6 ms·

I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscle

I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscles in your body it is not easy to increase its conditioning. IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of. And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.

shkkmo 12y ago
Many of the physical jobs also require a lot of critical thought. There is a reason why accident rates go up significanly the more hours people are forced to work. The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  It is ultimately very satisfying to see your complete roof, new shingles neatly laid across 5000 square feet. Or your plowed field ready for the planter, 80 acres of potential fertility. Even a half-acre neatly mowed. I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Yep, that was definitely the great satisfaction of construction work- seeing what you'd done at the end of the day. It's worth a lot more than many might expect.
  - padobson 12y ago
    Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."
    - tedks 12y ago
      Home Depot existed long before software. It'll exist long after software, too. Remember that we live in a bubble.
      - oldmanjay 12y ago
        There isn't going to be an "after software" with any sort of meaningful human civilization still around.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        Yeah I suspect "after human civilization" will happen sooner than "after software".
        crpatino 12y ago
        How curious! I've always thought it will be the other way around. Your assertion assumes either Doomsday scenario (where humans wipe themselves from the face of Earth, and automated machines keep going for a few more decades until disrepair catches up) or some sort of Singularity that makes humanity itself obsolet (a.k.a. Nerd!Rapture). On the other hand, History teaches that every civilization has their decline and fall. I suspect that software in its current incarnation (electromagnetic encoding of behaviors on a semiconductor based machine) is so tied to our current civilization that it will not survive more than 1 or 2 centuries at the most. But it is easy to imagine future civilizations thousands of years from now that have sophisticated forms of information processing which people alive today would not recognize as "software", even if the principles behind those are the same.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        I thought I was taking an optimistic view? Software is a tool like fire or the wheel. Barring a "Doomsday" (which I don't envision), our descendants won't give it up, even if they use vats of bacteria or lattices of anti-quarks or something even less recognizable as "hardware". One can imagine them giving up humanity and civilization. Eventually, both of those will seem pointless to anyone who isn't an antiquarian weirdo.
  - retrogradeMT 12y ago
    This is why started to build web projects on the side. I have one these white collar jobs and I don't get to create things. I work closely with construction workers and get to see how satisfying it is for them to build something real. Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    > I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.

shkkmo 12y ago

Many of the physical jobs also require a lot of critical thought. There is a reason why accident rates go up significanly the more hours people are forced to work. The difference is not that office jobs require more critical thought, but that physical jobs tend to produce actual value, and tend to produce value that is more easily measured.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
It is ultimately very satisfying to see your complete roof, new shingles neatly laid across 5000 square feet. Or your plowed field ready for the planter, 80 acres of potential fertility. Even a half-acre neatly mowed. I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Yep, that was definitely the great satisfaction of construction work- seeing what you'd done at the end of the day. It's worth a lot more than many might expect.
- padobson 12y ago
  Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."
  - tedks 12y ago
    Home Depot existed long before software. It'll exist long after software, too. Remember that we live in a bubble.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      There isn't going to be an "after software" with any sort of meaningful human civilization still around.
      - jessaustin 12y ago
        Yeah I suspect "after human civilization" will happen sooner than "after software".
        crpatino 12y ago
        How curious! I've always thought it will be the other way around. Your assertion assumes either Doomsday scenario (where humans wipe themselves from the face of Earth, and automated machines keep going for a few more decades until disrepair catches up) or some sort of Singularity that makes humanity itself obsolet (a.k.a. Nerd!Rapture). On the other hand, History teaches that every civilization has their decline and fall. I suspect that software in its current incarnation (electromagnetic encoding of behaviors on a semiconductor based machine) is so tied to our current civilization that it will not survive more than 1 or 2 centuries at the most. But it is easy to imagine future civilizations thousands of years from now that have sophisticated forms of information processing which people alive today would not recognize as "software", even if the principles behind those are the same.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        I thought I was taking an optimistic view? Software is a tool like fire or the wheel. Barring a "Doomsday" (which I don't envision), our descendants won't give it up, even if they use vats of bacteria or lattices of anti-quarks or something even less recognizable as "hardware". One can imagine them giving up humanity and civilization. Eventually, both of those will seem pointless to anyone who isn't an antiquarian weirdo.
- retrogradeMT 12y ago
  This is why started to build web projects on the side. I have one these white collar jobs and I don't get to create things. I work closely with construction workers and get to see how satisfying it is for them to build something real. Now I come home form 8 hours of work and spend 4 hours building things. Pretty bizarre.
- duaneb 12y ago
  > I don't know if it beats a library debugged and turning over 50,000 calls per second, but at least you can look at the other ones, see the whole expanse of what you accomplished laid out under the sun To me, being able to physically view work is orders of magnitude better to my mood than abstract accomplishments.