Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work and what that person created.

Honestly, the American obsession with "everyone should think of what the customer wants" is exhausting verging on toxic. The people who talk about that point loudest are inevitably owners saying "you should all care more to make me richer". If you want your employees to care about the customer more than their own personal satisfaction, give them significant equity and significant autonomy such that they can see how their actions have direct impact. Saying they should think of the customer and then treating the employees as an interchangeable cost to be minimized is insulting and won't lead to anyone focusing on the customer.

As per children, contraception exists and you should use it as kid is a dubious and too risky investment. You could for instance raise a little sociopath or two.

Healthcare for parents is for me at least letting them into a boat in the ocean when they get first alzheimer's symptoms like in Hemingway Old man and the sea. Native Americans used to do it. They just released their old guys to the forest or steppes. Which reinforces my point about the kids being rather bad investment. Do not count on that.

It's objectively more wise to save 500k-1mil from raising a kid to invest that money and spend it when old, hiring a professional caretaker. Have friends, spouse, not kids.

In any case it probably only matters that USA healthcare costs are so exorbitant. This is the crux to why it could never work for americans unless you are at much higher financial level than any sort of frugal upper middle class specialist in 40s.

It's the only western country where retiring earlier is so expensive. I thought maybe it would make up in the extra money you can make and save in taxes without VAT but no, after research I think that healthcare is so much pricier that it is incomparable.

So it is not simplistic but it's different environment altogether, one in which it actually works and I am really grateful for that.

OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)

> Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well. I'm not terribly frustrated that you don't get this.

Respectfully, this response here is a perfect example of you not getting it and assuming that I am the one that doesn't get it. You have not said anything that I have not already heard and understood before. The fact that people have different values does not mean they "don't get it." But saying something like "Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?" does imply that you don't understand other peoples' values.

The fact that you posted "Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well." indicates to me that you missed the point. Whether they are on those teams and whether they consider other engineers their customer is besides the point; they may not derive satisfaction from "delivering value" to those people regardless. That doesn't mean they don't care about their customers, which is the take away the median HN poster takes, but rather that they are not energized and motivated at the end of the day by delivering value to them.

> I've certainly worked with devs (and managers) who wanted to push new technology for the sake of using new technology,

Sure, everyone has. But the flip-side of this is a class of people who assume any tech improvement that doesn't directly move a metric is just an effort at resume-building. Just as often I've seen efforts and building a more robust system as unneeded resume building despite clear need (usually because the need is very hard to measure).

> and they should have found a side project as an outlet for this.

I mean, this is incredibly dismissive and exactly the attitude I was talking about. No-one is saying that engineers should be allowed to just do whatever to have fun. Work is work. But ideally you find ways to organize your team so that everyone is motivated and energized by their work, and doing so requires that you understand that not everyone is motivated by the same thing. But in these discussions, the attitude comes across as "everyone should be motivated by delivering good customer experience and if they aren't we shouldn't care."

If there's no opportunity to give these sorts of people fulfilling work, then fair enough. It *is* work. But the attitude displayed here is that we shouldn't even try and understand their values and think about ways to productively deploy that.

As an aside about customers, internal and external customers are, in my experience, treated vastly differently. We care about experience for external customers, but internal customers is usually all about velocity and trade offs. The bar is substantially lower, and rough edges are almost always ignored. So I am skeptical at the idea that we can just frame internal users as customers and all the discrepancies go away.

It also misses the fact that other people on my team are also my customers, because they have to maintain the system! And I am also my own customer, because I also have to maintain it!