Study Finds Most Fulfilling Jobs: Self-Employment, Government Work, Managing, and Social Service (seattletimes.com) 83
"Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth," the Washington Post wrote almost two years ago, after analyzing more than 13,000 journals from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' time-use survey. (For the first time the surveys asked how workers felt during the day.) And outdoor forestry jobs "look awesome by that metric, dangerous as they often are in the long run," the Post wrote in a recent follow-up. [Alternate URL.]
But is that really the right metric? "Readers kept reminding us that there's more to a fulfilling job than how happy you are while doing it." What about those wanting jobs where they're meaningfully impacting the world? We didn't have a stellar way to measure other feelings about work, but we kept our eye on an often-overlooked federal data provider: AmeriCorps. The independent agency, which CEO Michael D. Smith described to us as "bite-sized" but "punching well above our weight," funds the Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement, part of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey... In 2021 and again in 2023, the researchers behind the CEV asked if you agree or disagree with these four statements:
- I am proud to be working for my employer.
- My main satisfaction in life comes from work.
- My workplace contributes to the community.
- I contribute to the community through my work....
The workers most likely to say they're proud to be working for their employer and that they gain satisfaction from work are — surprise! — the self-employed. The self-employed who are incorporated — a group that often includes small-business owners — are almost twice as likely as private-sector, for-profit workers to strongly profess pride in their employer.
Government and nonprofit workers fall somewhere in the middle on those questions. But they rank at the very top on "My workplace contributes to the community" and "I contribute to the community through my work." Local government workers, who include teachers, take the top spot for strong agreement on both, followed by nonprofit workers. Private-sector, for-profit workers once again lag behind. The jobs that do worse on these measures tend to be in manufacturing or other blue-collar production and extraction jobs, or at the lower-paid end of the service sector. Folks in food services (e.g., bartenders and food prep), janitorial roles and landscaping, and personal services (e.g., barbershops, laundry and hotels) all struggle to find greater meaning in their work. Though some better-paid service jobs also struggle by some measures — think sales, engineering or software development.
On the questions regarding pride in your employer and life satisfaction, we see managers and our old friends in agriculture and forestry take the top spots. But right behind them — and actually in the lead in the other question — lurks the real standout, a set of jobs we'd classify as "care and social services." That includes, most notably, religious workers. Looking a bit deeper at about 100 occupations for which we have detailed data, we see clergy were most likely to strongly agree on every question.
Other observations from the article:
But is that really the right metric? "Readers kept reminding us that there's more to a fulfilling job than how happy you are while doing it." What about those wanting jobs where they're meaningfully impacting the world? We didn't have a stellar way to measure other feelings about work, but we kept our eye on an often-overlooked federal data provider: AmeriCorps. The independent agency, which CEO Michael D. Smith described to us as "bite-sized" but "punching well above our weight," funds the Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement, part of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey... In 2021 and again in 2023, the researchers behind the CEV asked if you agree or disagree with these four statements:
- I am proud to be working for my employer.
- My main satisfaction in life comes from work.
- My workplace contributes to the community.
- I contribute to the community through my work....
The workers most likely to say they're proud to be working for their employer and that they gain satisfaction from work are — surprise! — the self-employed. The self-employed who are incorporated — a group that often includes small-business owners — are almost twice as likely as private-sector, for-profit workers to strongly profess pride in their employer.
Government and nonprofit workers fall somewhere in the middle on those questions. But they rank at the very top on "My workplace contributes to the community" and "I contribute to the community through my work." Local government workers, who include teachers, take the top spot for strong agreement on both, followed by nonprofit workers. Private-sector, for-profit workers once again lag behind. The jobs that do worse on these measures tend to be in manufacturing or other blue-collar production and extraction jobs, or at the lower-paid end of the service sector. Folks in food services (e.g., bartenders and food prep), janitorial roles and landscaping, and personal services (e.g., barbershops, laundry and hotels) all struggle to find greater meaning in their work. Though some better-paid service jobs also struggle by some measures — think sales, engineering or software development.
On the questions regarding pride in your employer and life satisfaction, we see managers and our old friends in agriculture and forestry take the top spots. But right behind them — and actually in the lead in the other question — lurks the real standout, a set of jobs we'd classify as "care and social services." That includes, most notably, religious workers. Looking a bit deeper at about 100 occupations for which we have detailed data, we see clergy were most likely to strongly agree on every question.
