Comment by frotty

Comment by frotty 3 days ago

100% of the people around me at work care.

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?

lolwutgood 3 days ago

Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well?

Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem.

An "era of good enough" makes no goddamn sense in response to this article. NONE of the things listed are good enough. None of them.

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bccdee 2 days ago

No, the examples in the article are bad.
The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.
DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.
The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.
Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.

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LunicLynx 3 days ago

I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.

It means that one just does, maybe even more then necessary because one doesn’t actually understand what their responsibilities are. And to be not detected it’s better to seem very busy and very caring.

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dragonwriter 2 days ago

> I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It is not.
It can be a product of not caring, and what is actually not caring can be mistaken for incompetence, but incompetence can coexist with dedication (the idea that it cannot seems is a face of the "effort is all that matters, there are no real differences in capabilities" myth), competence and concern are not at all the same thing or inherently linked such that either necessary implies the other.

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wakawaka28 3 days ago

One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill. OK maybe not actually, but let's just say that some people are quick to apply a label of "incompetent" to people who think a little differently, or who are perhaps only 10% less knowledgeable, or to people they imagine are less knowledgeable.

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- DavidPiper 3 days ago
  
  > One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill
  Only when there's no way to measure the results.
  
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  wakawaka28 3 days ago
  
  Measuring results is notoriously hard in this industry. Any metric can be easily manipulated, and many qualitative aspects of software are not quantifiable. Moreover, the people who get to decide the metrics will tend to choose them in a way that gives an advantage to themselves.
  
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rcxdude 2 days ago

Not always. I've seen multiple people who are very enthusiastic and care deeply about something they are absolutely terrible at, but are unable to recognise it (possibly because it's a hard thing to admit to yourself that this thing you like and care about is probably best left to someone else).

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MichaelZuo 3 days ago

Maybe some fraction of incompetent interns are playing a kind of double game, where they merely pretend to be really caring.
But I doubt that’s the norm. There really are a lot of not so smart people of all ages out there in positions way beyond their actual capability.
Edit: And in a lot of situations the dumb and hard working are way more dangerous than the smart and lazy.
With the dumb and lazy being somewhat better, so I partially agree with the parent.

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- dgfitz 3 days ago
  
  In my 15 years, I’ve had a lot of interns, and a lot of indirect interaction with other interns. I can usually spot a genuine one in about a day at this point.
  
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  caseyy 3 days ago
  
  Show horses and workhorses – Hillary Clinton was all about that and say what you like about her, this distinction is quite wise.
  There is also the latin saying "res, non verba" – that one is proven by action rather than words.
  
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- sureglymop 3 days ago
  
  I'm sure there are also a lot of competent smart people who may happen to have other issues in their lives affecting their output. Maybe they are burned out, have some family drama, have health issues, etc.
  I for one am glad if 10 interns get a chance even if only 1 turns out to be truly useful. It's a matter of empathy and I hope it prevails because what real purpose do we have without it.
  
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asmor 2 days ago

As the software archeologist on call for literally anything going wrong with anything IT operations related for a large publishing house that unfortunately had an IT department since the 80s and a web presence since the 90s, I'd like to extend a generous "fuck you" to all the people who have not cared to document a single thing in the past 30 years.

Point being, this isn't new.

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norseboar 3 days ago

The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.

On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.

And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.

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whycome 2 days ago

Isn't "good enough" the definition of "bare minimum"? That aligns pretty well with "doesn't care"

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nomel 2 days ago

I've only used "good enough", and have only ever seen it used, when enough margin beyond bare minimum exists to make it "good enough", which requires caring.
I suppose it depends on the personal definition of good enough, but I like to reserve "bare minimum" for those who truly do the minimal work, teetering on line between functional and non-functional.

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