[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.

[try_the_bass]

At the end of the day, most people are employed in part because they want to (or need to) make money.

Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.

This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.

[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.