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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#71

Post by transcriptase »

safety1st wrote: post #50
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 think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods. It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 yea…

Exactly.

And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.

Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#72

Post by nancyminusone »

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.…

The goal is the same as it's always been: get the most resources for the least amount of effort. This is true whether you're a squirrel, a person, a company, or a government.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#73

Post by potato3732842 »

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.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#74

Post by buangakun »

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 not have background in this field. This guy just roped into this project and stayed.

I sent him articles, tutorials, and even documentations that say so and so is so and so, but he refused to believe it and said it was just my opinion. I even offered to work on these problems instead of him. But we ended up getting into heated arguments. I talked to my tech lead and my VP and they just brushed me off. It got so bad that I asked to be transferred to a different team.

I also realized later that my tech lead was not as technically competent as I hoped to be, so that's why he couldn't make a decision.

Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation. (In those forums I actually described exactly what were the problems)

To my surprise, a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man, just get your paycheck and go home, what an idiot". These are highly paid FAANG engineers.

So, that was my wake up call. They were right. Who the fuck cares. Just get my paycheck and go home, and work on other stuffs, work on side projects, side hustle, and go Leetcode.

I was 8 years too late into the industry to know that this should be my default attitude when working.

Now I am in "Who The Fuck Cares" club.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#75

Post by littlestymaar »

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.…

For the past five decade, we have lived in a society where the dominant ideology was about how “egoism lead to the greater good thanks to the magical forces of the free market”.

It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing.

Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#76

Post by curiousgal »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #44
naming_the_user wrote: post #23

People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal. In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc. In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox countin…

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.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#77

Post by Gravityloss »

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 wonder if this is how it felt in Rome or Byzantium or various other places in the years leading up to collapse.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#78

Post by b112 »

greedo wrote: post #70
b112 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage stagnation always happens at the start of any economic downturn. However, once over and the economy resumes, typically the stagnation ends, and wages jump. The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit. But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am n…

If you look at the rate of wage growth compared to inflation, it's pretty clear that wages have stagnated for a long time, with periodic bumps. The goal of most businesses is growth and increased productivity. The easiest way to have higher productivity is to constrain wages.

I will agree that in certain parts of the world, this is quite true.

However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course it's an economy still in the throws of massive transformation.

Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess it could for the few unaddicted.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#79

Post by greenavocado »

safety1st wrote: post #50
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 think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods. It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 yea…

The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors, even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't support real journalism, why would anyone bother?

The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#80

Post by mattmanser »

_lvbh wrote: post #37
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.…

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

Friendship groups are like mini echo chambers.

One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.

If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.

But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.

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