People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues

People with boring jobs tend to design dull jobs for their colleagues(medicalxpress.com)

65 points by NPV_Computers 7 years ago | 28 comments

My knee-jerk reaction is that this is sort-of a tautology:

If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire! Where there is a surplus of interesting work, people with interesting jobs will design interesting jobs for their colleagues.

Dunno. Just musing.

pdpi 7 years ago | |

It's only a tautology if "creating work" is all about delegating part of my own work, and there's limited amounts of interesting, engaging work to go around.

However, if I am in a managerial position, my own work can be quite different from my reports'. What this article is saying is that, if my work as a manager is boring and not very engaging, I'll give my engineers boring, unengaging work too, irrespectively of how interesting their work could be.

Humdeee 7 years ago | |

> Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

I don't know about this... we usually give the exciting stuff to the more junior or co-op/intern hires. The boring work has usually been the most important work from my experience. There is an inherent risk with the exciting and unknown ending in a flop.

mfoy_ 7 years ago | | |

Thinking about it, same here. If there's some tedious but critical 10-min sysops task, I'll usually just do it rather than try to pawn it off on a junior coworker. But if we want to do something exciting, such as set up a new piece of flashy tech for evaluation, that will usually fall to a junior resource to 1) help them grow and learn and 2) because if they fail spectacularly there was nothing important riding on it.

coldtea 7 years ago | |

>If there was interesting work available at their job, the people with boring jobs would not have boring jobs. Nobody is going to do the boring work first and leave the interesting stuff sitting around just waiting for a new hire!

This assumes the work available for those with boring jobs to dispense to others is of the same kind those with boring jobs do. There's absolutely no reason that this should be the case.

There could be tons of "interesting work available" at a job people with boring jobs work, just not in their specialty. And they can still create boring tasks for others, even if those others work in departments that allow for interesting work available.

Second, some people like boring tasks and hate change, excitement, anything unpredictable, etc. So it's not even a rule that "nobody is going to do the boring work first".

darkstar999 7 years ago | |

I think I'd need more concrete examples to understand this study. What kind of dull work? What dull work was created and what could have changed to make it better?

If the available work is to dig a hole or file papers into a cabinet, how can you possibly make that better?

maccio92 7 years ago |

What is this idea that every job you do has to be brilliant and engaging? There's an endless amount of dull, tedious, and repetitive work required to make many things possible. That's why it's called work.

noitsnot 7 years ago | |

"It is important that managers and others learn the value of creating higher quality work, especially if we want to be competitive in a world in which employees need to be innovative, agile, and high performing," Professor Parker said.

kbutler 7 years ago | | |

That begs the question - it assumes that the work in the world needs innovative, agile, and high-performing employees, when maybe the world needs a bunch of people that will dig in and do the stuff that needs to be done.

bg4 7 years ago | | |

More often than not, it's cleaning up someone else's mess.

carlmr 7 years ago |

>"It seems that people have a natural view that putting together a group of highly repetitive and similar tasks into a job is the most efficient way to organise work, but previous research suggests this view is rarely correct," Professor Parker said.

Spot on. Stop ignoring human psychology. There is a big importance in specialization and separation of tasks. We know that since the industrial revolution. But especially in knowledge jobs boredom can lead to less than stellar quality, which again brings down efficiency.

Humans are animals that evolved in a highly complex environment. To keep people engaged their task should be varied and contain some newness every now and then.

Specialization has driven us into these niches where most people don't perform as well as they could. Jack of all trades master of none is the usual adage. I see the people in software who know something about the OS, something about drivers, something about application software, something about web design, usually designing the best software. They are masters of a lot of categories, because they are jacks of all trades. Because a lot of knowledge in one category leads you to be better in another category.

In management speak synergy.

Each task doesn't even have to be particularly exciting. But let people choose from your boring tasks. Maybe something you find boring they find exciting. And even if they do, don't say they have to do this forever. Maybe they find it exciting because they didn't do it before.

kaibee 7 years ago |

Alternative Title: Most jobs, even newly created jobs, aren't exciting.

smileypete 7 years ago |

The website in the OP made me think of 'Mr Waturi' in the film 'Joe vs The Volcano' :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AYUB3tQs80

(Can be good film to watch after a shit day at the office...)

crawfordcomeaux 7 years ago |

Is this the contrapositive:

People who don't practice being fun and having fun at work won't make work that's fun.

Sounds reasonable.

proc0 7 years ago |

Explains exactly why I think managers who don't code have no business telling a capable coder what to do. So many software companies underestimate the amount of creativity that is needed for a successful programmer, and they insist on structuring their hierarchy with the top people not knowing how to code but have learned how to navigate the hierarchical structure. This obviously leads to work flowing down from those who don't have the knowledge to create what it is that they are commanding others to do. tl;dr: if you can't code you shouldn't be in a leadership position (in a software company) that affects the project directly. Who would that person be leading? Like a head chef that doesn't know how to cook.