Ask HN: Widespread Apathy? Not sure how to say this, but I've been developing code since 1999. Every company I've worked at everyone is super engaged until recently. I know it is easy to blame the pandemic, or remote work, threats of layoffs?... but lately nothing seems to be serious anymore. I'm not speaking for one company but the last 3 I've been at. Anyone else seeing this? |
In the 90's/2000's, the tech industry was seen as the place for visionaries and the hard workers who were there to change the world, to make it a better place. Google had the motto "Don't be evil", and wanted to make all of the world's information easily accessible. Apple was for the perfectionists, the artsy-tech crowd, Facebook was there to connect people, etc.
But as those company's (and the industry) matured, those dreams were pushed to the side. As these companies grew, it became about shareholder profit (because remember, company's have to operate in the best interest of their shareholders legally, which means protecting and increasing their wealth). As such, those visionaries at Google who were making the world a better place by making information accessible, now collect data and advertise to the world in, objectively, unethical ways. Those at Facebook who wanted to connect people from all over the world to build communities and promote discussion, now just grab as much data as possible to promote hyper-targeted ads.
The industry matured, interest rates rose, and VC's became more picky with where they spent their money. As such, these smaller slights against users and employees had to be accelerated in recent years. Teams and even entire departments were laid off, the quantity of ads was increased, while the quality decreased, free services locked behind paywalls, all in an effort to save money to meet a 5% profit growth that quarter.
Tech workers are no longer viewed as the world changers leading the company's vision for greatness, some execs view us as an obstacle to their revenue goals. We're a liability that needs to be mitigated, and layoffs are an easy way to do that.
Ultimately, we've all become kind of jaded to the tech industry. It's no longer about making the world a better place, it's about money, and we're not in the club.
Facebook really did connect everyone on Earth. Google really did make all the world’s information available to everyone. Apple really did put a device in everyone’s pocket to access all that information.
But that’s also what gave us superhuman algorithms designed to suck all of your attention away from all the real world things humans need to be happy. Like fresh air, exercise, and face to face interaction.
There are two people on my team who have become extremely disengaged of late–and I think one has good reason–and one way this manifests is in their agreement to do or fix something, but those changes never actually being implemented. I find myself having to follow up many times to ensure things don't get lost in the shuffle. But I don't directly manage one of the people, and it seems like they just DGAF what I say–no matter how I approach them. "Strong suggestions" really don't go anywhere. Pretty apathetic, if you ask me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_veto
edit: fixed typos
No one is going to hustle for a meh deal, unless they’re naive or unsophisticated.
1999-2020 was 20+ years.
That’s about the length of a long-term industry cycle.
It’s also 20 yrs of selling a narrative about tech that recruited ambitious, value-driven people who also wanted to make money.
Don’t want 18 hr days at Goldman or 10 years of medical school, but want the pay? Come work 8 at <tech co> and make the same pay without the intern and first years hazing by an alcoholic 45 y/o MD who hates their spouse and never goes home.
And then if I was to get pretty negative: Then, ~2020 hits, the cracks in the ideology show, no way to hide the data revenue models behind every nice Change the World pitch, turns out tech also shredded social discourse and now looks like it might unemploy Mom and friends, and maybe undue democracy (who saw that coming haha), and so on. VCs always win and you’re tired of reading their same think piece blog posts, layoffs always win, a lot of places that seemed the polar opposite still became IBM accidentally. Work, don’t work, it’ll be several quarters before that catches up to you. If you’re really introspective - why did I make $200k+ in my pajamas during COVID while someone made $15/hr at Whole Foods getting exposed to a pandemic all day long? Pretty sure people in that position actually got very sick… but HelloFresh kept getting delivered so I didn’t realize.
The shine has worn off. That is all imo. Place that are both really changing the world, actually understand the second order effects and plan for those, and you can get hired at are few and far between. It’s still/just an industry where you can make a ton of money and keep your brain curious.
There has been a quantitative shift in tech worker pay at the top end in the past twenty years.
In other words, the past twenty years have seen the rise of Big Tech: billion-user products, trillion-dollar valuations, eating up entire industries (retail, publishing, consumer electronics, entertainment). What enabled them are software economies of scale (production + distribution), the US's ability to train and attract talent, cheap money, and access to massive markets abroad.
We're really only talking about the top employees at the top tech companies in the top most expensive COL areas. It's not like every tech employee in the world is making $500K and driving a Ferrari, despite what HN commenters might sometimes say.
> There has been a quantitative shift in tech worker pay at the top end in the past twenty years.
