Nobody cares

by fzliu • 2 years ago

1071 960 2 years ago

theamk2• 2 years ago

The sad part, the "do not care" attitude is infectious. Maybe there is a bright-eyed programmer who just joined and who wants to make UX better.

They are full of enthusiasm, but nobody (around them) cares.

They are fixing the most annoying bugs that users complained forever about.. but they is not recognized, because nobody (around them) cares.

They hope to show a good example but nobody cares. Instead they get negative feedback when instead of blindly implementing horribly-designed feature, they are trying to fix it so it won't be so user-hostile.

Eventually they give up and stop caring. When asked what they like about the job, their answer is "stability" and "job security".

mulnz2• 2 years ago

These people show up, offer trivially incorrect or untenable solutions to the trickiest problems. Rarely do they have the insight that fixes them. Often they do things that introduce more risk.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

That's one possibility -

Here's a story of the burnout of one of the GNOME terminal maintainers

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/259

In a situation where no amount of effort seems to be enough its really easy to not see the point anymore

theamk2• 2 years ago

Not all problems are tricky, there are plenty of easy-to-fix bugs that go unfixed.

For example, there is an internal product that I use daily that has broken http links in error/status messages.

PoppinFreshDo• 2 years ago

I think this is just the flip side of disengaged workers and managers.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-...

To care is to be engaged.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

Why should someone working at big tech care? Their mission is , generally , to 'capture value' from elsewhere and in the process make the world worse. Hard mission to get behind.

And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.

And Elon Musk as the sole positive example is so lame.

All this bothers me because despite everything I do still care. But finding a way to express that is so hard. And after a while of it not mattering its hard to justify. And finding somewhere where your work actually matters seems impossible when we're funding everything except what's important

afinlayson• 2 years ago

Agreed about Musk. Elon Musk as an example of caring, is ignorant of his actions vs his narrative. Example him saying he says he's the best diablo player in the world, vs seeing him play poorly.

We live in a world full of people doing good who don't do it for the "player 1 energy"

kmoser2• 2 years ago

And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.

Because their actions affect the customers they interact with, who have no direct bearing on their jobs or salaries. To make your customers suffer because you're angry at your boss is misdirected at best, and selfish at worst.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

No that's true- I totally believe that everything is connected, that by putting good energy into the world you make other people's lives better and in return feel good about yourself and inspire others to do good as well.

There's a certain amount of lack of agency and connection that the modern worlds taken from us though. A McD's employee doesn't see the same customer twice. They're thoroughly disconnected from whether the company makes record profits or not. They are not empowered to change things. And management is often putting out bad energy.

The incentives are such that caring is more effort than not and doesn't accomplish much other than appealing to internal pride. If that gets grinded down its over.

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

it's a chain of broken windows. Their employers should care about making sure the primary interface with business cares. But they don't. So it goes down the chain until we simply say "7/11 is a sad place to be"

mulnz2• 2 years ago

This is a bullshit take considering the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.

And in software youre going to have to close a ticket or two that piss you off. You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features? Cool, see you in Japan bro.

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.

Broken windows. To use his example with bikes: the firms didn't care enough to allow the engineer to properly angle that entrance to the sidewalk. The engineer didn't care to push back because they were underpaid and things are getting more expensive at home. Things get more expensive because landlords are taking advantadge of the situation to jack up prices, because no regulation cared enough to stop that (or worse, regulation cared about money more and landlords "donated" to him to sway their ruling).

This apathy is a virus that spreads. At some point it becomes hard to figure out where it started. It's just this fog that seemingly always existed.

You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features?

I don't get paid to deliver features. If that bug is really critical enough I may push back on it.

Or I simply realize it's above my paygrade, don't care, leave a paper trail down the line for when they inevitably blame me, and do what I'm told like a proper worker.

russsaidwords• 2 years ago

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

jfengel• 2 years ago

Too late. Too many bastards. Too much grinding.

medhir2• 2 years ago

I relate to this a lot. Someone is referring to this take as “bullshit” contrasting the experience of the average worker to a software engineer.

I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.

Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the US in 2025 that has been enabled entirely by people not speaking up.

I’m myself guilty of staying on the sidelines. Starting to realize that perhaps I need to be louder, because no one else is speaking up and that “giving a fuck” is something that must be led by example.

paulcole• 2 years ago

I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.

This is a lame excuse. My caring is a choice I make. I can choose to care whether you care or not. I make the choice for myself.

lazide3• 2 years ago

Just wait until you try to speak up and get destroyed. Why do you think folks don’t speak up?

medhir2• 2 years ago

so… the fear of speaking up should lead to staying silent? what exactly are you advocating for here

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck.

Oh they care... about money. We're being sold out but keep re-electing the same perpetrators simply because "it's better than the other person".

Meanwhile a third of our country is a mix of "not caring" or legitmately unable to keep dates in mind and find a poll booth to vote. Who knows how things would change if voting was compulsory, as was receiving a ballot in the mail.

astroalex• 2 years ago

Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.

OJFord• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm just not American, but I've never had to go at all, it's just a bizarre TV/movie thing.

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

I think I have dealt with such organization thrice in my life. 3 driving tests. And on all times it was as pleasant experience as possible.

Only complaint I really have with that system is them caring too much. Why does my car need "type certificate" sticker... It is all online and tied to VIN... Replacement cost like 200€ and then tens more for showing them paperwork new one was ordered...

p1necone• 2 years ago

The idea that the DMV is a particularly awful experience does seem like something that would be especially susceptible to selection bias. Why would anyone ever announce "I went to the DMV today and it was fine"?

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

My experience has been that it sucks but not as bad as private customer service.

Getting a refund from UHaul was fifteen hours of pulling teeth. DMV was a 45 minute wait.

Worse in Texas where they dont fund it ofc.

thayne• 2 years ago

Well, now that it is a meme, and the DMVs where I live is actually very effient, I've actually heard multiple people say "I went to the DMV, and actually it was fine"

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

The service is fine. The lines and waits are horrendous and a DMV never seems to have the seating room for that. So you spend an hour before you even get in the door like you're waiting for a new iPhone or something.

datadrivenangel• 2 years ago

DMV in Virginia has been efficient and relatively painless in my experience.

ivraatiems4• 2 years ago

I've had experiences with the DMV in three US states, and in two out of the three it was highly efficient and worked great. In one of them it was mediocre to unpleasant, but nothing to write home about.

I suspect the DMVs in LA and NYC are particularly bad and that's why it's a cultural meme.

zonkerdonker• 2 years ago

I've had wonderful experiences at DOL offices (which are 3rd party contracted), not so much at the DMV. Which one are you going to? Honestly worth a drive (or bus ride, depending on the issue) to go to a a decent one

Over2Chars6• 2 years ago

Ironically, we may look with fond memories of the days when an actual human being handled our DMV paperwork.

An AI chatbot with an unblinking stare and frozen smile is likely to be your new DMV virtual assistant!

mikewarot• 2 years ago

Indiana's BMV used to be the Kafkaesque when I went with my mom in the 1970s. She waited in a huge line only to find out it was the wrong line...waited again to find she didn't have a certain document and had go home to get it.

About 20 years ago the would check to see if you had everything right as you came in.

Now it's almost magical how fast friendly and efficient they've become for the few times you actually have to visit. Most transactions are online or via mail.

tshaddox• 2 years ago

Most complaints I hear about the DMV are just about long lines.

ojbyrne• 2 years ago

I find the piling on of the DMV to really be a cheap shot. In a sense it made the entire rant seem like another example of someone not caring.

peterder• 2 years ago

Patton Oswalt has a bit on this and its too true. The problem with the DMV isn't the DMV or its employees... its the general public who can't be bothered to read basic instructions.

daveoc64• 2 years ago

Why do people in the US need to go to the DMV at all?

Here in the UK, pretty much any interaction with our equivalent (DVLA - Driver and Vehicle Licensing) can be done online or by phone.

If you want/need to apply in-person for a licence or to pay vehicle tax, you can do it at many post offices.

I guess it is a centralised system, while the DMV is per-state.

simanyay• 2 years ago

Same. Getting a drivers license and car plates in Seattle was a _fantastic_ experience. Start with a simple, fast web app. Finish with a 10 minute start-to-end in person appointment.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

Or I guess, put another way, IMO this is about Apathy. The feeling where doing things or not doing them, what's it matter anyways.

I think, a lot of the apocalyptic sentiment lately has a lot to do with it. Climate change is already ruining things and will only get worse and also has started getting worse faster. Politically, economically, things are pretty hopeless. What use is picking up trash or wearing a nice shirt in the face of all of this. What are we building towards, and does anything I do mean anything

monkeycantype• 2 years ago

Nah, I moved from a big city where people are feeling squashed by the pressure, to a small town, where people feel a bit more relaxed, and I am constantly surprised by how much of a shit people give. I’m not advocating for small towns here, I like the city, I’m advocating for making a society where we act like people matter and stop calling anyone who doesn’t want to kick everyone in the teeth to get ahead a communist, and stop calling people who do inspiring visionaries

hattmall• 2 years ago

I've lived in most every manner of setting the US has to offer. The best by far is the micro-urban settings. Where as opposed to a small town with strip malls and neighborhoods, there is high density around an urban center that pretty much immediately transitions to rural. That way you can still have walkability and the mix of bars / restaurants / activities that urban settings inspire without all the overhead of actual large cities. Even when I lived in large cities I spent most of my time in just a few blocks. So a few blocks of city and then all the recreational activities of rural areas is pretty great.

There's still issues with people not caring, but it seems like those are more so outliers than anywhere near the norm and it's a lot more expedient to get in contact with someone that does care and can take actionable measures where there is a problem.

Just as an example there was a water leak from the municipal system in the right of way in front of my house. It was repaired quickly but they had to dig up a lot of the yard, which they filled back in. But after a few heavy rains it washed out a fair amount. It was a little annoying but I just said "Oh well". A few years ago in Atlanta my neighbors had reported a sinkhole FOR YEARS, and nothing was done about it until it finally caved in and swallowed an entire intersection.

I had a friend come over though and this had been like 3 months and he asked about the hole. I told him the situation and he just said "Call the city and tell them you need dirt." So I did, and told someone that took a message. A couple hours later they called me back and confirmed my address and that I needed dirt. He said they were busy but would do it tomorrow, and sure enough the next day they came with a dump truck, a trailer of equipment and filled in the hole, compacted the area, smoothed it all out and planted grass. All in 24 hours for a problem that impacted no one but me.

jeffreygoesto2• 2 years ago

I want to live in a community where everyone cares.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

This is largely a political problem, I'd start there

ivraatiems4• 2 years ago

Trust me: You don't. You'd go insane.

See for example everyone who has to live with an HOA.

liontwist5• 2 years ago

Is that what caring about people in your community looks like? Or some kind of property value paranoia and sense of control.

jeffreygoesto2• 2 years ago

Classically underspecified, you are right. The care has to be about others and respecting them, not about oneself. Like in a good partnership. Care about giving, not taking.

But as the article frustratedly states, it usually goes the other way. Like Jethro Tull progressing into desillusion from

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=luDfuZkeqKU

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7SGq7jMdSU

This planet is such a beautiful marble and all we do is trample it with our feet. Guys, make a random somebody smile today, will ya?

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

That's Japan.

lazide3• 2 years ago

Eh, Japan is mostly a place where everyone is afraid to not ‘be Japanese’. It can be quite stressful.

janislaw• 2 years ago

Reading the original article I reflected: "I can totally see how this can happen, but for some reason it doesn't happen where I live"

I moved to Switzerland 9y ago. People care. I believe this is due to high trust society which evolved not that long ago from small, poor, tightly woven communities.

lnsru3• 2 years ago

I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type person. One can’t cary about every pothole in the world.

soulofmischief• 2 years ago

Please never give up the fight against entropy. We can keep the flame alive a little longer.

tolerance5• 2 years ago

Resist the cold churn toward pride-fueled apathy that this rant exhausts.

After reading this, if this is supposed to demonstrate the psyche of the sort of person who “cares”, I really hope he keeps indoors and spends a little bit more time on his self before stepping out on others.

lnsru3• 2 years ago

The thing is that I might be another psycho. But there is a city center, winter and an old women with blueish hands. Wearing no proper shoes and having only a sweater. There are hundred other caring and loving persons and missionaries around, heavy car traffic too. But somehow I am the one bringing her to the care facility a mile away. How can it happen!? Why do you think, that only a Good Samaritan can care and a psycho can’t?

maximinus_thrax2• 2 years ago

What a worthless rant. There are big problems and there are small problems and/or inconveniences. People do care, when they have a budget for caring. Unfortunately the modern world depletes that budget with the day-to-day life. I live close to where the author does and trust me, the city has way bigger problems to deal with than the nitpicky bullshit OP is calling out. In the suburb I live in, we have an app where the city does receive and implement reasonable recommendations. The reason why is that it's a small town with large pockets.

The rest of the things are just rants aimed at society? big tech? I don't get it.

When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.

No. Bullshit take. I used to care. But then in 2008, my employer showed me that I'm not the 'developer! developer! developer!' Steve Ballmer was excited about, I'm just a number on a spreadsheet governed by some pencil pushers in finance. All employers since have showed me again and again that if times are tough, I'm the ballast the company can shed to stay afloat. And in the past 4-5 years they've showed me I'm ballast even if the company is doing great, because 'activist' investors say so. So why should I care? I care about my family, I care about my personal projects, I care about my craft and I care about my health and the people around me. Do I care about your little annoying bug? Fuck no. Why would I? It's not even my intellectual property.

Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.

I have. It's actually called the DOL where we live, OP. And it's great. I need to renew my license in person because of my disability and it takes me 15 minutes in-and-out, I barely have to stay in line. I also renew my car tabs online exclusively with 0 problems. I really don't understand the DMV meme, at least in Washington state.

We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.

Oh, you shouldn't have gone there, you lost all credibility my friend.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

I agree the authors examples were all nitpicky and omg Elon was the worst example you could have picked.

But it does touch on a sort of apathy and nihilism that I can feel myself falling towards.

tolerance5• 2 years ago

I gather that the worth of this piece lies in relating and resolving not to follow the author’s lead.

flymaipie• 2 years ago

People do not care because they don’t want to suffer all the time they see some lack of effort. Even when there is 80% carers and 20% do-not-carers, 80% will suffer and go into the opposing group. It has upside-down-bowl stability.

szundi• 2 years ago

I care. Title busted.

ivraatiems4• 2 years ago

What the author of this post is actually mad about is that most people don't care about him. The people who designed the DMV don't care about him. The people who made the crappy Oracle HR software he probably has to use don't care about him. The people who designed the bike lanes don't care about him.

It's not their job to. They have about a million other priorities, they're not sorry about it, and they shouldn't be.

The DMV, the HR software people, the engineering people, they care about lots of things: Following the laws they are required to follow; maintaining regulatory compliance. Handling the latest set of changes and rules from a higher office who demands they be implemented yesterday. Not overwhelming the underpaid staff they have on-hand. Figuring out how to deal with a generally unpleasant general public, including the guy who wrote this. Holding back an ounce of sanity so they can get home at the end of the day and be happy and not drink themselves to death.

The reality is that life is a series of tradeoffs. Even if I am giving 100% at work (and I have a family and a life, so often I am not), that 100% does not get allocated entirely or even mostly to "deliver the best experience for the specific needs of the author of this article." It's dedicated to getting work out the door at an acceptable level of quality; monitoring our systems so they don't crash and lose us money; complying with the rules and procedures my employer demands I comply with; being tolerable and decent to my colleagues so they don't resent me and make my life harder. If I think about the needs of one specific customer out of the millions that transact business with my employer every day, it's because something extraordinary has happened with implications for one of the things above.

What sets people like Elon apart is that they are single-mindedly dedicated to getting people to appease them, and also pretty good at it. All Elon cares about is whatever interests him day-to-day, his ego, his impact on the world, whether people like him or hate him. He's "successful", by this author's metric, because he's self-obsessed.

All that said, the UK has a phrase for someone who cares only to do the bare minimum: a jobsworth, as in, more than my job's worth. A jobsworth is unhelpful on purpose, or because enforcing apathy is more valuable to them than doing anything that might impose upon them later an obligation to act. The thing is - those people are universally reviled. They are not liked or approved of in society. They're also a severe minority.

Most people are doing their best to stay above water on a dozen different things, and you are only one of them. The author ought to have some humility and realize that.

kmoser2• 2 years ago

Then why the huge disparity between cultural attitudes in the USA vs. Japan? Clearly the Japanese tend to take more pride of ownership, which is OP's point.

ivraatiems4• 2 years ago

Japan also has an entire group of people so disillusioned with society they completely lock themselves off from it (0), record high suicide rates (1), record low fertility rates (2), and a far lower rate of self-reported happiness.

I don't know why they prioritize differently, but I don't think it's working out for them.

Which set of tradeoffs would you rather live under?

(0) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori (1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-33362387.amp (2) https://apnews.com/article/japan-birth-rate-declining-popula... (3) https://countryeconomy.com/demography/world-happiness-index/...

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

He only thinks it's that way because in Japan, he's the big man with the big bucks the whole society caters to. An average Japanese person probably makes a terrible salary, has few if any economic prospects, sees a stagnant economy, and also is very unlikely to even start a family. I'd much rather have a family than have store clerks obsses about serving me.

If you have tons of money in Seattle area and live in an exurb, and only go to Seattle for the orchestra and a baseball game in a box, you probably think everyone in America cares too

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

It's cultural. Japan and Asian in general is a lot more conformist and taught to care about the larger society. Huge contrast of the individualism of US enforcing "hustle culture" and "dog eat dog world".

MattGaiser3• 2 years ago

I invite the author to work for a large corp or a government and try and improve things. The most supportive people for improvements will be your team. The least supportive will be the higher-level managers. And no, the Director of Transportation is not the real manager. That's the mayor or city council.

Why? They get measured on the sweeping stuff, by the broad demands, and the people who actually pay them (in money or votes).

A better bike ramp that involves user testing but involves a delay that pushes work into the next quarter, changing accounting? That's a problem. I've lived this scenario where user features got axed to ensure all work could be budgeted under a particular quarter. Or a sign? That costs money and also needs approval, perhaps from another department.

Oh, and you are improving one bike ramp? Can't do that without people complaining. Got to improve all of them. So that is now a multi-million dollar project.

In a large org, it often isn't clear who owns overall design control, if anyone.

Lights that are great for drivers but suck for everyone else? That's many things in most cities and that is because drivers are the most vocal (and often the largest) population. Drivers win on everything from parking to infrastructure spending and drivers will tell city council what's on their mind.

For the corporate software I worked on, many users hated it. Tons of complaints. Team agreed. Team created proposal to fix it. Team managers pitched it to those above for the broader roadmap. Management explicitly said they didn't want to waste time on UI as the people paying were not the same as the people using.

Never worked for the DMV, but know a guy who maintains some software for one. What's the priority? Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Nobody wants to fund the DMV. Nobody wants to pay for technological improvements for it. Nobody wants to pay for staffing. It is where small amounts get shaved off to pay for things people do care about. The guy in charge of the DMV is tasked with keeping costs low.

moconnor• 2 years ago

Maybe the Will To Have Nice Things is solved by culture not process.

