Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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Who's saying that lady's job is bullshit just because it can be automated? There is real value in paying some up front cost in detection/monitoring/validation of data to prevent mistakes. Just because software engineers would consider her job "beneath" them because they could do it faster or better does not make it not worth doing.

There are mega-efficient factory farms in Nebraska that are immensely productive per-human involved, but that doesn't mean what hobby farmers in Connecticut or subsistence farmers in Africa are doing is bullshit.

I think "bullshit jobs" are less of a thing than people believe. It's just that people devalue assembly-line or cog-in-machine work, even when they're the ones doing it - especially in the US where we grow up wanting to be a unique success story like an entertainment celebrity or rich entrepreneur and so that kind of work is antithetical to our idea of a successful person. Fact of the matter is, machines needs cogs, and we don't have an infinite capacity to replace human cogs with automated ones.

Does she find that task enjoyable and fulfilling? If not, it's bullshit.

And if bet money on it NOT being enjoyable and fulfilling. Humans almost universally hate being cogs doing the same repetitive trivial action over and over.

Do janitors find their job enjoyable and fulfilling? Probably not. Their job is still important for the functioning of society, so I wouldn't call it bullshit.

I was a janitor for a long time in my younger years, and I actually did find it enjoyable and fulfilling. Just sayin'.

What did you enjoy about it? Curious!

I enjoyed that what I did made a real impact on people, I enjoyed the sense of satisfaction from making a space nice again, and I enjoyed that it wasn't intellectually demanding, which gave me plenty of time every workday to think about hard programming problems.

There's a real sense of accomplishment in it, and it's nice that people can immediately see and enjoy the results of your hard work. There's also something about doing manual labor that is satisfying.

And I enjoyed being "invisible" around people who used the spaces I cleaned. You usually don't exist, so people tend to continue to speak to each other as if nobody else is listening. I learned a lot about people that way.

The 'probably not' bit of your reasoning is self serving.

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