> Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation
I have a severely low level of tolerance for this. My first team leader at my first job as a code monkey blatantly took credit for a huge improvement I made to one of the company's long standing processes. It soon became apparent that climbing the corporate ladder meant climbing over the backs of others. I quit 2 weeks later and never returned to a cubicle.
Autonomy is king. Without it, I personally cannot function.
And how do you achieve autonomy if not via taking power? I mean you can work as a contractor, but the game is the same. You either make low pay, or work for someone else, or have the power to govern other people's agenda.
> And how do you achieve autonomy if not via taking power?
For me it was by joining a capital 'P' Profession. It quickly became clear to me that I was never going to be a top tier programmer with the skills to dictate my terms of employment, so I ditched software development for teaching. This made sense in Australia because here the salary is at about the same level as senior software developer with essentially 100% autonomy. I go months without seeing my boss and our interactions consist of not much more than a cordial 'how goes it?'
I have a yearly performance review which is a friendly sit down with the boss in which I, for the most part, set the agenda and generally boils down to a summary of the professional development I've undertaken throughout the year. The meeting runs for 1 hour and has always been conducted as a meeting of equals, not as a shakedown.
The job is mostly performed in isolation which results in collegial interactions that are professional and respectful. After all, the profession is not adversarial. My colleagues have nothing to gain from making me look bad.
I often have to pinch myself when I think about the work I do. I am essentially my own boss without any of the uncertainty, volatility or downside.
If you're thinking of a career to teaching, beware and make your decision wisely. My understanding is that in the US it is a disaster. Poor pay, micromanaged to death with all the joy sucked out via standardised testing. It varies country by country. As always do your homework before making any rash decisions.
I imagine there are other professions that offer similar autonomy. Medicine springs to mind.
Practicing law at a firm is very similar. Even from the beginning when you're at the lowest rung you're given tasks and it's assumed you'll figure it out on your own or go find help. Very little micromanagement. As you progress upwards you gain the autonomy to find your own clients and manage your own files. Eventually you reach a point where no one gives a hoot what you're doing as long as you bill enough hours. Some people I know work from home and only go into the firm once or twice a month.
Regulated profession. In this context, a profession would essentially be a catch-all for paid work. And a Profession would be paid work for a specific regulated body of "Professionals" with a specific designation or exclusive right to practive. Think doctor, lawyer, accountant.
Depends what kind of engineer you're talking about. You need a license to practice Engineering[0] in the US. It's just that software developers aren't considered Engineers.
I was just about to say your experience with teaching is not the same as everywhere, and about to cite my friends that complain about all the petty "office politics" involved in their teaching jobs (between teachers and staff) and how easy it is to get fired (pre-tenure) when a kid decides they want to ruin your day, and generally management is one big cock-up (especially in university)...... but then you got to the paragraph where you said "My understanding is that in the US it is a disaster" and yep, my teacher friends are all in the US.
Damn, I wish teaching here worked like it does for you. I'd have much happier friends, and might consider it myself.
Personally I made some websites and started selling my apps from then. I quickly started making more than most salaried jobs and get complete control without having to be horrible to anybody. I don't understand why more people don't do it.
I think getting ideas is not the hard part, just do some quick or clever search on places like reddit and you can find lots of ideas or suggestions that people have but can't or won't create. As they say, execution is what actually matters.
Maybe you should spend more time making apps, whether they're a good idea or not. Often ideas in an area come from working in the area, solving problems in the area, talking to other people about the area, thinking about the area in the shower ...
Recently had a brief chat with a friend about this, why she wouldn’t consider moonlighting as a freelancer since she seemed to have lost passion in her day-to-day work.
“I wouldn’t be able to handle the added stress” was the response, and I can see why from that answer more people don’t do this. Decide to freelance in addition to doing a 9-5 and you’ll not only put more work on your table but other sorts of responsibilities - accounting, client relations, being your own project manager, etc. - will make it much more harder to decompress if you had a shit day at work.
