Ask HN: Widespread Apathy?

Lack of communication breeds lack of concern, in my opinion. I don't think some folk understand how high your communication bandwidth needs to be to go fully remote.

I recently heard from someone at stripe that their whole internal comms is dead. People are extremely unhappy and disengaged. Something surely is going on.

Lots of layoffs over last few years. Stuck at a company with high pay that I loathe (bad leadership, focus, expecting do 2 peoples worth of work) and searching for a year plus with barely a nibble.

I feel guilty I’m a drag on the company but so hard to move in this market.

So just why I haven’t been that engaged and burnout. Maybe others have similar experience.

I feel the same way, but I only have anecdotes from one company that I have stayed with for an unusually long time.

I feel like over the last year a lot of people around me have reached the point where they would naturally start looking around at other opportunities. But there just aren't that many opportunities around. So I suspect people are just hanging about, collecting a paycheque and waiting for the right time to bounce.

To me, this seems like a good sign that maybe the US norm of workaholism is finally on the decline and workers are starting to set boundaries. Work is a financial exchange of labor for money. "Super engagement" is not necessarily part of that exchange. IMO save your super-engagement for your family, your hobbies, your church, service to your community, and so on. Lifetimes are limited, how much of your soul-hours should you be spending on making some shareholders you've never met rich?

Maybe it's because money doesn't buy as much as it did 4 years ago. Since most employees have limited control over their mostly-static salaries, they've scaled down output accordingly.

I blame the enshittification of the Internet. So many of us work with the Internet. And seeing it turning into a pile of garbage is soulcrushing.

IMO it’s the reality of technology being a business, not a value-set, settling in.

1999-2020 was 20+ years.

That’s about the length of a long-term industry cycle.

It’s also 20 yrs of selling a narrative about tech that recruited ambitious, value-driven people who also wanted to make money.

Don’t want 18 hr days at Goldman or 10 years of medical school, but want the pay? Come work 8 at <tech co> and make the same pay without the intern and first years hazing by an alcoholic 45 y/o MD who hates their spouse and never goes home.

And then if I was to get pretty negative: Then, ~2020 hits, the cracks in the ideology show, no way to hide the data revenue models behind every nice Change the World pitch, turns out tech also shredded social discourse and now looks like it might unemploy Mom and friends, and maybe undue democracy (who saw that coming haha), and so on. VCs always win and you’re tired of reading their same think piece blog posts, layoffs always win, a lot of places that seemed the polar opposite still became IBM accidentally. Work, don’t work, it’ll be several quarters before that catches up to you. If you’re really introspective - why did I make $200k+ in my pajamas during COVID while someone made $15/hr at Whole Foods getting exposed to a pandemic all day long? Pretty sure people in that position actually got very sick… but HelloFresh kept getting delivered so I didn’t realize.

The shine has worn off. That is all imo. Place that are both really changing the world, actually understand the second order effects and plan for those, and you can get hired at are few and far between. It’s still/just an industry where you can make a ton of money and keep your brain curious.

People have gotten the message that capitalism is a cancer that will exploit workers of every bit of value for a pittance. People are fighting back by quiet quitting and doing the absolute bare minimum to collect a paycheck. There's literally no point in working hard for your higher ups to make bank off of you while you get an "attaboy." They're going to learn the hard way now.

Over-hiring in the zero interest years. It resulted in the hiring of non-qualified personnel and of qualified personnel with no concrete plans on how to utilize them. Either is a buzz kill, especially when the chickens came home to roost with respect to results (revenues) vs ballooned valuations.

My observations parallel those of many in this thread. Another thing I've noticed, but wasn't able to properly "name" until someone I work with did so, is the idea of a "pocket veto." [1]

There are two people on my team who have become extremely disengaged of late–and I think one has good reason–and one way this manifests is in their agreement to do or fix something, but those changes never actually being implemented. I find myself having to follow up many times to ensure things don't get lost in the shuffle. But I don't directly manage one of the people, and it seems like they just DGAF what I say–no matter how I approach them. "Strong suggestions" really don't go anywhere. Pretty apathetic, if you ask me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_veto

edit: fixed typos

Maybe tech companies being more focused on profitability rather than growth, leadership changes where start up environments are becoming more corporate like?

What is “recently”? How did you choose the last three companies you worked at and why did you leave them?

I don't know how anyone was ever all that engaged at large IT/Software companies - I always got the feeling I was working with a bunch of overly enthusiastic children lead by psychopaths who would cut up their families for the organs or whatever if they thought it would help them fulfill whatever their current ambition was.

I now work at a really small company lead by people who seem genuine (they've managed to at least keep up the act for a few years I suppose). It doesn't pay particularly well (though not bad for where I live either), and there's no "growth" potential (I learn lots of new stuff, but the money isn't going to double or triple or anything like that). No ads or hyperscaling - we just make a product that people are willing to pay money for. I'm as engaged as I've ever been for an employer.

People have realized that the systemic rot is far bigger than one Bad Orange Man, a Putler way out in Russia, & the horde of "science deniers". The high of frenzy from the 5 minutes of hate has worn off. Yet the problems remain...

I'm young, so a lot of my experience is mainly from being a kid/teen that was enamored by the tech industry, to joining in on the tail end (early 2010's).

In the 90's/2000's, the tech industry was seen as the place for visionaries and the hard workers who were there to change the world, to make it a better place. Google had the motto "Don't be evil", and wanted to make all of the world's information easily accessible. Apple was for the perfectionists, the artsy-tech crowd, Facebook was there to connect people, etc.

