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Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

I'll venture a good chunk of that is due to an out-of-sync-with-reality issue.

I think we'd all feel more productive and motivated working from home if the world wasn't collapsing all around us. Working on some new feature shaving a few milliseconds off an API call for investment bankers seems a bit out of touch, whether at home or in the office.

Blaming loss of productivity solely on working from home may be the wrong conclusion.

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At the same time JP Morgan wouldn't have done the WFH thing if the world hadn't been falling apart. But yes, when the sky is falling, most people get very anxious, and anxiety isn't good for productivity. For JP Morgan, getting people back into the office might simply cure the anxiety issue, if that's what the issue is, and paper it over, making it seem as though WFH was the problem. But for JP Morgan it probably won't really matter, because if productivity has been down, and going back to the office fixes it, that may be all they care about.

This has been a massive issue for me. I've had the same problem off-and-on over the past few years, whether in offices or at home. The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future. I at least sometimes get pulled back into feeling good about what I work on because it's a consumer app that does have a large userbase that depends on it for their happiness, and I do feel good about contributing to that, but if I was working in finance? No way.

Anyone who has been able to stay productive, let alone get more productive, in this reality is either in denial or far more optimistic than I'll ever be.

> in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future.

This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events.

> but if I was working in finance? No way.

People who say this tend to underestimate the importance of finance. For example, enabling easy mobile banking for tech illiterate people is going to have a much larger impact on society than 99% of the apps already out there. Another: imagine if you can fix budgeting for the 90% of people who don’t bother.

Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world.

> This is just your world-view being shaped by your “news” sources. Maybe get off of social media for a while or only follow people who do not talk about politics/current events.

This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse.

> Don’t shit on fields you don’t understand. It makes you look ignorant and blocks you from even realizing the opportunities in the world.

I took the comment as they are not interested in finance. Maybe they've worked in the field in the past and don't like it. They didn't "shit on" anything.

> This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on.

Unless you’re in a position to actually create change, I don’t see how following every single update to an unfolding news story helps you. I am not talking about being completely ignorant. There is a saying, important news will always find you.

You could try avoiding news, and letting the news find you. Just following that simple methodology will greatly change the perspective you have on the world, and your short term life.

Avoiding the news is a good recipe for becoming ignorant, and only knowing the propaganda. In a world of public relations experts, the only way to avoid this is to look for original sources that you can trust (e.g. by interacting with people who were part of the event), and/or listen to as many different news sources as you can find. You should usually avoid the bigger ones, especially the ones intended for mass consumption.

If you just find out about the world from what the NYT or Fox or WSJ write about, you only know propaganda.

Following the news is a good way to drink a bunch of propaganda and think you’re not ignorant when you still are. See Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

> This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more

The news have been biased towards negative stories for many decades, way before the internet so I wouldn't say watching/reading the news gives a good, balanced picture of reality. Ideally you need to balance a minimum ingestion of neutral, informative news with staying in touch with the reality around you, by meeting and getting in touch with local people and events. You might be surprised how big the difference is between how the news presents the world and the reality.

> “ This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse.”

The news cycle tends to focus on all the things going wrong in the world. Rarely will you hear positive or uplifting stories. After all, if it bleeds it leads.

I fail to see how opting out of the constant spew of toxic negativity by the media will result in you being ignorant. Who knows, it might even give you time to pick up a history book and give you some perspective on the current moment

> This is a good way to escape reality

The news isn’t reality, it’s the world through the lens of what the journalist who reports it wants you to see. They don’t report objective reality. They will willingly admit that their job isn’t reporting objective reality if you ask them.

> This is a good way to escape reality, but not much more. I've done this plenty of times, but the world doesn't stop moving because you're ignoring what's going on. You become ignorant, and that is far worse.

You’re ignorant either way. The only difference is whether or not you seem informed to your stuck up friends who read a particular news source every day. Do you realize how big the world is and how irrelevant the vast majority of “major national news” is to actual life?

I agree that the problems you mentioned are truly important. The issue is that most banks, and especially the giants like JPMorgan, are interested in making them worse.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-fi...

[2] https://jpmadoff.com/victims/

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-9-bi...

I had a friend die from CV-19. A parent got infected.

My home has been basically the center of racial justice protests: we’ve had fires set outside our door, tear gas wafting in to our windows, etc.

Even when there’s not a protest, the entire neighborhood is covered in protest-inspired murals that serve as a daily reminder that my life (as a Black person) doesn’t matter right now.

And these past few weeks we’ve been choking on wildfire smoke.

I don’t think this is from watching too much news or doom scrolling. There have been an unprecedented confluence of events that make most tech work seem meaningless right now.

Even with all those things happening, I'm not sure I'd say we're "in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future."

Finance is a great enabler and very important -critical even-, but there's no need to be rude about it.

> The work I do feels rather pointless in a world collapsing around me with no short or long term future.

Stop reading twitter, stop watching the news. Honestly the world isn’t representative to what they’re reporting and they profit from selling you fear.

What are you talking about? The world have made incredible progress in just the last 20 years, lifting billions of people out of poverty, and the exact financial system you're talking about was, and is, one of the main reasons behind this push. These milliseconds translate into liquidity provided into market, which in turn translates into more efficient and less risky allocation of capital, which in turn translates into efficient production and use of labour, and so on and so on.

All of that sounds incredibly boring, but that's the case with any real human progress. It's the same with a famous, and incredibly stupid quote "the brightest minds of our generation are working on making people click ads". Every time I hear it, I remember all the small businesses and ventures that only exist because of Instagram, Facebook and Google Ads. Housewives baking cakes, a leatherworker making custom backpacks, a blacksmith restoring antique knives - those are just personal friends of mine who wouldn't be able to build their businesses if not for what those brightest minds of our generation are doing.

Agree. If it were true "work from anywhere" and the preparation was all in place and the employee was going in with the right tools and set up and the mindset of being a true remote worker, we might not see the same drop in productivity.

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