Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

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Open Source software survives without needing masters with whips above or the ruin of poverty below. When there's work to be done the people who do the work know there's work to be done and they will do the work.

> Either it is an excuse we make up so that we can leave something that we obviously hate doing

Don't force people to do things they hate doing in order to survive when the amount of work it requires to feed and keep everyone comfortable is a far smaller quantity.

> or it's because our employers are unwilling or unable to pay for it to be done.

Don't have a system where work is only done at the whim and for the benefit of property owners.

If the work is never done, then people will keep working. They will do that because they want to work. It does not follow that we need bosses, hierarchy, management, government, property, militaries, and police forces to make us do the work just because there is work to be done.

So where did I lie?

P.S. I'm sorry for being aggressive. I am emphatic about this; I am not doing the work I want to do because I need to do the work someone with money wants me to do. Because people will toss me into the garbage disposal if I am not working for money. This article indicates that I am not alone; I am part of a majority.

When your outlook sustains, everything is good. But there is also a failure mode where you lose that motivation ("burn out") or never have it to begin with, and fall into a cycle of doing only what's required.

If that's only ever a small fraction of people at a time, then giving them food/shelter and letting them "freeload" is fine. But the worry is that by taking away any incentive to produce, that group will grow without bound and end up consuming non-neglible output from the people who do.

I'm not arguing to diminish your main point, but to strengthen it by adding nuance. The way I see it, our current system basically pushes people into burn out mode a priori, and only a lucky few escape to make money while still fully engaged. Which is why eg you visit the hospital and everyone there acts like what they're doing/saying actually makes sense, but when looking at the big picture it's obviously horribly broken. The Programmer's Stone (which I need to reread sometime) explores this phenomenon in depth while proposing a theory to explain it.

My take is that basic economics predicts that as people become more productive they should become wealthier. So their marginal utility of keeping their time goes up, their rate should go up (assuming they're worth it), and they should also start demanding to work less. But this is clearly not happening on a societal scale. IMHO because debt is the gradient version of slavery, and advances in surveillance technology have made debt such a prominent part of our society.

I accept your apology about being aggressive, especially since I may have been a bit too empathic myself (about work). The "lie" is about you saying that when work is done, people move on. I think the truth is that people say work is done so that they can move on, but work can never be done.

We do seem to agree on that point though, so I should probably retract your comment "lies". You're fine with people leaving 'projects' incomplete if they hate it...and I'm fine with that too. But work is indeed left incomplete, and that's why I made my comment.

If it makes you feel better, replace "employers" with "the open source community", and redefine pay to mean code/maintenance instead of money. I think my point still holds.

> I accept your apology about being aggressive, especially since I may have been a bit too empathic myself (about work). The "lie" is about you saying that when work is done, people move on. I think the truth is that people say work is done so that they can move on, but work can never be done.

Sure, but the perfect has always been the enemy of the good. If we actually applied this advice, we'd never ship anything. At some point, things are good enough to send them off and go home.

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