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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

It looks like preppers didn't have to be scared of an asteroid, a pandemic, a solar flare, a nuclear war. Instead society fell from something totally unexpected: No one wants to work anymore.

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I'm not entirely convinced anyone ever wanted to work.

There's work and work. I don't like being idle. Many people enjoy sitting around sipping drinks. I'd rather climb hills, create stuff and fix houses. My problem with work is the toxic ingredients:

- bad management

- no leadership

- stupid sociopolitical games

- therefore too much fakeness (toxic diplomacy)

- not enough perfectionism

- side effects of obligations (being paid means you are responsible, means you have to make something happen even if you have no clue what or how)

As a young developer trying to navigate the political aspects of software development, What is toxic diplomacy?

I've not heard the term, yet I feel like I know exactly what that GP means by it. And, it's hard to summarize, it has less/nothing to do with software development and more so just the politics involved in corporate culture. It's like the real ethos of the company (not the projected version) and how to be successful within it, the merits of your work as a software developer will not always be the most important deciding factor and you need to be aware of the various politics within the company. It differs by company but with enough experience you see common themes.

I guess the parent means the tendency of people to report things more positively to the management than they really are and the behavior of some to try to make a good impression to management by telling them exactly what they want to hear. Both might help the individual but typically not the organization

The need to coat everything in layers to avoid hurting feelings all the time. I'm no bully but I've witnessed a lot of dead end discussions where people(myself included) couldn't express themselves freely enough so we just kept going without any real progress.

ps: for instance I could propose a change, but that would imply people who worked in this manner to feel bad or worse, humiliated. So I back off and we keep wasting time. Or that would mean me taking steps to ensure I've discussed that with them privately so they know it's not an attack nor a way to take the light, but a global need for the group to reach better goals in less efforts.

> Instead society fell from something totally unexpected: No one wants to work anymore.

I can't tell if you're joking or not

I recently saw a Twitter thread with citations for sentiments like "nobody wants to work anymore" going back to the 1800's.

This went around a few weeks ago. It's clippings going back 100+ years of people saying no one wants to work anymore.

https://mobile.twitter.com/paulisci/status/15495277489508925...

John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 30s that the combination of extension of industrial production, healthcare, and education/family planning would result in cutting work hours in half and dramatically expanding leisure.

This isn't the fall of society, it's indicative of society advancing. People not working a job doesn't mean they're not working, it means they're putting energies towards things that don't earn them a wage. If you put your time into gardening that's still work, it's just on your own initiative instead of an employers'.

All of that only works for software developers that, at this point, are sleeping on keyboards.

The benefits of progress tend to be lumpy and unevenly distributed to start. But I expect these niceties will eventually trickle out to other fields as people change industries or see how their peers' work lives differ.

There's probably a lot of societal-level interventions needed to bring cost of living under control to make it more viable as well. For example, in my home-town where rents are cheap it's actually hard to staff barbers or beauticians because the pay is good enough to where people can work for maybe 8 or 9 months and have that cover their bills and expenses for a year if they're frugal.

Now it helps that the local economy is really uneven as well, so you have a base of doctors and lawyers earning very high incomes to underwrite these service providers. But that seems pretty familiar for tech-towns like Silicon Valley too, the key difference is cost-of-living. Instead of having all that high-earner money being sunk into real-estate and rents it's sloshing over into the service sector.

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