Are They Just Blagging it?

Posted on 2003/07/03 14:45:49 (July 2003) by john.

Does anyone actually do any real work?

On the train this morning (this method of starting articles is becoming a habit it seems) I sat in front of two businessmen. As the rest of the carriage was fairly quiet I couldn't help but listen in on their conversation.

I was trying to work out what line of business they were in to start with. It sounded like a vaguely financial sector, as there was the occasional mention of Prudential and companies like that. I think perhaps they might have worked for some kind of accounting firm, there were a few mentions of making reports, adding columns, getting the numbers to match and so on.

My point was, the more I listened, the more I got the impression that they don't actually do anything at all. The whole financial sector, in fact, to me seems just like writing numbers down on bits of paper, then moving them into a different column, then producing a report about it.

In my job, I make machines. Not enterprise wide workflow co-ordination and management solutions. Actual real machines that have a real job. Actual tangible boxes that, if taken out of the transmission chain, I can say categorically would stop your television receiving what it is supposed to.

Although I feel like I do a worthwhile job, I can appreciate it may still sound a bit vague to other people. Fundamentally I suppose it is still just moving bits of information about from one place to another, and maybe modifying it a bit along the way.

So, let's look a couple of generations back. My Grandad on my mother's side was a coal miner, he hit the coal face with a pickaxe and removed lumps of coal for people to burn. My Grandad on my father's side fixed machines in power stations when they stopped working. Two very clear and well defined jobs that, if they weren't being done, the lights wouldn't come on when you pressed the switch.

By comparison, when you hear people's job titles today, you really have to wonder what they actually do. Somehow we've become one of the richest nations in the world, by getting rid of all our heavy industry (all of the sort of jobs where you actually do something), and replacing it all with "soft services", that are vague, badly defined, probably unnecessary but strangely very highly paid.

No wonder there are problems with the world economy. High paid "workers" in rich nations couldn't get away with such a dodgy blag forever.

Shhh. Fool.

Posted by tom at 2003/07/03 18:26:08.

Did you know that the job centre have a sort code for the lofty title of philosopher. Fantastic stuff!

Posted by Rusty at 2003/07/03 18:52:17.

You seem to start off by saying that the other guys' jobs are meaningless. Then you say that yours isn't. Then you say that, acutally, your is just as meaningless too. Have I misunderstood you? If so, please clarify your position on how "Moving information about" differs from "Adding columns and getting numbers to match". If not, what exactly is your point?

Posted by Jimmy at 2003/07/04 24:35:09.

Nope you've understood correctly actually. I'd like to think my job is meaningful, but, if I evaluate it with the same objective impartiality that I look at other people's jobs, it does seem sort of pointless as well. My point is, then, that it seems to me like very few people in this country (and other similarly rich nations) actually do any real work. It's all kind of meta work, if you see what I mean.

Posted by John at 2003/07/04 14:18:54.

Fair enough. I always thought that digital TV was an especially extreme case, in that TV itself is pretty abstract, so TV support-kit is even more so. When it goes digital, though, and you need a whole industry (and billions of quids' worth of new equipment) to support the absurdly-abstract MPEG standards, it really make ya wonder. Well, it makes me wonder, anyway. Not that I'm complaining, being essentially in an entertainment industry myself (in fact, I'm only writing software to support the entertainment!). Hmmm. On the positive side, neither of us have to go down coal-mines. "Bring on the refugees and economic migrants" is what I say. We're in need of a cheap manual-labour force!

Posted by Jimmy at 2003/07/04 16:46:24.

If you put as much effort into sorting yourself out with a decent job we wouldn't have to listen to your winging pap.

Posted by jimbo at 2003/07/06 19:38:10.

Errr, you don't have to listen to any of this "whinging pap". That's the great thing about being an intelligent human being, you actually have your own free will and can choose not to read something, if you don't want to.

Posted by John at 2003/07/06 21:17:40.

Interestingly enough, I think I may retrain as a plumber. *that* would be useful.

Posted by tom at 2003/07/07 11:29:07.

I'm not whingeing at all ... I'm very happy with my job, thank you very much Jimbo.

Posted by Jimmy at 2003/07/07 14:20:54.

Not philisophical. Just boring. You wouldn't have a job, bank account, mortgage, use of the internet, education, without money man. fact of life.

Posted by will at 2003/11/25 17:00:21.

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