There is an old joke — oft repeated — which asks: “Why is a Bengali like sperm.” The answer: Only one in a million works. This was popular when the Left unions ran riot in West Bengal and reduced the state to a backwater of business and industry. Today, you will find different versions of the joke doing the rounds. Just replace Bengali with Tamilian, Punjabi and what have you.

Literature on the subject of happiness at work mainly looks at how to achieve it. We have travelled a long way since the days of Theory X which assumes that people dislike work and must be forced to do it. Their only need is security and work behaviour is tailored to achieve that. Theory Y, on the other hand, holds that people are satisfied in a work environment and naturally try to align their own goals with that of the organisation. Empowerment is the answer to higher productivity and innovation.

Further thought on these lines comes from Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Shorn of its theoretical trapping, “flow” is a state of great concentration, when nothing else seems to matter but achievement of a particular goal. This, postulates Csikszentmihalyi, is the happiest state a person can get to.

This happens very often at the workplace. Csikszentmihalyi’s thesis is that you are happier at work than on a holiday, which seems to mean that you should be putting in 12-hour days to achieve bliss. It starts from a different perspective, but isn’t it poaching on Theory X environment?

There is a lot of research to show that the ecosystem plays a role in this. If the economic conditions are good and jobs are freely available, people tend to be happier at work. When pink slips are flying around, work becomes a chore. Today, work is not at the office or factory alone; with technology (emails and smartphones), you are probably working 12 hours a day.

Is it possible, therefore, to have professions that are the happiest or the unhappiest? It depends, of course, on the individual. Professor C.N.R. Rao was recently awarded the Bharat Ratna. He has spoken his mind on “techies”. He says they are a bunch of unhappy guys who work only for money. Others have been saying that too. Employers have complained that engineers — the pool from which most techies come – are going into IT because that’s where the money is. At this year’s placement at the top engineering colleges in India, there was much satisfaction about the huge salaries on offer. That was on Day Zero, the first day of campus placement, a concept popularised by management schools. The proud placement officers went into hiding soon as most of the batch ended up with very poor jobs; even IT is not hiring the way it used to. Is engineering a happy profession? Here are two bits of evidence from around the world. According to a survey by recruitment site JobsCentral Malaysia, doctors, lawyers and engineers are the unhappiest profession in that country. Reports the Work Happiness Survey 2013: “The lack of jobs available for professional degree holders means that they are among the unhappiest workers in Malaysia.”

From the US comes the news that students at engineering colleges have a lot of long faces. A Forbes analysis of The Princeton Review finds that, over the past few years, most of the “unhappiest colleges' were schools predominantly made up of engineering students. Why? The facile answer is that they have to work harder. But shouldn’t work be fun?

Many engineers at the top schools have this year joined start-ups. Make no mistake, they have gone there for stock options. When money is the prime motivator, theories of happiness go down the tube.

BOTTOM FISHI NG

The unhappiest jobs in America

1. Analyst

2. Dispatcher

3. Program coordinator

4. Pharmacy technician

5. Teacher

6. Senior buyer

7. Clerk

8. Assistant professor

9. Operator

10. Engineer

11. Quality assurance specialist

12. Customer service associate

13. Legal assistant

14. Registered nurse

15. Security officer

16. Driver

17. Cashier

18. Operations supervisor

19. Associate

20. Sales associate

Source: CareerBliss; professions are according to the Standard Occupational Classification of the Bureau of Labor