Bingo--we're comparing only the top end of tech pay.
- WFH or at least hybrids enables a building or rebuilding of the social connections from neighborhoods, communities, and families. For about 2000 years, this was fulfilling to humans. From 2006-2020, Facebook became what’s fulfilling somehow. Good odds you’ll find the former fulfilling as a 101 human if you check it out. Don’t have to be a 30+ y/o with a spouse and kids either. Just takes imagination, resources (fortunately, pay is great!) and some initial introspection and imagination to figure out who you are and what you want. Then go do it. Most others never get the chance (see my Whole Foods example)
- technical knowledge and the time and freedom to think it through is a superpower to own your own life. WFH/hybrid removing commutes, to start, opened this all up. Go be a Capitalist Jr and spin up some companies. “Side hustle” doesn’t even do this situation justice. 2-5 years of work: you own your own internet conglomerate and have the next 30 years+ to benefit from it.
I'd like to add onto this particular comment, the mantra "think small".
The process of focusing on the smaller-scale things that are within your sphere of influence (your neighborhood, your family, yourself) are slower, less instant-gratification, but they also deliver much higher ROI in long-term satisfaction.
I've been doing this for over 20 years and if you counted the number of days I worked on a weekend or more than 8 hours, it would probably add up to less than a month.
You may see great opportunities to improve metrics within your org, but for various reasons you cannot actually achieve these goals based on your own individual effort. The reasons for failure are myriad, and I will avoid going down that path of sad tales.
Finally now, when I'm just about out of energy, I recognize that the most likely way to do something of significance or otherwise effect real beneficial change is to strike out on your own, ideally with a partner or two, and build something new. Of course that new thing will ultimately get bought by one of the bigger laggard companies who is incapable of allowing something like this to develop internally. But you accept that reality and vow to build something new after that opportunity is closed out.
At this point, we should be teaching classes on how to build great new things and get them sold off to the big slow giants. Rinse, repeat. I know there are people already doing this, but it's not well known or recognized.
Have we really reached a point where striking it out on your own is mostly an illusion?
I changed companies twice between 2020 and 2024 and I've noticed this at both places. Not only is the average tenure of current employees everywhere much shorter (most of the people in the big tech where I work joined in the last 3 years), everyone works like they're only planning to stay for a short while.
I feel guilty I’m a drag on the company but so hard to move in this market.
So just why I haven’t been that engaged and burnout. Maybe others have similar experience.
But honestly, I think it's better to find meaning outside of work. Work on something hard outside of work, or just find a few hobbies that make you happy. I'm not even 30 and I already personally feel the "grind mindset" leaving me as I find the things I thought were most important a decade ago don't matter so much any more e.g. lots of money and climbing the corporate ladder.
https://teambuilding.com/blog/manager-magazines
Read the articles and imagine your company leaders are following this advice. For example:
"When Your Employee Feels Angry, Sad, or Dejected"
https://hbr.org/2024/07/when-your-employee-feels-angry-sad-o...
Gives advice on what the right thing to do is, to get your employee performing again. It's almost like the leaders do not know this stuff themselves and are learning how to fake empathy. The article creates a two dimensional matrix for when to engage with employees and the two axes of that matrix are "Is your employee focusing on a time-sensitive goal?" and "Does your employee seem to be coping?". If the employee is doing something time-sensitive and they don't seem to be coping the advice is to "intervene and help that person focus". That is, help them focus on their work, ignore their problems, give them a pep talk, "you can do this", wink at them in meetings if they get shot down.
I've watched managers transform from nice people to tyrants due to absorbing stuff like this. They share this kind of advice with their peers also. "10 tricks to get more out of your employees and accelerate meeting your project deadlines". Maybe you could buy your managers a subscription to Psychology Today or something else that you think would be a better influence on them?
It's easy to dismiss this as just a smart ass comment, but it's 100% real for me. My employer pretends to treat me fairly and I pretend to work hard.
And the market is also terrible so everyone takes what they can get and it shows on the effort put in.
Yes, and most people have longed faced that without the pay of this quote: "Don’t want 18 hr days at Goldman or 10 years of medical school, but want the pay? Come work 8 at <tech co> and make the same pay without the intern and first years hazing by an alcoholic 45 y/o MD who hates their spouse and never goes home."
Real estate is bought in bulk by the same people that rake in the big bucks in those companies as well. And rented out to people that can't afford to buy a house for premium profit.
The same is happening online: companies are using the collective intelligence of everyone to train models to sell back to those same people for profit.