That's very inspiring but are you talking about something like US $300000/year? Or are you in a low-cost-of-living situation... US$30000/year? "3x the money you make a normal job" could mean a lot of different things !
For me I tend to earn between 120k and 240k USD / year, but I only ever work part time on that job, I used to just spend about 3 months of the year on it, but during those 3 months I would do 100 hour weeks. I'd spend the rest the time traveling for fun. If I was working full time constantly it would be double or triple that by now I think. Right now the sales are slumping a little, but that's because I'm neglecting that work a bit while I pursue my side passion a little more (which will hopefully become profitable later).
The reason the wind got taken out of my sails for creating my own apps is I worked for three small businesses in a row that had trouble getting enough marketing and visibility for their apps/software to sell enough to stay in business, and I'm hesitant to take on the risk myself, even though I think I have better ideas than some of the projects I worked on.
For the Apple store in particular I've seen it get so crowded without adequate app discovery mechanisms in place that it seems like without serious marketing money you're essentially rolling the dice on how successful your app is going to be. I don't really want to spend a bunch of my time on that, when I could spend it on other pursuits.
But maybe this is a mistaken perception? Why do you think it's so simple to do? Just because you've found success or is your approach different than the norm somehow?
Actually, probably not. Sometimes I still make an app that doesn't do too well. I guess this is the downside. To get started you have to be prepared to make several apps (maybe even up to 10) to be reasonably sure you'll start getting a good income.
But when you do get one, it can generate revenue for a long time coming.
I think with some good market research you could probably be more sure though. And also going into partnership with somebody lowers the risk as you can churn out more apps then share the profits when you do get a successful one. Personally I have not had much luck with the Apple app stores because of their crowded/discovery issues etc, but I also have not put much effort into them due to their horrible restrictions (the sandbox is a killer with the way they've implemented it, and a lot of my software needs admin privs to run)
What tends to happen is an executive makes an offhand remark in a meeting about a technology and five mid-level people pick up on it. They each tell 2-3 low level managers to work on it. By the time the project gets to individual contributors it has been distorted and several other groups are trying to deliver a similar project. Individuals just think, "why are we doing this?" because each level hides their intent to impress their boss's boss.
> - Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation
The next time you're on a death march, or even just the "usual" period of "sucking it up" at the end of a schedule, consider that the only people who will actually benefit from hitting the schedule are the project lead and the manager. The schedule is most likely imposed from sales and marketing without consultation.
Death marches and schedule success don't show on your resume unless you're one of those two people; "Brought in X, Y and Z on schedule."
I actually like this because it's probably challenging and ammo at review/promotion time. If it isn't appreciated monetarily then it will just be used as interview content for my next job.
This is a really cool article that goes really well with Daniel Pink's book Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Pink says that people need 3 things to truly feel motivated at work. Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose.
That seems to be based on self-determination theory mentioned in the article that autonomy, relatedness, and competence are human's basic psychological needs.
The link (http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2004_DeciVa...) about self-determination takes you to a paper that references a researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has done a lot of research on optimal experience and has written a great book about it called Flow.
I think Pink was making a even stronger statement than you give him credit for.
His statement in the book is that traditional methods of improving performance -- more pay for more work -- just doesn't work for tasks that require problem solving. In fact, counter-intuitively, experiments have demonstrated lower performance when paid to accomplish problem solving tasks.
What Pink outlines is that to improve performance on problem solving tasks (including creative tasks) you have to provide people with Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy.
The latter thing is often missing from most managerial textbooks since most managerial textbooks seem to have been written for industrial workers where precise control is emphasized. This totally backfires for IT jobs (and other types of jobs), and everyone has seen those disasters.
Maybe I'm wrong, but last I checked, Csikszentmihalyi's research never generated a following except outside of academia like in the media / business gurus. I fear that he's one of the massive names where the attention to his research goes away as soon as he dies.
He also gets a fair amount of attention from game designers, especially those of us who have one foot in academia and one in the industry / "real world".
I completely agree, and I'm glad someone's on this thread reminding everyone about the terrible state that social science research is in.
