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100% agree. Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I am not sure what has happened over the de

100% agree. Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down, and so want to make sure you don't end up in that position again. Covers all areas of IT from Cyber, DR, not just software. When I have moved between places, I always try to ensure we have a clear set of guidelines in my initial 90-day plan, but it all comes back to the team. It's been 50/50: some teams are desperate for any change, and others will do everything possible to destroy what you're trying to do. Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option. The trick is to work this out VERY quickly! However, when it does go really wrong, I assume most have followed the UK Post Office saga in the UK around the software bug(s) that sent people to prison, suicides, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect.

Noaidi 10mo ago
> for some, it's just a paycheck. What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Maybe if wages kept up with inflation people would still care. You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store.
- wccrawford 10mo ago
  Ethically? Nothing. Socially and emotionally? It's brutal. For both the employee and society in general. Spending almost half their waking hours not caring is not good for people.
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    Give us a reason to care. It's that simple.
    - bpt3 10mo ago
      The reasons to care are personal pride in the quality of your work, understanding that your lack of effort has a negative impact on your colleagues, and your continued employment. And if you hate your job, but are completely unable to find alternative employment (which is what you should do if you hate your job), you probably should reconsider how much you hate your job.
      - Noaidi 10mo ago
        Ah, noble poverty! Be grateful to tha masta' for providing you the scraps he can provide! Your paycheck is the beautiful work you produce for tha masta'! Seriously, pay people what they are worth and they will care. It is not that hard.
        bpt3 10mo ago
        The vast majority of people significantly overestimate their worth, yet people with your attitude seem to believe it only exists with respect to highly compensated employees. I agree with your second sentence, but it's harder than it should be due to what I said above.
      - zwnow 10mo ago
        Pride in the quality of my work is a phrase to make one feel bad about themselves. I take pride in my hobbies and in my hobby projects. I take pride in my family and friends. I do not take pride in being exploited for my work so some higher up can buy a new car every year.
        bpt3 10mo ago
        And again, someone comes and makes a comment that proves my point. Unless you are working in very unusual (and illegal in the developed world) circumstances, you are not being exploited in any real sense.
- mrweasel 10mo ago
  So I believe it actually worse that the article makes it out to be. Currently AI "solutions" being implemented in places like call centers are often technical solutions attempting to pave over organizational problems. Many IT solutions are like that. We refuse to fix the underlying problems, so we layer software on top, so we won't notice the stupidity below. IT companies will happily take the money and write the code, broken as it might be, because the real problems aren't actually resolved. That to me is a problem. Companies needs to be way better at saying no, and offer help address the underlying issues instead, even if they aren't technical in nature.
- hansvm 10mo ago
  > You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store. You still can almost everywhere outside of places like SF? I just spot-checked some data, and in Minneapolis for example currently available apartments are comparable to what they were when I was looking 10 years ago, cashier wages have gone up 45%, and that often comes with healthcare benefits now. It's not an especially wealthy life, but a single person should be very comfortable (that's a comparable hourly wage and apartment cost to what I had delivering pizza at some other part of my life, and I lived comfortably and was able to save up to splurge on a nicer used Miata and the down payment for a small house).
- mylifeandtimes 10mo ago
  >> for some, it's just a paycheck. > What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? Imagine a society where your work was an opportunity for you to provide products/services for your community, where you could earn a reputation for craftsmanship and caring, and where the real value was in the social ties and sense of social worth-- your community cares for you just as you care for it, and selfish assholery has high costs leading to poverty. Now imagine a society where the only measure of social worth is a fiat currency, and it doesn't matter how you get it, only matters how much you have. Selfish assholery is rewarded and actually caring leads to poverty. Which society would you rather live in? Which society is more emotionally healthy? So the question is, is our current society the one we want to live in? If not, how do we move it closer to what we want?
