10 ms·

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful,

This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely killed it, I was paid well for the time, everyone was happy. When I moved on and was given the respect and decision making ability that I wanted - same thing. Absolutely smashed it out of the park, money flowing from every plug socket. Whenever I've been in a working environment that has cost cutting, or bureaucratic bollocks, or management that decide what's best for the employees rather than asking them - my productivity has been horrendous, the company has lost money. Every single time I've worked without return - burnout. Every time, without fail. This extends outside of work. The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money, to just thinking - you know what? No-one outside of your immediate circle cares. They never did, and never will. They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing. And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless. Well, you know what? Fuck you guys, I'm getting mine now.

throwanem 6y ago
Okay. And what does that have to do with the article under discussion?
- esotericn 6y ago
  The entire article is about people who are treated as human beings being more effective at their jobs. I'm saying that this applies at every level of the scale, in work, love, friendship, society, everything. We are wasting mind-bendingly tremendous amounts of talent in our world simply because of tunnel-vision mindsets. And it saddens me that as hard as I try, I can't change this. I've spent my career trying. The well has run dry, and now I'm one of them. :/
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Oh, I see. The culture in which you and I and many others live is, in the current historical moment, a deeply deranged one - 'deranged' not in the colloquial sense, but as an engineer might use it: we live within a giant machine which for a long time now has been operating dangerously far outside its design parameters, with all the metaphorical noise and smoke and flying bits of molten steel that entails. We're all dodging its shrapnel all the time, to a greater or lesser degree. Or failing to dodge. I forget who said it, but I like the way it's put in this (paraphrased) quote: "Everyone is walking wounded. We have never seen a totally sane human being." - not even in the mirror. Even in the best of times, such a machine needs a large team chosen from among the best of people to operate it effectively. These are not the best of times, and they are not the best of people. Whether there'll be any fixing it before the bearings seize and the spindles snap, I've no idea. But even if they run it to destruction, that won't be the end of the world, although from here it seems like it would be. And either way - in the meantime, we all still have to get through the day, you know? It's to your credit that you tried so hard. But there's no shame in losing to something that's this much too big for any of us. Try not to take on too much about it, and spend some time thinking about how it, and you, might be if the machine does stop in your lifetime.
    - loopz 6y ago
      It's simple. Human to human, one at a time. Skip the interactions that discount you.
      - esotericn 6y ago
        I like this sentiment. :)
nextos 6y ago
> The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money [...] This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter. I see it everywhere. In academia, most big PIs I've met don't care about pushing knowledge frontiers. It's about their own careers, putting their names on as many manuscripts as possible and securing funding to hire more and more people. In my neighbourhood teens are systematically breaching COVID restrictions with huge illegal parties, spreading disease and therefore causing fatalities. Since the odds of having severe COVID are low for them, they don't care. The local power plant was scamming with their emissions in a VW-like way, by tampering CO2 meters in their chimneys. I could go on and on. How can we address these behaviors? Pg has said somewhere I can't find now that scaling big companies is still an unsolved problem, and that solutions are welcome. I think it's the same class of issue. Once you are big enough to require a layer of middle management, you won't be able to filter out the selfish ones.
- esotericn 6y ago
  Amusingly, without realising it, your post specifically hits on the reason I'm done with society. It's individualism for me now. Me, my friends, the neighbours. Everyone else, figure it out, I'm not your pawn.
  - ctdonath 6y ago
    Hence the American Revolution and subsequent Constitution: enough government to keep the basics together, otherwise do whatever you want. ...and occasional civil wars (small and large) reminding leaders to keep it that way.
    - krapp 6y ago
      >...and occasional civil wars (small and large) reminding leaders to keep it that way. And yet, oddly enough, countries with regular civil unrest tend not to be bastions of civil liberty, but violent mafia-run hellholes.
pgsimp 6y ago
Presumably companies that don't pay you well are already struggling, so their problems (that you were put to work on) were also more of a struggle. Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees. I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees like that, you would be just as successful". That seems a bit silly.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Of course not. But you mention causation. You have to treat your employees well if you want to be successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
  - pgsimp 6y ago
    It just seems too simplistic to me. Sometimes there is struggle. Taking an extreme example, soldiers at war. Are they generally being treated well? I'm not sure they are, and I don't necessarily mean deliberately. I don't think generals want their soldiers to be killed, in general. It just happens that situations arise where there is struggle and soldiers get killed. I remember complaints about CD Projekt Red (makers of Cyberpunk 2077) who had to ask for death marches despite of initial promises to ever do so. I don't think they liked doing that, but presumably the business situation made it necessary.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Considering how quickly CP2077 became profitable I doubt it's a good example of necessary death marches. Quite the opposite. I suspect they could have delayed until winter 2021 and still turned a profit easily.
      - pgsimp 6y ago
        They would have had to survive long enough, though. Profits in the future don't help you to pay your bills in the present.
diob 6y ago
I'm still early in my career (around 32, 8 years in), and I can heavily relate to what you said at the beginning. The company I work for recently got acquired and the entire culture changed to one of "fuck the engineers, only contracts matter, engineers are just butts in seats, the more the better (quality not required)". My boss is constantly turned down when he tries to advocate for me, or say that I deserve a slight bonus. At this point, I have had all productivity beaten out of me. I really don't understand the mindset. It's been a crash course on how to take a wonderful company and burn it to the ground in a matter of less than 2 years. Most of my coworkers have moved on at this point, and each contract they got out of it has now failed. So what the fuck was even the point? How do you have 40% turnover and not think "Am I the problem?"?
- foogazi 6y ago
  Shit happens, why are you still there?
  - Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
