If this is the case, maybe the solution is to understand more about the impact of one's work on the service being sold to customers. I find that having people reliant on my work to do something important, however abstract, scratches the itch on feeling useful. If a company is unable to connect the positive customer impact of an employee's work (and seeing that they're increasing the happiness/decreasing the unhappiness of another human), it makes sense that the employee would feel unsatisfied with what they're doing.

Large companies break down the work into small pieces, many teams, many layers of abstraction. As a developer, I actually enjoyed doing some customer support calls with users, to connect with how they use the software, and what’s not working for them. Almost no large workplace will offer you this option.

You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.

It’s funny I actually initially got into tech from parlaying a food service job into a customer service one at a software company.

You’re definitely right that it has more direct problem-solving satisfaction than a lot of other software adjacent tasks.

Hmmm… when you put it that way it seems almost tautological.

If complex work could be graspable to the common man, it would no longer be considered as such.

Some new, even more sophisticated work would arise and take its place.

I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team.

I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.

Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.

After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.

I work for a small startup and really enjoy my job, honestly. Definitely have a ton of autonomy.

And yeah I do know our customers and how we help them, but again it’s a bit of a second-step thing.

My point was more that white collar work is inherently less immediate and direct than some other professions, in the sense of doing an end thing for an actual human being, not a company.

When you work as a cook, you make a meal and someone eats it (a really fundamental human activity) immediately. Compare to say, working on a software feature that a few people at a company on the other side of the world uses to decrease their monthly churn rate. Not quite the same level of directness.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations.

It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare.

So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on.

So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.

I've heard people describe commodity fetishism as replacing social relationships with relationships to things you own (e.g. your car, your iPhone etc). Is this accurate?

The issue is not primarily psychological attachment to objects, but that private labor (labor carried out independently by separate producers, whose social validity is only realized through exchange) takes on the appearance of its opposite: labor in a directly social form through exchange. Through exchange, the values of commodities appear to individuals not as a relation between producers, but as a property inherent in things themselves. Use-value appears as value, concrete labor appears as abstract labor, private labor appears as social labor.

This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).

So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.

This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.

Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.

I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”

I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.

Perhaps they have that in common, but facism pushes out into directions that marxism does not. Esp wrt to class, race, and self-determination.

It helps to ask: how many of the modern fascist leaders are retreating to the farm? I see them developing and deploying tech to inceease their grip on power. I see the "farmsy-folk" as a contingent the facists have persuaded to nip at those in the middle. And the means of the persuasion is, ironically, using the Marxist argunent of alienation.

This is an exceptionally good point. Truly. Thanks for sharing.

Seeing is believing I guess?

I often joke that the company I work for did the same job 100 years ago but they only had manual laborers on hundreds of locations. They made the work schedule, they did recruitment. they filled out the contract, every Friday there was an envelope with your salary in it, always the same amount.

Today we have local managers, regional managers, job agencies, cluster coördinators, quality control people, layers of hr people, doctors, instructors and lots of fancy sounding expensive titles that translate poorly. Each with their own fancy car.

So, I ask them what value they add. Makes them furious. I'm not bitter about it, I'm honest about the joke/hypothetical.

The show is much more expensive and we do the manual (actual) work with fewer people. We work much harder and if someone calls in sick all hell breaks lose among the office folk. Zero redundancy.

Some nepotism aside they all think they do important work. Say, the schedule man makes a schedule for 700 people. He works hard but the results are vastly inferior to 8 people working on one location making their own schedule. If you need a day off or want to trade shifts, you just ask a coworker or two. The office worker begs people not to call him. In the future I'm sure he can also make schedules for the office folk(?)

It is that I remember how things use to work. Otherwise i wouldn't even consider if their jobs are useless.

Sitting down for a few minutes to do some administrative tasks is really nice if you are hurling heavy objects and running from left to right all day. Rest improves productivity so it doesn't really cost time. It makes the work less repetitive and if you screw up organizing things yourself you know who to blame.

Here is a simple concept. The job agencies schedules employees, counts hours and pays salaries. After they are done multiple people at the company have to check everything they do. They are doing everything twice! It's very complicated!

With just 8 people on location any idiot can schedule, count hours and multiply by $. It worked fine for 70ish years.

I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc.

For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.

I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.

Consuming goods and services created far away creates a similar problem. If you don't know where it's from or how it's made, it feels like magic, not quite real, and in some sense like it could go away at any time.

Personally I believe a lot of entertainment, especially games, scratch this itch for a lot of people. But it's good to be aware whether you actually enjoy it, or if it's an escape from your day to day drudgery.

Actually it's more complicated than that because for most people said day to day is essential to enable other objectives, like maintaining yourself and / or others.

In my family there are a lot of carpenters who build their own houses. I wonder what it’s like for them since building a house is also a project with a long loop and I could see that closing silently as well with all the “work you actually wanted to do but had to leave undone”. Those couple of licks of paint, that slightly-uneven flooring you made. I wonder.

Well that is actually about the long term. If the labour of an international software company is like that, which depends on management is uo to debate. When you follow the discourse on this newsboard, it seems more like the craftsmen building software often struggle with the manifestation in their domain of the fact, that the way corporations are managed is often not in regard to long term goals but to shortcircuits in the service or quick profits incentiviced by the disfunctionalities of current late stage capitalism. (Not being allowed or unable to build the quality software they would like to build; instead having to ship fast building tech dept etc.)

If you don't mind me asking (this is unrelated to your post), but is your company hiring? My next position I'm hoping to work at an international remote company, so I'm just following up on any lead that I see, hah