A good job

A good job is hard to define by a single feature.

Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham tied internal motivation not to one “thing you love” but to how the work is built: variety of skills, wholeness of the task, its significance, autonomy and feedback. Later Adam Grant showed in a field experiment that contact with the people the work actually helped could raise employees’ persistence and results.

Meaning here is not issued in the form of a solemn mission statement. It becomes more convincing when a worker sees a whole task, understands the consequences and has enough independence to consider the result partly their own.

A high salary does not compensate for everything. An interesting task does not cancel bad management. Public benefit does not grant the right to exploit staff. A convenient schedule can come with a professional dead end.

Several axes are worth assessing:

• whether the pay is sufficient;
• the content of the tasks;
• the quality of management;
• autonomy;
• development;
• stability;
• workload;
• the people;
• the effect on society;
• compatibility with the rest of life.

There probably will not be an ideal combination. Then you have to decide which drawbacks are acceptable right now.

Early in a career a person can trade part of their income for learning. After a child is born, part of their ambition for a predictable schedule. Later, stability for autonomy.

This is not inconsistency. The task has changed.

A good job does not have to be a beloved one. It is enough for it to be honest, manageable, sufficiently paid, not destructive and compatible with an important part of life.

Anything beyond that is a serious advantage.

If a job takes away health, dignity and the ability to leave, a high salary turns into compensation for an exit gradually sold off.

The axes are tested against each other, not separately. An offer with a salary a third above the market usually means something else is noticeably worse: the schedule, the manager, the industry or the life expectancy of the position itself. This is not necessarily a bad deal; sometimes that trade is exactly what you need right now. What is bad is when a person does not know what they sold, and a year later explains their exhaustion by their own weakness rather than by the terms they agreed to themselves.

It helps to say the trade out loud on the day you start. “I am trading this for that, and for this long”, written down once, later saves you long conversations with yourself about your character.