I think the important distinction is "doing the responsibilities of the level above yours" and "doing them well." These are actually very non trivial since many people don't actually know the former (what does your boss actually?), and then have no baseline so overestimate their actual competence if they do know. Simply doing more work of the same kind as before will not get you promoted.
It is a little bit like “it’s not what you know, is what you can prove”: I mean: “it’s not what you do, is what the boss of your boss sees”. And I emphasize “boss of your boss” because him is who you have to impress (or somebody 2 levels above, anyway).
Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
> Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
As you go up the levels that is exactly the job (for better or worse) so doing that is doing the work at the next level. You are organizational glue that connects people and ensures your team has proper visibility. If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
It does not have to be so, and in some companies is not so, notably the ones which thrive and meritocracy rules. Is a big fallacy to think all is politics, IMHO.
Between the most junior developer and the CTO, and all in between, is about taking good decisions, communicating clearly, and owning errors. If it is a healthy company with competent management, there is no need to make a powerpoint of every fart you shoot. Now the reality is, big companies are run typically by incompetent people with "cover your ass" mentality, with lots of internal and external corruption and nepotism. See Dilbert. It doesn't mean is the only model.
> If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
Big no. I totally knew and saw that, clear as day. But if when the position is open the nephew of the boss'es boss is looking for a job, you are just out of luck. Also if your boss is constantly talking bad of you anytime anyone internally asks for you.
As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.
That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.
So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.
I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.
Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create
Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.
FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.
I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.
(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)
I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.
For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.
Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.
This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.
On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.
Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.
I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.
I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.
Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.
I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?
But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.
I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.
I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money
imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.
You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.
I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.
All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.
Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.
> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".
I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.
"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.
This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.
It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.
We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)
They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.
If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.
Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.
Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money
I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.
Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.
If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.
It’s not a scam. It’s a system that exists for people and made by people. Period. Money, outcomes and so on only have value because people assign them value. If you remove people then what you do has no value or concept of value. Life is not some video game with an omniscient score counter. Other people are the score counter.
In your lens: people are often horrible at keeping score, distracted by values that do no help them win overall.
Not necessarily a bad thing at times. Of course some chance encounter that builds a friendship or even family can be worth not winning that ball game. But actions have consequences and maybe someone else needed to win to get their goals fulfilled.
In my lens the only true score is the collection perception of the score. Not a number, not a formula and not what you think the score is. There is no external absolute counter you can point to because the collective view is the truth.
You are part of the collective, but that does not necessarily mean that your perception matters for the purpose of the score, what this thread is about. Sticking to thread, in terms of perspective on corporate world, are you a decision-maker? or do you have any significant influence on a decision-maker? if no then your perception simply does not matter for the game that is being played.
But also applies to politics you're alluding too. Every election cycle is strewn with the paper votes of much of the electorate because, although they're part of the collective, it turns out their perception didn't matter. You can pretend you opt out of the score but unless you're planning to live on in a different country/planet you cant really.
Your perception matters to you and your values. It's still important but it's a mistake to assume it has to matter to the rest of society/corporation overall
Well sure. That's why we're in this situation. We (perhaps correctly) think no one cares about us in the wider society.
There's two reactions to this. Accept this and make your own trail in life, perhaps becoming a decision maker in the process. Or find others and collect together to make sure your agreed upon ideas can and must be heard.
There is no objective score and thus people are perfect at it since the score is by definition what other people think it is. Like the value of money or stocks. Once you realize that a lot of life is significantly less frustrating.
I'd say life becomes more frustrating of you really think this extreme. You realize your values and then realize certain people with contradictoryvalues aren't part of your community, hut obstacles to overcome. Now it's not a team game, it's a battle royale. Not necessarily winner take all, but overall a lot of people will lose more than they win.
A collective sense of "score" is needed to prevent that.
It’s got nothing to do with values but value. Are you doing things that provide value. Once you realize the only measure of that is how other people perceive what you’ve done it’s a lot less frustrating. It makes thing more cooperative as you now need to work with others and communicate with others and you know that versus clinging to a siloed invalid notion of value.
That goes into what my above reply warns about. Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
If some manager's value is "I just need to phone it in and retire" and you are misson-driven, you have an obstacle. Now you're going behind the back of the obstacle trying to stand out, and essential work isn't being met. Mamager panics, has to do more work and probably chastises the other person. Each are only trying to follow what their goals "value".
We do need "values", plural. "Values" will help let out singular "value" compromise as needed. So we shift from "I just want to retire" to "okay, I'll male sure the excited one can get on bigger projects while I chill". And let's the "I want to change the world" types occasionally compromise with "okay this person needs help for a moment". It's not crushing dreams but also making sure that other collective goals are met.
> Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
The goal is to ensure that for the value someone else can offer you, you have something of equal value to offer to them in kind.
