I suppose "the author can go fuck himself" is a frowned-upon response on Hacker News
Like what an incredibly egocentric, condescending, deplorable way to talk about other human beings with their own rich inner lives, desires, needs, relationships, etc.
"No, they're just pre-programmed, unthinking bots following basic algorithms."
Same with Musk, same with Zuckerberg, these entitled twats then use their money to try and convince the world that they are enlightened prophets, all while contributing nothing to the happiness and beauty of the world.
Otherwise the guy doesn't seem to be having a crisis at all. The problem is he's been doing business for the past 10 years. Likely put in a lot more hours than needed. Now business is all he knows and catching up to doing something more meaningful is hard.
The author is too dumb to even effectively disguise the extent to which he is just showing off throughout the article.
I suppose the fact that Musk is his idol sums it up.
If you can't empathise with someone and understand (to some extent) their world view, it would be very easy to see them as alien, programmed NPCs. Not everyone can easily train their empathy muscle.
Our brains are not evolved for the scale of human civilisation. The mind rebels trying to accept that 8 billion people have as much going on (or more) than you do.
"NPC coworkers" is a provocative way of phrasing it, but yesterday I saw another HN commenter say "We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value". This is mostly the same mindset.
To jump from "managers don't know how to allocate tasks" to "the employee being managed is an unthinking, fungible automaton" is enormous.
The disdain of this shithead toward coworkers is misplaced. He accuses his coworkers who are being mismanaged of being NPCs when it's more apt to accuse the managers of being bad "game designers," to carry the analogy further.
It's also a weird analogy to make in 2025, when co-op games exist. What mental deficiency, what arrogance must you suffer from to analogize coworkers to pre-programmed non-humans when actual humans play the games with you these days?
Edit: His entire line of thinking reminds me so much of the stupid geeks in high school who looked at athletically-gifted classmates and said "they aren't deep like I am." Give me a break. The shallow ones are the ones incapable of identifying the spark of the divine in people different from themselves.
it so easy to misinterpret text, ask any religion