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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

We talk about externalities. A chemical company pours toxins into a river, an automaker knows its products kill X people per year. These are tangible, understandable.

But we don't yet think of the effects on the workforce as social externalities. Industrial safety has made the workplace a much safer space physically, but not mentally.

The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic.

What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it.

But I have a few observations.

I meet lots of people who "got out of tech". People with PhDs who became landscape gardeners or opened a juice bar. I meet smart and engaging people in their 30s who dropped out of games or media careers.

The cost (to society) of educating a graduate is, what, $100,000? Average post-grad education is another 4 years. Then it costs approximately 20% of someones salary to hire and onboard them.

For what? So they can drop out after 5 years and go open a wind-surfing school?

In a way, these people, the workforce/pool are a national asset, and it could regarded a tragedy of the commons that harming them is inflicting an externality on the whole industry. By culturing inhospitable, mentally harmful environments the tech industry is pissing in its own drinking water.

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It’s interesting that you don’t consider landscaping, juice bars, and wind surfing schools as beneficial to the economy. Could it be that these highly educated and intelligent people you are talking about see things differently? Perhaps after 5 years in tech they realize that none of the companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative. That realization is sure to produce instant burnout as the work you’re putting in is now meaningless or even harmful. At that point it becomes a rational choice to start a small business that provides some immediate benefit to people no matter how trivial.

I don’t think there’s a damned thing you could change in the work environment to fix that, it’s the work itself that is the problem.

> companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative

Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing.

A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can do a lot worse for society than running a "soft" business ethically and happily.

I'm doing that now.

For free.

I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it takes to create shipping software.

These projects would be worth a lot of dosh, if I were to hang a sticker on them.

But I did them for no money.

Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

It's an issue, but one I have no ideas how to solve. I think that the right to spend money on what we want is an important one, and I won't gainsay anyone else's right to do that. If driving around in a Model X and having a model (of any gender identification) on your arm is your priority, and you have worked hard for that, then Godspeed and good luck. I have different priorities, and the story of how I got them is long and winding. Not so many folks have backgrounds like mine, and not many that do, have developed priorities like mine.

I am grateful to be in the position I'm in.

> Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

What about doctors? Nurses? Tenured professors? Blanket statements are fun but probably miss the more nuanced issue.

Systemically public education is broken leading to us undervaluing teachers in many public school districts. The same for social workers -- the US doesn't have robust social safety nets so social workers can provide less help. Perhaps that's why they're not viewed as favorably? The same budget constraints apply to their salaries, making it so the more qualified ones go into private practice perhaps?

>Nurses?

I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

>Tenured professors?

I know a few. I guess some of them are paid well, but they often make a lot less than their students. They do have job security (like tenured teachers).

Doctors don't make money because they help people. They make money, because people with money think what they do is important.

[UPDATE]: Note the downvotes. I didn't post anything that attacked anyone. I made a "blanket statement" that has been made millions of times, and is, regardless, quite true.

I also talked about some projects that I've done (a few that are easily accessible, for anyone interested). These were not mentioned to be "snotty." They are simply what I have done, out of Gratitude and for deeply personal reasons.

Don't like to look at things that make us uncomfortable? Join the club. However, it often makes us better people.

> I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

You're conflating recent and broad economic trends with the specific conditions of a specific profession. Millions of Americans all over the country have been quitting and changing careers (it even has a name: "the Great Resignation"). This doesn't mean their conditions are shit, but rather that pandemic-era economic forces have been reshuffling our economy.

My fiancee is a nurse. Conditions are absolute shit, especially in states where the patient to nurse ratio isn't legally protected.

I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative. Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).

The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.

The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.

Nurses are treated like complete shit and work in dreadful conditions in the UK too (public and private), and that certainly predates the pandemic.

Thank you. I see so much that people conflate some issues has having been a direct result of the pandemic. Its like, nope, the pandemic just made the problem surface, but the problem has been there for a lot longer. With nursing, it is keeping the nurses understaffed and hiring travel nurses when they are suddenly backed into a corner. Many hospital systems have been under-staffing nurses for years, it just didn't become apparent until the pandemic. The nurses at my local hospital went on strike a year BEFORE COVID over this exact issue.

What he's describing is by no means a recent trend!