    When you are working for a good company that values you, and embedded in a good team that also values you, there is a bonding that occurs that goes deeper than your average commercial exchange. If you have never been in this position, you may not understand the emotional difficulties involved in watching such a place slowly burn to the ground. Old timers usually still feel loyalty to those of their coworkers who are still sticking around; if the poster's boss is a good leader and strong advocate for them, which it sounds like they are, this can be even harder. People build a lot of loyalty towards good leaders. Sure, it's emotional stuff, and the purely rational actor would dip without question. But having emotions is healthy and normal, even if it means they sometimes lead you to somewhat suboptimal situations. Of course, it can reach a point where people get locked in out of fear of the unknown, just like bad relationships. But it's rarely as easy as just saying "Okay, time to leave."
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      I can't find a single thing to disagree on in your excellent comment but there's one more nuance: "When is the time to let go?" This goes for all areas of life: intimate relationships / marriages, employment, being part of a hobby club that's not the same anymore, local community help (donations, voluntary labor etc.). We the people are extremely bad judges of when is the right time to leave -- and 99% of the time we leave way too late. Usually after getting some deep emotional scars as a bonus. In hindsight (which as they say is 20/20) every time in my life after I left any kind of interaction between me and other people / companies, it was well after I should have. But only in retrospect. I gradually learned to recognize the signs and started to escalate problems early. And if they aren't addressed, leave early. Life is too short to keep a death grip on things that are poisoning you. It seems every one of us learns this lesson very late in life.
mulmen 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, your experience resembles my own. Can you explain your change of heart? You mention it happened in the last year but I’m not sure why. If anything this last year has motivated me to do even more. And I believe we can and will, but I am in a good place professionally. Are you speaking more personally than professionally? It sounds like maybe you did achieve some of what you set out to do but maybe you don’t think it was enough?
- esotericn 6y ago
  The way that my country has, and is handling the coronavirus pandemic, has meant that their vision of the future of society has diverged from something that I wish to be a part of. It's not about my accomplishments, but whether I feel like I have a stake in this. I have no stake in it now. They want a future that I don't want. No social ties, no bonds, no community. No counter-culture. No culture. No high street. No shopkeepers. Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber, Facebook, Netflix. Skyrocketing wealth inequality. Printing, printing, printing, QE, home prices ten times the median wage. An elite, and an underclass. A society that interacts, in a regulated manner, through a screen. By _force_. Because it's "safer". De-risked. Comfortable. And their answer for me? Therapy. Anti-depressants. Coping strategies. Learn to love the screen. Embrace the new future. Not me. Your insults, your attempts at control, they bounce off me now. "I'm alright, Jack", as they say.
  - dddd4alll 6y ago
    There's an old movie called They Live, starring wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. It was supposed to be satire on consumer culture. Looking at it again, it's could be called forward time shifted documentary. Now that you've become "Red Pilled" as wrong thinker, you'll search out for more truths. Especially how the establishment elite class pushes propaganda and pits the lower classes against each other. When lower classes are fighting each other about racism, etc. then they don't have time to fight against oligarchy. How the establishment elite keeps getting richer every second.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Is mask wearing, temporary social distancing, and vaccination asking too much from the individual to sustain the weakest and most vulnerable in society?
Jochim 6y ago
I think the most important thing for motivation and empathy is a sense of agency over one's own life and actions. When you feel like you have no control over what you do each day or don't have the freedom to make meaningful choices, it's very easy to slip into depression. I've experienced similar situations professionally. My previous employer was happy to hear and implement ideas from anyone on the team, it lead to a really productive and tight knit group, things got done well and at a good pace. My current one is the opposite. Very prescriptive, ideas coming from the top down. As a result everythimg moves like molasses and it's killed all the motivation I have for the work I do there. I'd urge you not to give up. I still believe things can change for the better, it feels like we're at a tipping point where society will either improve massively or fall into stagnation. Gen Z gives me hope that the former will win out. They seem much more active and interested in tackling these issues than older generations.
A12-B 6y ago
I can't really blame you, a bad system rewards this kind of individualism, and individualism then feeds into a bad system. In a better world we would consider human beings not as decentralised entities but as one big connected mass, and fixing poverty would actually raise everyone up.
- cccc4alll 6y ago
  Who controls the bad system now and who controlled the bad system in the past? Why is it not getting better? Who keeps getting richer every second, while everyone else stagnates?
jart 6y ago
This is the biggest steaming pile of bull I've seen on HN. Like a monologue from an Adam Sandler movie. https://youtu.be/LQCU36pkH7c https://youtu.be/LQCU36pkH7c
- esotericn 6y ago
  You're welcome. <3
vmception 6y ago
I like to imagine this is Gavin Newsom
eyelidlessness 6y ago
I think the thing you’re missing, probably because of whatever motivated you to use “prole” without irony, is you’re not a prole and don’t experience the economic impact of being inherently undervalued. People who never experience compensation resembling what they “put in” and are constantly navigating burnout. It’s not egotistical it’s just a matter of perspective. Most people don’t get to decide or don’t have enough energy to decide to “get mine” even if they knew where to begin.
- esotericn 6y ago
  You are absolutely right on every point. There was a time, when I was. And I've been blindingly lucky to crawl, bit by bit, out of that. But I still identify with that, because precisely the same societal decisions that fuck me, are the ones that fuck them too. I owe them something. They're still struggling. I don't owe the rest of society anything at all.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    I suspected that was in the mix and wanted to leave space for you to say so. I’ve been on this track too. This is why my approach is to extract as much value out of my privilege as I can and funnel as much of that as I can to my people who don’t share that privilege.
giantg2 6y ago
At least you've had good money coming in. I've been burnt out. I've knocked it out of the park. But I've never seen really good pay or even authority.
IntFee588 6y ago
There are quite a few studies that support this; higher earners generally work more hours, since their time is more valuable. The only exception is at extremely high income brackets. Minimum wage earners are being paid to show up. https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-longer-hours https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-long... Companies that are better to work at have generally seen more growth in their stock price: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/04/Stock-Returns-2020-Glassdoor-Final-Reduced.pdf https://www.glassdoor.com/research/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/... Doubt these findings will change corporate policies however.

