[Verdex_3]

Bad things can work out for your own personal good. Or even the good of the whole of society. However, that doesn't make them not bad.

I'm glad that your situation worked out for your own personal good. Nice things happening to people make me happy. Things working out for people make me happy. However, the situation you describe is the latter not the former. That your bad situation, which ultimately worked out for you, did not personally bother you enough to be problematic (for you personally) doesn't make it a good situation. I'm glad that it didn't bother you. However, it may have bothered someone else.

Your situation was objectively bad not because it bothered or didn't bother you or another person. Your situation was bad because it was the result of a powerful entity externalizing their failures onto weak entities.

A manufacturing plant that has the ability to setup logistics to keep a plant running 24/7 is a powerful entity. A manufacturing plant that is able to support jobs for at least three different engineering disciplines (chemical, mechanical, electrical) is a powerful entity.

A powerful entity is able to hire additional staff to handle non-working-hour emergencies. That they didn't hire this staff was their failure.

But that's okay, they don't have to pay for this failure because they can force their employees to pick up their failure by working extra hours. The employees are weak entities because they do not have the ability to decline an encroachment of their working lives into their personal lives.

They could be sleeping, or eating, or spending time with their families, or spending time on hobbies, or spending time innovating with their discipline. All things which help society and the economy. But instead that time has been stolen to make money for something that already has plenty.

[DATACOMMANDER]

This misses a big part of the picture. People—especially single young men—are ambitious and competitive. Someone with enough skill to be on-call at a modern manufacturing plant—let alone a software engineer—is not just scraping by. He doesn’t submit to long, hard hours because he has no choice; he does so because he wants to advance in his career. He has a real, meaningful choice: sacrifice work/life balance while he’s young in an attempt to maximize his earning power, or coast by comfortably—if frugally—and make roughly $PRESENT_AGE * 1000 (inflation-adjusted) right up until retirement. If you want to talk about sweatshops or sex slavery, sure, I’m right there with you. But let’s not kid ourselves.

[sevensor]

So if your measure of "objective" goodness is utilitarian calculus, as it seems to be, you're leaving out the fact that employees getting the shaft tends to correlate with cheaper goods and services. I disagree that this is any more objective than my initial assessment that "this is OK for now" or my later assessment that "this sucks, I'm going back to school." But this all comes back to what I said about "objective" being a slippery term. You and I do not agree about what it means.

[Verdex_3]

Not utilitarian calculus. It's closer to spider-man's Great power comes great responsibility.

For example, if I figured out the secret to creating strong AI with respect to writing software such that I could replace the entire software engineering industry with one large computer (note: this isn't something I believe will be possible for centuries if it is ever possible), then I would feel compelled to use the billions of dollars this would undoubtedly get me to help retrain all of the software engineers I just permanently put out of a job.

It's also stated as 'if it is within your power to do good, then you should do it'. My contention is that a powerful company should hire more people to cover additional work instead of finding creative ways to get additional work out of currently employed people for the same amount of money because hiring more people is a good that they are able to do and getting more work for less money isn't.

I'm fine with us not agreeing. But I'm also fine with me being right, which is why I'm still typing.

[sevensor]

It's disagreements like this that keep me coming back to HN. Thanks for a productive discussion!