Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.
This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.
Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type person. One can’t cary about every pothole in the world.
As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
The author should really move to Japan if they’re so impressed. Then they’ll get to find out what things in Japan no-one gives a shit about, and the shine will wear off.
I recently spent some time in the ER in a criminally underfunded and understaffed public healthcare system. People in quite severe pain were languishing waiting their turn but the nurses went out of their way to show a semblance of care and humanity to the patients and even apologize to them when they didn't have to and weren't expected to. Maybe that overall situation shows that key people in the society or government don't care but clearly the frontline people still care. I choose to focus on them and do my little bit to make things around me a little bit better when maybe no one expects me to either.
I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else. They just buy into a different social contract, one where they believe that if you behave a certain way towards others, your life in turn will be better as well. Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there. Those sorts of social contracts only work when everyone is on the same page.
>The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
The author could stop eating at McDonald's and send a message to the company with his behaviour. But he does not care.
>The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.
The author could ask the guy to turn off the music and make the hiking trail more pleasurable for everyone. But he does not care.
Et cetera. He cares for views on his blog so he writes on his blog.
This is cynical. There are a lot of people who do care. Consider that someone cared enough to build a bike lane in the first place. IMO life is hard for most people and as much as most would love to "care", they have to take care of themselves and their families first. The caring is focused where it is best applied.
I also don't think Elon would bother fixing a bike ramp or installing dog bag dispensers around his home(s). So if he does "care", it's not about things you care about.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.
I'm so glad that someone else had the patience and articulation to write this article so that I didn't have to (as a personal venting exercise). My personal takeaway of the mutually shared frustrations in poor design has been apparent since maybe the 1990's onwards. It is very sad to see throwaway consumerism, permeate culture to the point where from an industrial design POV you need to buy vintage or ludicrously expensive appliances to have a beautiful and functional product that is also reliable. In the past decades, companies like Braun were able to bring beauty into the house, where now Temu disposables have taken their place.
Thank you to the author for putting the feeling I have had since years into words. It's not just the US that is this bad, it's also in Europe. Just looking at the COVID pandemic tells you all you need to know about countries where people care and where they don't care. Maybe the west emphasized individualism too much? See also: Communitarianism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism
but once you start accounting for what the other person is going through, none of these may look as bad as they are.
A person could've lost his dog and want to free his mind by working out and forgets to put the weights back! one time its fine! few times its OK! happens every day, someone has to intervene!
In my experience it isn't individuals not caring as much as there is no one individual accountable for making these kind of decisions. Whomever designed the bike ramp probably followed a set of curb-and-ramp regulations set by some committee, thought they were stupid, but then remembered that the last time he pushed back it was a huge hassle and he got reprimanded by his boss. The committee people probably cared about the rules in general but didn't foresee all use cases and didn't make their rules flexible enough.
A McDonald's kiosk is a masterpiece of engineering perfectly designed to make as much money as possible. It's by no means lazily made or without afterthoughts or care. Every detail in the interface has was decided after tons of experiments and hours of meetings.
To make people / us care, we need to be subject to frequent community gossip. But the suburbs were built in part to escape that, hence why we create these omni-directional online communities, distressed at everything but responsible for nothing.
I set up a weekly auto-buy for a stock about a year ago with Cashapp.
I noticed the stock was way up today so I logged in to sell. Well, turns out the auto-buy has just... Not been firing... For a solid year. I have two purchases and then it stopped. It still says I have a weekly auto-buy set up, but I have not been charged.
In a just society, I would be owed my potential winnings for these unprocessed purchases, but having dealt with Cashapp support in the past I know damn well there's no way they're going to agree to that. I would be lucky to even catch the ear of a human being. It's sure as hell not worth taking them to court over a loss of maybe a couple hundred dollars at most.
The opaque and useless support of modern companies is literally in my eyes the worst part about the modern world. They quite literally do not care.
I don’t think people don’t care, I think they have too much to do. Kids at home, too much work, and still barely making ends meet. Our society is set up to push people to the max, prioritizing quantity and “good enough” over quality. Most people do not have a career where spending 1% more time on a curb design instead of spending that time with their kids results in any more pay, much less the spare time to focus on craftsmanship for its own sake.
Thanks for complaining about McDonald's self service, which is truly dreadful and just gets worse (no I don't have the app, why would I want something you people made on my own phone, stop asking!).
Another "they don't care" is the TV screens that have the menu on in the background, that used to have menu and prices when you went up to order, and now display "cool animations" half the time so you can't read the menu while you're up there ordering and have to wait and look like an idiot for the menu to come back.
People do not care because they don’t want to suffer all the time they see some lack of effort.
Even when there is 80% carers and 20% do-not-carers, 80% will suffer and go into the opposing group.
It has upside-down-bowl stability.
That bike lane ending might be so because it forces you to slow down. You are not supposed to crash into unsuspecting pedestrians when the bike lane ends. You should actually stop and get off the bike at this point.
From skip-reading, this is not about motivation (intrinsic or otherwise) in general. This is about other people not caring about you, or what you care about.
I care a great deal about DevEx, and since no one else tends to care as much as I do, I can do good work for a few years, but then I'm worn out from fighting alone. I move on and hope things are more aligned somewhere else. Doesn't mean my co-workers are wrong for "not caring", just that I haven't found my peers.
The driver who doesn't let you into her lane perhaps cares deeply about not being late, again, to pick up her kids from daycare. Or her brother is about to do that stupid thing again, and if she doesn't try to stop him, she'll feel bad forever, again. Which lane you're in doesn't even register on her list.
It’s not a case of not caring, but rather caring about something else more. If you live in a country that emphasizes profit and watching out for self as priority then yeah you’re not going to get a whole lot of wholesome selfless community minded behavior.
It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.
I invite the author to work for a large corp or a government and try and improve things. The most supportive people for improvements will be your team. The least supportive will be the higher-level managers. And no, the Director of Transportation is not the real manager. That's the mayor or city council.
Why? They get measured on the sweeping stuff, by the broad demands, and the people who actually pay them (in money or votes).
A better bike ramp that involves user testing but involves a delay that pushes work into the next quarter, changing accounting? That's a problem. I've lived this scenario where user features got axed to ensure all work could be budgeted under a particular quarter. Or a sign? That costs money and also needs approval, perhaps from another department.
Oh, and you are improving one bike ramp? Can't do that without people complaining. Got to improve all of them. So that is now a multi-million dollar project.
In a large org, it often isn't clear who owns overall design control, if anyone.
Lights that are great for drivers but suck for everyone else? That's many things in most cities and that is because drivers are the most vocal (and often the largest) population. Drivers win on everything from parking to infrastructure spending and drivers will tell city council what's on their mind.
For the corporate software I worked on, many users hated it. Tons of complaints. Team agreed. Team created proposal to fix it. Team managers pitched it to those above for the broader roadmap. Management explicitly said they didn't want to waste time on UI as the people paying were not the same as the people using.
Never worked for the DMV, but know a guy who maintains some software for one. What's the priority? Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Nobody wants to fund the DMV. Nobody wants to pay for technological improvements for it. Nobody wants to pay for staffing. It is where small amounts get shaved off to pay for things people do care about. The guy in charge of the DMV is tasked with keeping costs low.
Why don't people care? Maybe because they can't anymore? Look at the skyrocking number of silent quitters, of people doing the bare minimum. Look at the perpetual doomposting from the media since around 2015.
The world is in a perpetual decay, it's not a single bit the same as it was pre 9/11.
The world most of us grew up in is lost.
So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort?
Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse.
They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.
Sometimes people don’t care, but often they are just unaware because there is no mechanism for feedback to make its way to them after they have designed the thing. Whoever designed that bike ramp probably designed a thousand other road features, lives many miles away, and never communicates with the people that handle injury reports; he knows none of the visceral details that you see every day in your specific corner of the universe.
I agree with author's frustrations. So many things could be better if people cared and did the right thing.
Japan is indeed slightly better in this regard: the work culture emphasizes doing your job as well as you possibly can, no matter how menial the job is. That's why you'll so often see attention to little details, which makes life better for everyone. It is very noticeable on a daily basis.
There must be a name for this bias. "Everyone else's stuff sucks but the reason my stuff sucks is because someone is keeping me from doing good work"
Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."
Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price
In smaller communities, people care more. There is a reputation social cost associated with being a self-centered asshole when everyone knows each other. If one doesn't care about others, they'll soon find themselves excluded from social circles, not offered help when they need it, and similar.
This is not the case in large cities – show 1 million people you do not care for them and there are still millions that will treat you reasonably well, especially if you can make a nice first impression. In some way, this social environment optimizes for not caring.
This is why I spent 30 years living in large cities around the world and now moved to a relatively small town. And I couldn't be happier. Streets are tidy, the town administration fixes most known problems, the public spaces are refurbished and the parks are maintained, businesses are pleasant, and everyone is friendly – I think I could ask for a favor from my taxi driver and they'd probably try to help.
There is a list of grifters we all know and keep in our heads, and I don't think the community will ever do them any favors. That is justice – these people wouldn't do anything for the community, too. And this list happens naturally in small places – you know the character of those around you. Reputation for having good character has social value. And this is natural.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care.
The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact.
I admit the article is rather whiny but it did resonate a bit with me.
A good example - we are provided free Keurig cups at work. Lots and lots of disposable plastic. At the same time there’s been quite a number of changes put in place to “be more green” and help the environment.
I asked my coworkers one day why we use Keurig machines instead of making a pot of coffee and everyone just shrugged. I asked the administrative staff if there was any plans to switch to grounds to reduce the number of Keurig cups and they basically said “No, that would be too much effort.”
In that moment, it really did just feel like everyone around me did not care, so I dropped the subject.
I care. It's frustrating sometimes, but I still can't help myself.
Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.
On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.
I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.
This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.
In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.
You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.
I find that caring, and networking with other people who care, at work can be a huge career boost in the long term. So I'm not even sure the not-caring people are winning, long term, but maybe they also don't can't about that.
My experience is that such indifference comes with seniority. Unfortunately most people tend to try and change things outside of their control, ignoring what they can change and quickly burn out. With that said:
> It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
This really hits home as it's happened to me several times. Eventually, you stop caring as well and just cruise through. On the flip side, stress has gone down by quite a bit :)
This guy is this close to rediscovering worker alienation.
Most people don't care about doing their jobs well because they don't really choose what they work on, they don't own the product they're working on and don't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They know working harder won't improve their material condition either, only tire them more, seemingly pointlessly.
And so society turns to sh*t, but a lot of value is created for shareholders in the process, so who cares?
You know who really cares? The Karen in the HOA who relentlessly hounds the board because one of the units in the complex has the wrong color paint on their door. Be careful what you wish for, or the grass is always greener.
This is very prevalent in Eastern Europe, near east, probably China and India, not sure. Certainly not Japan.