Other observations from the article:
- "As a rule, you feel better about your job as you get older. Presumably, it's some mix of people who love their work delaying retirement, people job-hopping until they find meaningful employment, and people learning to love whatever hand they've been dealt."
- "Most measures of satisfaction also rise with education, often quite sharply. Someone with a graduate degree is twice as likely as a high school dropout to strongly agree their workplace contributes to the community."
- But... "More-educated folks are actually a bit less likely to strongly agree that work is their main satisfaction in life."
'Work is their main satisfaction in life' (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? Many people agree with statement? No wonder our family life is so often barren; we expect too little...
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Seriously? Many people agree with statement? No wonder our family life is so often barren; we expect too little...
That only applies to people with formal education, not to autodidactic coders in their moms' basements. Ahh . . . satisfaction . . .
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Sure why not. Firstly how much time do you work vs spend meaningfully with the family? And when I say meaningfully I don't mean that family satisfaction is derrived from you doing dishes while the wife is making the kids do their homework. You're at work 8 hours a day. You waste another 1-2 in traffic. Life tasks take up several more hours - cooking, cleaning, making dinner, brushing teeth, showering, chasing after your kids, etc, and then you need downtime too, add in 8 hours for sleep and the only real sa
Re: 'Work is their main satisfaction in life' (Score:2)
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Indeed work from home is a welcome change to US culture. What isn't welcome though is that you think it applies to the majority. Obviously that's not true and just because you exist doesn't invalidate the study.
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They probably measure "coding" by percentage of time spent typing. I would say 90% of the work is planning/mental. You can work 8 hours and produce less than 10 lines of code and still call it a success.
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That's part of why the avg. tenure at Amazon is a year. I don't know what it's like to work there, but nobody should be taking it as a model for anything.
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Even if a developer enjoys developing, Amazon Says Developers Spend 'Just One Hour Per Day' Coding [slashdot.org]. So most of the day you aren't even doing what you like to do at work.
Wow. You don't know the difference between "developing" and "coding"? Hint: Most developers don't spend most of their time coding. Developing is a complex problem solving activity including everything from research, architectural design, documentation, testing and yes a part of it is coding too. Learn the difference and then appreciate that what you just wrote doesn't disagree with what I said in the slightest.
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Re:'Work is their main satisfaction in life' (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that we conflate two very different things in general:
There is "Work" as in "The thing you go to on monday morning and clock in so that you can get paid and can afford to do other things with your life, despite it being a drain on your very soul and your main source of unhappiness".
And then there is "Work" as in "The thing you are good at because you have done it all your life, and it's what give you satisfaction when you put all your knowledge and experience together into something better than the sum of its parts".
When someone says that they hate work, they're talking about the first kind, while when another person says that they love their work, they're talking about the second kind.
Interestingly, remember when covid came and went and suddenly we had so many people quitting their jobs? Many talked about how confinement, sitting at home and getting paid without having to worry about bills and shopping, opened their eyes to that very confusion. People were so focused on The Grind (TM) that they never realized that one kind of work wasn't necessarily the other.
So yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all that there is a constant confusion between both. We need a second word for the second kind of work. "Purpose" is often used as a replacement but, like all things that come with introspection, it doesn't do well in modern society.
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Re:'Work is their main satisfaction in life' (Score:4, Informative)
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That only means that people in those countries interpret those questions in different ways. People normally assume cultural conventions with language and don't use a textbook meaning. If you ask some "what's up" you'd probably also get different ans
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I'll keep it simple:
- The bigger the company, the less you will enjoy working there.
When you work in the resource sector, all you do is "one thing" every day. If that's what you like, and you are not compelled to move up, stay there, and keep making that money. It's the people in charge that are often the morons ruining the place, and taking pleasure in making you not enjoy it, because people get hired out of what makes them competent and happy into supervisory, management members who "don't do anything mea
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I think this is why a lot of people in my age group were startup-hopping instead of staying in one place. It's not fun waiting for the next merger and whatever TSA/migration/integration death march that would ultimately come along and make all progress on what really matters stop for 3 years. All so the CFO can say they grew YOY and made a lot of cash which is being set aside for stock buybacks. Because obviously the employees are happy and taken care of, look at how well they performed!
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Seriously? Many people agree with statement? No wonder our family life is so often barren; we expect too little...
Work is a place you spend 22% of your adult days, 33% of your waking time. Is it so wrong to want to get some form of satisfaction out of it? Even if it is just a bit of friendship or maybe even self actualisation.
