this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Are most white-collar work environments unpleasant? I'm a software developer and I have never worked somewhere that didn't make a reasonable effort to keep me happy, properly rested, and in good health in order to improve my productivity.
In my experience as a sysadmin, corporate structure almost always sees workers as liabilities that must be micromanaged, prodded, and scrutinized in regards to productivity, regardless of profits.
A good manager who wants happy, productive workers that don't quietly work against their employer knows when NOT to enforce the standard corporate HR patronizing infantilizing bullshit.
It sounds like you've either worked for small organizations or had good managers that recognize the reality that skillled workers like you are more competent and important to keeping the paychecks flowing than the connected narcissistic idiots on the top floor that get off on flexing power and barking irrational dictates just to hear themselves bark.
Remember, the workers make and do everything that keeps the world running. The scientists and engineers do the inventing and discovering. The capitalist owners just take all the money and the social credit, they don't actually do or know anything that benefits anyone but themselves. Even their supposed "charity" is usually used as an excuse to get praise while robbing the commons of owed tax revenue by writing it off, which makes it a transaction, not charity at all. Charity is giving and expecting nothing in return, save a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And they often "donate" to arts and political causes, while the victims of the society they bleed dry and leave to crumble die of exposure to the elements in tent cities.
Steve Jobs, who made like he was prometheus bringing the iPhone down from Olympus, couldn't have repaired a broken iPhone with access to every lab, component, and schematic in Silicon valley, a month, and a gun to his head. He wasn't even smart enough to go to real doctors and take real medicine when he was dying.
Pulling together all the resources and ideas to make something happen is itself a valid skill. They're way overpaid for it, but it is real work.
Steve Jobs, in particular, created with help the original Mac and was screwed over by other powerful people in the business. He created the Mach kernel and the NeXT workstation before Apple crawled back to him for help salvaging the business.
He might have been an arrogant prick, but he did have the ability to bring vision into reality, and he helped make a lot of people other than himself wealthy.
We have this thing called specialization in modern society. Do you think an electrician can design and produce a microchip or a math teacher can manage a large corporate entity? We all make choices. Some of us have more options or more help.
The accountants and lawyers pull together resources to make something happen, and are the ones that do all of the math and all the legal research to see if something can happen, the one that barked the order didn't. And as for ideas, the world would be a better place if that was left to the scientists, developers, craftspeople, and engineers that have the beneficial ones that might actually create or improve something of worth.
"Turn a product you could buy into a subscription you have to rent" has been the most widely implemented "idea" the modern CEO has been inspired to have, aside from laying off the people that made them their money the same week they report record profits. If you call that a skill of any positive use to society, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And Steve jobs wasn't just a shitty marketing grifter who pretended he was some titan of invention, he was also a notoriously shitty person off the clock. It's sad people look up to a wealthy man who let his child subsist on welfare simply because he could.
I’m a software dev aswell and I think they do try to look after us because our wages are a pretty big investment. For the other people on minimum wage, they do not give a fuck.
Sometimes the management is clever enough to realise it's much more cost effective to keep your knowledgeable employees happy than to have to go through the process of hiring replacements. Sadly there are plenty of ladder-climbers and egotists who don't get this, and that's even when they consider the workers they're fucking around to be highly skilled. When the powers that be consider their employees to be easily replaceable then they lose all motivation to treat them like anything other than human resource.