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    > If not, how do we move it closer to what we want? By going all Ted Kaczynski on the elite and abandon sensationism and most of technology.
  - stronglikedan 10mo ago
    Our current society can and does have room for both, which is great since some people want to live to work, and some just want to work to live. I don't see a problem with either, as long as it makes one happy.
    - thwarted 10mo ago
      And there's another group, grifters, who are neither living to work nor working to live. They are the parasites, and our current society rewards grifters by not putting them in check. Probably because so many want a piece of the grifting pie, in the same way many people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
      - oarsinsync 10mo ago
        Don’t forget another group, permanently disenfranchised, who are working to barely live. They are the unsung heroes of our society, who for a brief year or two recently got celebrated as key workers, got claps and applause, and then forgotten again once normality resumed.
- AbstractH24 10mo ago
  > What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? Nothing. In fact, I envy people who can and wish I could. Consider it one of my largest flaws.
wccrawford 10mo ago
What happened is that most companies do not care about their employees, and their employees know it. If anything happens, the company will lay off people without a care for what happens to them. Even when they do care, such as in a smaller company, their own paycheck is being weighed against the employees, and they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems. CEOs making millions while they lay off massive amounts of people is the norm now, and everyone knows it. You can't blame the employee for not caring. They didn't start it.
- 1718627440 10mo ago
  > they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems. And that exactly used to be different and still is in small companies.
- steveBK123 10mo ago
  There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s. My dad worked as an engineer in the same firm for 30 years and retired. The company was founded before his father was born, and was publicly listed before he was born. Substantially every company I have worked for didn't even exist 30 years before I joined, let alone before I or my father were born. Most won't be around in 30 years. Several employers nearly went out of business, had substantial layoffs, or went thru mergers that materially impacted my department/team/job. The guys at the very top were always fine, because how could the guy in charge be responsible? Even within the companies I stayed 5 years, I had multiple roles/bosses/teams.
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    >There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s. As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void. Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on. I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up. No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.
zwnow 10mo ago
Work is just a paycheck because I am just a number for my employer. Why would I be proud of my work when apparently according to management I should be replaced by AI at some point because im just a cost factor. Why would I care about the business at that point? Fuck the higher ups, I'll be proud of my work and actually put in effort if I can afford a house.
hnthrow0287345 10mo ago
>I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Because there's still people doing less work than you do for a bigger paycheck Because you'd get fired or laid off for someone working for 1/2 to 1/4th of your pay Because they make you jump through multiple rounds of interviews and technical tests while people above you have a far less barrier to being hired Because someone stole credit for your work Because you'd get re-hired and find a mountain of shit code from a company that off shored their dev team Because companies stopped giving significant raises that didn't keep up with major inflation in the past few years, while your work might have gotten them many multiples more of profits Idk it's just a mystery we'll never know
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  Meanwhile: Your housing costs keep going up. Your food costs keep going up. Your transport costs keep going up. Your healthcare costs keep going up. Your education costs keep going up. Your family costs keep going up. And why? Not for any good reason, no. Just because they can. Your landlord isn't content when you pay $2,500 per month for an apartment, no. They need $2,600. $5 isn't enough for a dozen eggs, it needs to be $6. And what if we slapped 10-200% tariffs on random things, depending on the day? Wouldn't that be neat? The collective delusion it requires to not see what the problem is is astounding. It's actually quite depressing, because it makes me think we're never going to meaningfully solve this problem. Maybe companies have to start executing employees or something, I don't know. Maybe then people will be bold and decide to re-organize society.
