I don’t think there’s a damned thing you could change in the work environment to fix that, it’s the work itself that is the problem.

Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing.

A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can do a lot worse for society than running a "soft" business ethically and happily.

For free.

I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it takes to create shipping software.

These projects would be worth a lot of dosh, if I were to hang a sticker on them.

But I did them for no money.

Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

It's an issue, but one I have no ideas how to solve. I think that the right to spend money on what we want is an important one, and I won't gainsay anyone else's right to do that. If driving around in a Model X and having a model (of any gender identification) on your arm is your priority, and you have worked hard for that, then Godspeed and good luck. I have different priorities, and the story of how I got them is long and winding. Not so many folks have backgrounds like mine, and not many that do, have developed priorities like mine.

I am grateful to be in the position I'm in.

I don't think it's "US society", as much as it is urban and suburban society which has become dominant over the last few decades. Traditionally in the US, people were a lot more communal--neighbors and families would share farm equipment, help each other through busy seasons, watch each other's farm while the other was away, help raise each other's kids, etc. Maybe the problem isn't our Americanism, but rather the lack of it, and maybe the solution is figuring out how to integrate more of it into our modern society rather than doubling down on our increasingly isolated, me-first sub/urban existences.

And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

> And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

By working my butt off for over 30 years, making a rather humble salary, but never living large, avoiding personal debt like the plague, driving old cars, or crappy company cars, living in apartments and a small house, saving 25-40% of my earnings, investing in conservative, yet still a bit aggressive, funds, and then, after leaving a job I stayed at for nearly 27 years (at a famous Japanese imaging corporation, that makes optical equipment), being rejected (sometimes, quite rudely) by every place I applied at, for being too old.

The first project I mentioned was done over a period of ten years, as a "side project," while I worked as an Engineering Manager (a job I hated). I did it because my life was, literally, saved, by an organization, and I wanted to Give Back.

There are many reasons to do things that don't involve avarice, ego, anger, or cynicism. I want to make the world a better place. My resources are limited, but I have some ideas on ways to multiply my impact.

I'm finding it really hard to do. Even if I wanted to make the personal sacrifice (and thus sacrifice my future children's stability and environment..) for more virtuous pursuits for far less compensation, I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.

I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.

Organisations are generally pretty shit at achieving anything.

But the good news is that individuals can and do make a difference and ultimately change things. It's the small wins that count. Changing one person's habits. Getting one more friend to drop BigTech. Getting one teacher to rethink the effect of over-connectedness on our children. Showing one person the problem of e-waste and seeing them jail-break an old phone instead of buying a new one.

You overcome the myth of "the they" (the hordes of mindless "users" who just want convenience uber-alles that we always hear about on HN) one real person at a time.

Then you start to see friends and colleagues reflecting good values back at you. Help your doctor friend streamline her time with real computing tools, but also make it clear that you're not a charity, or a mug and that what you're doing comes with a message that you expect her to pass on. The health message about harmful technology [1] should resonate with doctors. Encourage her politely to change her lifestyle just as you would commit to changing your diet and exercise if she told you to.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

I don't really agree with this part. You can't demand that another adopt your morals, certainly not genuinely by offering conditional help. I avoid people like this, because they think they've figured out what's best for someone else and judge everyone who doesn't think the same.

Just aim for the highest good, and course correct since chances are you don't know what that really is. Others will join or oppose you, that's feedback.

Sounds like a worthy cause. The ten-year project that I mentioned was actually ready to go, after a couple of years. All the rest of the time, was spent, talking about it, and trying to help people use it, until it went viral, and was taken over by a fairly accomplished team.

Thanks to them, it has become a lot bigger than I could have made it.

If you contact me, I’m happy to share it. It’s aimed at a very specific demographic.

I'm not trying to replace that company with my free labor. Mostly looking for ultra low hanging fruit - like scripted replies to FAQs that burn 15 mins/day replying to.

