Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Considering caring for the happiness of your employees (or really people in general) to be infantilizing is a pretty toxic mindset IMO. I WANT MY JOB SOUL CRUSHING BECAUSE I'M A REAL MAN.

Happiness and entertainment are not the same thing. Most of us spend a huge portion of our life working, we might as well try to make it at least a little bit fulfilling instead of just a way to fund the two days of the week when you can do something else.

And more cynically happy people will almost certainly work better. Have you never taken much more time than necessary to complete a task just because it was so incredibly dull, tedious and uninteresting? Bugtrackers are filled with issues that would require two lines of code to fix but nobody can be bothered to write them.

View on HN

I'm obviously not saying that you should purposefully treat employees like garbage. The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing. We are all a part of a business for one purpose - to continue or increase the success of the business.

For me, a job has to be reciprocal. I take my salary very seriously, and I reflect on what I've done in the past pay period. I want to make sure that I've provided that amount of value in that amount of time. Of course my feelings are important, I'm not going to contribute to an environment that doesn't reciprocate the value that I provide with some combination of compensation and gratitude.

My point is, I hear a lot of programmers talk about the feelings of the business with disdain, and frankly complete entitlement. I've seen plenty of engineers not contribute their fair share value to the business side - they think they earn their living by showing up and completing a couple of tickets a week, when in reality the business needs are much more demanding. The ideal working relationship is reciprocal - both parties get some satisfying bit of value out of it.

> The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing.

That was just your interpretation. The parent commenter said that some engineers are motivated by money and some by new tech. Either way you need to keep workers happy or they will leave, that is just common sense. So if you choose boring technology you will get people motivated by money and not the "infant" engineers who "need toys" as you say. But really they don't "need" the toys, they just prefer it and will therefore leave if someone else gives them that when you don't.

Employees are hired guns. Employees want a tolerable job and a good salary while the executives and owners want to maximize profits.

If programmers can act with “complete entitlement” sometimes it’s only because they are some of the few workers who can demand something from their jobs, even without a union backing them. Most workers do not have that privilege/leverage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com