> NPC coworkers I suppose "the author can go fuck himself" is a frowned-upon response on Hacker News Like what an incredibly egocentric, condescending, deplorable way to talk about other human beings with their own rich inner lives, desires, needs, relationships, etc. "No, they're just pre-programmed, unthinking bots following basic algorithms."
It reminds me of the Sheeple comic from xkcd. It's common for people to fall into the mental pattern of thinking everyone else is a mindless drone. Our brains are not evolved for the scale of human civilisation. The mind rebels trying to accept that 8 billion people have as much going on (or more) than you do. "NPC coworkers" is a provocative way of phrasing it, but yesterday I saw another HN commenter say "We all kn…
To jump from "managers don't know how to allocate tasks" to "the employee being managed is an unthinking, fungible automaton" is enormous.
The disdain of this shithead toward coworkers is misplaced. He accuses his coworkers who are being mismanaged of being NPCs when it's more apt to accuse the managers of being bad "game designers," to carry the analogy further.
It's also a weird analogy to make in 2025, when co-op games exist. What mental deficiency, what arrogance must you suffer from to analogize coworkers to pre-programmed non-humans when actual humans play the games with you these days?
Edit: His entire line of thinking reminds me so much of the stupid geeks in high school who looked at athletically-gifted classmates and said "they aren't deep like I am." Give me a break. The shallow ones are the ones incapable of identifying the spark of the divine in people different from themselves.