throwanem 6y ago

Okay. And what does that have to do with the article under discussion?

esotericn 6y ago
The entire article is about people who are treated as human beings being more effective at their jobs. I'm saying that this applies at every level of the scale, in work, love, friendship, society, everything. We are wasting mind-bendingly tremendous amounts of talent in our world simply because of tunnel-vision mindsets. And it saddens me that as hard as I try, I can't change this. I've spent my career trying. The well has run dry, and now I'm one of them. :/
- throwanem 6y ago
  Oh, I see. The culture in which you and I and many others live is, in the current historical moment, a deeply deranged one - 'deranged' not in the colloquial sense, but as an engineer might use it: we live within a giant machine which for a long time now has been operating dangerously far outside its design parameters, with all the metaphorical noise and smoke and flying bits of molten steel that entails. We're all dodging its shrapnel all the time, to a greater or lesser degree. Or failing to dodge. I forget who said it, but I like the way it's put in this (paraphrased) quote: "Everyone is walking wounded. We have never seen a totally sane human being." - not even in the mirror. Even in the best of times, such a machine needs a large team chosen from among the best of people to operate it effectively. These are not the best of times, and they are not the best of people. Whether there'll be any fixing it before the bearings seize and the spindles snap, I've no idea. But even if they run it to destruction, that won't be the end of the world, although from here it seems like it would be. And either way - in the meantime, we all still have to get through the day, you know? It's to your credit that you tried so hard. But there's no shame in losing to something that's this much too big for any of us. Try not to take on too much about it, and spend some time thinking about how it, and you, might be if the machine does stop in your lifetime.
  - loopz 6y ago
    It's simple. Human to human, one at a time. Skip the interactions that discount you.
    - esotericn 6y ago
      I like this sentiment. :)

nextos 6y ago

> The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money [...] This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter. I see it everywhere. In academia, most big PIs I've met don't care about pushing knowledge frontiers. It's about their own careers, putting their names on as many manuscripts as possible and securing funding to hire more and more people. In my neighbourhood teens are systematically breaching COVID restrictions with huge illegal parties, spreading disease and therefore causing fatalities. Since the odds of having severe COVID are low for them, they don't care. The local power plant was scamming with their emissions in a VW-like way, by tampering CO2 meters in their chimneys. I could go on and on. How can we address these behaviors? Pg has said somewhere I can't find now that scaling big companies is still an unsolved problem, and that solutions are welcome. I think it's the same class of issue. Once you are big enough to require a layer of middle management, you won't be able to filter out the selfish ones.