If you are useless blob, that's not an obstacle, it merely means you're not even trying to be a team player. Face life alone if you so wish, but since the dawn of time humans have leaned into social organization for good reason.
And thars why the social contract is broken. The companies aren't even bothering to reciprocate, so why care about their values if they don't care about you?
You have your own goals and the company considers you a "useless blob", no matter how you align. Becauee the only value they see in you is pushing pencils. . That's how we create a low trust society.
The social contract is broken, but I'm not sure you've correctly identified the cause.
The reality is that a lot of people have truly become useless blobs. Look at Apple's 54 billion dollar cash holdings just sitting there waiting for something of value to cash it in for. That's 54 billion dollars in promises people made to deliver value that they've never made good on. Or, to put it another way, Apple has given away 54 billion dollars in value away for free...
...-ish. Theoretically they can still seek the promises that others made for future value delivery so it isn't technically free is the truest sense of the word, but for all practical purposes it is so. What on earth could you or I ever offer in return to make good on the promise of value we made? I mean, HN tends to be a little more inventive than the general population so maybe you can I can conjure up something at some point. But the average Joe on the street? What are they going to offer to turn that $54 billion promises into actual value? Let's be realistic. At this point, it's never going to happen.
Once upon a time we got this bright idea that if everyone funnelled into university research labs we'd start to all create all kinds of new value to deliver. It was a noble thought, if a bit unrealistic. But somehow that idea got watered down into "go to university so you can get a job pushing paper around", and now the masses don't even understand what value is anymore.
"Values" is (one way) how strangers bootstrap trust, "value" is how colleagues (dare I say "compadres") maintain it.
>if everyone funnelled into university research labs
University is an excellent microcosm for analyzing the social compact breakdown, because most of the value has been created by transient workers. With levels of cooperation that any profitable enterprise will laugh at, that value, if properly appreciated, will dwarf GDP.[0]
So I'd agree with GP that values, lack thereof, both internal to academia and of society at large, was the source of the rot.
There's the idea of the long-tail that nobody talks about now, it's still quite relevant, and I'm glad HN is keeping the flame.
[0] seminaries (quasi universities) did a suboptimal values-value tradeoff compared to the Teutonic model. Bell Labs 19xx-1970 obviously had an even better model, surfing on the transience. Internship program was the magic? Values-value resonance? The secret that neither ArcInst nor OpenAI will (re)discover? (Latter too coupled to value!) The profound Ability to capture value from joe and Joe?
Think they were called "program managers" or something.. incubators of valueS. And they didn't need to say what they were working on (contradicting conventional "Apple" wisdom)
i'd love to hear more of your philosophical perspective on IP, historiographic/economic evidence that you've accumulated
> "Values" is (one way) how strangers bootstrap trust, "value" is how colleagues (dare I say "compadres") maintain it.
1. That would imply that if you and I bootstrap trust and then disappear from each other's lives for 20 years, when we finally meet again that the trust will have been lost and will have to be rebuilt. Color me skeptical. It seems to me that most people will, once established, continue with trust until there is some reason to change their mind. It does not need to be maintained, but can be destroyed.
2. Value and trust are not intrinsically linked. In fact, that is the primary reason for why we have a legal system: So that you and I can exchange value without any need to trust each other. If one of us does something stupid within that, the other can send out the hired goons to mess up one's day, thus giving strong motivation to act in good faith towards each other without the presence of trust.
> So I'd agree with GP that values, lack thereof, both internal to academia and of society at large, was the source of the rot.
Nah. Like you said, "values" are only relevant to bootstrapping trust, but trust doesn't scale. Never has, never will. Studies have shown that people can only ever get to know hundreds of people in their lifetime, and cannot even recognize more than a few thousand faces. You cannot build any kind of relevant society on communal trust. Even the smallest communities we find today have way more people than an individual can mange to keep track of. Which, again, is why we establish legal systems instead.
Maybe eons ago, when there were only 100 people on earth, we had a society where values were relevant. But the not-broken social contract being spoken of cannot be from that era. There is no record of that time.
It's going to be hard for me to argue the existence of "high trust" versus "low trust" societies, but I'm happy to accept the relative observability of functional legal regimes. From then on we can discuss whether trust in _systems of rules_ can scale.
you might not like to talk about research orgs. Though I think they are example of a __productive__ system where informal contracts are the norm --so people default to using shared "values" and "folkways" to guide their activities and interactions -- you might argue that unconstrained exploration doesn't scale either.
As for the Dunbar number, it's been popular for HNers to argue for startups that way. "Doing things that don't scale" is one contrarian moral that seem to not involve a lot of legalese at its core. Most effective company lawyers should be like managers, invisible? And startup lawyers-- shared?
Value and trust. I somehow think we agree but I flubbed the exposition. Later.
