The millennial generation has been called “Generation Multi-Career,” “Job-Hopping Generation,” “Side Hustle Generation,” and more. There's a new name in a new article every time you open social media.
For many, due to student loans, rising rent, and other bills, the side hustle is less a choice for extra money and more a necessity. Slightly different than a necessary hustle but still falling into these new lifestyles of Millennials and Gen Z is the concept of polywork: the rejection of traditional full-time jobs in favor of pursuing multiple jobs to fulfill multiple interests. Someone might work as a social media marketer while also being an investor, a writer, and a podcast host; they might also run a nonprofit, manage investments and field more creative roles such as producing plays.
This approach to work and life has spawned at least one platform expressly for advertising all of your various skills, known as Polywork, backed by such names as Ray Tonsing, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, and Paypal co-founder Max Levchin. The site serves as a social-professional network, like LinkedIn, but one dedicated to showcases, professional portfolios or journals; they want to tell the full story of your career. The early adopters might be exactly whom you’d expect: influencers, developer advocates, designers, models, musicians, lifestyle entrepreneurs, etc. While it’s easier to conceive of those in creative fields or marketing or service roles pursuing multiple jobs at once, we often think of engineering roles as having the more traditional bounds of a full-time position. Given the demands of the work, is polywork possible as an engineer?
One of the longest-standing examples to examine is the freelance or contractor engineer. Often this is someone who joins teams and organizations on a project-by-project basis or for a set period of time. They may also be known as a consulting engineer, often an academic with specialized skills. This means that in order to take on work on the side of the main job with a university, an engineer will have invested a large amount of time and energy and will likely be later in their career. It is also true that a university will often OK consulting work as long as it brings some benefit back into the department; those with full-time industry jobs are far less likely to allow employees to take on work for possible competitors, often stipulating exclusivity in contracts.
Still, none of this quite approaches the idea of polywork, per se. This is about those with engineering skills using them in different areas of one industry or taking on work requiring their specialized skillset as it comes, enabling some more flexibility than a commitment to a single team. Polywork, on the other hand, describes the use of a breadth of skills to pursue many different fields of vocation. This comes at a time when people are not just overwhelmed by the stress of the pandemic but also often asked to wear many hats underneath a single job title, juggling administrative work with academia, or event planning with online marketing.
The platform Polywork conducted a study on their burgeoning workforce, finding that of the 1,000 workers it polled, aged 21 to 40 years old, 55% said an exciting professional life was more important than money, and just 35% said they could see themselves working a single job for life. Nearly 65% said they were already doing more than one job or hoped to, and even more believe that the pandemic has accelerated this trend, dovetailing with the fall in job satisfaction over the course of the pandemic. Polywork’s founders envision it as a shift in the workforce toward entrepreneurship.
Extrapolating this broader data to engineering, an industry less affected by the pandemic than many, may be difficult. Still, the younger members of the engineering workforce, like their Gen Z and Millennial counterparts in other industries, may be more likely to bulk at the prospect of the confines of the stable, single-faceted career. One of Polywork’s advisors is Idan Gazit, the director of research and future projects at GitHub, who says that people struggle with how one-dimensional job descriptions can be. Instead of being asked to “write code and more code,” he asks, “Where can you find people and opportunities to write code but also grow professionally, be given responsibility for outcomes?”
Engineers absolutely have skills that are pivotable. The trick is having the space and time to develop them and to imagine their uses outside of your field. And some do; there are mechanical engineers who are writers or chemical engineers who take public speaking engagements.
Polywork’s founder Peter Johnston makes the claim that as this desire for multi-faceted career develops and expands. Employers will have no choice but to accommodate it. “If businesses do not listen to their talent, we will see those companies start to become dinosaurs,” he said in Digiday.
It may take time for businesses to adapt for polywork to be truly possible for the average engineer, but if truly driven by the entrepreneurial spirit, engineers might well make the push. It is already possible to see hobbyists producing projects found on platforms like GitHub, spinning their interests outside of whatever their work may be into projects that are shared with the community and beyond. These projects encompass the desire for multi-faceted work lives and for filling needs in sectors, industries, and the everyday that are not necessarily part of their standard workday.
Polywork is an acknowledgment of the desire to expand beyond what someone else is asking of you, one certainly present in a community that thrives on sharing knowledge and finding solutions. As labor practices continue to evolve, it is certainly possible for more engineers to find the freedom to pursue other interests.
Cabe Atwell is a father, tech writer, electrical engineer and contributor to Fierce Electronics. He lives in Chicago.