esotericn 6y ago
Amusingly, without realising it, your post specifically hits on the reason I'm done with society. It's individualism for me now. Me, my friends, the neighbours. Everyone else, figure it out, I'm not your pawn.
- ctdonath 6y ago
  Hence the American Revolution and subsequent Constitution: enough government to keep the basics together, otherwise do whatever you want. ...and occasional civil wars (small and large) reminding leaders to keep it that way.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >...and occasional civil wars (small and large) reminding leaders to keep it that way. And yet, oddly enough, countries with regular civil unrest tend not to be bastions of civil liberty, but violent mafia-run hellholes.

pgsimp 6y ago

Presumably companies that don't pay you well are already struggling, so their problems (that you were put to work on) were also more of a struggle. Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees. I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees like that, you would be just as successful". That seems a bit silly.

lostcolony 6y ago
Of course not. But you mention causation. You have to treat your employees well if you want to be successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
- pgsimp 6y ago
  It just seems too simplistic to me. Sometimes there is struggle. Taking an extreme example, soldiers at war. Are they generally being treated well? I'm not sure they are, and I don't necessarily mean deliberately. I don't think generals want their soldiers to be killed, in general. It just happens that situations arise where there is struggle and soldiers get killed. I remember complaints about CD Projekt Red (makers of Cyberpunk 2077) who had to ask for death marches despite of initial promises to ever do so. I don't think they liked doing that, but presumably the business situation made it necessary.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Considering how quickly CP2077 became profitable I doubt it's a good example of necessary death marches. Quite the opposite. I suspect they could have delayed until winter 2021 and still turned a profit easily.
    - pgsimp 6y ago
      They would have had to survive long enough, though. Profits in the future don't help you to pay your bills in the present.

diob 6y ago

I'm still early in my career (around 32, 8 years in), and I can heavily relate to what you said at the beginning. The company I work for recently got acquired and the entire culture changed to one of "fuck the engineers, only contracts matter, engineers are just butts in seats, the more the better (quality not required)". My boss is constantly turned down when he tries to advocate for me, or say that I deserve a slight bonus. At this point, I have had all productivity beaten out of me. I really don't understand the mindset. It's been a crash course on how to take a wonderful company and burn it to the ground in a matter of less than 2 years. Most of my coworkers have moved on at this point, and each contract they got out of it has now failed. So what the fuck was even the point? How do you have 40% turnover and not think "Am I the problem?"?

foogazi 6y ago
Shit happens, why are you still there?
- Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
  When you are working for a good company that values you, and embedded in a good team that also values you, there is a bonding that occurs that goes deeper than your average commercial exchange. If you have never been in this position, you may not understand the emotional difficulties involved in watching such a place slowly burn to the ground. Old timers usually still feel loyalty to those of their coworkers who are still sticking around; if the poster's boss is a good leader and strong advocate for them, which it sounds like they are, this can be even harder. People build a lot of loyalty towards good leaders. Sure, it's emotional stuff, and the purely rational actor would dip without question. But having emotions is healthy and normal, even if it means they sometimes lead you to somewhat suboptimal situations. Of course, it can reach a point where people get locked in out of fear of the unknown, just like bad relationships. But it's rarely as easy as just saying "Okay, time to leave."
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I can't find a single thing to disagree on in your excellent comment but there's one more nuance: "When is the time to let go?" This goes for all areas of life: intimate relationships / marriages, employment, being part of a hobby club that's not the same anymore, local community help (donations, voluntary labor etc.). We the people are extremely bad judges of when is the right time to leave -- and 99% of the time we leave way too late. Usually after getting some deep emotional scars as a bonus. In hindsight (which as they say is 20/20) every time in my life after I left any kind of interaction between me and other people / companies, it was well after I should have. But only in retrospect. I gradually learned to recognize the signs and started to escalate problems early. And if they aren't addressed, leave early. Life is too short to keep a death grip on things that are poisoning you. It seems every one of us learns this lesson very late in life.

