We have a lot of founders that will work 16 hours a day on HN, but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people (in the US at least) prefer having a work-life balance.
The average employee? Not so much. Stock might be somewhat of an incentive but it's really a dice roll.
I’ve been lucky to meet people throughout my life who were motivated by that, not by money. Some where in creative professions, some not, some had big salaries, some not.
I guess automation and UBI could solve that replacing the proverbial janitors with robots. But then it may just incentivize more people to lay in bed and stare at the ceiling all day. Is it a bad thing? Is it a good thing? I do tend to believe most people will eventually fall into doing some kind of rewarding work-like activity if left to themselves completely and money was taken out of the equation. On the other hand relationships/ families may be a time-suck and many peopl etc would just “spend time with the kids” all days.
The hikkikomori phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori) is still growing so there's little reason to believe that.
I'd support universal basic employment, even if it's for make-work tasks like keeping the street clean, but not UBI. There needs to be a tie between what one gives to society and what gets from society or inevitably there will be a breakdown of some sort.
I'm not saying this lifestyle is healthy, but I can see why some people want to opt out of a system that doesn't consider their desires or wellbeing.
Also, not everyone can be a software developer. Why do you consider being a game dev to be noble and productive, but playing games to be a drain on society?
If it were purely lack of work -> become recluse, we'd see this with 100% of retirees everywhere, but we don't. I'm not saying it's 0%, but I've known plenty of retirees with hobbies and socialization.
It's a sad reality for some people, I do know some people that are living this way.
Amazon’s market cap is ~$1.25T. Under the conservative (false) assumption that a union bidding for half the shares would not move the price at all, that union would have to spend ~$625B on those purchases, meaning total employee dues would be that much, implying a wage base (at 1% dues) of $62.5T, or more than 3 years of the entire US GDP.
Said differently: if employees could buy half their company for 1% (or even 10%) of their wages, there’d be no need for them to have a union negotiate their wages.
There's a common trap I've run into in my hobby of game development, that probably has a name that I don't know: trying to solve every problem with a single solution (and also its close cousin, rejecting a proposed improvement because it doesn't solve every problem). This is clearly also applicable to real life, with things like people complaining solar isn't viable at all because it can't provide for every bit of our energy needs on its own.
The idea datavirtue suggests is a good one. It just needs other things to be happening at the same time to support it—like strong antitrust action against the tech giants.
In abstract I like unions and unions have helped me out, if I had become a cop obviously I'd be part of the Union, and I suspect union negotiators were persecuted in Chile for very very good reason in the elite's view. Like those guys would actually negotiate hardcore, knew all the tricks, well-read, not intimidated by glances or ugly looks, knew what to charge...basically a union negotiator. Negreated the negreators, well and that's why they were persecuted. Strictly money in that case.
It's never spoken openly, nobody ever brings up union negotiators. Think hostage negotiator. And working in the interest of the company, don't want it going underwater so it can keep paying wages. And also making sure the business stays competitive, but actually. In one case in Uruguay there was a strike, sort of the workers took over the factory and started working again right away, cut the management out completely, kept it going fine, hostile takeover so to speak.
If you want to show up and “just do your job”, that’s not my jam but more power to you. However, “quiet quitting” as I’ve seen it is people being “anti-work” and actively doing as little as humanly possible to collect a pay check. Borderline not doing their job.
It takes so much extra effort from the people who are trying to do their job, that the people I have heard about are an active detriment to teams - not a net positive or net neutral.
Form what I have seen, these are not people “trying to have a good work life balance”.
For some reason I had thought it meant actually not working when you otherwise would / can.
I think that’s the problem, everyone has these implied scenarios they don’t mention.
Not that I don’t put in extra work, but I don’t think of just 8 being quiet quitting.
If quiet quitting means not actually working while still collecting a salary, then who else deserves the blame?