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Comment by zulgan | Hacker News Reader

I had a co-worker who was super chill during outages; especially at night, we were 10-15 people on the call fixing issues related to his work almost monthly.

those outages costed millions of euros, and he never picked up his phone at night, once I asked him why he never picks up, he told me:

"I used to be a general surgeon, when someone calls me people die. Relax, nobody is dying during our outages."

now I think I am taking myself(and my work) too seriously.

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It's likely the only way to stay sane in a corporate environment. The problem is, you don't need much people practicing that, before it drags everyone down to the same niveau. You can choose to try to continue your quest into doing work seriously (this will likely drive you insane over the years), or to join in that kind of negligence (goodbye spine), or to quit. In the end it got us where we are now, a world filled with fake companies selling their fake little products as they were qualitative, and making a game of disrespecting their own customers. Pure facade, been there...

I've done it before, but I'll recommend to you Scott Adams' book, The Dilbert Principle for some light reading about forces like that at work.

Given that the statistical economic value of human life is around $7m, maybe he should start picking up his phone.

"I used to be a general surgeon, when someone calls me people die."

Hence he's not a surgeon anymore.

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