mulmen 6y ago

Thanks for sharing, your experience resembles my own. Can you explain your change of heart? You mention it happened in the last year but I’m not sure why. If anything this last year has motivated me to do even more. And I believe we can and will, but I am in a good place professionally. Are you speaking more personally than professionally? It sounds like maybe you did achieve some of what you set out to do but maybe you don’t think it was enough?

esotericn 6y ago
The way that my country has, and is handling the coronavirus pandemic, has meant that their vision of the future of society has diverged from something that I wish to be a part of. It's not about my accomplishments, but whether I feel like I have a stake in this. I have no stake in it now. They want a future that I don't want. No social ties, no bonds, no community. No counter-culture. No culture. No high street. No shopkeepers. Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber, Facebook, Netflix. Skyrocketing wealth inequality. Printing, printing, printing, QE, home prices ten times the median wage. An elite, and an underclass. A society that interacts, in a regulated manner, through a screen. By _force_. Because it's "safer". De-risked. Comfortable. And their answer for me? Therapy. Anti-depressants. Coping strategies. Learn to love the screen. Embrace the new future. Not me. Your insults, your attempts at control, they bounce off me now. "I'm alright, Jack", as they say.
- dddd4alll 6y ago
  There's an old movie called They Live, starring wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. It was supposed to be satire on consumer culture. Looking at it again, it's could be called forward time shifted documentary. Now that you've become "Red Pilled" as wrong thinker, you'll search out for more truths. Especially how the establishment elite class pushes propaganda and pits the lower classes against each other. When lower classes are fighting each other about racism, etc. then they don't have time to fight against oligarchy. How the establishment elite keeps getting richer every second.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Is mask wearing, temporary social distancing, and vaccination asking too much from the individual to sustain the weakest and most vulnerable in society?

Jochim 6y ago

I think the most important thing for motivation and empathy is a sense of agency over one's own life and actions. When you feel like you have no control over what you do each day or don't have the freedom to make meaningful choices, it's very easy to slip into depression. I've experienced similar situations professionally. My previous employer was happy to hear and implement ideas from anyone on the team, it lead to a really productive and tight knit group, things got done well and at a good pace. My current one is the opposite. Very prescriptive, ideas coming from the top down. As a result everythimg moves like molasses and it's killed all the motivation I have for the work I do there. I'd urge you not to give up. I still believe things can change for the better, it feels like we're at a tipping point where society will either improve massively or fall into stagnation. Gen Z gives me hope that the former will win out. They seem much more active and interested in tackling these issues than older generations.

A12-B 6y ago

I can't really blame you, a bad system rewards this kind of individualism, and individualism then feeds into a bad system. In a better world we would consider human beings not as decentralised entities but as one big connected mass, and fixing poverty would actually raise everyone up.

cccc4alll 6y ago
Who controls the bad system now and who controlled the bad system in the past? Why is it not getting better? Who keeps getting richer every second, while everyone else stagnates?

jart 6y ago

This is the biggest steaming pile of bull I've seen on HN. Like a monologue from an Adam Sandler movie. https://youtu.be/LQCU36pkH7c https://youtu.be/LQCU36pkH7c

esotericn 6y ago
You're welcome. <3

vmception 6y ago

I like to imagine this is Gavin Newsom

eyelidlessness 6y ago

I think the thing you’re missing, probably because of whatever motivated you to use “prole” without irony, is you’re not a prole and don’t experience the economic impact of being inherently undervalued. People who never experience compensation resembling what they “put in” and are constantly navigating burnout. It’s not egotistical it’s just a matter of perspective. Most people don’t get to decide or don’t have enough energy to decide to “get mine” even if they knew where to begin.

esotericn 6y ago
You are absolutely right on every point. There was a time, when I was. And I've been blindingly lucky to crawl, bit by bit, out of that. But I still identify with that, because precisely the same societal decisions that fuck me, are the ones that fuck them too. I owe them something. They're still struggling. I don't owe the rest of society anything at all.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I suspected that was in the mix and wanted to leave space for you to say so. I’ve been on this track too. This is why my approach is to extract as much value out of my privilege as I can and funnel as much of that as I can to my people who don’t share that privilege.

giantg2 6y ago

At least you've had good money coming in. I've been burnt out. I've knocked it out of the park. But I've never seen really good pay or even authority.

IntFee588 6y ago

There are quite a few studies that support this; higher earners generally work more hours, since their time is more valuable. The only exception is at extremely high income brackets. Minimum wage earners are being paid to show up. https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-longer-hours https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-long... Companies that are better to work at have generally seen more growth in their stock price: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/04/Stock-Returns-2020-Glassdoor-Final-Reduced.pdf https://www.glassdoor.com/research/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/... Doubt these findings will change corporate policies however.