I’ve seen the above too. Imbuing an organisation with the Will To Have Nice Things seems unsolved because, as you say, the value is constantly traded off against more measurable outcomes.

I think the solution has to be building and rewarding a culture of doing the right thing, taking pride in delivering not just to spec but excellence. So when the org plan demands a giant construction barrier near the kids playpark of course the person responsible also commissions a dinosaur mural for it. Not because it’s a KPI or was debated and traded off on the functional spec but as a matter of personal and professional pride.

Interestingly I think the drop in taking pride in your work coincides with the relative anonymity of society in which reputation is no longer tracked through past interactions or word of mouth but is institutionalised in rating systems. This is perhaps related to why a more insular and smaller society in Japan has managed to retain it to a higher degree. Certainly there are elite groups around the world in which everyone knows the other players and so reputation and (from an institutional perspective) over-delivery are still valued, and these groups are the ones that accomplish otherwise unachievable advances. The broader anonymous society that delivers only to spec ends up with leaky abstractions that gradually collapses under its own weight of incompetence once the former culture of Wanting Nice Things degrades to Somebody Else’s Problem.

If true this predicts a stable rule-of-law-based society or organisation in which the most powerful all know each other and which otherwise is broken into small mostly-stable communities would foster the Will To Have Nice Things more than an anonymous interchangeable mass would.

I can hear patio11 reminding me that this should have been a blog post.

MattGaiser3• 2 years ago

I imagine so. You need agreement on "nice things" first.

My city constantly fights over this. Is a mural a nice thing or is the tax saving? Heck, is colour printing too much? I've heard people whine about them printing city handouts for council in colour.

sidkhuntia• 2 years ago

Wait till you discover India and goverment.

willswire• 2 years ago

Everybody cares actually. Obviously the author cares more about investing the time to write this blog post than to take a sledgehammer and some concrete and fix the bike ramp himself. Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.

The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish - incurvatus in se (curved inwards).

"Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake." - Martin Luther

383toast• 2 years ago

Everybody cares, but not enough to make a difference

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.

uhh, yes? What was the point of this ridiculous metaphor you yourself created?

The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish

It's a bit more basic than that. If people aren't happy they care less, because their senses dull to focus only on survival and not assisting one's community.

A lot of people are unhappy these days.

imgabe4• 2 years ago

Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.

Over2Chars6• 2 years ago

A well known CEO noted that in a failing organization he was trying to devise a turn around plan for that everyone in the organization invariably blamed... the other teams! Not a one said "our team is responsible for our failure".

The engineers blamed product, the product people blamed sales, etc.

He said he provided this suggestion, "You are of course right (it's the other groups fault, and it might have been so), but what can you do, in your group, as part of a solution we all work towards to help fix this?"

So yeah, it is the other guys fault. But what you can you do to help fix it?

imgabe4• 2 years ago

Sure, that's great if you all work for the same organization and everyone involved asked themselves that and they all benefited from the organization's overall success.

But that is not the case here. That is not how bike lanes or many other things get built. The engineer is a consultant that works for one independent company. The contractor is a different independent company. The client is another company or a government entity. Possibly the client involves several different entities with competing demands and priorities.

And "success" for the engineer doesn't really mean building a good thing. It means a happy client who will come back for repeat business.

How does this problem get fixed? Well, eventually someone hits that curb and breaks their neck and sues the city. Then the city hires an engineer to create design standards that they include in future contracts when they build new bike lanes.

000ooo0002• 2 years ago

Classic CEO. "How can you, the powerless IC, fix an organisational problem? No, I mean without me having to do anything meaningful or risky"

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

Definitely a cultural problem where any sort of flaw is punished. We definitely need to root that out if we are to come together.

LouisSayers2• 2 years ago

The irony is that the CEO is essentially blaming the employees in this case without listening and figuring out what the actual problem is.

caseyy4• 2 years ago

There are two groups of people: blamers and doers. For example, people will often blame local government for issues such as not disposing of fly tipping garbage quick enough, but they will not do much to clean up the pavements with sofas or fridges around their house – a man with a van can often drive over these large bits of garbage to a recycling centre for like $30/£30 an hour. Sometimes people will say government is spending money poorly, but they will not have participated in any of the consultations the government did on the matter, even if they were online or accepted mail-in comments. And in workplaces, they will often blame other departments without having put in elementary effort to resolve the issues with them. Sometimes people will blame government services for collapsing – there are certainly many YouTubers that constantly moan about how bad public transit is in many regions of the US, but few will donate to groups and politicians that genuinely want to replan public transit. Few will campaign for them, which can be done online in the fraction of a time it takes to produce a video.

If an org gets taken over by the blamer culture, it is doomed. These people will make no attempt at fixing problems, even when that would sometimes take 5 minutes and an email, but they will moan. And they will blame, and sometimes they'll blame the person suggesting an easy and workable course of action to resolve the problems.

Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain. And still, people who tend towards the blamer group will blame and moan. Though I make no insinuation that moaning doesn't have any other benefits (such as YouTube video revenue, virtue signalling, and similar) – it is clearly appealing to one of the two groups I mentioned.

AdieuToLogic• 2 years ago

Care does not come from without, but instead from within.

To proclaim "Why does nobody care about anything?" is to neglect an oft quoted axiom:

  You must be the change you wish to see in the world.[0]

0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mahatma_gandhi_109075

DowsingSpoon• 2 years ago

Okay, I now care passionately about each and everything I do. The bike ramp still sucks. What now?

em-bee• 2 years ago

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

zoogeny• 2 years ago

You know who really cares? The Karen in the HOA who relentlessly hounds the board because one of the units in the complex has the wrong color paint on their door. Be careful what you wish for, or the grass is always greener.

MattGaiser3• 2 years ago

You bring up an important adjacent point. OP believes bikers and non-drivers are substantial stakeholders, but ignores that the tax complainers and drivers may prefer the world that way. And they do hound council.

hosteur• 2 years ago

How would a better solution to the bike lane cost more tax or worsen situation for drivers?

xnx2• 2 years ago

Indeed. Imagine a neighbor who was upset that people didn't care enough to clear the parkway of leaves and selflessly dedicated himself to spend hours loudly leaf-blowing the whole neighborhood.

Sammi3• 2 years ago

Most Karen's are actually great. We only hear about the unhinged ones on social media because the algorithm rewards outrage. But most Karen's are kind and they care and they work hard and they set an example for all of us. It's the Karen's in the world that keep all the small things from being shitty all the time.

onemoresoop• 2 years ago

Those aren’t Karens, they’re all Jessicas

karmakaze2• 2 years ago

Have you thought this through? Incessant requests for an unimportant matter is a sure way to have those in charge of said matters not care, not only about that particular request but requests in general or the desires of requesters.

Izkata• 2 years ago

They're called "Karens" because they're unhinged, not because of whatever other criteria you're imagining. The kind people you're referring to aren't Karens.

Shank• 2 years ago

In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.

My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.

readthenotes14• 2 years ago

I used to rank the McDonald's in Toppongi hills Tokyo as having the best employees anywhere after I saw one run from one side of the little shop to the other when the French fry buzzer went off.

However, it got beat out by the McDonald's in Arkadelphia Arkansas, where the employee fast walked as quickly as hen could to take the order to the car waiting in the Drive-Thru, and then also fast walked back. Running of course would have been against OSHA and gotten hen in trouble so hen did the best hen could.

wegfawefgawefg4• 2 years ago

The run usually isnt because they care its because theyre scared of senpai and (bucho/shacho) big boss.

If the management is chill they arent gonna run.

unknownsky2• 2 years ago

Are you Swedish? Just wondering because I've never seen the gender neutral pronoun "hen" in English.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

Til https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_(pronoun)

cafard2• 2 years ago

I don't want to see employees running in the direction of hot fat, thanks.

wegfawefgawefg4• 2 years ago

In Japan this attentive behaviour is often out of fear or boredom. Either way the service is good overall.

I live here. Sometimes the service isnt good and staff behaves like an insentient robot who repeats a script and fucks off.

If you know Japanese and actually talk to them, its obviously the same ape base mech the rest of us are driving.

8n4vidtmkvmk3• 2 years ago

Oh.. do people not do that anymore? At the little grocery store I worked at in BC Canada, if there were like 2 or 3 people in line we'd call for help if they weren't already on their way. Seems like a pretty basic thing.

Here in the US, I don't know what's going on with the cashiers. They're slow. They don't say a single word to you, not even to give you your total. And they're awful at bagging. I just don't get it. It's not a hard job.

athrowaway3z• 2 years ago

How roles are perceived, becomes how people perceive themselves, becomes how people act out those roles.

Or more to the point: Its easier to be what people expect you to be.

In my experience the US is especially susceptible to this 'roleplaying', probably because all (entertrainment) media comes from the same overarching culture.

mc33012• 2 years ago

It is a hard job if you and your partner both have full-time jobs and other part-time or side-hustles just to barely pay the rent.

NoGravitas8• 2 years ago

It's not a hard job to check out any single customer's groceries. It's a hard job to do it all day, especially when you're not allowed to sit down.

numpad0• 2 years ago

One thing that rarely mentioned in Japanese 7-11 efficiency is the "employment ice age" problem that contributed to it: there was a massive job crisis around 1993-2005 and major STEM university graduates were dime a dozen. A McDonald's but with only clones of Gordon Freeman as employees tends to become a bit different place than a regular hamburger shop.

wegfawefgawefg4• 2 years ago

theres an effect in countries with high average iq where the quality of low skill labor workers is higher. I dont remember the name, but was convinced it was causal.

its similar to what you are saying, but applies across the board, not just to university grads, and in taiwan also.

i suspect japanese workers at 7-11 now are not college grads still working there from the 90s. its mostly young part time workers. i see middle age people sometimes. Noteably theyre losing the high quality service reputation entirely because many of the stores are being run by immigrants from nepal and the philipines now who dont follow the japanese service memes.

They also mess up the sushi at sushiro/kurasushi and your fish come sideways.

arisbe__• 2 years ago

Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.

When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.

wegfawefgawefg4• 2 years ago

"does this dress make me look fat"

is it lying or not? People lie all day every day, and if you dont they wont like you. They expect you to lie.

Someone invites you somewhere. You respond you dont want to go because meh. They get angry. "Atleast make up an excuse or something dont just tell me you dont want to go!!"

Very common. More common in women.

anal_reactor3• 2 years ago

I refuse to socialize with people who cannot handle my way of communication, unless I strictly require them in a professional setting. Recently I organized a party and it was so amazing to be able to communicate in a group without any barriers at all.

joeldg• 2 years ago

I mean... This guy must not have kids in school—because to be a teacher, you have to be nothing but a ball of caring because the job sucks the life out of you at every step. No money, half the country thinks you want to turn their kids into trans people and want you to teach their specific brand of a religion and so they defund you at every step. I feel bad for teachers—they really, really care.

This guy must not ever volunteer for anything—In my town we have volunteers who will find houses with dogs chained up and offer to build them a fence for free because they don't like seeing dogs on chains. We have volunteers who work community evenings and do cleanups at schools, parks and graffiti removal for community spaces. My city has hundreds of volunteer fronts, and they always need an extra hand.

This guy must not ever have bought girl scout cookies or got a Christmas tree from the boy scouts, a lot of people volunteer to make sure all that happens and the money goes back to the kids, and nobody there is getting "paid" and they all care.

This guy must never have talked to a fireman or a parks worker, they have crap pay and dangerous job conditions (Park rangers are assaulted at the highest rates for any job). They do it because they care.

This guy must never have been to a museum... actually, I could go on all day about people who care ...

At this point, all I can figure is this guy has his head firmly lodged up his rear-end.

eviks• 2 years ago

You might think "something something incentive systems". No.

It's exactly that. All your government and regulatory capture examples are precisely about bad incentives leading to bad outcomes (including people who cared but stopped caring because these perverse incentives punished them for caring one way or another)

But wait, the author understands this!:

Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much.

So it's a YES?

sandreas• 2 years ago

It's interesting how people react first when you start acting different, doing little things like picking up garbage you didn't throw on the ground.

Even my kids went: Why are YOU picking this up, you didn't do it?

I just ask: Why not ME?

After some of similar experiences my kids asked to help and they were so excited when a friend of my wife bought them trash tongs to help me.

It's not that I'm proudly making the world a better place by doing something very difficult (like in the movie Pay it forward), but just doing small things that aren't difficult to do. Somehow it feels nice.

whyenot• 2 years ago

Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.

maximinus_thrax2• 2 years ago

Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!

GuestFAUniverse• 2 years ago

And playing PoE!

batiudrami• 2 years ago

Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).

sam_lowry_• 2 years ago

I work for the government IT.

Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.

Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.

An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.

orwin2• 2 years ago

I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).

The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.

Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).

Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.

steve_adams_862• 2 years ago

My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.

I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.

I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.

ClaraForm• 2 years ago

The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.

tqi6• 2 years ago

Imagine taking the answer to an innocuous question like "what is your favorite part of the job?" in what I assume was a social setting and extrapolating from there to "they don't care about their job."

NoGravitas8• 2 years ago

This is my experience as a government worker.

mattlondon• 2 years ago

Some of this I think is misjudged - there is an implication that people know what they are doing or what their actions' consequences are, but do not care about it.

I would argue that for a bunch of things, people just don't think.

It's not that they don't care: they've not even reached that stage of awareness. They just don't ever get to thinking about if what they're doing has any kind of follow-on consequences or implications. It doesn't even enter their minds.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but as I've grown older I think I've learnt that not everyone thinks like I do. I guess here on HN and at work we're surrounded by people who are ultimately "knowledge workers" who are paid (and selected for) their ability to think. We're doing mental gymnastics and playing 4D chess against ourselves in our head all day. Meanwhile outside of tech, people aren't and there are IMHO lots of people who just think in a totally different way. It's like they stop at Step 2 or 3 of a linear thought process, but we as tech engineers etc are already on Step 7 of a decision tree with multiple branches etc even if we don't actively realise we're doing it.

Not saying we're any better/smarter, but we're at least implicitly trained and attuned to thinking things through, identifying edge cases, defensively coding to handle inevitable misuse/issues etc etc. Not everyone thinks like that.

Some stuff though is just experience or lack of it. I never knew how much of a pain it can be to push a kids buggy around until a did it and I would see sometimes the difference in others when I was struggling with one: some people (other parents with older kids, grandparents etc) would offer to help or to go out of their way to move out of the way etc, while others were blithely unaware (as I was!) and just don't realise because they have no knowledge or experience of the situation so even with care, they just don't know (which is fine - this is why we have schools and books etc, to teach people things they don't know). That bike lane in the article looks totally fine to me for example - even if I think think a whole range of scenarios in my head, I have no in-depth knowledge or experience or understand what the problem the author of the article is talking about as it looks totally ok to me but I only have very simplistic knowledge of riding a bike.

Tl:Dr - not always malicious or deliberate, just a lack of awareness and experience.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.

I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.

The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.

That sort of thing.

One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.

mc33012• 2 years ago

I really enjoyed your comment. Without digging deep into design philosophy, it really is a fun practice to try hard to notice the things around you (especially in the physical world as opposed to digital) that were specifically designed for you in mind and have actually positively affected you. Most of them were quite intentional, indeed! Isn't that great?

LastTrain• 2 years ago

On Vomiting in Dunning-Kruger…

DharmaPolice• 2 years ago

As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.

In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

Love the analogy and your explanation

liontwist5• 2 years ago

Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

GreatGaijin• 2 years ago

- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need

- Functioning government

- Competency, skilled engineers

ks2048• 2 years ago

I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).

unknownsky2• 2 years ago

I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.

That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.

jhanschoo• 2 years ago

The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.

Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment

I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.

Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...

automatic61312• 2 years ago

Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.

syncsynchalt• 2 years ago

There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.

If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.

james_marks2• 2 years ago

I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.

There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.

This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.

https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

earthdeity• 2 years ago

Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.

- You cannot fire your staff (easily) - Rather than replace staff, you need to train them - You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry

I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but... Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.

arresin• 2 years ago

Because it’s full of Japanese.

lmm• 2 years ago

Japan has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).

High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.

buzzardbait2• 2 years ago

If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.

xtiansimon• 2 years ago

Living outside NYC, I’m reminded of both extremes with every visit to the city.

parpfish4• 2 years ago

if you care and you end up in a position where you don't have the ability to act on that feeling, you WILL burnout and get cynical and go into not-caring preservation mode.

I used to work at a big tech co that made a popular consumer app. New hires were always excited because not only was it a pretty cushy job, they got to work on a product that they loved. They cared until the bureaucracy and product decision making processes ground that enthusiasm into dust. Everybody ended up jaded.

InsideOutSanta• 2 years ago

This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.

So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.

mattgreenrocks• 2 years ago

The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.

navane• 2 years ago

An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.

akudha• 2 years ago

Sure, I get your point. But there are lots of tiny things that we can do to make our lives a teeny, tiny bit better - these things are fully in our control.

Example - someone makes a large spreadsheet, but without locking the header row or adding filters. It would take 10 seconds to do, but people in my org don’t, even after I requested them, showed them how.

I understand fixing massive problems like money in politics etc are super hard. But it doesn’t cost anything to not play music in elevators without headphones (yes, it happens, I am not lying) or write a sensible bug report with useful details instead of “this ain’t working” etc. If we can’t even do small things well, how can we even begin to take on massive problems like wealth inequality, poverty, judicial reforms etc?

valval• 1 year ago

None of the corporations I’ve been part of have been doing “abhorrent” things. You’re projecting your socialist ideology.

bjornsing7• 2 years ago

That doesn’t explain the doctor who doesn’t care that they are misdiagnosing their patients though… Or am I missing something?

bccdee13• 2 years ago

I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity, etc.

Of course, I don't know the actual situation, but this seems more likely to me than a doctor who doesn't care about their patient's health enough to spend 10 seconds diagnosing them. At the very least, I expect they're investing enough effort in their job enough to avoid transparent malpractice.

silexia3• 2 years ago

Government is definitely the worst here. Zero accountability means that after a while working there, even the most motivated best worker will have his desire to work destroyed by watching less competent people do nothing and move ahead. Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job. It grows and grows and drains more resources, just like cancer does.

bccdee13• 2 years ago

Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job.

Do they? The example given in the article is the DMV, and the only problem I've ever had at a DMV was long wait times caused by too FEW employees.

Yes, government can be overly bureaucratic, but I think people come up with a lot of weird narratives about it that go well beyond the actual inefficiencies at play.

fredphilo• 2 years ago

this articles has a ton of typos but that reinforces the emotional state the author was - an emotional state that i think is becoming more and more common. theres an underlying anxiety here; the world you grew up in is gone. this is bad and we (the author and myself) are not falling victim to nostalgia. all the things i interact with are becoming more and more dysfunctional. everybody has their answer to whose fault it is, people to blame for the fact that things simply don’t work anymore, but i think an analysis of this “lack of care” or “i just dont dgaf” attitude on the part of the workers, the employees of the companies who, theoretically, make the USA and similar countries the beacons of good living that they appear to be, might be fruitful. i’ll definitely be thinking about this observation for a while.

