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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#491

Post by alphazard »

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.…

This is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities presented to people at work. There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance, and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the quality of their work. A yearly meeting where your wage is adjusted to keep up with inflation or reflect your time in the workforce isn't something you can control.

This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.

The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#492

Post by 1dom »

oooyay wrote: post #421
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 v…

I guess it comes down to world view, since we can never know the answer: when a human has everything they need, including enough bandwidth, how many will care by default vs being apathetic by default.

If they care by default, all we need to do is give them everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not, then giving them everything they need will result in them doing nothing more.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#493

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

I find there is middle ground between "who the fuck cares" and "I got to fight for what is righteous". Do the job best you can. Accept resources, including skilled human beings, are what they are and unless you own the place there is very little you can do about it. Try to do the best work you can with the resources you are given is all I can say. It does give pleasure to at least try to do a good job.

Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#494

Post by jplusequalt »

chrisco255 wrote: post #206
jplusequalt wrote: post #43

This is late stage capitalism at work. Our economy and political systems incentivized the behavior that lead us here, and the current apathy we see is the working class realizing the rot in the bottom of society.

There's no such thing as late stage capitalism. There's ebbs and flows, businesses that were formerly great (like newspapers), fade out and go out of business. New forms of media take their place, the cream rises to the top, the train keeps going.

>There's no such thing late stage capitalism

I'd wager you'd argue there was such a thing as late stage socialism, no? You're inability to imagine anything else than capitalism is a fallacy. Google Capitalist Realism.

>the cream rises to the top

No it doesn't. Success is largely determined by who had access to the most capital, or who was able to build a moat around themselves fast enough. The meritocracy people love to imagine they live in, is nothing more than a myth for a majority of people.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#495

Post by neilv »

flkiwi wrote: post #481
neilv wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

If you have the misfortune to deal with that category of corporate specimen, additional reasons for why they might disregard good advice:

* Option A (bad choice for company) has some angle upside for them, such as something they can credit to themselves or that increases their status, but option B (the best choice for the company) would be owned by one of their rivals.

* Loss of face, such the best option for the company would too clearly expose and reverse a mistake they made (when they and/or the org doesn't believe in acknowledging mistakes).

* (Speculating about some weirder ones) They are all about confidence projection, as you say, and further, they've come to believe their own BS. (Maybe this falls under the psych quirks I mentioned earlier.)

So the confidence in ChatGPT, or in anything else, might not be irrational or misinformed, but merely part of their internal sales act for selfish advantage.

Fortunately, I haven't run into any of these problems a lot, but have enough experience to know they can happen. Today, I would recognize some BS quickly, and move to confirm and correct it, and probably leave if there was too much uncorrected BS.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#496

Post by azemetre »

whstl wrote: post #365
azemetre wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you won't be rewarded with money and influence while still having the same risks of layoffs. At this point you're better off working on your own thing because the company is usually, always with few exceptions mind you, a dishonest actor that is openly hostile. The elites can't blame the state of the world on workers when they've created out hellscape of treadmills to delusion and abandonment.

Yep. The only reward in a place that doesn’t care is time. I am in a proper place now, but I regret not getting a second job in my previous fintech job.

Why do you feel the need to work a second job, why would that be better? Wouldn't you rather be a part of your local community and put effort there rather than a private enterprise?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#497

Post by _DeadFred_ »

MisterTea wrote: post #46
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.…

This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the…

It's also way more in your face that you are a sucker now that you can see the rich, carefree lives of people online. While it might not be your boss, it's people in the same circle living the same lifestyle.

Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#498

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

mettamage wrote: post #127
buangakun wrote: post #74

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that. What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work. So wo…

I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and chill for a bit.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#499

Post by jimbokun »

WalterBright wrote: post #227
palmotea wrote: post #193

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. > Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE. The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that. It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fa…

> The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that. No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.

But there's a lot of variance in how long it takes for a company to reach that point.

Some fight it off longer than others.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#500

Post by azemetre »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #470
intalentive wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buybacks sacrifice long term investment for short term stock price gains.

Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do. Buybacks merely allow publicly listed stock owners to precisely time their capital gains tax events. Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.

No, buy packs are pure market manipulation. There is a reason why they were banned prior to 1982. It's a SEC rule that can easily be reversed too but the rich love their ability to manipulate markets for their benefit.
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