Human beings are complicated and difficult to study, so I can appreciate the challenge that social science researchers have in front of them. But, propagating conclusions from a field of research that has a 33% reproducibility rate is just negligent journalism. It's not true just because it's in one study and it matches our intuition or something we read in a Malcolm Gladwell book.
> Human beings are complicated and difficult to study
Well that's a positive way to put it. I wonder whether it is possible to find steady cause and effect patterns at all.
Same goes for economy (which IS basically a proxy for human behavior). You can certainly have a go at documenting its history but the present and future are probably not predictable because they are subject to evolutionary responses.
When I had to take an economics 101 class negative interest rates were out of the question and look what we have now.
Same here, especially when the study surveys ordinary workers. People who run larger companies and banks typically score higher on the psychopathy scale (see the documentary "I am Fishhead"). Just because individuals may desire autonomy doesn't mean those type of people make it into leadership roles.
Wait, what? You base your argument for disagreeing with the study on a documentary? You're aware that as bad as the standards for social sciences are, they still run circles around the standards for documentaries, right?
And you're aware that the core part of that documentary is based on an (AFAIK) unreproduced study on psychopathy - by somebody who likely has a vested interest in psychopathy being a problem. (Robert Hare - see www.hare.org)
I'm all for questioning the accuracy of studies, but I'd hope we'd use somewhat higher standards than that.
The original paper was proven to be more alarmist than true. Dan Gilbert's team put out an excellent analysis of the paper and found many poorly performed replications. That being said, it sheds light on the greater problem of p-value hacking that may exaggerate any kind of statistical result
If it is the article I remember, one example was showing that the study could be replicated if done at the same university (which would be years after the first study), but the criticism was that it couldn't be replicated at a different university.
So the criticism of the criticism seems to be quite overstated. If the study can only be replicated at a single university (or even all in a general area), it means that we need to be very careful in generalizing the results. So to the extent that people take a study of one very specific group and generalize to an entire culture (or worse, to all humans), the criticism sticks.
Back when I was getting my psychology degree, there was a joke that 90% of the findings in psychology can only be generalized to broke American college students who are willing to be lab rats for beer money. While that overstates the problem, there is still a lot of truth in it.
Obviously it's not possible to pick a sample size large enough to eliminate all bias. However it's important to pick a sample that doesn't inherently bias the effect that is being measured. This has to apply to both the original and the replication.
The response to the paper points out few examples where the replication was not judicious in picking a sample that minimized its influence on the measured effect. Even besides that, the original study had sampling and scoring procedures which contradicted its original aims.
Lastly, sensationalist headlines of "more than half of all papers are not replicable" are blatantly wrong and not what the original paper even states.
As to your point, I agree that only being able to replicate in one sample type is grounds for skepticism, but more replications have to be done to ensure the replication sample is not the one that is flawed. One can't really draw conclusions unless the replication is repeated a large number of times across a wider sample space.
>However it's important to pick a sample that doesn't inherently bias the effect that is being measured. This has to apply to both the original and the replication.
All this shows is that psychology is less useful that people thing because any data is likely only applicable to the given group. Even if we say the studies are still good, this means that psychology loses the ability to be generalized to others groups beyond the one studied. And given how often psychology has that done to it, we must question every finding all the more.
This is what has been bothering me all day / week and just before I clicked this. I cannot stand being micromanaged. I'm being driven crazy by it now, and it makes me want to go back to entrepreneurship.
Can I ask you a question. Is your boss able to (in practice) fire you?
I have been a manager in situations where I could fire at will and others where I had no ability to fire. When I could fire I could just explain to my reports what needed to be done and leave them to get on with - when I couldn't fire the only way to get the work done was by micromanaging. I hated every moment of micromanaging, but there was no other way to get done what had to be done. Responsibility without power is a nightmare.
BOSS::Make those sales numbers! You have 12 dealers in that territory who should be feeding you leads!
