The incompetence level in the industry has increased. In the past perhaps more people were close to being technical. Now there is a deluge of nontechnical positions and management layers that contribute nothing. This increases cynicism.
Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#62People have gotten the message that capitalism is a cancer that will exploit workers of every bit of value for a pittance. People are fighting back by quiet quitting and doing the absolute bare minimum to collect a paycheck. There's literally no point in working hard for your higher ups to make bank off of you while you get an "attaboy." They're going to learn the hard way now.
> People have gotten the message
The generation of young people in the 1960s thought this. Then the generation of young people in the 1970s thought this. Then the generation of young people in the 1980s thought this, and so on. I'll be 50 this year, I've gotten to see it twice myself. I've started reading about it historically (Days of Rage by Burrough is informative and neutral tone).
Capitalism isn't a cancer. It's just a framework that gives you enough liberty to succeed or fail. Many fail. Many who fail spend years pouting about it, waste what little time they might have for any second attempts.
> They're going to learn the hard way now.
"They" won't learn anything. They don't have to learn anything, but if they did, you don't have any leverage anyway to be able to force the issue. They're out there busy creating a world, right now, right this very minute, in which they don't need you or other malcontents at all. They're satisfied that they can create this world and soon. And they're not penciling in a place for you or those like you to exist within it. And you have no leverage. What leverage you might have managed to squirrel away before, you rejected it. You reject it now, even in this comment. There's that nagging little thought in the back of your mind, that if you were to try to fix the system from within the system, you might discover you no longer worry so much about fixing it, right?
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#63From my perspective of 30 years in professional tech development, there are rapidly diminishing returns for one's effort within companies. You may see great opportunities to improve metrics within your org, but for various reasons you cannot actually achieve these goals based on your own individual effort. The reasons for failure are myriad, and I will avoid going down that path of sad tales. Finally now, when I'm ju…
> Of course that new thing will ultimately get bought by one of the bigger laggard companies who is incapable of allowing something like this to develop internally.
Have we really reached a point where striking it out on your own is mostly an illusion?
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#64I think an engaging workplace is hard to cultivate. You have to be working on hard stuff and the people working toward it need real stakes in the game. That's not easy to find these days. If you do want this I think you'd be able to find it in AI companies that are _actually_ pushing the envelope (not most of them). But honestly, I think it's better to find meaning outside of work. Work on something hard outside of w…
Being under 30 and already having this mindset is going to take you far. I would argue it makes you even better at work because you'll over time iterate towards things that you value weighed against all the other good things in life rather than just try to find the biggest paycheck making a Belching as a Service app that some VC thought up on ayahuasca.
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. We're really only talking about the top employees at the top tech companies in the top most expensive COL areas. It's not like every tech employee in the world is making $500K and…
I think it’s important to calibrate what “great pay” is in a full spectrum way. Cutting corners on details here - Jane, making $120-150k as an engineer at non-FAANG, but fully (or at least maximized risk controlled) on the right side of every gnarly automation unemployment theme we all know is coming simply because Jane knows how to code, link systems, and is ahead of the curve such that she can learn how to use AI i…
This is a potential outcome, but by no means guaranteed.
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why employees advocating RTO for the socialization depress me. There’s a big world out there, go find it.
You will spend a substantial chunk of your life working. Likely a plurality of your time alive as an adult. Wanting it to be socially rewarding is reasonable.
I would prefer not to be friends with colleagues, with an employer picking a pool of candidates for social relationships.
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#67Hardly a day goes by without my thoughts turning to Ecclesiastes.
What did people believe? In an ever-progressive world? That’s a limited and superficial perspective on life. Everything that is born, whether physical or not, will eventually die. The current circus will also come to an end.
There is a time for everything......
a time to tear down and a time to build...
The natural cycle of things will unfold, regardless of human desire.
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#68Lack of communication breeds lack of concern, in my opinion. I don't think some folk understand how high your communication bandwidth needs to be to go fully remote.
Agreed, you need very proactive communicators. I just left a startup but it felt like issues fell through all the time, and not because they weren't raised, but it felt like people didn't understand the importance. Had a persistent collection of issues all in the realm of reliability, it took a long, long time (and many Pagerduty alerts) for me to realize that Engineering leadership above me was not communicating to Product that there was a cluster of similar issues affecting end users. And Product, I guess, wasn't reading post-mortems.
Looking at it from another point of view, even if your workplace objectively sucks and you don't want to be there, the lack of communication makes it worse:
* You can't really "see" the stress in people's faces. Hell, there's Zoom airbrushing so you don't look dead. You don't see when they start the day, end the day, have a long lunch, etc. All of those were subtle cues for what you yourself could get away with doing and not doing yourself.
* If your coworkers were phoning it in, it was relatively clear. Which isn't bad, it means you could phone it in. But we've had layoffs now. And since you can't really "see" people working, when they say "I spent 8 hours sweating over my keyboard," you take it as face value. You think that you have to do the same and more just to be average.
* If your coworkers aren't fulfilled with the work or another aspect, it's probably not well-articulated or even shared. These used to be things you simply ended up discussing over a beer. Now you end up intentionally Slacking each other (if at all), and probably when the sentiment has gone from "this isn't great" to "I'm actively looking and stressed." You don't get as much time to fix things, or as much time to realize you're not alone in it.
All-in-all, I'd still hope we can have remote as a norm, but only a handful of people know how to communicate proactively imo. The rest probably need 2 straight weeks of in-person work every quarter or 2 days of hybrid work per week.
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
With WFH, you get social reward from people who aren’t forced to be there with you, from the sources parent comment mentioned. Conversely, many don’t find that forced socialization you advocate for remotely rewarding and have to suffer through it for the minority that do like it. Again - a majorly depressing blind spot for the RTO crowd, or the RTO crowd devalues/dislikes their families and communities I guess? Edit…
So you're spending time with your families and communities instead of working during the day then. That thing you're calling "forced socialization" has another name. It's called work. Your ability to have conversations with your coworkers and customers about your work is in fact part of most jobs that involve developing products. Most of us making over $200k don't just pull the code lever at the code factory all day…
Somehow, I manage to work, have an ambitious career ahead of my peers, clear said-pay, pull the ol’ code lever at the code factory as it were… I.e “work and advance,” while seeing my spouse consistently from 9-5 instead of Brad in marketing, and seeing my community consistently because I buy coffee and lunch in town vs StarQdobaDonalds. That adds up, and I hope you get the chance to experience it as well. And those conversations you mention - nothing that can’t be achieved by Zoom, modern Slack usage, and quarterly off-sites or similar models. No ceiling found yet but maybe depends on what ceiling one counts as mattering. But so far, I haven’t found any yet.
Re: Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?
#70Looks like this post was buried, what part of the rules did it fall afoul of?