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Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.

I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.

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It has been known for a while that there is a link between leadership and severe mental health issues [1]. Unfortunately this is how a lot of organisations are being built and how they are fluorishing.

And the higher the position, the worse it is [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniesarkis/2019/10/27/seni...

A recent HN article/discussion that I think is relevant ("Don't kill yourself"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543543

Yes. Once I passed a certain threshold of comfortable income, and it was certainly less than anything to be found in Silicon Valley, money stopped being any motivation to me at all. What's the point of going from "comfortable plus ten percent" to "comfortable plus five hundred percent"? That's not worth one single headache, let alone a mental breakdown.

Oh, come on.

The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment.

Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

> Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer.

> The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others

Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.

You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."

The damage they're doing to themselves will eventually trickle down to those they live with - spouse, kids, parents, friends, etc.

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