> you might not like to talk about research orgs. Though I think they are example
Are they a good example, or are they simply an example of where the stakes are low to non-existent? If the farmer fails to make good on delivering value (i.e. food), there is real risk of you staving to death. That's a problem. If a researcher fails to deliver value. Oh well...? Hell, the very nature of research is such that sometimes value will not be found so that idea is baked in.
These are delicate issues. Not least because research value takes an unpredictably (default long) time to harvest. Here's an agricultural example, which exposes some of the same. Might not be better than the above though it could move the discussion: vanilla farming
-guy discovers manual pollination, unable to capture value in his lifetime.
-people don't starve when they can't have vanilla in their soft serve, but it's still one of the more expensive spices.
-lawlessness means farmers often lose harvests to thiefs.
-Ongoing research to automate pollination (& move production to more developed polities) but I don't think the status quo is going to budge in the coming decades, mostly because the end users always get their supply
The hypothetical vanilla farmer hasn't reached a place of having value. Only after the vanilla is actually able to be captured as value does the farmer enter into trade with it. This scenario you've outlined is much like the entrepreneurial software developer in his basement working on his secret startup idea. Until he has a working MVP that people actually want to buy, he's just there on his own trying to find value to deliver.
This is not aligned with the participation spoken of earlier where the value is already established and others are giving up their value under the expectation of receiving equal value in kind. You're going down a much different road here.
Sorry again I was more interested in the ongoing vanilla automation research angle-- where the value of current research strat not established. that's why it's the last point, though contrasted by structure to the first (so the question is "better" IP infra all you need to shift the status quo, how interaction between value and values can guide design/deployment of research infra)
All examples are not hypothetical, there are indeed vanilla farmers who have demo'd enough value to buy (unregulated) shotguns+ammo, but not to DIY that,or hire goons OR proper research managers :)
(Abstract just to demo some basic convo "value", note that it's undergrad project and already paywalled :)
Trying to establish we agree on the basics, then move on to questions we're both interested in.
Edit: related thread that I hamfistedly tried to participate in, I'm guessing I'm more inclined to think this guy is providing some value, even if you discount he earned 10+ karma from this very comment -- which means the top one, less insightful imho, has like nX ??!!:)
I think there's quite a jump from "ChatGPT has a high user retention rate" to "AI is useful to people". That's like saying funko pops were useful to nerds just because they kept buying them.
Any time there is something new everyone will sign up to try it out. Give it time. Once there are enough intrusive ads, or subtle ads shimmed into answers, social manipulation and political bias once it hits critical mass, rewriting of history, squeezed rate limits, more cost for less rate limits that number will drop if they are honest and/or deleting inactive accounts. The negative features will not creep in until they believe they have achieved critical corporate capture and dependency.
Twitter has a TON of active users though and those aren't going anywhere.
Hell, those that did leave Twitter did it to move to Bluesky which is basically Twitter under a different banner.
Even if people move away from specific instances of some form of technology (like Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon or whatever) they are not necessarily moving away from the idea/tech iself (like microblogging in this example).
Same with other social media: notice how after "Reddit gone shit" the people who felt like that and did move away didn't move back to forums or whatever, they went to Reddit-like boards like Lemmy.
Active users on twitter has gone down massively the past 4 years! As far as we know, because the company doesn’t report numbers as proactively as it used to.
And sure, you can say people just moved to other platforms, but I don’t think you can substantiate that either.
Personally I just dropped all twitter likes, and a lot of my old twitter friends did too. We have discord servers now.
But it’s hard to have a discussion like this without data and we’re never gonna have the data. So you have to use qualitative data instead.
Or that the vast majority of people don't actually value their own productivity and time that much. Which given the popularity of social media and people not paying a few dollars to avoid hours of streaming ads per month seems fairly clear to me.
The core of the argument is that they say the rules are X but the actually mean they are Y. That has nothing to do "freedom of association" but simply with being two faced liars. Which people often dislike. And the thing called "freedom of speech" lets me say those last bits. :)
Ironically, if the mods here thought your comment was over the line, it would be removed. I don’t think you understand what freedom of speech actually means lol
And that's fine, this site has rules and the mods follow those rules. I am free to say things but I am not guaranteed a platform to say them on. My usage of the term is just as inaccurate as your usage of "freedom of association." The difference is that I am aware of that and was seeing if you'd bite which you did. Accuracy clearly only matters to you as a way to discredit others but not as a pillar of your own arguments.
> There were many decades where phones didn't have back doors.
Your cell phone provider almost certainly will respond to a valid warrant and wire tap your non e2e encrypted phone call.
I'd be very surprised if the most common mode of remote communication in any time period was not subject to government interception in some format within a short time of becoming such. That includes physical mail, telegrams, landlines, cell phone calls, txt messages, emails, etc.
Referring to "how things used to be" is not in fact helping the case for privacy.