What about doctors? Nurses? Tenured professors? Blanket statements are fun but probably miss the more nuanced issue.

Systemically public education is broken leading to us undervaluing teachers in many public school districts. The same for social workers -- the US doesn't have robust social safety nets so social workers can provide less help. Perhaps that's why they're not viewed as favorably? The same budget constraints apply to their salaries, making it so the more qualified ones go into private practice perhaps?

I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

>Tenured professors?

I know a few. I guess some of them are paid well, but they often make a lot less than their students. They do have job security (like tenured teachers).

Doctors don't make money because they help people. They make money, because people with money think what they do is important.

[UPDATE]: Note the downvotes. I didn't post anything that attacked anyone. I made a "blanket statement" that has been made millions of times, and is, regardless, quite true.

I also talked about some projects that I've done (a few that are easily accessible, for anyone interested). These were not mentioned to be "snotty." They are simply what I have done, out of Gratitude and for deeply personal reasons.

Don't like to look at things that make us uncomfortable? Join the club. However, it often makes us better people.

You're conflating recent and broad economic trends with the specific conditions of a specific profession. Millions of Americans all over the country have been quitting and changing careers (it even has a name: "the Great Resignation"). This doesn't mean their conditions are shit, but rather that pandemic-era economic forces have been reshuffling our economy.

I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative. Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).

The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.

The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.

The broader question is how do we change that? Is it worth squeezing an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity from people to have them burn out in 5 years vs. a more steady 25 year career?

For one, that extra education? It often isn't seen as part of one's career. But for any course worth its salt, those years are still draining. It's a minor point, but also an overlooked one.

Second, there's the mismatch problem. Outside STEM, loads of people aren't getting jobs in their fields. Inside STEM (mostly tech, really), most people are getting tech jobs completely different from what they learned in school. Often uninteresting and/or boggled with politics and bureaucracy (read: majority of them are CRUD webdev jobs trying to appease corporate's whims).

Third, the job market is ravenous. Absolutely ravenous. Anyone not solidly mid career is discriminated against to some degree. Too old? Have fun being seen as a liability despite your experience. Too young? Here's a set of requirements you wouldn't learn in most corporations, schools won't teach you and somehow you're magically supposed to get this experienced in a corporate setting, noted as "requirements". Oh, and you better cite the company's values by heart and claim it's your dream job, even if their product is yet another luxury / minimal improvement driven to make profits, as there are 20 others lined up.

The whole burnout thing already starts before you enter your first job.

True that K-12 costs more, but public assistance in higher education is substantial [1]. From grants, subsidized loans to directed money into public universities, it's a sizable investment at the state and federal level. It'd be more efficient to take that money and invest it directly in vocational schools if we knew people would utilize it and then swap careers due to burn out.

1 - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...

Edit: Updated reference to 2019 version.

Most people joining the tech industry today aren't doing it because they're particularly good at it, or they want to. It's the best way to raise capital to do something else.

I definitely didn't say that. At least three of my friends now do those things. They're very happy. And they add a lot to the world, at the least by the smile they wear each day.

Looking around me, I do know a fair amount of people quitting tech. To become a sport or management coach, a sound designer, a bar owner, a writer, etc. But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.

Beware of bias when attributing value to someone else's struggles. "happiness" and "fulfillment" are innate personal perceptions. And they are the aggregate not just of one's job, but of one's circumstances in life on the whole.

For one person, the struggle associated with being a writer might be totally worth it. For someone else, it could be entirely the wrong road to follow. Thing is, the only person who needs to figure out what path in life is the right way would be... that person. That's what personal responsibility, freedom, agency, independence,... is all about.

In a way, the big trap in this debate is ending up shoehorning people into different boxes. Just because someone graduated with a tech degree doesn't mean they can't do something else in life. Even when that pursuit is, arguably, harder then just sitting in a chair and struggling with - say - Homebrew, trying to install a different versions of Node.

You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.