ME(1997)::Uh, boss about that. Those 12 dealers hate my program because they get 10% commission instead of 30% commission like they usually do. They actively work against me! Instead of feeding me leads, they are trying to sell competitors product because they make more money!! They hate my program! They make less money!
BOSS:: (hits loop phase of discussion) You have 12 dealers in that territory who should be feeding you leads! Make those sales numbers or your fired!
ME:: well, shit.
<proceeds to make sales numbers by not telling dealers anything>
When money fell from the sky, dealers didn't seem to care if it was 10% or 30% money because it showed up like free money. 0 effort for them. It was hell working with a group that not only I couldn't fire, the corporation could not even discipline them. They were independent dealers. I could make a sale, and they could refuse to process it (happened a few times). In those cases it was then a no-sale. I had to sell the customer and the dealer. Or do the deal without the dealer knowing about it until they received the check. After a year of free money, the worst dealer became the best dealer. He had been around 30 years, a grumpy old codger who was king of his area and all his customers trusted him 100%. His change in opinion (in his area alone) was worth about $25,000 a year in commissions in 1998. Thanks again Bob!
I vowed to myself to never get in a position where I had all the responsibility to make something happen, but none of the authority to make it happen. That vow has kept me out of some situations, and whenever I break it is when I get miserable again. Then I re-vow ...
I can concur with this. I actually have responsibility for two teams at present in a way - one team I can fire all of and the other that even people three levels above me cannot it appears because of contractual relationships that are stronger than anything else. Even though someone had one of my team members fired, he couldn't fire everyone because both of the teams I have some responsibility for are different contracting companies.
The team that I can't fire is the team that I consider a net negative amount of work performed because I or another person I delegate has to do their work for them repeatedly. They have shown no capacity to learn (we have to write runbooks for them still to the detail that we should just write a shell script with the time spent, so now we have unreliable humans that are executing bash scripts).
> Miles leaned forward into the vid pickup. [...] "If you surrender quietly, I can control what happens. If ImpSec has to detain you by force, it will be up to chance, chaos, and the reflexes of some overexcited young men with guns and gallant visions of thwarting mad Komarran terrorists."
> [...] "If you unleash ImpSec, the consequences will be your doing," said Cappell.
> "Almost correct," Miles agreed. "If I unleash ImpSec, the consequences will be my responsibility. It's that devil's distinction between being in charge and being in control. I'm in charge; you're in control. You can imagine how much this thrills me."
-- A standoff in "Komarr", by Lois McMaster Bujold
Micromanagement is so corrosive to my motivation. I've worked retail for a long time, and it seems that managers with that tendency are usually pushed out. Telling people how to do Every. Single. Little. Thing. is the surest way to foment dissent and resentment. I'm tired of the inconsistency of the skill of people with authority over me, so am now fully pursuing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Freedom, autonomy, I suddenly realize, are paramount to my contentment.
I seriously doubt if he ever would (not only "you" but pretty much anybody). And IMHO it tells a lot about both parties involved in a micromanagement situation (and - to an extent - about the situation itself whose creation they have been active/passive part of).
As a shill for libertarian socialism, i am obviously glad to see controlled experiments that validate my prejudices about human nature. I switched jobs a few months ago from a steady job with good benefits to a less steady job with no benefits because it gave me far more autonomy and independence. I know many people who are very ambitious and want to be their own bosses: few of them want to rule others. In fact, of the bosses i know, all of them are frustrated by having to order and direct people.
There is one pattern of thought that i think is missed by this experiment, but another one could just as well measure it too and i hope someone decides to: it's easier to order people to do what you think is right than it is to convince them that you are right. I think under circumstances where a person feels frustrated that their point of view isn't being validated by others they will have a greater tendency towards authoritarian power as opposed to autonomous power.
Certainly, how many of us have gone through the phase of growing up where we think that if everyone just listened to us and did what we said, everyone would be better off? I think well intentioned paternalism is a greater cause for authoritarian desires than narcissism and ego validation.