Culture - is what people do when nobody is watching (or they think that nobody is watching) (I am stealing this definition from somewhere else).
So changing from good-enough culture to 'We are closer to perfectionists, culturally' -- is a big change that would take generations.
To be honest -- I am not if there is a 'one thing' that would drive this, may be it is an instinct, something built-in, more prevalently, in specific ethnics groups but not in others? if it is an instinct, then it should be preservable during immigration. Are the Japanese when living for more than on generation in a 'good enough culture' preserving the perfectionist traits ?
> The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.
This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss.
Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes what I’d even call malevolence) reaches a certain level feedback mechanisms are overwhelmed: those who do care can no-longer impose negative consequences on those who don’t. Their boss doesn’t care either, their careers progress just the same, they make the same money, their jobs are just as secure. It snowballs from there.
At least here in Sweden it’s taboo to say it, but I think we just need to get back to individual negative consequences for not caring.
I feel this way a lot, i would suspect however that these "1% improvements" are really obvious to some people and completely not obvious to the person who did it.
People are lazy, which means if it isnt obvious to them, or more importantly, if they don't see a direct incentive to their life, they don't do it.
In reality "1% effort" probably looks like 10-50+% effort... and society would be 10-1000x better for it but the incentives are wrong.
I used to care so much 10 years ago. I didn't have to factor the state of the world or society into all my decision. I trusted society fully like I trusted air.
Now I feel like the boiling frog and I only trust a handful of people. I don't trust the system. I don't trust that it's fair. I feel like being honest is harming my survival odds.
Imagine you have to live in North Korea... Your awareness of how that society operates can make it challenging to sing your praises to your dear leader.
I really hope things change. I live outside the US and it feels like we get the worst of everything. It's as though the political machinations which used to take place in Africa to keep the people poor has spread on to parts of the western world in a slightly different form. In Africa, the environment is about artificial deprivation of resources and rights; in the west, it's about deprivation of opportunities.
In Africa, the goal is to deprive people of resources and rights; to allow corporate monopolies to exploit their labor as much as possible. In the west, the goal is to deprive people of opportunities to prevent them from competing against monopolies.
In the west, we have a fake society where everyone pretends to be on the same playing field, but we're not even close.
If nobody cared, art would not exists. Nobody would do science. Civilisations would not be built. Health care would not exists. And nobody enjoys living in a shit hole. People collectively do make decisions which are selfless, so long they know there is a positive outcome. People stop caring about something soon as they recognise their efforts is wasted or it's all for nothing.
90% of "not caring" is actually external limitations where trying to overcome those would so far outweigh any benefit or even tangentially have anything to do with the original problem, that you must be a lunatic to waste energy trying to change it.
His "snowball of care" doesn't work if your 1% effort needs to put out the house fire first.
America glorifies hustlers and hustle culture. Society is about bragging and showing off how successful you and your family are compared to everyone else. What do you expect then? Of course no one cares enough to do more than they have to to get ahead of the other guy!
He's really talking about aesthetics (the philosophy of beauty) and how we lost the ability do admire beautiful things. The only means we have to assess & debate merit are quantitative (and lossy) so the grotesque dominates.
There are a couple exceptions about apathetic doctors and degrading community, but most of his examples are complicated and ugly things (McDonalds app, the bike ramp, dog mess , etc)
Whatever your locality is, there are existing opportunities to volunteer. Even if you don't particularly care about whatever that organization does, it's a great place to meet people who care, and they usually care about more than one thing. Maybe ask them about mutual aid.
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There is a very real danger in being too helpful in some organizations. I was too helpful and I got looks from my coworkers. People would call and ask for me specifically, which pissed them off.
In some organizations being too helpful is threatening to the boss. Are you trying to take their job?
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Another problem is the legacy mudball - it's not just for source code. The sidewalk fix that would cost less than $1000 in materials may wind up costing $100,000 after bubbling through all the required layers. The layers are there because of very real historical failings, but they create failures NOW. It's hard to build things now because of 'the sins of the father'.
I don't have faith that this is something we can fix in the short term because most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first. I'm not saying that the opposite is good either, but we should find a balance in between. I also feel like that we are all becoming more disconnected, alone, and where the center of gravity is only ourself. Despite my premise, I still have some hopes for future generations, but unfortunately I think that things will get way worse before correcting.
What make OP think they do not care? They apparently care about themselves more than anybody else to not care about anyone else. What is it called: selfishness!
I ran out of (good) things to watch on Netflix so I watched a couple of Japanese drama shows (TBS product I think). At first it seems boring as heck: no sex, no violence. But after a while, I think I got hooked. The usual theme is always something around respect, self-sacrifice, leaving a place better than when you found it kind of feeling. It is just a departure from the usual US based drama.
Is it just the general direction we in the US live everyday for the last decade?
The sad game theory result of this is that no one ends up caring or comes to the conclusion there is no point of caring. Wonder if it is at all possible to reverse it once you fall in this cycle.
I think there's an undertone of why should I care? or the idea of motivation. In Japan, theres definitely a social pressure to care, only because you'll become ostracized if you don't. In the west there are phrases from pop culture such as,"If it ain't broke don't fix it, Welp not my problem, ..." So the question is where does this stem from. Why do we not care?
Societies decide if they are pro-social or anti-social.
Pro-social is more work. It’s harder. It is caring, sensitive, flexible. You have to give a shit because society actively disapproves of and discourages not giving a shit. No one wants to be your friend cus your the asshole who doesn’t give a shit.
Anti-social is easier: you don’t have to care. My industrial effluent will cause cancer? I don’t care. My bigass truck is more likely to kill pedestrians? I don’t care. Masking during a pandemic jmight save someone else’s life? I don’t care.
Everyone wants to live in a prosocial society. Certainly many people complain about the fact that society isn’t pro-social, yet themselves are deeply anti-social.
“No one wants to work! Do you pay a living wage? Benefits? Heck no, my business wouldn’t be as profitable”
Unfortunately, the ability to freeload off the collective relatively more pro-social past is coming to a rapid end.
Or I guess, put another way,
IMO this is about Apathy. The feeling where doing things or not doing them, what's it matter anyways.
I think, a lot of the apocalyptic sentiment lately has a lot to do with it. Climate change is already ruining things and will only get worse and also has started getting worse faster. Politically, economically, things are pretty hopeless. What use is picking up trash or wearing a nice shirt in the face of all of this. What are we building towards, and does anything I do mean anything
Why should someone working at big tech care? Their mission is , generally , to 'capture value' from elsewhere and in the process make the world worse. Hard mission to get behind.
And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
And Elon Musk as the sole positive example is so lame.
All this bothers me because despite everything I do still care. But finding a way to express that is so hard. And after a while of it not mattering its hard to justify. And finding somewhere where your work actually matters seems impossible when we're funding everything except what's important
Nowadays, the scope of what I can care about is drastically reduced.
But one area where I don't allow care to be dissolved (apart from my family) is the work I do.
I had to leave a job where co-workers wouldn't care and it was about to influence my own level of care by the end.
Zooming out of your own world is a gift that can be taught.
You have a gift that 100% makes your life easier, with the side effect of the occasional frustration.
I feel compassion for those people who live in their own body and keep hitting walls.
I moved to Norway 5 years ago and I can say pretty confidently that everyone cares here. I haven’t been to Japan so can’t compare to that, but I haven’t experienced any of the not-caring examples you described at all.
It really sucks to be the one person who cares amongst colleagues that don’t care. You’re seen as creating work for others, making waves, causing instability, etc etc. Or because you care, you get burned out by trying to fix everything.
This person is missing that modern global society is rigidly organized around principles of competition. It's not the case that people don't care -- instead we are systemically pressured into putting all of our care into getting one over everyone else and taking care of our own. A society organized around different principles would give us the space to care about our collective wellbeing. Hopefully one day we'll get there.
People obviously "care", as in: we are social animals. We survived and thrived through coexistence and caring.
But how do you scale "caring" to huge and complex societies where vast numbers of individuals pursue a vast number of (possibly conflicting) interests?
When it appears that nobody cares its more a manifestation that the amount of systematic care we have invented and organized is not matching the need.
One powerful but ultimately limiting tool we invented is money. You can think of it as tokenizing care. "I have cared for $x worth of cleaning you now you care for $x worth of feeding me in return".
Many of our caring problems link to the primitive and oversimplifying traits of financialization. Which - in addition - over time have become grossly abused by shrewd operators.
Parents don't need to get paid to care for their babies and no amount of money will produce equivalent quality of care.
Elon does not care about others hundreds of billions of times more than a "normal" person does.
But the organizational failure from monetizing everything is only one pathology. There are many others:
As social animals we also care a lot about power structures. Organized violence and destruction shows that caring about others is not universal behavior in time and space.
Above all, intrinsic traits are groomed in childhood in a positive feedback loop. An educational system that reinforces caring behavior does not fall from a coconut tree. It needs to be cared about.
My instinctive, gut reaction is to hate this article, because I suspect its written by the kind of person who thinks they are better than everyone else.
But on deeper reflection I think they are actually right. Our civilisation became great because people took pride in their work - and not just at the crop level: the average poor tailor or cobbler would take 100x more pride in their work than the average government employee today. This is a problem — I suspect largely caused by the internet and technology warping people’s reward mechanisms - and it needs addressing.
Far as the bike lane/sign thing goes at least there’s a bike lane. Many streets in Seattle don’t even have a sidewalk let alone a bike lane. And I got hit by a car while biking in seattle a few years ago.
Either way wear a helmet while biking
Republicans want to tear government apart and privatize everything. Democrats have big ideas but sacrifice them on the altar of protecting public unions. Nobody fights for good government. I'm sick and tired of the endless big vs small government argument, I want to vote for good effective responsive government, good hang for the tax buck whatever it's size.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
It's a sad realization. When our culture only values profit as a measure of success there is a strong incentive to cut down costs (now) in exchange for quality (that will only be perceived in the future). It slowly moves down the threshold, bit by bit, until you suddenly realize how much we all lost for a few very rich people to become a little bit richer.
I think the undue romanticism for East Asian societies is an instance of not caring. I think it’s racist too.
East Asians are regular people, with regular problems, and regular levels of care or indifference.
I think the same of anyone who believes in the magic of ancient Chinese medicine. It’s not endearing to believe that the Chinese have some mystical otherworldly powers. It’s just racist.
I relate to this a lot. Someone is referring to this take as “bullshit” contrasting the experience of the average worker to a software engineer.
I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.
Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the US in 2025 that has been enabled entirely by people not speaking up.
I’m myself guilty of staying on the sidelines. Starting to realize that perhaps I need to be louder, because no one else is speaking up and that “giving a fuck” is something that must be led by example.
