by Noaidi 15 hours ago
> for some, it's just a paycheck.
What is wrong with just wanting to work for money?
> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce.
Maybe if wages kept up with inflation people would still care. You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store.
>> for some, it's just a paycheck.
> What is wrong with just wanting to work for money?
Imagine a society where your work was an opportunity for you to provide products/services for your community, where you could earn a reputation for craftsmanship and caring, and where the real value was in the social ties and sense of social worth-- your community cares for you just as you care for it, and selfish assholery has high costs leading to poverty.
Now imagine a society where the only measure of social worth is a fiat currency, and it doesn't matter how you get it, only matters how much you have. Selfish assholery is rewarded and actually caring leads to poverty.
Which society would you rather live in? Which society is more emotionally healthy?
So the question is, is our current society the one we want to live in? If not, how do we move it closer to what we want?
Our current society can and does have room for both, which is great since some people want to live to work, and some just want to work to live. I don't see a problem with either, as long as it makes one happy.
And there's another group, grifters, who are neither living to work nor working to live. They are the parasites, and our current society rewards grifters by not putting them in check. Probably because so many want a piece of the grifting pie, in the same way many people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Don’t forget another group, permanently disenfranchised, who are working to barely live. They are the unsung heroes of our society, who for a brief year or two recently got celebrated as key workers, got claps and applause, and then forgotten again once normality resumed.
"Show HN: I drive a garbage truck" wouldn't make the front page, but the world would grind to a halt tomorrow if those people stopped showing up for work.
The NYC garbage truck people are more than content to be paid handsomely in dollars instead of claps and cheers. Their union has the city by the balls and they know it, and they abuse that power to block modern trash containerization improvements. I wouldn’t have any qualms about personally automating their job
> If not, how do we move it closer to what we want?
By going all Ted Kaczynski on the elite and abandon sensationism and most of technology.
Ethically? Nothing.
Socially and emotionally? It's brutal. For both the employee and society in general.
Spending almost half their waking hours not caring is not good for people.
Frankly, people for whom the work is "just a paycheck" I know in real life are simultaneously happy and simultaneously frequently produce actually good reliable work.
Work being "just a paycheck" does not mean you hate it or half ass it. But, it means you do go home to get rest, you do socialize outside of work instead of irrationally pushing it and then using meetings for socialization. It means you do not have ego tied to it so much you throw temper tantrum when things are imperfect (which is not the same as being able to change things for the better).
So is it not good for people to care and yet be blocked from being able to do good work.
Then pay people so they have a reason to care their work. This is like a wife beating husband wondering why his wife to care more about him.
every company in the united states could become a co-op and nothing would change for the business and everything would change for the workers. And everyone would be much happier at work and you would have the caring people you want.
It is the system that is the problem, not the people.
There's a difference between caring about your personal work product (and reputation), your colleagues on a personal and professional level, and your employer as an entity.
I expect my employees to show up to work and put forth a solid effort on a regular basis. Note that this doesn't mean a constant death march towards some unreasonable objective, or anything even close to it. Just apply yourself using the skills we agree you have for the pay we also agreed upon for 8 hours a day on average. In my field, this means you have pay that is well above the norm for an average software developer, and the working conditions are good or better.
A shocking number of people are incapable of this, and generally are also the same people who would claim that "they didn't start this".
I don't know how to explain any better that, if given the choice, I would simply not do what I do for the company for which I do it. Full stop. Somehow, when we talk about companies laying off thousands, that's "business as usual" and "nothing personal". But when an employee acts like the robot the company sees them as, suddenly people get upset! Why is it so hard to understand that people work because they have to, and not because they want to? Why is that so threatening to your worldview? Is it because, deep down, you know it's true?
I used to cope like that. I told myself that I could throw myself into my work, maybe stand out and make a difference. Guess what? I was overworked, burned out, and laid off right as I worked a few weekends and pushed through a crazy (and arbitrary) deadline. I still haven't recovered emotionally. I was sort of believing the lie, for a bit, but this severed the last thread.
My story isn't unique or special, but then I come on HN and I get told that I just have to "take pride in my work", like I'm not checking my e-mail every day to see if I even still have a job, during the worst cost of living crisis since 2008. I'm sorry, that's a fucking joke.
There are a million other things I'd rather be doing all day than this. And a lot of them involve programming a computer! But not things that allow some suit to send me a smarmy e-mail about "making 2026 our best year ever", no. Things that help me, my friends, my family, my community. Those are the only things that matter. Work exists because my landlord wants to retire comfortably in Florida. Bully for him. The rest of us, well. We have to grind it out and hope we make it to the finish line.