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

I have a feeling this is a very common sentiment as one gets older though.

When you live somewhere where wages and costs diverge further and further every year, as you get to be 30-40-50-60, etc. you feel more and more like the world was better back then

hn_acc1• 2 years ago

I also think part of the realization is that as you grow up, the world was "whitewashed" for you when you were younger. Your parents took care of going to the DMV, or taking you to the dentist and paying / using insurance, and making sure there was someone to drive you there.

Now, you're the parent, and you have to figure out if you can drive your child, make sure they're covered by insurance, make sure you can pay the dentist if your insurance is maxed out for the year, heck, just in the last year, find a new dentist because the one you had for 20 years switched to "not taking Delta" and suddenly wants you to pay $500/checkup instead of previous $0, etc. And if you can't pay, well.. sucks to be you..

I'm in my 50s, and I kind of understand this attitude, and I also understand why people get cynical. I moved to the US due to finding someone to marry online (from Canada), and while I had heard some stories of how bad the US was, I felt like I had my eyes open going in, knew about insurance, etc. I never figured I'd have to worry about the government going openly hostile, somehow embracing Russia AND Nazis at the same time, etc - I always figured things would slowly improve over time (especially when Obama was elected), not get drastically worse. So I've stopped caring as much - during Covid, I canceled several charities we used to donate to regularly - suddenly, after feeling quite secure financially (not rich, but ok), I didn't feel that way anymore. I got laid off the day after my 50th birthday and after transferring to another position in the same company, again 1.5 years later and I stopped donating to the local food bank where I was employed. Finally found a job ~1 year later - actually with better pay, but less WFH and it's hard to go back.

Eventually life gets to you. Looking around, there are a whole lot of people who care greatly - but what they care about is hurting specific groups of "others" in specific ways.. Or in grifting as much $$ as possible. So now I don't care as much. I just want the ants to stop crawling into the house and the neighborhood dog to stop barking at night so I can sleep. Because I'm (*&@#$ TIRED.

f4stjack• 2 years ago

Preach brother. I am in the same boat but in the caring side of things. I read e-mails, I respond to them as promptly as I can. I read the tickets and contact the users to resolve their issues as quickly as I can. I attend to meetings, do the required things and long story short, I give two shits about what is going on around me.

You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.

Hell. No.

The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.

But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?

tolerance5• 2 years ago

I feel like I’ve been in his shoes before and they tend to run you toward running people away from you who do “care”…well they may not care about how long it takes a guy to get a shed approved or order McDonald’s (can a man claim to care who cares to wish to expedite his order of that?) or that nobody wants to help him lace the streets with dog crap sack sticks when they’re worried about actual human issues like they’re well-being, dignity and identity.

I’m conflicted by this article. Because I hate most of it, because I relate to it.

Institutional gripes are low hanging fruit that are only significant in relation to taking care of what’s relevant to a mundane life but not relevant at all to a life worth living and dying over as a man. Maybe a man-child, but not a man.

This reads like “Suicidal Tendencies All I wanted was my Pepsi” remixed into Yacht Rock. This is not a rant, but a wining pantomime griping over things that a town elder would roll his eyes over his grave and take pity on the youthful.

So yeah man, I felt you. I felt you. But I beg Allah that I never have to feel where you’re coming from again beyond knowing about how I once felt myself & the destruction it caused me and the disdain it arises from the people who I thought I was just trying to help.

xnx2• 2 years ago

"Nobody Cares [about the things I think they should care about in the specific way I think they should]"

The author seems very conscientious and civic minded, but there are often unsatisfying explanations for why things are they way they are or why people act how they do.

solatic• 2 years ago

Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.

The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.

spencerflem11• 2 years ago

lovely perspective <3

liontwist5• 2 years ago

Nobody is asking you to care and fix everything. They are asking you to care about the things in direct control, like your job or kid.

This thread is filled with “I do care but can’t because _”. And yet there are those rare people who do care, and with a little bit of preparation and effort make a big difference.

When people start in a new job they go through a tough 3-6 week sink or swim experience, and then the skills and approach they develop rarely changes. Think about that. Most professionals probably have spent 200-300 focused hours of their entire life trying to get good at what they do for 40 years.

DavidPiper2• 2 years ago

Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, thank you for writing this.

I have a pet theory that selling products and services that reduce people's ability to look after their own needs (either directly or as a side-effect), while marketing that the same product actually improves your life is one of the key business strategies of our generation.

johnfn• 2 years ago

I don't like this post, mainly because I think I don't like the attitude behind it. It seems somewhat obvious to me that people who do care exist and are out there; all you have to do is go and ask people what they care about and you'll get some interesting answers. You can choose to view the world as having no one who cares, but that seems seems a distorted way of viewing the world. And distorted in way that will make you more lonely, since you aren't looking for other people like yourself, since you've concluded they don't exist.

BigFnTelly• 2 years ago

I read the blog post feeling the author's rage, but your insight is far more important. Humanity's collective goodwill is stifled by friction and inertia while moneyed interests are given jetpacks.

dfedbeef2• 2 years ago

The DMV in Seattle is good though...

dfedbeef2• 2 years ago

It's called the DoL btw. I guess nobody cares about getting department names right anymore.

ripped_britches• 2 years ago

Believe it or not, there are many super rural places in the US where people care because there is such a close knit community

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

Maybe I'll retire to one. Will I be welcome as a transgender person? How far do I need to drive for tofu? I've been eating a lot the last few weeks and I don't want to give it up

Yen• 2 years ago

I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.

For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.

I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.

I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.

I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."

And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.

RajT88• 2 years ago

There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries.

The collectivism of the society which both gives them a public sense of ownership of the whole country (thus, the caring), also yields crazy bullying in school and work, a high suicide rate, and lots of racist and xenophobic attitudes.

Maybe it's changing. It's been a long time since I spent any real time in Japan. My buddy who grew up in Tokushima also is out of touch with how things are there now. Who knows?

Edman2742• 2 years ago

The suicide rate in the United States is higher than it is in Japan if you believe official government figures of Japan and the United States. The talking point about suicide in Japan is one of those that's 30 years out of date.

Karrot_Kream4• 2 years ago

This is still pretty true. The xenophobia is waning as Japan's economy stagnates and there's a general vibe that Japan did something wrong economically. But otherwise, these all continue to be real issues in Japan.

These days there's also huge problems with infidelity, marriage rates, and divorce.

disambiguation• 2 years ago

Everyone cares, but:

- everyone has a different idea of what that means.

- many problems can't be solved by one person.

- caring has an opportunity cost.

- caring introduces liability.

- we live in a society.

Caring is a luxury, most people are just trying to survive.

challenger-derp• 2 years ago

This list is quite well-put.

Also, for a large number of roles, people are judged by the net value that they've contributed (net of mistakes). In a pretty large subset of such roles, it's usually the case that small-ish mistakes result in small-ish penalties, or sizeable penalties that aren't apparent immediately – so in the short-term, the here and now, folks in these roles are incentivized to focus on the big picture, and to ignore what they might feel could cause small-ish mistakes.

Consider a person involved with the modification of city street infrastructure to better cater for bikes. It's pretty good by most people's standards to have made progress by building reasonably use-able bike pathways, stands, etc. in say, a 4 km radius in a year. If it just so happens that like three out of, say, sixty of such constructs are problematic (mistakes) but they aren't big-ish problems, then on the whole, this person would be, quite justly, credited for having contributed to at least fifty seven functioning constructs; all in all, pretty good work despite three problematic constructs.

Of course, not all types of work is like that. That is, not all work are that forgiving in the sense that most earnest mistakes turn out to be small ones relative to the overall value produced. E.g., trading: algorithmic or otherwise.

Now, just a note in closing, the distribution of the price of mistakes in a given role is a different matter, can be an art in that it involves qualitative judgement, may be largely sensitive to context, and may be quite opinionated depending on who is reached for comment.

pestaa2• 2 years ago

Another example of everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Maybe not everything. And certainly not nobody. But there's so much to be grateful for in most people's lives, if we all just calibrated our perspectives a little.

johnnyanmac15• 2 years ago

Everyone has a breaking point and negativity bias makes the awful stuff pile on quicker.

Put it another way: Things are getting worse for more people. It may still be "amazing" for most people, but the ones next to the metaphorical "awful" line see it creeping. So it can feel very arrogant when someone a mile out says "why aren't you happy, it's great" as you see the line start to take your amazing things.

pestaa2• 2 years ago

I hear you. I also sense people generally are becoming more anxious. More and more we took granted for decades has a question mark next to it.

But I didn't expect the author to feel happiness, or be grateful for the state of things. However, we can pause and realize how much people still do (for a salary or otherwise) for each other, despite things getting worse for them.

A good bike road with one bad turn is still mostly a good bike road. Still took a lot of caring to build. There's only so much capacity to fix mistakes.

ternnoburn• 2 years ago

Karl Marx talked about alienation -- we are alienated from our work, we are alienated from one another, and eventually alienated from our humanity.

I disagree with Marx about a lot of things, but I do think that this theory makes a lot of sense. As we become increasingly mechanistic in our work, we feel less agency. Less control. Less attachment to the work. We stop caring about the product.

You can pay people to care, for agile, but ultimately the alienation wins. The solution? I'm not sure! Probably several possible things, not least of which is probably work that's focused on building one's community and helping meet their needs.

SCUSKU• 2 years ago

Ctrl+F'ed to see if anyone mentioned alienation, since this post basically seems to be OP talking about alienation without them knowing.

I think fundamentally if we want people to care about things again, we are going to need to give them ownership of the things they produce. Otherwise, why would anyone care?

throw7• 2 years ago

Yes. Give people the ownership of their job. Kaizen comes to mind.

What we have today are MBA's that tweak spreadsheets and see employees as replaceable cogs in a machine. No one cares in that environment.

morgengold• 2 years ago

I tend to agree with the author. But then, look around: a lot of stuff works really really well.

throwaway277432• 2 years ago

I care. It's frustrating sometimes, but I still can't help myself.

Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.

On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.

I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.

This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.

In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.

You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.

daft_pink• 2 years ago

I think if you want the closest thing to Japan in the United States, consider moving to Hawaii.

Seriously, the cops drive Toyota 4Runners. It’s an asian majority state.

It might be a good compromise into what you are looking for.

Fricken• 2 years ago

White LEDs reduce car crashes by 0.1% and that is measurable, but sleep quality and aesthetics are not measurable. You just have to care about them. And nobody cares.

I've always been sensitive to the flicker and broken colour spectrum of fluorescent lights, it has been a longstanding "How come everyone is so willing to spend all day every day under these horrible lights?" type pet peeve.

This guy has a problem with white LEDs and I'm not sure what his issue is. He really hates them but didn't explain why. I can't empathize, I don't understand.

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

Also he says that they switched to white LEDs because they don't care when they likely switched to save on their electric bill.

tommiegannert• 2 years ago

From skip-reading, this is not about motivation (intrinsic or otherwise) in general. This is about other people not caring about you, or what you care about.

I care a great deal about DevEx, and since no one else tends to care as much as I do, I can do good work for a few years, but then I'm worn out from fighting alone. I move on and hope things are more aligned somewhere else. Doesn't mean my co-workers are wrong for "not caring", just that I haven't found my peers.

The driver who doesn't let you into her lane perhaps cares deeply about not being late, again, to pick up her kids from daycare. Or her brother is about to do that stupid thing again, and if she doesn't try to stop him, she'll feel bad forever, again. Which lane you're in doesn't even register on her list.

Sammi3• 2 years ago

It's really about culture. The US is high individualism, low in long-term orientation, and high in indulgence. The US has a bad culture for caring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio...

guelo• 2 years ago

Republicans want to tear government apart and privatize everything. Democrats have big ideas but sacrifice them on the altar of protecting public unions. Nobody fights for good government. I'm sick and tired of the endless big vs small government argument, I want to vote for good effective responsive government, good hang for the tax buck whatever it's size.

bilater• 2 years ago

The sad game theory result of this is that no one ends up caring or comes to the conclusion there is no point of caring. Wonder if it is at all possible to reverse it once you fall in this cycle.

anal_reactor3• 2 years ago

I don't care because I honestly believe that caring in a world of stupid cunts is not worth the limited time I have on this Earth, which I'd rather spend doing things that make me happy, instead of being perpetually frustrated and disappointed. There are some people who keep pushing out good value despite the frustration and I think they're the real heroes, but I'm not a hero myself. BTW the society is constructed in such a way that I won't have kids so all of you can go fuck yourself once I die.

ed_mercer• 2 years ago

This article resonated with me and OP was able to clearly articulate what I have been feeling pretty much my entire life. It’s probably not as extreme as OP makes it sound but it’s there. Enough to make you feel defeated. The dreaded feeling of “yeah we are going to be so f*cked 100 years from now” because no one gives a shit. In Japan this feeling transforms into optimism and hope because people generally do care and take things seriously. It has given me the strength to care and try to do my best. The power not be an asshole to the person next to me. The ability to see the bigger picture.

ReDeiPirati• 2 years ago

I don't have faith that this is something we can fix in the short term because most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first. I'm not saying that the opposite is good either, but we should find a balance in between. I also feel like that we are all becoming more disconnected, alone, and where the center of gravity is only ourself. Despite my premise, I still have some hopes for future generations, but unfortunately I think that things will get way worse before correcting.

swed420• 2 years ago

most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first

This is definitely intertwined with rampant individualism, but I don't think it's just our education or lack thereof that's to blame. It's also the environment we're born into and therefore never really question where it leads us and why. Century of the Self [0] makes an excellent case for where/how things went wrong, and we never deviated from this path because capitalism and its consumption-first economies would never permit such a thing.

For those comparing post-WWII to now, the only real difference seems to be capitalism becoming ever more desperate to squeeze all remaining profits. Capital concentrates [1] and profits continue to trend toward zero as Marx warned they would. It's a fundamental contradiction built into capitalism that has yet to be addressed except for by those few who are already disproportionately benefiting from the arrangement at everyone else's expense.

Consider how the average baby boomer was treated by their company of employment compared to the average worker in the 21st century. Employers now make it painfully obvious that everybody is disposable, and the only thing that matters are the metrics tied to their own compensation, no matter how disconnected that is from producing results that are actually good for society. The workers are all incentivized to become back-stabbing careerist wolves fighting and hoarding secrets instead of cooperating to build actual Good Things. The best way to get a raise is to jump ship to another company. Etc.

Given all of the above, it'd be very strange if we didn't end up in the hellscape that we are currently in.

[0] https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...

Karrot_Kream4• 2 years ago

we never deviated from this path because capitalism and its consumption-first economies would never permit such a thing.

While I haven't read Century of the Self, I will say that most of East Asia outside of China and NK are fiercely capitalistic. Ads are everywhere and obvious. There's a huge focus on consumption and status. There's generally much looser restrictions on zoning, gambling, and prostitution than the West. And yet the cultures continue being a lot more collective and understanding of their fellow person. South Asia is less capitalistic (having transitioned from more socialistic modes of economic organization somewhat recently), but is still quite capitalistic.

I think capitalism might exacerbate this in the West but it is fundamentally a Western problem. Most of East and South Asia still operates on an extended family model where there's an expectation that when a person or a family is having a hard time they take resources from their family and when they're in a position to do well they give resources to their struggling family members. Lots of extended families have family members who are ... problematic. Many of these folks have gambling issues, can't hold down jobs, have mental health problems, etc. But families support them. They never really thrive but they usually have food, shelter, companionship, and understanding around them. I think this creates a level of empathy that's just absent from Western society.

My partner and I are Asian but we have caucasian friends. Many of our caucasian friends will cut off problematic family members immediately. Indeed a lot of caucasians I know are very quick to cut people they don't like or who don't align with their values out of their life. This culture of individual supremacy is what I think really plagues the west which used to at one time have a less individualistic nature and now finds its hyper atomization eating away at the foundations of its societies.

NoGravitas8• 2 years ago

Yes, this is the correct understanding of the problem. The thing is, correctly understanding the problem is highly disincentivized, much less doing anything about it.

cafard2• 2 years ago

The Maryland DMV used to be quite efficient. Once, having mislaid my driver's license (at my mother-in-law's, 100 miles away), I drove to the Wheaton DMV, and was out within 20 minutes with a new license.

This was about two years before 9/11, after which a whole lot of rules came down about verifying one's identity, and the DMV then crawled.

georgeplusplus2• 2 years ago

Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face . People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.

georgeplusplus2• 2 years ago

Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face act. On the surface they pretend to care but well, People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.

joeyagreco• 2 years ago

I want to live in a community where everyone cares.

This summarizes the whole thing quite well.

from-nibly2• 2 years ago

Has the author been tested for ADHD? Not that people with ADHD are the only ones that care. They just care really hard about all the little things, and have a really hard time switching it off for their own benefit.

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

What you’re describing sounds more like OCPD than ADHD to me

from-nibly2• 2 years ago

I mean that's in the anxiety disorder family so it probably bleeds between both.

alganet• 2 years ago

They just care really hard about all the little things

Maybe they just care and the world has become an endless distracting sea of little things that get in the way.

I mean, there's a lot of people trying to shift others attentions to little things, like ego.

cadamsdotcom• 2 years ago

The author should really move to Japan if they’re so impressed. Then they’ll get to find out what things in Japan no-one gives a shit about, and the shine will wear off.

jchw• 2 years ago

People often seem to caution against romanticizing Japan, and I think that is a good instinct no matter what, but at least among my cohort, I don't know anyone who has moved to Japan and shown any signs of having regret for having done it. I've never considered moving to Japan, but based on what I know and people I've talked to, I suspect I'd probably enjoy it too, though having only one year of Japanese class under my belt, it'd be quite a long road for me.

But actually, I like a lot of aspects of the United States, too, and I also wish more people gave a shit here. They're clearly speaking in hyperbole but I think the overarching point rings true; less people give a shit than you'd hope. Hell, I struggle to give a shit some days.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

Hmm, I've met quite a few people over the years who spent time living in Japan and moved back, they usually weren't in any hurry to return. Seems like some really love it and others think they will, but don't.

ksplicer• 2 years ago

This is where the author lost me as well. Massive peer pressure to conform is not the same as not caring. Maybe thats a little reductive, or the worst possible way to look at it, but no place that really cares would have such a bad reputation for terrible working conditions.

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

I would like to a make a small joke about something that Japanese culture does not care about: Home insulation! I have been in so many older, frigid homes and small hotels with paper thin windows and walls. It is like they are allergic to building insulation! Of course, newer homes and buildings are much better now.

GolDDranks• 2 years ago

I've been living in Japan for more than 9 years. I think that the author is right in the sense that people in Japan seem to care more. Of course, the stress is on the word "seem". Some people truly care, but there is also the cultural expectation that you should care. I don't know if realising that counts as the "shine that will wear off", but it seems to not a bad default.

myheartisinohio• 2 years ago

Nihilism is a cancer on the western psyche.

kerblang• 2 years ago

Nihilism is cynicism with a turbo button

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

I care about the work I do.