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    We also printed several trillion dollars because of a respiratory virus outbreak. That was never not going to inflate the cost of everything.
Hendrikto 10mo ago
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Simple: 1. People lost ownership of the things they work on. In the early 1900s, more than half of the workforce was self-employed. Today, it is 10% in the US, 13% in the EU. What you produce is not “yours”, it’s “your employer’s”. You don’t have ownership, and very limited to no agency. 2. People lost any tangible connection to the quality and quantity of their output. Most workers don’t get rewarded for working harder and producing more or better output. On the contrary, they are often penalized with more and/or harder work. To quote Office Space: “That makes a man work just hard enough not to get fired.” 3. People lost their humanity. They are no longer persons. They are resources. Human resources. And they are treated like it. They are exploited for gain and dumped when no longer needed.
- almostgotcaught 10mo ago
  How many people agree with the above but "disagree" with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation Lololol Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki: 1. From a worker's product 2. From a worker's productive activity 3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being) 4. From other workers Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional.
  - Thorrez 10mo ago
    I don't specifically disagree with Marx's theory of alienation. However I disagree with communism. I think communism makes the problem worse, not better.
    - Herring 10mo ago
      Marx died in 1883. Things have moved on a little since then. Some parts of the economy are great under state control: monetary policy, military, infrastructure, healthcare, education, safety nets, etc. Some parts prefer a mix of public and private investment: utilities, rail, airports, R&D. Others work best with very little direct state control (other than regulations): most retail, consumer goods, IT, etc.
graemep 10mo ago
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Many employers actively discourage people from doing work that they are proud of. You cannot be proud of something that is built as cheaply as possible. You can get employees to care about customers or the product, you cannot get employees to care about profits and dividends.
willvarfar 10mo ago
> I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect I recall there was a whistleblower Richard Roll who said that engineering did know of the bugs and flaws
nkrisc 10mo ago
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. My local grocery stores won’t accept pride as payment for food, and working harder doesn’t make my paycheck increase.
- throwawaysleep 10mo ago
  This is basically it. The US at this point has shown that the winning move is to just lie and scam and loot and then do it all again. I will be held to the standards of billionaires and politicians. Not one micron more.
ferguess_k 10mo ago
People have to be interested in their jobs to care about it. Corporations know that people rarely get to do whatever they want, so they assume (correctly) that most workers do not care, so they move on to care about processes, workflows, which makes even less workers care about their jobs. For individual workers, the best thing is to work @ something you love && get good pay. Like a compiler engineer, a kernel engineer, an AI engineer, etc.
merrvk 10mo ago
People need visas and that’s all they care about
stardude900 10mo ago
You started an excellent discussion with this comment
jt2190 10mo ago
> I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down… To the great surprise of my younger self I have never seen “it all come crashing down” and I honestly believe this is extremely rare in practice (i.e. the U.K post saga), something that senior devs like to imagine will happen but probably won’t, and is used to scare management and junior devs into doing “something” which may or may not make things better. Almost universally I’ve seen the software slowly improved via a stream of urgent bug fixes with a sprinkle of targeted rewrites. The ease of these bug fixes and targeted rewrites essentially depends on whether there is a solid software design underneath: Poor designs tend to be unfixable and have complex layers of patches to make the system work well enough most of the time; good designs tend to require less maintenance overall. Both produce working software, just with different “pain” levels.
- QuercusMax 10mo ago
  I've worked on two different systems which were built in weakly-typed languages that just got too difficult to reason about and fix bugs, so we ended up porting to Java. Customer-facing bugs that the guy who built the framework couldn't figure out. Sometimes people make such a big mess you have to burn it down and start over.
