Coworkers are less ambitious; bosses adjust to the new order
wsj.com
wsj.com
No wonder they aren't inspiring Gen Z. A Mercedes isn't a status symbol for Gen Z, and it barely is for Millennials.
I'm glad to see people recognizing the emperor has no clothes. Sacrificing yourself for a company you don't own--at all, never mind completely--won't make you wealthy. The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them. It's never been easier to create enough value on your own terms to sustain yourself and not let someone else siphon out your value on their terms.
Yes that's true of course.
>It's never been easier to create enough value on your own terms to sustain yourself and not let someone else siphon out your value on their terms
Not so sure about that part. Maybe it's easier today but if you mean things like freelancing the problem is that you then have to do lots of stuff that isn't interesting to a lot of technical oriented people (like finding clients, negotiating contracts etc). The advantage of working for a company is that you can concentrate on the things that interest you and leave the rest to others.
Sure you'll end up earning less but, in my book at least, its worth it. But nothing says you have to "sarifice yourself" you can work for a company but still have a decent balance to have time for other things.
For most, it's way more work handling all those tasks you mentioned, in addition to the work you 'are getting paid for'. The stress alone is killer.
In our industry, it's hardly serfdom: I have reasonable autonomy, get paid vacation time, and can largely code (my preference) the bulk of the day.
Will you? I thought going independent had a higher variance but similar or slightly lower median than working for an employer.
Rather than having a company with gazillions of layers of management tell me what my options are for everything outside of the work that is my direct responsibility, I can choose which things I care about and how much and pull those levers myself, either doing them or hiring them done.
I want maximum money for myself not making less money so I can make some philosophical point about other people not siphoning value from me. If a company pays me that money then I don't really care how much money they make (aside from when I'm negotiating for more money from them). If something else pays better, without additional cost such as shitty healthcare or a lot of tasks I hate doing, then that's the way to go but not due to caring if someone else also makes money or not.
Many people factor other values into their consideration than raw dollars, but since value is subjective, it's their prerogative to do so and yours to value only money if you wish.
It's not about some self-righteous desire not to produce value for anybody else. It's about a realization that you can derive maximum value without the corporate employer.
Are they? According to the BLS the percentage of people who are self-employed is lower than it was 2004-2006. It increased during the start of covid but hasn't gone up since then.
Going from "we don't want to put as much effort into corporate jobs that won't reward us for it" to "we want to be self-employed" is a big stretch that numbers don't justify.
This is a stabilizing (therefore desirable) feature in the system, not a bug. I want that (and work hard to ensure that) my company receives more value from me than I cost them. That makes them want to retain me in a stable relationship that benefits both of us. I don't want their surplus to be too great, but I want there to be a definite, undeniable surplus on their end.
The alternative is far worse: if you are costing the company ore than the value you're providing, a rational company should fire you to improve their company. That they haven't means you're working for incompetent leaders in the best case (and leaders who are about to fire you in a worse case).
In general, show you more than pay for yourself in a month, you can write your own raise.
Invariably, company management viewed the above as an expense to incur only as long as infra was percieved as a problem. In my third year of experience I had a banger of a year at a startup and could rightfully claim 3 million per year in savings. In uncertain terms it was implied to me that I wasn’t expected to stick around for the second year but I was given a 2% raise out of kindness :shrug:
Management generally views themselves as valuable, and finds people like themselves as valuable. I got wise to this and transitioned fields.
The past was no picnic, but I know there was better respect towards the workers in decades gone by. I remember a “how to get rich” book from back then talking about not hiring or contracting the absolute cheapest bid, believe it or not. It preached making sure your side of the deal didn’t come at an unfair cost to another side. Believe it or not.
The long timers in LV who had worked in both the mob days and corporate america/modern had a strong preference for working for the mob. That should tell it all.
// I didn't say this was easy. I said it was how.
It’s totally different when you are making $18 / hour and the company calculates your value at $19. Screw up a little bit your done. Push you to work extra for free and they just doubled your net value!
If, as another commenter said, I'm generating $600k of value and only being paid $300k, it's easier now than it ever has been for me to reduce my effort and generate, say, $450k, and still get to keep $300k of it working for myself. I can reduce my output my 25% without reducing my income.
That's not to say it's easy, just easier than it ever has been, and people are figuring that out.
If you reduce that $600K to $450K of revenue, the CM becomes $270K while paying you $300K, meaning a rational employer should fire you.
Yes, a company should fire you of you reduce production by 25% and require the same payment. But the whole point is that all these people are figuring out they don't need the company for their income as much as the company needs them for the revenue they produce.
> The alternative is far worse: if you are costing the company ore than the value you're providing, a rational company should fire you to improve their company. That they haven't means you're working for incompetent leaders in the best case (and leaders who are about to fire you in a worse case).
I think the big problem comes from this largely overlooked next part. Companies are rarely rational. Some leaders will keep people on staff just to show that they are a big team. Some leaders have cronies. Some are just super incompetent themselves; and seem to use the Dilbert Principle [1] as a guiding light by promoting their incompetent cronies or flatterers to high positions. Often, they will snare workers in a lot of make-work tasks while awarding huge bonuses to themselves. Anyone in management is rarely fired -- you will often see managers who have been at the same job for 20 years coasting by just as much as, if not more than their employees.
It seems to me that the overlooked part of "quiet quitting" is due to workers noticing this sort of problem in their management; and taking that into account while deciding how long they work.
And, oddly enough I don't think this is at odds with what you said -- basically, the more irrationally a company seems to behave, the more they will get people who want to coast since they realize the irrationality. I feel like a good way to right the ship is to promote a lot more rationality into management; and quickly get rid of managers who seem toxic, prone to cronyism, or having a lot of attitude about "these people work for me".
----------------------------------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle, says (semi-humorously) that the most incompetent people usually get promoted to management to prevent them from doing more damage in IC positions
This is basic micro economics: both parties are better off after the exchange. It’s not zero sum. Or at least doesn’t have to be.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-microeconomics/chapter/...
IF both parties were actually better off, people wouldn't leave and stay gone. They might strike out, thinking the grass was greener, but they'd be back in short order.
That they're leaving and staying gone shows that the reality wasn't living up to the theory.
It's currently cobfirming that the pre-covid reality of work wasn't living up to the balance in the theory where everybody ends up better off.
Employees are exhausted and their employers were only one part of the equation.
COVID and other personal issues are the others.
Thanks to healthy savings accounts, many people could afford to quit their jobs. Quitting wasn't 100% the employer's fault.
They've clearly concluded they're better off now than before, across whatever factors matter to them, so again, the reality wasn't living up to the theory.
That changes nothing about my point though--if your employer was getting exactly the value they were paying you, they would be indifferent to keeping you employed. And vice-versa.
One thing I love about their ad is it reminds me of this classic speech by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Same tactic, different decade.
> The bad news is - you've got, all of you got, just one week to regain your jobs, starting with tonight. Starting with tonight's sit. Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture? You laughing now? You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money. Get their names to sell them! You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit, you are shit.
Fixations about cars (literally, or as a proxy for income), or about "our people", or "good families", are largely disappearing in the cohort of people who are starting careers and families today.
This trend started 60 years ago in the US, and is finally fully mainstream today, even if some parents are still holding on to the past (and if some communities are slower than others). But thank goodness for the progress, at least!
...
But the super-out of touch part of "new Mercedes" is that, even among the status/materially-motivated members of younger generations, a new car, and certainly a new Mercedes, ain't it.
"We want people who want a new Chevy! .. I mean, a new Lincoln! Cadillac? Camaro? Lotus? Mercedes? BMW TT? Prius?! Tesla?? Rivian??? Oh Jeez stop making it so difficult for me to sign up you kids to make me richer already!"
I assure you it’s not unique to desis in the US.
> even if some parents are still holding on to the past (and if some communities are slower than others). But thank goodness for the progress, at least!
It’s sad how many desis confuse “being more like white people” with “progress.”
But I would suggest that children living their parents' lives, or for their parents' approval, is a recipe for deep dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and lost opportunities for many many people.
Some communities impose their "traditional" (usually hierarchical and patriarchal) expectations on the next generation more strongly than others.
