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99% of people in tech aren't changing the world. They are building accounting and metrics and shopping and add platforms to get marginal increases to marginal r
by anm89 5y ago
99% of people in tech aren't changing the world. They are building accounting and metrics and shopping and add platforms to get marginal increases to marginal revenue so some business can make a bit more money than they were making before.
I'm honest that I trade my time for money. There are many times when I'll prioritize other things like working with people I like or not working with people I dislike, the same thing for processes or schedules or whatever.
But I'm not going to sit around and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can go play with the latest JS framework instead of the one that was cool 6 years ago or so I can be in a sexier sounding industry. I'm going to trade my time for money and work towards financial freedom so hopefully I can go work on stuff that's interesting to me on my terms at some point.
- BlargMcLarg 5y agoOn that note, is anyone else getting a little tired of all the pretentiousness going about in tech? Suddenly, every tech company is claiming to "change the world" and "not like the others". You know, hyping these adds, metrics, platforms, etc. up as if they're going to really change life in a noteworthy way for Average Joe. Whatever happened to just putting in a good day's effort and admitting we're doing it for the money so we can pay the bills and a nice dinner?
- hotpotamus 5y agoI think it taps into peoples' inherent religious desires and motivates them to put in more work and possibly do things they wouldn't otherwise. There's a reason it's called drinking the kool aid.
- BlargMcLarg 5y agoSee I do agree on surface level it makes sense to decorate things. But I have yet to see any empirical evidence of this, let alone weighted against the long term costs of burnout, disillusion, embitterment, increasing costs using third parties to fix the problems, and more. Anecdotally, the far majority of "we really love to work here!" people I met seemed to either stop caring very soon, were clearly faking it or were barely distinguishable from their more skeptical co-workers performance-wise, bar a few individuals with a savior complex.
- hotpotamus 5y agoThat's a fair point - I've never really been in a position to measure the performance of such people. It's entirely possible that performance isn't actually all that relevant. It might just be that leaders prefer followers who "worship" them as leaders of the shared religion of work. I don't think this is all some sort of Machiavellian scheme either - I think a lot of it is unconscious on both ends of the deal.
- drewcoo 5y agoI think everyone agrees that performance is difficult to define, let alone measure. Passion, though . . . aren't all startup founders issued a brand new Passionometer(TM)? I think that's in the rules or bylaws or somesuch.
- Apocryphon 5y ago"Suddenly"? It's been going on for at least a decade, decade and a half, nearly two decades now, whenever Web 2.0 was getting off the ground and startups started booming again post-Dot Com bubble.
- munificent 5y ago"I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" came out in 1971. Corporate ego is ancient.
- sanderjd 5y agoThis isn't sudden... It has ever been thus. For decades at least.
- jseban 5y agoI think it would be correct to say 99% of people. Only tech is suddenly under this type of scrutiny, and if you generalise like this over whole companies and whole fields of work, you can pretty quickly come to the conclusion that everything is evil.