TED: Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs and innovation

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html

by geuis • 17 years ago

108 30 17 years ago

sprsquish• 17 years ago

The Dirty Job's approach to their show is so perfect. No nonsense, no fear, just show it for exactly what it is.

pjhyett• 17 years ago

Easily one of the best TED talks I've seen. It certainly makes me wonder what I'm contributing to society building GitHub. Not that what I'm doing isn't fulfilling and helpful to others, but rather what more I could be doing.

sho2• 17 years ago

I think you're doing fine. GitHub is infrastructure, and programming is a dirty job.

cottsak• 17 years ago

"...programming is a dirty job"

hell yes!

ejs3• 17 years ago

Programming is not a dirty job for most (maybe if you are a plant PLC programmer)... the shows name is quiet literal, as figurative as you may want this to sound it just doesn't work talking about Mike Rowe. Unless you regularly arrive home showered in feces and tape your pants to your boots before heading into work.

coglethorpe2• 17 years ago

To many programmers, handling source control is certainly a "dirty" part of the job. If GitHub cleans that up, it's a huge win for everyone.

gcheong2• 17 years ago

You're helping to save the world from CVS/SVN.

jrockway• 17 years ago

GitHub is good work, and it's made my life measurably more enjoyable. I'm sure hundreds of other programmers can say the same thing.

If that's not valuable, I don't know what is.

10ren• 17 years ago

I wish I've had a classics education

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anagnorisis

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peripeteia

yan• 17 years ago

I love Dirty Jobs and Mike Rowe is an amazing host. The amount of charisma that man has is insane and the ability to say the right thing at the right time, every time, is something I wish one day to acquire.

coglethorpe2• 17 years ago

He does one very dirty job very well: selling Fords.

peregrine• 17 years ago

Mike Rowe gets it right on so many levels. If Obama really wants to make a difference I think he needs to talk to this guy. He systematically relates to intellectuals and non-intellectuals and does it with ease.

anamax• 17 years ago

Rowe's strengths don't apply to Obama's situation.

Unlike Obama, Mike Rowe isn't trying to tell people what to do and never has to deal with anyone who wants to thwart his goals.

jonknee• 17 years ago

He's what Joe the Plumber should have been.

karl11• 17 years ago

I like his overall message - but I can't help feel a twinge of disagreement that happiness and success do not come from following your passion and your dreams. I think a better way to say it would be that you might not find yourself where you originally dream, but if you have a direction, work hard, follow it, opportunities will come and you will get somewhere fulfilling.

gry• 17 years ago

Reminds me of Joseph Campbell.

"...namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."

jerf• 17 years ago

Are you disagreeing because you have copious experience showing that following your dream leads to happiness, or are you disagreeing because it's what you've been told all your life and you can't easily give the idea up?

Mike Rowe is not necessarily the world's expert on job-related happiness, but he does have a unique and extraordinarily well-traveled perspective. I am not entirely inclined to agree with him either (because of my own personal experience; I am very happy as a programmer, but I note that even many of my coworkers aren't, in the very same environment), but I can't dismiss what he says entirely either, because the man has me creamed on the experience front.

briancooley• 17 years ago

I don't agree with that thought in particular. Here's my take:

http://briancooley.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/17/

For the tl;dr crowd: People that choose dirty jobs are often passionate about something auxiliary to the job.

alex_c• 17 years ago

I'm a big fan of Mike Rowe, and it looks like he's serious about the message he wants to spread. There's more at the site he's starting (started):

http://www.mikeroweworks.com/

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

The thing I love about Mike Rowe is that he's been to hundreds of 'dirty' jobs and has come out with a converse theory on nearly everything we've been told to believe.

We're told we should work as little as possible in a job thats as physically undemanding as possible and believe we should be paid more for it.

The best days work for me was when I had to knock down a wall. I had a 10 lb sledge hammer, a wall I'd wrongly presumed to be cinder block, but was in fact reinforced concrete blocks they used for bomb shelters in WW2. It took me about 6 hours to finally get the wall down and that night I slept like a baby and for like 3 days I don't think it was even physically possible to get annoyed.

I don't know why, but when I work with my hands I always seem to be in a much happier mood, and I think it helps that demolition is just downright stress relieving. IIRC there's a demolition company in the UK where you can pay them to let you rip down a part of an apartment or office building before they tear it down. Apparently they made a lot of money with the idea.

gcheong2• 17 years ago

There are also working "dude" ranches where you get to work like a real cowboy. Some are probably more authentic than others. Not sure about that lamb castration thing though, but I have seen it done in person. I guess that's one benefit of growing up in a small rural town.

nlanier• 17 years ago

You enjoyed it so much because you knew you didn't have to do it for the rest of your life.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

Ha, I'd been doing work like that for a year and I did it for 2 years after that. The only reason I stopped is because I moved out of the country, and I've got a guaranteed job offer to go straight into a construction job as soon as my papers go through.

That's purely work, that's not including the things I've done as favors to people. Helping to build a dock was the most fun, but a weekend of drink and power tools is hard to beat.

I think I need a DNA test, I think I've got some hillbilly in me.

snprbob86• 17 years ago

Discovery Channel is the unsung hero here. Mike Rowe is a fantastic host and narrator, but it is the Discovery Channel which has given him and others the platform to do what so many else have struggled to: get young people interested in science and technology. Sure, a lot of it is overly high-level or pseudo-science or simply mindless explosions... but they sure have done one hell of a job making a lot of traditionally uninteresting things, interesting.

TED: Mike Rowe talks about dirty jobs and innovation

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