I don't think people are arguing against complying with valid warrants. They object to blanket surveillance being done with tools available to any law officer that can be used at any time, warrant or not.
Of course they will respond to warrants, they have to, and nowadays they have the infrastructure to forward all traffic to law emforcement's servers in real-time.
We're discussing this in regards to an article where the obvious "solution" was found by the government to this very approach. You're free to build it that way and we're free to put you all in jail afterwards as a result. Rubber hose decryption at its finest.
Phone operators are heavily regulated and licensed, and this is a legal requirement and a requirement of their licence. Complying with lawful warrants is also obviously a legal obligatuon.
Your comment is just another illustration that many people have so little experience with an actual dictatorship to not realize the difference. The US isn't perfect but that's a start contrast to an actual dictatorship. For now at least.
I’ll say the same is true for those that hold your point of view.
When the public or a segment are signaling concern about a dictatorship, it’s an alarm and signal that they see signs.
What is misunderstood: Once the dictator secures power, it’s far too late. The critics are long silenced, and all of the checks and balances have been hollowed out and made powerless.
They boy who cried wolf. We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.
Saying the former when the reality is the latter means your message will simply becomes ever more ignored the closer to a dictatorship we get and thus makes a dictatorship more likely.
> I’ll say the same is true for those that hold your point of view.
I aways find it so interesting that having a view that aims to be based on reality and not overly exaggerated fear mongering is seen as so negatively by both sides. I can't see that ending well for the US to be honest. Fear mongering is how you get dictators, left or right, and not how you get a stable democracy.
> We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.
While there is truth in that, it is also important to note that there is no such thing as a clear-cut line where we go, ok this is it, now it's a dictatorship.
Which in turn means that it becomes easy to rationalize and say that because they aren't doing this or that yet, it can't be a dictatorship yet. And those goalposts keep moving.
So perhaps one analogy is like a recession. We never really know the economy is in a recession until it's already been in one for a while but it wasn't obvious yet, only in hindsight.
I find it fascinating that saying "we're not yet an actual dictatorship" is seen as complacency.
> Of course, my family escaped a dictatorship and made our home in the US. So we have a better sense of these things.
Fascinating what people assume about others and then use that to discount the views of others if those views disagree with them.
Clearly you've got a lot of trauma but panic and excess anxiety are not healthy responses to that as they make your decisions irrationally biased. That's how you get lots of immigrants who escaped communist dictatorships voting for a right wing dictatorships in the US. Their trauma biases their world view so much that they panic and then cause an equally bad outcome.
In a dictatorship this happens indeed. And there's nothing you can do about it.
In the US people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc. It is unfortunate that someone is trying to become dictator, but the point of this country is that it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that.
> people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc.
It's actually pretty normal for modern dictatorships to have all that too. During eras where common people and peer nations appreciate democracy and liberalism, the typical way of operating a dictatorship is to allow for nominal expression of all those things but to structure in limits on its efficacy. They happen, they're just made sure never exceed the regime's capacity to rein them in, and sometimes are even instigated by the regime as an alternative means of influence.
> it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that
Sure. And it also doesn't only become a dictatorship when those things are no longer visible. If you only see dictatorship as some abstract platonic ideal of complete repression of dissent, instead of as a concentration of power effectively beyond the reach of the demos and its guardian institutions, you'll miss most of its occurrences in the real world.
Not like Germans didn't fight the nazis. Their road to power was littered with the corpses of liberty and actual people.
But its not so much trump I'm concerned about, its the people using him (though he is using them in some kind symbiotic relationship), and that is project 2025, federalist society, christo fascist tech billionaires like Thiel, or even the CEO of ycombinator, that supports them, etc. There's a chance it could end with trump, they know that, so they're working on making sure it doesn't.
I understand. And I hope you are doing your part to fight what you perceive to be the bad guys. Because, you realize that if you do nothing, and everyone does the same as you, then we all deserve our ultimate fate, one of subjugation and dictatorship.
Fortunately, here in the US, one can still do stuff, and that action can actually move the needle. In China, you can do nothing. If you don't like what Xi is doing, tough luck.
My point is: it is very fashionable here on HN to complain about how the US is bad, or a tyranny, or unjust, or whatever. But out of all the countries in the world, the US still has the highest aversion to dictatorship and tyranny. People do fight. Look at Harvard. Columbia didn't fight, but Harvard did. Some people fold, but some fight.
The founding idea of the US is that people are imperfect. Some will always try to grab power. That's human nature. The solution is to have multiple checks and balances. They will not create a perfect society, but they'll reduce the likelihood of one group of people to take over, as it happened with the Nazis in the inter-war period in Germany. Just checks and balances are not enough, it's also the democratic tradition. It's the people willing to take a stand. And fortunately, such people still exist.
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