alt Hacker NewsThere was a lot more pride in professional work yeah. People cared about doing a good job. I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades but you could probably throw a dart at "the internet" and probably hit something partially related.
I think theres just MUCH more depression over the much more visible reality that your upper managers don't care about you or the work you put out. Especially now with AI companies pitching them a salivating dream of doing the work of 100 with 10.
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No the decline is because people woke up to the fact that it doesn't matter if you take great pride in your work and work unpaid overtime and always produce quality output: you will still get laid off when the economy explodes or when some VP decides to cancel your whole product division. It doesn't matter. You are a sucker if you go over and above every day to the benefit of the company.
> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades
Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.
For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.
The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.
Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".