What the author of this post is actually mad about is that most people don't care about him. The people who designed the DMV don't care about him. The people who made the crappy Oracle HR software he probably has to use don't care about him. The people who designed the bike lanes don't care about him.
It's not their job to. They have about a million other priorities, they're not sorry about it, and they shouldn't be.
The DMV, the HR software people, the engineering people, they care about lots of things: Following the laws they are required to follow; maintaining regulatory compliance. Handling the latest set of changes and rules from a higher office who demands they be implemented yesterday. Not overwhelming the underpaid staff they have on-hand. Figuring out how to deal with a generally unpleasant general public, including the guy who wrote this. Holding back an ounce of sanity so they can get home at the end of the day and be happy and not drink themselves to death.
The reality is that life is a series of tradeoffs. Even if I am giving 100% at work (and I have a family and a life, so often I am not), that 100% does not get allocated entirely or even mostly to "deliver the best experience for the specific needs of the author of this article." It's dedicated to getting work out the door at an acceptable level of quality; monitoring our systems so they don't crash and lose us money; complying with the rules and procedures my employer demands I comply with; being tolerable and decent to my colleagues so they don't resent me and make my life harder. If I think about the needs of one specific customer out of the millions that transact business with my employer every day, it's because something extraordinary has happened with implications for one of the things above.
What sets people like Elon apart is that they are single-mindedly dedicated to getting people to appease them, and also pretty good at it. All Elon cares about is whatever interests him day-to-day, his ego, his impact on the world, whether people like him or hate him. He's "successful", by this author's metric, because he's self-obsessed.
All that said, the UK has a phrase for someone who cares only to do the bare minimum: a jobsworth, as in, more than my job's worth. A jobsworth is unhelpful on purpose, or because enforcing apathy is more valuable to them than doing anything that might impose upon them later an obligation to act. The thing is - those people are universally reviled. They are not liked or approved of in society. They're also a severe minority.
Most people are doing their best to stay above water on a dozen different things, and you are only one of them. The author ought to have some humility and realize that.
This post is angry detritus. I’m sorry someone upset you recently Grant, but seriously?
Billions of people care. And if you bother looking for them, you’ll find them. Most of the problems he describes result from complex systems being challenging and individuals having limited ability both to comprehend and influence them.
And no I don’t mean “this software module is complex” complex. I mean, “this social problem has hundreds of interacting incentives, changing any of them in isolation makes things worse, and it will take years and millions of dollars to change things, all while political winds of change are trying to blow down the consensus to tackle the problem.”
This article resonated with me and OP was able to clearly articulate what I have been feeling pretty much my entire life. It’s probably not as extreme as OP makes it sound but it’s there.
Enough to make you feel defeated. The dreaded feeling of “yeah we are going to be so f*cked 100 years from now” because no one gives a shit. In Japan this feeling transforms into optimism and hope because people generally do care and take things seriously. It has given me the strength to care and try to do my best. The power not be an asshole to the person next to me. The ability to see the bigger picture.
Karl Marx talked about alienation -- we are alienated from our work, we are alienated from one another, and eventually alienated from our humanity.
I disagree with Marx about a lot of things, but I do think that this theory makes a lot of sense. As we become increasingly mechanistic in our work, we feel less agency. Less control. Less attachment to the work. We stop caring about the product.
You can pay people to care, for agile, but ultimately the alienation wins. The solution? I'm not sure! Probably several possible things, not least of which is probably work that's focused on building one's community and helping meet their needs.
In my experience, most people don't care because they are lazy. Initiative on the job requires effort, IF they're allowed to have initiative. If someone is put into a thinking job, but are more suited to have an assembly line job, failure will ensue.
The 12 years or so I have lived in America I have observed that people always keep the door open for those walking behind them.
Always. Everywhere. DC, Boston, LA, New York, Seattle, Cupertino, everywhere.
Nobody cares about anything.
Somebody cares about something.
Everybody cares about everything.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. This makes me optimistic. At least, its nice that people care to hold doors open : )
I like to think I care about putting out good quality work, but, the nature of agile and especially standups and reviews means I am under pressure each day to be able to say I have completed a jira story.
If that story's acceptance criteria doesn't say "take the time to make this perfect" which of course it doesn't, and mr big balls bullied us into it being pointed a 2, then am I going to spend an extra day or two really making it perfect with perfect test coverage etc? When I am surrounded by (competing with) contractors who don't have to do anything other than churn out sprint work and rack up points?
On Japan caring so much:
They live in a society where pretty much everyone's ancestors are from the same geographical location, they all look similar, they are basically a nationalistic society, they all feel "Japanese" and they all pull together in the same direction more or less.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
They absolutely do care! But they have competing interests.
I don't think it's wise to assume everyone is going to be perfect at their job. Yes, that bike line sucks. But haven't you ever made a mistake at your job? Expecting everything to work perfectly in life is a recipe for misery.
The sad part, the "do not care" attitude is infectious. Maybe there is a bright-eyed programmer who just joined and who wants to make UX better.
They are full of enthusiasm, but nobody (around them) cares.
They are fixing the most annoying bugs that users complained forever about.. but they is not recognized, because nobody (around them) cares.
They hope to show a good example but nobody cares. Instead they get negative feedback when instead of blindly implementing horribly-designed feature, they are trying to fix it so it won't be so user-hostile.
Eventually they give up and stop caring. When asked what they like about the job, their answer is "stability" and "job security".
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No.
It's exactly that. All your government and regulatory capture examples are precisely about bad incentives leading to bad outcomes (including people who cared but stopped caring because these perverse incentives punished them for caring one way or another)
But wait, the author understands this!:
> Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much.
Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face act. On the surface they pretend to care but well, People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.
Nah, I moved from a big city where people are feeling squashed by the pressure, to a small town, where people feel a bit more relaxed, and I am constantly surprised by how much of a shit people give. I’m not advocating for small towns here, I like the city, I’m advocating for making a society where we act like people matter and stop calling anyone who doesn’t want to kick everyone in the teeth to get ahead a communist, and stop calling people who do inspiring visionaries
> I've met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say "stability" or "job security" as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.
This is dumb. Of course people enjoy job stability. It's irrational to draw a line from "I value being able to feed my family" to "I do not care about actually doing my job".
And beyond that, does the author actually know why it takes 18 months to get a permit? Does it actually take that long? Or is he doing a stand-up bit, and that's just a line that's designed to elicit the 2 seconds of laughter from the audience as a punchline?
> But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.
So the author cares, but is sufficiently burned out that he's done caring. I wonder what he'd answer when he finds his magical Japan-like community - presumably one with stability - and is asked what his favorite part of living there is.
Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face . People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.
It's interesting how people react first when you start acting different, doing little things like picking up garbage you didn't throw on the ground.
Even my kids went: Why are YOU picking this up, you didn't do it?
I just ask: Why not ME?
After some of similar experiences my kids asked to help and they were so excited when a friend of my wife bought them trash tongs to help me.
It's not that I'm proudly making the world a better place by doing something very difficult (like in the movie Pay it forward), but just doing small things that aren't difficult to do. Somehow it feels nice.
What a worthless rant. There are big problems and there are small problems and/or inconveniences. People do care, when they have a budget for caring. Unfortunately the modern world depletes that budget with the day-to-day life. I live close to where the author does and trust me, the city has way bigger problems to deal with than the nitpicky bullshit OP is calling out. In the suburb I live in, we have an app where the city does receive and implement reasonable recommendations. The reason why is that it's a small town with large pockets.
The rest of the things are just rants aimed at society? big tech? I don't get it.
> When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
No. Bullshit take. I used to care. But then in 2008, my employer showed me that I'm not the 'developer! developer! developer!' Steve Ballmer was excited about, I'm just a number on a spreadsheet governed by some pencil pushers in finance. All employers since have showed me again and again that if times are tough, I'm the ballast the company can shed to stay afloat. And in the past 4-5 years they've showed me I'm ballast even if the company is doing great, because 'activist' investors say so. So why should I care? I care about my family, I care about my personal projects, I care about my craft and I care about my health and the people around me. Do I care about your little annoying bug? Fuck no. Why would I? It's not even my intellectual property.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
I have. It's actually called the DOL where we live, OP. And it's great. I need to renew my license in person because of my disability and it takes me 15 minutes in-and-out, I barely have to stay in line. I also renew my car tabs online exclusively with 0 problems. I really don't understand the DMV meme, at least in Washington state.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
Oh, you shouldn't have gone there, you lost all credibility my friend.
The Maryland DMV used to be quite efficient. Once, having mislaid my driver's license (at my mother-in-law's, 100 miles away), I drove to the Wheaton DMV, and was out within 20 minutes with a new license.
This was about two years before 9/11, after which a whole lot of rules came down about verifying one's identity, and the DMV then crawled.
"We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care"
In the hypothetical world where Im the Supreme Leader, there are crack teams of sharpshooters that who get placed around randomly selected grocery store parking lots dealing out summery justice to people that dont return their shopping carts.
My hot take on this is that it is due to a lack of energy. I liked the phrase “a will to have nice things.”
We all want the nice things. However, they require conscientiousness. People who are run down and lack energy struggle with conscientiousness.
So why are we all rundown and lacking the energy required to have nice things? There are many reasons, some controversial.
One that is not so controversial is the industrialization of food. As the quality of food that our mothers consume has degraded, so have their offspring. I believe in TCM this concept is called maternal jing, or the essential life essence that you receive from your mother. Healthy moms breed a healthy populace. This is a problem generations in the making that keeps getting worse.
One that is more controversial is the impact of banking. Money is the life blood of society, and we’ve given bankers the right to siphon off our blood as they see fit. Generations of wealth transfer from the working class to bankers has left the populace anemic.
Japan has it better because they have maintained a more traditional way of life.
Human beings evolved to be surprisingly efficient. At any give moment, we are running in our heads a statistical analysis with a massive number of simultaneous inputs. We think about what we need, prioritize this list by level of necessity, analyze the perceived costs, multiply by probability of success, and divide by predicted time to reward. From this analysis, we make our choices whether or not to take action. In a system where people generally already have what they need, caring would be an inefficiency and an aberration. We have a salary, a house, food, water, companionship. We are comfortable. Why would a comfortable man care? To care for the sake of caring goes against 6 million years of evolution.
I thought about this the other day and came up with a theory that people _do_ care if the thing they are doing has their name associated with it for everyone to see (in theory).
Edit: And sometimes, it's just the tragedy of the commons
I care way too much and it causes burnout because those in power do not care.
That's probably my take on this: those in power do not care anymore. Money has turned into political influence in America, so now politicians are there for money first of all, and the needs of their communities are an afterthought. Even back in the day when you had shitty politicians or robber-barons, they still wanted their local area and America to succeed because they lived there, but in today's world the oligarchs and their appointed cronies (execs, upper management, etc.) just jet around the planet and could not care less about how well people are doing in one area of the world over another. This leads to the regular American seeing the lack of responsibility and lack of punishment for injustice and they also stop following the rules or caring about doing a good job, or they are too busy to do so, and you can't really blame them.