But as those company's (and the industry) matured, those dreams were pushed to the side. As these companies grew, it became about shareholder profit (because remember, company's have to operate in the best interest of their shareholders legally, which means protecting and increasing their wealth). As such, those visionaries at Google who were making the world a better place by making information accessible, now collect data and advertise to the world in, objectively, unethical ways. Those at Facebook who wanted to connect people from all over the world to build communities and promote discussion, now just grab as much data as possible to promote hyper-targeted ads.

The industry matured, interest rates rose, and VC's became more picky with where they spent their money. As such, these smaller slights against users and employees had to be accelerated in recent years. Teams and even entire departments were laid off, the quantity of ads was increased, while the quality decreased, free services locked behind paywalls, all in an effort to save money to meet a 5% profit growth that quarter.

Tech workers are no longer viewed as the world changers leading the company's vision for greatness, some execs view us as an obstacle to their revenue goals. We're a liability that needs to be mitigated, and layoffs are an easy way to do that.

Ultimately, we've all become kind of jaded to the tech industry. It's no longer about making the world a better place, it's about money, and we're not in the club.

I theorize it's the wage gap. Why bust your ass for a company that makes millions or more, when the wage you get as an employee will not even allow you to buy a roof over your head?

Real estate is bought in bulk by the same people that rake in the big bucks in those companies as well. And rented out to people that can't afford to buy a house for premium profit.

The same is happening online: companies are using the collective intelligence of everyone to train models to sell back to those same people for profit.

We're getting screwed at both ends

For the first time in a long while a generation is worse off than their parents. Food, housing, health, clean air and water. Every basic need from the bottom of Maslow's pyramid is currently under scrutiny.

I think an engaging workplace is hard to cultivate. You have to be working on hard stuff and the people working toward it need real stakes in the game. That's not easy to find these days. If you do want this I think you'd be able to find it in AI companies that are _actually_ pushing the envelope (not most of them).

But honestly, I think it's better to find meaning outside of work. Work on something hard outside of work, or just find a few hobbies that make you happy. I'm not even 30 and I already personally feel the "grind mindset" leaving me as I find the things I thought were most important a decade ago don't matter so much any more e.g. lots of money and climbing the corporate ladder.

When there is no hope, operating model follows. There are various costs to convince someone to care (economic, org culture, etc). People have stopped caring for good reason: value prop decline.

No one is going to hustle for a meh deal, unless they’re naive or unsophisticated.

My theory is that the Great Resignation (which was moreso the "Great Job Hop") and the layoffs that followed moved a lot of people from roles that they enjoyed working in to roles that they don't enjoy, and the average happiness across the tech industry has dipped sharply as a result.

I changed companies twice between 2020 and 2024 and I've noticed this at both places. Not only is the average tenure of current employees everywhere much shorter (most of the people in the big tech where I work joined in the last 3 years), everyone works like they're only planning to stay for a short while.

Everyone who said, "Yeah, I like computers and stuff," took a Python bootcamp and expected a $500k total compensation package after just three months. The quality of people in tech has become absolutely terrible. Many lack domain knowledge, and those who have it are frustrated, stuck fixing problems without getting recognition or finding any enjoyment like they used to. Every resume seems to belong to someone who just wants to be in tech, regardless of what they did before. It’s all about getting into tech by any means necessary. We now have project managers who can’t even turn on a computer without it catching fire, yet they are managing highly technical projects everywhere.

I am apathetic about the entire industry, as a consultant. Everybody is working on bullshit products that have no relevance whatsoever with the real world, overcomplicated with bullshit techniques like morning standups and Zoom meetings that are a total waste of time. We had a taste of freedom during the pandemic and now all we get is a mockery of it, with 99.9% companies hiring only on hybrid 3 days in the office bullshit contracts. Without touching upon the fact that any tech interview for any bullshit position is a 3-stage gauntlet you'll have to subject yourself to after winning the lottery of a recruiter randomly picking your CV out of 500 ones from younger, less experienced but cheaper devs.

The technology is ever boring. I've been studying CS papers from the 1960s-1990s and there is a lot of ingenuity and new avenues being explored. Now any random HN engineer can only ask "how is this better than Rust?" and I feel that not only we have remained stuck on languages and tech from the 1980s, we have regressed so much that most developers have forgotten or never even learned about "futuristic" environments such as Lisp or Smalltalk. People roll their eyes at these names for the simple reason that no one has been paid to improve upon these for the past 40 years, because companies only care about average productivity of the junior dev. We've spent the last 30 years reinventing C and UNIX; now the cool kids are adding coloured text in their VT100 terminals. Mindblowing.

I am still consulting because being an employee is more and more like white-collar slavery, and post-pandemic it's not even that well-paid, what with the massive influx of low-quality, low-requirement workers and the post-2008 money tap being closed. I am spending my free time devouring old CS papers, and the thought of writing 1500 lines of YAML to deploy a Kubernetes sounds such a pointless, anachronistic castle of sands built by massive tech corps that have just found a way of turning the art of computer programming into a circus of Taylorist code monkeys following a script for 8 hours a days.

Of course I'm apathetic. I'm too old for this.

/rant

Whatever.

From my perspective of 30 years in professional tech development, there are rapidly diminishing returns for one's effort within companies.

You may see great opportunities to improve metrics within your org, but for various reasons you cannot actually achieve these goals based on your own individual effort. The reasons for failure are myriad, and I will avoid going down that path of sad tales.

Finally now, when I'm just about out of energy, I recognize that the most likely way to do something of significance or otherwise effect real beneficial change is to strike out on your own, ideally with a partner or two, and build something new. Of course that new thing will ultimately get bought by one of the bigger laggard companies who is incapable of allowing something like this to develop internally. But you accept that reality and vow to build something new after that opportunity is closed out.

At this point, we should be teaching classes on how to build great new things and get them sold off to the big slow giants. Rinse, repeat. I know there are people already doing this, but it's not well known or recognized.