> We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities... (especially US society)

I don't think it's "US society", as much as it is urban and suburban society which has become dominant over the last few decades. Traditionally in the US, people were a lot more communal--neighbors and families would share farm equipment, help each other through busy seasons, watch each other's farm while the other was away, help raise each other's kids, etc. Maybe the problem isn't our Americanism, but rather the lack of it, and maybe the solution is figuring out how to integrate more of it into our modern society rather than doubling down on our increasingly isolated, me-first sub/urban existences.

The other half of this picture is that the old farming communities have died, and the whole of the American Midwest is now a giant machine for the industrial production of food, inhabited by just a few people, who maintain the giant sprinklers and combines that stride across the depopulated landscape.

This isn’t true where i hail from (also, which parts of the midwest rely on sprinklers? I’ve only seen them in the west and southern plains. Maybe Kansas and the western Dakotas?

The view from I80 across Nebraska and Iowa.

My grandparents town in the south used to have a vibrant down town with local everything. Then walmart came and wiped out all the stores, then farms became ever less practical financially, all the kids moved away, then the local restaurants closed. Now there's a few streets of closed businesses and a few restaurants hanging on. This is why all those people from the small towns feel the apocalypse is on them, there is no viable financial path for people there anymore, and they have to support politicians who say only they can fix it, but end up hurting them even more. This same thing happened to my great grandparent's farmland and small town in a town 500 miles away.

> But I did them for no money

And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

> > But I did them for no money

> And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

By working my butt off for over 30 years, making a rather humble salary, but never living large, avoiding personal debt like the plague, driving old cars, or crappy company cars, living in apartments and a small house, saving 25-40% of my earnings, investing in conservative, yet still a bit aggressive, funds, and then, after leaving a job I stayed at for nearly 27 years (at a famous Japanese imaging corporation, that makes optical equipment), being rejected (sometimes, quite rudely) by every place I applied at, for being too old.

The first project I mentioned was done over a period of ten years, as a "side project," while I worked as an Engineering Manager (a job I hated). I did it because my life was, literally, saved, by an organization, and I wanted to Give Back.

There are many reasons to do things that don't involve avarice, ego, anger, or cynicism. I want to make the world a better place. My resources are limited, but I have some ideas on ways to multiply my impact.

Thanks. Sounds like a ride. Glad you're able to have space to do work well-aligned with your values.

I'm finding it really hard to do. Even if I wanted to make the personal sacrifice (and thus sacrifice my future children's stability and environment..) for more virtuous pursuits for far less compensation, I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.

I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.

> I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.

Sounds like a worthy cause. The ten-year project that I mentioned was actually ready to go, after a couple of years. All the rest of the time, was spent, talking about it, and trying to help people use it, until it went viral, and was taken over by a fairly accomplished team.

Thanks to them, it has become a lot bigger than I could have made it.

Awesome. If I may ask: what was this project?

I don’t really mention it in public, but it’s no secret. If you visit the littlegreenviper.com Web site, I tell the origin story, under “Miscellany.”

If you contact me, I’m happy to share it. It’s aimed at a very specific demographic.

> I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.

Organisations are generally pretty shit at achieving anything.

But the good news is that individuals can and do make a difference and ultimately change things. It's the small wins that count. Changing one person's habits. Getting one more friend to drop BigTech. Getting one teacher to rethink the effect of over-connectedness on our children. Showing one person the problem of e-waste and seeing them jail-break an old phone instead of buying a new one.

You overcome the myth of "the they" (the hordes of mindless "users" who just want convenience uber-alles that we always hear about on HN) one real person at a time.

Then you start to see friends and colleagues reflecting good values back at you. Help your doctor friend streamline her time with real computing tools, but also make it clear that you're not a charity, or a mug and that what you're doing comes with a message that you expect her to pass on. The health message about harmful technology [1] should resonate with doctors. Encourage her politely to change her lifestyle just as you would commit to changing your diet and exercise if she told you to.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

> Help your doctor friend [...] but also make it clear that [...] what you're doing comes with a message that you expect her to pass on

I don't really agree with this part. You can't demand that another adopt your morals, certainly not genuinely by offering conditional help. I avoid people like this, because they think they've figured out what's best for someone else and judge everyone who doesn't think the same.

Just aim for the highest good, and course correct since chances are you don't know what that really is. Others will join or oppose you, that's feedback.

Doctors aren’t exactly starving for business, hope you are getting compensated, even if it’s minimal. You it would cost the doctor 10x if they hired a software shop to do the work.

It would cost 10x, and thus they never do. They instead can only pay old crusty companies for software that's passed through all regulatory hoops to which they provide shit support.