Give us a reason to care. It's that simple.
I believe that seeking external validation, inspiration and/or reason is not robust and a path to unhappiness. IMO, it's better if the reasons for you to care come from within.
I dont pay my bills from reasons within.
The reasons to care are personal pride in the quality of your work, understanding that your lack of effort has a negative impact on your colleagues, and your continued employment.
And if you hate your job, but are completely unable to find alternative employment (which is what you should do if you hate your job), you probably should reconsider how much you hate your job.
Got any recipes for delicious meals I can make with my pride?
I take pride in the stuff I enjoy doing. A job is just a paycheck because I need it.
He wasn't asking you to work for free.
I know. But people will worry about dollars first before they even think about pride.
I find it hard to believe you actually read my comment before demonstrating you are probably one of the people I'm talking about at the end of it.
At no point did I state or imply that workers should be working solely or even primarily for anything other than money.
But if you can't be bothered to take pride in the work you're being paid to do, you shouldn't be paid to do it for long.
I will do my job as well as necessary to keep it in order to keep receiving money. If I could find a job that pays well and made me happier I would.
If you can't find a better job, you should probably appreciate the one you have and not try to skate by with the bare minimum, if for no other reason than you're likely to miscalculate at some point.
That’s just another way of saying work harder for same pay because the company knows they have you by the balls.
No, it's recognizing you have no better alternative so you shouldn't take what you do have for granted, because it's not guaranteed to continue.
"Beatings will continue until morale improves."
People have a working contract and all you have to do is work according to the contract.
Ah, noble poverty! Be grateful to tha masta' for providing you the scraps he can provide! Your paycheck is the beautiful work you produce for tha masta'!
Seriously, pay people what they are worth and they will care. It is not that hard.
The vast majority of people significantly overestimate their worth, yet people with your attitude seem to believe it only exists with respect to highly compensated employees.
I agree with your second sentence, but it's harder than it should be due to what I said above.
Pride in the quality of my work is a phrase to make one feel bad about themselves. I take pride in my hobbies and in my hobby projects. I take pride in my family and friends. I do not take pride in being exploited for my work so some higher up can buy a new car every year.
And again, someone comes and makes a comment that proves my point. Unless you are working in very unusual (and illegal in the developed world) circumstances, you are not being exploited in any real sense.
In the end this depends on your definition of "fair". What percentage of your generated production do you think is fair for the company to take? 95%? 50%? 10%?
That depends on the value of your generated production, among many other things, and ultimately isn't the right question to ask.
Can an employee obtain better employment terms elsewhere (which is a complex concept to define in itself)? If so, they are underpaid, if not, they aren't.
You were talking about exploitation. Using the fact that the employee cannot obtain a better employment elsewhere to extract as much of the production or value from the employee smells a lot like exploitation to me.
If an employer offers an employee $100 per hour, and the next best offer that employee can obtain elsewhere is $90 for an otherwise equivalent job, should the employee take that job for granted? Is the employer exploiting them with their pay rate?
In my humble exploited worker opinion, you resemble Samuel L Jackson in Django Unchained. You dont even realize in what position you are in. Get back to the ground bootlicker.
And in my humble opinion, you will continue to be dissatisfied and somehow it's everyone's fault but your own.
> You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store.
You still can almost everywhere outside of places like SF? I just spot-checked some data, and in Minneapolis for example currently available apartments are comparable to what they were when I was looking 10 years ago, cashier wages have gone up 45%, and that often comes with healthcare benefits now. It's not an especially wealthy life, but a single person should be very comfortable (that's a comparable hourly wage and apartment cost to what I had delivering pizza at some other part of my life, and I lived comfortably and was able to save up to splurge on a nicer used Miata and the down payment for a small house).
So I believe it actually worse that the article makes it out to be.
Currently AI "solutions" being implemented in places like call centers are often technical solutions attempting to pave over organizational problems. Many IT solutions are like that. We refuse to fix the underlying problems, so we layer software on top, so we won't notice the stupidity below.
IT companies will happily take the money and write the code, broken as it might be, because the real problems aren't actually resolved. That to me is a problem. Companies needs to be way better at saying no, and offer help address the underlying issues instead, even if they aren't technical in nature.
> What is wrong with just wanting to work for money?
Nothing. In fact, I envy people who can and wish I could. Consider it one of my largest flaws.