And I would characterize moving away from those kinds of traditional expectations, as progress toward a more (difficult, but) chosen and intentional life. And I would call that a good thing.
But that’s your ultimate point.
> But I would suggest that children living their parents' lives, or for their parents' approval, is a recipe for deep dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and lost opportunities for many many people. Some communities impose their "traditional" (usually hierarchical and patriarchal) expectations on the next generation more strongly than others.
In desi culture, it’s very important that children follow the right track, which their parents understand, instead of their own impulses. This cultural disposition is conducive to success—desi children are far more successful in American society than American children from similar economic backgrounds.
It’s also a recipe for contentment. You assert that living for what parents wants makes kids unhappy, but it seems to me that it’s American kids, who grow up being told to “follow their bliss,” who end up unhappy when their silly and unrealistic dreams fail to materialize. If you look at the statistics, from suicides to drug overdoses to cratering family formation, the western approach isn’t going that well.
> And I would characterize moving away from those kinds of traditional expectations, as progress toward a more (difficult, but) chosen and intentional life.
Individual “choice” is a distinctly western fixation. Worshiping the impulsiveness of youth over the judgment and experience of elders is a western fixation. It’s sad that so many desis conflate “being more westernized” with “progress.”
Self-determination and the ultimate responsibility of children to outgrow the default acceptance of their parents' belief systems are the absolute rights of every generation. Some communities acknowledge that fact, some encourage it, and some hide from it. Hiding won't make it go away.
Anyone who holds them back is committing an injustice against future generations.
It's not measured in economic success. That's a plainly myopic point of view. Freedom of activity and of thought is very noisy stuff, and it necessarily includes some failures. There are parallels to other systems of control exerted upon others here too, i.e. governments, etc. The seeds of those failures live in every community, they just are not dealt with as honestly in some.
The paternalist-authoritarian impulse to constrain the next generation's path is just old people not being able to admit that they don't know everything. This is like the landed gentry model of democracy. This way lies the death of the mind and the spirit.
Remember we're talking about overbearing parents having opinions about what brand of car their child's (inevitably, their daughter's) suitor drives. This is a trivial case of the parents' belief system failing the child. There are much more dramatic cases, of course, springing from the same self-serving impulses.
Spoken as someone who hates the necessity of owning a car. To me, it is a mode of transportation and that's it.
I think the reason cars might not be a reliable status symbol anymore is debt. If someons is in my socia-economic group but driving a very expensive car, it signals to me that they loaned the money so that they could have the status symbol.
I also agree on your last point. Most young people today are unable to afford a home, or even pay off college debt. Wealth distribution is increasingly fat-tailed.
The tech bro demo in SF loves high tech electrical stuff, and Lucid, Rivian, Taycan, etc. are, COOL and NEW and align to their political and social sensibilities, while also allowing them to flex the conspicuous consumption and signaling.
Mercedes is not new and does not align to obvious socio-political ideals outside of $$$$.
This is also mid-level bling in the grand scheme; the big money is still driving Lambos
Meanwhile, it's only the owners actually getting the Mercedes.
That's not really true - figuring out contribution value is really hard in a lot of cases, they could be overstaffing for expected growth, keeping you off the market for competitors, could be for political reasons etc.
Millions of reasons why you could be on the payroll but not pulling your own weight.
Do they truly want people that will happily just throw money down the drain for appearances’ sake?
I’m interested in many ridiculously expensive things. But a car sure ain’t one.
For most of us, it's just how we get places, and there's not a big enough difference between how comfortable I am with a carful of screaming kids in traffic in a Toyota vs. a carful of screaming kids in traffic in a Mercedes.
Driving isn't an "experience" for Gen Z. Being a passenger certainly isn't. They barely look up between getting in the car and back out. They're not even going to notice the features of a Mercedes.
Look at the features and interior of a modern Civic or Corolla. The software is as good as it gets, the quality of materials and fit an finish are as good as what a BMW or Mercedes was a decade ago. A GR Corolla has 300 HP and tons of torque.
Expensive cars just don't make as much of a difference as before.
But one doesn’t need to own or event rent a Mercedes for that.
While I can see how it could be reasonable for a professional driver to use such a car, I fail to see how it makes sense for most other (non-ultra-wealthy) people.
And making owning any specific thing, especially such a generic one, into some sort of personal life goal really is beyond me.
It's interesting to me that it's defined by owning things in other generations.
I don't think there was ever a time you could take for granted being treated decently. So it does really seem like different priorities.
It was a status symbol to own a Mercedes, now I can easily rent the newest nicest of any car for a few Instagram shots a year.
So this is what many millennials did/do. Chose their status symbol for the current occasion then use something practical the rest of the time.
GenZ was brought up with this mental model and didn’t see any of these rentables as real status symbols.
The COVID shutdowns exposed the lack of loyalty (possibly humanity too) on the side of employers. Additionally, most employees have internalized that it's sometimes better to be unemployed while up-skilling than to maximize raw employment time.
This is blowback for companies treating employees as disposable, but acting surprised when employees catch on and start to see such jobs as disposable too.
Either way I see no evidence that there are “a lot of companies that did everything they could to keep people employed” when it meant them losing money or not benefiting from corporate government welfare to keep people employed.
In my experience there are more employers like mine than yours in the world.
Well yes, but actually no. "The company" has no idea how much value you provide, and even if it did, the value you provide to "the company" and the value you provide to your immediate management chain (who is likely to make hiring/firing decisions almost autonomously at the IC level) are entirely different. Empire building is the first thing that springs to mind.
Ah sweet summer child. Even if your 1st lvl logic would hold they would ditch you if your replacement + replacement cost was less than yours. But never mind. Companies have limited and wildly inaccurate information regarding your value and contributions. But even worse, "companies" do not make hiring/firing decisions, people do. And people have not only extreme irrational behaviors, but even when they act rational they act in their own interest, not "the company's", and the larger the company, the less causally aligned these interests are.
Obviously the entire thing has a big "in their assessment" caveat around it too. This is also* part of the problem, not anything that negates what I already said.
It just isn't the status symbol if was for previous generations.
This has been my experience, and my personal theory to explain this change in productivity is that it's taking younger people in the workforce less time to figure it out than it took people my age. There normally comes a time around middle-age, when you say "I've been working like a dog for 15 years now, and what has it gotten me, and what good has it done in the world, and how much worse would it be if I coasted from here on out?" Now that's happening a few years sooner. The pandemic probably accelerated this introspection.
> An ADP Research Institute survey conducted in November 2021 found that U.S. workers said they were doing 8.4 hours of unpaid overtime work each week, down from nine hours the prior year.
Lazy so-and-sos. Makes me sick to my stomach.
One of my friends busted his ass the first year he started working, got an average performance review. 2nd year he chilled out a lot and got a better performance review. Performance reviews at most companies are useless and it doesn't take long to figure it out.
Another friend told me that it's not possible to get the top performance rating in his company. They just don't give that rating out.
My take is that a lot of Gen Z are entering the workforce and thinking "you expect me to do all this work for an ok salary I will never be able to afford a house on? that's a bad deal".
Individual performance reviews reduce incentives to cooperate, because you only need to have a good review in comparison, not on some non-existent absolute metric.
Performance review systems will always have flaws, but it’s better (in nearly all workplaces) to have a formal and transparent process for them than to have none at all.
So I have to question the validity of your anecdote. And even if you HAVE completely avoided any going-through-the-motions performance reviews, because you're working only for SUPER-early-stage seed round startups, then well... there are plenty of disadvantages to that life too. Not the least of which is that rising interest rates will likely be choking off the 15-year private equity gravy train cycle this year.
A formal review process at least surfaces those thoughts. It’s better than the quiet process where managers form their own conclusions without communicating them.
Boss: You did a good job this year, really appreciate the effort.
Serf: Well, golly thank you boss! Have I noted how great your hair is? Or how well you crack the whip? I surely would not have been as productive had you not been overseeing me with such zest.
Not just useless but political and down to interpersonal relations more than they are to actual work.
I used to work for a major tech company that would have their employees write a plan for each year. It would be agreed and signed off by your manager.
At the end of the year you were supposed to use this as a template to see if you had achieved your goals, and that would be part of some sort of grading which would affect any bonus, promotion chances and any pay rise you might have coming that year.
