| ▲ | woodylondon 5 hours ago |
| 100% agree. Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down, and so want to make sure you don't end up in that position again. Covers all areas of IT from Cyber, DR, not just software. When I have moved between places, I always try to ensure we have a clear set of guidelines in my initial 90-day plan, but it all comes back to the team. It's been 50/50: some teams are desperate for any change, and others will do everything possible to destroy what you're trying to do. Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option. The trick is to work this out VERY quickly! However, when it does go really wrong, I assume most have followed the UK Post Office saga in the UK around the software bug(s) that sent people to prison, suicides, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect. |
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| ▲ | Hendrikto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Simple: 1. People lost ownership of the things they work on. In the early 1900s, more than half of the workforce was self-employed. Today, it is 10% in the US, 13% in the EU. What you produce is not “yours”, it’s “your employer’s”. You don’t have ownership, and very limited to no agency. 2. People lost any tangible connection to the quality and quantity of their output. Most workers don’t get rewarded for working harder and producing more or better output. On the contrary, they are often penalized with more and/or harder work. To quote Office Space: “That makes a man work just hard enough not to get fired.” 3. People lost their humanity. They are no longer persons. They are resources. Human resources. And they are treated like it. They are exploited for gain and dumped when no longer needed. |
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| ▲ | parpfish 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | One weird thing about software jobs as opposed to other crafts is the persistence of the workpiece. A furniture maker builds a chair, ships it out, and they don’t see it again. Pride in their craft is all about joy of mastery and building a good external reputation. In most software jobs, the thing you build today sticks around and you’ll be dealing with it next month. Pride in your craft can be self serving because building something well makes life easier for future-you | | |
| ▲ | chemotaxis an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think this ignores the codebase churn in Big Tech. The code you write today probably won't be there in ten years. It will be heavily refactored, obsolete, or the product will be outright canceled. You can pour your heart in it, but in all likelihood, you're leaving no lasting mark on the world. You just do a small part to keep the number going up. Tech workplaces are incredibly ephemeral too. Reorgs, departures, constant hiring - so if you leave today, in 5-10 years, there might be no single person left who still remembers or thinks highly of the heroic all-nighters you pulled off. In fact, your old team probably won't exist in its current shape. If you build quality furniture for your customers, chances are, it will outlive you. If you work on some frontend piece at Amazon, it won't. I think the amount of pride in your workmanship needs to scale with that. | | |
| ▲ | jama211 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Well said. I’ve always also thought that writing code and craftsmanship is a forced metaphor. At most, the product is the craft, not the code. And a product is exactly as good as people’s experiences of using it and how well it solves their problems. The underlying code quality is correlated with these things, but let’s be honest a badly designed product that doesn’t meet the customers needs can have PERFECT code and zero tech debt and still be a bad product because of it. Also you know what, some code is disposable. Sure, we all want to craft amazing sculptures of metaphorical beautiful wooden chairs that will last a lifetime, but sometimes what the customer needs is a stack of plastic chairs, cheap, and done next week. Who cares if they break after like 1 year. So, sometimes when I accept that my boss wants something rushed through, I don’t complain about the tech debt it’ll cause, I don’t fight back about how it should’ve designed to have wonderful code… not because I have no pride in my work, but because I understand the businesses needs. And sometimes the business just wants you to make plastic chairs. |
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| ▲ | Miraste 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That only applies if you expect to be at one job for a long time. Current business culture makes that a poor bet, both due to pernicious Jack Welch style layoff management and the career and salary benefits of changing jobs every few years. |
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| ▲ | JambalayaJimbo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | By "self-employed" - are you referring to subsistence farming? Everything I know about subsistence farming makes it appear much more precarious than corporate work; where hard work is especially disconnected from your rewards; governed by soil conditions, weather, etc. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > are you referring to subsistence farming? It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions. Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions. TLDR: survivorship The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion. The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot. | |