Solution: Money out of politics first, then we need to instill a pride and responsibility for the local community into the new generations of Americans, but in a non-propagandized way because they actually have to have real pride and not some fake patriotism like today.
I agree 100% with the comment about the McDonald's food ordering system. It is legitimately the worst of all the major fast-food chains. It is slow, ad-heavy, and there are certain things that you cannot order.
>a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture
>municipal governments
>department of transportation
>Street lights
>airport
What do they all have in common?
I think he dismissed “incentive systems” way too early.
I would also argue that people not following the law (e.g. not picking up their dog’s poop) or proper laws simply not existing (e.g. playing shitty EDM on a trail) have the same root cause.
Governments don’t care.
It’s still amazing to me how some smart people still want the government to manage an even larger part of their lives when we should clearly be pushing in the other direction.
Of course they only want this when The Party I Agree With(TM) is in power, not so much when it’s The Party I Don’t Agree With(TM).
My gut says that it isn't a lack of caring, or anything nefarious.
I think Hanlon's Razor is handy here:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
In this case I'd modify it slightly, as I don't think it is stupidity at play, but ignorance. It takes activation energy to address ignorance, and its too easy to kill activation energy inadvertently. It could just be that the person who could fix it is not aware of the issue, and everyone else just looks at it and thinks, wow, someone should do something.
regarding "These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving. If your house is near one, they suck."
I have a blinding street light across from my house. I complained to the city and they put a shade on the light so that my house is now in the dark. Its so much in case anyone else has the same problem.
Title could be “Nobody cares about the same things that I do”. Or simply “Nobody agrees with me”, which also would be exaggerated, but slightly less myopic.
There was a crummy, barely used, mostly abused, walking path with a sitting area near my old apartment complex. [0]
One day I decided to pick up all of the trash/cigarette butts, installed a butt bin, and planted a bed of flowers in the center. Big sunflowers.
The next day I went out and someone had destroyed the cigarette bin. When the flowers sprouted someone immediately doused them with something and set all but one on fire.
I replaced the butt bin same day and replanted the flowers the day after they were burned.
Nobody cared, they even resisted at first, but, eventually people stopped trashing the place and what was an empty sitting area started filling up with people.
It’s worth trying. Sometimes people will care.
[0]: Turns out (and I learned this way after the fact) that the path marked the site of a WWII POW work camp. I didn’t know this but German prisoners were shipped to the US to make up for the farm labor shortage during by WWII.
Anyway, the path was a loop with a sitting area at the entrance. Imagine the most out of the way, inconvenient place you could put a plaque. That’s where they put it. The plaque informing you that your apartment complex was built on the former site of a Nazi work camp was at the very back of the loop with the text facing away from the path.
I had the great displeasure of working with a colleague who thought he was the only one who cared. He told me flat-out that "its OK to care!" during a disagreement.
I did care. I just cared about different things than he did. He cared about fixing little hinks in code that drove him made. I cared about fixing things users cared about and would notice.
Of course, I'm kind of outside the "incentive system," so I do it for different reasons.
Yes, it's frustrating, when I encounter obvious "Person didn't care" stuff. Sometimes, it infuriates me, but usually, it helps me to feel that I need to care more about my own work.
I'm not sure that I buy that every example given is a "Person didn't care" instance. I feel that personal values may play a part, in interpreting the work.
Also, when you run large organizations/municipalities, small numbers become big numbers, quite easily, and you are often serving folks with very different priorities. Can't make everyone happy. Often, unfortunately, folks decide to make the weakest people unhappy.
Want people to care? Incentivize them. That's not just money. Treat the people (and their work) better. Hire and promote good managers. Stand up to unreasonable demands from above, etc. If you are an "above" person, then don't be insecure. Let the people under you, stand up to you, if you are being unreasonable. It really doesn't hurt as much as you might think. You always have the power to force your will, anyway, but I found that it was a good idea to listen to my employees.
When you deal with a wide variety of people, constraints, etc you develop processes to deliver output. The DMV is that way for a reason, sidewalks get made a particular way for a reason
And that’s that, you don’t rethink it every time. It’s all transactional. human APIs interfacing with other human APIs
It’s a long cry from the old timey village where you had people: Bob was the only baker, and your neighbor. You also need his help to shovel your driveway. But he needs your help to make house repairs and get eggs from your chickens. If you don’t care then you have longer term personal consequences.
That’s not the case today - if you don’t care and deliver subpar experiences, people rant then move on to their next transaction and you to yours. You aren’t affected one bit in the long run. (Assuming people don’t have a choice - if they do then you do care just enough to get the sale)
>White LEDs reduce car crashes by 0.1% and that is measurable, but sleep quality and aesthetics are not measurable. You just have to care about them. And nobody cares.
I've always been sensitive to the flicker and broken colour spectrum of fluorescent lights, it has been a longstanding "How come everyone is so willing to spend all day every day under these horrible lights?" type pet peeve.
This guy has a problem with white LEDs and I'm not sure what his issue is. He really hates them but didn't explain why. I can't empathize, I don't understand.
I don't care because I honestly believe that caring in a world of stupid cunts is not worth the limited time I have on this Earth, which I'd rather spend doing things that make me happy, instead of being perpetually frustrated and disappointed. There are some people who keep pushing out good value despite the frustration and I think they're the real heroes, but I'm not a hero myself. BTW the society is constructed in such a way that I won't have kids so all of you can go fuck yourself once I die.
Contrary to the author's quip about incentive systems, I wish I'd learned earlier that it's a fool's errand to care about things that have no positive feedback loop, no relevancy in my life, that I have no actual influence over, or that are otherwise beyond my purview. To 21 year old me, and probably many others, it would seem heartless or self-serving, but by doing so I get to focus on the few things I can authentically care about without worrying about how much they're reciprocated, and I don't need to passive aggressively try to influence broader behavior indirectly. If a neighbor or random stranger needs a hand, I give it to them and don't ask for anything in return. Likewise if someone wants to strike up a convo. I give people my time and energy if I can afford to and want to. I try to make that possible more often than not, and it leaves me with a very healthy social life, along with a non-burnout inducing work life. Beyond that, it'd be self-destructive and non-economical.
I realized years ago that in retrospect it was stupid to care beyond what I was rewarded for caring about or that my success was measured by, which was time, not quality, or accessibility, or usability, or anything else, and that's usually the case. If you have 2 weeks to get something completed, and it's not in the definition of completed to make sure screen readers can parse the website or whatever, then it's not your job to do that unless you'd be there anyway and get the rest of the stuff done with time to spare.
If you work at the DMV, you're sure as hell not wise to try and fight for different higher level decisions, it's not worth losing it for, and you're not measured by how happy of a place it is. Sure, engage in your interactions with people with respect, but don't take on responsibilities you're not paid for.
That said, if you could otherwise afford to spend a bit more time or effort outside work on things that aren't entirely self-serving, after you've done things that do bring you only personal value, but deliberately choose not to all the time, then ya that's just lame af.
Lastly, I do ultimately agree that some people are just absolute careless assholes on an individual level or deeply antisocial unfortunately, and we shouldn't be cultivating that in our cities, but that's a different convo. The worst I tend to see on a daily basis is cigarettes being tossed on the sidewalk and dogshit left by owners who I'd prefer didn't have them.
I feel like I’ve been in his shoes before and they tend to run you toward running people away from you who do “care”…well they may not care about how long it takes a guy to get a shed approved or order McDonald’s (can a man claim to care who cares to wish to expedite his order of that?) or that nobody wants to help him lace the streets with dog crap sack sticks when they’re worried about actual human issues like they’re well-being, dignity and identity.
I’m conflicted by this article. Because I hate most of it, because I relate to it.
Institutional gripes are low hanging fruit that are only significant in relation to taking care of what’s relevant to a mundane life but not relevant at all to a life worth living and dying over as a man. Maybe a man-child, but not a man.
This reads like “Suicidal Tendencies All I wanted was my Pepsi” remixed into Yacht Rock. This is not a rant, but a wining pantomime griping over things that a town elder would roll his eyes over his grave and take pity on the youthful.
So yeah man, I felt you. I felt you. But I beg Allah that I never have to feel where you’re coming from again beyond knowing about how I once felt myself & the destruction it caused me and the disdain it arises from the people who I thought I was just trying to help.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
How does the second part of this paragraph disprove "something something incentive systems" ?
I am sincerely curious, as I can't make the connection myself, and of course "something something incentive systems" would be exactly my argument.
Has the author been tested for ADHD? Not that people with ADHD are the only ones that care. They just care really hard about all the little things, and have a really hard time switching it off for their own benefit.
Saying engineers don't care is victim blaming. The way to survive at a company with "blah blah incentives" is to _not care_. You have to stop caring until you have an opportunity to move to another job.
I think the author is very myopic in understanding that other people care - just not about the same things he cares for. Most people don't care about publicly available dog poop bags or fixing a random bike lane that's sort of wrong. In fact you could argue that the things he cares about are not the most important things. Other people might care more about family than work, or about animal activism than petitioning for green space. It's not that others don't care, they just care about different things - sometimes more important and sometimes less.
Preach brother. I am in the same boat but in the caring side of things. I read e-mails, I respond to them as promptly as I can. I read the tickets and contact the users to resolve their issues as quickly as I can. I attend to meetings, do the required things and long story short, I give two shits about what is going on around me.
You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.
Hell. No.
The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.
But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?
I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.
I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm.
I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.
It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.
this articles has a ton of typos but that reinforces the emotional state the author was - an emotional state that i think is becoming more and more common. theres an underlying anxiety here; the world you grew up in is gone. this is bad and we (the author and myself) are not falling victim to nostalgia. all the things i interact with are becoming more and more dysfunctional. everybody has their answer to whose fault it is, people to blame for the fact that things simply don’t work anymore, but i think an analysis of this “lack of care” or “i just dont dgaf” attitude on the part of the workers, the employees of the companies who, theoretically, make the USA and similar countries the beacons of good living that they appear to be, might be fruitful. i’ll definitely be thinking about this observation for a while.
Rich (relatively?) software bro wants other people to care more. Does not reflect on the economics. Everything is economic. Tech has exacerbated the hyperfinancialization, enshittification, and general reduction to meaninglessness of every action.
Caring requires time and energy. Most tech companies aim to consume every freaking instant of your life (or else they serve the other tech companies that do that). For many people there is little time or energy left to care (or there is a sense that there is little time or energy left). Gotta hustle more, gotta hurry up so I can look at my phone.