Only, in between the two the year would happen. Business realities and management direction would change, and what you did bore little relation to what you planned to do. So instead of you being graded on how much of your plan you had achieved, you were graded much more fuzzily, usually on how much the manager liked you or how much you made them look good to their superiors. I'm not saying this out of bitterness either, I was usually one of the more favoured ones.
When I had a few years under my belt I decided that it was much easier to be a contractor and opt out of all that sort of ****
you just exactly described me, exactly 15 years. a lot of sleepless nights dwelling on this.
why do this for another 15, will never afford a home, my savings will be worth -50% in 15 years of what they are now.
i feel like i have to do something different but stuck on that first step. if it was that easy and so on...
In order to have v 2.3 you basically need to have 0 for the next 4 years if you average the previous year in.
Specially with Air BnB and pensioned foreigns driving the prices sky high.
I think to still know enough about my home country.
Maybe this is true in America, but many of us don't live there despite a desire to do so.
Working hard has basically made my career. I'm not substantially smarter than most of the people I've worked with, but I got rapid promotions basically exclusively from going above and beyond.
I respect not everyone wants to do that, but it's concerning that people increasingly don't even see the value in caring.
You're not going to get to $1M+ TC with job hopping alone.
[0]: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
some IT companies I worked for in a past life paid for overtime. it was a lot more than what you would get regularly and lots of coworkers did it. is this not a general experience? are companies not paying for overtime?
ime for most white collar contracts: no
maybe because time tracking (esp. with remote work) is trust based and hence essentially just a formality where noone expects the employee to report under-time.
But there seems to be a lot of “time in lieu”, work extra take the time off.
But that’s only a 1 to 1 ratio, not 1.5 or 2.0, and.
That’s just not worth it for many people. I too wouldn’t give away a weekend for that money, considering I’ll be in a zombie state for the next two weeks and would probably straight get sick and waste many more days in paid leave depending on the timing. Even the money I’d spend to compensate for the stress could burn through the surplus.
It would of course be a different proposition if I was someone who could work for weeks without any impact, I know some people fit the bill, just not me.
PS: Forgot one of the most important aspect when you have family: is your overtime pay worth the time you’re not spending with them, especially on weekends ?
Cashiers where I live have those terms. And young people without children benefit alot from the deal.
Additionally those sacrifices won't count anything when it comes to select who's going away in the next layoffs round.
The guy doing 40h is getting the same as the overworked ones doing 60h plus. Plus in Germany it is illegal to do more than 10h per day anyway.
Only buy what one can afford, subscriptions only for infrastructure, credits only those that one can afford to pay from saving and no longer than 3 years.
I have been doing this for quite a while, no need to get rich, not even money can cure everything, only make it less painful.
The important part is that the mortgage was backed by an asset - I could have decided to sell the flat and pay back the debt at any time.
Not everyone needs or wants to live on the west coast.
Debt, as long as it’s backed by a sufficiently good asset can be a good option.
Right now you need a pretty good rate of return just to keep pace with inflation if you're saving.
Meanwhile that same inflation is reducing the value you the debt you've taken on to buy a house and you get to live in the house as it pays off.
Always remember that the Mortgage Bankers Association defaulted on their mortgage.
> I get paid because of my expertise.
Agree.
> You cant’s compensate me enough to put in more than 40-45 hours a week
Disagree. (There’s probably a speed to results + pay that has value here) The assumption is that there’s way more work to do than possible to finish.
In exceptional circumstances this would be true, but I seriously doubt many company's actually have those (as opposed to managers pushing the panic button at the last second after ignoring issues for months).
At my first tech lead job working for a company that sent home health care workers to take care of special needs kids. The field workers were making around $12-$17 hour (government reimbursement rates suck).
I was leading an integration effort based on my own designs and we were migrating off of their current payment platform. If the integration efforts didn’t get done by a cut off date around Christmas, they would have received paper checks late. The office salaried workers wouldn’t have been affected.
My management said that was an ok alternative - I vehemently disagreed. I fought for my team to get comp time and bonuses for working over time to meet the deadline.
I could also see mandated overtime at TurboTax. You have hard deadlines to meet and often the “requirements” aren’t set by the government until late.
Yes, in any given year, the specific nature and timing of the requirements may be out of their hands, but in aggregate, they absolutely bear some responsibility for that.
Furthermore, it should also be their responsibility to ensure they have enough trained staff on hand to handle the tax season rush without harming their employees.
There is a limit to how long you can focus on a single task for longer periods of time before you need to rest up properly to recharge your batteries. Everything beyond that will lower your productivity, up to a point where you will end up negative due to the mistakes being made. If you are lightweight on useless processes and stuff, a 30 hour week would be way more optimal for a lot of people. Crunch time should be very short and if stuff cannot be "crunched" in a single week it is useless to continue on like that, because everyone involved will be like 50% as effective as someone just working 30h per week (who can focus on the actual work).
However, the data is never available until mid-day the day before (it’s all news based). The deadline is next trading day. You have 16hrs to make the new model and data work.
The upside is that you’d be compensated a percentage of the trades. Positive is good(if you’re good, make millions), negative you get nothing.
Is 40hr a hard limit to work now?
My point is if someone was paid high enough, they’d bust that 40hr limit easy. It’s not really a hard limit of any sort. There’s a price for it, that’s for sure.
I asked in another reply would someone work for Twitter at twice their current compensation. Both of the replies were that wouldn’t.
If I had an opportunity to make twice my current compensation but I had to give up my current lifestyle - working remotely, traveling six months a year, never being on call, doing the work I enjoy, I would say no without thinking twice.
Thing is, it will damage you, and no amount of money can save your rear end from an early exit out of this world through the accumulated damages.
> I won’t work overtime
Is personal preference.
> You *can’t* pay me enough to work overtime
Is being diva, implying that there is imaginable number of money that can convince them to do so.
So not a diva. Just honest.
I made “enough” when I was making in the $150s in 2020 that we didn’t even notice the difference when I fell into my current BigTech job where the intern I mentored got a return offer that was that much.
We already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, etc.
We are spending less per month now than we were when we already had “enough”.
See the story of the Mexican fisherman.
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
That's really approaching "effectively zero time to do things that are important to me". You only have one life to live and while money enables some things, free time is much more precious. It's really hard to see a justification for giving up that much capacity for self determination.
I declined each time. Anything we couldn’t afford from my working 40 hours a week we didn’t need.
My dad is a retired factory worker and he turned down overtime opportunities a lot during the latter part of his career. My mom (teacher) and my dad retired in their mid 50s and are still going strong at 77 and 80.
They had ordinary middle class jobs and never got involved in the rat race.
Her retirement is a combination of a government pension and social security.
My dad as a factory worker just got shares of middling performing consumer goods company (Proctor and Gamble) for his retirement.
They bought a house in 1978 in southern Georgia where they still live. It only increased in value along with inflation.
And reconcile this with some companies requiring 80+ hours a week. I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.
I find very unlikely the idea that we have found the sweet spot of hours worked per week at 40. How do you know it's not 50 hours per week which maximizes production?
80+ week schedule is not because of output effectively. One reason for it is mismanagement - a lot of wasted time and general chaos. People posturing how much they work, but not actually being productive. And second reason is creating social buble - a group of people effectively isolated from outside relationship. That allows for generaly more abusive/controlling style of management, it allows you to shape employees opinions more. That is necessary condition for companies like Enron used to be to operate.
Pencavel, "The Productivity of Working Hours", 2014
> The conclusion from the work presented in this section is that the output-hours relation is decidedly non-linear: below 49 weekly hours, variations in output are proportional to variations in hours; for those observations corresponding to 49 or more hours, output rises with hours at a decreasing rate and a maximum of output occurs at about 63 hours. Output at 70 hours differs little from output at 56 hours and, therefore, the HMWC’s recommendations about the innocuous effects for output of hours reductions are consistent with these estimates.
Note that this is about manual labour, not knowledge work.
I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.
Not the OP, but I would think they are deliberately damaging their workers. The effect on the company itself is of no concern relative to that.
I wish everyone had the ability to not be afraid of their employer, it's liberating.
We are settling into a grove of traveling six months, flying across the US with a couple of stays in Canada and Mexico, staying in hotels and the other six months living in what would usually be considered a second home/investment property.
