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Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but wonder if the tech industry did this to itself. Tech companies offer so many amenities at the office from free food, to laundry, to massages that the line between office and home has blurred. Maybe the solution is making offices feel like offices and normalizing forty hour work weeks?

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You think it was the benefits, rather than the we're-a-family, always on-call, live your work culture employers have been pushing?

I think it started with college campus activism 10-20 years ago. If you feel empowered to shut down the dean’s office to oust a professor, you’ll probably think the same techniques can be applied to your workplace. It certainly doesn’t help that your workplace strives to walk and quack like some kind of college campus.

Campus activism is much older than 10-20 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Philadelphia_student_demo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_strike_of_1970

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_protests_o...

Yes, but this particular flavor is new.

Shutting down college campuses? Hear of the 1960s? Sit Ins? We had a little of that in the 80s around Sout Africa and, oh Alaska ANWAR. Shutdown wallstreet toxics campaign. It is different now but in just the way everything that the Internet touches changes.

No, it’s different in that now the shutdowns are not over issues such as the Vietnam War but rather a professor objecting to to a ‘day without white people’[0], an instructor using a word in Chinese that merely sounds like an unmentionable word in English [1] or a progressive dean using the word ‘slaveholder’ in a self-deprecating context [2]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-lesson-in-campus-consequences...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54107329

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/nyregion/CUNY-law-school-...

You’re comparing large movements involving most of society with a few anecdotes during the current period of relatively little societal unrest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_activism

A quick skim indicates that student activism has been recorded in some places dating to the early 1800s. How far do you think we should roll back civil rights?

> It certainly doesn’t help that your workplace strives to walk and quack like some kind of college campus.

Is this not a great thing? Having a walkable place with quality of life amenities is a positive thing when youre talking about somewhere you spend at least 1/3 of the day

It started with bulldozer parenting, which lead to a generation being unequipped to deal with the real world. They are effectively still toddlers, stuck in arrested development. They demand to be protected from everything, including words and ideas. If they don't get what they want, they throw a tantrum. Colleges turned into their pushover parents, and then tech companies, and now almost every institution.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...

I have two college age children and two high school age kids, and i work with a number of people right out of school, and that statement does not reflect my experience. Multiple recessions, 9-11, covid, climate change, social unrest due to racism and violence, and yet they are motivated to act as citizens with responsibility for their system of government. They work hard, are savvy about many things we never spoke of in the 1980s in North Carolina, trauma and difficulties of all sorts, and work to help each other. In a world where the older generations seem happy to condemn them to expensive education, economic and health insecurity, and all sorts of under investment in basic infrastructure, they are pragmatic and innovative in their efforts to improve the whole. They both see the insanity of the Leet Code gates, and develop many ways to master it.

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