The two types of jobs

The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1089 points –
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Don't get me.wrong I really love excel and enjoy spending my days playing with it; but sometimes I'll look at my work in a big picture context and don't understand how I make so much money doing a totally made up thing that serves no practical purpose.

If you tried working at your company for a week with no paperwork or spreadsheets you'd realize their necessity pretty quick. You are a bureaucromancer. Very little gets done, and none of it on budget, without you playing with spreadsheets all day.

Soldiers might fight a war, but logistics wins one. It's no different for business.

I felt the same thing watching my partner working this morning. I've been with him 10 years and I still can't explain his job beyond its title because as far as I understand he oversees people as well as works on software that's developed, deployed and managed by another company, but they don't manage software or services or develop anything but they deploy it, but that's not not his team, and it's this one specific program, but it's actually 12 integrated programs, and he's working on one that's in development but he's not a developer, but is not part of anything they're actually doing yet, and that's not his main role.

Everytime he explains it, I get more lost...

What is this job? It's obviously stressful, a lot of other companies rely on on whatever this service is, and my partner, as of this year, makes 8x my income, so it must be important.... Right!?

Right!? He's not making 8x my income pushing pencils....right!?

I teach General Education at a community centre for people who missed out on formal schooling.

My job is 3 words "I teach SOSE", and you know almost exactly what I do you can picture the main tasks and also picture my output (educated graduates)

His job did not exist 15 years ago, the concept of a job like his in software for the masses did not exist 50 years ago, a desk job to this degree of pencil pushing did not exist 100 years ago.

Sometimes I think about how my job is technically one of the oldest in the world, but never a well paid one.

Sometimes I consider a pencil pushing job for a few years, to just get my retirement fund sorted, but if I don't even understand what the job is how can I expect myself to do it?

Humans have a complexity fetish I'll never understand. Nothing is ever as complex as it seems (in the way it seems, anyway).

I feel like it's just the opposite.

Try designing something without instructions or a template. You'll run into a thousand little issues you didn't realize needed to be considered.

That's true of software, sure. But it's also true if you want to make a wooden dresser without plans or build an rc airplane from scratch.

In my experience, things are rarely as simple as they first seem.

You're so right. You should be mindlessly using an ERP!