thwarted 10mo ago
> Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option. This leader is not going with the quickest or cheapest option. Doing so would probably be laudable. They are going with the claims made by someone that a certain way is going to be quicker or cheaper. It doesn't matter if it actually is, or ends up being, quicker or cheaper. One plan is classified as meeting the requirements while another plan is classified as being cheaper, the cheaper one will be chosen even though it doesn't meet the requirements.
stronglikedan 10mo ago
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Anecdotal, but I used to be proud of the work I produced, and then it got old and repetitive. However, as it was getting old, I was earning more. Now I'm in a place where if I were to quit and find something I could be proud of, I would have to accept a huge reduction in compensation. No thanks. I'd rather have a much higher "just a paycheck" and find things to be proud of outside of work. Plus no one else cares anymore so why should I? Just pay me a lot and I'll keep showing up.
wiseowise 10mo ago
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Millions of boocampers and juniors trying to make a quick buck; any tech work that is not “make it, and make it quick” is punished; tech debt swept under the rug; any initiative is being shut down because status quo is more important; “we’ll optimize when it becomes a problem” on 15 seconds page reload; dozen of layers of parasites and grifters making your life hell, because their paycheck depends on it; salary bumps that don’t even cover inflation – the only way to actually move in life is to join, raise as much hell as possible in 2 years and jump ship leaving the fallout for the next SOB in the line. And that’s just what I bothered enough to type on bad iOS keyboard.
chemotaxis 10mo ago
> Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I found that most of the "people problems disguised as technical problems" are actually generated by people who get far too invested in their work and let it define them. They get territorial, treat any lost argument as an attack on their whole self, etc. They also lose perspective, getting into flame wars over indentation styles or minor API syntax quibbles. People who show up for the paycheck are usually far more reasonable in that regard.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Yep. I’m just like “pick a technology. I don’t care what, just stick with it long enough to get something done with it”
anal_reactor 10mo ago
Frankly, something that I don't see discussed enough is the truth that many people are plain stupid. If my position in the company depends on stupid people, then this completely changes the game, because then good engineering isn't the best way to maximize my status anymore. That's how you get smart people spend their time coming up with elaborate tactics to appear productive while in reality they aren't and play office politics. All successful corporations understand this and build processes around the assumption that their workers are idiots, which has the side effect of suffocating smart workers, but the truth is, ten thousand morons is a bigger force than a hundred geniuses.
thewebguyd 10mo ago
> for some, it's just a paycheck. I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Hard to be proud of the work you produce when you have no ownership over it, and companies show less and less loyalty and investment in their employees. When, at any random time, you can be subject to the next round of layoffs no matter how much value you contributed, it's hard to care. So yeah, for most it's just a paycheck unless you are working for yourself, or drank a gallon of the koolaid and seriously believe in whatever the company's mission is/what it's doing. I'm proud of my own work and projects I do for myself, tech or otherwise, and put great care into it. At $dayjob I do exactly what I am paid to do, nothing more nothing less, to conserve my own mental energy for my own time. Not saying I output poor work, but more so I will just do exactly what's expected of me. The company isn't going to get anything extra without paying for it. Didn't used to be that way, but I've been burned far too many times by going "above and beyond" for someone else. If employees had more ownership and stake in the companies they work for, I think the attitudes would change. Likewise, if companies went back to investing in training and retention, loyalty could go both ways again.
agumonkey 10mo ago
I'd really wish there was a better way to allocate compatible people together.. the distribution is often subpar.. lazies with motivated people drowning to fill in. If you change the ratio and let creative / driven / team-spirited work together you get exponentially better results.
dvrj101 10mo ago
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. ignorance against wrongdoers has been a bliss for your generation, curse for ours and deadly for future