There is no amount of money that would make me give up my dream.
> For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour – one's capacity to transform the world – is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss.
When I was in my mid 20ties I was writing code in C almost non-stop, they replaced me with 7 people and a scrum master. Apparently, cheaper than giving me 12% raise I demanded (around 2015).
Look at it from business point of view, they are the only ones who see the money and if they don't feed you requirements you are blind. If they give you a 12% raise today then who's to say you won't just come back tomorrow and request another and another and another, there's really no end. Newsflash, asking for a raise everyday is an exponential growth (did you even know that your incessant raises would lead to your cost ballooning 30x within a month?), while 7-8 highly skilled consultants is a one time 7-8x bargain relative to your exponential growth demands wherein you will consume all the earths resources within the year. How selfish can one person be? MY GOD!
Twentyties?
Serious comment: some managers are addicted to empire-building and their status derives from the number of people they manage. Not how productive they actually are...
Everywhere I have seen, machines are doing almost all work.
All these complaints that productivity growth has been matched by salary growth always seems to ignore that most of the productivity gains have been the result of capital expenditure, not of workers being better at their jobs.
The execs of each company didn't personally invent every machine and write every piece of software their employees are now using to be productive. Hell, a lot of it they didn't even particularly choose—so much of the productivity gains comes from basic stuff like "personal computers" and "Microsoft Office".
They are benefiting from the labour and expertise of others, and saying that means they deserve to get more money. Why? Why should those gains not be shared equally with the people who are actually doing the work?
That is, the shareholders who own the business and paid for the machines, not the employees who merely operate them.
* produce a financial projection?
* run a PCR sequencing?
* weld a steel beam?
* determine if an electrical installation is up to code?
* teach ninth-graders about calculus?
If the answer is "no" to any of these, then machines clearly aren't doing "all the work".
The required skill level when using older tools and processes (welding and other building processes) is typically higher than with modern tools. This makes workers more replaceable today.
Modern tools make productivity less dependent on the skills of workers. It's not a moral argument, just a fact that explains the observed phenomenon.
However, it is clear that the cat is out of the bag now - and people look at those working their asses off like they're suckers, not like they're role models.
I wonder if compensation & promotion is going to change, or if the future is just going to be a race to the bottom for worker productivity.
Many small businesses are completely family owned and operated and only employ 1 or 2 people (the family).
So this statistic that everyone spouts out that most people "work for" small businesses - I'm curious how accurate that statement actually is to what people think it means.
Most of their workers had their own LLCs that only employed themselves. A lot of companies force people to subcontract to get out of paying benefits. The statistic is a shameful one because it is not an indicator of a society that values gumption, tenacity, and entrepreneurship - it’s an indicator of the exploration of labour and crushing one’s fellow man underfoot in the eternal march for lower margins and higher profits.
But saying that they "work for a small business" seems strange.
This seems true for most contractors, tbh.
It's not a new problem. 150y ago Marx called this exploitation of laborers the extraction of surplus value. Slavery is of course a very ancient evil.
There is notably one group who are at minimum compensated for the work they do: billionaires, some of whom "earn" a million dollars per hour.
A family friend of mine operates a couple small businesses in a rural community. They’ve tried to bootstrap or acquire a couple companies over time, operating them at a loss for a while as they try to make them efficient enough to work.
It’s surprisingly hard to make a break-even business. There’s a common misconception that business owners are all raking in cash at the expensive of their employees, but that’s not easy or common. A lot of small businesses close because it costs more to pay employees than the business can actually bring in (minus operating expenses).
Even many big companies like Uber are operating at a loss, contrary to the public perception that these companies are a rip-off that exploit everyone to the max.
Ironically, in software I’ve seen a lot of people getting compensated far above their output for many years before the company finally catches on. This is one field where people who interview well can get a foot in the door and then coast on organizational inefficiencies at a lot of places while doing very little work. Obviously this doesn’t apply at all companies, but it’s weirdly common to hear engineers bragging here on HN about how few hours they work each week, or even people expressing disbelief that anyone can do more than an hour or two of work each day.
Because workers aren't productive, because you get paid by the lowest common denominator, because that's all businesses expect - and anyone doing more - unless to gain skills for the benefit of themselves - is a fool.
To state the obvious, operating at a loss is not contrary to exploiting your workers.
And I waste a lot of time here and did not seen much bragging about working too little.
e.g. https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-workers-mocked-open-le... and the replies to https://twitter.com/TheCriticalDri2/status/15921735359378554...
They just want to be able to do a job and be compensated well so that they can have a life to enjoy. VERY VERY few people want to work 80 hours a week at Twitter for a reduced salary and stock options that sit behind all other investors and the billion dollar albatross Musk put around the company's neck.
The skeleton crew at Twitter today are H1B's that literally can't leave because the tech world is burning around them... and that's sad.
It's also generally accepted as a primary mechanism for determining how a company values your work, unless you hit one of those "career levels." If you're a junior person stuck at a low level for a few years, something is probably askew.
It'd be fantastic if positions had a wider salary band and you could earn raises for productivity without having to constantly climb the corporate ladder. I've not really seen that outside of union jobs and even then, you don't have a band so much as a guaranteed raise every few years. This is all based on US companies I've seen in the tech (salaried) and construction (union, hourly) sectors.
That is why promotion must be a goal for everyone, so that people who actually have a clue get to make the decisions.
Treating employees like humans; getting to know each one as an individual, and sincerely working to help each of them to achieve their personal goals. Treating their work with Respect is also really important.
I was a manager at a company that paid "competitive" (i.e. "low") salaries, and had to motivate with "softer" rewards.
I've always been a "carrot" person, as opposed to a "stick" person. I find that it's better (but not easier) to lead folks with rewards, than it is to drive them with threats. I also found that money is a fickle motivator. It works well, if you want transient, highly-capable people that will not stick around, and will not be there, when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.
But I have also found that I'm an outlier, and that my style of management is not only ignored, but attacked and despised.
I'm pretty happy to be out of the Rotten Management Rat Race.
You say this, but money is also part of respect. Many employers do not index raises to inflation, so you're literally working for less each year you stay with that employer. Yes, you absolutely need to treat employees like humans and not numbers, but compensation is part of the respect you show employees. Ignore it at your peril.
> It works well, if you want transient, highly-capable people that will not stick around, and will not be there, when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.
Anecdotally, the most capable people I have worked with are there to solve problems, and if they run into a problem that can't be solved (mostly because of organisation politics/culture) then they recognise the futility of trying and move on.
Not being there when the excrement hits the fan is just a byproduct of not sticking around in a dysfunctional environment.
Agreed. Many companies push non-monetary HR stuff, in an effort to keep salaries low. That's usually pretty transparent, though.
In the end, there's absolutely nothing that can fix broken management; especially the first- and second-line managers.
I found management to be a very difficult and humbling experience. The variable was usually me; not the employee. I had to be constantly reviewing my own motivations and whatnot.
> Anecdotally, the most capable people I have worked with are there to solve problems, and if they run into a problem that can't be solved (mostly because of organisation politics/culture) then they recognise the futility of trying and move on.
One of my jobs, as a first-line manager, was to shield my employees from the corporate culture. I managed highly experienced C++ engineers, working on pretty advanced image processing pipeline stuff. Not exactly your "bootcamp leetcode master" type. When they finally rolled up our department, the engineer with the least tenure, had ten years, and we were never really paid that well.
But I have had many folks, on this very forum, tell me what a terrible manager I must have been.
Hum... The GP is talking about your superiors. What you just confirmed when you said you had to shield your people from them.
That is, unless you were the one deciding to reduce people's salaries every year.
But I had to fight like crazy to get them raises and promotions. I have to admit that I sometimes did less than I would have liked.
I was often instructed to reduce the positive scores of my employees. It was infuriating. They did good, they deserved praise, even with the best score possible, their raise would not have been that great.
I almost never got a good score, myself, but they also kept me for almost 27 years.
Very few people would show up to work without the money. Let’s stop pretending they would.
This is pointedly true for employees who hop between low-wage jobs.
It’s easier to manage when all you do is assign work, reward with money and blame silent quiting, millennials, or whatever the latest cause of people “just not working enough”.
