Worked Over: How Round-The-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream by Jamie K McCallum

Author:Jamie K McCallum [McCallum, Jamie K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: 1541618343
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

I CAME THERE in search of something too. Unlike Nikil, it was neither cougars nor capital. I came with a question: Why did we begin to search for meaningful work in the first place? To trace the history of an idea requires one to investigate the multiple headwaters of the stream. And I was convinced one ran through the Rosewood.

The clientele of the Rosewood stands in contrast to Thorstein Veblen’s depiction of the wealthy in The Theory of the Leisure Class. His examination of turn-of-the-century wealth offered a vivid portrait of the rich committed to “conspicuous consumption,” strategic buying practices that conferred on themselves status and honor. Whereas idleness and leisure were once markers of having made it, today the rich acquire prestige by flaunting their extreme commitment to work. Here was a group of relatively rich people, whose conception of self rested on their commitment to hard work, busyness, and long hours at the office. Veblen might suggest that today’s well-off participate in a culture of “conspicuous busyness.” When work was dirty, less was more; now that it’s meaningful, more is better.

Douglas Coupland captured that kind of consummate passion for work in his prophetic 1995 novel, Microserfs, in which a group of nerdy engineers who hate their jobs at a fictional buttoned-down IBM move from Redmond, Washington, to Silicon Valley in search of more self-actualizing work. Their new home is literally the light of their life, constructed with just the right illumination streaming through plate-glass facades and spatial harmony to create beauty and intimacy. As they grow tired of chasing venture capital funding, which always seems just out of reach, one programmer has a startling revelation: “I would have come here for nothing. I never had to get paid.… It’s never been the money. It rarely ever is. It wasn’t with any of us—was it?”2

The real Google has never been far from Coupland’s fictional world. “Do what you love” was the incantation I heard repeated ad nauseam, from low-level coders to more seasoned employees. Indeed, a growing trend among tech employers is to compete for recruits by offering nonmonetary perks, a practice that, according to industry insiders, is exactly what employees want. “We’re seeing people taking a lower offer if the project they get to work on aligns more with their own goals,” Rishon Blumberg, of the recruiting agency 10x Ascend, told CNBC.

Google is hardly a monolith, however. During my tour through tech country I heard more than a few dissenting voices. That night at the Rosewood I met a Google engineer named Mike, and I mentioned my run-in with his colleagues on the Google Bus. “Google thinks that if we have meaningful jobs we will prefer them to the other parts of our lives,” he said. “Hence, more work. Everywhere you look you hear people talking about meaning. They aren’t philosophers. They aren’t psychologists. They sell banner ads. What do they know about meaning? I love this job. But that doesn’t mean I need it to save my soul.

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