Noaidi 10mo ago

> for some, it's just a paycheck. What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Maybe if wages kept up with inflation people would still care. You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store.

wccrawford 10mo ago
Ethically? Nothing. Socially and emotionally? It's brutal. For both the employee and society in general. Spending almost half their waking hours not caring is not good for people.
- zwnow 10mo ago
  Give us a reason to care. It's that simple.
  - bpt3 10mo ago
    The reasons to care are personal pride in the quality of your work, understanding that your lack of effort has a negative impact on your colleagues, and your continued employment. And if you hate your job, but are completely unable to find alternative employment (which is what you should do if you hate your job), you probably should reconsider how much you hate your job.
    - Noaidi 10mo ago
      Ah, noble poverty! Be grateful to tha masta' for providing you the scraps he can provide! Your paycheck is the beautiful work you produce for tha masta'! Seriously, pay people what they are worth and they will care. It is not that hard.
      - bpt3 10mo ago
        The vast majority of people significantly overestimate their worth, yet people with your attitude seem to believe it only exists with respect to highly compensated employees. I agree with your second sentence, but it's harder than it should be due to what I said above.
    - zwnow 10mo ago
      Pride in the quality of my work is a phrase to make one feel bad about themselves. I take pride in my hobbies and in my hobby projects. I take pride in my family and friends. I do not take pride in being exploited for my work so some higher up can buy a new car every year.
      - bpt3 10mo ago
        And again, someone comes and makes a comment that proves my point. Unless you are working in very unusual (and illegal in the developed world) circumstances, you are not being exploited in any real sense.
mrweasel 10mo ago
So I believe it actually worse that the article makes it out to be. Currently AI "solutions" being implemented in places like call centers are often technical solutions attempting to pave over organizational problems. Many IT solutions are like that. We refuse to fix the underlying problems, so we layer software on top, so we won't notice the stupidity below. IT companies will happily take the money and write the code, broken as it might be, because the real problems aren't actually resolved. That to me is a problem. Companies needs to be way better at saying no, and offer help address the underlying issues instead, even if they aren't technical in nature.
hansvm 10mo ago
> You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store. You still can almost everywhere outside of places like SF? I just spot-checked some data, and in Minneapolis for example currently available apartments are comparable to what they were when I was looking 10 years ago, cashier wages have gone up 45%, and that often comes with healthcare benefits now. It's not an especially wealthy life, but a single person should be very comfortable (that's a comparable hourly wage and apartment cost to what I had delivering pizza at some other part of my life, and I lived comfortably and was able to save up to splurge on a nicer used Miata and the down payment for a small house).
mylifeandtimes 10mo ago
>> for some, it's just a paycheck. > What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? Imagine a society where your work was an opportunity for you to provide products/services for your community, where you could earn a reputation for craftsmanship and caring, and where the real value was in the social ties and sense of social worth-- your community cares for you just as you care for it, and selfish assholery has high costs leading to poverty. Now imagine a society where the only measure of social worth is a fiat currency, and it doesn't matter how you get it, only matters how much you have. Selfish assholery is rewarded and actually caring leads to poverty. Which society would you rather live in? Which society is more emotionally healthy? So the question is, is our current society the one we want to live in? If not, how do we move it closer to what we want?
- zwnow 10mo ago
  > If not, how do we move it closer to what we want? By going all Ted Kaczynski on the elite and abandon sensationism and most of technology.
- stronglikedan 10mo ago
  Our current society can and does have room for both, which is great since some people want to live to work, and some just want to work to live. I don't see a problem with either, as long as it makes one happy.
  - thwarted 10mo ago
    And there's another group, grifters, who are neither living to work nor working to live. They are the parasites, and our current society rewards grifters by not putting them in check. Probably because so many want a piece of the grifting pie, in the same way many people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
    - oarsinsync 10mo ago
      Don’t forget another group, permanently disenfranchised, who are working to barely live. They are the unsung heroes of our society, who for a brief year or two recently got celebrated as key workers, got claps and applause, and then forgotten again once normality resumed.
AbstractH24 10mo ago
> What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? Nothing. In fact, I envy people who can and wish I could. Consider it one of my largest flaws.

wccrawford 10mo ago

What happened is that most companies do not care about their employees, and their employees know it. If anything happens, the company will lay off people without a care for what happens to them. Even when they do care, such as in a smaller company, their own paycheck is being weighed against the employees, and they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems. CEOs making millions while they lay off massive amounts of people is the norm now, and everyone knows it. You can't blame the employee for not caring. They didn't start it.

1718627440 10mo ago
> they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems. And that exactly used to be different and still is in small companies.
steveBK123 10mo ago
There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s. My dad worked as an engineer in the same firm for 30 years and retired. The company was founded before his father was born, and was publicly listed before he was born. Substantially every company I have worked for didn't even exist 30 years before I joined, let alone before I or my father were born. Most won't be around in 30 years. Several employers nearly went out of business, had substantial layoffs, or went thru mergers that materially impacted my department/team/job. The guys at the very top were always fine, because how could the guy in charge be responsible? Even within the companies I stayed 5 years, I had multiple roles/bosses/teams.
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  >There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s. As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void. Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on. I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up. No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.

zwnow 10mo ago

Work is just a paycheck because I am just a number for my employer. Why would I be proud of my work when apparently according to management I should be replaced by AI at some point because im just a cost factor. Why would I care about the business at that point? Fuck the higher ups, I'll be proud of my work and actually put in effort if I can afford a house.

