Hacker News Reader

Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

I believe wage work has a significant factor in all this.

Most are not paid for results, they're paid for time at desk and regular responsibilities such as making commits, delivering status updates, code reviews, etc. - the daily activities of work are monitored more closely than the output. Most ESOP grant such little equity that working harder could never observably drive an increase in its value. Getting a project done faster just means another project to begin sooner.

Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.

View on HN

It gets worse than that: You can possibly get rewarded based on your manager's goals, or maybe your skip level's, but that doesn't necessarily have to line up all that well with more serious business goals. I am sure I am not the only one that had to help initiatives that I thought would be, at best, just wasteful to the business, or that we could get 80% of the value with 20% of the efforts. But it's ultimately about the person who writes the review.

This gets us to the rule number one of being successful at a job: Make sure your manager likes you. Get 8 layers of people whose priority is just to be sure their manager likes them, and what is getting done is very unlikely to have much to do with shareholder value, customer happiness, or anything like that.

> Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.

Wow. I've read a lot of hacker news this past decade, but I've never seen this articulated so well before. You really lifted the veil for me here. I see this everywhere, people thinking the work is the point, but I haven't been able to crystallize my thoughts about it like you did just now.

Marx had a lot of good ideas, though you wouldn't know it by listening to capitalist-controlled institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

I think it's related. The nature of the wage work likely also self-selects for people who simply enjoy coding and being removed from the bigger picture problems they are solving.

Im on the side of only enjoy coding to solve problems and i skipped software engineering and coding for work explicitly because i did not want to participate in that dynamic of being removed from the problems. instead i went into business analytics, and now that AI is gaining traction I am able to do more of what I love - improving processes and automation - without ever really needing to "pay dues" doing grunt work I never cared to be skilled at in the first place unless it was necessary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com