate on the toilet seats, leave blood on toilet seats/floors and pick & stick boogers on every surface in the bathroom then between the strong smell of mold in the building every time it rains and the jet exhaust coming in the doors on windy days I'll die long before my dotage.

Visiting the OpenAI office 2 years ago ruined my life. Clean offices, everyone was calm and quietly working, no overlords passive aggressively staring at you if you were talking, catered meals twice a day, no smell of mold, no one coughing and sneezing without covering their mouths, was offered water (from a bottle! It wasn't even milky white, I'm not kidding you our tap water is milky white the first several seconds) by the nicest security guard ever. I thought I'd died and gone to job nirvana. I was just visiting someone though for a quick meeting unrelated to OpenAI, alas I had to return to my bottom rung office job where I'm a replaceable serial number and not a human being.

At least I'm not digging graves anymore though, sun poisoning sucked.

Oh wow. What technical background do you need to get a job literally in Hell? :(

I clear international freight through customs, if you've got a pulse and can type have I got a job for you haha. It wasn't so bad when I started, it was terrifying due to the volume of information you have to learn (back then it was 3 weeks in a classroom before you touched a shipment, now it's 2 and then everything you touch is quarantined and reviewed before it gets submitted) but over the years it's gotten more and more blah.

When I started we didn't share desks and up until maybe 4 years ago only like half the office shared desks. Now basically everyone does unless someone quits even though we have like 25-30 new desks they bought planning to add more jobs to our office but then opened 2 satellite offices in other states instead... but those desks aren't in the core area so no managers can peak out of their offices and see them.

We have a lot of issues with our building (water/mold, leaking pipes, blah water, HVAC goes out all the time) but that's not my employer's fault, we lease the building (I believe from IND airport authority) and you know how that goes... landlords generally suck.

As far as dirty people, pick and stickers, people peeing on the floor, people crapping on the toilet seats... well, a lot t of that happens on 2nd and 3rd shifts. You attract a weird group of people that want to work from like 9pm-5:30am.

In the past we had someone that would smear their feces on the wall, you could see their fingerprints in it. We also had someone that kept flushing paper towels down the urinals. It got to the point where it was a very real threat that bathrooms would require management to go with you because we were having so many issues in the men's rooms and the managers were the ones that had to clean it up. A couple of people quit that summer though and it magically stopped (poop on walls, paper towels). That was just one or more disturbed individuals probably.

It's all just a lot of little stuff that adds up and makes you miserable. Sharing desks is super annoying as you come in and your keyboard has crumbs or hair on it, your monitors are moved, every possible setting on your chair is changed and all of your stuff has to fit in one drawer and you have to buy wipes to wipe everything down because you don't know if the person was sick. Then the HVAC being inconsistent means you never know if you should dress warm or dress light because it might be 66F and it might be 74F in the winter and in the summer You're lucky if it's 74F and it might get to 82F for a few weeks in the office (again, not my employer's fault, totally the building owner's fault because they'd rather send someone out for 5 hours to tinker than actually replace the HVAC equipment). Then you've got 2 microwaves and 100ish peopel there during the day. Then you've got 1 soda vending machine and 1 snack machine and the vendor comes once a week but will sometimes vanish for 3-5 weeks without notice and the machine is mostly empty within 3 days and you don't have time to go anywhere with your 30-minute lunch if you need a caffeine fix because we're on airport property and the closest thing is McDonald's which will take about 20 minutes roundtrip if it isn't busy and the two refrigerators aren't big enough for even half of an entire shift to store stuff in.

It just adds up. Then all the constantly changing government stuff... it just adds up.

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