hnthrow0287345 10mo ago

>I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Because there's still people doing less work than you do for a bigger paycheck Because you'd get fired or laid off for someone working for 1/2 to 1/4th of your pay Because they make you jump through multiple rounds of interviews and technical tests while people above you have a far less barrier to being hired Because someone stole credit for your work Because you'd get re-hired and find a mountain of shit code from a company that off shored their dev team Because companies stopped giving significant raises that didn't keep up with major inflation in the past few years, while your work might have gotten them many multiples more of profits Idk it's just a mystery we'll never know

venturecruelty 10mo ago
Meanwhile: Your housing costs keep going up. Your food costs keep going up. Your transport costs keep going up. Your healthcare costs keep going up. Your education costs keep going up. Your family costs keep going up. And why? Not for any good reason, no. Just because they can. Your landlord isn't content when you pay $2,500 per month for an apartment, no. They need $2,600. $5 isn't enough for a dozen eggs, it needs to be $6. And what if we slapped 10-200% tariffs on random things, depending on the day? Wouldn't that be neat? The collective delusion it requires to not see what the problem is is astounding. It's actually quite depressing, because it makes me think we're never going to meaningfully solve this problem. Maybe companies have to start executing employees or something, I don't know. Maybe then people will be bold and decide to re-organize society.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  We also printed several trillion dollars because of a respiratory virus outbreak. That was never not going to inflate the cost of everything.

Hendrikto 10mo ago

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Simple: 1. People lost ownership of the things they work on. In the early 1900s, more than half of the workforce was self-employed. Today, it is 10% in the US, 13% in the EU. What you produce is not “yours”, it’s “your employer’s”. You don’t have ownership, and very limited to no agency. 2. People lost any tangible connection to the quality and quantity of their output. Most workers don’t get rewarded for working harder and producing more or better output. On the contrary, they are often penalized with more and/or harder work. To quote Office Space: “That makes a man work just hard enough not to get fired.” 3. People lost their humanity. They are no longer persons. They are resources. Human resources. And they are treated like it. They are exploited for gain and dumped when no longer needed.

almostgotcaught 10mo ago
How many people agree with the above but "disagree" with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation Lololol Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki: 1. From a worker's product 2. From a worker's productive activity 3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being) 4. From other workers Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional.
- Thorrez 10mo ago
  I don't specifically disagree with Marx's theory of alienation. However I disagree with communism. I think communism makes the problem worse, not better.
  - Herring 10mo ago
    Marx died in 1883. Things have moved on a little since then. Some parts of the economy are great under state control: monetary policy, military, infrastructure, healthcare, education, safety nets, etc. Some parts prefer a mix of public and private investment: utilities, rail, airports, R&D. Others work best with very little direct state control (other than regulations): most retail, consumer goods, IT, etc.

graemep 10mo ago

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Many employers actively discourage people from doing work that they are proud of. You cannot be proud of something that is built as cheaply as possible. You can get employees to care about customers or the product, you cannot get employees to care about profits and dividends.

willvarfar 10mo ago

> I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect I recall there was a whistleblower Richard Roll who said that engineering did know of the bugs and flaws

nkrisc 10mo ago

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. My local grocery stores won’t accept pride as payment for food, and working harder doesn’t make my paycheck increase.

throwawaysleep 10mo ago
This is basically it. The US at this point has shown that the winning move is to just lie and scam and loot and then do it all again. I will be held to the standards of billionaires and politicians. Not one micron more.

ferguess_k 10mo ago

People have to be interested in their jobs to care about it. Corporations know that people rarely get to do whatever they want, so they assume (correctly) that most workers do not care, so they move on to care about processes, workflows, which makes even less workers care about their jobs. For individual workers, the best thing is to work @ something you love && get good pay. Like a compiler engineer, a kernel engineer, an AI engineer, etc.

merrvk 10mo ago

People need visas and that’s all they care about

stardude900 10mo ago

You started an excellent discussion with this comment

jt2190 10mo ago

> I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down… To the great surprise of my younger self I have never seen “it all come crashing down” and I honestly believe this is extremely rare in practice (i.e. the U.K post saga), something that senior devs like to imagine will happen but probably won’t, and is used to scare management and junior devs into doing “something” which may or may not make things better. Almost universally I’ve seen the software slowly improved via a stream of urgent bug fixes with a sprinkle of targeted rewrites. The ease of these bug fixes and targeted rewrites essentially depends on whether there is a solid software design underneath: Poor designs tend to be unfixable and have complex layers of patches to make the system work well enough most of the time; good designs tend to require less maintenance overall. Both produce working software, just with different “pain” levels.