In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

People are trying to figure out their lives or how they want to live. There is nothing wrong in coming back to what they had quit. Making fun of other people's life choices is very immature in my opinion.

The comment happens to be against the status quo and for the every day person and that has a higher chance as being seen as something that is unusual and more negative than it actually is.

It's a writing style (mannerism?) but not necessarily ill-intentioned.

How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.

> How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.

1775 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War

(I'm not saying anything one way or t'other, just pointing out a little history)

Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?

Of course, the logistics of undoing the neolithic revolution are mind-boggling. You're supposed to learn to be a hunter-gatherer over a lifetime, not to be thrust into it in the middle of your adult life. If some leader-type tried to abandon complex society right away, it would probably go about as well as the Cultural Revolution went. Lots of people accidentally picking the wrong mushrooms and killing themselves, because their parents never taught them how to tell them apart.

Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure.

""" She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support.

You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """

""" t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases.

Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress.

And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """

The dark cynic in me says that in a country with a for-profit health system all these effects are considered good features of the workplace.

The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.

What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure.

The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.

Yes some marriages end in divorce and families disconnect in some cases, with various outcomes. The family still exists even if no-one participates in it. The guy is being overworked and unable to see his kids, I'm all for that guy seeing his kids. It can have huge knock on effects if it's ignored. You aren't forced to participate in family.

Family is built from natural impulses, biological connections and installs in the children an inheritance of values, schooling and relationships. There are reasons from first principles for families and the surrounding neighbourhood, city and country benefits from families. You can't hand-wave away the meaning of family as 'power' and 'arbitrary'.

And we are trying to move into the future, not the past.

Are nuclear families really so important and successful that we need more of it? Is this really an undebatable absolute truth that should be forced on people? Let people decide on their own if they want to spend their new found free time on families or something else.

Edit: the "special status" is loyalty, and loyalty is bad if we are trying to live in a meritocracy.

What says that the parent will necessarily be the "best" person for their child through their whole life, and not someone else? That's arbitrary.

You see no issues with swearing life long loyalty to blood relations? That's just going to be the optimal solution in every case? That's making it a little bit too easy don't you think?

It's also just as natural for people to branch out and leave their families, as it is to stay close to their families.

And I think it's irrelevant to the discussion of shortening working hours, and a bad example because it's another oppressive construct.

It's like arguing for shortening working hours so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned and has seen decreasing success.

How about just shortening the working hours so that people can be more, free? And do what they want?

This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches.

Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation. You can walk out of Church whenever you want.

Doing what you want tends to be quite narrow, hedonistic and unsatisfying in the end. It's easier to make the argument for free time from higher principles.

Well I guess we can say that we have a fundamentally different view on what constitutes development and improvement of life and society.

Freedom is the ability to swim in any direction you want, so go ahead. Do whatever you want. The map of your possible options already exists and the institutions are just one or many worthwhile places to visit. When people do whatever they want it quite often ends up on a place on the map where there is a lot of hedonism and not much in the way of higher meaning or valuable aims.

As a dispassionate observer it is my inclination to suggest that people will take the argument for more free time off work in the favour of church and family as an easier argument to make, given it's connection to a higher meaning and relatable values. A boss will likely see anything connected to 'wants' as room for more work.

[Developed] societies have been systematically failing at addressing externalities for the last hundred years.

We do have many scientific methods to measure pollution, climate change, mental health, physical health, income inequality.

The socioeconomical system is designed to prioritize economical growth [for large company owners] over everything else.

Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Or maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society).

You remember the Tom Sawyer story, where he gets the others to paint the fence for him? Work is very much "in the mind". You can have the work of Sisyphus and get to love the rock. In the best cases work is the making of some people. It can liberate you from boredom and self indulgence. An artist or poet talks about their "work" in an entirely different spirit. We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work".

