[sp0rk]

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?

I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

[palmotea]

>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?

> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.

If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.

[const_cast]

Most workers have learned that going above and beyond almost always backfires. Employers don't value long-term employment relationships, so working hard just results in you raising the bar for yourself, with no benefit.

A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers and college students who got burned too many times. They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work. Eventually they can't live up to the standard they themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their expectation.

Nobody wants to be Atlas.

[capyba]

Dang, feeling this right now. Went above and beyond again and again, for years, barely got a thank you - let alone a raise of any sort. Now I’m completely burnt out and don’t have the energy to even consider my own ideas for my own next move.

[MichaelZuo]

Then why are you still there?

People who’ve succeeded in tricking you… likely will do so again in the future.

And maybe with even less scruples.

[spwa4]

That's an easy one - they're still paying ...

[thefringthing]

> They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work.

Don't be ridiculous. They got a pizza party and $20 gift card to a mall store.

[WalterBright]

> it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results

I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.

[toomuchtodo]

GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.

[1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025

[2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-... - April 9th, 2024

[3] HN Search: Boeing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[Aunche]

> Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed

I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?

https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-deat...

[toomuchtodo]

> Works until it doesn't.

Boeing 737 Max: The troubled history of fatal crashes and 346 deaths in 7 years - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi... - July 8th, 2024

As Boeing looks to buy a key 737 supplier [Spirit AeroSystems], a whistleblower says the problems run deep - https://www.npr.org/2024/06/16/nx-s1-4998520/boeing-737-spir... - June 16th, 2024

Boeing’s Decline Traced to Decades of Catering to Shareholders Above All Others - https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/boeings-decline-traced-... - April 8th, 2024

Boeing’s long fall, and how it might recover - https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... - April 7th, 2024

[Aunche]

Are there actually more issues or are people just more aware of them? Like I said, commercial airline flights are significantly safer than they were in Boeing's supposed golden era despite these publicized scandals.

[WalterBright]

Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.

Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.

It's not about prioritizing short term results.

[palmotea]

>> GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.

> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.

The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.

It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.

> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.

And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?

You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.

[TeMPOraL]

> It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.

Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.

This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.

It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.

[bumby]

>And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?

I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.

[WalterBright]

> The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.

No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.

[dsr_]

The book on GE is specifically about how they lied, cheated, and committed fraud -- er, accounting irregularities -- for decades, in order to maintain the illusion of number goes up predictably.

In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.

[spwa4]

But ALL of the FANGs pride themselves on predictably rising numbers. They all have a semi-believable story, and in fact only Amazon has a unique tactic (which is cheating taxes entirely by having zero profit, hence their revenue goes up predictably instead of profit. The others have steadily rising profit with slight variation in the rise of their revenue)

But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.

In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.

[saghm]

> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.

> It's not about prioritizing short term results.

Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.

[triceratops]

> They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down

But why?

[grumpy_coder]

Boeing has consistently underperformed the market massively since the MD merger. Making maybe 3% after inflation

[WalterBright]

The vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.

[bumby]

>It’s not about prioritizing short term results

Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).

[WalterBright]

Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.

> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer

The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.

In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.

[badpun]

Boeing stock price still almost doubled in the past 10 years. Went up by hundreds of percent in the past two decades. GE stock is worth 40x what it was worth 40 years ago, when Jack Welsh took over management! These two seem like two very successful companies, led by succesful strategies.

[int_19h]

Do stock prices even meaningfully represent anything anymore? Looking at some valuations makes me feel like it has all devolved entirely into gambling.

[immibis]

A lot of things did. Seems like prices much tend to rise faster than inflation.

[badpun]

A lot of badly managed companies (or just companies in stagnant industries) saw their stock prices stagnate or fall. Boeing and GE had large rises though (meteoric in case of GE).

[layer8]

There is no contradiction between stocks going up and things being mediocre due to focus on short-term profits.

[WalterBright]

Looks like a contradiction to me. If you're sacrificing the long term for the short term, your stock isn't going up.

[ruszki]

GameStop teaches us, that there is no causality link between performance and stock prices.

[bumby]

Depends on the time horizon of investors.

[WalterBright]

The value of a stock is based on long term results. If the investors catch wind of the company sacrificing the long term for the short term, the stock price will go down accordingly.

[ncruces]

The short term spanning multiple decades undermines the argument.

[layer8]

Why not? You’re still profitable, just with mediocre stuff.

[WalterBright]

Your competitors will eat your lunch.

[intalentive]

Buybacks sacrifice long term investment for short term stock price gains.

[lotsofpulp]

Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do. Buybacks merely allow publicly listed stock owners to precisely time their capital gains tax events.

Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.

[dowager_dan99]

stock markets are indices of successful companies; you need to look at the composition. The metric I would look at is the age of the companies in the S&P 500 or similar, and that IS increasingly skewing young, which shows both a focus on the short term and increasing markets

[MSFT_Edging]

That assumes the stock market is by and large logical.

In a way it is, its logically a machine that makes money. The actual business doesn't matter if it's making money.

It's a long form rug pull, where you make money until the company no longer can and you hope you're not holding the bag.

