A Review of Work - Shop Class as Soulcraft

I knew this would happen. Life gets in the way and the blog gets neglected. I've been working like a maniac, organizing a bicycle festival, applying for jobs, and tried to eat an 8lb burger in a single sitting. Busy times, and somewhat relevant to my book review. My biggest reason for not writing more consistently is that last week I had my first interview for a government job. This was a huge breakthrough for me, and even if the job fails to come through, I learned a lot and feel prepared for the next one. I believe I did well, as I spent hours studying the competencies that they would be testing me on. I wrote out answers with specific examples and practiced orating them. I think I know what it takes to do well and I worked as hard as I could. For me, that also means winding down studying the night before and chilling out so that I can relax and push off any anxiety. If I work on memorizing something one or two days before, I don’t need to burn the midnight oil trying to memorize it. It will turn more so on delivery and feeling confident and relaxed, rather than saying the correct words. I felt good.
Every time a job application or interview comes up, I have to reflect back on my past work experience to think of examples. Examples of things like teamwork, dealing with adversity, handling competing priorities, or analytical thinking. Since my “professional” work experience is limited to a couple employers, I frequently draw on experiences from my time with them. It so happens that these were the worst times I’ve ever had in a work environment. Uncertainty, angst, conflict, lack of direction or purpose... these are the thoughts that come up when I think of these places. I can think of things I learned or skills I developed during these times, but I really did not enjoy the experience. So, when I’m asked to discuss the steps I used to manage a project in the past, I need to slot in the specific actions IMy past work experience dealing with "project management" was a ad hoc as it gets. No real budgetary concerns, a constantly changing scope that was beyond my control, a lack of direction from management and virtually no contact with "clients". Most formal project management involves having a solid grasp on all of those areas. My experience was more like getting dropped in a big bucket of mud with my team mates. In the mud bucket were some hints and solutions to our problems and we had to find them on our own. So, we would try hard, and I would work to think about how to best approach our dilemma, even though I had no experience with swimming in buckets of mud. We would eventually find some solutions together. But the solutions were merely how to survive in the mud. In the end we were still stuck in a bucket of mud. We were still alive, but we were covered in crap. Yup, that's what work was like.
Ok, going back to the government hiring process I was in. The interview was actually yhe4 third stage. I had passed the first two. The first stage was being screened in based on my resume. I did a good enough job to links my experience with the competencies they were looking for. My education passed the bar as well. The second stage requested that I complete a written assignment over the weekend. I had to create a 4 slide PowerPoint outlining what I believed was the "role of a project management analyst within a project management office." Here's what I made:

This Angry Birds themed PowerPoint slide got me to the interview stage. I laid out all the magic words, and made a theme that would likely catch the eye of someone with an iPhone and think, "this guy would be fun to work with", or "this guy is young and fun".. or something that would make them want to me. Then came the interview, where again, I had to say all the magic words that tested four distinct competencies. There's the teamwork question, the analytical thinking question, the multi-tasking question, and the "why do you want to work here question". The job actually looked like something I might enjoy. But they continued the interview under the assumption that knowledge and experience with very formal management processes was necessary to perform the work well. The funny part of the PowerPoint that got me in the door is how much it speaks to what they wanted - the formalization, organization and automation of tasks, yet contains a hint at reality - Angry Birds. Can you truly break down the cognitive processes you're going through in a game of Angry Birds that lays out a formal plan that anyone can follow in order to play correctly? Yes, you strategize, execute, learn, etc. But, I'm willing to bet that out of 100 people playing any given level in Angry Birds, each successful player has distinct approaches, bird trajectories, lucky breaks, etc. Going back to an interview, this is often the hardest part to show - your uniqueness, your worthiness because you're you, the fact that a formal process is largely bullshit, and that truly, a PPT slide on Project Management would probably have 25 more slides, and they'd all repeat at some point and get deleted at others along a project's development.