Lest we forget, that well-intentioned paternalism is sometimes entirely on target: on Reddit at the moment there's a link 'Engineer Who Blamed Himself For Not Stopping Challenger Launch Dies' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/challenger-engineer-bob-...
How on earth could one consider that case to exemplify paternalism in any fashion? "Detail-oriented engineers overruled by schedule-obsessed management." Film at eleven.
He talked about bringing a shotgun to work to stop the launch. Perhaps it would be better to say it exemplifies what the paternalists imagine they are doing.
One could more easily see the managers as the 'parents' who thought they knew better than the engineers below them, though, making it say quite the opposite of what you are trying to say.
The classic explanation is from E. Fromm, The Art of Loving with, to paraphrase,
"For humans the fundamental
problem of life is getting
a feeling of security in the
face of the anxiety from
our realization that alone
we are vulnerable to the hostile
forces of nature and society."
rough quote from memory.
So, alone we feel vulnerable. So, we want security in the face
of that vulnerability.
Notably, Fromm does not say that
money or power will give that
feeling of security and, instead,
claims that the first recommended
solution is a good romantic
relationship, that is, with
"knowledge, caring, respect,
and responsiveness" where the knowledge means the couple
readily exchanges knowledge
of themselves.
Sure, one can try to use
autonomy and self-sufficiency, and those via, say, money and/or power to get the feeling of security. But if only by
omission, Fromm is saying that
being so alone won't work well.
My entire concept of office politics is based on a work by Fromm, Escape From Freedom. His Premise in the book is that people don't want to have to make decisions or be responsible, that they would rather have other people make decisions for them. He makes a point there there is a relationship, like a ratio, between being responsible and freedom. People would gladly give up freedom over being responsible.
This is something I struggle with. A part of me just wants to put my brain on autopilot and simply let my manager tell me what to do. That usually doesn't end well for me.
However, I realize that people who want less responsibility and make no decisions are looking for a sense of stability and security in their lives. They want to wake up each morning, go to work, come home, and get paid on a regular basis. They want the regular paycheck.
The irony of this, of course, is that this course of action is no less risky than entrepreneurship, because, at a moment's notice, your employer could fire you and destroy the illusion, even if you've worked over a decade for them. No matter what path you take in life, you need to own it. The days of working for a company for a few decades following a defined path were brief.
You need to find a more healthy relationship then! Seriously though, in my experience, for what it's worth, my wife has never been interested in being married to someone who was wealthy, high status, and so forth; she is more interested in my being responsible and available. If I was to make a ton more money it probably wouldn't help our relationship much, but if I was to lose my job by being irresponsible that would probably hurt it.
I don't think the distinction between autonomy and influence/power is so clear-cut in practice.
The article defines autonomy as the absence of unwanted influence. But in a human society, unwanted influence is not something you can simply opt out of. Having autonomy without isolating yourself from the rest of the society means having at least some degree of influence over those who would like to influence you in unwanted ways.
As long as there are people out there (politicians, marketers, burglars, terrorists, etc.) who are trying their damnedest to influence you, the only way you can achieve autonomy is to be able to tell them to get the fuck off your lawn. Sometimes you need to push people physically off your lawn. Sometimes you need to kill them, because they would kill you if you don't. An autonomous person without effective power will quickly cease to be autonomous.
So autonomy is just another form of power. Some might even say that everything is power, and it's not just empty rhetoric.
Makes me think of something i ran into about the freedom concept that was bouncing around at the time of the American revolution (and thus inspiring and influencing the founding fathers).
I think it boiled down to freedom being the absence of coercion in any form.
Well, it's different things at work, right? Yes on one side people want autonomy. This very much so applies to many developers. But power is actually also exciting, for some people even sexual. Why do I think that? Well, computer games and porn for instance. In both you already get your agenda. But there are games and porn that gives you explicitely power over another (virtual) person. And people still like that, when they already have power over themselves.
To add to this: Women are attracted to men who are leaders, be that in the work place, in social situations or, yes, in the bedroom. A lot of books on seduction advocate this.