Just sayin'.

Of course, I'm kind of outside the "incentive system," so I do it for different reasons.

Yes, it's frustrating, when I encounter obvious "Person didn't care" stuff. Sometimes, it infuriates me, but usually, it helps me to feel that I need to care more about my own work.

I'm not sure that I buy that every example given is a "Person didn't care" instance. I feel that personal values may play a part, in interpreting the work.

Also, when you run large organizations/municipalities, small numbers become big numbers, quite easily, and you are often serving folks with very different priorities. Can't make everyone happy. Often, unfortunately, folks decide to make the weakest people unhappy.

Want people to care? Incentivize them. That's not just money. Treat the people (and their work) better. Hire and promote good managers. Stand up to unreasonable demands from above, etc. If you are an "above" person, then don't be insecure. Let the people under you, stand up to you, if you are being unreasonable. It really doesn't hurt as much as you might think. You always have the power to force your will, anyway, but I found that it was a good idea to listen to my employees.

csours• 2 years ago

Whatever your locality is, there are existing opportunities to volunteer. Even if you don't particularly care about whatever that organization does, it's a great place to meet people who care, and they usually care about more than one thing. Maybe ask them about mutual aid.

---

There is a very real danger in being too helpful in some organizations. I was too helpful and I got looks from my coworkers. People would call and ask for me specifically, which pissed them off.

In some organizations being too helpful is threatening to the boss. Are you trying to take their job?

---

Another problem is the legacy mudball - it's not just for source code. The sidewalk fix that would cost less than $1000 in materials may wind up costing $100,000 after bubbling through all the required layers. The layers are there because of very real historical failings, but they create failures NOW. It's hard to build things now because of 'the sins of the father'.

---

You can't fix bureaucracy all at once - it's not one thing, and it has many different causes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645391

charlie0• 2 years ago

After all thay griping, this last bit really stuck out at me.

We're not going to move to Japan, but would absolutely be willing to move within the US.

Let me finish it for him.

I just don't care (enough).

As for me, I'm looking forward to visiting Japan.

auggierose• 2 years ago

That bike lane ending might be so because it forces you to slow down. You are not supposed to crash into unsuspecting pedestrians when the bike lane ends. You should actually stop and get off the bike at this point.

shermantanktop• 2 years ago

Given the design, looks like the rider will definitely be getting off the bike one way or the other.

whycome9• 2 years ago

The author stated that a sign should be BEFORE the end of the lane. When riding, it's not clear that your lane will all of a sudden disappear so that you have time to slow down and change 'modes'. That wouldn't be allowed for the equivalent car lane without advance notice/signage.

The "bike lane ends" sign is...at the END (almost as bad as it saying 'bike lane has ended). And, it conflicts with the messaging on the road itself which features a "this is a bike lane and its going right" marking even up to the end." That marking is trying to say "this is turning into a combined pedestrian/bike pathway" but that's not clear and it makes it extremely dangerous for pedestrians.

Here's the streetview of the bike lane in question:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/J2b5mgG5LhNLhQk38

highfrequency• 2 years ago

Sometimes people don’t care, but often they are just unaware because there is no mechanism for feedback to make its way to them after they have designed the thing. Whoever designed that bike ramp probably designed a thousand other road features, lives many miles away, and never communicates with the people that handle injury reports; he knows none of the visceral details that you see every day in your specific corner of the universe.

frotty• 2 years ago

100% of the people around me at work care.

I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."

So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.

We're in the era of Good Enough.

I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.

There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.

Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.

Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.

My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?

LunicLynx• 2 years ago

I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.

It means that one just does, maybe even more then necessary because one doesn’t actually understand what their responsibilities are. And to be not detected it’s better to seem very busy and very caring.

MichaelZuo• 2 years ago

Maybe some fraction of incompetent interns are playing a kind of double game, where they merely pretend to be really caring.

But I doubt that’s the norm. There really are a lot of not so smart people of all ages out there in positions way beyond their actual capability.

Edit: And in a lot of situations the dumb and hard working are way more dangerous than the smart and lazy.

With the dumb and lazy being somewhat better, so I partially agree with the parent.

wakawaka282• 2 years ago

One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill. OK maybe not actually, but let's just say that some people are quick to apply a label of "incompetent" to people who think a little differently, or who are perhaps only 10% less knowledgeable, or to people they imagine are less knowledgeable.

dragonwriter2• 2 years ago

I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.

It is not.

It can be a product of not caring, and what is actually not caring can be mistaken for incompetence, but incompetence can coexist with dedication (the idea that it cannot seems is a face of the "effort is all that matters, there are no real differences in capabilities" myth), competence and concern are not at all the same thing or inherently linked such that either necessary implies the other.

rcxdude3• 2 years ago

Not always. I've seen multiple people who are very enthusiastic and care deeply about something they are absolutely terrible at, but are unable to recognise it (possibly because it's a hard thing to admit to yourself that this thing you like and care about is probably best left to someone else).

norseboar• 2 years ago

The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.

On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.

And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.

lolwutgood• 2 years ago

Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well?

Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem.

An "era of good enough" makes no goddamn sense in response to this article. NONE of the things listed are good enough. None of them.

bccdee13• 2 years ago

No, the examples in the article are bad.

The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.

DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.

The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.

Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.

sureglymop3• 2 years ago

Good enough... seems almost too self explanatory. Its good enough! Great!

tucaz• 2 years ago

Thanks for the domain name suggestion.

TheCaringCompany.com was taken but a good enough variant wasn’t and I got it.

Thank you!

_cenw• 2 years ago

As the software archeologist on call for literally anything going wrong with anything IT operations related for a large publishing house that unfortunately had an IT department since the 80s and a web presence since the 90s, I'd like to extend a generous "fuck you" to all the people who have not cared to document a single thing in the past 30 years.

Point being, this isn't new.

anarticle• 2 years ago

Not really sure why you brought your job into this, other than to inject corporatism into social problems.

Good enough = human shit in the street in USA.

This reads more like a death by a thousand tiny cuts, much like people that do not return their shopping carts.

As for solutions, it won't happen in our life time in USA.

Shame has a function in society, USA as a whole is shameless, that's all there is to it.

whycome9• 2 years ago

Isn't "good enough" the definition of "bare minimum"? That aligns pretty well with "doesn't care"

nomel• 2 years ago

I've only used "good enough", and have only ever seen it used, when enough margin beyond bare minimum exists to make it "good enough", which requires caring.

I suppose it depends on the personal definition of good enough, but I like to reserve "bare minimum" for those who truly do the minimal work, teetering on line between functional and non-functional.

reverendsteveii• 2 years ago

There are an infinite number of things to care about (which is to say, to spend resources on, because that's what caring about something actually means), a finite amount of resources allocated to everyone except about 6 people who have a practically infinite amount of resources, and a social organization system that revolves around getting as much of those resources as possible and nothing else. What you're looking at is the real end product of "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family" neoliberalism. It's not just that no one cares, it's not even that no one has answered the question "Why should I care?". It's that the majority of people simply cannot care.

azeirah4• 2 years ago

The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.

I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.

I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.

dgfitz3• 2 years ago

My spouse bought us kindles recently, and it popped in my head today that at some point e-books are going to have ads interspersed…

culi2• 2 years ago

There are kindle alternatives. Luckily the technology isn't that advanced and any/all of them pretty much MUST support a general PDF (or whatever other similar format). You might have to manage your own library a bit but that means you can just use these devices completely offline

I think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads

roland352• 2 years ago

Kindles already can have ads on the sleep screen! Unless you paid for the ad free version.

spc476• 2 years ago

I've found books that had ads inserted into them [1]. It seemed to be a thing from maybe the 1960/1970s. The ad page was a different type of paper, and no text from the book was on it (that is---the ad wasn't on one side and book text on the other).

[1] One example: https://boston.conman.org/2002/12/31.1

shae• 2 years ago

My swedish books from the 1800s have ads inside.

culi2• 2 years ago

if you don't, someone else will. Maybe you could've introduced a "bug" that makes it so it usually doesn't work except when a member of the QA team is looking at it :P

azeirah4• 2 years ago

Well.. I did implement most of the framework. The good thing is that I'm waaaayyyyy detail oriented, and I made an extremely sophisticated system for it.

Maybe a little bit TOO sophisticated

Not my proudest _engineering_ achievement, but as an R&D project? I consider it a success.

Ethical outcome? Success.

benjijay• 2 years ago

Volkswagen already had this idea...

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

maxerickson• 2 years ago

Yeah, there's always the "No thanks" button but not the "No, fuck you" button.

wat100004• 2 years ago

Or in online spaces, the ever more common “maybe later.” No means no, maybe go jump in a lake of fire.

PaulDavisThe1st• 2 years ago

because that 2nd one requires a "No, fuck YOU!" button and so on ad infinitum.

whycome9• 2 years ago

I hate that the options when faced with a location permissions request is "block" or "allow". why isnt ignore an option?? Block adds the site to a discrete local list which i dont need recorded on my computer...

agumonkey2• 2 years ago

and decoupling order taking with service makes for "funny" times. since mcdonalds installed the tablets i regularly wait 10 minutes while looking at confused / avoidant employees not knowing what to do, even if there's nobody else waiting.

i can almost feel the meeting where someone managed to sell this idea to shareholders... "decouple everything, more efficient !"

LeafItAlone• 2 years ago

That seems more indicative of just bad management. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been in (specially) a McDonalds, but I used to frequent them easier in my life. The ones I went to were well run and efficient. But still as seemed as decoupled as kiosk ordering. The cashier would take the order and put it into the computer. The food preparers would prepare the food and put it on the trays where the packagers would subsequently take it and put it on your tray or in your bag. There was 0 communication between the three groups in 99% of the cases. Often I would make small talk with the cashiers or packagers if there was nobody behind me.

I don’t see how kiosk/tablet ordering would change that significantly.

seabird• 2 years ago

This is a result of Taylorist management brain rot drive to reduce drive thru wait time metrics at the expense of anybody not in the drive through. Watch the shot clock near the drive through window (they're highly visible at Taco Bell) and observe that drive thru customers almost never wait more than 60-80 seconds.

listenallyall3• 2 years ago

This seemed like a poor example for the author to choose, of "not caring." Annoying, sure. But these extra upsells originate from someone who definitely cares about increasing revenue and is aggressively exploring multiple avenues to achieve it.

wat100004• 2 years ago

Companies don’t care about you, they care about your wallet, extraction of money from. The most pleasant companies to deal with are the ones who have found a niche where customer satisfaction helps with the goal of wallet, extraction from. But at best it’s a means to an end, and McDonald’s is definitely not one of those companies.

ryandrake2• 2 years ago

Lately, the number of times (across different businesses/industries) where I've found myself thinking "Will you please just fucking take my money and stop bothering me?" is too damn high.

amatecha• 2 years ago

Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.

whycome9• 2 years ago

Hey now, you can pay extra for "McDonald's without ads" like you can with Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney okay.

gonzo41• 2 years ago

This feeling is a driver of theft at self service checkouts.

amrocha• 2 years ago

Respect for standing up for what you believe in

Animats3• 2 years ago

I recently went to a gas station where the pump worked right! No affinity cards. No car wash offer. No asking for a ZIP code, since I'd been there before. No screen with ads. Press card against RFID reader, select octane, pump gas.

I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use. I go back there occasionally, even though the station with the ad screen is cheaper.

_sys49152• 2 years ago

nah - gas pumps that ask for phone numbers for savings card id's are great opportunities to save cents at the pump. 555-555-5555 always works everywhere and half the time gets you savings.

boredumb• 2 years ago

I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use, He. Did. Not. Care.

willis936• 2 years ago

I go to a gas station that blares ads at an ear piercing volume. I now keep duct tape in my driver's side door.

s-video• 2 years ago

I feel like this reveals some sampling error in the OP rant. When you see something negative get made that makes you think "nobody cares", you're not seeing the people who did care and left.

michaelhoney• 2 years ago

Which relates to the linked incentives piece: when you create incentives, you think you're changing people's behaviour. Actually you're selecting for people who respond to the incentive.

aaron695• 2 years ago

McDonald's touch-screen were only profitable because users ordered more. Possibly Covid and processes to get costs down have changed this, but not to begin.

I feel like your comment falls under "Nobody cares"

I love the touch screens and having the time to order what I want. I used to rush my order at the checkout and never got exactly what I wanted.

If you did a start-up 'ethical ordering' you'd care, made money, and probably forced McDonalds to change it's touch screens. In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.

azeirah4• 2 years ago

I was working so hard to change the internal culture for this.

I did not succeed.

It's ran by business people who want to make money. Not by philosophers.

maeil6• 2 years ago

In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.

Really? I guess I've just never taken up such an upsell, but I'll try to remember it next time I go just to see the UI. Barely ever go there now that ironically Lotteria has more veggie burger options here (1) than McDonalds (0), and their chicken burgers are imo worse than KFC's.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

Even Costco gives you a pop up trying to upsell you on a cookie.

jl2718• 2 years ago

I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seemed their targeting was worse than naive-bayes by a large factor, especially with respect to customer conversion. I was a pretty good data scientist, but this company paid their DS people an awful lot of money, so I couldn’t have been the first to actually discover this. The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. I started getting a lot of work in advertising, and it took me a number of clients to see a general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be. Note that this is not insider knowledge of actual policy, just common observations from analyzing data at different places.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

One thing you know about ad guys—they are really good at tricking people into spending money. I mean, it’s right there in their job description. For some reason their customers don’t seem think they’ll fall for it, I guess.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.

sanj• 2 years ago

This is a really interesting insight. Drop me a line if you want to talk further.

rrrx32• 2 years ago

They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.

I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.

The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.

This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

lqet• 2 years ago

That is fucked up.

Yes. Our local IKEA recently started doing this. During self-checkout, you have to click through hot dog, ice cream, cinnamon buns and drink offers, and the inevitable offer to get an IKEA family card before you are actually able to pay for your furniture.

Seeing this after waiting in line for 10 minutes, navigating a sluggish, unresponsive touch screen terminal and unsuccessfully trying to scan slightly bend bar codes while 10 people are watching you doesn't exactly increase my desire to return to this store.

I really think a huge part of the problem is that there isn't a direct interaction with a human anymore. If IKEA would ask their cashiers to advertise all this crap to customers before accepting their money, they would revert this after a single day because many customers would very, very strongly complain, and the cashiers would care and threaten to quit.

But you cannot complain to a self-checkout-terminal, which makes this even more frustrating. As another comment has pointed out, there is just a "No thanks" button. I want a "I am seriously offended that you try to milk me like a brainless cash-cow, you should be ashamed to even advertise this to me after I bought a couch for 1,400 EUR, and I will not return anytime soon" button.

kevincox• 2 years ago

Last time I went it was only one food upsell. But it is still really annoying. Before this they had basically a perfect self-checkout, fast and easy to use. But now it is adding crap and I fear that I'm going to have to stop shopping there like many of the other self-checkouts around me.

BlueTemplar2• 2 years ago

Next time go to the cashier instead, and complain to them about the self-checkout terminal ??

poisonborz• 2 years ago

Just want to thank you for standing up for your values at your workplace. I wish more SWEs would have morals like this.

pards2• 2 years ago

At the dominant pharmacy/convenience store in my area (Shoppers Drug Mart), it can take up to 12 clicks to self-checkout, depending on what garbage they're upselling on the day. I counted them.

I refuse to use them, and (annoyingly, I know) let the cashier know why each time as they're checking me out. I feel bad for the poor cashier but unfortunately for them, they're my only interface to the company.

zzzeek• 2 years ago

you can't say "they don't care" though, the folks making these screens are obviously pretty motivated to keep squeezing out more profits and care a lot about that. if they "didn't care" they'd have told you "ok fine, im going for break"

Nathanba• 2 years ago

I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.

I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm. I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.

It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.

nikeee• 2 years ago

I thought about this the other day and came up with a theory that people _do_ care if the thing they are doing has their name associated with it for everyone to see (in theory).

Edit: And sometimes, it's just the tragedy of the commons

aabajian• 2 years ago

I agree 100% with the comment about the McDonald's food ordering system. It is legitimately the worst of all the major fast-food chains. It is slow, ad-heavy, and there are certain things that you cannot order.

foxglacier2• 2 years ago

When I know what I want, I order at the counter, which is faster and there's never a queue because everyone else is using the kiosk. There isn't a cashier waiting but you just stand there and somebody will stop to take your order pretty quickly.

warner252• 2 years ago

I recently used the system to order a bunch of chicken nuggets for my four kids. When my order came out, I got a bunch of spicy nuggets. If you have young kids, you know that this is a disaster. Anyway, I said, "Uh, spicy nuggets? That's not what I ordered." The supervisor sighed and immediately said that I could keep them if I wanted to, but he'd fast-track a new order of regular nuggets for me (on the house, of course). Then he started complaining about how the kiosk UI confusingly puts the spicy nuggets as the first choice, so this happens all the time.

Meanwhile, an old man was hollering about how he wanted to pay with cash, but the kiosk wouldn't take cash, so another employee was trying to figure out how to transfer his order to the register at the counter to take his payment.

So in addition to being a horrible experience for customers, this whole thing appeared to be a disaster for the company in terms of both employee time and real money.

james_marks2• 2 years ago

By “nobody cares”, I think they mean “not everyone shares my exact priorities”.

I see this rant against the exact way a bike lane was installed- installed because someone cared ALOT to get it approved and built- and all they can think to do is complain?

The world is a complex place full of trade-offs and compromises, I feel for the people that worked so hard to get this project done.

a12k• 2 years ago

I don’t know, prioritizing sharing the sidewalk with everyone who wants to use it seems like it should transcend individual priorities.

wedn3sday• 2 years ago

In the hypothetical world where Im the Supreme Leader, there are crack teams of sharpshooters that who get placed around randomly selected grocery store parking lots dealing out summery justice to people that dont return their shopping carts.

percentcer• 2 years ago

Sounds terrible!

ndileas• 2 years ago

At least the benevolent supreme leader cares! Just look at the corpses!

ecuaflo• 2 years ago

I wonder if it’s really about not caring or rather optimizing for perverse incentives or just lack of competency.

Pigalowda• 2 years ago

I’ll care - for money.

ryanisnan2• 2 years ago

This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.

I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.

They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.

All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.

But this is exactly the "don't care" attitude. Ignore the specifics of the problem, avoid studying it or just giving it a thought. Didn't think that, not being a cyclist themselves, they should ask somebody who is. Didn't even think about very obvious things, like putting a warning sign ahead of the actual object that it would warn about.

No. That person did not care. Really sad.

wat100004• 2 years ago

Imagine building an app for a market you’re totally unfamiliar with. You don’t research the market, you don’t talk to potential users, you don’t do any real world testing. You just build something that seems like it should be ok, ship it, and never touch it again.

None of us would dream of doing that, but that’s what the designer of this atrocity did, if we’re assuming the best.