Caring is not financially rewarded. Caring is generally penalized because no one else cares, so you're just wasting your time. How many ppl in this world can say this: "There are legal jobs I would not take, no matter how much they pay, because they make the world shittier." Caring doesn't make you money, and money is what the world wants. Until that changes, the problem persists.
What's sticking out to author like a sore thumb is a normal for majority. One can not imagine a better way of things until they have experienced a better one. Even if they are badly bitten by one, majority still can't come up with any better idea.
It's not that nobody cares, they just don't know any better.
When people ask me what cope is, I'll be pointing them to the comments here.
All of the things he mentions really could be better. It's lazy and careless to say that there's a constraint so something had to be bad. Every engineering problem has constraints.
I don't like this post, mainly because I think I don't like the attitude behind it. It seems somewhat obvious to me that people who do care exist and are out there; all you have to do is go and ask people what they care about and you'll get some interesting answers. You can choose to view the world as having no one who cares, but that seems seems a distorted way of viewing the world. And distorted in way that will make you more lonely, since you aren't looking for other people like yourself, since you've concluded they don't exist.
By “nobody cares”, I think they mean “not everyone shares my exact priorities”.
I see this rant against the exact way a bike lane was installed- installed because someone cared ALOT to get it approved and built- and all they can think to do is complain?
The world is a complex place full of trade-offs and compromises, I feel for the people that worked so hard to get this project done.
The fact that there are reasons for things that they are how they are is one thing, and it's true he does not elaborate - but I take it his point is one of general attitude: U.S. Americans are different from Japanese. I would not say either group cares less; instead, they probably care about different things (different cultures have different value systems; the weight put on individual versus society plays a large role here, too).
It's easy to spot problems everywhere, especially if you are an analytical mind.
Somebody else might care, but they may not perceive things as problematic to begin with.
Different people have different levels of sensitivity and granularity of perception: I buy "just cheese" when my wife buys "Gruyère français medium-aged" and don't you dare getting her the wrong brand.
Then, some people actually like the things how they are, so there are differences in opinion and personal taste, heck, some may even financially benefit from the status quo financially (distinguish those who don't care
to help make change happen but would enjoy it if others did the work from the ones who genuinely don't care about either outcome, and both of them sit next to a third group, who do not what that change, full stop.
The post was more than just a rant: he notices where he lives, his community and him do not have "value fit" (to borrow and modify the concept of "product-market fit", since this is HN), and he is comtemplating a move. But when he says he won't move to Japan (where in any case he would always be an outsider) he is looking for middle ground - so I read his blog post as a "search query aimed at human blog readers", a call for information to find out where may be more likeminded folks, which is a good idea, given his situation.
That people do not see the need for change, one former co-worker of mine calls the "fish bowl effect": a new person joins a company, and they see everything that is broken immediately. But all the other people who have been there for 20 years don't get it. Like a new fish that joins the aquarium, who blurts "hey guys, the water in here is pretty dirty!" and all the other fill shake their head about such a weird statement, "What is he talking about?" They have been around for so long, they can't even perceive the water as "not clear" anymore, perhaps a survival adaptation to avoid permanent state of frustration.
So I wish all readers of HN that they will never become that kind of fish who stops seeing things! (Belated happy New Year, too.)
Seems to me that bike-lane-onto-pavement transition is designed to be deliberately awkward so that the cyclists have to SLOW DOWN before they join the pavement and share the space with pedestrians
It's a common misconception of youth to think nobody cares. For the most part, people care, a lot, to the point that they get exhausted. The challenge is prioritizing what to care about, which means as much about not caring as it does about caring.
People can’t have nice things, so they get grumpy, unhappy, and stressed. This creates a market for therapists and dietary supplements to offset stress.
And why care? The second law of thermodynamics will inevitably march on. Let’s dissolve in entropy now!
But their _are_ some people who care. I've been busting my ass in the software world for over 10 years, documenting it as I go. Largely everything I give away for free, or at the very least offer a free tier. I cant control what other people do, but I can keep chugging along doing the best that _I_ can do.
Some of this I think is misjudged - there is an implication that people know what they are doing or what their actions' consequences are, but do not care about it.
I would argue that for a bunch of things, people just don't think.
It's not that they don't care: they've not even reached that stage of awareness. They just don't ever get to thinking about if what they're doing has any kind of follow-on consequences or implications. It doesn't even enter their minds.
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but as I've grown older I think I've learnt that not everyone thinks like I do. I guess here on HN and at work we're surrounded by people who are ultimately "knowledge workers" who are paid (and selected for) their ability to think. We're doing mental gymnastics and playing 4D chess against ourselves in our head all day. Meanwhile outside of tech, people aren't and there are IMHO lots of people who just think in a totally different way. It's like they stop at Step 2 or 3 of a linear thought process, but we as tech engineers etc are already on Step 7 of a decision tree with multiple branches etc even if we don't actively realise we're doing it.
Not saying we're any better/smarter, but we're at least implicitly trained and attuned to thinking things through, identifying edge cases, defensively coding to handle inevitable misuse/issues etc etc. Not everyone thinks like that.
Some stuff though is just experience or lack of it. I never knew how much of a pain it can be to push a kids buggy around until a did it and I would see sometimes the difference in others when I was struggling with one: some people (other parents with older kids, grandparents etc) would offer to help or to go out of their way to move out of the way etc, while others were blithely unaware (as I was!) and just don't realise because they have no knowledge or experience of the situation so even with care, they just don't know (which is fine - this is why we have schools and books etc, to teach people things they don't know). That bike lane in the article looks totally fine to me for example - even if I think think a whole range of scenarios in my head, I have no in-depth knowledge or experience or understand what the problem the author of the article is talking about as it looks totally ok to me but I only have very simplistic knowledge of riding a bike.
Tl:Dr - not always malicious or deliberate, just a lack of awareness and experience.
"Nobody Cares [about the things I think they should care about in the specific way I think they should]"
The author seems very conscientious and civic minded, but there are often unsatisfying explanations for why things are they way they are or why people act how they do.
Maybe the bike lane is that because of real world engineering, regulation, or design limitations?
Perhaps the author should appreciate the bike lane existing in the first place. It's better than no bike lane.
I get the sense a lot of these cynical types feel a desperate need for control over every component of their lives. Relax, some things aren't perfect but they're probably better than they were a hundred years ago. Progress takes time, accept that it takes time.
trying to fix half this stuff would burn you out, the other half would leave you jobless
I tried to fix the neighborhood playground and it took 2 years to get funding for a renovation that might happen 2 years from now... I gave up pushing for it because I don't have the time anymore... who knows if it will happen
most americans don't have a strong enough support system that gives them the space to care
There are an infinite number of things to care about (which is to say, to spend resources on, because that's what caring about something actually means), a finite amount of resources allocated to everyone except about 6 people who have a practically infinite amount of resources, and a social organization system that revolves around getting as much of those resources as possible and nothing else. What you're looking at is the real end product of "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family" neoliberalism. It's not just that no one cares, it's not even that no one has answered the question "Why should I care?". It's that the majority of people simply cannot care.
A lot of this is attributable to the way our society is designed at a high level
With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness
Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose
A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale
I mean...
This guy must not have kids in school—because to be a teacher, you have to be nothing but a ball of caring because the job sucks the life out of you at every step. No money, half the country thinks you want to turn their kids into trans people and want you to teach their specific brand of a religion and so they defund you at every step. I feel bad for teachers—they really, really care.
This guy must not ever volunteer for anything—In my town we have volunteers who will find houses with dogs chained up and offer to build them a fence for free because they don't like seeing dogs on chains. We have volunteers who work community evenings and do cleanups at schools, parks and graffiti removal for community spaces. My city has hundreds of volunteer fronts, and they always need an extra hand.
This guy must not ever have bought girl scout cookies or got a Christmas tree from the boy scouts, a lot of people volunteer to make sure all that happens and the money goes back to the kids, and nobody there is getting "paid" and they all care.
This guy must never have talked to a fireman or a parks worker, they have crap pay and dangerous job conditions (Park rangers are assaulted at the highest rates for any job). They do it because they care.
This guy must never have been to a museum... actually, I could go on all day about people who care ...
At this point, all I can figure is this guy has his head firmly lodged up his rear-end.
Tldr: smorgasbord of 0.1th to 1st world problems designated as horrendous failures by me ain't fixed, so I decide that people in their jobs don't care.
I actually like the bike ramp. Cyclists merging to a footpath at 20mph are a danger. Take em out before they hit the pedestrian.
This is a bullshit take considering the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.
And in software youre going to have to close a ticket or two that piss you off. You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features? Cool, see you in Japan bro.
Another example of everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
Maybe not everything. And certainly not nobody. But there's so much to be grateful for in most people's lives, if we all just calibrated our perspectives a little.
Everybody cares actually. Obviously the author cares more about investing the time to write this blog post than to take a sledgehammer and some concrete and fix the bike ramp himself. Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.
The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish - incurvatus in se (curved inwards).
"Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake." - Martin Luther
I love looking at the About Me section of a site when I read a blog post that can be summed up as “The world would be objectively better if I were simply put in charge of it” because it’s always like “When I’m not blogging I’m working on chat with a blockchain for scooter thieves” or whatever and in this case our new overlord is “a founding engineer at Row Zero where we've built the world's fastest spreadsheet”
Nobody cares
(grantslatton.com)977 points by fzliu 15 January 2025 | 937 comments
Comments
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
The author could stop eating at McDonald's and send a message to the company with his behaviour. But he does not care.
>The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.
The author could ask the guy to turn off the music and make the hiking trail more pleasurable for everyone. But he does not care.
Et cetera. He cares for views on his blog so he writes on his blog.
I also don't think Elon would bother fixing a bike ramp or installing dog bag dispensers around his home(s). So if he does "care", it's not about things you care about.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.
but once you start accounting for what the other person is going through, none of these may look as bad as they are.
A person could've lost his dog and want to free his mind by working out and forgets to put the weights back! one time its fine! few times its OK! happens every day, someone has to intervene!
- everyone has a different idea of what that means.
- many problems can't be solved by one person.
- caring has an opportunity cost.
- caring introduces liability.
- we live in a society.
Caring is a luxury, most people are just trying to survive.
They do care a lot, but about the wrong thing.
I noticed the stock was way up today so I logged in to sell. Well, turns out the auto-buy has just... Not been firing... For a solid year. I have two purchases and then it stopped. It still says I have a weekly auto-buy set up, but I have not been charged.
In a just society, I would be owed my potential winnings for these unprocessed purchases, but having dealt with Cashapp support in the past I know damn well there's no way they're going to agree to that. I would be lucky to even catch the ear of a human being. It's sure as hell not worth taking them to court over a loss of maybe a couple hundred dollars at most.
The opaque and useless support of modern companies is literally in my eyes the worst part about the modern world. They quite literally do not care.
