I struggled with this at Google, where we were hiring people right out of college to do dull customer-support work. I tried convincing them that we were “funding creativity a nickel at a time.” One young woman who’d studied philosophy in college, called BS immediately. “Look, the job is a little boring,” she said. “Let’s just admit that. It’s OK. Plutarch laid bricks. Spinoza ground lenses. Tedium is