As opposed to actually caring about your staff, making sure the work is fulfilling and that the team are bought into what they are doing at an individual level.
Leading shouldn’t be about what makes it easier for the manager.
You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with me then. No big deal. We find the environment that motivates us.
One of the ways that I've learned to practice respect is actually not really getting to know people personally too much. I've been manipulated before by "leaders" who try to use personal information like family needs or other goals as a fake carrot that is not in their power to exchange. As a result I have a pretty "no questions asked" policy on the privacy rights of my direct reports when it comes to approving any time off or facilitating whatever it is they want to do with their careers, and it doesn't require "getting to know them" beyond their own voluntary sharing in private. Sometimes it will grow into a closer relationship but it totally doesn't have to.
Maybe it's an extreme reaction to the bad taste from interacting with folks who like to pretend that work is a family. I just don't trust workplaces enough to be fully vulnerable anymore, and by extension would never demand that another employee be unconditionally trusting with their full humanity, because it is never a two-way street. When the company wants to mess with livelihoods it does not need to seek permission, so it is unfair to ask for the disclosure of personal information beyond what is necessary to carry out the work.
For just one more recent example, I fell for the advertised inclusive corporate culture by putting my pronouns on my Slack profile (having never been publicly out as a queer person at work before), I experienced weird behaviours from people that made it harder to do my job normally. So I ended up going back into the workplace closet because it's just easier to project what "regular" folks want to see in order to solve problems efficiently.
I'd love to hear your take on healthy boundaries, because sometimes I wish there could be more connection with people in the workplace besides the naturally occurring camaraderie that arises through direct collaboration and the inevitable small handful of friends with similar values. Is it possible to have a deeper connection with everyone as a general approach?
I saw my employees through a lot of life's challenges, like cancer, marriage, divorce, child issues, elder issues, whatever. I made sure that we could keep working as a team, even if it meant that one of the members may have had to opt out for a while.
I also withheld information from HR, that they would have liked to have had, because, quite frankly, it was none of their damn business. It did not always endear me to them. I kept secrets, and never used anything I learned to manipulate, but I did use it to optimize.
For example, I had one engineer that is "on the spectrum." He Just. Could. Not. Come. In. Before. Noon. to save his life, but often worked until 2AM.
Also, the code he wrote was nothing short of miraculous. He's possibly the best coder I've ever worked with.
HR wanted me to bully him into submission. I did not, and they were un-thrilled with me. But Japan loved him, and they held the upper hand.
It wasn't for everyone, but we made it work.
I feel that "one size fits all" solutions may be necessary for large organizations, but I had the luxury of managing a small team (never more than 10 people). Everyone involved was serious about the work, had pride in the company, and appreciated the leeway I gave them. My LI profile has a number of testimonials, and some are from former employees. To this day, we still keep in touch.
Because of the nature of the work we did, there was no way for "slackers" to hide. Everyone's work was just too visible.
As a manager, my #1 priority was always to represent what was best for the corporation. In some cases, that meant preventing the corporation from engaging in self-destructive behavior. Now, that is a classic "slippery slope," and it could have easily turned into self-will run riot, but it didn't; because I'm who I am.
Managers aren't cookies, and they can't be formed from cookie-cutters, no matter what the "HR Consultants" say.
I did my best. I do tend to expect top-shelf results (as opposed to "effort"), though, which does not always win me fans (but the company I worked for, expected nothing less).
There is likely a notable shortage of people donating free time to a company which should technically be described as "sensible". Wasting time was never a sensible thing to do for an ambitious person.
I live in a productive rural district with high exports; dumb people and million dollar machines don't produce anything of note.
People that know the ground, know the past variations, know their seed stock, etc. produce good returns over decadal periods, as yet machiness and AI alone don't match that.
Now, give it a few years...
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/03/05/look-agricultural...
For example, 15th-century peasant can't use a computer at the level of a teenager playing Minecraft. So clearly it's not just the machines; it's the people. And as the chart shows, the people are getting a raw deal.
Look at what people had to do in the 70s and 80s... You'd spend all your time doing math to fill out a spreadsheet, cutting and gluing construction paper to make a presentation, or re-typing a document to change a sentence. That's not the machine doing the work, it's just the machines making it easier for us to do the work. But the end result is an expectation to produce more better quality work faster than our parents or grandparents had to.
My grandparents had a summer house, they took 7-kid family vacations, and they disconnected from co-workers when they left the building... And that's what "upper middle class" in America used to look like 40 years ago. And they had unions, and pension plans. When my grandfather retired, his pension was 80% of his pay for life. Plus what he had saved up for retirement.
Anyway yes, I think we're a lot more productive.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/productivity_class.PN...
1. Just because we're in the top 1% doesn't mean we shouldn't care about the bottom 99%.
2. That graph shows that (real) wages are basically flat for each group the last ten years of the graph while productivity has almost inexorably climbed, so I'm not sure I'd agree that it "hasn't stagnated".
Are we looking at the same graphs here? In the last 10 years of the graph, I see that both productivity gains and wages were leveling out.
Also, it's the long-term trend that matters. Is the gap between each blue line and the yellow line narrowing or widening since the start of the graph? It's the latter, so things are getting worse and not better.
One of the things that did me in was working insane hours (like 80 hour weeks) to get a project done on time. It was completed on time. My thanks was a satisfactory on my yearly review. When I pushed back on my manager, he said sorry, I deserved it, but they were required to give a certain percentage satisfactory and he had had to give the exceptional review to someone else. That is when I learned that the whole system is rigged. That was about 15 years ago. I’ve been coasting ever since.
My take on work is have fun (yes, I can do some extra hours now and then), never neglecting physical and mental health.
As others note, feedback that only goes up one level can't really be anonymous.
In some organizations, the manager could've urgently worked up the chain of command, that some performance review plan had, er, unintended consequences. If that was the situation.
(The organization might've had a plan for raises that they could quickly reformulate to have the same cost but better morale and retention outcomes. Or this might've been their way to quietly prepare for layoffs, or to implement some awful stack-ranking practice. Or maybe a consultant, golfing buddy, or someone who wanted some change credited to themself... proposed some questionable HR practice. Or, if your manager wasn't being truthful, it could be that there was some reason that they or someone higher up thought/wanted you to get a lower rating, but manager didn't want to tell you that, so they blamed it on the curve.)
I still don't think I've recovered from the experience - my team was pretty great and the tech was healthy, but the management surrounding all this really put me off redoing this for a long time, if ever.
I phrase it in this way: I can no longer deliver 100% of my "personal excellence" to my employer. I "selfishly" want a good chunk, ideally most of it, to myself for my own pursuit and life enjoyment.
I'm pro-ambition, pro-commitment-to-the-team/mission, and a recovering workaholic. But don't do crazy hours like this. It's permanent damage.
Target 40 hours a week. Make those hours productive towards the org's goals and not misaligned individual goals/metrics (experienced engineers and the manager and PM should be blasting the inefficiencies out of everyone's way). Keep stress low, and only for good reasons (again, stupid reasons need to be fixed promptly).
If you've got people being actually productive and on-track towards org goals at 40 hrs/wk with low stress, that's a great environment. And when some rare emergency happens that can't just mean slipping the schedule, then some people will have the time/energy/morale to surge their effort to to whatever sweat/magic is necessary. Then they get flex time after.
And we educate new people about how we were able to handle the emergency, and the importance of not breaking this hard-earned effective organization.
Not as easy as it sounds.
For me, doing 40 hours of actual work means staying 60h near the computer or in the office. I take too many breaks chatting with colleagues, or browsing HN. Well, this is my problem...
Plus my company measures "impact". Unfortunately, lot of work which has to be done is not impactful from management's perspective, and requires working more in order to generate impact and have something to say in your self-assessment. Of course, everybody in my team do work more than 40h, so you have to keep up in order not be in the 15% of low performers in line for the next layoff.
Have you considered remote work, from a timezone 2-3 hours ahead of others? It’s nice to have mornings free from distraction…
If that lands you in the bottom 15%, I’d start looking for other opportunities.
I’ve been in your shoes. We had time tracking and for me to consistently log 40h of actual work in a week, I’d have to sit in front of my computer from morning to night. Even weekends sometimes to catch up on what I’d missed.