Another "they don't care" is the TV screens that have the menu on in the background, that used to have menu and prices when you went up to order, and now display "cool animations" half the time so you can't read the menu while you're up there ordering and have to wait and look like an idiot for the menu to come back.
I care a great deal about DevEx, and since no one else tends to care as much as I do, I can do good work for a few years, but then I'm worn out from fighting alone. I move on and hope things are more aligned somewhere else. Doesn't mean my co-workers are wrong for "not caring", just that I haven't found my peers.
The driver who doesn't let you into her lane perhaps cares deeply about not being late, again, to pick up her kids from daycare. Or her brother is about to do that stupid thing again, and if she doesn't try to stop him, she'll feel bad forever, again. Which lane you're in doesn't even register on her list.
It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.
Why? They get measured on the sweeping stuff, by the broad demands, and the people who actually pay them (in money or votes).
A better bike ramp that involves user testing but involves a delay that pushes work into the next quarter, changing accounting? That's a problem. I've lived this scenario where user features got axed to ensure all work could be budgeted under a particular quarter. Or a sign? That costs money and also needs approval, perhaps from another department.
Oh, and you are improving one bike ramp? Can't do that without people complaining. Got to improve all of them. So that is now a multi-million dollar project.
In a large org, it often isn't clear who owns overall design control, if anyone.
Lights that are great for drivers but suck for everyone else? That's many things in most cities and that is because drivers are the most vocal (and often the largest) population. Drivers win on everything from parking to infrastructure spending and drivers will tell city council what's on their mind.
For the corporate software I worked on, many users hated it. Tons of complaints. Team agreed. Team created proposal to fix it. Team managers pitched it to those above for the broader roadmap. Management explicitly said they didn't want to waste time on UI as the people paying were not the same as the people using.
Never worked for the DMV, but know a guy who maintains some software for one. What's the priority? Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Nobody wants to fund the DMV. Nobody wants to pay for technological improvements for it. Nobody wants to pay for staffing. It is where small amounts get shaved off to pay for things people do care about. The guy in charge of the DMV is tasked with keeping costs low.
So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort? Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse. They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.
Japan is indeed slightly better in this regard: the work culture emphasizes doing your job as well as you possibly can, no matter how menial the job is. That's why you'll so often see attention to little details, which makes life better for everyone. It is very noticeable on a daily basis.
Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."
Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price
It's always really interesting to see.
This is not the case in large cities – show 1 million people you do not care for them and there are still millions that will treat you reasonably well, especially if you can make a nice first impression. In some way, this social environment optimizes for not caring.
This is why I spent 30 years living in large cities around the world and now moved to a relatively small town. And I couldn't be happier. Streets are tidy, the town administration fixes most known problems, the public spaces are refurbished and the parks are maintained, businesses are pleasant, and everyone is friendly – I think I could ask for a favor from my taxi driver and they'd probably try to help.
There is a list of grifters we all know and keep in our heads, and I don't think the community will ever do them any favors. That is justice – these people wouldn't do anything for the community, too. And this list happens naturally in small places – you know the character of those around you. Reputation for having good character has social value. And this is natural.
The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact.
You’re all part of the problem.
A good example - we are provided free Keurig cups at work. Lots and lots of disposable plastic. At the same time there’s been quite a number of changes put in place to “be more green” and help the environment.
I asked my coworkers one day why we use Keurig machines instead of making a pot of coffee and everyone just shrugged. I asked the administrative staff if there was any plans to switch to grounds to reduce the number of Keurig cups and they basically said “No, that would be too much effort.”
In that moment, it really did just feel like everyone around me did not care, so I dropped the subject.
Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.
On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.
I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.
This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.
In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.
You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.
> It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
This really hits home as it's happened to me several times. Eventually, you stop caring as well and just cruise through. On the flip side, stress has gone down by quite a bit :)
Good enough is going to be the output when nobody has the time or people's time isn't valued.
Most people don't care about doing their jobs well because they don't really choose what they work on, they don't own the product they're working on and don't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They know working harder won't improve their material condition either, only tire them more, seemingly pointlessly.
And so society turns to sh*t, but a lot of value is created for shareholders in the process, so who cares?
US is becoming a culture of 'Good enough'
This is very prevalent in Eastern Europe, near east, probably China and India, not sure. Certainly not Japan.
Culture - is what people do when nobody is watching (or they think that nobody is watching) (I am stealing this definition from somewhere else).
So changing from good-enough culture to 'We are closer to perfectionists, culturally' -- is a big change that would take generations.
To be honest -- I am not if there is a 'one thing' that would drive this, may be it is an instinct, something built-in, more prevalently, in specific ethnics groups but not in others? if it is an instinct, then it should be preservable during immigration. Are the Japanese when living for more than on generation in a 'good enough culture' preserving the perfectionist traits ?
This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss.
Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes what I’d even call malevolence) reaches a certain level feedback mechanisms are overwhelmed: those who do care can no-longer impose negative consequences on those who don’t. Their boss doesn’t care either, their careers progress just the same, they make the same money, their jobs are just as secure. It snowballs from there.
At least here in Sweden it’s taboo to say it, but I think we just need to get back to individual negative consequences for not caring.
People are lazy, which means if it isnt obvious to them, or more importantly, if they don't see a direct incentive to their life, they don't do it.
In reality "1% effort" probably looks like 10-50+% effort... and society would be 10-1000x better for it but the incentives are wrong.
Now I feel like the boiling frog and I only trust a handful of people. I don't trust the system. I don't trust that it's fair. I feel like being honest is harming my survival odds.
Imagine you have to live in North Korea... Your awareness of how that society operates can make it challenging to sing your praises to your dear leader.
I really hope things change. I live outside the US and it feels like we get the worst of everything. It's as though the political machinations which used to take place in Africa to keep the people poor has spread on to parts of the western world in a slightly different form. In Africa, the environment is about artificial deprivation of resources and rights; in the west, it's about deprivation of opportunities.
In Africa, the goal is to deprive people of resources and rights; to allow corporate monopolies to exploit their labor as much as possible. In the west, the goal is to deprive people of opportunities to prevent them from competing against monopolies.
In the west, we have a fake society where everyone pretends to be on the same playing field, but we're not even close.
His "snowball of care" doesn't work if your 1% effort needs to put out the house fire first.
There are a couple exceptions about apathetic doctors and degrading community, but most of his examples are complicated and ugly things (McDonalds app, the bike ramp, dog mess , etc)
---
There is a very real danger in being too helpful in some organizations. I was too helpful and I got looks from my coworkers. People would call and ask for me specifically, which pissed them off.
In some organizations being too helpful is threatening to the boss. Are you trying to take their job?
---
Another problem is the legacy mudball - it's not just for source code. The sidewalk fix that would cost less than $1000 in materials may wind up costing $100,000 after bubbling through all the required layers. The layers are there because of very real historical failings, but they create failures NOW. It's hard to build things now because of 'the sins of the father'.
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You can't fix bureaucracy all at once - it's not one thing, and it has many different causes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645391
Whatever you do today, through action or inaction, it will ripple through eternity with both intended and unintended consequence.
I ran out of (good) things to watch on Netflix so I watched a couple of Japanese drama shows (TBS product I think). At first it seems boring as heck: no sex, no violence. But after a while, I think I got hooked. The usual theme is always something around respect, self-sacrifice, leaving a place better than when you found it kind of feeling. It is just a departure from the usual US based drama.
Is it just the general direction we in the US live everyday for the last decade?
Pro-social is more work. It’s harder. It is caring, sensitive, flexible. You have to give a shit because society actively disapproves of and discourages not giving a shit. No one wants to be your friend cus your the asshole who doesn’t give a shit.
Anti-social is easier: you don’t have to care. My industrial effluent will cause cancer? I don’t care. My bigass truck is more likely to kill pedestrians? I don’t care. Masking during a pandemic jmight save someone else’s life? I don’t care.
Everyone wants to live in a prosocial society. Certainly many people complain about the fact that society isn’t pro-social, yet themselves are deeply anti-social.
“No one wants to work! Do you pay a living wage? Benefits? Heck no, my business wouldn’t be as profitable”
Unfortunately, the ability to freeload off the collective relatively more pro-social past is coming to a rapid end.
I think, a lot of the apocalyptic sentiment lately has a lot to do with it. Climate change is already ruining things and will only get worse and also has started getting worse faster. Politically, economically, things are pretty hopeless. What use is picking up trash or wearing a nice shirt in the face of all of this. What are we building towards, and does anything I do mean anything
And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
And Elon Musk as the sole positive example is so lame.
All this bothers me because despite everything I do still care. But finding a way to express that is so hard. And after a while of it not mattering its hard to justify. And finding somewhere where your work actually matters seems impossible when we're funding everything except what's important
Nowadays, the scope of what I can care about is drastically reduced. But one area where I don't allow care to be dissolved (apart from my family) is the work I do.
I had to leave a job where co-workers wouldn't care and it was about to influence my own level of care by the end.
I feel compassion for those people who live in their own body and keep hitting walls.
You can help people care, it's your path.
In these places you’re pushed to not care.
But how do you scale "caring" to huge and complex societies where vast numbers of individuals pursue a vast number of (possibly conflicting) interests?
When it appears that nobody cares its more a manifestation that the amount of systematic care we have invented and organized is not matching the need.
One powerful but ultimately limiting tool we invented is money. You can think of it as tokenizing care. "I have cared for $x worth of cleaning you now you care for $x worth of feeding me in return".
Many of our caring problems link to the primitive and oversimplifying traits of financialization. Which - in addition - over time have become grossly abused by shrewd operators.
Parents don't need to get paid to care for their babies and no amount of money will produce equivalent quality of care.
Elon does not care about others hundreds of billions of times more than a "normal" person does.
But the organizational failure from monetizing everything is only one pathology. There are many others:
As social animals we also care a lot about power structures. Organized violence and destruction shows that caring about others is not universal behavior in time and space.
Above all, intrinsic traits are groomed in childhood in a positive feedback loop. An educational system that reinforces caring behavior does not fall from a coconut tree. It needs to be cared about.
But on deeper reflection I think they are actually right. Our civilisation became great because people took pride in their work - and not just at the crop level: the average poor tailor or cobbler would take 100x more pride in their work than the average government employee today. This is a problem — I suspect largely caused by the internet and technology warping people’s reward mechanisms - and it needs addressing.
Yeeahhhh... I'd stay as far as possible from Miami.
About his ego. Nothing else.
East Asians are regular people, with regular problems, and regular levels of care or indifference.
I think the same of anyone who believes in the magic of ancient Chinese medicine. It’s not endearing to believe that the Chinese have some mystical otherworldly powers. It’s just racist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.
Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the US in 2025 that has been enabled entirely by people not speaking up.
I’m myself guilty of staying on the sidelines. Starting to realize that perhaps I need to be louder, because no one else is speaking up and that “giving a fuck” is something that must be led by example.
