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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#271

Post by short_sells_poo »

curiousgal wrote: post #76
short_sells_poo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or…

Yeah even if you had one of those fancy job and make over 150k, owning a decent flat in London is still out of reach nowadays.

Sadly this is true. 150k a year is "only" about 80-85k net, good luck buying a tiny Victorian row house for >1mln quid without your parents sponsoring the down payment. Or you can buy a crappy apartment built to "UK Standards" where everything is done by people who truly don't give even a shred of effort to quality and you are in the hilarious position that you don't even own your own walls.

And that is all on a very-very good salary in the UK (90th %ile is 60k).

Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a solution either. If you want to be on a main train line, the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to become an unmitigated misery as the terrible, dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.

There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but this is not possible if your job physically requires your presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#272

Post by nemomarx »

weweersdfsd wrote: post #173
ramesh31 wrote: post #30

I've always thought that caring is the most precious resource in software development. You can pay people to show up to an office, you can pay people to write code, but you simply cannot pay people to care. It takes some special confluence of factors that money can't buy. And great software is only made by people that care. This is the real "10x" factor that most people and organizations don't have.

Perhaps you can't pay people enough to make them care, but you sure can make them not care by paying too little.

necessary but insufficient, I think. if your salary doubled tomorrow but without a change in responsibilities or agency at work, would that move the needle? I think you need other things in addition to the pay, like recognition for efforts and outcomes

Re: The Who Cares Era

#274

Post by _DeadFred_ »

malfist wrote: post #249
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they offshored the project and fired people, and are bringing it back, and now you have to deal with that mess Your potential reward for fixing all of it and reminding them to not do it again? Nothing!

The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out.

Sadly many of us in tech get a rush from the 'superman' feeling that gives us. Our sheer force of effort/genius saves the day yet again. Until it burns us out, or we get dropped and realize we weren't actually valued.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#275

Post by Aunche »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #170
WalterBright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.

GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't. [1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025 [2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/poli…

> Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed

I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?

https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-deat...

Re: The Who Cares Era

#276

Post by ewhanley »

saulpw wrote: post #261
ewhanley wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?

Because, as has been mentioned innumerable times in this thread, going through all that extra effort does not get you more money. It gets you more stress and a target on your back when you make a mistake.

Bingo - sorry, this was a mostly rhetorical question.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#277

Post by toomuchtodo »

Aunche wrote: post #275
toomuchtodo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't. [1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025 [2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/poli…

> Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights? https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-deat..…

> Works until it doesn't.

Boeing 737 Max: The troubled history of fatal crashes and 346 deaths in 7 years - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi... - July 8th, 2024

As Boeing looks to buy a key 737 supplier [Spirit AeroSystems], a whistleblower says the problems run deep - https://www.npr.org/2024/06/16/nx-s1-4998520/boeing-737-spir... - June 16th, 2024

Boeing’s Decline Traced to Decades of Catering to Shareholders Above All Others - https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/boeings-decline-traced-... - April 8th, 2024

Boeing’s long fall, and how it might recover - https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... - April 7th, 2024

Re: The Who Cares Era

#278

Post by pixl97 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #73
fhennig wrote: post #41

People do care, about their own self interest and making money. Homo economicus, here we are! A critique of this attitude must look at its origins, and I think the reason we see this so much, is because the narrative of the last 40 years or so has been that: If we all look out for our own self interest, the market will balance everything out, and things will be great! Turns out, doing the bare minimum in an almost ma…

We got into this situation because everything is so consolidated and filled with bureaucracy and metrics and statistical analysis that whether any individual does or doesn't try won't actually come back to benefit them, or at least not enough to be worth the squeeze in the end.

But if you understand the problem, you'll also understand why the bureaucracy exist...

The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society, has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the problems to understand them.

I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause issues like this. An application needs a security related setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an upstream server. This security related setting causes another problem with a necessary application on the server causing connection problems with it.

The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an immense number of other applications. All of these issues get bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and such.

And this is just software, something that is inherently flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these schedules break all the time because when you start digging you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed back months while drivers are screaming in frustration because the road is down to one lane forever.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#279

Post by ryandrake »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #152
b112 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legislation often lags immensely behind change. The worst of this has only being going on for a little over 10 years. Maybe 12, so 3x changes of elected legislators. Some of these issues are also safety issues. Being distracted is certainly obvious in a car, and massive fines and even criminal charges are now the result. But there are subtle things one must do in many jobs, just generically paying attention, which re…

Another possibility is governments outlawing addictive social media. There are probably several ways this could be done, but breaking up the big advertising monopolies would be a good first start

I would love to see Social Media and addictive apps like sports betting treated like smoking. If not outlawed altogether, at least forbidden to children, and socially and legally discouraged for adults. We need to start seriously treating these things like the terrible things they are.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#280

Post by WalterBright »

layer8 wrote: post #226
WalterBright wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a contradiction to me. If you're sacrificing the long term for the short term, your stock isn't going up.

Why not? You’re still profitable, just with mediocre stuff.

Your competitors will eat your lunch.
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