What a fool I was.
I did that for years for mediocre pay (although I couldn’t see it at the time) to the detriment of everything else around me.
It wasn’t worth it. Now I couldn’t care less. The whole “quiet quitting” phenomenon resonates deeply with me.
The idea of the 40h work week isn't to be productive 40h, no one can do that in creative work. The idea is you are available 40h. If you are at a healthy workplace, then no one around you works more than 40h either.
I interviewed at GS and as soon as I saw the room of clearly exhausted and joyless developers, I could see they actually valued the appearance of work more than productivity.
The 40-hour work week was introduced for a reason: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc...
It is sad that 100 years after Ford made the discovery people still don't get this. Team A consistently working 40 hours per week will output more work than Team B working 60+ hours per week. That's true for 60, 80 and especially 95+ hours.
I think the young guy they interviewed whose dad makes barely more than he will summed it up perfectly. You realize that if you put in all that extra work you get paid fuck all extra. It doesn't make any sense to work so hard for so little reward in most fields.
I feel like tech, finance and maybe law are the only corporate careers where it makes sense to work really hard because there are outsized rewards for high competence, but even then it doesn't always make sense.
Millenials kind of realized this Zoomers have fully realized this. Probably related to most fields stagnating heavily career-wise and having relatively poor pay.
It's interesting to see a lot of Millenials and Zoomers cottoning onto the fact that tech pays well. It's surprisingly common on social media and IRL to see something along the lines of "someone is making a lot of money = most likely works in tech", and vice versa.
actually i found that to be the most flawed part. they didn’t describe the industry the dad was in, nor the dad’s wage when he had the son’s YOE. it’s fair to report the feelings of the son to the revelation, but intellectually dishonest to leave out some basic objective analysis around it.
that said, flaws or not, yes it seems that is the crux of it. people are done with working to improve the lot of the masters. something i think would help is to reduce CEO to median worker compensation multiple.
Cut tech from the list. Job hoping is the way to get wage increases, not working more than you are payed to.
In law and finance there often are kickbacks from sales.
Learning really hard might pay of in tech.
It used to be I had like 1 dev who was that way. He come in at 10. He left at 6. Period. Any "overtime" was an immediate PTO accrual, without exemption. He'd work a Saturday, but he was taking off Monday.
The rest of the team worked whatever was required of them.
It created a lot perverse incentives for me, my co-owner, and our clients. If we kept hitting impossible deadlines, why wouldn't our clients keep asking it of us? Why wouldn't we keep saying yes to them? It made fiscal sense to do so. Clients were happy. We made more money. Staff largely didn't complain.
Now, the "workaholics" are a lot more rare, and we're a lot more careful about it.
If someone works over 40 hours, we compensate for that, salaried or not. It's called overtime, and we actually take a lower-margin on the hourly rate. If we're making our team work more than 40 hours, we fucked up. We deserve to make less money. We also charge a "rush rate" to clients, because while we're happy to help them out, the team deserves to be compensated. We've only had one client push back on it, and we fired them.
The staff is a lot happier, our clients have adjusted to the new expectations, and our staff churn has lowered.
Why do employers expect to treat me in that clinical way, but not have me mirror that behavior doing things exactly by terms to my maximal benefit?
You get the dance you lead, boss.
This is irresponsible.
Personally I’m really happy that I gave up making excuses and actually tried to improve my situation. Despite all your persuasive arguments and conviction that it’s all a pretty fantasy, it did in fact work.
Here’s hoping we get to see you arguing the other side one day.
These kind of arguments would greatly benefit from people just saying what they think the actual number is
Being able to disregard everyone who thinks it's 1 or 0 is quite handy
This is the real and _only_ way to improve their chance of success, just telling that «you have to create your luck» or other non-sense, is just dangerous advice that exists only based on survivor bias and does nothing but improving the risk of destroying lives.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/978-whether-you-think-you-c...
A common thread is if you believe you cannot succeed, you won't. If you blame your failures on others, fate, etc., you will not succeed. If you find yourself saying "it's not my fault" a lot, your life isn't going to go well.
On the other hand, if you accept full responsibility for your failures, and do your best to learn from them, and are willing to try again, then success becomes probable.
I know these views are very much out of fashion today. But they still will work for you, if you choose to implement them.
Of course, you will need to be rich to begin with to fund all these attempts.
Business is about connections and rich people get a great head start on the rest of us, but the average person does a lot of self-sabotage, as well.
Forget that nonsense, it's about starting with a large pool of money with which to bet.
Let me shoot that statement down in flames for you!
Successful businessmen have a lot of initial funds to pursue a lot of different ventures of which perhaps 1 will be a success.
If you ever talked to the successful businessman types you will find they have lots of companies but only 1 will be the source of their money. The rest either lose money or break even.
According to the maths, given people of identical skill and the same starting funds. Some small percentage of people will get lucky and accelerate out into riches whilst the rest will drop into poverty.
The people who accelerated into riches can't tell you why they accelerated out into riches, since it was purely luck based to begin with.
The more funds you acquire, the more risks you can take, the more money you can make.
Taking risks doesn't make you rich, becoming rich makes you take risks. It's that way around.
I did well for myself comparing to what I came from. I could probably do better. But at some point, I laid out how it all played out. The kicks that made me serious money were simply luck. By working and exposing yourself, you increase your luck surface. But that doesn’t change the fact: It’s luck.
Now, if we are in a hot field like Tech, many more people are going to make it. That’s not because Tech people are amazing, but it’s because Tech is booming. Luck here starts to make sense only at the extremes (ie: becoming a Zuckerburg) but at a local area, because luck is abundant, your hard work matters more. We are all lucky (Tech people) to be in this very particular time.
Yes, connections are a part of “worth”, but the money you can make off them (or through them) is not necessarily.
You can't have both safe and lucrative.
It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes.
We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy.
The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.
If you claim that, how about your own comment? And with
> nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly
you pretty much completely ignore what OP wrote. Sure, you can claim "technically correct" because indeed nobody is stopping you. You just leave out the statistics about the result. What is stopping people is looking at their actual chances, so sure, you can technically claim they are stopping themselves. Only that it's highly misleading.
I left awell-paid software job in the US and returned to Germany, opened a small business with a friend after looking around. We barely managed to sell it off at cost, leaving the next person to find out it really did not work (he saw everything but thought he could do better). Then I did freelance jobs, very highly paid. Also extremely unsatisfying. The especially well-paying corporate jobs especially so, more often than not what I had worked on was discarded after I left, because of company merger or internal politics leading to a stop on the project.
Now I'm in a business started by a former CTO of a famous successful startup, where he made lots of excellent connections and also has the brand name recognition now. I only do tech now. And no, you can't just easily connect to the right people. Some few one-in-ten-thousand people can do that. Most people have the necessary connections through birth or from previous employment. Creating them from scratch is incredibly hard.
When giving general advice about something and not to somebody specific for a specific situation, I suggest to always scale your advice, from "works for anyone" to "works for everyone". Many of those suggestion fall apart right then and there.
How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best? It's just that the equilibrium created from that is what we have now. Because the system does not work when "everybody" does it. You get a dynamic equilibrium with lots of losers and a lot of effort just not being worth it. Despite starting out with everybody highly motivated and adventurous. So "try harder" IMO has already happened long ago and we now are in a much later state of the dynamic system. What happens in the "everybody works hard" phase is a lot of pain and the winnings going to a few winners who sit at key points in the network.
Let's look at statistics then. In the US, it seems that about 30% small businesses are successful enough to last over 10 years [1]. Your personal failure in one particular venture is not out of the norm, but your rant against entrepreneurship is totally wrong.
By the way I don't think anyone is arguing that the system is fair, that people who don't start businesses are lazy, or that everybody can make it. I don't know where you came up with these arguments. All that has been argued is that trying to start a business on your own is a risk/reward trade-off strategy that can pay off, and often does.
[1] https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small-busine...
Most “independent business owners” who own franchised locations for instance have owners who work 50-60+ hours a week, and have spouses and their children providing free labor.
If you look at the net income of most franchise locations, they average around $60-$70K berz
And no I’m not just throwing out financial terms. I’m a proud MBA dropout (undergrad in CS)
How would that have turned out if you invested that money in your own store and opened it in February 2020? What happens if you open your store next to a store like Walmart or in a mall next to one of the major chains and they closed or moved reducing foot traffic (saw that plenty of times)?