We're getting screwed at both ends
For the first time in a long while a generation is worse off than their parents. Food, housing, health, clean air and water. Every basic need from the bottom of Maslow's pyramid is currently under scrutiny.
Something related I heard yesterday during consulting in a client:
"Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why my code, comes from AI"
is this actually an issue for tech workers? I don't know a single person in tech that can't afford a home within 30min of the city center.
Looking at it from another point of view, even if your workplace objectively sucks and you don't want to be there, the lack of communication makes it worse:
* You can't really "see" the stress in people's faces. Hell, there's Zoom airbrushing so you don't look dead. You don't see when they start the day, end the day, have a long lunch, etc. All of those were subtle cues for what you yourself could get away with doing and not doing yourself.
* If your coworkers were phoning it in, it was relatively clear. Which isn't bad, it means you could phone it in. But we've had layoffs now. And since you can't really "see" people working, when they say "I spent 8 hours sweating over my keyboard," you take it as face value. You think that you have to do the same and more just to be average.
* If your coworkers aren't fulfilled with the work or another aspect, it's probably not well-articulated or even shared. These used to be things you simply ended up discussing over a beer. Now you end up intentionally Slacking each other (if at all), and probably when the sentiment has gone from "this isn't great" to "I'm actively looking and stressed." You don't get as much time to fix things, or as much time to realize you're not alone in it.
All-in-all, I'd still hope we can have remote as a norm, but only a handful of people know how to communicate proactively imo. The rest probably need 2 straight weeks of in-person work every quarter or 2 days of hybrid work per week.
The technology is ever boring. I've been studying CS papers from the 1960s-1990s and there is a lot of ingenuity and new avenues being explored. Now any random HN engineer can only ask "how is this better than Rust?" and I feel that not only we have remained stuck on languages and tech from the 1980s, we have regressed so much that most developers have forgotten or never even learned about "futuristic" environments such as Lisp or Smalltalk. People roll their eyes at these names for the simple reason that no one has been paid to improve upon these for the past 40 years, because companies only care about average productivity of the junior dev. We've spent the last 30 years reinventing C and UNIX; now the cool kids are adding coloured text in their VT100 terminals. Mindblowing.
I am still consulting because being an employee is more and more like white-collar slavery, and post-pandemic it's not even that well-paid, what with the massive influx of low-quality, low-requirement workers and the post-2008 money tap being closed. I am spending my free time devouring old CS papers, and the thought of writing 1500 lines of YAML to deploy a Kubernetes sounds such a pointless, anachronistic castle of sands built by massive tech corps that have just found a way of turning the art of computer programming into a circus of Taylorist code monkeys following a script for 8 hours a days.
Of course I'm apathetic. I'm too old for this.
/rant
Pair this with this sick obsession the industry seems to have developed to replace humanity with chatbots, and yeah, here we are.
I feel like over the last year a lot of people around me have reached the point where they would naturally start looking around at other opportunities. But there just aren't that many opportunities around. So I suspect people are just hanging about, collecting a paycheque and waiting for the right time to bounce.
What did people believe? In an ever-progressive world? That’s a limited and superficial perspective on life. Everything that is born, whether physical or not, will eventually die. The current circus will also come to an end.
There is a time for everything......
a time to tear down and a time to build...
The natural cycle of things will unfold, regardless of human desire.
I now work at a really small company lead by people who seem genuine (they've managed to at least keep up the act for a few years I suppose). It doesn't pay particularly well (though not bad for where I live either), and there's no "growth" potential (I learn lots of new stuff, but the money isn't going to double or triple or anything like that). No ads or hyperscaling - we just make a product that people are willing to pay money for. I'm as engaged as I've ever been for an employer.
Btw - I've been developing since 1999 as well, so there are plenty of people cleaning up the debt I left.
I read this article a couple days ago: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/06/12/japan-quiet...
Japan is a great barometer for where many of the developed economies are heading.
>Only 6% of the Japanese workforce is engaged, one of the lowest readings in the world,
Labor Force Participation Rate in Japan increased to 63.10 percent in April, the highest in five months,
Less then 4% of their 120 million citizens are actually working and doing things their society demands.
The generation of young people in the 1960s thought this. Then the generation of young people in the 1970s thought this. Then the generation of young people in the 1980s thought this, and so on. I'll be 50 this year, I've gotten to see it twice myself. I've started reading about it historically (Days of Rage by Burrough is informative and neutral tone).
Capitalism isn't a cancer. It's just a framework that gives you enough liberty to succeed or fail. Many fail. Many who fail spend years pouting about it, waste what little time they might have for any second attempts.