Bonus: the app probably isn’t going to kill anyone.

dieselgate2• 2 years ago

Usually constraints are financial related. It takes money to do all that and public works is not some big tech company

leipert• 2 years ago

Ha. The traffic curb example is actually a good one. I don’t think it’s an excuse to build a potentially dangerous ramp because you aren’t a cyclist yourself. People who design ramps should be capable to do it properly.

Imagine it were a ramp for wheelchairs and they would have decided that a 20 degree slope is doable.

caseyy4• 2 years ago

Yeah, not doing one's job well because they don't know how to (and won't bother to figure out) is an example of not caring, fundamentally.

Animats3• 2 years ago

This may be intentional.

Road to sidewalk is a speed transition point. The transition from street to sidewalk via a tight turn here is an effective traffic-calming component to slow down bikes from road speed to walking speed. That's done on freeway off-ramps, where there's a curved section or two of decreasing radii to force vehicle speeds down before they reach a stop sign or traffic light. Same problem.

sasmithjr• 2 years ago

I agree people should be able to design things property, but I'm not sure this ramp is actually a good example. It might be! But no one is talking about an obvious issue for any ramp that would exist in that photo: it is merging bikes in to pedestrian traffic. So I'd think that you specifically want a ramp that forces the bike to slow down.

foresto• 2 years ago

This reminds me of Tempest in a Pothole, an episode of The Paper Chase TV show from 1984:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEFBX4M5LCQ&t=2896s

The thrust is that standards of accountability are (or should be) higher for a professional than for a random reasonable person.

ryanisnan2• 2 years ago

I don't disagree with you that people who design these things should be capable. That isn't what the post is about though, it's about whether or not they care.

duderific• 2 years ago

I imagine the designer was under a set of constraints, for example, only a certain about of linear space was available for the ramp, because of other issues in the area; or maybe there was some budget constraint.

The designer may have thought about what it's like for a cyclist to make that curve, and thought, "the bicyclist can slow down to make the ramp."

None of those things have anything to do with not caring.

whycome9• 2 years ago

This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.

They literally mentioned it to the Director of the Seattle DOT. If the person who designed a bike lane isn't aware of the needs and dangers to bike users then they are not fit for the job. Engineers must make decisions for the curve of car lanes based on speed limits and terrain. They must make those same decisions for other vehicles.

codemonkey-zeta• 2 years ago

I completely agree. The author is attributing apathy to every action or inaction of everybody they see.

Just take the banal examples, like the person listening to their headphones. Maybe that person is listening to an audio book about medicine, because they are in medical school, and they really care about being a good student. Or the people taking up the whole escalator. Maybe they are old friends who have the opportunity to be together, and they care about listening to the conversation. Maybe the man zoned out in traffic who doesn't see your signal has his mind occupied by thoughts of his new baby who is sick in the hospital. Maybe the bike ramp was designed by a plucky intern who, despite inexperience, successfully got the entire mile-long bike lane installed in the first place.

The author is entirely wrong because they are myopic. It isn't that nobody cares, but rather that _everybody cares_. About different things, but the author has no insight into this and it's not their place to judge those things in the first place. They reach a good conclusion though, which is to change the things they care about with personal activism.

NoGravitas8• 2 years ago

Yes, I get a lack of empathy from this article. The author mentions a lot of little things other people do that annoy him, without the sense that maybe you need to put up with a little annoyance to get along with other people, and without any awareness that maybe he does little things that annoy other people.

grayfaced• 2 years ago

The whole article is "This design isn't optimized for me" and "No one else prioritizes my priorities". Empathy is something one can develop with practice if you take the self-reflection to recognize things from others perspectives. Their "Nobody cares" can easily be redirected back to author with how little other perspectives they consider. Multiple times their "objectively" better thing is worse for some.

Dunan• 2 years ago

it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.

Can you even imagine any piece of automobile infrastructure being designed in a way that is dangerous to drivers, and those drivers' concern being downplayed with the excuse that perhaps the person who designed the infrastructure isn't an automobile driver and didn't think about what it would be like to be a driver?

That would be inconceivable, but when non-drivers are the ones whose safety is ignored in favor of automobile drivers' convenience, nobody cares.

CalRobert2• 2 years ago

If the person designing it can't consider the needs of people who are biking then they shouldn't have that job.

nextlevelwizard• 2 years ago

Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.

So... In other words... They did not care about their job enough to investigate and think through the situation. They just did the default easy thing and moved on with their day.

postcert• 2 years ago

Does anyone have the time to care anymore? I searched for "time" in the comments and found a few unrelated hits.

Good enough is going to be the output when nobody has the time or people's time isn't valued.

shibby2• 2 years ago

We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care.

The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact.

You’re all part of the problem.

foxglacier2• 2 years ago

Bloggers mention Musk like they do Trump to politicize their writing for some stupid reason. Ignoring it isn't part of any problem. Starting a flame war over it is.

shibby2• 2 years ago

Yes because this place is known for its tolerance and ability to just sidestep such nuances.

Tech bro bs.

cbsmith• 2 years ago

It's a common misconception of youth to think nobody cares. For the most part, people care, a lot, to the point that they get exhausted. The challenge is prioritizing what to care about, which means as much about not caring as it does about caring.

jongjong• 2 years ago

I used to care so much 10 years ago. I didn't have to factor the state of the world or society into all my decision. I trusted society fully like I trusted air.

Now I feel like the boiling frog and I only trust a handful of people. I don't trust the system. I don't trust that it's fair. I feel like being honest is harming my survival odds.

Imagine you have to live in North Korea... Your awareness of how that society operates can make it challenging to sing your praises to your dear leader.

I really hope things change. I live outside the US and it feels like we get the worst of everything. It's as though the political machinations which used to take place in Africa to keep the people poor has spread on to parts of the western world in a slightly different form. In Africa, the environment is about artificial deprivation of resources and rights; in the west, it's about deprivation of opportunities.

In Africa, the goal is to deprive people of resources and rights; to allow corporate monopolies to exploit their labor as much as possible. In the west, the goal is to deprive people of opportunities to prevent them from competing against monopolies.

In the west, we have a fake society where everyone pretends to be on the same playing field, but we're not even close.

tonymet• 2 years ago

He's really talking about aesthetics (the philosophy of beauty) and how we lost the ability do admire beautiful things. The only means we have to assess & debate merit are quantitative (and lossy) so the grotesque dominates.

There are a couple exceptions about apathetic doctors and degrading community, but most of his examples are complicated and ugly things (McDonalds app, the bike ramp, dog mess , etc)

sureglymop3• 2 years ago

We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.

I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.

BhavdeepSethi• 2 years ago

What do you not agree with? That he doesn't care? I would assume scaling Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity are net positive for the world (as it stands). Can you achieve those ambitious things if the leader/ceo of the company doesn't care?

tdeck4• 2 years ago

I mean, he clearly didn't care that supervisors at his company were calling people the N-word on the job. He cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image, at least to a specific audience.

Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.

notfed• 2 years ago

You know what what happens when you assume...

arretevad• 2 years ago

Elon only cares about enriching himself.

podgorniy• 2 years ago

If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?

I believe his motivations are beyond getting rich. At some point in life money become means to goals, and goals are driven by real motivation.

jeffhuys2• 2 years ago

I think he mostly cares about getting humanity off this planet, he's been saying that for a long, long time.

Starting a space company to enrich yourself sounds like a very weird thing to do if you only care about money.

andrepd• 2 years ago

That's not fair. He also cares what twitter randos think of him (e.g. to the point of paying to boost his diablo account or whatever).

caseyy4• 2 years ago

In smaller communities, people care more. There is a reputation social cost associated with being a self-centered asshole when everyone knows each other. If one doesn't care about others, they'll soon find themselves excluded from social circles, not offered help when they need it, and similar.

This is not the case in large cities – show 1 million people you do not care for them and there are still millions that will treat you reasonably well, especially if you can make a nice first impression. In some way, this social environment optimizes for not caring.

This is why I spent 30 years living in large cities around the world and now moved to a relatively small town. And I couldn't be happier. Streets are tidy, the town administration fixes most known problems, the public spaces are refurbished and the parks are maintained, businesses are pleasant, and everyone is friendly – I think I could ask for a favor from my taxi driver and they'd probably try to help.

There is a list of grifters we all know and keep in our heads, and I don't think the community will ever do them any favors. That is justice – these people wouldn't do anything for the community, too. And this list happens naturally in small places – you know the character of those around you. Reputation for having good character has social value. And this is natural.

batsoupremacy• 2 years ago

There is no solution, only trade-offs.

cyrnel• 2 years ago

You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.

Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.

Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.

Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.

I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).

Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.

usr350891230• 2 years ago

Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.

The author was complaining about the use of cool white (5000k) LEDs instead of warm ones (2700k). Cool LEDs aren't any cheaper or more efficient than warm ones. So what tradeoffs are we talking about?

Tokkemon2• 2 years ago

Maybe the city has a million of them sitting in a warehouse from some previous administration and they don't want to buy new ones.

eweise2• 2 years ago

regarding "These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving. If your house is near one, they suck."

I have a blinding street light across from my house. I complained to the city and they put a shade on the light so that my house is now in the dark. Its so much in case anyone else has the same problem.

r-w• 2 years ago

What city are you in? Or state / general region, if you'd rather not share.

eweise2• 2 years ago

marin county

chaseadam17• 2 years ago

I don’t think people don’t care, I think they have too much to do. Kids at home, too much work, and still barely making ends meet. Our society is set up to push people to the max, prioritizing quantity and “good enough” over quality. Most people do not have a career where spending 1% more time on a curb design instead of spending that time with their kids results in any more pay, much less the spare time to focus on craftsmanship for its own sake.

ndesaulniers• 2 years ago

Apathy is death.

brailsafe• 2 years ago

Contrary to the author's quip about incentive systems, I wish I'd learned earlier that it's a fool's errand to care about things that have no positive feedback loop, no relevancy in my life, that I have no actual influence over, or that are otherwise beyond my purview. To 21 year old me, and probably many others, it would seem heartless or self-serving, but by doing so I get to focus on the few things I can authentically care about without worrying about how much they're reciprocated, and I don't need to passive aggressively try to influence broader behavior indirectly. If a neighbor or random stranger needs a hand, I give it to them and don't ask for anything in return. Likewise if someone wants to strike up a convo. I give people my time and energy if I can afford to and want to. I try to make that possible more often than not, and it leaves me with a very healthy social life, along with a non-burnout inducing work life. Beyond that, it'd be self-destructive and non-economical.

I realized years ago that in retrospect it was stupid to care beyond what I was rewarded for caring about or that my success was measured by, which was time, not quality, or accessibility, or usability, or anything else, and that's usually the case. If you have 2 weeks to get something completed, and it's not in the definition of completed to make sure screen readers can parse the website or whatever, then it's not your job to do that unless you'd be there anyway and get the rest of the stuff done with time to spare.

If you work at the DMV, you're sure as hell not wise to try and fight for different higher level decisions, it's not worth losing it for, and you're not measured by how happy of a place it is. Sure, engage in your interactions with people with respect, but don't take on responsibilities you're not paid for.

That said, if you could otherwise afford to spend a bit more time or effort outside work on things that aren't entirely self-serving, after you've done things that do bring you only personal value, but deliberately choose not to all the time, then ya that's just lame af.

Lastly, I do ultimately agree that some people are just absolute careless assholes on an individual level or deeply antisocial unfortunately, and we shouldn't be cultivating that in our cities, but that's a different convo. The worst I tend to see on a daily basis is cigarettes being tossed on the sidewalk and dogshit left by owners who I'd prefer didn't have them.

globalnode• 2 years ago

I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else. They just buy into a different social contract, one where they believe that if you behave a certain way towards others, your life in turn will be better as well. Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there. Those sorts of social contracts only work when everyone is on the same page.

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

    > I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else.

They do care more than most countries where I have visited or lived. There is a real send of "excellence" about their public behaviour that is hard to replicate. For example, when you queue to board a train, people stay to the side to allow passengers to exit. After others have exited, they board the train. (Tourists sometimes make the mistake of rushing into the train when the doors open, but it only takes one try to figure it out!) Ask yourself: Why do they do it? I don't why, but I observe it on the daily, and the incentive to behave well in public is pretty low in a modern ("selfish") society. I feel the same about littering -- the amount of litter in public places is astonishingly low in Japan. Another tiny thing that you may notice: When in a busy public place where two groups of people are crossing one another's path, people in Japan make an effort to allow one person to cross from each side. It is like watching a ballet performance when you see it.

    > Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there.

This is a myth. Japan (and, coincidentally, Germany) welcomes three groups of foreigners: (a) students (language and university, mostly), (b) low skill workers (factory, farm, retail), and (c) high skill knowledge workers. I would say it is much easier to get (and keep) a work visa in Japan compared to the US.

yakshaving_jgt3• 2 years ago

This is how trains work in Bangkok also, and Thai culture is very different from Japanese culture.

This is just how trains work in that place. It’s not deeper than that.

emchammer• 2 years ago

I sure do miss the sodium lamps.

nph278• 2 years ago

Why was this written?

thrance• 2 years ago

This guy is this close to rediscovering worker alienation.

Most people don't care about doing their jobs well because they don't really choose what they work on, they don't own the product they're working on and don't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They know working harder won't improve their material condition either, only tire them more, seemingly pointlessly.

And so society turns to sh*t, but a lot of value is created for shareholders in the process, so who cares?

NoGravitas8• 2 years ago

This guy is this close to rediscovering worker alienation.

A lot of people in the comments are, too. It's been a real interesting case study for me.

omgJustTest• 2 years ago

I feel this way a lot, i would suspect however that these "1% improvements" are really obvious to some people and completely not obvious to the person who did it.

People are lazy, which means if it isnt obvious to them, or more importantly, if they don't see a direct incentive to their life, they don't do it.

In reality "1% effort" probably looks like 10-50+% effort... and society would be 10-1000x better for it but the incentives are wrong.

aoeusnth1• 2 years ago

I find that caring, and networking with other people who care, at work can be a huge career boost in the long term. So I'm not even sure the not-caring people are winning, long term, but maybe they also don't can't about that.

freen• 2 years ago

Societies decide if they are pro-social or anti-social.

Pro-social is more work. It’s harder. It is caring, sensitive, flexible. You have to give a shit because society actively disapproves of and discourages not giving a shit. No one wants to be your friend cus your the asshole who doesn’t give a shit.

Anti-social is easier: you don’t have to care. My industrial effluent will cause cancer? I don’t care. My bigass truck is more likely to kill pedestrians? I don’t care. Masking during a pandemic jmight save someone else’s life? I don’t care.

Everyone wants to live in a prosocial society. Certainly many people complain about the fact that society isn’t pro-social, yet themselves are deeply anti-social.

“No one wants to work! Do you pay a living wage? Benefits? Heck no, my business wouldn’t be as profitable”

Unfortunately, the ability to freeload off the collective relatively more pro-social past is coming to a rapid end.

dieselgate2• 2 years ago

Far as the bike lane/sign thing goes at least there’s a bike lane. Many streets in Seattle don’t even have a sidewalk let alone a bike lane. And I got hit by a car while biking in seattle a few years ago. Either way wear a helmet while biking

juliend2• 2 years ago

I used to feel the same before having a kid.

Nowadays, the scope of what I can care about is drastically reduced. But one area where I don't allow care to be dissolved (apart from my family) is the work I do.

I had to leave a job where co-workers wouldn't care and it was about to influence my own level of care by the end.

jwr• 2 years ago

I agree with author's frustrations. So many things could be better if people cared and did the right thing.

Japan is indeed slightly better in this regard: the work culture emphasizes doing your job as well as you possibly can, no matter how menial the job is. That's why you'll so often see attention to little details, which makes life better for everyone. It is very noticeable on a daily basis.

donatj3• 2 years ago

I set up a weekly auto-buy for a stock about a year ago with Cashapp.

I noticed the stock was way up today so I logged in to sell. Well, turns out the auto-buy has just... Not been firing... For a solid year. I have two purchases and then it stopped. It still says I have a weekly auto-buy set up, but I have not been charged.

In a just society, I would be owed my potential winnings for these unprocessed purchases, but having dealt with Cashapp support in the past I know damn well there's no way they're going to agree to that. I would be lucky to even catch the ear of a human being. It's sure as hell not worth taking them to court over a loss of maybe a couple hundred dollars at most.

The opaque and useless support of modern companies is literally in my eyes the worst part about the modern world. They quite literally do not care.

kristianp• 2 years ago

having dealt with Cashapp support in the past

Yet you're still a user? Perhaps you also do not care? Actually the "do not care" covers a lot of ground here, perhaps you still find it useful and reliable enough, that you are willing to forgive this one bug due to the general convenience of cashapp.

donatj3• 2 years ago

No, I despise their stock feature. It was just easy to set up, but is fundamentally terrible in every aspect. The rub is I have a bunch of stock with them from the start of the pandemic and am pretty sure there is no way to move it to another service without triggering a taxable event.

So I guess I don't care in that I don't care enough to lose money on switching, or complicating my taxes even further by utilizing multiple investment firms.

throwaway20375• 2 years ago

As HN loves to quote Hanlon's razor: <<Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or incompetance).>> First, assume that they shares were purchased, but not correctly credited to your account. Second, confirm that with CashApp. (Doubt it -- but try that first.)

Assuming CashApp is a US-based brokerage, I would first raise a complaint with CashApp. If you get the blow-off (which I fully expect), send a written letter to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and CC CashApp legal and compliance team. (Make it clear in the letter that you are CC'ing CashApp L&C.) Usually, brokerages are not allowed to make a customer whole after an execution mistake. However, if they make enough mistakes, SEC will slap them with a huge fine. (See: Robinhood.) It is very important to formally register your complaint with CashApp. In fact, I would use this exact phrase: "I would like to formally file a complaint about poor execution service from your brokerage firm." Everything is recorded in brokerage firms these days (voice or written). There will be absolutely no doubt that you wish to formally file a complaint, and I can guarantee you that it will be taken seriously by either CashApp (L&C team) or SEC (enforcement team).

xigency5• 2 years ago

This is great advice I hope GP follows, but this also highlights something that I wish the original article addressed: not caring is contagious.

The reason corporate interests push a façade of not caring is so that many customers will also not care.

Between binding arbitration and other legalese-fu, the process for remediation slowly chips away at people who at first thought they cared.

yakshaving_jgt3• 2 years ago

I think the undue romanticism for East Asian societies is an instance of not caring. I think it’s racist too.

East Asians are regular people, with regular problems, and regular levels of care or indifference.

I think the same of anyone who believes in the magic of ancient Chinese medicine. It’s not endearing to believe that the Chinese have some mystical otherworldly powers. It’s just racist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism

nejsjsjsbsb2• 2 years ago

Tldr: smorgasbord of 0.1th to 1st world problems designated as horrendous failures by me ain't fixed, so I decide that people in their jobs don't care.

I actually like the bike ramp. Cyclists merging to a footpath at 20mph are a danger. Take em out before they hit the pedestrian.

hoosier2gator• 2 years ago

As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.

paulnpace2• 2 years ago

My primary care physician will only do video meetings or wait 6 months for in-person appointment. He does not care.

sien3• 2 years ago

Why don't you change ?