If you can save up enough money to open a store, you can also save up enough money to go to technical school and learn a trade that is a lot less risky.
Nobody said that. Nothing human is 100%.
> How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best?
Strawman, because nothing human is 100%.
If you are a CS major, can successful “grind leetCode” and get an offer at any of the major tech companies, you can get an offer in the mid $100s minimum. In five to seven years you can get $350K+.
Realistically, what are the chances of your own business having that income trajectory?
Taking a bigger risk could result in a bigger reward or also result in a bigger failure. Be safe doesn't necessarily mean less return, it means less return only if your risky bet pays off, if your risky bet fails you are likely better off yo have played it safe instead. Not sure what that has to do with what one is "really" worth as you put it.
Yeah, it does. You can see it in stocks & bonds every day. More risk means more potential upside. Less risk means less upside. Across all the investments.
You pay more for a new car because it comes with less risk. You pay less for a used car because it might be a clunker.
Statistically, you have much more chances of making money if you don’t have deadweight in your company.
I’m making about 6x as a software founder as what I used to earn in a company.
Making yourself a one man consultancy or contractor is also a business and has a decent success rate if you’re actually good
A Saas business, startup, or similar? Yeah much lower probability
But even in the latter case if you don’t have much living expenses it can make sense to make a modest living and enjoy your day to day much more.
Bottom line as with so many things in life: don’t do it for the money
First you have people who call themselves “consultants”. But they are really just staff augmentation. Those “consultants” are a dime a dozen and all in, can’t command a premium and would probably be better off working a full time job.
You can find some just as good overseas and a lot cheaper.
Then you have your actual strategic consultants who have “a seat at the table” and talk with people who control budgets. They can charge a premium.
After working with both as a tech lead between 2016-2018 is what made me pivot to getting experience in “cloud” and specialize in “application modernization” - enterprise dev + cloud + “DevOps”.
You have to both have a network and find companies willing to do C2C contracts. Those are also some of the first people to cut during a downturn. You saw that a lot right after Covid.
I now work in the cloud consulting department at AWS. It’s a full time position and my compensation structure is like SDEs.
I would hate to be constantly hustling for clients and take care of all of the other minutiae that I have an entire organization to handle.
My impression is that you can pretty easily beat fulltime pay doing fulltime staff aug, except faang salaries. Of course it helps if you have a spouse with health insurance.
But in this new market, hard to say I guess
I’ve worked a lot longer as a developer. But because of bad career decisions until 2008, I ended up doing a career reset.
My first experience with staff augmentation type contracting was in 2011-2012. The company I worked for went out of business and was sold for scraps and I got a contract working with one of our customers.
Local tech salaries for my skillset were in the low $100s - standard mid level C# developer. I couldn’t push above $60/hour. At 1800 hours a year, it was a wash. But no health insurance - I was also married.
The next time was in 2016. I purposefully took a contract to perm job to get my first tech lead experience. I couldn’t find contract jobs for more than $70/hour. That translates to about $126K which was a little below average for senior dev in my area ($135K - $150K). But a racked up on hours.
When I was hired full time, we were paying the contracting agency $90/hour and the contractors were making $70.
Looking at one of the sites I use to use (https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424), it still seems like your average enterprise dev is still getting $70/hour.
I’ve seen the same numbers on other sites.
HOWEVER, many who have tried to launch products have not met success. But I was happy to try and fail too.
That was a poem from a simpler time.
Boss makes a thousand while I make a cent,
And he’s got employees that can’t make rent.
This job can be fulfilling and interesting, but unfortunately we are being squeezed to produce maximum orange juice. Companies dream of reaching and maintaining high growth rates and valuations.
We should shift to valuing consistency over raw velocity. Long-term, I think this is the winning strategy.
The owners explaining their decisons to me while keeping a straight face.
Make no mistake, owners (no matter how progressive, with very few exceptions) will screw you over if it improves the bottom line or their remuneration.
It's one of the worst aspects of my role. Owners straight up lying to my face about why they do things.
Make a mistake though and bosses are quick to point the finger directly at you. Credit and rewards for the higher ups, blame and discipline for the rank and file. Privatized gains, socialized losses.
Instead, my real wage has decreased this year. Of course, this means I substitute free time for work. My work time budget has been reduced.
Since real wages have been falling consistently for most workers (US Swe excepted maybe) this should not be surprising.
Profits are up, real wages and wealth share of younger workers decrease. Who is to say which causal direction this has with work time? Back in the day, sinking in all that free time paid off. Now it pays off less.
For me, it has nothing to do with ambition. Sad to see that many decision makers are apparently wrong on this.
That is not them being untrustworthy, it's signalling that they will move if they are not recognised for their work and growth.
Generally it takes 3-6 months to get productive at a new role, another 6 months to generally show competency / growth, and the last 6 months is spent waiting for recognition that you are willing to move up.
Unfortunately the most common growth structures dictate that people need to "act" as if they're in a more senior role already, alongside doing their existing one, and maybe they might get the title and salary bump. Often they don't, or are promised at their next review. Most just move.
If there's a group of 3-6 month (or shorter) spots, then I'm certainly asking about the work that happened during those.
This policy was explicit at my first corporate job, and it was a major contributor to my decision to work for myself.
Imagine a system where an employee is identified as a candidate for a higher position and tentatively promoted to it to see if they can adjust to the role. Sadly it seems the only place this system exists is the role of startup founder.
On the other side there needs to be a position for them to move into - there isn’t an infinite number of Senior/Lead Developer jobs available in any given company, and typically the ones available are already filled. You’ll have a better chance at a large company where there are other teams you can transfer to, but then you’re dealing with the increased bureaucracy around that.
TikTok, a Chinese app, is not allowed to show you such content in China and must instead show pro-work, pro-family messaging.
Coincidence?
Doesn't invalidate the "less for more" philosophy though. This is what everybody should strive for. The chinese will too, in time.
People change their behavior when presented with new information, this isn’t a grand conspiracy.
the algorithm can be easily influenced to push propaganda and sway opinions. From the Twitter Files (and even prior) we know the old Twitter regime, for example, existed to push woke leftists agendas, including working with the whitehouse and various govt agencies to push propaganda.
They didn’t reveal anything like what you describe. And the admin in the White House when the supposed collusion happened was the Trump admin.
But if this is a psyop I think it's going to backfire.
Labour theft, power imbalance and unfair employment practices eat away at the foundations of the social contract.
I can hardly think of a worse way to undermine the U.S than to encourage workers to get fair pay and working conditions.
The psyop is about making consumers aspire to be a social media influencer, rather than having meaningful role in society. The videos pushing for fair pay is often “sign up to get my get rich quick course”.
China’s version of Tiktok have forced content filters and the content featured by the algo is radically different from the US version. They’re winning the psyop.
> 14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
> 15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
Twitter management was fully engaged. The head of trust and legal were involved in decisions, especially the ongoing partnership with the FBI — with screenshots and transcripts showing the deep levels of engagement. If you’ve not seen this, you must be reading about twitter files from a 3rd party or ignoring what happened.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601014175366402048?s=2...
===
> The Aspen Institute hosted reporters, media companies and social media firms in Sept. 2020 to prep for a possible Russian hack of Hunter Biden, one month before the NY Post story, at a time when the FBI had the laptop and had Giuliani under surveillance. Amazing coincidence.
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1604977967754461185?s=20
===
> Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1605219914813673473?s=20
===
She realized instead of working overtime to make more money, she should ask for a raise.
Thus the removal of content restrictions alone would be enough to push these to the top, so this alone is not interesting.
I'd imagine the CCP would find the discontent these videos sow to be convenient, but despite that perhaps it would result in net positive if workers wages rise and wealth inequality gap falls.
Tbh I'm more concerned about the algorithm promoting vapid entertainment dumbing down the next generation while apparently in China educational videos are more promoted.
That way the most urgent tasks tend to get handled first.
This goes for corporations selling higher margin things to easier customers; customers seeking higher quality and better service for less, and workers seeking higher pay per time and effort spent
Proof of this?
