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Nobody cares

grantslatton.com

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Re: Nobody cares

#71

Post by lazide »

medhir wrote: post #12

I relate to this a lot. Someone is referring to this take as “bullshit” contrasting the experience of the average worker to a software engineer. I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care. Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the…

Just wait until you try to speak up and get destroyed. Why do you think folks don’t speak up?

Re: Nobody cares

#72

Post by spencerflem »

As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.

I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.

The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.

That sort of thing.

One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.

Re: Nobody cares

#74

Post by tolerance »

lnsru wrote: post #21

I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type perso…

Resist the cold churn toward pride-fueled apathy that this rant exhausts.

After reading this, if this is supposed to demonstrate the psyche of the sort of person who “cares”, I really hope he keeps indoors and spends a little bit more time on his self before stepping out on others.

Re: Nobody cares

#75

Post by imgabe »

Over2Chars wrote: post #49
imgabe wrote: post #38

Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.

A well known CEO noted that in a failing organization he was trying to devise a turn around plan for that everyone in the organization invariably blamed... the other teams! Not a one said "our team is responsible for our failure". The engineers blamed product, the product people blamed sales, etc. He said he provided this suggestion, "You are of course right (it's the other groups fault, and it might have been so), b…

Sure, that's great if you all work for the same organization and everyone involved asked themselves that and they all benefited from the organization's overall success.

But that is not the case here. That is not how bike lanes or many other things get built. The engineer is a consultant that works for one independent company. The contractor is a different independent company. The client is another company or a government entity. Possibly the client involves several different entities with competing demands and priorities.

And "success" for the engineer doesn't really mean building a good thing. It means a happy client who will come back for repeat business.

How does this problem get fixed? Well, eventually someone hits that curb and breaks their neck and sues the city. Then the city hires an engineer to create design standards that they include in future contracts when they build new bike lanes.

Re: Nobody cares

#77

Post by DharmaPolice »

As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.

In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.

Re: Nobody cares

#79

Post by fredphilo »

this articles has a ton of typos but that reinforces the emotional state the author was - an emotional state that i think is becoming more and more common. theres an underlying anxiety here; the world you grew up in is gone. this is bad and we (the author and myself) are not falling victim to nostalgia. all the things i interact with are becoming more and more dysfunctional. everybody has their answer to whose fault it is, people to blame for the fact that things simply don’t work anymore, but i think an analysis of this “lack of care” or “i just dont dgaf” attitude on the part of the workers, the employees of the companies who, theoretically, make the USA and similar countries the beacons of good living that they appear to be, might be fruitful. i’ll definitely be thinking about this observation for a while.

Re: Nobody cares

#80

Post by GuestFAUniverse »

maximinus_thrax wrote: post #67
whyenot wrote: post #62

Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they r…

Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!

And playing PoE!
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