| ▲ | danans 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions. Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm. If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Those are usually large plantations There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same. > Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious. Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always. | | |
| ▲ | danans an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. This sounds like a semantic disagreement. I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case. Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master". "Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different. | |
| ▲ | saghm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions. > There are no plantations around here. FWIW you haven't really stated where "here" is for you. It's not necessarily going to be the same for everyone, and based on the parent comments, the potential area under discussion could include the entirety of the US and Europe (although the initial comment only mentioned UK specifically, it doesn't seem clear to me that it's explicitly only talking about that). I'm not sure you can categorically state that no one in this conversation could be talking about areas that have plantations. |
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| ▲ | NegativeLatency 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it’s pretty dependent on where you farmed. Orchards in California being vastly more profitable than like North Dakota. Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone. | | |
| ▲ | 9rx 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. It's not ignored. It is already encoded into the original comment. No need to repeat what is already said. |
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| ▲ | psunavy03 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias | |
| ▲ | bpt3 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > farming was insanely lucrative during that time That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had? Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time. |
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| ▲ | taeric 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is almost certainly a nice story we tell ourselves about a mythical past that just didn't exist. It can be annoying to say, but modern factory produced things are in an absurdly higher quality spectrum than most of what proceeded them. This is absolutely no different from when machined parts for things first got started. We still have some odd reverence for "hand crafted" things when we know that computer aided design and manufactured are flat out better. In every way. As for ownership, I hate to break it to you, but it is very likely that a good many of the master works we ascribe to people were heavily executed by assistants. Not that this is too bad, but would be akin to thinking that Miyazaki did all of the art for the movies. We likely have no idea who did a lot of the work we ascribe to single artists throughout history. On to the rest of the points, even the ones I somewhat resonate with are just flat out misguided. People were ALWAYS resources. Well before the modern world. | | |
| ▲ | Miraste 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Computer and machine manufactured parts can be better, but it's a mistake to believe they always are. Take two contrasting examples. In guitar manufacturing, CNC machines were a revolution. The quality of mid-range guitars improved massively, until there was little difference between them and the premium ones. In furniture, modern manufacturing techniques drastically worsened the quality of everything. MDF and veneers are inherently worse than hand-crafted wood. The revolution here was making it cheaper. CNC and other machining techniques raise the high bar for what's possible, and they have the potential to lower costs. That's it. They don't inherently improve quality, that's a factor of market forces. | | |
| ▲ | taeric 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I would wager that the general change in availability of wood is by far the biggest driver in difference for the markets you are describing? Particularly, furniture benefits greatly from hard wood. At least, the furniture that is old that you are likely to see. It also benefits heavily from being preserved, not used. | |
| ▲ | lupire 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Comparing a cheap thing to an expensive thing is absurd. The appropriate comparison is which is better for the same price | | |
| ▲ | Miraste 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If the cheap thing replaces the expensive thing and there is no same-price comparison, is it absurd? My point is that many products that were handmade at high quality no longer exist because of modern manufacturing. If you want a chair or, say, a set of silverware at the same inflation-adjusted price it would have been available for seventy years ago, you can't get it because the market sector has shifted so thoroughly to cheaper, worse products (enabled by modern manufacturing) that similar quality is only available through specialty stores at a much higher price.
