The Who Cares Era

I would claim this is not a good example at all.

A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.

If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.

All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.

Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.

Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.

I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.

So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?

I do not understand anyone's confusion about this. We are a resource to be used in companies now; replaced, shunted, and changed as they see fit. We are not an asset. Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?

This "Who Cares Era" sort of nonsense just absolutely reeks of the pearl clutching that occurred with "Quiet Quitting" (otherwise known as doing the expectations of your own job and no more).

My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.

And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.

So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.

When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community.

Now we have reality TV stars parading their frankenstein bodies and the hype generated by social media as major influences for children growing up today.

Spelling a word correctly is harder than letting our apps auto-correct it for us. Playing a video game takes less physical effort than venturing out to a playground. Heating and eating a ready-meal takes less effort than cooking something.

I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population. We in the tech community are partly responsible for this.

I don't know what the solution is - but I guess what the author suggests is a good start. Start caring.