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Comment by amonith | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I've met anybody happy this year (I live in Poland but it's not because I live in Poland I swear :D). It's not just job uncertainty. Our whole world (that is "1st" and "2nd" world countries) is currently unstable. A literal war is brewing, currently with Russia, maybe with China, maybe the Middle East stuff will escalate. Those maybes are a big problem.

And let's not even start about the housing market and the possible future job market shift due to AI.

Almost none of it is due to the current local job stuff. That doesn't matter. It's all about how the future seems to look like.

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Those factors are consistent for everyone, though, and it seems that developers have more job induced unhappiness than many other careers. There's something fundamentally wrong and broken with this discipline.

A good point — and as even the article points out, plumbers and farmers live in the same world as engineers and aren't grousing about housing costs or wars potentially brewing. Why is that?

Plumbers and farmers are deeply unsatisfied, just try talking to them. That's why a sizable majority of them plan on voting for Trump.

It is almost as if humans are not made for sitting 8-10 hours learning abstract stuff and thinking really hard about imagined logic puzzles in constant stress.

The fact that a programmer would quit their 50h/w job, which they hate, to then take on a personal 80h/w project (open source, saas, educational, etc), which they enjoy, suggests that the malaise has little to do with the craft.

It's as if we get some satisfaction from doing physical things with our hands and seeing progress for our labors at the end of each day.

Is there something like the SO Developer Survey for other industries?

I'm in the US and have similar worries, but to be honest they sort of pale in comparison to climate change; we just had the three hottest days ever this month and it looks like we are committed to accelerating warming. I don't mean to depress anyone further, but this is literally a thing that keeps me up at night.

1. Look at https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matt...

It may alleviate some of your worries.

2. You say "climate change" "keeps me up at night". Do you believe that is a rational state of mind to have? Shouldn't you open up a bit and talk to a friend or professional about your feelings?

Also US. I think WW3 is a more pressing threat for most in the developed world than climate change is.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-havi...

There's a nervous murmur going around with men younger than me (31) about the draft coming back. Dying in a field from a consumer-grade drone dropping a grenade on you is increasingly frightening.

I can’t tell what a world war would actually be about these days. It’s easy to imagine a lot of regional squabbles as the Pax Americana unwinds itself, but I can’t see any large issue that would unite two global factions against one another. And it’s hard to imagine the US having the stomach for more foreign involvement to include actual “boots on the ground” after the disastrous lessons learned since Vietnam, but especially of the Bush Administration.

I also thought talk of "WWIII" was putting too fine a point on it. Is anyone really worrying about all out nuclear warfare?

I believe that nuclear war is going to kill a lot more people than climate change over the next one hundred years. We've had way too many close calls over the last 70 years, and nuclear weapons are in far too many unstable hands for them not to be used eventually. It might not happen this year or this decade, but it's almost inevitable they'll be used in the next hundred years, likely sooner rather than later.

Perhaps it's unlikely to be "all out" nuclear warfare. Climate change is projected to kill a small number of millions of people. It wouldn't take much for a limited nuclear war to kill more than that.

Nuclear war ain't shit.

Wait until bioweapons are made and inevitably leak from a BSL-max lab. That's like if the nukes were invisible, without number, and diligently tracked every individual down.

Unlike nukes, that's extinction time.

Not if we become multiplanetary by then though.

> Wait until bioweapons are made and inevitably leak from a BSL-max lab. That's like if the nukes were invisible, without number, and diligently tracked every individual down.

Plus, as we now know, the attacker might be able to rely on a sizable portion of the target population downplaying, denying, and deliberately spreading, and otherwise politicizing the bio agent. You don't get that with nukes. Once the bombs start dropping, nobody's going to have the time to spread conspiracy theories.

To be honest never-ending myriad of "local" conflicts and long-term economy downturn stresses me much more than nuclear war. That would be over pretty quick...

> That would be over pretty quick...

That's not a safe assumption. A nuclear war is far more likely to be a limited local exchange than the all-out-war imagined during the cold war. So you're unlikely to be killed outright by the exchange. Instead you're likely to to have to deal with the nuclear radiation fallout, severe food insecurity and increased global tension.

> I can’t tell what a world war would actually be about these days. It’s easy to imagine a lot of regional squabbles as the Pax Americana unwinds itself

Our current situation is very close to how WWI expanded from a regional squabble. Look to that one and ignore WWII to see how it might occur.

These are intimately related. Climate causes all sorts of geopolitical stresses that add new concerns about conflict, access to resources, etc.

Ignore the news. Almost none of it concerns you nor can you affect it.

I do now but the damage is done. I already know what's happening even without updates. Also I have <200km to war-torn Lviv, so... kind of concerns me.

... on the national and international level. but absolutely read your local / state news. it is 1) often very, directly relevant, and 2) is something you may have the ability to impact, and often directly.

case in point: my sister in law and her husband got pissed off about speed bumps and signs (too many, and/or too few, in the right places), and started going to town hall meetings. show up with photos and make some valid points and things get changed...

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