The book I recently read is called Shop Class as Soulcraft - by Matthew B. Crawford. The author holds a Ph.D in Political Philosohpy, once directed a think tank, and is now a full time philosopher, author, and motorcycle mechanic. The book's jacket best describes the author's thesis: Those of us who sit in an office often feel a lack of connection to the material world, a sense of loss, and find it difficult to say exactly what we do all day. For those who felt hustled off to college, then the the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural nets, this book seeks to restore the honour of the manual trades as a life worth choosing... Crawford questions the imperative of turning everyone into a knowledge worker, based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing... Crawford shows us how such a partition, which began a century ago with the assembly line, degrades work for those on both sides of the divide.

I connected with this books on many levels. Firstly, I enjoy labour history. The book focuses a lot on the advent of Taylorist work systems, whereby manual labour became highly automated, de-skilled and broken down into component parts in order to increase productivity and lower costs. This took the brains out of manual work, leading today to the perception that all work that is manual precludes advanced thinking. The author proves otherwise and advocates the merits of the manual trades, particularly those that involve constant learning, intuition, and solid reasoning skills. Like a motorcycle or bicycle mechanic.I enjoy working on my bike, so the book hit home on this point as well. We're not talking here about unscrewing an oil filter, taking a new shiny one out of a box and screwing it on. A machine can do that. Actually, it's scary how much machines are doing now a days. Think about the wheels on those hundreds of thousands of bicycles that Walmart and Canadian Tire sell each year. Each wheel has roughly 32 spokes, a hub that houses the bearings, a rim, and screws for the mounting and tensioning of each spoke (they're actually called nipples. :) Those shitty wheels are built by a machine faster than any man could make them. But they're made far inferior. I won't get into the details, but the spoke pattern is much weaker because of the machine's inability to weave the trailing and leading spokes. The machine also doesn't spend time to gradually load up the tension on the spokes, pre-stress the wheel, etc, etc. The machine can't do a bunch of processes, but it also can't intuit the various sub-processes of wheel building. There are so many things that the wheel builder is thinking about and working on as he builds a wheel. It's a skill that you acquire through experience. It's thinking while doing. It's an art. An it's rewarding. This is the kind of work that the author explores, but in his case, he's looking at complex motorcycle maintenance processes.

The author had a work experience fresh out of his Master's degree that really hit home. He was hired by a company that indexes and creates search tools for academic papers. His job was to take these academic works, read them, and make a abstract or synopsis of the work. This abstract would then be read by those using the search tool to help them check the relevancy of the work to their needs. He noted that it was ridiculous work. Each paper already contained an abstract. He had to make a new one. Who was he to make a new abstract of an academic paper? What could he add beyond the author's abstract that wouldn't just cause confusion or error? This "knowledge" work, he noted, made him feel tired all the time. Unaccomplished and tired. Man, I did this exact same work when I worked for a law firm. It hit home so hard. I was fresh off my BA, and I was sitting in a law firm's library reading human resources academic works by this one major academic, then making new abstracts of the work in order to help a lawyer quickly check it's relevancy to his work. It was ridiculous. And it made me feel tired. And depressed.

I believe there are definitely office or "knowledge" jobs out there that are rewarding, challenging and make one feel accomplished. I believe the government job I recently applied for could have been one of them. The project was not some generic title they threw into the job. The position was a one year, fixed-term contract. The project was very real, and would result in a large government initiative being roled out next Spring. It could have been rewarding and challenging. I also believe that there's a ton of work out there that is bullshit. Most of the people I talk to who work in the military and mid-level government perform bullshit on a day to day. The challenge comes mainly in survival, not in engaging your spirit, your thinking abilities, your thirst for knowledge.

I'll cut this short and say this book is great. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know the feeling of being in control, accomplishing something, and engaging my ability to think on many levels. I currently work a little in a bike shop. The days go by faster, as I'm involved in my work and enjoying the processes. However, I don't want think I'll be a bike mechanic forever. Some day I'll find the work that engages me, pays me fairly, and gives opens up that spirit of curiosity and enjoyment that I get when I work on my bike.


Shop Class as Soulcraft

Overall: 4.25/5 (The book ends a little too abruptly for me. I think it could have been wrapped up a little more consisely.


Next review: I'll explore the idea craftsmanship.