I really feel sorry for people who only go to work for work... You spend so much time there and miss out on a lot (but meh, it's your life).
As for the headline, a better alternative would be "Jobs where you're not working for an already rich arsehole to make them even more rich are the most
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"Work is my main source of satisfaction" is a far different statement than "I get some form of satisfaction from my work". The first statement is profoundly sad if it describes you.
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I was wondering about this myself.
I guess I assumed MOST people were pretty much as mercenary with regard to their jobs as I am.
I work PURELY and SOLEY for money....if I were independently wealthy I'd never work another day in my life...I work to make money to fund my lifestyle I prefer, to funds my hobbies and other things in life outside of 'work'.
I know in this big world, there are all ty
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Then how do you explain people like Linux developers? Unpaid, and yet they do it. It's mostly the same work as programming at a corporation, only fewer meetings maybe or they're online meetings. Maybe they short circuit the documentation and hope some other volunteer does it. But it's mostly the same. So there's stuff in the office that people don't like but it that's usually not the entire job.
I've worked at a place doing "enterprise" software. Hated it. I was also severely underpaid but that wasn't t
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That was a phrase on a prison camp, from a fascist country. This was never a slogan for communism or socialism, even those are the types of countries you listed.
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Some of us elected not to settle in a long-term career until we found something with goals aligned with our own. I work in higher education and sustainability. I genuinely enjoy the work I do (usually) and I consider my work virtuous.
Yes, I have life outside of work, but I also look forward to doing the work that I do.
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Depends on the job. Having a job you like, or with a good reason to do it beyond a paycheck, is a nice thing. If someone is unsatisfied in their job maybe they should consider something else, if they have the means?
Of course, there's always something else in the job that someone dislikes, but that doesn't mean there isn't satisfaction about getting stuff done. Or getting stuff done that helps other people, stimulates the mind, etc.
My main satisfaction in life comes from work. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's an odd question to ask. I love what I do and would recommend everybody to take on a job that they enjoy doing. But that's far from saying that my work is my main satisfaction in life. Mind you I've been self-employed for 27 years and would recommend that as well. Don't get me wrong. If I'm in the middle of a good coding run, I'm in Zen and enjoying myself. But as much as I like my work, I like traveling and listening to music more than my work.
Talking about being self-employed, I have noticed how some of the people who are employees get envious of me. That even includes my wife, who has to get up at 5:45 AM while I can sleep in until 10. But as much as self-employment comes with freedom perks, it also has a lot of drawbacks, including health insurance, lots and lots of paperwork, no paid time off, being on-call pretty much all the time, yada yada. I don't think people think about all those things.
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Self employment only works for a small subset of jobs. The chemical plant I worked at cost $1.6 billion to build. It runs 24 hours a day.
Nor is building solar panels by hand likely to be rewarding or viable economically.
That said I did rather enjoy keeping the plant up and running. The mining job I started at just out of college was even more fun. The ore body was not very consistent so the feed going into the mill would change with no warning. That selenium pocket was particularly memorable. By the time we
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The thing I found got to me was effectively imposter syndrome: I could never get over the hump that this one might be the last job so I would always take a job and found I kept overworking myself. I'm glad freelancing works for you and in some sense I'm jealous not of the job per-se but of the ability to carry it off. There's no point in being jealous of a job I cannot actually hack.
On the other hand I am now working for a startup as a senior person, I have a budget, I get to commute into work by bike (usua
Envy the lumberjacks... (Score:3)
Are you sure ?!? [youtube.com]
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...for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth.
Leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia?
fulfilling job...when getting the paycheck !! (Score:2)
Government work? (Score:2)
Aren't those the people who the incoming administration thinks of as "agents of the Deep State"?
Re:Government work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't those the people who the incoming administration thinks of as "agents of the Deep State"?
Just wait until people can't get their monthly checks or can't get permits or anything else they rely on the government to do. Then you'll hear the whining at which point my response will be, "You voted for this. Deal with it."
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It's true I think that much of the bloat is about preventing the government from being ripped off. Ie, lots and lots of oversight becaue heaven forbid that someone get benefits who didn't deserve it. Check, double-check, and deny. Some voter sees a welfare recipient with a second hand phone and immediately thinks that this person is cheating the system, or they see a company get a defense contract that they think are just fleecing the system, so they demand that their legislatures make things harder. Ove
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So you think the main task of a government worker is to write checks ? Is that what *YOU* think ?!? Good god...