"Mostly", because quite a few people still just want control over others. And someone striving for "autonomy" through power still just wants to make you a tool for achieving their autonomy.
I remember seeing a talk a while back where the presenter was attempting to define the utility function that characterizes intelligent agents. His thesis was that an intelligent agent would work to maximize, up to some event horizon, its number of possible courses of action. This reminded me of that talk - money, power, etc... are all ways to increase one's freedom of choice and thus autonomy.
I'm sure I was reading results of studies > 10 years ago, about stress levels of people within some number of large organisations, and finding people towards the top of the hierarchy were less stressed than those at the bottom. It was possibly speculative, though I'm sure I recall they'd confirmed it somehow, that it was due to people towards the bottom of an organisational structure had far less control over what their day or week looked like, and how they could plan out their tasks, than those at the top.
I don't mean to be glib - but they needed a study for this?
I think this is one of the primary reasons people have chased power for millennia - either to have control over themselves, change the world they live in, or lord over (seek retribution) those who've wronged (done arbitrary things to) them (perceived or otherwise).
Reminds me of a Jimmy Carr joke: "I was in a taxi when the driver said 'I love my job! I'm my own boss and nobody tells me what to do!'. I said 'Great. Now take a left here!' "
When doing something a customer asks for, you are doing something for someone's benefit (usually...).
When doing something the boss asks for, well, you may never know whether it makes any sense to anybody at all if the company sufficiently detaches employees from the results of their work. There are places where you just feel like you are wasting time for nothing.
Besides that, you can always (but not too often ;)) tell some particularly annoying customer to leave and pick up another one.
My view has been that someone always works for someone else. Even the most powerful board members answer to shareholders and entrepreneurs answer to their customers - lest they go out of business.
Tell me about why you don't think you have to answer to your customers.
Customers are a constraint, to be sure, but so are the laws of physics. Customer preferences are just market conditions, and adopting to market conditions is closer to dealing with physical constraints in your product design than it is to being told what to do by your boss.
I mean, sure, in some sense you're "working for" your customers and "working for" a boss, but that's just using the same phrase to describe two fundamentally different relationships. Customers have no meaningful say in anything beyond buying your product or not; they can't dictate culture, they can't play politics, they can't drag you down with pointless meetings... etc.
Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent. Especially for consumer-oriented products, they're faceless. In a hierarchy, you have one immediate boss and a some bounded number of executives above them, all of whom operate more or less as a single entity. You can't just decide to ignore a segment of your management the way you can change focus to a different class of clients. And you have to deal with your boss one-on-one in a way that you can avoid for any individual customer.
And hey, customers don't misbehave in the same ways. They fundamentally can't micromanage or claim credit for your work. Any customer by themselves probably has relatively little direct power over you which means they have less latitude to be jerks and if they are, it's easier to deal with.
Obviously, this isn't true for all customers. If you're beholden to a small handful of large customers or you're consulting, the relationship is a lot more like having a boss. But for consumer-oriented products and any businesses that scale—basically anything you could reasonably describe as a product—having customers is completely different from having a boss.
I believe this is the most important difference, at least for me:
> Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent
This gives me freedom. Sure, it would be best if I just received a one billion dollar gift (I don't think small :P) but until then, having the freedom to choose what projects I'm willing to work on is amazing.
You could also formulate the issue in terms of "alienation," that is, the degree to which you feel a real relationship based on your own volition and desire... like, you aren't beholden to someone else's promises, you get to keep whatever profit you make, etc.
Your customer may dislike your work, but you have power to change your work,just time and energy. Your boss may dislike you, but you can't have the time and energy to change enough to please him. Difference between engineering something and politicizing something.
Even when running a business I don't think you necessarily have to answer to customers, and you are certainly not forced to answer to shareholders or board members if the company is not structured in such a way to necessitate that.
The only one or thing you absolutely have to answer to is the market, people can complain all they want about whatever they want, but so long as there are people who will open their wallet you really don't need to pay attention. This is completely different from typical boss-employee relationships, you're solving a problem in an autonomous fashion not following orders.
