Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?
14 points by chobeat
14 points by chobeat
Not a single mention of Jira in TFA or the comments? It's the first thing I thought of when I see tech and sadness together with a question mark
The first time I tried to mark a bug as a duplicate of another bug I ended up on https://ifuckinghatejira.com
For a glorious few decades, it was possible to do work that didn't fucking suck. More recently, you had to look a bit, but it was still there. Today, it's getting harder and harder to find that, and it's plausible that it's going to be taken away entirely. And in exchange for what? The tech that's doing this also makes every other aspect of our lives worse -- it's like being employed to smash artwork and set literature on fire.
It might be possible to be happy if the world was getting better as a result of our work, but it's very obviously not. Even ignoring the impact onpersonal impact on the careers of us and our friends, it's setting the planet on fire, and making it even more difficult for artists to produce art as a way to make ends meet.
It's hard to be happy in the circumstances we've engineered.
I think of it as a series of expanding circles of "suckless:" hopefully my showing up to work makes some small portion of my colleague's work experience suck less, and I always hope that the end users of the things I'm building have their lives made better in some small way, and I for sure benefit from the absolutely staggering amount of value produced by Mozilla, Android, GitLab, the kind souls that make Linux such a workhorse, and the fact I don't have to goddamn call anyone on the phone like a caveperson to schedule a flight/train ticket/check inventory in a store
There's always going to be something horrible, because the incentives are out of whack, but as long as the campsite is in better shape than when I got to it, I consider it a net win
what if the campsite is the base camp of an army committing war crimes against civilians? Because that's what a lot of the tech people are working on these days.
I can't really relate to this article, I wonder if it's a cultural difference since it's focussed on America.
“Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies.”
That's always been in the case in my experience. Most of the people I've worked with have had, and like to talk about, fulfilling lives outside of work. The few who derive their sense of meaning from their job tended to be bores, or startup founders. Even people (like myself) who are into programming as a hobby sharply differentiate between programming for work and programming for fun.
I don't think AI has accelerated this trend at all.
The altruism in these careers, then, is hard to find. So how does anyone do it without losing their mind?
You do it for the money so you can enjoy your life outside of work. You work so you can live, not the other way around.
But does this power take people too far from their work? Does something feel off about having someone else execute nearly all the work, even if the work didn't feel very meaningful to begin with?
Good quote.
Some disagreements I have with the article:
I think many knowledge workers have known for a long time of the "pointless" nature of knowledge work. After all, it's one of the "knowledges" that they work with.
Also, the trope of "work as religion" is as old as Max Weber, at least.
Also, the trope of "work as religion" is as old as Max Weber, at least.
I doubt most tech workers have been exposed to the concept, especially the Protestant workerist ones in the USA so it's good to repeat it.