So you think I can’t walk into damn near every Government office doing anything and NOT find bloat? Is that what YOU think?!?
Checks going out, was the parents lame example. Pick any job. Pick any government office. As if you have a defense here.
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And there's a big difference between optimizing processes a bit, which is certainly always possible, and pretending you can fire 80% of gov workers, as I've heard Musk say, and think things will actually improve. Those guys are insane.
Re: Government work? (Score:3)
First, is there bloat and waste, sure it's everywhere, but it's not nearly as rampant as people think.
Second, so much "waste" was because we couldn't have just a little more money. Our tools were crap. I was making custom cables and wires we burned so much time because we ran out of part A or razor blades or whatever. We were constantly scavenging everything. We were building 1 working drill from
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Some can be useful, some can be useless. I've run into both, and the people who were actually useful also seemed happy.
Government work is also a lot of stuff people don't think about. Teachers for example, many find their jobs fulfilling, when even in retirement they have past students telling them thanks. Firefighters, those in cities and those battling wildfires in national forests, etc.
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There are many more "government jobs" than the federal ones being targeted by the incoming adminstration. There are state, county, regional, municipal, utility, public K-12, public university, etc.
Been there, done that ... (Score:3)
Been there, done that. Just leaves you chewed up, pissed off and poor.
At this point, I'd be happy to sell cigarettes and booze to four year olds.
I mean, I still hope for the best, but in the real world it is a combination of nepotism and corruption that lets one rise.
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I've been developing software professionally since 1988, in a number of different industries, and different types of companies from small to large.
What I've found is that work is what you make it. Work for even a bad company can be tolerable, if you don't let the BS get to you. In the end, most of the shenanigans pulled by incompetent managers are just bluffs. If you just do your job and ignore the politics, it's possible to do just fine, connect with others who are actually enjoyable to work with, and be r
Self-employed proud to work for their employers (Score:3)
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Speaking from experience - being self employed also brings uncertainty. That monthly paycheque can be variable or stop altogether and with that comes stress particularly if you have a family,.
Suffice to say I'm no longer self employed - I happily traded being my own master for a regular income doing meh jobs that might not be interesting but I can tolerate the boredom, though obviously everyone has different priorities.
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I worked as an employee for 28 years. In such a long run, obviously work won't always be meaningful or interesting. But generally speaking I appreciated it and think I did a nice job.
But, the important part is... I had a plan since day 1 of work. Up until my 50th birthday, every month, I would separate 10% of my income and invest it. I didn't even considered that 10% really "income". It wasn't my money, it was my future self's money.
It worked so fine, that at 45 I could finally turn to self-employed and sim
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It's sad that so many governments around the world are trying to make self-employment a much less attractive offer than permanent work. The UK seems to be leading the charge, Australia and Canada coming in fast, and even the USA, spearheaded by California are getting in on the action.
Whether you're self employed or just work for a small company (a "micro company" perhaps) of just a couple of people, keeping it small avoids the cube-farm mentality and strips away most of the office politics. None of those th
fake 1099's pushed by big corps is hurting self em (Score:2)
fake 1099's pushed by big corps is hurting self employment.
We need better labor laws.
There are real self employment workers and others that are only self employment in name only with little to no control over hours , pay rates, rules, tools they can use, etc.
Realistic expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
My grandpa was a coal miner. He died of silicosis.
I get to do physically-undemanding stuff sitting behind a desk in a warm office for a living. I earn 10 times what my Grandpa used to earn.
You know what? When it feels meaningless or not fulfilling enough, I remind myself that I could be filling my lungs full of coal dust at work.
Here's my take: I take pride in what I do. Whatever I'm asked to do, I'll do it to the best of my abilities. If you ask me to do QA, I'll be the best QA engineer there is. If you ask me to clean the toilet bowl, it'll be the whitest, cleanest toilet bowl in the building. If you ask me to fold envelopes, they'll have the crispest crease in the whole outgoing mail pile.
That's how I get my kicks. I take pride in doing what I'm asked to do well, provided it's safe and legal. For the rest, I try not to be a snowflake because I could be shoveling dung in a field in some third world country or burning toxic plastics to recover commodity metals in a landfill in African and I don't.
In popular culture (Score:2)
In popular culture, coal miners, fishermen, lumberjacks, underwater welders, and all the most dangerous jobs done by men are never complained about (nor covered) in the news media. One could erroneously conclude that those men are happy with their jobs and not worried about the 10 men dying on the job every day of the year, every year for decades.