This happens even if the specialty stores are using computer-aided techniques and not handcrafting, because of the change in economics of scale. | | |
| ▲ | taeric 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The catch here is that most people did not have high quality hand made furniture. Most people had low quality hand made things. Pretty much forever. And is why they aren't here for you to see them. |
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| ▲ | potato3732842 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >1. People lost ownership of the things they work on. In the early 1900s, more than half of the workforce was self-employed. Today, it is 10% in the US, 13% in the EU. At a high level nobody works smarter and harder than people working for themselves because they see the direct results in near linear proportion. So basically half the workforce was in that situation vs a tenth. Say nothing about taxation and other things that cost more the higher up you go and serve to fractionally break or dilute the "work harder, make more, live better" feedback loop. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | almostgotcaught 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How many people agree with the above but "disagree" with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation Lololol Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki: 1. From a worker's product 2. From a worker's productive activity 3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being) 4. From other workers Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional. | | |
| ▲ | Thorrez 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't specifically disagree with Marx's theory of alienation. However I disagree with communism. I think communism makes the problem worse, not better. | |
| ▲ | potato3732842 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Identifying the bad stuff is not hard. Marx is far from unique in being able to do that. I find his class framing and assessment of the roles the various classes do in the status quo to be particularly good even if it ought to be deeply unflattering to the HN tax brackets. Advising on where to go from there in an actionable way that produces good results is the hard part. Marx didn't do it. Those attempting implementation of his ideas have an exceptional record and not in a good way. And worse still, some of the worst aspects of those movements are the ones that stuck around to be peddled again and again under different brands. | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The bad idea from Marx that lead him astray into pseudo-science territory wasn't worker alienation. It was the labor theory of value (and the other stuff he created to make it looks like it works). Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common. But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile". | | |
| ▲ | kagakuninja an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers? There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies... | | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay an hour ago | parent [-] | | Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak). There is more to alienation than equity. |
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| ▲ | almostgotcaught 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile" Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!" This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East. | | |
| ▲ | taeric 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Flourished, you say? | | |
| ▲ | bpt3 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Great retort, I actually laughed out loud. I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there. |
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| ▲ | LudwigNagasena 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Surely Marx would disagree with such assessment and call it idealistic and not grounded in material reality? |
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| ▲ | LudwigNagasena 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is no reason to buy into the whole Marxist framework just because you share one single sentiment that various thinkers had before and after him. | | |
| ▲ | almostgotcaught 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > one single sentiment Lol alienation of labor is not a single "sentiment" - it's a core principle. So like it or not you share a core principle with Marx. | | |
| ▲ | LudwigNagasena 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The sentiment is shared with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc and probably lots of other less known people. Marx's theory of alienation is far more developed and nuanced than the generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people of various political inclination, not only Marx. | | |
| ▲ | almostgotcaught 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > sentiment ... > theory these two words aren't interchangeable > Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc ... > generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine" you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed. |
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| ▲ | wccrawford 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What happened is that most companies do not care about their employees, and their employees know it. If anything happens, the company will lay off people without a care for what happens to them. Even when they do care, such as in a smaller company, their own paycheck is being weighed against the employees, and they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems. CEOs making millions while they lay off massive amounts of people is the norm now, and everyone knows it. You can't blame the employee for not caring. They didn't start it. |
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| ▲ | steveBK123 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s. My dad worked as an engineer in the same firm for 30 years and retired. The company was founded before his father was born, and was publicly listed before he was born. Substantially every company I have worked for didn't even exist 30 years before I joined, let alone before I or my father were born. Most won't be around in 30 years. Several employers nearly went out of business, had substantial layoffs, or went thru mergers that materially impacted my department/team/job. The guys at the very top were always fine, because how could the guy in charge be responsible? Even within the companies I stayed 5 years, I had multiple roles/bosses/teams. | | |
