Conditions vs Meaning

I had an epiphany the other day regarding something I wrote almost a year ago in these two posts: Good conditions can totally "make" a job. To the point where they can even override what you actually do on the job.

As I mentioned in the previous post - a couple of weeks ago I basically took a relatively lowly kitchen assistant type job over a software engineering one. Now granted, I'm not exactly super passionate about clawing my way back into the software development profession in the first place - but the feel of the office space at the place I interviewed certainly gave me a bad vibe too.

So the choice was basically this: a BoH kitchen job in a five star resort complex where I know the conditions are going to be awesome, versus a software development job in a place which may very well turn out to be a bit of a codemonkey sweatshop.

I suppose it comes down to what I wrote before about "alienated labour" versus "meaningful work". If you love certain work so much that it aligns with your sense of career fulfillment even when you're doing it for someone else for an external reward - that's great! But when you don't, then it's actually much easier to just step right away from trying to find any real meaning in your work, and truly treat it as just a job.

To some extent I envy people who can do that. The whole problem with me and knowledge work is that I have trouble "whoring out my brain". If an intellectual exercise doesn't truly inspire me, on a personal level, my patience with it goes out the window before it was even in the room. Of course, with jobs which let you keep your head - this isn't an issue at all. The only "challenge" is to put up with a certain level of repetition and boredom, which is in fact relatively easy once you've got some basic meditation techniques down.

Still, it's interesting to think about this from the point of view of "equivalent" jobs too. I never gave this much thought before. But there's definitely a reason why companies like Google are considered great to work for, while your average corporate cubicle codemonkey job is considered to be a burnout-waiting-to-happen. It largely comes down to conditions.

Sure, the content of the work matters too - it's generally more interesting to work on cool cutting-edge technologies than to maintain boring obscure business systems that were designed in the 1990s - but good conditions are what really makes it. And when conditions get past a certain extreme (good or bad) threshold, then even the underlying occupation involved can be overridden by them.