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Comment by MichaelZuo

4 hours ago

I’m pretty sure the amount of care for fellow coworkers is normally distributed… so it makes sense the way below average just do that.

Heck the bottom decile would probably directly tell folks to pound sand if they could get away with it.

But "Go away I'm a curmudgeon" is an honest signal. Honest signals are required for a trust-based workplace. Whether you want a person to be a curmudgeon at work aside, knowing what they really are like and what they will do when you need something is foundational for trust.

AI washes that away. Everyone replies with AI voice, so nobody replies with honest signals, not the good / helpful folks or the curmudgeon unhelpful ones.

  • I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.

  • Well you should probably find a workplace that doesnt punish the “curmudgeons” for directly saying that.

    I doubt that will become a widespread norm within this century at least.

    • The people are answering with copy-paste AI are the curmudgeons trying not to get fired for being “hard to work with”

      The workplace of the future is just fake nice and pretty people parroting whatever their google babelfish tells them to

      1 reply →

I doubt it's normally distributed, if you look at displays of altruism in general you got outliers who will give a lot more to charity, help more in volunteer work... but also many that don't do anything. Obviously that's not the same as caring about fellow coworkers but if I were to guess it would follow this sort of distribution more if you have a good measure for 'caring'.

I would also believe certain subgroups of workers to be more or less caring. Maybe early joiners care more about coworkers, those which have been there the longest, the ones WFH the least, religious upbringing vs non religious. Coworkers are a pretty heterogeneous groups in many companies.