Is it not allowed ?

tqi6• 2 years ago

You think PCPs get to decide what their schedule looks like? Or do you think they have a specific patient load they are expected to meet, which dictates how many in-person vs remote slots they have in each day?

ikr678• 2 years ago

His care does not scale and he has to ration his care between existing patients. For him to give you more care, it will likely come at the expense of someone else's care.

This situation has occurred because somewhere and somewhen else, a chain of other people have not cared and allowed primary care resources to get to this state.

nozzlegear2• 2 years ago

My mother is a nurse practitioner who works in an acute care clinic, and I can say that she feels horrible when she makes a mistake, learns that one of her patients’ conditions has worsened and they’ve been hospitalized, or — worst of all — when they die, even if it was expected.

least2• 2 years ago

A lot of physicians have terrible bedside manner and that is going to be one of the biggest criteria a non-physician is going to use to judge how much they care.

And I don't think that's unreasonable, either. It's necessary for a physician to communicate effectively with their patient. Trust is a requirement to work effectively together. If you can't establish that, then you've failed. Encounters with doctors shouldn't feel adversarial.

parpfish4• 2 years ago

in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0].

In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and medical aptitude.

So if you find a doctor with bad bedside manner, they're likely to have better medical aptitude otherwise they would've been filtered out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

nusl• 2 years ago

My personal experience with multiple doctors, some in primary care and others in hospitals, is that they often don't care and just want to get you out of the door.

Bring up some symptoms not immediately easily attributed to something? Sorry, those are "nonspecific symptoms" and they can't help you. Maybe see a specialist, maybe not. Figure it out.

Obviously this isn't all of them, but it is definitely a decent chunk.

0xfffafaCrash• 2 years ago

Doctors are at the very top of my list of people who don’t care. Not necessarily that they got into the field not wanting to care, but that in practice they quickly get to the point of caring largely about getting through their day — maybe a few select patients stir them out of their bizarrely intense waking slumber where they go from patient to patient and immediately prescribe nearly the first thing that comes to mind for nearly the first diagnosis that comes to mind. Given the volumes of patients they are expected to churn through though it’s not surprising that they become desensitized and divorced from the ramifications of shoddy work with minimal research — for many (especially nonspecialists) it’s effectively impossible to do thoughtful work for every patient. I think overwork desensitizes many/most and few actually have the time or energy to do more research or think deeply about an individual patient, but ultimately decisions which consume minimal resources from them drastically affect the lives of patients.

Healthcare professionals know this to be true. This is why when their own loved ones are the patients they have such a strong tendency to become very actively involved —- it’s not necessarily that the person attending to their loved one is incompetent, but chances are that their loved ones will similarly be just another face that occupies another physician’s mind for a few minutes.

Artificially high barriers of entry in the field may lead to massive compensations but also to a huge ratio of patients to physicians — this takes a toll.

Earw0rm3• 2 years ago

It's not just the ratio. In many medical roles, engaging your full humanity with every patient would destroy you psychologically, even at a much lower number of patients.

"Follow the process, follow the training" is how medics, emergency responders and the armed forces are able to stay in the job more than a few years without burning out completely.

(It's also, as psychological defensive mechanisms go, somewhat fairer than those used in the past. Ask a retired medic in their 80s or 90s if you know any.)

Graa• 2 years ago

Regardless of facts about how much doctors actually care, he still perceives the world as one where almost nobody does. I'm glad he expressed himself as such because I feel the same way sometime, even though I know that most people try to fill their role in society well. It's like a special kind of loneliness that grows quick. I like how he describes the development of this loneliness. Once he put on its glasses, he thinks carelessness is everywhere, even in doctors who do care, so he develops existential hopelessness of some sort.

deltaburnt• 2 years ago

Loneliness is a really good way to describe it. I definitely have had similar experiences to the author. It can make you feel really pessimistic and like a freak outcast for actually caring. It makes me feel arrogant or overly confident too.

I think ironically it does show that the author thinks highly of people and their potential. A truly bitter person would have long stopped expecting anything of anyone, which I think is very unhealthy. You expect people to care but only about things that harm you.

I'm guessing there's more people out there who feel this way, and likewise I'm glad the author shared this experience even if it's not the healthiest mindset to always be in.

FigurativeVoid• 2 years ago

This is a statement of privilege: find a doctor who cares and stick with them.

I'm T1 diabetic, and it took me a long time to find an endo and a PCP that care. I have long since moved away from their offices, but I still make the drive because they are worth it.

My tip on finding good providers is basically to get lucky and find a good one. Then you should ask who they recommend. They know who the bad ones are.

aksophist2• 2 years ago

It’s a statement of privilege to believe (and say) that there are hundreds of good doctors per handful of bad ones? It sounds to me like a statement of fact. And that you dispute the fact. What does privilege have to do with it?

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

The entire article is a form of engagement bait. It’s a pile of stereotypes with storytelling. Paul Graham does the same thing. Arguing about which stereotype is true or false… you’re just playing into it.

gist• 2 years ago

And in particular engagement bait, when you're blogging or writing, requires you to not be circumspect but rather be polarized and absolute in what you say.

maeil6• 2 years ago

Let me ask you a question. What's the longest time you've spent on a single patient over the last month? What do you think that number is like for your fellow physicians?

Of course this will massively depend on your specific workplace, the ratio of doctors to patients in your vicinity, and so on. But I've seen plenty of doctors for who that statistic can't be higher than 10 minutes.

I'll freely admit I'm biased. I have a medical issue that despite visiting a good number of different doctors, none have properly diagnosed. This is despite the symptoms being visible, audible and showing up on certain scans (inflammation), so it can't be disregarded as "it's in your head". Some have made an attempt, and after that failed quickly did the equivalent of throwing their hands up and saying "I don't know", providing no further path.

graphememes• 2 years ago

Nobody see's the time or effort that went into a thing only it's outcome. Unfortunate reality.

Tokkemon2• 2 years ago

Author, be the change you want to see in the world. Stop whining and do something.

ary• 2 years ago

You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.

Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.

MetroWind• 2 years ago

Well, I don't know about the other things, but I absolutely hate the orange street lights. Bad color reproduction, and make me sleepy.

They spend all their free time doing activist stuff

Having free time is a privilege. The author is privileged and they don't know it.

ok_dad• 2 years ago

I care way too much and it causes burnout because those in power do not care.

That's probably my take on this: those in power do not care anymore. Money has turned into political influence in America, so now politicians are there for money first of all, and the needs of their communities are an afterthought. Even back in the day when you had shitty politicians or robber-barons, they still wanted their local area and America to succeed because they lived there, but in today's world the oligarchs and their appointed cronies (execs, upper management, etc.) just jet around the planet and could not care less about how well people are doing in one area of the world over another. This leads to the regular American seeing the lack of responsibility and lack of punishment for injustice and they also stop following the rules or caring about doing a good job, or they are too busy to do so, and you can't really blame them.

Solution: Money out of politics first, then we need to instill a pride and responsibility for the local community into the new generations of Americans, but in a non-propagandized way because they actually have to have real pride and not some fake patriotism like today.

softwaredoug• 2 years ago

It really sucks to be the one person who cares amongst colleagues that don’t care. You’re seen as creating work for others, making waves, causing instability, etc etc. Or because you care, you get burned out by trying to fix everything.

In these places you’re pushed to not care.

miiiiiike• 2 years ago

There was a crummy, barely used, mostly abused, walking path with a sitting area near my old apartment complex. [0]

One day I decided to pick up all of the trash/cigarette butts, installed a butt bin, and planted a bed of flowers in the center. Big sunflowers.

The next day I went out and someone had destroyed the cigarette bin. When the flowers sprouted someone immediately doused them with something and set all but one on fire.

I replaced the butt bin same day and replanted the flowers the day after they were burned.

Nobody cared, they even resisted at first, but, eventually people stopped trashing the place and what was an empty sitting area started filling up with people.

It’s worth trying. Sometimes people will care.

[0]: Turns out (and I learned this way after the fact) that the path marked the site of a WWII POW work camp. I didn’t know this but German prisoners were shipped to the US to make up for the farm labor shortage during by WWII.

Anyway, the path was a loop with a sitting area at the entrance. Imagine the most out of the way, inconvenient place you could put a plaque. That’s where they put it. The plaque informing you that your apartment complex was built on the former site of a Nazi work camp was at the very back of the loop with the text facing away from the path.

Tiktaalik• 2 years ago

Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.

No the reasons are likely wholly political.

It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.

Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.

These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.

hint hint.

It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.

The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.

avalys• 2 years ago

Umm, in 99% of the US, cyclists and pedestrians are definitely the special interest group, and the vast majority of voters and especially taxpayers want to see the transportation infrastructure optimized for cars.

EliBullockPapa• 2 years ago

Well damn I guess I’m living in the 1% /s

Karrot_Kream4• 2 years ago

Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.

grajaganDev3• 2 years ago

Many cyclist are also drivers.

bccdee13• 2 years ago

Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.

Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.

deeg• 2 years ago

I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing.

You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.

Earw0rm3• 2 years ago

That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.

Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.

It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.

(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)

I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.

Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.

To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.

LouisSayers2• 2 years ago

the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded

This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.

As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.

The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(

montag2• 2 years ago

It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.

bccdee13• 2 years ago

No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.

The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.

Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency

handity• 2 years ago

Person with headphones blocking the sidewalk.

Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.

subjectsigma• 2 years ago

I admit the article is rather whiny but it did resonate a bit with me.

A good example - we are provided free Keurig cups at work. Lots and lots of disposable plastic. At the same time there’s been quite a number of changes put in place to “be more green” and help the environment.

I asked my coworkers one day why we use Keurig machines instead of making a pot of coffee and everyone just shrugged. I asked the administrative staff if there was any plans to switch to grounds to reduce the number of Keurig cups and they basically said “No, that would be too much effort.”

In that moment, it really did just feel like everyone around me did not care, so I dropped the subject.

hshshshshsh2• 2 years ago

You should not care. The universe does not need your help.

Universe instantiated you in this reality in a random body in a random timeline with zero input from your side.

It's just your ego that think your care actually makes any difference in this reality.

The universe will continue to run creating bodies, life forms and so on. It keeps destroying and recycling stuff.

Nothing is permanent. The more you care about impermanent things the more you suffer.

nozzlegear2• 2 years ago

I do care. In fact, I bring a sort of "fuck it, we ball" vibe to the existentialism that nihilists don't really like.

hshshshshsh2• 2 years ago

Nice. The ying and the yang.

zubairq• 2 years ago

Great article. I need to care more myself even if other do not care, thanks for the wake up call!

IAmGraydon• 2 years ago

Human beings evolved to be surprisingly efficient. At any give moment, we are running in our heads a statistical analysis with a massive number of simultaneous inputs. We think about what we need, prioritize this list by level of necessity, analyze the perceived costs, multiply by probability of success, and divide by predicted time to reward. From this analysis, we make our choices whether or not to take action. In a system where people generally already have what they need, caring would be an inefficiency and an aberration. We have a salary, a house, food, water, companionship. We are comfortable. Why would a comfortable man care? To care for the sake of caring goes against 6 million years of evolution.

heurist• 2 years ago

This is cynical. There are a lot of people who do care. Consider that someone cared enough to build a bike lane in the first place. IMO life is hard for most people and as much as most would love to "care", they have to take care of themselves and their families first. The caring is focused where it is best applied.

I also don't think Elon would bother fixing a bike ramp or installing dog bag dispensers around his home(s). So if he does "care", it's not about things you care about.

minifridge• 2 years ago

I think it is the direction of the situation, rather than the state of things, that is concerning. The general direction is that everyone is incentivized and rewarded to look after their bottom line and personal gain and then everything else.

IMO, not caring about the wider impact of our actions is something that will keep happening at an increasing rate.

otikik• 2 years ago

We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.

About his ego. Nothing else.

NL807• 2 years ago

If nobody cared, art would not exists. Nobody would do science. Civilisations would not be built. Health care would not exists. And nobody enjoys living in a shit hole. People collectively do make decisions which are selfless, so long they know there is a positive outcome. People stop caring about something soon as they recognise their efforts is wasted or it's all for nothing.

tlapinsk• 2 years ago

I tend to agree. Anytime I encounter negativity or cynicism of this level, it reminds me of a speech by David Foster Wallace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2BvRbjOYo

In text if preferred: http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html

kls0e• 2 years ago

another approach would be to take it easy and lead by good example.

squidsoup• 2 years ago

As much as I hate the light from hooded LED streetlights, they leak far less light than sodium lights and are better for wildlife.

dartos• 2 years ago

I care.

thedstrat• 2 years ago

I think the author is very myopic in understanding that other people care - just not about the same things he cares for. Most people don't care about publicly available dog poop bags or fixing a random bike lane that's sort of wrong. In fact you could argue that the things he cares about are not the most important things. Other people might care more about family than work, or about animal activism than petitioning for green space. It's not that others don't care, they just care about different things - sometimes more important and sometimes less.

tqi6• 2 years ago

Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...

aheidne• 2 years ago

It’s* ironic, because you don’t even seem to understand his argument and lazily disputed the LED part which isn’t even remotely what he’s complaining about.

But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.

tqi6• 2 years ago

Thanks grant!

ulbu• 2 years ago

[flagged]

easygenes2• 2 years ago

It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.

tqi6• 2 years ago

Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....

_lyxd• 2 years ago

OK but blinding blue LEDs are most common substitutes, because it's the lazy default, and because people do not care. That's the point of the article.

matthewdgreen4• 2 years ago

Here in Baltimore the city seems to have purchased a huge batch of defective LEDs that are actually purple. It’s disturbing when you encounter one.

a_e_k• 2 years ago

The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.

Tomte• 2 years ago

In the netherlands I have seen green street lights with motion sensors. Only on smaller streets and pedestrian paths, though.

maayank2• 2 years ago

Any way to test my light's spectrum? e.g. a cheap home spectrometer

flyinghamster2• 2 years ago

In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.

The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.

CalRobert2• 2 years ago

The ones in the article clearly go against the best principles at https://www.savingourstars.org/ though.

veltas4• 2 years ago

I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light.

This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply.

Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.

bobthepanda• 2 years ago

it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly.

This particular lane was done in 2018. https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...

You can actually see the diagram here: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/Maintenan...

The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.

pointedAt• 2 years ago

you guys are smarter than that.

in our civilization people observe and tell.

all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?

it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".

and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......

renox• 2 years ago

While you're right on the LED part, this bike lanes is obviously misdesigned.. I have a similar one next to my house and fell from my bicycle due to its poor design, some French civil engineer also don't care :-(

0xEF2• 2 years ago

We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.

phito• 2 years ago

Except he is talking about the color of the LEDs. Blue LEDs are terrible, just put orange ones. Has nothing to do with the fact that it's LEDs or hallogen.

logifail2• 2 years ago

There are enormous design standards [..]

I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.

drunner6• 2 years ago

Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands.

https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.

crabbone2• 2 years ago

I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.

But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.

For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.

But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.

* * *

Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)

maeil6• 2 years ago

But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.

In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.

As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.

addicted2• 2 years ago

Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old.

If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.

pdimitar8• 2 years ago

No, I can't imagine that because again, nobody cares.

You are demonstrating the problem very clearly btw: you assume people would have cared and that's why nothing was done.

Which is a puzzling thing to say. Because clearly, the people who care have no power.

gizmo2• 2 years ago

Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason.

"Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes.

Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.

Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.

Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.

And so on.

The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.

There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

Eh, I think as always is still just comes down to resource contention right at the root of the issues. We still all monk e, some things will never change.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons.

I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.

Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.

stdbrouw2• 2 years ago

But is that even true? My mid-tier appliances are all great and I love my IKEA furniture. Some things suck some of the time. Other things don't.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.

mcswell4• 2 years ago

IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)

(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)

tqi6• 2 years ago

They might not be good reasons to you, but that is not the same thing as not caring. If someone cooks something that without salt for health reasons, that doesn't mean they don't care about salt as much as me.

stevedekorte• 2 years ago

But street lights don't have to use harsh 3000 kelvin LEDs, there are warm light LEDs (2400-2700 kelvin). For example, these lights are widely available for home, yet most people just buy the 3000K LED bulbs because (IME) it doesn't occur to them that there is a strong aesthetic (and health) difference between these colors. i.e. They don't care.

Vampiero4• 2 years ago

The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work

People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.

cassepipe2• 2 years ago

Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.

pclmulqdq6• 2 years ago

Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.

ieee2• 2 years ago

Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.

nicce• 2 years ago

I would even argue that the current design of the bike line is better than the one suggested by the author.

It forces the biker to slow down and reduces the collision risks with others in the line.

It is selfish to think only about the biker coming from the hill. The biker that thinks it is okay to drive 20mph in that situation.

mensetmanusman3• 2 years ago

You can accomplish both with the right design.

drunner6• 2 years ago

Yeah, that's why we put sharp turns at the bottom of roads too.

It is selfish to only think about the driver coming from the hill. The driver that thinks it is okay to drive 45mph in that situation.

Do you see the irony of your statement.

4ndrewl• 2 years ago

He does not care

mensetmanusman3• 2 years ago

LEDs last longer, but cities took the savings to add even more blue light, so the lifetime doesn’t matter.

The light pollution has absolutely increased because of the amount of LEDs that have been installed. This is well documented.

Also, the sodium line spectrum is easy to filter out for astronomy, broad spectrum blue LEDs add light pollution there.

bill_joy_fanboy• 2 years ago

This post is massive copium.

If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.

pdimitar8• 2 years ago

There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you.

OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.

Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.

stronglikedan• 2 years ago

Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.

gspencley• 2 years ago

But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.

He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.

I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.

The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.

xiande04• 2 years ago

That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.

Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.

scosman• 2 years ago

I'm a big bike lane design nerd: that bike lane design absolutely sucks, and in more ways than the author mentions. The person designing it didn't care.

bccdee13• 2 years ago

The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste.

Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.

BeFlatXIII2• 2 years ago

Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

I think spending a week in Japan you would see what the author is talking about, they care, we (USA) dont.

hackernoops• 2 years ago

LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 2 years ago

this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research

It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

Don’t take anything here too seriously.

I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.

ksec3• 2 years ago

But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.

Well thanks to all the replies below to prove may be he is not assuming it's because everyone is stupid.

I think this reply also amplifies what the author was saying. Just because the standard is like this and everyone is following the standard doesn't mean the standard is good.

more_corn• 2 years ago

LEDs come in multiple color temperatures. It’s possible to install led streetlights that don’t suck.

Yes that bike lane follows some sort of standard. Still sucks.

DMV sucks. Know what doesn’t suck? AAA DMV services.

I think you’re right though. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner of suck and we don’t know how to get out.

mikeen• 2 years ago

Hawaii Big Island does care about light pollution - for the sake of astronomical observatories. They use yellow low pressure sodium light. Yellow is dispersed less by air. The energy efficiency of low pressure sodium bulbs is also high, comparable or higher than most LEDs.

65• 2 years ago

This article is dumb.

Maybe the bike lane is that because of real world engineering, regulation, or design limitations?