> without foregoing the actual productivity

Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology. Producing what? Productivity is a slippery word. Unless you're a farmer most of us can't point to anything tangible we produce. The best we can hope for is to help fellow human beings in whatever small way we can each day. Increasingly that is done by subverting the system. Worthwhile work occurs despite, not through the systems we inhabit.

I'm explicitly not doing that. My whole comment can be rephrased as: "if we can meet society's needs with less soul-crushing, we should do so, but some of the soul crushing may be inherent (needing to work to meet our own physical needs can be inherently exasperating for some)".

> Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology.

I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.

We can absolutely "meet society's needs". We already do, amply, and have for many decades. The problem is that we've over-supplied needs, and replaced huge tracts of activity pandering to wants and whims. It is that over-provision that is at the root of so much of the soul crushing emptiness.

> I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.

Of course. I know the square root of jack about economics. But I do know how to read what credentialed economists write. So I think the difference may be in our choice of credentialed economists. Here's one take [1]. But who I am really echoing is Yanis Varoufakis, who says it much better than either Thompson or myself, that we've a very poor idea what "productivity" really is.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201230-how-the-pandem...

Yes, we have plenty of resources to feed everyone and provide people with the things that I personally value, but defining "productivity" in terms of one person's values and then organizing society to optimize for that "productivity" (in other words, a sort of planned economy) is a much worse oppression than laboring for one's own values. If that's not what you're getting at, then please state it plainly because we're several comments into this exchange and it's still unclear what solution you're imagining.

Bold of you to assume office work involves "productivity".

Are you including undergrad or just grad programs? If we include undergrad and do ballpark math: government pays 40 billion in grants per year, there are 20 million students, so that's 2 thousand per student cost to society

Whereas I'm paying upwards of 30k. The cost is on me, not on society. Although I'm just an anecdote so I'm curious to hear from others

What I'm most worried about in leaving my career as a solutions architect is that the ability to start and build a business of my own seems insurmountable when you consider the world's reliance on social media and popularity/wealth as a requirement for success. There are so many people doing absolutely the same thing these days, and so many people that present the image of success and popularity in being an entrepreneur in pretty much every field that valid/great ideas get drowned out so easily... If everyone is doing the same thing, and many people are faking their success, coupled with wealthy individuals that can easily copycat ideas, it creates massive barriers to organic success.

There is usually only one page on most sites for publications, that's often a wild and crazy mashup of posts from all disciplines and fields of interest. Our attention spans are also shrinking because of short form content, that makes it very easy to view something important, but also forget it 5 seconds later, so even marketing is overwhelming to most of the people that would support independent business.

Sites like Reddit started out great, but now subreddits are often run with other intentions than open communication... Many mods secretly steer business in their own directions because of the flood of competition, and it feeds deceptive marketing techniques and brigade culture.

I don't want to be stuck in complaining, I think the world really needs to evaluate how much we are fostering "monopolistic dynasty" culture and nepotism on the Internet, and how it's destroying capitalism... We all really need to bring back a sense of distributing speaking time among wider ranges of audiences and speakers, and fostering discussions that aren't based on popularity and wealth as indicators of validity... The very same culture that has negatively infected the workplaces we might want to leave.

In the face of so much disruptive potential, so much surplus of intellect, and so much human energy unleashed by automation and fossil fuels, the strategy of the incumbents has been to stifle it.

I mean, isn't that what the entertainments business has been focused on for the past 40 years, with DRM etc? What some parts of the tech industry does is actually anti-technology. We have a kind of job creation scheme with one person digging a hole, while another fills it in. Some computer scientists working to create innovation, and others overtly set on stifling it. To ignore that adversarial aspect is to completely fail to understand modern technology.

Productivity is the goal, right? Increasing worker happiness and reducing stress should be the focus. I think this will produce the largest effect on productivity.

Instead, we get sociopathic slave-driving at work: a narrow focus on KPIs, mandated hours of work and methods of working, prostration from micro-management (it can go on forever).

Working environments are low-trust and hostile, with no focus on what truly makes a worker happy, and what actually makes them productive!