[seadan83]

The focus on short term results could generally be true. Perhaps... generally nothing is true though of course.

(1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias. A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to determine any more nuances that might be important).

(2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long term growth.

(3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop back and forth between them. This point contradicts the premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).

(4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all future revenue divided by the number of shares (or something like that), thus, stock price is in part also the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla is a notable example, the price of their stock is still very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains, but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.

[bumby]

Or…PE ratios bloat to provide price support. See:CAPE-adjusted PE ratio.

[nostrademons]

The financial industry isn’t immune to “who cares”-ism, or folks who are bad at their jobs. Heck, the index fund is the ultimate “who cares?” product - you’re explicitly saying that you don’t care about underlying fundamental valuations and are going to piggyback off the price discovery mechanism of other active investors, and you accept average returns as a result.

In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.

[loa_in_]

Stocks suck up all the value. For example the value of a house is in the living space it provides. If you convert it to money, you end up with... money.

[dowager_dan99]

are you discounting the supply of new companies that continually replace the decliners? What's happening to those the previously existed for 50+years? Will we ever see a new company last 100+ years?

[lamename]

Have you ever noticed that stocks can go up as enshittification also goes up?

[_DeadFred_]

Red Lobster

[sahilagarwal]

This perfectly illustrates why I've always preferred working at startups over major corps including FAANG / MANGA.

There is a top down culture of not embracing mediocrity that genuinely makes me thrive at work. My current company has a good work life balance and if I make a point that some part of the system needs improvement, my voice actually gets heard. Only place I've seen where sprint retros actually made impact. Most of my friends have no work life balance and also don't have a voice when they see half-assed work.

The numbers showcase the effect of this as well. The startup has thrived even when VC's have tightened their purses.

[deadbabe]

Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.

Results now are way better than results later.

[adjfasn47573]

I think your comment comes from a very specific point of view. Like software/tech jobs. (Even there you have long term stuff that we all would definitely benefit from).

There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.

Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.

And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.

In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.

[palmotea]

> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.

> So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die.

So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?

> Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.

Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case.

> Results now are way better than results later.

So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?

[pixl97]

>That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.

You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.

>So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?

You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?

[palmotea]

>> That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.

> You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.

Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing?

>> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?

> You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?

What's your point with that political derail? It's honestly baffling.

[yifanl]

It's not just a political derail to bring up a highly-visible example of the described behaviour. People don't care if they aren't forced to care, and in a world driven by deadlines, we're only motivated to care a certain amount.

There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.

[_DeadFred_]

Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit

[abenga]

I think they mean (to stretch the analogy), we are razing trees to build rapidly changing highways so much now that the tree you plant today may be chopped down in a couple of years through no fault of your own.

[squigz]

> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.

> Results now are way better than results later.

I don't see why you can't have both.

[pmg101]

Not sure why you get down voted for this.

Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term over long-term gain.

Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing? Do people disagree that short termism is rationally appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.”

Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.

No wonder people become cynical.

[jauntywundrkind]

I'd also say we are lost in scale.

The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.

I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.

I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.

(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)

[porridgeraisin]

Yes.

When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).

If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.

In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest”

I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.

[porridgeraisin]

> reduce to purely economical

I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.

>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.

What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

"But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does."

I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.

[chinchilla2020]

> Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.

Eloquently put. This is what drives me nuts about Brian Chesky. He wants employees to take ownership - but doesn't give them any ownership.

If I worked for BNB and was aggressively pursuing a new idea, I could still be laid off any second because of his ego. That isn't ownership.

[toomuchtodo]

https://ilsr.org/

[warkdarrior]

What does this Institute for Local Self-Reliance do? Their primary photo on the main page is showing a network/LAN testing device.

[nyarlathotep_]

In software specifically, we're now at year two+ where the entirety of investment and innovation is in literally replacing people.

We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly hostile statements about replacing their software workforce with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about whatever models are going to be better than whatever title of developer in $TIME.

How there can be any loyalty or long-term thinking from employees at all in such circumstances is beyond me.

I can't even think of an analogous scenario at any time in my life. Open worker hostility.

[_DeadFred_]

IT/tech has kind of represented this to the average worker since forever.

When I switch from development to running IT, I sat with people to understand how the company worked. Everyone I sat with was terrified I was going to automate away their jobs.

[try_the_bass]

Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so.

I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.

Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.

I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".

[saubeidl]

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.

Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.

This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

[WalterBright]

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

[saubeidl]

It was a place where people lived good lives and had plenty of opportunities to succeed, along with free education and healthcare.

I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

[robotnikman]

>I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse when most people end up living poor quality lives?

[nradov]

Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.

[saubeidl]

I'd argue the repression of reactionaries was part of the secret sauce that made it work so well. We saw what happened when they were loosened in the 90s.

[nradov]

Repression like that is never acceptable regardless of the reasons or results.

[nec4b]

Thank you comrade to alleviate us peasants of having to think too much on our own.

[Ray20]

>people live in misery.

People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.

[saubeidl]

As somebody who's from there, no, they don't.

