Can We Get Freedom From Our Jobs ?

The one thing that all of us love is freedom. Freedom is something fundamental to the nature of humans. Whenever someone tries to curb our freedom, we feel agitated. History is a great example of this. All the countries under foreign rule fought for years, even centuries to gain freedom. This concept of freedom is not just for bigger things like freedom of a country. Even at the level of our everyday lives, we all crave for freedom. I want to explore this concept in the context of our work life.

I am very sure that the majority of us always wanted to do great work. When we completed our studies and entered the job life, we were not the person who wanted to slack off in their work. As engineers, we wanted to build great things that benefit the users, and earn a living while doing good work. But as years passed by, a lot changed for most of us. The feeling of enjoying our work slowly started going away. If we think about it deeply, many times the reason behind this change in attitude was lack of freedom on how we do our work.

Every company comes up with lots of processes on how a certain thing should be done. This leaves very little wiggle room for actual creativity. At times, you have to deliver a project under tight deadlines, even if it means medium quality work. You have very little to no say on how deadlines work. At times, the priorities are inclined towards growing the business or promotion of your leadership rather than doing the right thing for the users. This results in building features without much demand. You end up questioning whether your work is worth enough or not. And you have very little to no say in what the product roadmap will look like.

Above are some examples of how you start seeing the lack of freedom in your work. The enthusiasm you started with when you were a fresher starts fading away, and you start to see through the robotic nature of your work. If you think deeply, leadership in any organisation is focussed around building processes which the employees can follow. While these processes truly improves the organisation’s efficiency and reduces the errors, they end up leaving very little room for creativity. In short, they end up killing the freedom of the employees as they are supposed to follow those processes as much as possible.

So if you see, this freedom plays a crucial role in all aspects of our life, from our country level, down to our daily work life. We feel agitated when our freedom gets curbed. This results in a feeling of dissent against our 9-5 jobs. Unfortunately, I do not have a quick solution to this, but I feel that just knowing deeply about our thoughts helps us get over them. We need to know that our feeling of negativity in our jobs is not because of some bad manager or bad technology we are working on. The very nature of every job is such that it restricts our freedom. Changing jobs would not help much, it will just delay our feelings for a short period of time.