| ▲ | jack_tripper 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s. As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void. Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on. I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up. No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns. | | |
| ▲ | FatherOfCurses 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problems GenX had to deal with was watching Boomers, who enjoyed all the benefits of post-WW2 expansion of infrastructure and social services, pull the rope ladder up behind them once they got well-paying jobs. The 80's and 90's saw the beginning of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that pervades all but the most egalitarian societies. Reagan and Thatcher deregulated and privatized everything, and as a result a select few made a mountain of money and destroyed the middle class. "Shareholder value" and mass layoffs became the order of the day way before the dot com bubble burst. GenX knew we'd never have it as good as our parents - we just didn't know how fucked we were going to end up. | | |
| ▲ | jack_tripper 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >The problems GenX had to deal with was watching Boomers, who enjoyed all the benefits of post-WW2 expansion of infrastructure and social services, pull the rope ladder up behind them once they got well-paying jobs. No, I agree. But pulling the ladder from under them is not the biggest issue per se since every generation after them did them same if they could get on the ladder, the big problem with boomers is their immense hypocrisy. GenX and Millennials knew that the situation was every man for himself grab everything you can while the going is still good, but crucially IMHO they didn't try to gaslight the next generations that this system of gains is somehow fair or the result of hard work and self sacrifice. But boomers indulged in the period of sexual liberation and drug use, while then preaching about conservative family values and war on drugs when they got older, they enjoyed crazy good housing market and unionized jobs while preaching you should pull yourself by your bootstraps for a job that treats you like a disposable cog and won't buy you a house, they vocally hate socialism while depending on a generous social security system they designed for themselves and costing the taxpayer a huge amount on socialized government healthcare programs paid by the younger generations, etc the examples could go on. You can't hate boomers enough for this. Granted, not all are this hypocritical, but enough for the dots to form a line on the graph. |
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| ▲ | taeric 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To be fair, the actual lesson of Fight Club is that maybe you do need a woman in your life. :D (That and don't delude yourself into believing the fascist inside of you.) What really killed corporate loyalty for a lot of us was the lack of jobs that have lifetime pensions, if I understand it correctly. Why would I agree to work somewhere til retirement if I would be better jumping somewhere else to make more money now? |
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| ▲ | vladms 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think too much "caring" can also be negative. I do not want employees so "loyal" to the company that they don't consider changing for another. I do not want companies so "loyal" to all employees such that they would go bankrupt rather than keep 50% of people active. I would hope people would be more responsive to the actions of companies. Earlier in my career I looked for another company when the discrepancy between CEO bonus and employee bonus was larger than what I found reasonable. | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems. And that exactly used to be different and still is in small companies. |
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| ▲ | nkrisc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. My local grocery stores won’t accept pride as payment for food, and working harder doesn’t make my paycheck increase. |
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| ▲ | throwawaysleep 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is basically it. The US at this point has shown that the winning move is to just lie and scam and loot and then do it all again. I will be held to the standards of billionaires and politicians. Not one micron more. |
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| ▲ | hnthrow0287345 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Because there's still people doing less work than you do for a bigger paycheck Because you'd get fired or laid off for someone working for 1/2 to 1/4th of your pay Because they make you jump through multiple rounds of interviews and technical tests while people above you have a far less barrier to being hired Because someone stole credit for your work Because you'd get re-hired and find a mountain of shit code from a company that off shored their dev team Because companies stopped giving significant raises that didn't keep up with major inflation in the past few years, while your work might have gotten them many multiples more of profits Idk it's just a mystery we'll never know |
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| ▲ | chemotaxis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I found that most of the "people problems disguised as technical problems" are actually generated by people who get far too invested in their work and let it define them. They get territorial, treat any lost argument as an attack on their whole self, etc. They also lose perspective, getting into flame wars over indentation styles or minor API syntax quibbles. People who show up for the paycheck are usually far more reasonable in that regard. |
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| ▲ | ferguess_k 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People have to be interested in their jobs to care about it. Corporations know that people rarely get to do whatever they want, so they assume (correctly) that most workers do not care, so they move on to care about processes, workflows, which makes even less workers care about their jobs. For individual workers, the best thing is to work @ something you love && get good pay. Like a compiler engineer, a kernel engineer, an AI engineer, etc. |
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| ▲ | graemep 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Many employers actively discourage people from doing work that they are proud of. You cannot be proud of something that is built as cheaply as possible. You can get employees to care about customers or the product, you cannot get employees to care about profits and dividends. |
