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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#421

Post by oooyay »

1dom wrote: post #149

I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right now. Article didn't really touch on it directly, but: > something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later. It's not that the dudes don't care, i…

I agree with you to some degree. When I got to the bottom of the article I read this:

> Be yourself.

> Be imperfect.

> Be human.

> Care.

It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout.

What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#422

Post by 0_____0 »

WalterBright wrote: post #150
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.…

I did some business with the a city department at one time. I discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or will "be back later".

My partner and I ended up sleeping on an air mattress while we waited for the one person at the building department who could sign off on our project to come back from vacation. They were in fact completely unresponsive between thanksgiving and two weeks after new years.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#423

Post by ranprieur »

alabastervlog wrote: post #258
Night_Thastus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of…

I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation" actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the main outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of offices, among other places: they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody , adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to underst…

"Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in power want to give less and get more.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#424

Post by antisthenes »

ryandrake wrote: post #291
Balgair wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take: "in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22n…

Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are trending, anyway. I don't think anyone wants to think about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly economically…

Frankly, the younger I was the longer my prospective time horizon was.

E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to happen in 2100.

Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years, as my life experience has taught me that life is often unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that ability to temper our expectations through health issues and other things.

I also don't have the executive function anymore to think about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.

So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look different than what I imagine.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#425

Post by CamperBob2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #213
grumpy_coder wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing has consistently underperformed the market massively since the MD merger. Making maybe 3% after inflation

The vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.

Right, and isn't that everyone's point? When their focus was on the product, they excelled.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#426

Post by CamperBob2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
layer8 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your competitors will eat your lunch.

The most successful companies, in my experience, are not successful because they're so much more awesome than everyone else. They are successful primarily because of luck... the luck of having competitors that suck total ass.

Microsoft, for instance... or in more modern times, Tesla.

I wouldn't put Boeing into that category, though -- it took more than just a lack of good competition to accomplish what they did, back in the day.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#427

Post by warkdarrior »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #317
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also say we are lost in scale. The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons. I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful pl…

https://ilsr.org/

What does this Institute for Local Self-Reliance do? Their primary photo on the main page is showing a network/LAN testing device.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#428

Post by JKCalhoun »

WalterBright wrote: post #153
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…

> because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.

That may be, but it's possible it has become more employer-adversarial; that the employer/employee "contract" has become increasingly one-sided.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#429

Post by strgcmc »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #344
XorNot wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the same answer? Like, the answer you're giving is still a WTFC answer - it's just "leave". The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.

In the tradeoff between [rest and vest] vs [leave for higher standards], I think the second option is better, and “more care-y”. At the very least, it shows the company that there is a problem, and doesn’t squander talent. You’re right that there are even more care-y paths though — potentially op could continue to escalate the issue, train all his coworkers, or work crazy hours to fix the problem themself. There is a…

But this thread here has either misinterpreted or willingly ballooned the problem up, into this strawman of an unfixable culture or a terrible company which no one engineer could possibly fix...

The OP here, basically has a simple (and common!) 3-way collaboration/communication problem:

- OP did not get along with 1 single fellow coworker that he was assigned to work with; this coworker reportedly does not listen to reason, does not read the research or background info that OP shared, etc.

- OP tried to seek help from a manager/lead type person, but that person was also not useful (i.e. not able to force a course-correction towards better collaboration).

Note: OP did not actually indict his entire team, or the entire eng organization, as all being hopelessly useless. OP said he had a problem with 2 specific people, and asked for tips to deal with that (small!) scenario. But instead of giving "small" advice for a "small" (and again, common and usually fixable/at-least-improvable) problem, both the toxic hive-mind as well as the HN commentators here have completely avoided trying to solve the actual root issue (which isn't nearly the impossibly-large-turnaround effort that everyone's making it out to be)... What we have here, is fundamentally an XY problem (https://xyproblem.info/), in that OP asked for help with X, but got advice about Y.

EDIT: Okay so I guess I should offer some concrete advice to OP for what I'm calling his "small" original problem -- usually there are 2 categories of options from this point: either escalate again, or try to resolve interpersonally without escalation.

- Escalation route: OP tried the 1st manager/tech-lead, who couldn't bring a resolution... that's... pretty common actually! So escalate 1 more level, calmly and professionally. Whether it's a skip-level director/VP, or a project manager, or whichever stakeholder is appropriate in OP's context -- explain politely what steps you have tried to solve the problem so far, why the counter-proposal / alternative is bad or won't work, and emphasize that you are still happy to collaborate further, but you are currently at an impasse and need a more senior person to weigh in. Then, OP needs to be prepared to "disagree and commit", if the decision doesn't go his way. NOTE: if the decision doesn't go his way, it could mean 1 of 2 things: a more senior person brought in extra context or expertise that OP did not know about and hence made a better decision that OP can learn to appreciate, OR it could mean everyone is an idiot and OP is the only sane person in the company... there's no reason to jump to the most negative conclusion as the only one, but certainly I acknowledge it's possible (I just don't think it's good advice to assume the worst, without even trying a simple +1 extra round of escalation... OP could at least try 1 more time).

- Non-escalation interpersonal route: OP can find a professional way to say to the problematic coworker, "frankly, I still disagree with your approach, and it's my job to document my disagreement with our manager(s), but at the end of the day, if you insist on doing it your way, then go ahead". Sometimes, the only/best way to learn, is to let someone else try and fail. This isn't callousness or retribution, this is actually a common lesson for mentors who might otherwise struggle to try and protect their mentees from ever possibly making a mistake or being wrong about something... an overbearing/overprotective mentor would need to learn how/when to take a step back, to let a mentee try and fail and learn-how-to-learn from their failures. Of course, OP is not this coworker's mentor, and does not need to feel obligated to assume that role, but I am simply pointing out that letting someone go off and do something you disagree with, can actually be an act of caring (rather than a form of not-giving-a-fuck).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#430

Post by JKCalhoun »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #288
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…

On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.

Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've thought that too but have had to point out to myself that some very deserving people were in fact promoted.

Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.

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