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For a lot of them, they pay really well. If you watch Deadliest Catch, those crab fishermen are routinely earning over a hundred thousand dollars over the season o
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They get paid a lot but are excluded from any regular media discussion as the jobs are dirty, dangerous and worked by 99% men.
High risk, high pay and drastically shortened lifespan (underwater welders is ~40 years) do not necessarily equate to happiness with the job.
https://inspenet.com/en/articu... [inspenet.com]
"This profession is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, with a mortality rate of 15%, requiring up to two years of training. It is estimated that the average life span of an underwater welder is around 3
Software Development (Score:3)
Though some better-paid service jobs also struggle by some measures â" think sales, engineering or software development.
They got that right. Software development is a thankless job. Most of what we hear from people is when our software doesn't work. It's extremely rare that a customer calls with "Thank you, this helps us every day." Every now and then, I get to hear second or third hand about how highly my customers regard my work. Interestingly, the self-employed work I do results in direct adulation by my customers, and gives me the most satisfaction. But I have found VERY little self-employed work because I charge $65/hour. My day job pays the bills, but it is far from satisfying.
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Sounds like you need to go job hunting!
I've found it possible, over my 35-year career, to find numerous highly satisfying jobs. Sometimes, you have to be willing to move for a good job, and that's why I ended up in Houston, that's where the jobs were.
Self employment is hard for software developers in general, because they tend to be introverted. That makes it harder for them to find more contract jobs. My self-employed friend once said that when you're self-employed, you're actually constantly looking for y
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Sounds like you need to go job hunting!
I'm seven to ten years away from retirement from a place I've been at for nearly 24 years, with a house that's nearly paid off, and a family I would have to uproot. I'm going to ride it out and bitch about it on Slashdot instead.
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And THAT is why you feel your job is thankless. They've got you in a deal you can't walk away from. Any time you're in an arrangement you can't walk away from, you are in a bad place. In your case, you're willing to stay with a thankless job, even though you aren't being treated with respect. Why would the company feel the need to change their relationship with you? They know they have you where they want you!
Your experience is not representative of people who are willing to walk away from that hellhole for
We're social primates (Score:4, Insightful)
You want satisfaction? Find a job you can do competently, provides for your needs, helps others in your group (however you have defined that), and gets you that group's appreciation.
Who wouldn't love a government job? (Score:2)
Hell, when you don't have to go into the office hardly ever and nobody checks on you but you still get paid and a raise every year, who wouldn't be "fulfilled"?
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That's not how it works.
Not really relevant, at all. (Score:1)
13,000?
The pompous comments make this ridiculously broad headline far more interesting.
*popcorn*
There is a problem with the metrics (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like you can make any job be best by choosing the right metrics.
A metric I would use would be to use a market perspective. The idea is to find people who are qualified for jobs A and B, A pays better, but they are doing B and have no intention of going for A. It means that B should be an overall better job than A by an amount proportional to the difference in pay. With enough such pairs, it should be possible to establish a ranking. My guess is that artistic jobs will rank quite high, as most artists would be better off pay-wise with a boring office job, but they prefer to practice their art instead.
Invalid survey questions are distressingly common (Score:2)
>...the researchers behind the CEV asked if you agree or disagree with these four statements:
>- I am proud to be working for my employer.
>- My main satisfaction in life comes from work.
-> My workplace contributes to the community.
-> I contribute to the community through my work.
Sigh. These survey questions are all invalid and will skew the survey results. They are presented as positive-leaning statements, which prime the respondent [wikipedia.org] to answer more positively than they otherwise might. A valid
I never wanted to be a barber (Score:2)
Inefficiency (Score:2)
Happy and satisfied employees is usually a red flag to a VC, CFO, or other powers that be that there is inefficiency to be mined. Happy making work means you can either demand more output or pay less, usually both.
Happy jobs these days seem to just be transitory as a result. If you don’t whip your employees, then a competitor will, putting you out of business. Failing that you become a target for acquisition by someone who sees “hidden value” and will squeeze it out by laying off as man
Is the type of job the right consideration? (Score:2)
Is "fulfillment" correlated more to the type of job or other things like the boss, coworkers, compensation, work-life balance, individual personality, or even one's current life situation outside of work?
Of course, this question is sort of fuzzy. "Fulfillment" means different things to different people. We might as well have a discussion about which jobs are "good" or "nice".
I'll wait here for the happy (Score:2)