18 ms·

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower

by sp0rk 1y ago

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

adamc 1y ago
Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.
- tomslick 1y ago
  > And many work multiple gigs I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.
palmotea 1y ago
>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike. Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road. If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term. So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations. Results now are way better than results later.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term. That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. > So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? > Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations. Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case. > Results now are way better than results later. So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
    - pixl97 1y ago
      >That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this. >So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?
      - palmotea 1y ago
        >> That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. > You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this. Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing? >> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? > You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA? What's your point with that political derail? It's honestly baffling.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example. If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost. We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the complaining as performance art when we know the solution but choose not to implement it. If we want people to care, we have to pay them enough to care.
  - parpfish 1y ago
    there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in work if you're being forced to follow a script or the demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork. i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
  - edc117 1y ago
    Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.
WalterBright 1y ago
> because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  That may be, but it's possible it has become more employer-adversarial; that the employer/employee "contract" has become increasingly one-sided.
saubeidl 1y ago
The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement. Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market. This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?
  - layer8 1y ago
    Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine? Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses. Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
      - layer8 1y ago
        I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.
        ambicapter 1y ago
        GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.
II2II 1y ago
I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get. Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. I think strong unions are the only way forward
  - aerostable_slug 1y ago
    > without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board. It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.
      - 1y ago
thewebguyd 1y ago
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike. I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits. A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  “ There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is” Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up. It seems companies hate their employees and customers
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > It seems companies hate their employees and customers They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.” Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess. No wonder people become cynical.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  I'd also say we are lost in scale. The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons. I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes. I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged. (The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    https://ilsr.org/ https://ilsr.org/
munificent 1y ago
I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions. We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us. If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship. So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've thought that too but have had to point out to myself that some very deserving people were in fact promoted. Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
    Obviously deserving people do find career advancement. Yet it is incredibly frustrating that I can think of two load bearing individuals who were the most dependable people in the company, yet received no recognition for this fact. They would just constantly roll up their sleeves and do the vital, non flashy work that kept the business functioning.
simonsarris 1y ago
Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.
try_the_bass 1y ago
Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so. I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here. Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly. I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
paulddraper 1y ago
When do you think large employers were pretending to care? And when did people stop caring? Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?
navane 1y ago
"It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike." I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.
reaperducer 1y ago
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos. Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.

by sp0rk 1y ago

adamc 1y ago

Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.

tomslick 1y ago
> And many work multiple gigs I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.

palmotea 1y ago

>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike. Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road. If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.

deadbabe 1y ago
Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term. So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations. Results now are way better than results later.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term. That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. > So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? > Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations. Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case. > Results now are way better than results later. So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
  - pixl97 1y ago
    >That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this. >So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?
    - palmotea 1y ago
      >> That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. > You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this. Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing? >> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? > You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA? What's your point with that political derail? It's honestly baffling.

toomuchtodo 1y ago

Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example. If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.

ryandrake 1y ago
Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost. We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the complaining as performance art when we know the solution but choose not to implement it. If we want people to care, we have to pay them enough to care.
- parpfish 1y ago
  there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in work if you're being forced to follow a script or the demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork. i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
- edc117 1y ago
  Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.

WalterBright 1y ago

> because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
That may be, but it's possible it has become more employer-adversarial; that the employer/employee "contract" has become increasingly one-sided.

saubeidl 1y ago

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement. Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market. This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

WalterBright 1y ago
Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?
- layer8 1y ago
  Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine? Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses. Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
    - layer8 1y ago
      I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.
      - ambicapter 1y ago
        GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.

II2II 1y ago

I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.

thewebguyd 1y ago
It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get. Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. I think strong unions are the only way forward
- aerostable_slug 1y ago
  > without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board. It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.
    - 1y ago

thewebguyd 1y ago

> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike. I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits. A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
“ There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is” Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up. It seems companies hate their employees and customers
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > It seems companies hate their employees and customers They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.” Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess. No wonder people become cynical.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago
I'd also say we are lost in scale. The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons. I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes. I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged. (The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  https://ilsr.org/ https://ilsr.org/

munificent 1y ago

I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions. We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us. If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship. So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago

On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've thought that too but have had to point out to myself that some very deserving people were in fact promoted. Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Obviously deserving people do find career advancement. Yet it is incredibly frustrating that I can think of two load bearing individuals who were the most dependable people in the company, yet received no recognition for this fact. They would just constantly roll up their sleeves and do the vital, non flashy work that kept the business functioning.

simonsarris 1y ago

Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.

try_the_bass 1y ago

Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so. I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here. Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly. I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".

paulddraper 1y ago

When do you think large employers were pretending to care? And when did people stop caring? Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?

navane 1y ago

"It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike." I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.

reaperducer 1y ago

I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos. Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.