Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#481

Post by flkiwi »

neilv wrote: post #474
flkiwi wrote: post #385

I keep experiencing absolutely mediocre middle manager types challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..." The outsourcing of the most basic thinking by people who would rather do anything other than think is, paradoxically, creating a bonanza for people like me who end up having to do the thinking for them (and clean up their m…

> challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..." This might be a variation on one I've seen a few times: I'm an expert on something, and advising someone who wants to instead go with advice from their friend who isn't even involved. (And who usually has little-to-no experience in the thing. But it's like calling up your nephew at…

That’s the funny part: decision-makers never cause this issue for me. They, generally speaking, are deeply aware of what they don’t know and welcome my input.

It’s always the climbers, the middling intellect crowd that play the petty dominance and status games in a large organization, believe that their advancement is enabled by unwavering confidence. I say they keep rising but there’s a limit—they generally end up at the top of the peon pyramid but never ascend to the very highest leadership roles. But, unfortunately, I still have to deal with them.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#482

Post by ausbah »

0_____0 wrote: post #418
danans wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans. It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standar…

In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.

people are hugely dependent on private sector companies as well. sure the financial impacts are passed onto the capital owners, but those are passed onto consumers in most cases no? i dont see a huge difference here

also the wage differences between tech and a public service worker is laughable. if you underpay in a high pressure environment, of course they won’t care. we get what we pay for with publicly owned utilities

Re: The Who Cares Era

#483

Post by homefree »

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.…

Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F...

Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#484

Post by chaosbolt »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #368
gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket. The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find t…

>Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced.

I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem would've been to change the financial system.

>Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.

It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite Facebook.

>HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.

It's not?

>An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.

An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not affect macbook sales.

>Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.

They're less than that in most ways except for select use cases.

I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#485

Post by dividefuel »

gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every year.

Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#486

Post by erikerikson »

ranprieur wrote: post #423
alabastervlog wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zero sum claims do not a positive sum reduce

Re: The Who Cares Era

#487

Post by dividefuel »

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've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.

Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.

People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#488

Post by robotnikman »

thewebguyd wrote: post #208
SamBam wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Al…

> Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now. I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job…

It makes me wonder if there are still those "bike shop" jobs to be found in tech. I feel like I missed out on the golden years of the tech age where I would have found my curiosity and interests satisfied by my job, but maybe there might be a few niches out there somewhere...

Re: The Who Cares Era

#490

Post by _DeadFred_ »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
palmotea wrote: post #102

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…

> 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.

Red Lobster
Post reply on HN