I'm not trying to replace that company with my free labor. Mostly looking for ultra low hanging fruit - like scripted replies to FAQs that burn 15 mins/day replying to.

> It’s interesting that you don’t consider landscaping, juice bars, and wind surfing schools as beneficial to the economy.

I definitely didn't say that. At least three of my friends now do those things. They're very happy. And they add a lot to the world, at the least by the smile they wear each day.

A baker, landscaper, or small business owner doesn't need to do 10 years of additional education at specialize schools, not that they're less beneficial. The charitable reading of the OP's comments would be that it's an inefficient use of society's resources to invest in the education of these folks only to have them leave their respective fields after a short amount of time.

The broader question is how do we change that? Is it worth squeezing an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity from people to have them burn out in 5 years vs. a more steady 25 year career?

A ton of people, including many in technical or technical-adjacent roles, don't really directly use a lot of what they learned in school. Yes, learn how to learn, critical thinking, etc. But directly use what they learned in XYZ class? A lot less.

Most of society's direct expenses in their education is in the K-12 phase, not in the undergrad or graduate schooling. A baker, landscaper, and a computer programmer all had very similar levels of direct educational investment. I don’t think the computer programmer has any different obligation back to society than any of the others.

> Most of society's direct expenses in their education is in the K-12 phase

True that K-12 costs more, but public assistance in higher education is substantial [1]. From grants, subsidized loans to directed money into public universities, it's a sizable investment at the state and federal level. It'd be more efficient to take that money and invest it directly in vocational schools if we knew people would utilize it and then swap careers due to burn out.

1 - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...

Edit: Updated reference to 2019 version.

So there are a few problems.

For one, that extra education? It often isn't seen as part of one's career. But for any course worth its salt, those years are still draining. It's a minor point, but also an overlooked one.

Second, there's the mismatch problem. Outside STEM, loads of people aren't getting jobs in their fields. Inside STEM (mostly tech, really), most people are getting tech jobs completely different from what they learned in school. Often uninteresting and/or boggled with politics and bureaucracy (read: majority of them are CRUD webdev jobs trying to appease corporate's whims).

Third, the job market is ravenous. Absolutely ravenous. Anyone not solidly mid career is discriminated against to some degree. Too old? Have fun being seen as a liability despite your experience. Too young? Here's a set of requirements you wouldn't learn in most corporations, schools won't teach you and somehow you're magically supposed to get this experienced in a corporate setting, noted as "requirements". Oh, and you better cite the company's values by heart and claim it's your dream job, even if their product is yet another luxury / minimal improvement driven to make profits, as there are 20 others lined up.

The whole burnout thing already starts before you enter your first job.

I love the use of the word boggled here. As an idiot when it comes to office politics I can relate

People save money doing a job they hate to one day start a business they don't hate all the time. The key part of this story is 'raising capital.'

Most people joining the tech industry today aren't doing it because they're particularly good at it, or they want to. It's the best way to raise capital to do something else.

It's not the work itself. YOu can always take a break. the problem is people's workaholic attitudes: especially managers.

Our jobs are more productive in economic terms and that's the reason we can get paid more. You have a good points about net negatives but objectively our jobs pay more tax & there are plenty of companies where our skills can be applied for good.

Do we have some tangible numbers on the long term situation of those "quitting tech" people? Like, ok, they open a wind-surfing school, but then what? Does that work, are they more fulfilled and able to work the next 10+ years in that situation without burning out? Or do they go back to tech after a while because grass is always greener, and a job is a job and there are not as much fulfilling jobs as we would like to be.

Looking around me, I do know a fair amount of people quitting tech. To become a sport or management coach, a sound designer, a bar owner, a writer, etc. But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.

Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.

You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.

In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

But is the system really responsible for all of this? I mean, if we go back to a more "natural" state, with simpler jobs and with more direct impacts, are we actually happier? Is cutting woods all day long more fulfilling that a tech job? Or being a mason and putting block on top of each other for other people that you do not know about?

Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?

As like many others here, I started writing code in my late teens. And experienced my first bout of burn out sometime in my mid 20s. I was sick of making all these 2D, non-real things and wanted to make real world products that I could hold in my hand. So I did. Then I learnt that the pay was often shit, the work was really difficult and the physical toil it took on my body was not something I could take for long. So I went back to writing code in a comfy, climate controlled office with all the snacks I can eat. And spend my weekends instead doing amateur carpentry. That's so much more fulfilling on all levels.

