What no one understands about your job

As someone who has worked in digital media my whole life, I will admit that I don’t know what it’s like to sit down at one’s job and do anything other than write. I’m not alone in this, Derek Thompson reveals. He asked readers what other people just don’t get about their jobs, and pastors, playwrights, postal workers, and others shared their perspectives for his latest piece.?

Maybe the reason these jobs are misunderstood has to do with how we’re educated. As the world shifted priorities to favor standardized testing in the early 2000s, subjects that required skills that couldn’t be quantified were de-emphasized. Today, students have limited exposure to the way everyday things work and are made. The problem, Temple Grandin writes, is best illustrated by math class, where educators “persist in a rigid approach that rewards those who ‘get it’ and leaves the rest—including those with the very kinds of minds our economy and our future most desperately need—with a sense of profound failure.”

This is true for students in elementary-school classrooms and persists all through higher education, where the standardized tests, like wealth and connections, can serve as barriers to entry. If you believe the system is rigged, Evan Mandery has a suggestion: Stop excusing—and donating to—the elite institutions that perpetuate it.

Holding powerful institutions accountable can be thornier than it sounds, as Helen Lewis illustrates in her piece about the controversy at the Guggenheim in the summer of 2020. Was justice served, or was a curator who lost her job merely a scapegoat?

I’ll leave you with two other pieces I’m thinking about this week. As always, Charlie Warzel provides a sharp analysis of the latest Elon Musk vs. Twitter developments, which shatter the myth of the “tech genius.” And while Web3 may conjure images of NFTs and crashing cryptocurrency, Kaitlyn Tiffany reminds us what the original movement for a decentralized internet looked—and still looks—like.

— Kate Lindsay

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From the Archive

“Slackers of the World, Unite!,” by Ellen Cushing (October 2021)

“In 2014, the executives at a brand-new start-up called Andela made a decision whose consequences they would only understand much later. Andela’s model was to recruit and train promising African engineers, then place them at Western tech firms, which meant its employees and clients were scattered across time zones; it desperately needed a way for its distributed workforce to share information and make decisions easily and asynchronously, ideally without subjecting anyone to a deluge of emails. So the company started using Slack.”

Read the full story.?

Last Word

“The trend of teacher and nurse burnout is common on both sides of the Atlantic. The question is what pressure researchers can exert on employers to avoid the ‘educate then exhaust’ cycle from worsening.” — Lydia Dye-Stonebridge on Twitter, responding to “Teachers, Nurses, and Child-Care Workers Have Had Enough”