> They're going to learn the hard way now.
"They" won't learn anything. They don't have to learn anything, but if they did, you don't have any leverage anyway to be able to force the issue. They're out there busy creating a world, right now, right this very minute, in which they don't need you or other malcontents at all. They're satisfied that they can create this world and soon. And they're not penciling in a place for you or those like you to exist within it. And you have no leverage. What leverage you might have managed to squirrel away before, you rejected it. You reject it now, even in this comment. There's that nagging little thought in the back of your mind, that if you were to try to fix the system from within the system, you might discover you no longer worry so much about fixing it, right?
I got to less worry by concluding that there's no fixing it at all. It's all an entropic reaction, like milk mixing in coffee. You can't freeze the mixture in time or reverse it. It's all deterministically headed toward its lowest energy state, whether that's some utopia or dystopia. And, in a roundabout way, that translates into it not needing fixing! The only thing that needs fixing is my approach/relationship to it. The fix to which is turning out to seem like taking everything (the system, people, life) less seriously and becoming a lolbertarian. Don't worry and just have a good time, man. :D (Luckily for me, that includes -- actually, is mostly -- coding.) Anyways, what was that about the '60s?
Everyone has a different starting hand on how easy this is to do. In my experience, some starting points are crushingly unfair.
However, there is nothing stopping me from trying with the hand I have. The terrain to pick is pretty large as well. I can do these even if my parents aren’t landed nobility or the right caste. The knowledge needed is freely provided somewhere. The professional networks needed can be built out freely. I can move anywhere, and pick any market within at least the US’s domain - every state, every trading partner, and now via the internet every regulated western-ized market. The ways I fail in an unrecoverable way are also somewhat owned by me - don’t bet the farm, don’t take on financial obligations greater than what would lock me out of free choice due to realities of paying a mortgage and so on, if you want kids at 30 start thinking about how to set it up around 20.
These system rules aren’t understood by everyone, but imo doesn’t mean it doesn’t work more or less as designed. And to your last point, people who check into this path tend to check out of the old path and the old path’s complaints.
$30k/mo income pre-tax or $360k/yr. Obviously not ideal, but a dual income family can afford this. My tech worker friends typically put more down 20% down (avoid jumbo loans), so their monthly could be much lower.
Again - a majorly depressing blind spot for the RTO crowd, or the RTO crowd devalues/dislikes their families and communities I guess?
Edit - touched the usual nerve, but it’s the truth and I’ll leave it at this: Work involves people, but not forced friendships and community, in the same way leadership involves people but not friendship. People who expand past that at work tend to get burned and used by management, and have the blindspots I note, IME. People who instead expand into their families and communities don’t. And yes, you can build these community social bonds without slacking at work either. Such a false equivalency.
Suffice it to say it's hard to focus on intellectually demanding work when a 2-year-old is throwing a fit because her juice box ran empty.
And I honestly don't mind my co-workers, we have a fair bit in common. It's nice to get some regular social exposure outside of kids + spouse, even if it is mostly surface-level.
Cutting corners on details here - Jane, making $120-150k as an engineer at non-FAANG, but fully (or at least maximized risk controlled) on the right side of every gnarly automation unemployment theme we all know is coming simply because Jane knows how to code, link systems, and is ahead of the curve such that she can learn how to use AI in time, is in a much different and much more beneficial position than Sarah, at a bank, making $300k, knowledge stops at excel wizardry, and a LLM is about to unemploy her at 40 bc it gets better than a CFA 3.
Latter is possible for sure, but I don’t think anyone really thinks the tech hasn’t arrived, or isn’t on edge enough to give it the serious benefit of the doubt. Things just have to develop naturally from Netflix in 2013 (laggy and small library) to Netflix in 2024, and we’re there. IMO it’s a willful blind spot from those benefiting from this change to fully argue otherwise.
I’m guessing you’re being sarcastic but, I make that much at a tech company and absolutely can not afford a Ferrari. At least, not if I want a roof over my head. Of all the engineers I know making this much, and even double or triple that, the most expensive car driven is a model S.
Actually the only person I know with a Ferrari is a cabinet contractor. He drove it over with paint cans that I requested for kitchen cabinet touch ups.
Don't worry, I'm sure your luck will turn around.
I don't think that dream quite materialized.
I doubt it will with AI either; they will just be supervising the AI, or spending time on more important things that the AI frees them up for.
That's my "prediction", anyway...
What labor tasks AI providers a nice automation and UI wrapper on is… a much much larger scope than what cloud could do.