by godelski | 2025-04-24 23:59:06+00:00
> You don’t invest in your future ... the average tenure of a software developer is 3 years and at any time an employee can leave.

Well this is a 2 stage problem and I think the response is bad for multiple reasons.

1) Tragedy of the Commons: If we all act like this, then no one gets invested in. If we all invest in our employees then when they leave another company gets the rewards. That's still true when "we" are the "other company". You still benefit regardless. Under the condition that most companies (or rather at least the big companies) collude in this way. They have good reason to as coalitions maximize utility for all parties involved.

2) Why the fuck are we training people and then tossing them away? We do this in many ways but the most obvious one is hiring a new dev and paying them more than the current devs. Guess what? That new dev needs to be trained and now your old devs are pissed that they aren't getting paid as much. So now you not only waste time and money onboarding someone new, you lose your experience.

> Companies don’t care about society - they care about their bottom line

I'm telling you that this is dumb shortsighted thinking. This is a low order approximation. It is true under "spherical chicken in a vacuum" type of settings, but not in the real world. These are not mutually exclusive things. Remember how Ford paid his employees more and gave them time off? We're told that story as he needed customers. But there's a side benefit to that too. Not only are the workers happier and more productive (leading to fewer mistakes and costly accidents) but they're walking advertisements. There goes that Ford employee in his car, I wish I could be like them. Yes, it requires understanding abstraction and making future predictions to understand this rather straightforward logic, but we're programmers who spend all our days dealing with abstractions and trying to predict future events (i.e. how the damn thing will be used and especially used incorrectly).

> My job is to do what’s best for the company as long as it is not illegal or unethical

Exactly!

I don't understand why you think we're in disagreement about this. Every single one of my points has come down to this. I've said it explicitly. My very first message stated that there were selfish reasons to do these things. The selfishness and foresight doesn't apply just to yourself.

> My job is not to make society better

Not always, but these are usually strongly correlated. There's 3 ways about it, right? If your job makes society better, awesome. If it is neutral, so be it. If it makes society worse, well you deserve hate because you're harming people. But the point of an economy is to align value with improving society, right? We don't have to get super philosophical here. There's many ways to improve society. Entertainment, a new widget, social action, cleaning shit, whatever. I'm not gonna judge here and pretend what's better and not.

But it is just a weird argument all together anyways. Your job isn't to make society better? Read that again. Your job isn't to make your life better? Certainly a paycheck makes your life better, right? I really hope it isn't making it worse. But we're social creatures too. Your job isn't to make your family's lives better? Your job isn't to make your friends' lives better? If it isn't to better yourself, your family, and your friends, then what the fuck are we even doing here? You have autonomy. And here's the fun part, if we care about our local groups and improve our local groups, this usually improves broader groups by extension. We're interconnected. I'm not saying you need to care about some dude on the opposite side of the country, but I sure as hope you don't think your job is to do harm. The "not illegal or unethical" part really is concerning. Frankly, I'd call doing harm unethical, even if it is small. It's more unethical to steal someone's wallet than to snatch a penny, but both are still unethical.

So I really don't get where you're trying to go with this. Because frankly, the selfish act improves society. It's just you have to consider that other people exist. If you're selfish and you model a world where you're alone, then yeah, maximize yourself at all costs. But when there are other agents in the world, the way to maximize your utility is through coalitions, through improving the group.