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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.

Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.

Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.

As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.

Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...

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> Ageism is just a dick move in general.

It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.

This only works assuming somebody cares what works and what doesn't. Often nobody does. Most organizations do not tend to reward the good decision that made everything easy. They reward things that look hard and projects that take forever as long as they can somehow be spun as successes.

I've been pretty successful but my advice is almost always ignored. Where it matters is the stuff I do or the stuff I have control over (e.g. teams I lead).

This entire comment reverberates deep in my bones of late, and I sympathize with you on struggling to find recognition for just doing good work or having good ideas.

A company I worked at years ago had a devious and exploitative approach to market domination: hiring older super experienced workers and plugging them into teams with young over-eager programmers…

People with deep industry knowledge who were trained up to be decent programmers (middling, but serious, consistent, and quality focused), setting the direction. Those domain experts were working with young dumbasses who would burn 60+ hour weeks to make sales deadlines and keep current with ever shifting platform tech that breaks all the time. SMEs baked into the core development loop, DDD-made-flesh essentially, with cheaper more junior devs supporting scale for less money and maximizing the SMEs vision/contributions.

It’s an obvious and effective strategy. I’d speculate the management skills it takes to setup are what keep it as a rarity.

Try telling this to the baby faced MBAs that run the org.

> Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.

What is the alternative ?

A little over 100 years ago women were only 20% of the labor force. [1] Which is to say, most women did not participate in wage employment.

Now they're ~47%. Which is great! But it also hints that society doesn't need most of the labor for the system to still function.

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history

Rather like subsistence farming, everyone got out of housework as soon as possible and into a far less onerous office.

People didn't get out of housework. They're doing housework and office work.

Housework isn’t as onerous now as it was 100 years ago, though.

if I could retire, raise my kids and homeschool them, and do housework instead I would in a second. Nothing is more interesting, more fulfilling, and more challenging then raising the next generation.

"Work" does not exclusively mean "work full time for a wage".

yeah but carrying and raising kids?

You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously.

There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.

The disappearing middle class in America is becoming the upper class.

>Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.

How does a society that allows not working function? How does it defend itself against attacking societies?

How much of our labor is being used on activities that improve society's ability to defend itself, even in an indirect way? Isn't most of it being used to, as a schematic, serve coffee and send email?

Waste is abound, but how would you get members of the society to feel like things are "fair enough" if everyone didn't "have to work"? (they are obviously not currently, but I am referring to a more ideal society where obviously some people need to do some work)

With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life. Those excess gains were slurped up by the ruling class instead. And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.

>With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life.

The current allocation of who does and who does not have to work and how much they have to work is suboptimal, and one of the reasons for societal decay.

>And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.

There are multiple examples of the Chinese, Russian, Americans, and other boogeymen "getting" others in my short lifetime of 40 years.

Either way, there's highly undesirable work that has to be done for many societies, whether it be cleaning sewers, farming in humid, hot weather, and educating one's self for 30 years just to do surgery at 2AM, and clean up the fluids and mess of that surgery. If only some people have to do that and not others, it obviously brings up questions of fairness, so the fair alternative is everyone has to work for a certain quality of life (which is not currently true for those with >$x assets).

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