Both of these comments touch on something that irritates me quite a bit. Because I have
a chip on my shoulder and enjoy confrontation, I regularly apply for jobs even when I'm
only a tiny bit interested in changing jobs. (Plus, who knows? Maybe someone will make
a really good offer.) In doing so, I often apply for jobs for which I'm "over
qualified". I don't get paid much for what I _am_ qualified to do. So, it wouldn't
be much of a hit to take a job for which I'm over qualified. These jobs almost always
have something educational about them. I regard the education as part of the
compensation. I'm willing to take a lot less money in exchange for the chance to
learn-on-the-job.
The interviewers never seem to understand that point. When it comes down to the
practicals of offering me a job, they often get caught by my inadequate answers to the
question "Why would you want to do these jobs, for this salary? Why give up what
you have already?" I don't know ... YOLO? It happens so often, perhaps I should be
less enthusiastic about whatever projects I'm working on at any given time. Maybe if I'm
all grumpy about the sh!t I have to do, I'd get less complaints about me being over
qualified for some other job ... which obviously I'm not. My incompetence knows no
bounds. I've never had a boring job, from selling carpet water proofing door-to-door, to
sacking groceries, selling electronic parts at the university store, flowcharting
assembly code for obsolete avionics, etc. There are always boring tasks to every job,
but the jobs have never been boring in their entirety.
In any case, it seems to me like incentive is always weaker than motivation,
regardless of the dimensions involved. But, then again, I'm a white male from
a middle-class household in the US. So, surely that biases me.
On 07/14/2015 01:05 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
Motivation is such a subjective thing. Like most people, I like to work on
things that are at least a little challenging intellectually, but
sometimes, just seeing the end result and knowing that I did it is reward
enough to make the tedium bearable. A few years back, I did a bunch of very
tedious work that synchronized video of conference speakers with their
slide presentations NM INBRE. The idea was to create a Flash presentation
that showed the video of the speaker, but displayed static images (taken
from the PPT presentation) representing the auditorium's screen. This saved
a lot of bandwidth compared to streaming a composite video of both the
speaker and the actual screen, and in the 2006 timeframe, really was
necessary.
So, I had “capture” video from tape from two sources (speaker and screen);
scrub through the two resulting videos, recording slide translation
timings; export and trim images for each slide; compress video into
appropriate formats; import images and video into Flash, and enter the
timings that I recorded; etc etc. All that multiplied by 10 or more
speakers, it took me over a month to complete. Kind of like mowing your
lawn with a pair of fingernail clippers. I automated as much as I could,
but given the number of tools that I had to deal with, I really didn’t have
time to automate very much. So, I just became a robot for a month or so.
But the end result was very nice for the time, and despite lack of
intellectual challenges, was one of my proudest accomplishments that I was
able to make myself stick to it. In fact, I even did the same robot work
again the next year. I’ve always been meaning to get to automating that
type of work...
On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com>
wrote:
"Interesting vs. boring is orthogonal. So, there's interesting-hard and
boring-hard. I'll accept money for either type of work, though I much
prefer interesting-hard ... obviously."
How about engaging, imaginative, educational, or surprising work vs.
detail work. Doing detail work may be delayed gratification or it can no
purpose other than to respond to extrinsic motivation. Remove the
extrinsic motivation (money), and it is boring and depressing.
Ok, if one is tasked with making an app to print checks, it could be
educational to learn how to put widgets on a screen or to do page layout.
What that discovery process is over, either another naïve person is needed
or extrinsic motivation.
Marcus
--
⇔ glen
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