It's not their job to. They have about a million other priorities, they're not sorry about it, and they shouldn't be.
The DMV, the HR software people, the engineering people, they care about lots of things: Following the laws they are required to follow; maintaining regulatory compliance. Handling the latest set of changes and rules from a higher office who demands they be implemented yesterday. Not overwhelming the underpaid staff they have on-hand. Figuring out how to deal with a generally unpleasant general public, including the guy who wrote this. Holding back an ounce of sanity so they can get home at the end of the day and be happy and not drink themselves to death.
The reality is that life is a series of tradeoffs. Even if I am giving 100% at work (and I have a family and a life, so often I am not), that 100% does not get allocated entirely or even mostly to "deliver the best experience for the specific needs of the author of this article." It's dedicated to getting work out the door at an acceptable level of quality; monitoring our systems so they don't crash and lose us money; complying with the rules and procedures my employer demands I comply with; being tolerable and decent to my colleagues so they don't resent me and make my life harder. If I think about the needs of one specific customer out of the millions that transact business with my employer every day, it's because something extraordinary has happened with implications for one of the things above.
What sets people like Elon apart is that they are single-mindedly dedicated to getting people to appease them, and also pretty good at it. All Elon cares about is whatever interests him day-to-day, his ego, his impact on the world, whether people like him or hate him. He's "successful", by this author's metric, because he's self-obsessed.
All that said, the UK has a phrase for someone who cares only to do the bare minimum: a jobsworth, as in, more than my job's worth. A jobsworth is unhelpful on purpose, or because enforcing apathy is more valuable to them than doing anything that might impose upon them later an obligation to act. The thing is - those people are universally reviled. They are not liked or approved of in society. They're also a severe minority.
Most people are doing their best to stay above water on a dozen different things, and you are only one of them. The author ought to have some humility and realize that.
Billions of people care. And if you bother looking for them, you’ll find them. Most of the problems he describes result from complex systems being challenging and individuals having limited ability both to comprehend and influence them.
And no I don’t mean “this software module is complex” complex. I mean, “this social problem has hundreds of interacting incentives, changing any of them in isolation makes things worse, and it will take years and millions of dollars to change things, all while political winds of change are trying to blow down the consensus to tackle the problem.”
I disagree with Marx about a lot of things, but I do think that this theory makes a lot of sense. As we become increasingly mechanistic in our work, we feel less agency. Less control. Less attachment to the work. We stop caring about the product.
You can pay people to care, for agile, but ultimately the alienation wins. The solution? I'm not sure! Probably several possible things, not least of which is probably work that's focused on building one's community and helping meet their needs.
Sometimes people did care, but they left because they didn't want to deal with the rest who didn't any more, and found better conditions elsewhere.
Nobody cares about anything. Somebody cares about something. Everybody cares about everything.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. This makes me optimistic. At least, its nice that people care to hold doors open : )
I like to think I care about putting out good quality work, but, the nature of agile and especially standups and reviews means I am under pressure each day to be able to say I have completed a jira story.
If that story's acceptance criteria doesn't say "take the time to make this perfect" which of course it doesn't, and mr big balls bullied us into it being pointed a 2, then am I going to spend an extra day or two really making it perfect with perfect test coverage etc? When I am surrounded by (competing with) contractors who don't have to do anything other than churn out sprint work and rack up points?
On Japan caring so much:
They live in a society where pretty much everyone's ancestors are from the same geographical location, they all look similar, they are basically a nationalistic society, they all feel "Japanese" and they all pull together in the same direction more or less.
America on the other hand...
They absolutely do care! But they have competing interests.
Seriously, the cops drive Toyota 4Runners. It’s an asian majority state.
It might be a good compromise into what you are looking for.
"I am proud of my work" >> "You should work harder!"
They are full of enthusiasm, but nobody (around them) cares.
They are fixing the most annoying bugs that users complained forever about.. but they is not recognized, because nobody (around them) cares.
They hope to show a good example but nobody cares. Instead they get negative feedback when instead of blindly implementing horribly-designed feature, they are trying to fix it so it won't be so user-hostile.
Eventually they give up and stop caring. When asked what they like about the job, their answer is "stability" and "job security".
It's exactly that. All your government and regulatory capture examples are precisely about bad incentives leading to bad outcomes (including people who cared but stopped caring because these perverse incentives punished them for caring one way or another)
But wait, the author understands this!:
> Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much.
So it's a YES?
This is dumb. Of course people enjoy job stability. It's irrational to draw a line from "I value being able to feed my family" to "I do not care about actually doing my job".
And beyond that, does the author actually know why it takes 18 months to get a permit? Does it actually take that long? Or is he doing a stand-up bit, and that's just a line that's designed to elicit the 2 seconds of laughter from the audience as a punchline?
> But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.
So the author cares, but is sufficiently burned out that he's done caring. I wonder what he'd answer when he finds his magical Japan-like community - presumably one with stability - and is asked what his favorite part of living there is.
Even my kids went: Why are YOU picking this up, you didn't do it?
I just ask: Why not ME?
After some of similar experiences my kids asked to help and they were so excited when a friend of my wife bought them trash tongs to help me.
It's not that I'm proudly making the world a better place by doing something very difficult (like in the movie Pay it forward), but just doing small things that aren't difficult to do. Somehow it feels nice.
The rest of the things are just rants aimed at society? big tech? I don't get it.
> When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
No. Bullshit take. I used to care. But then in 2008, my employer showed me that I'm not the 'developer! developer! developer!' Steve Ballmer was excited about, I'm just a number on a spreadsheet governed by some pencil pushers in finance. All employers since have showed me again and again that if times are tough, I'm the ballast the company can shed to stay afloat. And in the past 4-5 years they've showed me I'm ballast even if the company is doing great, because 'activist' investors say so. So why should I care? I care about my family, I care about my personal projects, I care about my craft and I care about my health and the people around me. Do I care about your little annoying bug? Fuck no. Why would I? It's not even my intellectual property.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
I have. It's actually called the DOL where we live, OP. And it's great. I need to renew my license in person because of my disability and it takes me 15 minutes in-and-out, I barely have to stay in line. I also renew my car tabs online exclusively with 0 problems. I really don't understand the DMV meme, at least in Washington state.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
Oh, you shouldn't have gone there, you lost all credibility my friend.
> They spend all their free time doing activist stuff
Having free time is a privilege. The author is privileged and they don't know it.
This was about two years before 9/11, after which a whole lot of rules came down about verifying one's identity, and the DMV then crawled.
To proclaim "Why does nobody care about anything?" is to neglect an oft quoted axiom:
0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mahatma_gandhi_109075Yikes.
We all want the nice things. However, they require conscientiousness. People who are run down and lack energy struggle with conscientiousness.
So why are we all rundown and lacking the energy required to have nice things? There are many reasons, some controversial.
One that is not so controversial is the industrialization of food. As the quality of food that our mothers consume has degraded, so have their offspring. I believe in TCM this concept is called maternal jing, or the essential life essence that you receive from your mother. Healthy moms breed a healthy populace. This is a problem generations in the making that keeps getting worse.
One that is more controversial is the impact of banking. Money is the life blood of society, and we’ve given bankers the right to siphon off our blood as they see fit. Generations of wealth transfer from the working class to bankers has left the populace anemic.
Japan has it better because they have maintained a more traditional way of life.
Edit: And sometimes, it's just the tragedy of the commons
That's probably my take on this: those in power do not care anymore. Money has turned into political influence in America, so now politicians are there for money first of all, and the needs of their communities are an afterthought. Even back in the day when you had shitty politicians or robber-barons, they still wanted their local area and America to succeed because they lived there, but in today's world the oligarchs and their appointed cronies (execs, upper management, etc.) just jet around the planet and could not care less about how well people are doing in one area of the world over another. This leads to the regular American seeing the lack of responsibility and lack of punishment for injustice and they also stop following the rules or caring about doing a good job, or they are too busy to do so, and you can't really blame them.
Solution: Money out of politics first, then we need to instill a pride and responsibility for the local community into the new generations of Americans, but in a non-propagandized way because they actually have to have real pride and not some fake patriotism like today.
>We're not going to move to Japan, but would absolutely be willing to move within the US.
Let me finish it for him.
>I just don't care (enough).
As for me, I'm looking forward to visiting Japan.
I hear people all around me all the time be boastful of how much they don't care. It's a competition.
>software […] found some regulatory capture
>a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture
>municipal governments
>department of transportation
>Street lights
>airport
What do they all have in common?
I think he dismissed “incentive systems” way too early.
I would also argue that people not following the law (e.g. not picking up their dog’s poop) or proper laws simply not existing (e.g. playing shitty EDM on a trail) have the same root cause.
Governments don’t care.
It’s still amazing to me how some smart people still want the government to manage an even larger part of their lives when we should clearly be pushing in the other direction.
Of course they only want this when The Party I Agree With(TM) is in power, not so much when it’s The Party I Don’t Agree With(TM).
I think Hanlon's Razor is handy here:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
In this case I'd modify it slightly, as I don't think it is stupidity at play, but ignorance. It takes activation energy to address ignorance, and its too easy to kill activation energy inadvertently. It could just be that the person who could fix it is not aware of the issue, and everyone else just looks at it and thinks, wow, someone should do something.
I have a blinding street light across from my house. I complained to the city and they put a shade on the light so that my house is now in the dark. Its so much in case anyone else has the same problem.
One day I decided to pick up all of the trash/cigarette butts, installed a butt bin, and planted a bed of flowers in the center. Big sunflowers.
The next day I went out and someone had destroyed the cigarette bin. When the flowers sprouted someone immediately doused them with something and set all but one on fire.
I replaced the butt bin same day and replanted the flowers the day after they were burned.
Nobody cared, they even resisted at first, but, eventually people stopped trashing the place and what was an empty sitting area started filling up with people.
It’s worth trying. Sometimes people will care.
[0]: Turns out (and I learned this way after the fact) that the path marked the site of a WWII POW work camp. I didn’t know this but German prisoners were shipped to the US to make up for the farm labor shortage during by WWII.
Anyway, the path was a loop with a sitting area at the entrance. Imagine the most out of the way, inconvenient place you could put a plaque. That’s where they put it. The plaque informing you that your apartment complex was built on the former site of a Nazi work camp was at the very back of the loop with the text facing away from the path.
I did care. I just cared about different things than he did. He cared about fixing little hinks in code that drove him made. I cared about fixing things users cared about and would notice.
Just sayin'.
Of course, I'm kind of outside the "incentive system," so I do it for different reasons.
Yes, it's frustrating, when I encounter obvious "Person didn't care" stuff. Sometimes, it infuriates me, but usually, it helps me to feel that I need to care more about my own work.