[nec4b]

In Yugoslavia you couldn't even get bananas or coffee or jeans. People had to go to Italy or Austria to buy it. You had to wait more than a year to get a car. Of course then there was no gas for it. Inflation ate your paycheck before you could spend it.

[WalterBright]

Why did you leave?

[layer8]

Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?

[WalterBright]

Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?

Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.

Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)

[ryandrake]

This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).

[WalterBright]

Yugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...

High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.

[saubeidl]

Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.

[Ray20]

>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.

That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.

Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.

So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.

[WalterBright]

Why did 20 million people over the last 4 years sneak into America? How many Americans left for Yugoslavia?

[skeaker]

You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".

[layer8]

I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.

[ambicapter]

GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.

[bumby]

There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.

I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”

[trinix912]

You know Yugoslavia was heavily industrialized right? To the point they even made their own computers [1][2][3][4][5].

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...

[WalterBright]

I built my own 6802 computer in those days, too. I bought the chips and parts and drew schematics and put it all together.

I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.

Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.

[bumby]

Should the economy serve the people or the people serve the economy?

[lelandbatey]

Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for the idea to be a reasonable and workable one.

But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".

[WalterBright]

> the high levels of dysfunction/conflict

Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.

[trinix912]

The conflict was due to it being a federation of several culturally quite different nations. When Tito died, the politicians that replaced him started heavily pushing nationalist ideologies amidst the 1980s economic crisis (which was not limited to Yugoslavia).

PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.

[nec4b]

If you had lived in then you should know the standard of living was poor. More then a million people left to work in Germany as Gastarbeiters to send money home. Gas was limited. Common goods had to be brought through the border with Austria or Italy. Inflation was crazy, everybody bought German Marks the same day they got their paychecks, otherwise the money was worthless by the next day. What happened to you if you were caught as a political opposition in Yugoslavia is a story on its own.

[WalterBright]

> You're arguing with people who lived there.

You're using the past tense. Is that intended?

[antisthenes]

What % of easy carbohydrate energy was Yugoslavia consuming at the time, compared to, say, USSR or USA or China?

[nradov]

Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.

[antisthenes]

No, actual energy. Coal/Oil/Gasoline/Kerosene.

What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.

[nradov]

In terms of fossil fuels they had significant domestic coal production but most oil and natural gas was imported.

[nec4b]

That is such a big lie. There was no worker self-management in practice. All the companies had leadership structure like most companies have today. Those leading them, were loyal members of the communist party and were politically appointed. They were the betters, the avant-garde and had access to things a normal worker couldn't dream of, like special stores which had western goods. No worker had any say how a company will work and had no share of the profits besides a paycheck.

[thewebguyd]

> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.

A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is”

Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up.

It seems companies hate their employees and customers

[bluefirebrand]

> It seems companies hate their employees and customers

They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit

[adamc]

Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.

[tomslick]

> And many work multiple gigs

I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

[_DeadFred_]

Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.

[simonsarris]

Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.

[II2II]

I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.

[thewebguyd]

It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get.

Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.

I think strong unions are the only way forward

[aerostable_slug]

> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.

In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.

It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.

[ryandrake]

Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.

[ThrowawayR2]

A good chunk of the readership here is in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy and have their incentives firmly aligned with their employers thanks to superb pay and equity grants. Poor? Powerless? Certainly not them.

[int_19h]

Yeah, right up until the point where you get sucked into a massive layoff right as your company is posting record profits and boasting how much code is written with AI now.

I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.

[erikerikson]

It can go differently. Germany seems like an example.

[reaperducer]

I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.

A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.

Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.

[JKCalhoun]

Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've thought that too but have had to point out to myself that some very deserving people were in fact promoted.

Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Obviously deserving people do find career advancement. Yet it is incredibly frustrating that I can think of two load bearing individuals who were the most dependable people in the company, yet received no recognition for this fact. They would just constantly roll up their sleeves and do the vital, non flashy work that kept the business functioning.

[munificent]

I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions.

We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.

If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.

So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?

[navane]

"It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike."

I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.

[toomuchtodo]

Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example.

If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.

[ryandrake]

Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.

[parpfish]

there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in work if you're being forced to follow a script or the demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork.

i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.

[toomuchtodo]

It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost. We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the complaining as performance art when we know the solution but choose not to implement it. If we want people to care, we have to pay them enough to care.

[edc117]

Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.

[XorNot]

Which is of course an argument for the idea that workers rights, civil liberties and welfare might just have outsized effects on productivity and economic growth compared to their sticker price.

[toomuchtodo]

All roads lead to unionization and strong worker rights, which HN is allergic to (broadly speaking). “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Churchill supposedly said. Wages must go up, worker power must go up, there is no other legal path to success (broad improvements in economic security) in this context. If you can show me an alternate path derived from first principles, I’m all ears.

[eyesofgod]

Can't be asked to take pride in my work when I'm not allowed do, because we just need to ship ship ship without any thought or coordination.

[WalterBright]

> because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees

There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.

[JKCalhoun]

That may be, but it's possible it has become more employer-adversarial; that the employer/employee "contract" has become increasingly one-sided.

[paulddraper]

When do you think large employers were pretending to care? And when did people stop caring?

Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?