Perhaps the author should appreciate the bike lane existing in the first place. It's better than no bike lane.

I get the sense a lot of these cynical types feel a desperate need for control over every component of their lives. Relax, some things aren't perfect but they're probably better than they were a hundred years ago. Progress takes time, accept that it takes time.

_y5hn• 2 years ago

For caring you need empathy.

I hear people all around me all the time be boastful of how much they don't care. It's a competition.

CuriousRose• 2 years ago

I'm so glad that someone else had the patience and articulation to write this article so that I didn't have to (as a personal venting exercise). My personal takeaway of the mutually shared frustrations in poor design has been apparent since maybe the 1990's onwards. It is very sad to see throwaway consumerism, permeate culture to the point where from an industrial design POV you need to buy vintage or ludicrously expensive appliances to have a beautiful and functional product that is also reliable. In the past decades, companies like Braun were able to bring beauty into the house, where now Temu disposables have taken their place.

willvarfar• 2 years ago

Saying engineers don't care is victim blaming. The way to survive at a company with "blah blah incentives" is to _not care_. You have to stop caring until you have an opportunity to move to another job.

nyokodo2• 2 years ago

I recently spent some time in the ER in a criminally underfunded and understaffed public healthcare system. People in quite severe pain were languishing waiting their turn but the nurses went out of their way to show a semblance of care and humanity to the patients and even apologize to them when they didn't have to and weren't expected to. Maybe that overall situation shows that key people in the society or government don't care but clearly the frontline people still care. I choose to focus on them and do my little bit to make things around me a little bit better when maybe no one expects me to either.

doubleorseven• 2 years ago

Zooming out of your own world is a gift that can be taught. You have a gift that 100% makes your life easier, with the side effect of the occasional frustration.

I feel compassion for those people who live in their own body and keep hitting walls.

You can help people care, it's your path.

cafed00d• 2 years ago

The 12 years or so I have lived in America I have observed that people always keep the door open for those walking behind them. Always. Everywhere. DC, Boston, LA, New York, Seattle, Cupertino, everywhere.

Nobody cares about anything. Somebody cares about something. Everybody cares about everything.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. This makes me optimistic. At least, its nice that people care to hold doors open : )

r0ckarong• 2 years ago

90% of "not caring" is actually external limitations where trying to overcome those would so far outweigh any benefit or even tangentially have anything to do with the original problem, that you must be a lunatic to waste energy trying to change it.

His "snowball of care" doesn't work if your 1% effort needs to put out the house fire first.

veltas4• 2 years ago

Thanks for complaining about McDonald's self service, which is truly dreadful and just gets worse (no I don't have the app, why would I want something you people made on my own phone, stop asking!).

Another "they don't care" is the TV screens that have the menu on in the background, that used to have menu and prices when you went up to order, and now display "cool animations" half the time so you can't read the menu while you're up there ordering and have to wait and look like an idiot for the menu to come back.

vv_3• 2 years ago

My experience is that such indifference comes with seniority. Unfortunately most people tend to try and change things outside of their control, ignoring what they can change and quickly burn out. With that said:

It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.

This really hits home as it's happened to me several times. Eventually, you stop caring as well and just cruise through. On the flip side, stress has gone down by quite a bit :)

pards2• 2 years ago

It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.

I have a few people on my team that do not care and seem to be incapable of caring. I'm trying to get them removed but it takes months.

In the meantime, I'm deeply worried that the solid performers will find other opportunities and leave because they can find new jobs in a few weeks.

The Dead Sea effect in action [0] (and HN responses [1]).

[0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23166786

vv_3• 2 years ago

I'm trying to get them removed but it takes months.

If you're not directly responsible for them I wouldn't bother. That they're still in the position they're in is indicative of a problem in management and it won't change, no matter how much you push for change. Just collect the paycheck and look for something better, or create something better.

rgovostes2• 2 years ago

One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."

This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.

What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.

It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.

Seattle35032• 2 years ago

One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.

There is a tradeoff between affordability and aesthetics. Lengthy review processes make housing more expensive. Seattle cares, but it cares more about affordability. With the cost of housing right now I think that's the right call. Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?

jodrellblank3• 2 years ago

Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?

Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.

akoboldfrying3• 2 years ago

Do you think New York and Florence have those beautiful buildings because their local design review committees had high standards? I don't.

I think aesthetics should nearly always come second to other concerns, except in very specialised cases. For a start, it's largely a matter of personal taste. "Streamlining the design review process" is something I wish was more of a priority where I live. Those rates (local property tax) dollars are much better spent on almost anything else in my opinion.

buzzardbait2• 2 years ago

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Also, there is often a tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability. The cost of living has gone up, and most people struggling to climb the property ladder would happily sacrifice the former for the latter. With respect, this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems.

rgovostes2• 2 years ago

The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.

this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems

I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.

presentation6• 2 years ago

I’ve gone the other way. I moved to Tokyo, most of the buildings are copy-pasted and objectively ugly. But taken together it forms an extremely functional city, so it’s a dream to be here.

tmvphil• 2 years ago

I am much more depressed by our crushing lack of new housing construction that keeps cities unaffordable for the middle class than I am about new buildings not being sufficiently pleasing to my eye.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

In NYC at least, the low point of architectural beauty was in the 1960-2000 era. In the past decade or two I think there has been a lot of really quality architecture going up. The current aesthetic issue plaguing the city is the onerous regulations that result in unneeded scaffolding being put up around buildings for months or even years.

surrTurr• 2 years ago

The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.

They absolutely do care! But they have competing interests.

fullstackchris• 2 years ago

But their _are_ some people who care. I've been busting my ass in the software world for over 10 years, documenting it as I go. Largely everything I give away for free, or at the very least offer a free tier. I cant control what other people do, but I can keep chugging along doing the best that _I_ can do.

d--b• 2 years ago

And yet:

People who care too much are angry.

People who care too much fight over stupid things.

People who care too much self-righteous.

People who care too much are intolerant.

People who care too much are not adaptable.

People who care too much are bullies.

People who care too much are trolls.

People who care too much write rants on their blogs.

People who care too much are miserable.

smusamashah• 2 years ago

What's sticking out to author like a sore thumb is a normal for majority. One can not imagine a better way of things until they have experienced a better one. Even if they are badly bitten by one, majority still can't come up with any better idea.

It's not that nobody cares, they just don't know any better.

xivzgrev• 2 years ago

I mean, it’s a symptom of scale right?

When you deal with a wide variety of people, constraints, etc you develop processes to deliver output. The DMV is that way for a reason, sidewalks get made a particular way for a reason

And that’s that, you don’t rethink it every time. It’s all transactional. human APIs interfacing with other human APIs

It’s a long cry from the old timey village where you had people: Bob was the only baker, and your neighbor. You also need his help to shovel your driveway. But he needs your help to make house repairs and get eggs from your chickens. If you don’t care then you have longer term personal consequences.

That’s not the case today - if you don’t care and deliver subpar experiences, people rant then move on to their next transaction and you to yours. You aren’t affected one bit in the long run. (Assuming people don’t have a choice - if they do then you do care just enough to get the sale)

parasti• 2 years ago

I wish I had billions of sheer force of will.

HL33tibCe7• 2 years ago

My instinctive, gut reaction is to hate this article, because I suspect its written by the kind of person who thinks they are better than everyone else.

But on deeper reflection I think they are actually right. Our civilisation became great because people took pride in their work - and not just at the crop level: the average poor tailor or cobbler would take 100x more pride in their work than the average government employee today. This is a problem — I suspect largely caused by the internet and technology warping people’s reward mechanisms - and it needs addressing.

bibelo• 2 years ago

I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.

I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.

Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.

We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.

I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,

and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.

ceth• 2 years ago

I agree also with most of the rant but the part about state/municipal jobs looks a bit unfair to me. If you have ever volonteer or worked for this kind of job, you could find that many people are so ungrateful: only few care to answer polls or attend public meetings, almost nobody cares about the why. But when something changes, lots of loud mouths shout rants like this one. People sometimes don't imagine how hard this is to have basic consensus on anything when there is lots of people in a group. Doing anything is also so complicated nowadays with the numerous parts involved in any decision, each one having their own priority set and timelines, the constraints of the law...

The care is certainly not the only reason of having broken things.

dustypotato2• 2 years ago

It's not just the West. I'm Indian and it's 2x worse there.

sss111• 2 years ago

Don't have a ton of experience in Paris, but I stayed at the Yotel at Charles De Gaulle once. The first room had dirty bedsheets, and the lamps were broken. I called the guy to give me another room, and he just goes, 'there's no problem' And I was left wondering—what is 'problem' reserved for? A fire?

moktonar• 2 years ago

Welcome to capitalism, where people care only about one thing: money.

gunian2• 2 years ago

reality as a whole doesn't care caring and creating perfect producrs a fundamentally flawed system is a contradiction

openrisk• 2 years ago

People obviously "care", as in: we are social animals. We survived and thrived through coexistence and caring.

But how do you scale "caring" to huge and complex societies where vast numbers of individuals pursue a vast number of (possibly conflicting) interests?

When it appears that nobody cares its more a manifestation that the amount of systematic care we have invented and organized is not matching the need.

One powerful but ultimately limiting tool we invented is money. You can think of it as tokenizing care. "I have cared for $x worth of cleaning you now you care for $x worth of feeding me in return".

Many of our caring problems link to the primitive and oversimplifying traits of financialization. Which - in addition - over time have become grossly abused by shrewd operators.

Parents don't need to get paid to care for their babies and no amount of money will produce equivalent quality of care.

Elon does not care about others hundreds of billions of times more than a "normal" person does.

But the organizational failure from monetizing everything is only one pathology. There are many others:

As social animals we also care a lot about power structures. Organized violence and destruction shows that caring about others is not universal behavior in time and space.

Above all, intrinsic traits are groomed in childhood in a positive feedback loop. An educational system that reinforces caring behavior does not fall from a coconut tree. It needs to be cared about.

advael• 2 years ago

A lot of this is attributable to the way our society is designed at a high level

With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness

Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose

A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale

WesolyKubeczek• 2 years ago

Don’t worry.

People can’t have nice things, so they get grumpy, unhappy, and stressed. This creates a market for therapists and dietary supplements to offset stress.

And why care? The second law of thermodynamics will inevitably march on. Let’s dissolve in entropy now!

motoxpro• 2 years ago

There must be a name for this bias. "Everyone else's stuff sucks but the reason my stuff sucks is because someone is keeping me from doing good work"

Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."

Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price

It's always really interesting to see.

xigency5• 2 years ago

Well, we live in a punitive culture that ascribes great social value to appearances.

To your example, if I tell my friends that I had a tough day at work because the old code was broken I will get more sympathy then if I say I wrote some shitty code last week and it made my day awful.

Another example, in a minor traffic accident, it might be nice to say "oh I'm sorry that was my fault" but I would be penalized by my insurance carrier for making such a statement.

We have successfully integrated the results of capitalism and game theory directly into our language. And I believe that has a knock on effect: people's actions follow from their thoughts which are influenced by the set of things they're allowed to or not allowed to vocalize.

We have aggressively evolved away from anything like humility or empathy being expressed in this culture because we punish that behavior.

monophonica• 2 years ago

Illusory superiority - "a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their abilities compared to others"

We have really developed an entire culture in the US around illusory superiority. It seems like the average person in 2025 thinks they are above average in basically everything.

I think this is a big reason why sports betting has taken off the way it has in the US. Every sports fan basically thinks they are way above average in their understanding of sports.

ragazzina2• 2 years ago

The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.

The author could stop eating at McDonald's and send a message to the company with his behaviour. But he does not care.

The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.

The author could ask the guy to turn off the music and make the hiking trail more pleasurable for everyone. But he does not care.

Et cetera. He cares for views on his blog so he writes on his blog.

montag2• 2 years ago

Y'all seem to willfully miss the point.

A lot of people are just not very conscientious.

0xEF2• 2 years ago

I get where you are coming from and also got the impression that this guy is just bitching about people not doing things the way he wants them to.

But, I catch myself doing this sometimes, though the motive for my gripe may be a bit different. The music on the trail one is a good example, since I like to hike. Generally speaking, most people are respectful out on the trails because we are all there for a similar reason; to connect with nature and relax our mind/spirit while we get our dose of motion medicine. It's an immersive experience, but that immersion and the comradery that comes with it is broken by people who disrupt the serenity of the experience by not considering how their actions effect other people around them.

If I apply that to the examples, that "nobody cares about the impact of their actions on the lives of others" it clicks. Yes, it's heavily cynical, but it is hard not to be, most days, which is why I hike (among other hobbies) to get out of my own head and shed that default cynicism for a bit.

Maybe the author feels that way, but didn't articulate it well enough? Or maybe it's just a hard thing to convey since it always appears as just bitching about the way things are. I guess I empathize, but would have approached it differently.

keyle• 2 years ago

The last time I asked someone to turn down the music they dropped their bag to their feet and headed straight to punch me out.

Maybe the wisdom is to just not care, and know you'll die soon, who cares.

Every generation is a shitshow after the next.

BeFlatXIII2• 2 years ago

This is why concealed carry is so important.

egorfine2• 2 years ago

The author could ask the guy to turn off the music

People who tend to blast their music on a loudspeaker are not exactly the kind of people who are going to accept the message.

ragazzina2• 2 years ago

Doesn't this work for every point then?

Programmers should speak up against managers who want to upsell fries, but they don't care.

Managers who tend to upsell fries are not exactly the kind of people who are going to accept the message.

ggreer• 2 years ago

One time I asked a guy on the bus to turn his music down. (He was wearing headphones but also blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker.) He got extremely upset and threatened to beat me up. Everyone else on the bus got away from us. Nobody seemed willing to help me if he attacked. Fortunately the bus came to a stop about 20 seconds later and he got off.

I have since moved out of the SF bay area and I drive everywhere. My life is much more pleasant.

prmph3• 2 years ago

It's even worse. Many people find it odd if you do care

t0bia_s• 2 years ago

It's also a question of competence. Many do things that don't understand. And don't even try to understand it.

someothherguyy• 2 years ago

Don't take anything here too seriously

550 comments later...

agal• 2 years ago

I moved to Norway 5 years ago and I can say pretty confidently that everyone cares here. I haven’t been to Japan so can’t compare to that, but I haven’t experienced any of the not-caring examples you described at all.

helboi47• 2 years ago

I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.

presentation6• 2 years ago

If everybody followed their hearts deepest passions, we’d all be starving.

helboi47• 2 years ago

I do see your point. But that is why what the article describes is an inevitable problem.

Edit: I also do think that if I didn't do my job, nobody would be starving, and I am greatly overcompensated for it. Doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers... all of those jobs that are wildly more important for society to function are way less paid than my job fixing bugs in a corporate website, which is a fundamental flaw in the system if the aim is to incentivise people to keep society running well. For example, I know someone who is a doctor who is trying to leave to work at a hedge fund because the work is so under-compensated. This is a massive problem.

noisy_boy• 2 years ago

Unless you can find a person who's deepest passion is feeding others.

djeastm• 2 years ago

I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.

bccdee13• 2 years ago

Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them?

Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things nobody needs, in pursuit of returns for investors. Does the Silicon Valley VC unicorn portfolio model actually help anyone other than VCs and founders?

silexia3• 2 years ago

Doctors usually only care about money, and use regulatory capture to get it. That's why the US spends 27% of GDP on doctors and hospitals even though we only see a doctor mostly an hour per year.

stanleykm2• 2 years ago

27% of gdp on doctors and hospitals, are you sure youre not missing a middleman or two in there?

helboi47• 2 years ago

Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?

codeulike• 2 years ago

Seems to me that bike-lane-onto-pavement transition is designed to be deliberately awkward so that the cyclists have to SLOW DOWN before they join the pavement and share the space with pedestrians

brap• 2 years ago

DMV
software […] found some regulatory capture
a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture
municipal governments
department of transportation
Street lights
airport

What do they all have in common?

I think he dismissed “incentive systems” way too early.

I would also argue that people not following the law (e.g. not picking up their dog’s poop) or proper laws simply not existing (e.g. playing shitty EDM on a trail) have the same root cause.

Governments don’t care.

It’s still amazing to me how some smart people still want the government to manage an even larger part of their lives when we should clearly be pushing in the other direction.

Of course they only want this when The Party I Agree With(TM) is in power, not so much when it’s The Party I Don’t Agree With(TM).

sunaookami• 2 years ago

Thank you to the author for putting the feeling I have had since years into words. It's not just the US that is this bad, it's also in Europe. Just looking at the COVID pandemic tells you all you need to know about countries where people care and where they don't care. Maybe the west emphasized individualism too much? See also: Communitarianism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism

bjornsing7• 2 years ago

Yeah the pandemic was very enlightening, in a not so positive way.

mda• 2 years ago

"We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care"

Yikes.

Pete-Codes• 2 years ago

I don't think it's wise to assume everyone is going to be perfect at their job. Yes, that bike line sucks. But haven't you ever made a mistake at your job? Expecting everything to work perfectly in life is a recipe for misery.

dspillett6• 2 years ago

People are often not compensated enough to warrant the mental energy of caring more, or the effort or making those around them care.

Sometimes people did care, but they left because they didn't want to deal with the rest who didn't any more, and found better conditions elsewhere.

giantg2• 2 years ago

Rhe bike ramp thing is likely intentional. You don't want a bike doing 20mph on a sidewalk with pedestrians and the ramp forces bikes to slow down.

n00b_heal• 2 years ago

Why don't people care? Maybe because they can't anymore? Look at the skyrocking number of silent quitters, of people doing the bare minimum. Look at the perpetual doomposting from the media since around 2015. The world is in a perpetual decay, it's not a single bit the same as it was pre 9/11. The world most of us grew up in is lost.

So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort? Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse. They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.

alpb2• 2 years ago

It's most likely capitalism doing this to us. A lot of people are disenfranchised in society, most are alienated from their labor, don't feel happy about the work they do –if they have any control over it at all. Most of us don't have "third places" we go every day, we don't spend our days hanging out with our loved ones. Most of us are mainly isolated, maybe not intentionally, but work-rest-sleep-work cycle doesn't leave a lot of room for recreation or socializing.

Money doesn't fix any of our problems either, even if you're one of the few lucky to have enough of it, you can't possibly be happy living society perpetually decaying. We'll always be as happy as our neighbor.

jll29• 2 years ago

The fact that there are reasons for things that they are how they are is one thing, and it's true he does not elaborate - but I take it his point is one of general attitude: U.S. Americans are different from Japanese. I would not say either group cares less; instead, they probably care about different things (different cultures have different value systems; the weight put on individual versus society plays a large role here, too).

It's easy to spot problems everywhere, especially if you are an analytical mind. Somebody else might care, but they may not perceive things as problematic to begin with.

Different people have different levels of sensitivity and granularity of perception: I buy "just cheese" when my wife buys "Gruyère français medium-aged" and don't you dare getting her the wrong brand.

Then, some people actually like the things how they are, so there are differences in opinion and personal taste, heck, some may even financially benefit from the status quo financially (distinguish those who don't care to help make change happen but would enjoy it if others did the work from the ones who genuinely don't care about either outcome, and both of them sit next to a third group, who do not what that change, full stop.

