Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford

The ideas in this book really resonated with me. For a while now, my dissatisfaction with technology has been growing, and I sometimes dream of doing “real work,” something more concrete and physical like being an electrician. Crawford hit on many of the reasons why I find knowledge work unnatural at times and made a convincing case that the trades should not be a second-class career path.

I felt a bit disappointed after finishing the book. The ending itself was fine, albeit a bit abstract. (Crawford does have a Ph.D. in political philosophy, and he writes like it.) I found myself wishing there was more I could do to apply what I’d learned, so to speak. Short of making a drastic career change, I’m struggling to know how to take some of the appeal of manual work and bring it to my software development job. Perhaps that’s on me for failing to deeply understand and connect the concepts, or perhaps that’s because the work is just inherently different.

Software development does feel to me like a sort of middle ground between the trades and stereotypical knowledge work, though. Unlike the trades, software is very much divorced from the physical world, and it can be difficult to objectively measure output quantity or quality. But it also has some similarities in that a real, visible, usable product is produced, even if it is virtual. A development task is clearly “done” when the software’s behavior has been changed in the desired way. Many of Crawford’s descriptions of the joys and struggles of motorcycle repair reminded me of how it feels to fix software bugs, too.