QuercusMax 10mo ago
I've worked on two different systems which were built in weakly-typed languages that just got too difficult to reason about and fix bugs, so we ended up porting to Java. Customer-facing bugs that the guy who built the framework couldn't figure out. Sometimes people make such a big mess you have to burn it down and start over.

thwarted 10mo ago

> Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option. This leader is not going with the quickest or cheapest option. Doing so would probably be laudable. They are going with the claims made by someone that a certain way is going to be quicker or cheaper. It doesn't matter if it actually is, or ends up being, quicker or cheaper. One plan is classified as meeting the requirements while another plan is classified as being cheaper, the cheaper one will be chosen even though it doesn't meet the requirements.

stronglikedan 10mo ago

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Anecdotal, but I used to be proud of the work I produced, and then it got old and repetitive. However, as it was getting old, I was earning more. Now I'm in a place where if I were to quit and find something I could be proud of, I would have to accept a huge reduction in compensation. No thanks. I'd rather have a much higher "just a paycheck" and find things to be proud of outside of work. Plus no one else cares anymore so why should I? Just pay me a lot and I'll keep showing up.

wiseowise 10mo ago

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Millions of boocampers and juniors trying to make a quick buck; any tech work that is not “make it, and make it quick” is punished; tech debt swept under the rug; any initiative is being shut down because status quo is more important; “we’ll optimize when it becomes a problem” on 15 seconds page reload; dozen of layers of parasites and grifters making your life hell, because their paycheck depends on it; salary bumps that don’t even cover inflation – the only way to actually move in life is to join, raise as much hell as possible in 2 years and jump ship leaving the fallout for the next SOB in the line. And that’s just what I bothered enough to type on bad iOS keyboard.

chemotaxis 10mo ago

> Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I found that most of the "people problems disguised as technical problems" are actually generated by people who get far too invested in their work and let it define them. They get territorial, treat any lost argument as an attack on their whole self, etc. They also lose perspective, getting into flame wars over indentation styles or minor API syntax quibbles. People who show up for the paycheck are usually far more reasonable in that regard.

SoftTalker 10mo ago
Yep. I’m just like “pick a technology. I don’t care what, just stick with it long enough to get something done with it”

anal_reactor 10mo ago

Frankly, something that I don't see discussed enough is the truth that many people are plain stupid. If my position in the company depends on stupid people, then this completely changes the game, because then good engineering isn't the best way to maximize my status anymore. That's how you get smart people spend their time coming up with elaborate tactics to appear productive while in reality they aren't and play office politics. All successful corporations understand this and build processes around the assumption that their workers are idiots, which has the side effect of suffocating smart workers, but the truth is, ten thousand morons is a bigger force than a hundred geniuses.

thewebguyd 10mo ago

> for some, it's just a paycheck. I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Hard to be proud of the work you produce when you have no ownership over it, and companies show less and less loyalty and investment in their employees. When, at any random time, you can be subject to the next round of layoffs no matter how much value you contributed, it's hard to care. So yeah, for most it's just a paycheck unless you are working for yourself, or drank a gallon of the koolaid and seriously believe in whatever the company's mission is/what it's doing. I'm proud of my own work and projects I do for myself, tech or otherwise, and put great care into it. At $dayjob I do exactly what I am paid to do, nothing more nothing less, to conserve my own mental energy for my own time. Not saying I output poor work, but more so I will just do exactly what's expected of me. The company isn't going to get anything extra without paying for it. Didn't used to be that way, but I've been burned far too many times by going "above and beyond" for someone else. If employees had more ownership and stake in the companies they work for, I think the attitudes would change. Likewise, if companies went back to investing in training and retention, loyalty could go both ways again.

agumonkey 10mo ago

I'd really wish there was a better way to allocate compatible people together.. the distribution is often subpar.. lazies with motivated people drowning to fill in. If you change the ratio and let creative / driven / team-spirited work together you get exponentially better results.

dvrj101 10mo ago

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. ignorance against wrongdoers has been a bliss for your generation, curse for ours and deadly for future