I'm not sure that I buy that every example given is a "Person didn't care" instance. I feel that personal values may play a part, in interpreting the work.
Also, when you run large organizations/municipalities, small numbers become big numbers, quite easily, and you are often serving folks with very different priorities. Can't make everyone happy. Often, unfortunately, folks decide to make the weakest people unhappy.
Want people to care? Incentivize them. That's not just money. Treat the people (and their work) better. Hire and promote good managers. Stand up to unreasonable demands from above, etc. If you are an "above" person, then don't be insecure. Let the people under you, stand up to you, if you are being unreasonable. It really doesn't hurt as much as you might think. You always have the power to force your will, anyway, but I found that it was a good idea to listen to my employees.
When you deal with a wide variety of people, constraints, etc you develop processes to deliver output. The DMV is that way for a reason, sidewalks get made a particular way for a reason
And that’s that, you don’t rethink it every time. It’s all transactional. human APIs interfacing with other human APIs
It’s a long cry from the old timey village where you had people: Bob was the only baker, and your neighbor. You also need his help to shovel your driveway. But he needs your help to make house repairs and get eggs from your chickens. If you don’t care then you have longer term personal consequences.
That’s not the case today - if you don’t care and deliver subpar experiences, people rant then move on to their next transaction and you to yours. You aren’t affected one bit in the long run. (Assuming people don’t have a choice - if they do then you do care just enough to get the sale)
This summarizes the whole thing quite well.
I've always been sensitive to the flicker and broken colour spectrum of fluorescent lights, it has been a longstanding "How come everyone is so willing to spend all day every day under these horrible lights?" type pet peeve.
This guy has a problem with white LEDs and I'm not sure what his issue is. He really hates them but didn't explain why. I can't empathize, I don't understand.
I realized years ago that in retrospect it was stupid to care beyond what I was rewarded for caring about or that my success was measured by, which was time, not quality, or accessibility, or usability, or anything else, and that's usually the case. If you have 2 weeks to get something completed, and it's not in the definition of completed to make sure screen readers can parse the website or whatever, then it's not your job to do that unless you'd be there anyway and get the rest of the stuff done with time to spare.
If you work at the DMV, you're sure as hell not wise to try and fight for different higher level decisions, it's not worth losing it for, and you're not measured by how happy of a place it is. Sure, engage in your interactions with people with respect, but don't take on responsibilities you're not paid for.
That said, if you could otherwise afford to spend a bit more time or effort outside work on things that aren't entirely self-serving, after you've done things that do bring you only personal value, but deliberately choose not to all the time, then ya that's just lame af.
Lastly, I do ultimately agree that some people are just absolute careless assholes on an individual level or deeply antisocial unfortunately, and we shouldn't be cultivating that in our cities, but that's a different convo. The worst I tend to see on a daily basis is cigarettes being tossed on the sidewalk and dogshit left by owners who I'd prefer didn't have them.
I’m conflicted by this article. Because I hate most of it, because I relate to it.
Institutional gripes are low hanging fruit that are only significant in relation to taking care of what’s relevant to a mundane life but not relevant at all to a life worth living and dying over as a man. Maybe a man-child, but not a man.
This reads like “Suicidal Tendencies All I wanted was my Pepsi” remixed into Yacht Rock. This is not a rant, but a wining pantomime griping over things that a town elder would roll his eyes over his grave and take pity on the youthful.
So yeah man, I felt you. I felt you. But I beg Allah that I never have to feel where you’re coming from again beyond knowing about how I once felt myself & the destruction it caused me and the disdain it arises from the people who I thought I was just trying to help.
Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.
How does the second part of this paragraph disprove "something something incentive systems" ?
I am sincerely curious, as I can't make the connection myself, and of course "something something incentive systems" would be exactly my argument.
You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.
Hell. No.
The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.
But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?
I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm. I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.
It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.
Caring requires time and energy. Most tech companies aim to consume every freaking instant of your life (or else they serve the other tech companies that do that). For many people there is little time or energy left to care (or there is a sense that there is little time or energy left). Gotta hustle more, gotta hurry up so I can look at my phone.
Caring is not financially rewarded. Caring is generally penalized because no one else cares, so you're just wasting your time. How many ppl in this world can say this: "There are legal jobs I would not take, no matter how much they pay, because they make the world shittier." Caring doesn't make you money, and money is what the world wants. Until that changes, the problem persists.
Fix the values, fix the world
It's not that nobody cares, they just don't know any better.
All of the things he mentions really could be better. It's lazy and careless to say that there's a constraint so something had to be bad. Every engineering problem has constraints.
I see this rant against the exact way a bike lane was installed- installed because someone cared ALOT to get it approved and built- and all they can think to do is complain?
The world is a complex place full of trade-offs and compromises, I feel for the people that worked so hard to get this project done.
It's easy to spot problems everywhere, especially if you are an analytical mind. Somebody else might care, but they may not perceive things as problematic to begin with.
Different people have different levels of sensitivity and granularity of perception: I buy "just cheese" when my wife buys "Gruyère français medium-aged" and don't you dare getting her the wrong brand.
Then, some people actually like the things how they are, so there are differences in opinion and personal taste, heck, some may even financially benefit from the status quo financially (distinguish those who don't care to help make change happen but would enjoy it if others did the work from the ones who genuinely don't care about either outcome, and both of them sit next to a third group, who do not what that change, full stop.
The post was more than just a rant: he notices where he lives, his community and him do not have "value fit" (to borrow and modify the concept of "product-market fit", since this is HN), and he is comtemplating a move. But when he says he won't move to Japan (where in any case he would always be an outsider) he is looking for middle ground - so I read his blog post as a "search query aimed at human blog readers", a call for information to find out where may be more likeminded folks, which is a good idea, given his situation.
That people do not see the need for change, one former co-worker of mine calls the "fish bowl effect": a new person joins a company, and they see everything that is broken immediately. But all the other people who have been there for 20 years don't get it. Like a new fish that joins the aquarium, who blurts "hey guys, the water in here is pretty dirty!" and all the other fill shake their head about such a weird statement, "What is he talking about?" They have been around for so long, they can't even perceive the water as "not clear" anymore, perhaps a survival adaptation to avoid permanent state of frustration.
So I wish all readers of HN that they will never become that kind of fish who stops seeing things! (Belated happy New Year, too.)
People can’t have nice things, so they get grumpy, unhappy, and stressed. This creates a market for therapists and dietary supplements to offset stress.
And why care? The second law of thermodynamics will inevitably march on. Let’s dissolve in entropy now!
I would argue that for a bunch of things, people just don't think.
It's not that they don't care: they've not even reached that stage of awareness. They just don't ever get to thinking about if what they're doing has any kind of follow-on consequences or implications. It doesn't even enter their minds.
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but as I've grown older I think I've learnt that not everyone thinks like I do. I guess here on HN and at work we're surrounded by people who are ultimately "knowledge workers" who are paid (and selected for) their ability to think. We're doing mental gymnastics and playing 4D chess against ourselves in our head all day. Meanwhile outside of tech, people aren't and there are IMHO lots of people who just think in a totally different way. It's like they stop at Step 2 or 3 of a linear thought process, but we as tech engineers etc are already on Step 7 of a decision tree with multiple branches etc even if we don't actively realise we're doing it.
Not saying we're any better/smarter, but we're at least implicitly trained and attuned to thinking things through, identifying edge cases, defensively coding to handle inevitable misuse/issues etc etc. Not everyone thinks like that.
Some stuff though is just experience or lack of it. I never knew how much of a pain it can be to push a kids buggy around until a did it and I would see sometimes the difference in others when I was struggling with one: some people (other parents with older kids, grandparents etc) would offer to help or to go out of their way to move out of the way etc, while others were blithely unaware (as I was!) and just don't realise because they have no knowledge or experience of the situation so even with care, they just don't know (which is fine - this is why we have schools and books etc, to teach people things they don't know). That bike lane in the article looks totally fine to me for example - even if I think think a whole range of scenarios in my head, I have no in-depth knowledge or experience or understand what the problem the author of the article is talking about as it looks totally ok to me but I only have very simplistic knowledge of riding a bike.
Tl:Dr - not always malicious or deliberate, just a lack of awareness and experience.
The author seems very conscientious and civic minded, but there are often unsatisfying explanations for why things are they way they are or why people act how they do.
Maybe the bike lane is that because of real world engineering, regulation, or design limitations?
Perhaps the author should appreciate the bike lane existing in the first place. It's better than no bike lane.
I get the sense a lot of these cynical types feel a desperate need for control over every component of their lives. Relax, some things aren't perfect but they're probably better than they were a hundred years ago. Progress takes time, accept that it takes time.
I tried to fix the neighborhood playground and it took 2 years to get funding for a renovation that might happen 2 years from now... I gave up pushing for it because I don't have the time anymore... who knows if it will happen
most americans don't have a strong enough support system that gives them the space to care
550 comments later...
You talk about the [underlying reason for the problem][1] and everybody hates you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness
Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose
A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale
People who care too much are angry.
People who care too much fight over stupid things.
People who care too much self-righteous.
People who care too much are intolerant.
People who care too much are not adaptable.
People who care too much are bullies.
People who care too much are trolls.
People who care too much write rants on their blogs.
People who care too much are miserable.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-...
To care is to be engaged.
This guy must not ever volunteer for anything—In my town we have volunteers who will find houses with dogs chained up and offer to build them a fence for free because they don't like seeing dogs on chains. We have volunteers who work community evenings and do cleanups at schools, parks and graffiti removal for community spaces. My city has hundreds of volunteer fronts, and they always need an extra hand.
This guy must not ever have bought girl scout cookies or got a Christmas tree from the boy scouts, a lot of people volunteer to make sure all that happens and the money goes back to the kids, and nobody there is getting "paid" and they all care.
This guy must never have talked to a fireman or a parks worker, they have crap pay and dangerous job conditions (Park rangers are assaulted at the highest rates for any job). They do it because they care.
This guy must never have been to a museum... actually, I could go on all day about people who care ...
At this point, all I can figure is this guy has his head firmly lodged up his rear-end.
I actually like the bike ramp. Cyclists merging to a footpath at 20mph are a danger. Take em out before they hit the pedestrian.
And in software youre going to have to close a ticket or two that piss you off. You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features? Cool, see you in Japan bro.
Maybe not everything. And certainly not nobody. But there's so much to be grateful for in most people's lives, if we all just calibrated our perspectives a little.
Universe instantiated you in this reality in a random body in a random timeline with zero input from your side.
It's just your ego that think your care actually makes any difference in this reality.
The universe will continue to run creating bodies, life forms and so on. It keeps destroying and recycling stuff.
Nothing is permanent. The more you care about impermanent things the more you suffer.
The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish - incurvatus in se (curved inwards).
"Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake." - Martin Luther