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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#121

Post by amendegree »

energy123 wrote: post #96
_lvbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago: > It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic si…

I don’t know what the context of that quote is, but I gotta say the realization that I would never be the smartest person in the room if I want to do interesting things (bec I simply don’t have the reasoning or memory that these people have naturally) was super humbling. I’ve spent the last few years coming to terms with it and in the meantime… I hate to say it but, I’ve surrounded myself with mediocrity as an ego boost. Only one job in the last decade did I feel like I wasn’t the smartest person on the team… and I got out of there so fast, I had way too much imposter syndrome and too big of an ego to admit it.

So I don’t get to do interesting things but my ego doesn’t feel stupid.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#122

Post by bwfan123 »

buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

I would describe it differently - "another day, another dollar" - where work is done as required - no more no less. Corps know this, and try to incentivize employees to bring some passion to work - via equity ownership - so, incentives are aligned. Another way is to pretend to have a mission statement like "organize world's info" which can fool employees to align without any monetary reward.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#123

Post by tolerance »

Where I think that pieces like this fall short at are identifying what they think people should "care" about and why these things matter.

For example,

* Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway?

(People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.)

* Why should people care to fund or listen to audio deep-dives into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man's memoir about when he was 12 and he heard songs?

* Why shouldn't people submit boilerplate responses to boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?

I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the questions like this.

We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.

I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#124

Post by mystifyingpoi »

buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

In my first job after graduating I've found:

* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded

* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks

* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time

* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job

So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#125

Post by deadbabe »

palmotea wrote: post #102
sp0rk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in…

>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride…

Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.

Results now are way better than results later.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#126

Post by this15testingg »

_lvbh wrote: post #37
0_____0 wrote: post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

to be fair we now have the knowledge and ability to begin to see the scale of the universe but are still burdened with the expectation of continuing the industrial age factory worker schedule of 40 hours a week coupled a constant barrage of information that it's actually doing more harm than good. How can you really blame anyone when the society is just working for the sake of it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#127

Post by mettamage »

buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that.

What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.

So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."

I give a fuck.

I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.

I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:

1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).

2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.

That's the balance I'm currently taking.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#128

Post by bigtex88 »

jaccola wrote: post #15
maxehmookau wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though. In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely. Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.

Maybe (and I mean this genuinely, I don't know for certain) "Who cares?" is a cause of wage stagnation.

Absolutely not.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#129

Post by joshcsimmons »

Dan - the article strikes right at the core of the problem. I enjoyed your writing style so I decided to have a look around your site and found myself saving a bunch of other articles to read later.

I see that you're an artist. The concept your writing about here is obvious to most artists but not so to technologists (generally speaking). What do you make of that?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#130

Post by SamBam »

0_____0 wrote: post #57
sndean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while. In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and…

I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there. They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility…

I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are certain professions where you're more likely to find someone who cares.

You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.)

Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and finally working where ever offers them a job.

You're only likely to even consider working at a bike shop if you want to work at a bike shop.

Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.

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