What Makes Work Meaningful or Meaningless
I wonder how much counter-signalling there is on the part of the interviewees. They are going to be prone to say things that associate far-mode, positive ideals with them.<p>Like, they won&#x27;t say, &quot;I found a lot of meaning that time my hard work, blood, sweat, and tears were actually meritocratically rewarded with that large bonus&quot; because it makes them sound near-mode, greedy, overly materialistic, etc.<p>Instead, they&#x27;ll say something far-mode, about how they related to the human element of an experience or a coworker or a client, or how their family finally appreciated the deeper meaning in their work.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I really believe that people find work meaning mostly in these far-mode, idealistic things. Rather, I think they want <i>to be seen as someone who values these things</i> because then people will associate good stereotypes with them.<p>This also helps explain why it&#x27;s more reflective, episodic, and after-the-fact rationalized to be meaningful, rather than being tied to concrete properties of the work itself.<p>I think for myself, I do have some moral and ethical baselines that I don&#x27;t want the byproducts of my labor to violate, like harming others, perpetuating government oppression, wasting resources.<p>But beyond these things, I don&#x27;t actually get more or less meaning out of any different topical type of work than some other type.<p>What <i>does</i> make me feel like work is meaningful is to experience lots and lots of <i>autonomy</i> in my workplace decision making and my approach to solving problems. I also like to feel that I have the freedom to pursue whatever quality standards are pragmatic for the problem, and am not constrained by bureaucracy to pursue inelegant solutions when there&#x27;s no pragmatic reasons why they actually need to be inelegant (this happens all the time).<p>After that, I feel meaning at work most when I am given adequate quiet and private physical space and can reach a state of psychological flow.<p>I could be writing code to process ATM transactions or to cure cancer and I&#x27;ll feel the same amount of meaning if (a) I can mostly do it my own way within some loose context of the broader team&#x27;s needs, and (b) I am left alone to actually get work done and I am not interrupted or inundated with an unhealthy, oppressively wide open working space.<p>For me, these resonated more with the comment in the article that good managers are rarely even mentioned in the context of meaningful work, whereas bad managers are often to blame for work that is not meaningful.<p>Good managers are invisible geniuses who know how to fade into the backdrop, get out of your way, allow you to make decisions, and do not feel fear that they have to micromanage or create empty superficial artifacts to justify that they are working. They are so, so hard to find, and when you find one, you are so happy that you will give so much loyalty to working for that manager, and forgive so much other crap the company might pull.