Liking your job is a form of insanity
You may like it, but it's destroying everything around you.
También podés leer la versión en castellano.
I like my job. I've been working for the last two decades, and it's the first time I can say that. I've had jobs where I made friends; I've had jobs that depressed me; I’ve had jobs that paid well, or jobs that got me out of a pinch. Now, I have a job that I really like. As much as I like my job, it's not particularly meaningful. That is, society hasn’t changed for the better after I finished a hard day's work. This isn't me being hard on myself—there are probably just a few jobs that really matter: health care workers, construction workers, farmers, and Amazon couriers. It's a short list.
On the other hand, there is no shortage of jobs with no meaning. Meaningless, but impactful. All of us who have reported to a mid-level manager know what I am talking about. I've been a mid-level manager (okay, low-level manager; we all exaggerate on our CVs), and I spent most of my time performing meaning rather than contributing towards meaning. Nonetheless, things managers do impact people's lives. Recall the last time your manager asked you to work over the weekend to meet a deadline. I’m pretty sure it had an impact on your tan.
There are jobs that are conceived with meaning, lofty ideals, principles, and ethical standards. For example, the UX designer. For those of you who are not familiar with this cog in the product development machine, these are the women and men who design a product's interface so it's more intuitive, beautiful, evocative, and accessible. They don’t define what a product looks like. They also don't decide what a product does. They design how a user interacts with a product to get something done. In their parlance, they are here to create “experiences” that “delight” users. Whatever application, gadget, or hardware you use in your day-to-day, there's a good chance a UX designer was involved in developing its user interface.
For example, you know the beeping sound an elevator makes when you press a floor button? UX designers call that “user feedback,” and they put it there so you can hear that the machine works and will execute your instruction. How about the protruding bumps below the floor number on those same buttons? That's braille, so the visually impaired know which button to press. It’s referred to as “accessibility,” and it's the type of thing UX designers consider. The elevator door timing so it shuts right when you are on the threshold, making you spill your coffee? We have UX designers to thank for that. It's what they call “humor.”
It doesn't matter if you’re a start-up with a handful of employees or a tech giant with thousands under your command; any company that wants to do good has UX designers among their staff. But something is happening lately that makes me think these noble workers have lost their direction. Not a day goes by without an app getting a version update with a shiny new user interface. There are applications I could once use blindfolded, relying on muscle memory, until some UX designer decided it needed an upgrade. Buttons change locations and get new icons, features get new names, settings are dropped, and new ones are added. Something that used to work fine is dramatically changed, and you're forced to get the new version. It's programmed obsolescence without the obsolescence.
What happened to their lofty goals, like delighting users? Having to re-learn how to do online banking with every app upgrade is more of a nuisance than a delight. How does reorganizing the entire application on a whim make things more accessible? Is the idea of an intuitive interface even possible? Intuition is pretty subjective, and I have the impression every upgrade is a passionate, newly hired UX designer giving us their version of it to keep busy and justify their job. And they need their job. Without it, they can't pay rent, purchase food, get a new phone every year, or take that Instagrammable vacation to Barthelona.
The UX designer is not alone. There's a whole chain of workers above and below them who are in the same predicament. A UX designer’s new version means new code for software developers to write—that’s them being able to pay for their frappuccinos. Don't forget the product managers who feed the UX designers an endless list of new requirements. If that list ends, they’re joining the ranks in tent city. Without new features, the entrepreneur who hired all these workers doesn't have anything new to sell. How’s he going to pay for his helicopter flying lessons?
Just like me, a lot of these people like their job. Maybe not all these jobs, but a lot of them began with meaning. Yet slowly, jobs that had meaning are void. Or even more lamentable, their original meaning is replaced with a new one—not so lofty, not so principled. A new meaning that is impactful, that undermines a person's well-being and is detrimental to everything around them. We go to work every day so we can make money to buy the things we make at work. Insanity. To top it all off, we end up changing the world in ways we cannot control, predict, or undo.
But worst of all, now I can't find the damn share button.