Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?

When there is no hope, operating model follows. There are various costs to convince someone to care (economic, org culture, etc). People have stopped caring for good reason: value prop decline.

No one is going to hustle for a meh deal, unless they’re naive or unsophisticated.

For me it’s not only the internet. Add climate change and the world wide shift to the right. It feels like everything is going to shit and nothing changes…

Crying shame, I would have liked to have known you in another life

I don't think the pay angle got serious until after like Google went IPO - somewhere around like 2005-2010. Before that, tech workers were paid well, but not so much beyond like a financial analyst. Now there's a mass market of FAANG-M jobs, perhaps like 500k jobs in total. They all pay way more compared to the average job, in multiplier terms.

There has been a quantitative shift in tech worker pay at the top end in the past twenty years.

In other words, the past twenty years have seen the rise of Big Tech: billion-user products, trillion-dollar valuations, eating up entire industries (retail, publishing, consumer electronics, entertainment). What enabled them are software economies of scale (production + distribution), the US's ability to train and attract talent, cheap money, and access to massive markets abroad.

I am apathetic about the entire industry, as a consultant. Everybody is working on bullshit products that have no relevance whatsoever with the real world, overcomplicated with bullshit techniques like morning standups and Zoom meetings that are a total waste of time. We had a taste of freedom during the pandemic and now all we get is a mockery of it, with 99.9% companies hiring only on hybrid 3 days in the office bullshit contracts. Without touching upon the fact that any tech interview for any bullshit position is a 3-stage gauntlet you'll have to subject yourself to after winning the lottery of a recruiter randomly picking your CV out of 500 ones from younger, less experienced but cheaper devs.

The technology is ever boring. I've been studying CS papers from the 1960s-1990s and there is a lot of ingenuity and new avenues being explored. Now any random HN engineer can only ask "how is this better than Rust?" and I feel that not only we have remained stuck on languages and tech from the 1980s, we have regressed so much that most developers have forgotten or never even learned about "futuristic" environments such as Lisp or Smalltalk. People roll their eyes at these names for the simple reason that no one has been paid to improve upon these for the past 40 years, because companies only care about average productivity of the junior dev. We've spent the last 30 years reinventing C and UNIX; now the cool kids are adding coloured text in their VT100 terminals. Mindblowing.

I am still consulting because being an employee is more and more like white-collar slavery, and post-pandemic it's not even that well-paid, what with the massive influx of low-quality, low-requirement workers and the post-2008 money tap being closed. I am spending my free time devouring old CS papers, and the thought of writing 1500 lines of YAML to deploy a Kubernetes sounds such a pointless, anachronistic castle of sands built by massive tech corps that have just found a way of turning the art of computer programming into a circus of Taylorist code monkeys following a script for 8 hours a days.

Of course I'm apathetic. I'm too old for this.

/rant