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Well, y'know. You're likely to be better off if you put that desire to one side and focus within. Consider a soup kitchen vs a supermarket checkout. The people
by roenxi 3y ago
Well, y'know. You're likely to be better off if you put that desire to one side and focus within.
Consider a soup kitchen vs a supermarket checkout. The people working at the soup kitchen arguably care a lot more. The person at the supermarket checkout can be as glassy eyed as they feel and still be part of feeding more people in absolute terms.
Humans seem to have some sort of emotional heuristic to focus on care (really, focus on motivation of others I think). That works in small groups but it is highly misleading in large ones. In large groups, the only factors that matter are incentives and competence. If the incentives are good and the people are competent, good results will happen. If the reverse, corruption. The motivation heuristic actually does a lot of harm because it causes a huge amount of noise in the discourse where people whinge about this person or that having bad character to no avail. It is often true that people have impure motivations, but at scale that is true of effectively everyone. There are the devils you know and the devils waiting to become known. We can get great outcomes regardless; our politicians are cut from the same cloth as the Nazi and Communist parties but look at the difference in outcomes.
One of the most peaceful insights I ever stumbled across was that of the people in the workplace who cared less than me, there were a significant and productive subset who were just doing more good than me through competence and being thoughtful about what work to pick up.
- ozr 3y agoI've been on large and small teams of people that cared and didn't care. It feels noble and reasonable and right to tie it to a greater purpose; like your soup kitchen vs supermarket example. It's not that type of care the OP is getting at. It's closer to a craftmanship kind of care. Being proud of what you're putting into the world. Caring that it works well, not because the purpose is important, but because it's something you're doing and you want to do it well.
- roenxi 3y agoIf someone wants high personal standards then ok, that'll be good for them in the long term. But if we're talking about colleagues that care then that is just a cover for bad management. And fair enough bad management is endemic in the software industry so teams pick up the slack. But it is management's job to decide on software quality standards and provide feedback to devs. Expecting the developers to be responsible for quality as a baseline is just a path to burnout for those devs; because then they are going to go mad because everyone on the team has different personal standards. The person with the highest standards on the team will never be satisfied. You can't reasonably expect teammates to cover for bad managers, it is much cleverer to learn to identify good managers and try to work for them. Or become one.
- patch_cable 3y agoHow would you describe the difference between thoughtful and caring?
- roenxi 3y agoMaybe I'd pick on an auditor as an example. They need to think about whether people are doing what they say they do. They don't need to care about what they are doing. To me, caring means expecting work to be done to your standards instead of an independent standard.