The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.
[1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - >>44102034 - May 2025
[2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-... - April 9th, 2024
[3] HN Search: Boeing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
It's not about prioritizing short term results.
In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.
But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.
In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.