It's almost certainly true that the closer you got to the ancestral environment, the more fulfilling people's lives would be. That's hunter-gatherer society, not serf farming. In the grand scheme of things, brick laying and lumber are still pretty modern. The hypothesis is that, in the ancestral environment, your instincts would actually be working in your favor, so good things would actually feel good, and bad things would feel bad.

Of course, the logistics of undoing the neolithic revolution are mind-boggling. You're supposed to learn to be a hunter-gatherer over a lifetime, not to be thrust into it in the middle of your adult life. If some leader-type tried to abandon complex society right away, it would probably go about as well as the Cultural Revolution went. Lots of people accidentally picking the wrong mushrooms and killing themselves, because their parents never taught them how to tell them apart.

> the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.

There’s no country that has blown things up and given power to the people. So there’s no precedent to look at.

There’s no such thing as “giving power to the people.” This is grossly naive in both basic economics and society. There is only giving power to different people and under different terms.

> > the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

> How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.

1775 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War

(I'm not saying anything one way or t'other, just pointing out a little history)

> Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.

People are trying to figure out their lives or how they want to live. There is nothing wrong in coming back to what they had quit. Making fun of other people's life choices is very immature in my opinion.

I read the previous comment as a figure of speech, not making fun of anyone.

It's a writing style (mannerism?) but not necessarily ill-intentioned.

The last line shows their intention is good faith and on the side of the common people. There’s no proper way to interpret their comment as a bad faith making fun of people.

The comment happens to be against the status quo and for the every day person and that has a higher chance as being seen as something that is unusual and more negative than it actually is.

> But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.

Beware of bias when attributing value to someone else's struggles. "happiness" and "fulfillment" are innate personal perceptions. And they are the aggregate not just of one's job, but of one's circumstances in life on the whole.

For one person, the struggle associated with being a writer might be totally worth it. For someone else, it could be entirely the wrong road to follow. Thing is, the only person who needs to figure out what path in life is the right way would be... that person. That's what personal responsibility, freedom, agency, independence,... is all about.

In a way, the big trap in this debate is ending up shoehorning people into different boxes. Just because someone graduated with a tech degree doesn't mean they can't do something else in life. Even when that pursuit is, arguably, harder then just sitting in a chair and struggling with - say - Homebrew, trying to install a different versions of Node.

There's a great read on this at https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-peop...

Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure.

""" She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support.

You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """

""" t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases.

Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress.

And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """

Social pollution isn't a new concept. In the 1970s the, um, I'll be charitable here and say "well meaning but somewhat less than perfect", welfare efforts of the 1960s were often compared to factories that churned out some product and patted themselves on the back for great work while ignoring the havoc wreaked on the local environment. Industrial pollution was a big deal in the 1970s so it's unsurprising that people made this comparison back then. A key point of the comparison was that these messes take a long time to clean up. You screw a generation out of stable families and father figures and, well, we're still dealing with that, the same way that we're still dealing with industrial pollution of decades past.

I agree about the criticism against long working hours, but it's unfortunate I think to use the nuclear family as an example of another superior example here, to shove people further into another old fashioned failing arbitrary power structure comes a bit short as a vision of a better alternative.

What's arbitrary about a family? It's changed in size over the history of homo sapiens, but it has always existed and is pretty obviously a biological necessity and unavoidable natural law for us.

The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.

You assign an enormous amount of special status to certain people who you happen to be related to by blood, and that's arbitrary. It works when it works, and it doesn't work when it doesn't.

What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure.

The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.

Divorces are between people not related by blood (usually). The reason you provide resources to blood relatives (kids) is to give your genes the best chance to survive.

What if a person not related by blood will give your kids better chances?

What says that the parent will necessarily be the "best" person for their child through their whole life, and not someone else? That's arbitrary.

You see no issues with swearing life long loyalty to blood relations? That's just going to be the optimal solution in every case? That's making it a little bit too easy don't you think?

Are you arguing that there's zero biological programming specific to children or blood relatives?

No, but I'm arguing that it's very unreliable, often fully backfires and becomes actually destructive, and that in our modern society there are other factors that are much more relevant to people's success in life, and blood relations I would say is fully arbitrary.

It's also just as natural for people to branch out and leave their families, as it is to stay close to their families.

And I think it's irrelevant to the discussion of shortening working hours, and a bad example because it's another oppressive construct.

It's like arguing for shortening working hours so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned and has seen decreasing success.

How about just shortening the working hours so that people can be more, free? And do what they want?