The post was more than just a rant: he notices where he lives, his community and him do not have "value fit" (to borrow and modify the concept of "product-market fit", since this is HN), and he is comtemplating a move. But when he says he won't move to Japan (where in any case he would always be an outsider) he is looking for middle ground - so I read his blog post as a "search query aimed at human blog readers", a call for information to find out where may be more likeminded folks, which is a good idea, given his situation.

That people do not see the need for change, one former co-worker of mine calls the "fish bowl effect": a new person joins a company, and they see everything that is broken immediately. But all the other people who have been there for 20 years don't get it. Like a new fish that joins the aquarium, who blurts "hey guys, the water in here is pretty dirty!" and all the other fill shake their head about such a weird statement, "What is he talking about?" They have been around for so long, they can't even perceive the water as "not clear" anymore, perhaps a survival adaptation to avoid permanent state of frustration.

So I wish all readers of HN that they will never become that kind of fish who stops seeing things! (Belated happy New Year, too.)

epolanski• 2 years ago

People barely care about their family nowadays, a huge amount of people don't even care about themselves, how can we care about anything really?

charlieyu1• 2 years ago

It is really more about culture.

Havoc• 2 years ago

It’s not a case of not caring, but rather caring about something else more. If you live in a country that emphasizes profit and watching out for self as priority then yeah you’re not going to get a whole lot of wholesome selfless community minded behavior.

It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

trying to fix half this stuff would burn you out, the other half would leave you jobless

I tried to fix the neighborhood playground and it took 2 years to get funding for a renovation that might happen 2 years from now... I gave up pushing for it because I don't have the time anymore... who knows if it will happen

most americans don't have a strong enough support system that gives them the space to care

rayiner• 2 years ago

This is the official motto of the Microsoft Teams and (New) Outlook groups.

Dansvidania• 2 years ago

You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.

How does the second part of this paragraph disprove "something something incentive systems" ?

I am sincerely curious, as I can't make the connection myself, and of course "something something incentive systems" would be exactly my argument.

runeks• 2 years ago

Seems like the title of this post ought to be "nobody cares about the things I care about"

bjornsing7• 2 years ago

The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.

This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss.

Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes what I’d even call malevolence) reaches a certain level feedback mechanisms are overwhelmed: those who do care can no-longer impose negative consequences on those who don’t. Their boss doesn’t care either, their careers progress just the same, they make the same money, their jobs are just as secure. It snowballs from there.

At least here in Sweden it’s taboo to say it, but I think we just need to get back to individual negative consequences for not caring.

ggddv• 2 years ago

In the US your insurance is literally worthless. Doctors make more money referring doctors to bullshit specialists then doing their job. I think you’re right about Swedish cheese. It does taste better.

bjornsing7• 2 years ago

Not saying the US system is better. But the basic problem that people just don’t care is fairly ubiquitous in the West I think.

Maybe catholic countries are doing a bit better. I sometimes get that feeling.

Sloowms3• 2 years ago

This is a great way to get all doctors who care out of the profession.

Healthcare is always going to have the most severe consequences when mistakes are made. Diagnosis are also hard and there are many risks with treatments. If you are going to demand punishment for mistakes consider punishing yourself next time you make a normal mistake at your job.

bjornsing7• 2 years ago

The thing is, I care a lot when I make a mistake. To me some kind of “punishment” wouldn’t make a dent. I already imagine I do get “punished” for my mistakes, in the form of reputation and missed opportunities down the line (even if that may not be strictly true).

But if you don’t care and you expect zero consequences, then yes: “punishment” would make a dent.

And to be clear, the kind of “punishment” I think is needed is e.g. that a regulatory authority keeps a score of severe misdiagnosis that is publicly accessible. Every doctor would probably have a few in their career, nothing to worry about. But if you routinely misdiagnose patients then it’s going to add up over the years.

patrickwalton• 2 years ago

When people ask me what cope is, I'll be pointing them to the comments here.

All of the things he mentions really could be better. It's lazy and careless to say that there's a constraint so something had to be bad. Every engineering problem has constraints.

pammf• 2 years ago

Title could be “Nobody cares about the same things that I do”. Or simply “Nobody agrees with me”, which also would be exaggerated, but slightly less myopic.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

I've met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say "stability" or "job security" as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.

This is dumb. Of course people enjoy job stability. It's irrational to draw a line from "I value being able to feed my family" to "I do not care about actually doing my job".

And beyond that, does the author actually know why it takes 18 months to get a permit? Does it actually take that long? Or is he doing a stand-up bit, and that's just a line that's designed to elicit the 2 seconds of laughter from the audience as a punchline?

But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.

So the author cares, but is sufficiently burned out that he's done caring. I wonder what he'd answer when he finds his magical Japan-like community - presumably one with stability - and is asked what his favorite part of living there is.

shreyansdoshi• 2 years ago

| Does such a community really exist? Where everyone cares? Or at least a | supermajority? Or does it need to be built?

Yeeahhhh... I'd stay as far as possible from Miami.

jordanpg• 2 years ago

This entire article is code for "regulations are bad."

NoGravitas8• 2 years ago

I mean, you talk about the problem, and everybody loves you and rushes to agree with your observations.

You talk about the [underlying reason for the problem][1] and everybody hates you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

byyoung3• 2 years ago

I actually believe the DMV workers care that it does actually suck (eg. they want it to suck haha)

flpm• 2 years ago

It's a sad realization. When our culture only values profit as a measure of success there is a strong incentive to cut down costs (now) in exchange for quality (that will only be perceived in the future). It slowly moves down the threshold, bit by bit, until you suddenly realize how much we all lost for a few very rich people to become a little bit richer.

_madmax_• 2 years ago

Guy lost me when he mentioned Musk is caring. Of course he cares...about his fortune and his power hunger.

i_love_retros2• 2 years ago

On caring as a software developer:

I like to think I care about putting out good quality work, but, the nature of agile and especially standups and reviews means I am under pressure each day to be able to say I have completed a jira story.

If that story's acceptance criteria doesn't say "take the time to make this perfect" which of course it doesn't, and mr big balls bullied us into it being pointed a 2, then am I going to spend an extra day or two really making it perfect with perfect test coverage etc? When I am surrounded by (competing with) contractors who don't have to do anything other than churn out sprint work and rack up points?

On Japan caring so much:

They live in a society where pretty much everyone's ancestors are from the same geographical location, they all look similar, they are basically a nationalistic society, they all feel "Japanese" and they all pull together in the same direction more or less.

America on the other hand...

i_love_retros2• 2 years ago

America glorifies hustlers and hustle culture. Society is about bragging and showing off how successful you and your family are compared to everyone else. What do you expect then? Of course no one cares enough to do more than they have to to get ahead of the other guy!

bloomingeek• 2 years ago

In my experience, most people don't care because they are lazy. Initiative on the job requires effort, IF they're allowed to have initiative. If someone is put into a thinking job, but are more suited to have an assembly line job, failure will ensue.

xkcd1963• 2 years ago

"You're at the airport. There's a group in front of you on the escalator taking up the full width, preventing anyone from walking by" take the stairs

bitcoin_anon• 2 years ago

My hot take on this is that it is due to a lack of energy. I liked the phrase “a will to have nice things.”

We all want the nice things. However, they require conscientiousness. People who are run down and lack energy struggle with conscientiousness.

So why are we all rundown and lacking the energy required to have nice things? There are many reasons, some controversial.

One that is not so controversial is the industrialization of food. As the quality of food that our mothers consume has degraded, so have their offspring. I believe in TCM this concept is called maternal jing, or the essential life essence that you receive from your mother. Healthy moms breed a healthy populace. This is a problem generations in the making that keeps getting worse.

One that is more controversial is the impact of banking. Money is the life blood of society, and we’ve given bankers the right to siphon off our blood as they see fit. Generations of wealth transfer from the working class to bankers has left the populace anemic.

Japan has it better because they have maintained a more traditional way of life.

iandanforth• 2 years ago

The sad thing about this article is that they can't be happy making the world a better place, instead they focus on what other people aren't doing.

"I am proud of my work" >> "You should work harder!"

semilattice• 2 years ago

I agree with that.

US is becoming a culture of 'Good enough'

This is very prevalent in Eastern Europe, near east, probably China and India, not sure. Certainly not Japan.

Culture - is what people do when nobody is watching (or they think that nobody is watching) (I am stealing this definition from somewhere else).

So changing from good-enough culture to 'We are closer to perfectionists, culturally' -- is a big change that would take generations.

To be honest -- I am not if there is a 'one thing' that would drive this, may be it is an instinct, something built-in, more prevalently, in specific ethnics groups but not in others? if it is an instinct, then it should be preservable during immigration. Are the Japanese when living for more than on generation in a 'good enough culture' preserving the perfectionist traits ?

noname120• 2 years ago

That's quite literally the reason #1 why I moved to Switzerland. It's the only place in Europe that I know where people care about doing things well.

aksophist2• 2 years ago

This post is angry detritus. I’m sorry someone upset you recently Grant, but seriously?

Billions of people care. And if you bother looking for them, you’ll find them. Most of the problems he describes result from complex systems being challenging and individuals having limited ability both to comprehend and influence them.

And no I don’t mean “this software module is complex” complex. I mean, “this social problem has hundreds of interacting incentives, changing any of them in isolation makes things worse, and it will take years and millions of dollars to change things, all while political winds of change are trying to blow down the consensus to tackle the problem.”

hermannj314• 2 years ago

The world is what it is today because 1% of people do care. Or more probably, 5% of people care for about 20% of their life.

Whatever you do today, through action or inaction, it will ripple through eternity with both intended and unintended consequence.

ixtli• 2 years ago

this is such a US coded essay and to anyone else i think it would be like "you really need to get outa there"

mrbonner• 2 years ago

What make OP think they do not care? They apparently care about themselves more than anybody else to not care about anyone else. What is it called: selfishness!

I ran out of (good) things to watch on Netflix so I watched a couple of Japanese drama shows (TBS product I think). At first it seems boring as heck: no sex, no violence. But after a while, I think I got hooked. The usual theme is always something around respect, self-sacrifice, leaving a place better than when you found it kind of feeling. It is just a departure from the usual US based drama.

Is it just the general direction we in the US live everyday for the last decade?

dustypotato2• 2 years ago

Was just thinking about this the other day. I feel vindicated that I'm not the only one who thinks this.

gorjusborg• 2 years ago

My gut says that it isn't a lack of caring, or anything nefarious.

I think Hanlon's Razor is handy here:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

In this case I'd modify it slightly, as I don't think it is stupidity at play, but ignorance. It takes activation energy to address ignorance, and its too easy to kill activation energy inadvertently. It could just be that the person who could fix it is not aware of the issue, and everyone else just looks at it and thinks, wow, someone should do something.

golly_ned• 2 years ago

I had the great displeasure of working with a colleague who thought he was the only one who cared. He told me flat-out that "its OK to care!" during a disagreement.

I did care. I just cared about different things than he did. He cared about fixing little hinks in code that drove him made. I cared about fixing things users cared about and would notice.

efitz• 2 years ago

Many things that suck, like DMV, do so not because nobody cares, but because incentives are aligned in a way to make things work the way they do.

megamix• 2 years ago

Now this is another Luigi right here

totaldude87• 2 years ago

Mindfulness of others is a very rare trait.

but once you start accounting for what the other person is going through, none of these may look as bad as they are.

A person could've lost his dog and want to free his mind by working out and forgets to put the weights back! one time its fine! few times its OK! happens every day, someone has to intervene!

bflesch• 2 years ago

This is an amazing post, it resonates a lot. Good on you for calling it out.

agent281• 2 years ago

Let's keep cycling between articles about how nobody cares and how everyone is burned out until we can see the pattern.

jsrozner2• 2 years ago

Rich (relatively?) software bro wants other people to care more. Does not reflect on the economics. Everything is economic. Tech has exacerbated the hyperfinancialization, enshittification, and general reduction to meaninglessness of every action.

Caring requires time and energy. Most tech companies aim to consume every freaking instant of your life (or else they serve the other tech companies that do that). For many people there is little time or energy left to care (or there is a sense that there is little time or energy left). Gotta hustle more, gotta hurry up so I can look at my phone.

Caring is not financially rewarded. Caring is generally penalized because no one else cares, so you're just wasting your time. How many ppl in this world can say this: "There are legal jobs I would not take, no matter how much they pay, because they make the world shittier." Caring doesn't make you money, and money is what the world wants. Until that changes, the problem persists.

Fix the values, fix the world

BizarroLand• 2 years ago

Give me a single actionable item that will enable me to fix the values of anyone else and I will move the world.

"Fix the values, fix the world" should go on the wiki page of examples of things that are easier to say than to do

jsrozner2• 2 years ago

imo, values are the only thing that matters in the long run

But having more people be able to say "there are jobs I would not take, no matter how much they pay, because they do harm to the world" would make a substantial impact. This is the thing which can be done. Every day opting out of some deleterious but widely held social value. It is not easy.

Among the things people should generally reconsider as providing negative value to society...investment banking, consulting, private equity, corporate law, facebook, VC, most of google, many AI companies

shrug

tammer• 2 years ago

This person is missing that modern global society is rigidly organized around principles of competition. It's not the case that people don't care -- instead we are systemically pressured into putting all of our care into getting one over everyone else and taking care of our own. A society organized around different principles would give us the space to care about our collective wellbeing. Hopefully one day we'll get there.

jrflowers2• 2 years ago

I love looking at the About Me section of a site when I read a blog post that can be summed up as “The world would be objectively better if I were simply put in charge of it” because it’s always like “When I’m not blogging I’m working on chat with a blockchain for scooter thieves” or whatever and in this case our new overlord is “a founding engineer at Row Zero where we've built the world's fastest spreadsheet”

truth_seeker• 2 years ago

extremely relatable ! thanks for sharing.

IndexPointer• 2 years ago

A McDonald's kiosk is a masterpiece of engineering perfectly designed to make as much money as possible. It's by no means lazily made or without afterthoughts or care. Every detail in the interface has was decided after tons of experiments and hours of meetings.

They do care a lot, but about the wrong thing.

ike2792• 2 years ago

In my experience it isn't individuals not caring as much as there is no one individual accountable for making these kind of decisions. Whomever designed the bike ramp probably followed a set of curb-and-ramp regulations set by some committee, thought they were stupid, but then remembered that the last time he pushed back it was a huge hassle and he got reprimanded by his boss. The committee people probably cared about the rules in general but didn't foresee all use cases and didn't make their rules flexible enough.

fasterdoge• 2 years ago

I think there's an undertone of why should I care? or the idea of motivation. In Japan, theres definitely a social pressure to care, only because you'll become ostracized if you don't. In the west there are phrases from pop culture such as,"If it ain't broke don't fix it, Welp not my problem, ..." So the question is where does this stem from. Why do we not care?

elendee• 2 years ago

To make people / us care, we need to be subject to frequent community gossip. But the suburbs were built in part to escape that, hence why we create these omni-directional online communities, distressed at everything but responsible for nothing.

ksec3• 2 years ago

Hacker: Last night a confidential source disclosed to me that British arms are being sold to Italian red terrorist groups.

[…]

Hacker: You don't see to be very worried by this information.

Sir Humphrey: Well, these things happen all the time. It’s not our problem.

Hacker: As does robbery with violence, doesn't that worry you?

Sir Humphrey: No, Minister. Home Office problem.

Hacker: Humphrey, we are letting terrorists get hold of murderous weapons.

Sir Humphrey: We are not.

Hacker: Who is?

Sir Humphrey: Who knows? Department of Trade, Minister of Defense, Foreign Office,...

Hacker: We, Humphrey, the British Government. Innocent lives are being set at risk by British arms in the hands of terrorists.

Sir Humphrey: Only Italian lives, not British lives.

Hacker: British tourists abroad.

Sir Humphrey: Tourists? Foreign Office problem!

[......]

Hacker: I don't believe this! We're talking about good and evil.

Sir Humphrey: Ah, Church of England problem.

[....]

Sir Humphrey: Government isn't about morality.

Hacker: Really? What is it about then?

Sir Humphrey: Stability. Keeping thing going. Preventing anarchy. Stopping society falling to bits. Still being here tomorrow.

Hacker: What for?

Sir Humphrey: I beg your pardon?

Hacker: What is the ultimate purpose of government if it isn't for doing good?

Sir Humphrey: Government isn't about good and evil. It's about order or chaos.

fishstock252• 2 years ago

I've lived in sweden for a while, I have family ties. People there care, compared to US. I've seen people pick up some random trash on an otherwise spotless sidewalk. I've seen people point out to somebody misbehaving that they are out of line. I've seen city council adjusting sth on a sidewalk within a week after some people living there pointed out a minor issue. People care.

Not everywhere, bot everybody. But enough for me to notice.

ksec3• 2 years ago

Caring, being able to tell differences, design or envision something for the better, as in many of the example you pointed out is more of a curse than a gift.

Being the 1%, and sometimes 1% of the 1% is this world, is either what most normal people call genius or simply insane.

The first thing that springs to mind of "better" world is Japan is I shared this immensely with the author. If only I could learn Japanese I would have lived there.

cwrichardkim• 2 years ago

I think we shift to what we have the capacity to care for. Startups care immensely about each bug and customer because there's a small customer base. Once your inflow comes from millions of users, your capacity to care for the individual is diminished and you begin caring about something at a higher level of scale

Same goes for the urban planning example. Regulation and standards attempt to address problems at scale over individual implementations.

Are there definitely people who don't care at that level either? Certainly, but there are definitely people who do care, who just don't have the capacity to care at the minute level

variadix• 1 year ago

Most of this sounds like the symptoms of an individualist society. If people only take into consideration their own incentives, why would they care about the experience of anyone else? In my opinion this world view is a result of a society that is only held together by the economic interests of individuals.

Willish42• 1 year ago

For all of the naysayers in the comments, I think the author has hit on a palpable societal trend, at least in the US.

My leading theory is that the pandemic supercharged a lot of folks' individualist tendencies and/or nihilism, and we're seeing the decline in real time. To claim that the author is simply missing the incentives, bureaucracy, or other structural mechanisms behind enshittification, is missing the point, and they even allude to these towards the bottom of TFA!

Poking holes in the examples is similarly missing the point, but I know we love correcting people on the internet. Cunningham's law and all that...

spydr• 1 year ago

As much as I would love to be a Leslie Knope, by the time I’ve allotted all my caring to the things in life that keep me employed , fed , housed, and ad hoc family requests, I don’t have the capacity to care about much more. I really wish I did ,but because I have a limited “care bucket” , most of it is going to a bunch of insignificant BS. What the author noticed I notice a lot too , but I think that is because I am someone who actually tries to engineer better solutions to problems. I’ve noticed a “good enough” attitude in almost all aspects of my life and it’s frustrating.

bobbylox2• 1 year ago

Weird timing to be praising Elon Musk's propensity to care deeply (for future internet readers, he recently gave a nazi salute during a Donald Trump rally).

Nobody cares

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