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| ▲ | stronglikedan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Anecdotal, but I used to be proud of the work I produced, and then it got old and repetitive. However, as it was getting old, I was earning more. Now I'm in a place where if I were to quit and find something I could be proud of, I would have to accept a huge reduction in compensation. No thanks. I'd rather have a much higher "just a paycheck" and find things to be proud of outside of work. Plus no one else cares anymore so why should I? Just pay me a lot and I'll keep showing up. |
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| ▲ | jt2190 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down… To the great surprise of my younger self I have never seen “it all come crashing down” and I honestly believe this is extremely rare in practice (i.e. the U.K post saga), something that senior devs like to imagine will happen but probably won’t, and is used to scare management and junior devs into doing “something” which may or may not make things better. Almost universally I’ve seen the software slowly improved via a stream of urgent bug fixes with a sprinkle of targeted rewrites. The ease of these bug fixes and targeted rewrites essentially depends on whether there is a solid software design underneath: Poor designs tend to be unfixable and have complex layers of patches to make the system work well enough most of the time; good designs tend to require less maintenance overall. Both produce working software, just with different “pain” levels. |
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| ▲ | thwarted 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option. This leader is not going with the quickest or cheapest option. Doing so would probably be laudable. They are going with the claims made by someone that a certain way is going to be quicker or cheaper. It doesn't matter if it actually is, or ends up being, quicker or cheaper. One plan is classified as meeting the requirements while another plan is classified as being cheaper, the cheaper one will be chosen even though it doesn't meet the requirements. |
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| ▲ | willvarfar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect I recall there was a whistleblower Richard Roll who said that engineering did know of the bugs and flaws |
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| ▲ | Noaidi 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > for some, it's just a paycheck. What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Maybe if wages kept up with inflation people would still care. You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store. |
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| ▲ | mylifeandtimes 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >> for some, it's just a paycheck. > What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? Imagine a society where your work was an opportunity for you to provide products/services for your community, where you could earn a reputation for craftsmanship and caring, and where the real value was in the social ties and sense of social worth-- your community cares for you just as you care for it, and selfish assholery has high costs leading to poverty. Now imagine a society where the only measure of social worth is a fiat currency, and it doesn't matter how you get it, only matters how much you have. Selfish assholery is rewarded and actually caring leads to poverty. Which society would you rather live in? Which society is more emotionally healthy? So the question is, is our current society the one we want to live in? If not, how do we move it closer to what we want? | | |
| ▲ | stronglikedan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Our current society can and does have room for both, which is great since some people want to live to work, and some just want to work to live. I don't see a problem with either, as long as it makes one happy. | | |
| ▲ | thwarted 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And there's another group, grifters, who are neither living to work nor working to live. They are the parasites, and our current society rewards grifters by not putting them in check. Probably because so many want a piece of the grifting pie, in the same way many people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. |
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| ▲ | zwnow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If not, how do we move it closer to what we want? By going all Ted Kaczynski on the elite and abandon sensationism and most of technology. |
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| ▲ | wccrawford 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ethically? Nothing. Socially and emotionally? It's brutal. For both the employee and society in general. Spending almost half their waking hours not caring is not good for people. | | |
| ▲ | bpt3 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a difference between caring about your personal work product (and reputation), your colleagues on a personal and professional level, and your employer as an entity. I expect my employees to show up to work and put forth a solid effort on a regular basis. Note that this doesn't mean a constant death march towards some unreasonable objective, or anything even close to it. Just apply yourself using the skills we agree you have for the pay we also agreed upon for 8 hours a day on average. In my field, this means you have pay that is well above the norm for an average software developer, and the working conditions are good or better. A shocking number of people are incapable of this, and generally are also the same people who would claim that "they didn't start this". | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So is it not good for people to care and yet be blocked from being able to do good work. | |
| ▲ | Noaidi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Then pay people so they have a reason to care their work. This is like a wife beating husband wondering why his wife to care more about him. every company in the united states could become a co-op and nothing would change for the business and everything would change for the workers. And everyone would be much happier at work and you would have the caring people you want. It is the system that is the problem, not the people. | |
| ▲ | watwut 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Frankly, people for whom the work is "just a paycheck" I know in real life are simultaneously happy and simultaneously frequently produce actually good reliable work. Work being "just a paycheck" does not mean you hate it or half ass it. But, it means you do go home to get rest, you do socialize outside of work instead of irrationally pushing it and then using meetings for socialization. It means you do not have ego tied to it so much you throw temper tantrum when things are imperfect (which is not the same as being able to change things for the better). | |