> so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned

This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches.

Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation. You can walk out of Church whenever you want.

Doing what you want tends to be quite narrow, hedonistic and unsatisfying in the end. It's easier to make the argument for free time from higher principles.

Haha ok so church has no power. And people can never be free, they must be institutionalised, and we should use shortening of working hours to just move them to a different institution that is even more old fashioned and increasingly failing, than then ones we are freeing them from.

Well I guess we can say that we have a fundamentally different view on what constitutes development and improvement of life and society.

I doubt we have a different view, as I haven't stated one on 'what constitutes development and improvement of life a society'.

Freedom is the ability to swim in any direction you want, so go ahead. Do whatever you want. The map of your possible options already exists and the institutions are just one or many worthwhile places to visit. When people do whatever they want it quite often ends up on a place on the map where there is a lot of hedonism and not much in the way of higher meaning or valuable aims.

As a dispassionate observer it is my inclination to suggest that people will take the argument for more free time off work in the favour of church and family as an easier argument to make, given it's connection to a higher meaning and relatable values. A boss will likely see anything connected to 'wants' as room for more work.

What "special status"? It simply is how the world is, as we've seen over all of history.

Yes some marriages end in divorce and families disconnect in some cases, with various outcomes. The family still exists even if no-one participates in it. The guy is being overworked and unable to see his kids, I'm all for that guy seeing his kids. It can have huge knock on effects if it's ignored. You aren't forced to participate in family.

Family is built from natural impulses, biological connections and installs in the children an inheritance of values, schooling and relationships. There are reasons from first principles for families and the surrounding neighbourhood, city and country benefits from families. You can't hand-wave away the meaning of family as 'power' and 'arbitrary'.

> What "special status"? It simply is how the world is, as we've seen over all of history.

And we are trying to move into the future, not the past.

Are nuclear families really so important and successful that we need more of it? Is this really an undebatable absolute truth that should be forced on people? Let people decide on their own if they want to spend their new found free time on families or something else.

Edit: the "special status" is loyalty, and loyalty is bad if we are trying to live in a meritocracy.

Great link, thanks for that.

The dark cynic in me says that in a country with a for-profit health system all these effects are considered good features of the workplace.

> A chemical company pours toxins into a river ... a great many jobs make us sick

[Developed] societies have been systematically failing at addressing externalities for the last hundred years.

We do have many scientific methods to measure pollution, climate change, mental health, physical health, income inequality.

The socioeconomical system is designed to prioritize economical growth [for large company owners] over everything else.

> The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it.

Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Or maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society).

> Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)?

Bold of you to assume office work involves "productivity".

I'm not saying that office work is a particularly productive form of work, but rather that there is some work product that gets done and it's difficult to increase the mental health aspects of office work without directly trading off on productivity.

> maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society).

You remember the Tom Sawyer story, where he gets the others to paint the fence for him? Work is very much "in the mind". You can have the work of Sisyphus and get to love the rock. In the best cases work is the making of some people. It can liberate you from boredom and self indulgence. An artist or poet talks about their "work" in an entirely different spirit. We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work".

> without foregoing the actual productivity

Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology. Producing what? Productivity is a slippery word. Unless you're a farmer most of us can't point to anything tangible we produce. The best we can hope for is to help fellow human beings in whatever small way we can each day. Increasingly that is done by subverting the system. Worthwhile work occurs despite, not through the systems we inhabit.

> We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work".

I'm explicitly not doing that. My whole comment can be rephrased as: "if we can meet society's needs with less soul-crushing, we should do so, but some of the soul crushing may be inherent (needing to work to meet our own physical needs can be inherently exasperating for some)".

> Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology.

I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.

> I'm explicitly not doing that. My whole comment can be rephrased as: "if we can meet society's needs with less soul-crushing, we should do so, but some of the soul crushing may be inherent (needing to work to meet our own physical needs can be inherently exasperating for some)".

We can absolutely "meet society's needs". We already do, amply, and have for many decades. The problem is that we've over-supplied needs, and replaced huge tracts of activity pandering to wants and whims. It is that over-provision that is at the root of so much of the soul crushing emptiness.

> I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.

Of course. I know the square root of jack about economics. But I do know how to read what credentialed economists write. So I think the difference may be in our choice of credentialed economists. Here's one take [1]. But who I am really echoing is Yanis Varoufakis, who says it much better than either Thompson or myself, that we've a very poor idea what "productivity" really is.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201230-how-the-pandem...

