Tangible things, the value of work
I started reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work at the recommendation of an acquaintance. I’m only 30 pages in, but boy has it got me thinking.
The book aims to rehabilitate the image and value of "manual work" as opposed to “knowledge work.” It describes the satisfaction that can come from having a deep understanding of things — say, a washing machine or motorcycle (the author quit his job to become a motorcycle mechanic) — and the ability to solve their puzzles to work on them. The author underscores the cognitive effort and depth required to develop and apply this sort of expertise, contrary to the notion that manual work is somehow cognitively inferior to knowledge work.
I’m a frontline people manager at a big tech company, far on the knowledge-work end of the spectrum. I’m busy, I’m handsomely paid (for the moment), I do well on performance reviews, and I’m often praised as a great manager. But I never feel fully comfortable accepting that praise or feeling that I’ve earned that money, because I don’t honestly know what value I provide. What does my trade, my craft, consist of? What are the tangible outputs? If my team does well or does poorly, to what extent am I responsible? And how can I prove it?
Sure, I write lots of emails and chats and docs. My calendar is full. Occasionally I’m able to get someone a better performance rating or a promotion (which requires fierce, protracted advocacy these days). There’s some tangible stuff I can point to. But it doesn’t add up to much, especially in the face of how overwhelmed I often feel.
I’ve been laboring under the assumption that this general unease is inevitable in modern work. The book has me thinking I’ve made that assumption far too hastily.
I’m out of minutes for this lunchtime post and nowhere near any conclusions. I’ll close with this excerpt from the introduction of the book, which might help you decide if you’re interested in reading it:
In this book I would like to speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the “opportunity costs” of spending one’s time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.