@glyph @dalias When I was in my late teens, if I went to a public park there'd sometimes be a bunch of people mowing the grounds, doing simple weeding work and the like. Most of them had mild-to-moderate cognitive disabilities, and this sort of "menial" work was the only thing left for them to do.
Now they've been replaced with robot mowers - but many of them, now in their senior years, still hang around the parks, picking up bottles to collect the bottle return fee, and sometimes just cleaning up trash if they find it. They're not economically desperate or homeless (and you don't make *that* much from a day's worth of bottle returns) - virtually all of them are on disability pensions, which is a livable income here. I've talked to many of them (as I also did when they were employed and I was some young delinquent smoking weed in the park, so some of them instantly recognize the older and at least outwardly more respectable me). They do it because they like to feel useful. That at least they're contributing *something* to the community. They don't like to feel "useless".
And honestly, this is *the same thing* I feel when I'm staring down the barrel of unemployment.
Now, I should mention that I live in a culture with a social-democratic work ethic, which is perhaps the only thing that's even harsher than a protestant one. But it generally seems to me that many people genuinely like feeling that they're contributing something to the fellowship, and often feel bad if they're deprived of a way to do so.
I'm not saying we should take Enoch's hammer to the robot mowers! But I'm saying that something that *to me* looks like miserable shit-shoveling might well be the thing that makes someone else feel like there's at least a small thing they can do to keep the community running. And if the last 30 years have taught me anything, it's that programmers are not necessarily the right people to make these judgment calls.
And certainly, programmers organized in privately-owned corporations aren't.
