Hacker News Reader

Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

> do they care?

Do you mean really care or just be good at pretending? The first thing I learned when I started working is the importance of not caring.

Caring can cause innner-team conflicts and burn out. Yes, you need to appear motivated but caring too much will just make you annoying.

Also this is more about the power of influence I get over a project. If I get real ownership and the power and tools to make decisions, yeah I am going to care, if not, not, just no. I am not wasting mental energy on things I can't change.

I will pretend to care about anything you want me to care though, if the pay is right.

View on HN

Honest question: Are there things privately you care about? I take pride in parts of my work with the same emotional response as I take pride in my family. Not exactly the same magnitude, but the same emotional pathways at work. After 15 years of working I've learned to say "no", manage emotions, etc. to become at least robust in not 'caring' about office politics and such (in the emotional sense). But I do care about my work. It's the main thing I do.

Sure, there is lot's of things I care about privately. In fact I absolutely love programming languages and it took me a while to separate my excitement from my professional work.

Your family comparison is super weird. There is no love and loyalty between employer and employee. The relationship is antagonistic by nature. If I find a better job, I am out. If they don't need me, they will kick me out. They pay me the minimum amount they can get away with and try to squeeze out the maximum value. They don't care about me as a human being and they should not, that is business. (It is the job of labor laws and unions to make the interaction more humane, I don't believe in idealism.)

Of course, I still have professional pride and given the choice will try to do a good job but for me being a professional also means being emotionally detached from it. It is just business. I work for money. The meaningful stuff in my life happens outside of my employment.

"Super weird" /to you/? I just ment to underline that (for me) it's the same type of caring. I'm professional, could do the same job at a dozen employers, etc. I think we feel the same about that.

But I care about my work in a deep way that you don't seem to feel. If I manage to get a junior / medior to properly step up to a task and grow confident I feel pride, connection and sense of doing the right thing. The whole business layer comes second for me at that moment.

Another thought is that I feel that 'in Europe' (generalisation) the antagonistic nature of employment is not felt the same way especially for professional jobs. We have no firing at will. As an manager I understand that I have a multi year relationship with people that should transcend the tasks at hand. The tasks at hand should be done and done well, but a job should be both fulfilling and manageable for the individual. Even if a hiring fails somewhat you have to make it work. The current job market creates an even bigger reason to treat people well.

Are you saying people in Europe care more about their jobs?

That's certainly not my experience. I've met just as many Europeans that hate their jobs and just do it for the money. They spend as little time as possible doing them.

I'm reminded of this book

https://web.archive.org/web/20090901204114/https://www.nytim...

Well, didn't she do well (as the host of a popular UK TV game show used to say about contestants)

https://www.corinnemaier.info/english/

Of course, you work to pay for the rest of your life but I think there is a role for craft and teamwork in all of this.

> There is no love and loyalty between employer and employee.

I don't think anybody here talks about employees caring about or loving their employer.

It's about about worker caring about their work.

Because if I don't care, this is what happens:

    if input == input_that_causes_bug_1948348 {
        return static_output_for_bug_1948348
    }

Add UT. Next ticket please.

Well, if a given architecture doesn't allow for another solution, that might be the only implementable choice.

Remaking the core architecture to solve an obscure bug which only happens when you've got overlapping leap years and leap seconds is most certainly a bad decision.

For a simple example: Phillips hue movement detectors don't work for a very short time before new years. (My guess is that they're validating the year for the activation signal). I don't know how the bug occurs, but i can imagine several ways in which this could become unfixable if a given architecture was chosen... I still want it to work though, so I'd really like it if they'd just added something like your example.

How about these implementable choices for a dirty fix:

- make lightbulbs work in these last seconds of the year 2022 and only that year

- make lightbulbs work in the last seconds of years 2023-2036 or more

This is the distinction I've been trying to make: there are sometimes powerful incentives pushing workers into the former, even if the latter could be approximately the same effort.

Ah, I misunderstood your example in that case.

I was thinking more about solving it at the source vs essentially just catching the error case and overwriting the behavior. And while the latter is definitely "code smell"/technical debt... Sometimes, there aren't really any good solutions to a given problem

I think it's more likely you just haven't been in a company with coworkers who write this kind of code chronically, and also opt out of any participation in architecture meetings or design reviews. Just interminable finger-pointing and stop energy any time there's some critique.

> It's about about worker caring about their work.

Eh, nearly every worker will given the time and ability will do the proper solution. I have NEVER seen "workers caring" to be an issue in practice.

The reason code starts to smell is nearly always management. If boss says to quick fix, quick fix it is. The fish always rots from the head down.

There is much truth in this comment, many people don't wish to see this and are there suprised when their "nice boss or management" fires them without caring how they will support their family.

> There is no love and loyalty between employer and employee.

Where you are perhaps. But there are still pockets of civilization left on this planet.

> I take pride in parts of my work with the same emotional response as I take pride in my family.

Well, that's just plain wrong.

Is it? You spend a large part of your day on the job. Quite often spend most of your energy there too.

At least make that worthwhile. Make this time count for you. Make it something you care about?

Yeah I always struggle with the “you just need to care less, you’ll be happier that way” theme.

I spend 8-10 hours on a given day exchanging my work for some revenue. That is (at least) half of my waking day. Day after day. To the tune of ~2000 hours a year. That is a massive part of one’s _life_. I think it’s reasonable to want some sort of satisfaction during at least some of those hours.

Also, I find it takes active effort to actually not care. It is not a minimum energy test state for me. I actually have to work even harder to do the job and NOT care.

Well, this is plain wrong.

(Super useful comment huh?)

There is a book called the subtle art of not giving a fuck, and you summed it up. You can only give so many fucks so choose them wisely!

If you are a programmer who doesn't care about your user, you are a terrible programmer - period.

Care about the user, programmers. Not the manager, not your fellow work competitors. The USER.

Without a USER, nothing you do has value - at all.

(Note: your manager and your fellow work competitors can be users too. Don't overlook that fact! Hopefully they care enough about the users, too, that they are willing to wear the user hat during your product development cycle. Even managers wearing users hats are users. I hope you still care even then!)

You are right in the sense that thinking from the perspective of the user is a good professional skill to have.

In practice though, you a very privileged if you get to work on any software that is not user-hostile per design. In the end of the day, programmer don't make the decisions.

If you care about the user but management prevents you from acting on it, you are hurting yourself for no reason, like agonizing over all the bad news across the nation and world. Your shoulders can't carry the whole world

You are describing not a problem with caring, but a problem with bad leadership that destroys the benefits of caring and the people who care.

Stopping caring is a coping strategy to help you extract funds (if you aren't getting good funds, leave!) from a company that refuses to let you do good work.

Ouch. That last statement hits close to home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com