| ▲ | zwnow 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Give us a reason to care. It's that simple. | | |
| ▲ | rmah 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I believe that seeking external validation, inspiration and/or reason is not robust and a path to unhappiness. IMO, it's better if the reasons for you to care come from within. | | | |
| ▲ | bpt3 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reasons to care are personal pride in the quality of your work, understanding that your lack of effort has a negative impact on your colleagues, and your continued employment. And if you hate your job, but are completely unable to find alternative employment (which is what you should do if you hate your job), you probably should reconsider how much you hate your job. | | |
| ▲ | nkrisc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Got any recipes for delicious meals I can make with my pride? I take pride in the stuff I enjoy doing. A job is just a paycheck because I need it. | | |
| ▲ | GaryBluto 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | He wasn't asking you to work for free. | |
| ▲ | bpt3 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I find it hard to believe you actually read my comment before demonstrating you are probably one of the people I'm talking about at the end of it. At no point did I state or imply that workers should be working solely or even primarily for anything other than money. But if you can't be bothered to take pride in the work you're being paid to do, you shouldn't be paid to do it for long. | | |
| ▲ | nkrisc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I will do my job as well as necessary to keep it in order to keep receiving money. If I could find a job that pays well and made me happier I would. | | |
| ▲ | bpt3 an hour ago | parent [-] | | If you can't find a better job, you should probably appreciate the one you have and not try to skate by with the bare minimum, if for no other reason than you're likely to miscalculate at some point. |
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| ▲ | zwnow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People have a working contract and all you have to do is work according to the contract. |
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| ▲ | Noaidi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ah, noble poverty! Be grateful to tha masta' for providing you the scraps he can provide! Your paycheck is the beautiful work you produce for tha masta'! Seriously, pay people what they are worth and they will care. It is not that hard. | |
| ▲ | zwnow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pride in the quality of my work is a phrase to make one feel bad about themselves. I take pride in my hobbies and in my hobby projects. I take pride in my family and friends. I do not take pride in being exploited for my work so some higher up can buy a new car every year. | | |
| ▲ | bpt3 an hour ago | parent [-] | | And again, someone comes and makes a comment that proves my point. Unless you are working in very unusual (and illegal in the developed world) circumstances, you are not being exploited in any real sense. |
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| ▲ | mrweasel 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So I believe it actually worse that the article makes it out to be. Currently AI "solutions" being implemented in places like call centers are often technical solutions attempting to pave over organizational problems. Many IT solutions are like that. We refuse to fix the underlying problems, so we layer software on top, so we won't notice the stupidity below. IT companies will happily take the money and write the code, broken as it might be, because the real problems aren't actually resolved. That to me is a problem. Companies needs to be way better at saying no, and offer help address the underlying issues instead, even if they aren't technical in nature. | |
| ▲ | AbstractH24 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > What is wrong with just wanting to work for money? Nothing. In fact, I envy people who can and wish I could. Consider it one of my largest flaws. | |
| ▲ | hansvm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store. You still can almost everywhere outside of places like SF? I just spot-checked some data, and in Minneapolis for example currently available apartments are comparable to what they were when I was looking 10 years ago, cashier wages have gone up 45%, and that often comes with healthcare benefits now. It's not an especially wealthy life, but a single person should be very comfortable (that's a comparable hourly wage and apartment cost to what I had delivering pizza at some other part of my life, and I lived comfortably and was able to save up to splurge on a nicer used Miata and the down payment for a small house). |
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| ▲ | wiseowise 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce. Millions of boocampers and juniors trying to make a quick buck; any tech work that is not “make it, and make it quick” is punished; tech debt swept under the rug; any initiative is being shut down because status quo is more important; “we’ll optimize when it becomes a problem” on 15 seconds page reload; dozen of layers of parasites and grifters making your life hell, because their paycheck depends on it; salary bumps that don’t even cover inflation – the only way to actually move in life is to join, raise as much hell as possible in 2 years and jump ship leaving the fallout for the next SOB in the line. And that’s just what I bothered enough to type on bad iOS keyboard. |
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| ▲ | merrvk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People need visas and that’s all they care about |
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| ▲ | stardude900 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You started an excellent discussion with this comment |
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| ▲ | zwnow 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Work is just a paycheck because I am just a number for my employer. Why would I be proud of my work when apparently according to management I should be replaced by AI at some point because im just a cost factor.
Why would I care about the business at that point? Fuck the higher ups, I'll be proud of my work and actually put in effort if I can afford a house. |
