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Nobody cares

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Re: Nobody cares

#241

Post by norseboar »

frotty wrote: post #200

100% of the people around me at work care. I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view." So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amou…

The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.

On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.

And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.

Re: Nobody cares

#242

Post by mewpmewp2 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #133
batiudrami wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).

I work for the government IT. Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers. Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring. An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownersh…

There are many problems with individual ownership though. It is a whole large system where people constantly change. You need to have multiple owners and redundancy otherwise all the projects are dependent on one individual who might quit any time. Things happen in the past, people make mistakes and you start to incorporate processes to avoid it because people are and will always be imperfect, you end up with thise processes and bureaucracy.

Re: Nobody cares

#243

Post by foxglacier »

shibby wrote: post #234

> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact. You’re all part of the problem.

Bloggers mention Musk like they do Trump to politicize their writing for some stupid reason. Ignoring it isn't part of any problem. Starting a flame war over it is.

Re: Nobody cares

#244

Post by cbsmith »

It's a common misconception of youth to think nobody cares. For the most part, people care, a lot, to the point that they get exhausted. The challenge is prioritizing what to care about, which means as much about not caring as it does about caring.

Re: Nobody cares

#245

Post by ClaraForm »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #174
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…

My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of t…

The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.

Re: Nobody cares

#246

Post by jongjong »

I used to care so much 10 years ago. I didn't have to factor the state of the world or society into all my decision. I trusted society fully like I trusted air.

Now I feel like the boiling frog and I only trust a handful of people. I don't trust the system. I don't trust that it's fair. I feel like being honest is harming my survival odds.

Imagine you have to live in North Korea... Your awareness of how that society operates can make it challenging to sing your praises to your dear leader.

I really hope things change. I live outside the US and it feels like we get the worst of everything. It's as though the political machinations which used to take place in Africa to keep the people poor has spread on to parts of the western world in a slightly different form. In Africa, the environment is about artificial deprivation of resources and rights; in the west, it's about deprivation of opportunities.

In Africa, the goal is to deprive people of resources and rights; to allow corporate monopolies to exploit their labor as much as possible. In the west, the goal is to deprive people of opportunities to prevent them from competing against monopolies.

In the west, we have a fake society where everyone pretends to be on the same playing field, but we're not even close.

Re: Nobody cares

#247

Post by leipert »

ryanisnan wrote: post #229

This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve. I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made…

Ha. The traffic curb example is actually a good one. I don’t think it’s an excuse to build a potentially dangerous ramp because you aren’t a cyclist yourself. People who design ramps should be capable to do it properly.

Imagine it were a ramp for wheelchairs and they would have decided that a 20 degree slope is doable.

Re: Nobody cares

#248

Post by foxglacier »

aabajian wrote: post #216

I agree 100% with the comment about the McDonald's food ordering system. It is legitimately the worst of all the major fast-food chains. It is slow, ad-heavy, and there are certain things that you cannot order.

When I know what I want, I order at the counter, which is faster and there's never a queue because everyone else is using the kiosk. There isn't a cashier waiting but you just stand there and somebody will stop to take your order pretty quickly.

Re: Nobody cares

#249

Post by tonymet »

He's really talking about aesthetics (the philosophy of beauty) and how we lost the ability do admire beautiful things. The only means we have to assess & debate merit are quantitative (and lossy) so the grotesque dominates.

There are a couple exceptions about apathetic doctors and degrading community, but most of his examples are complicated and ugly things (McDonalds app, the bike ramp, dog mess , etc)

Re: Nobody cares

#250

Post by SCUSKU »

ternnoburn wrote: post #112

Karl Marx talked about alienation -- we are alienated from our work, we are alienated from one another, and eventually alienated from our humanity. I disagree with Marx about a lot of things, but I do think that this theory makes a lot of sense. As we become increasingly mechanistic in our work, we feel less agency. Less control. Less attachment to the work. We stop caring about the product. You can pay people to car…

Ctrl+F'ed to see if anyone mentioned alienation, since this post basically seems to be OP talking about alienation without them knowing.

I think fundamentally if we want people to care about things again, we are going to need to give them ownership of the things they produce. Otherwise, why would anyone care?

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