> We can absolutely "meet society's needs". We already do, amply, and have for many decades. The problem is that we've over-supplied needs, and replaced huge tracts of activity pandering to wants and whims. It is that over-provision that is at the root of so much of the soul crushing emptiness.

Yes, we have plenty of resources to feed everyone and provide people with the things that I personally value, but defining "productivity" in terms of one person's values and then organizing society to optimize for that "productivity" (in other words, a sort of planned economy) is a much worse oppression than laboring for one's own values. If that's not what you're getting at, then please state it plainly because we're several comments into this exchange and it's still unclear what solution you're imagining.

I'm curious how you got the estimate of $100,000 cost to society to educate a graduate?

Are you including undergrad or just grad programs? If we include undergrad and do ballpark math: government pays 40 billion in grants per year, there are 20 million students, so that's 2 thousand per student cost to society

Whereas I'm paying upwards of 30k. The cost is on me, not on society. Although I'm just an anecdote so I'm curious to hear from others

I literally pulled that number out of my arse based on some vague recollection of such a figure. It may be conservative, or grossly exaggerated, but I think it's ballpark for the "cost of creating a graduate". The costs are complex because, for example, a student at college is not (except by paying my salary as a professor) participating in the economy for three years.

I agree with everything you've said. But, as long as there is an endless line of engineers ready and willing to replace those lost workers, then industry and management in general has no incentive to change their ways. that's just what happens when you have a vast oversupply of labor.

I think you're right. I'm just afraid that any solution here will be much more on the "stick" side than the "carrot" side that you propose.

I wish I could favourite this comment. So insightful.

You can! If you click the timestamp next to the comment, there'll be a favourite button on the comment page.

Thanks :)

How does society end up burdened with the cost, when education isn't free?

There is a huge cost to losing the most talented people in the workforce. Exit these days means that very talented people often lose track of their field and face a harder re-entry point with lower salary if they decide to return.

What I'm most worried about in leaving my career as a solutions architect is that the ability to start and build a business of my own seems insurmountable when you consider the world's reliance on social media and popularity/wealth as a requirement for success. There are so many people doing absolutely the same thing these days, and so many people that present the image of success and popularity in being an entrepreneur in pretty much every field that valid/great ideas get drowned out so easily... If everyone is doing the same thing, and many people are faking their success, coupled with wealthy individuals that can easily copycat ideas, it creates massive barriers to organic success.

There is usually only one page on most sites for publications, that's often a wild and crazy mashup of posts from all disciplines and fields of interest. Our attention spans are also shrinking because of short form content, that makes it very easy to view something important, but also forget it 5 seconds later, so even marketing is overwhelming to most of the people that would support independent business.

Sites like Reddit started out great, but now subreddits are often run with other intentions than open communication... Many mods secretly steer business in their own directions because of the flood of competition, and it feeds deceptive marketing techniques and brigade culture.

I don't want to be stuck in complaining, I think the world really needs to evaluate how much we are fostering "monopolistic dynasty" culture and nepotism on the Internet, and how it's destroying capitalism... We all really need to bring back a sense of distributing speaking time among wider ranges of audiences and speakers, and fostering discussions that aren't based on popularity and wealth as indicators of validity... The very same culture that has negatively infected the workplaces we might want to leave.

There's a lot going on that's squeezing out real value and replacing it with a controllable facsimile of value. And yes, this is anti-social, and anti-capitalist, in the purest and best sense of both those terms. It's a bonfire of human value.

In the face of so much disruptive potential, so much surplus of intellect, and so much human energy unleashed by automation and fossil fuels, the strategy of the incumbents has been to stifle it.

I mean, isn't that what the entertainments business has been focused on for the past 40 years, with DRM etc? What some parts of the tech industry does is actually anti-technology. We have a kind of job creation scheme with one person digging a hole, while another fills it in. Some computer scientists working to create innovation, and others overtly set on stifling it. To ignore that adversarial aspect is to completely fail to understand modern technology.

I’ve tried to talk to people about this for so long. This is the root of the problem with ‘office culture’ and just ‘work culture’ in general.

Productivity is the goal, right? Increasing worker happiness and reducing stress should be the focus. I think this will produce the largest effect on productivity.

Instead, we get sociopathic slave-driving at work: a narrow focus on KPIs, mandated hours of work and methods of working, prostration from micro-management (it can go on forever).

Working environments are low-trust and hostile, with no focus on what truly makes a worker happy, and what actually makes them productive!

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