Really important distinction: if you fire a customer you've lost some of your income; if you fire your boss (i.e. you quit) you've lost all your income.
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
>"My view has been that someone always works for someone else."
Taking that thought exercise a step further--I've tried to think of professions where one truly is beholden to no other individuals.
The only thing that comes to mind is a securities trader. If you are trading, sure the markets change, but you can make money on the upside or downside, and you really don't have any "customers." Now in theory you can be part of a larger bank, and being a solo trader can be harder, but it is possible.
Are there any other careers where one truly is independent and accountable to ones self and nobody else?
Some artists get to a place where no fucks are given. If there's adequate money from royalties or an inheritance or donations or marriage - even if it's not much in absolute terms - then there's no external pressure to produce.
E.g. A composer called Conlon Nancarrow spent most of his life in Mexico, punching holes in player piano rolls to make music that was impossible for humans to play.
He was pretty much ignored until he was 65, by which time he'd been writing music with no audience for most of his life, making next to no money from anything.
His career finally took off in a big way when he got a MacArthur award at the age of 70.
Another would be professional poker player, an idea I toyed with for awhile. You have customers in the same way sharks have customers. Every other person at the table could hate your guts (though that's not optimal), but they'll still sit there and give you money, provided you're sufficiently skilled.
The two professions are pretty similar - they both involve a zero sum game you're playing against other people.
Its more about minute-to-minute autonomy than answering to a person/customer per se. With the customer you still retain control over your day to day ... if I feel like going to the dentist on Tuesday, and then going to watch a matinee after lunch because I felt like it, I'll do it, and the customer will never know about it ... can't do that at most fulltime jobs.
Working independently definitely does not save one from BS and playing by the rules. However, I think the main distinction is that it feels less "personal".
In a poorly-run hierarchy, having a manager means playing along for someone else more powerful, playing along with their personal politic, etc. That can be very distracting and exhausting, because for less-adequate managers it involves a lot of mental effort. And, importantly, it feels very person-centred rather than craft- or value-centred.
Contrast that with freelance work: yes, clients can be very difficult to deal with, and in fact may require more "high touch" interaction. However, at that stage it is just a social contract, customer service, explicitly outlined interaction. And the relationship is transactional from the outset, there is a clear value focus. Plus, one could theoretically fire their client and move on (although that is not always realistic).
As another comparison, let's look at a trades job in a highly unionized company: it can actually be quite liberating, because promotion and career track are again detached from specific personal impressions and set to a highly regulated and enforced schedule. People feel empowered, because it is a shield of sorts (albeit one that comes with costs as well).
So in poorly run companies, you're selling a style of personal interaction rather than your ability to create value. I'm guessing in poorly run companies the company must resort to over paying for talent, (otherwise they can switch to better managed companies easily) and that premium could be selling the compliance to be poorly managed.
While you have more autonomy in some ways, you have less autonomy in others. Instead of a boss, you have clients you need to satisfy if you want to remain in business. And not everyone can be picky when it comes to clients, especially in a competitive market.
My feeling is that it is impossible to achieve autonomy in the workplace for no other reason than the fact that the factors for what you end up doing in day-to-day job is, ultimately (if not immediately), dictated by the investors of the company. Essentially I am exchanging my skills, expertise and time for money.
If not investors, then who? My point would still remain, and it getting down-voted to oblivion is not going to change the factuality of it (else, someone would have contradicted it by now).
Even workers cooperatives have investors (the workers themselves). Unless you have a business with no capital requirements then you must have investors.
Sure but we are talking about this in the context of being autonomous. So while you could say that you yourself are the investor, it ultimately doesn't matter for the overall argument.
- Being forced to do work assigned to someone else.
- Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation
- Being forced to appear as though under someone else's control (other than direct manager)
- Being forced to do the more dangerous, risky, difficult, or thankless work
- Being forced to do work far below one's qualifications
- Being forced to take over failed projects or projects that have already been rejected by upper management.