100 years from now historians of labor will mark the COVID-19 pandemic as the time of the great reset, when labor finally got fed up with
-- Being constantly told to "do more with less" after yet another round of cost-cutting
-- Being loyal to companies that weren't loyal to them
-- Being exploited for some vague promise of reward in the future
-- Having no social or family life
I'm glad this has finally happened; I'm just sorry it took a global pandemic to force the issue.
A curious perspective; fear of options. Emotion over logic.
A free market would be something like a farmers market where producers sell directly to consumers. Instead, the US stock market is more like a cartel where there is a central group of intermediaries, which control money moves between producers (companies) and buyers (small/medium investors).
No, a free market is when people are free to make transactions with whoever they please. Big companies are just as free market as mom & pops.
Not really. A company that's big enough to be (even a regional) monopoly forces people to transact with them by virtue of being the only game in town. The question is whether this is a continuous gradient from "more free" to "less free" or more similar to a step function when a company reaches monopoly status.
Your local supermarket may be the only one in your village, but the next village is easily attainable. Something being more convenient doesn't make it a monopoly.
I grew up in the Air Force. My mom would always shop at the base PX because it was cheaper, and sometimes it was a 30 minute drive away, passing store after store to get there. To make the drive worthwhile, she'd buy 2 weeks worth of groceries at a time.
In Seattle, there are some neighborhoods without stores, but that is usually because the stores cannot handle the shoplifting anymore, and quit. It's still not far to another store outside those neighborhoods.
You can even buy food from Amazon from your Lazy-Boy. Push a button, and food appears on your porch.
If you have a really hard time finding food where you live, may I suggest:
Happy new year to you!
P.S. I buy some food items from Amazon that, including shipping, are cheaper than what the local grocery store prices them at. Isn't American competition great?
Aren't you? I find that businesses like my money.
What stocks in the market are you prevented from buying?
https://www.sec.gov/education/capitalraising/building-blocks...
Stock price is a part of a public companies responsibilities, but there are many other priorities and responsibilities a company's charter and board can set. Personally I only want to have stock in companies with a vision. Ultimately they tend to become the most valuable in terms of stock price too.
Hum... Are you sure? Keep in mind that state backed companies that are not allowed to fail create almost exactly the same problem.
You also forgot the national auto industry that was bailed out from certain disaster in 2008.
You have obviously lived in cities your entire life.
Farms fail all the time. Ask any banker at a branch in an agricultural area.
Every industry is too big to fail.
Honestly, other than entertainment, I can't think of any situation where the government would allow an entire industry to fail.
I'm appalled anybody needs to ask this question after the 2008 bailouts.
> In total, U.S. government economic bailouts related to the global financial crisis had federal outflows (expenditures, loans, and investments) of $633.6 billion and inflows (funds returned to the Treasury as interest, dividends, fees, or stock warrant repurchases) of $754.8 billion, for a net profit of $121 billion.[89]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Progra...
And the outflows include about 30% that went to Fannie and Freddie, which were quasi govt operations, and 10% to auto makers that the govt created no mechanism to recover money from.
In reality, outside of the original Bear Sterns collapse, what the 2008 financial sector basically saw was a loss of confidence which was leading to a bank run. All the govt did was provided a backstop that prevented the bank run, which is why even though the government took ludicrously low ownership stakes for the money they put in, their stakes were still highly profitable.
Another example showing this, but from the private sector, was Warren Buffett getting Goldman Sachs to basically pay him hundreds of millions of dollars just to lend his credibility, which was sufficient for them to weather the environment (this was structured as a loan, but the loan was just window dressing for the fact that Buffett was saying he had trust in GS).
In reality, there was always gonna be a recession as house prices went back to more realistic levels and the wrongly rated AAA mortgage backed securities were marked to market to a much more realistic number, along with the knock on effects on various portfolios that included them.
What tipped this recession into a major financial crisis was Paulson forcing Lehman brothers to collapse despite bids from at least 2 other companies that would have saved Lehman, simply because of a personal vendetta.
The overnight and unexpected Lehman bankruptcy sowed massive uncertainty into the markets, drove a bank run, and triggered a chain reaction of failed assets that eventually made it to AIG, and the risk of an AIG failure, was what eventually caused the crisis.
Much of it could have been avoided simply if Paulson wasn’t such an asshole.
I would find it absolutely hilarious if Apple banning certain kinds of in-app tracking combined with Binance sparking a run on FTX for laughs ended up collapsing the software and crypto industries for a few years.
So who even gives a crap if you win this rigged game?
> harder work does not necessarily pay better or lead to advancement
Smarter work does, though.
In a free market, supply&demand set employee compensation at about 85% of the value the employee produces.
The reason is simple. If the company overpays, the company goes bust. If the company underpays, his competitor will hire the person away.
If you believe you're underpaid, make your case to your employer. If he agrees, good for you. If he doesn't, and you're not convinced, quit and work for his competitor.
The thing to do then is keep founding competitors and make a profit selling them to the "monopoly".
P.S. buying a company is not "sabotaging" it. LOL
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_s...
Also- based on my cursory reading here, it seems disingenuous to claim 46% of GDP is government spending- the stat is that government spending is comparable to 46% of the GDP of that year. Government spend doesn’t comprise 46% of the GDP, rather we are using GDP as a measuring stick to evaluate the sanity of government spending amounts.
Defense spending. Government workers. Infrastructure projects various governments partially or fully pay for. Subsidies. And so on.
However, I’m struggling to square that fact with the observation that the Wikipedia table shows a number of entries >100%. How could government spending ever exceed 100% of GDP given it is counting toward GDP?
That was after the arms race that Kennedy started to starve the USSR out of GDP succeeded, when the USSR was allocating all its GDP to defense instead of consumer industries. Which immediately stifled the extremely impactful consumer industry that the USSR had from 1950s to late 1960s. In that period, Kennedy admn. was quite concerned about the progress of the USSR, circulating internal memos saying how the USSR was able to raise the life standards of its people from desperation to 2nd world standards within the same generation, and at that rate other countries could start copying their development model. Ie, socialism. If this was not countered, the global economic control of the US that it gained in post-Ww2 environment would fell down like dominoes as nation after nation chose socialism and allied with the USSR. This was later called 'the Domino theory'. To prevent it, it was decided to 'make examples of' the countries that tried such 'independent development' (that's what they call socialism in their internal memos). That's where the Vietnam War originated from. Also all the other things including the blockade on Cuba etc.
What relevance this has to the topic at hand is that, if the employees feel that they are actually receiving something out of the work they do and their lives are getting bettered in ANY way, they work. If there is no improvement regardless of how much they work, they just dont care anymore. That's the current situation in the US - any wage raise is immediately sucked out by the privatized critical services ranging from healthcare to food, from rent to education. Its just not worth putting in more effort anymore because the more effort you put into making money, the more the market sucks out of your wallet.
The nuclear arms race started immediately after WWII (or possibly during it), the space race (and associated missile race) started in the 1950s. The idea that Kennedy started “the arms race” is…ahistorical.
Those weren't races. The decision to start an arms race and space race to starve the USSR of GDP is an explicitly laid out plan in Kennedy admn.'s internal memos.
The nuclear arms race, space race, and missile race (the second being intimately connected to the third, and in a way its public face, at least initially) were, in fact, races (and components of the broader arms race) and they, in fact, started before Kennedy was in office (the space and missile races, under Eisenhower.)
That Kennedy capitalized on that reality, and built a strategy beyond the most obvious superficial goal of those races, is clear, but to say that he “started” the Cold War arms race is silly and ahistorical.
That's your interpretation. And possibly a likely noticeable segment of the public. The Kennedy administration's race is an actual, specific race with a specific plan. It cannot be 'interpreted away' like that. It was a specific decision taken with specific goals in mind. And those goals were not just 'reaching space' or 'have more nuclear bombs' like the others.
I recommend watching some relevant Chomsky lectures on the matter. He gives excruciating details of the affair.
It’s a well-documented fact.
> The Kennedy administration’s race is an actual, specific race with a specific plan.
The Kennedy strategy only makes sense as an a strategy within the well-documented arms race that was already occurring.
> It was a specific decision taken with specific goals in mind.
An arms race is not defined by the existence of a strategy of one side, it is an escalating cycle of response between two (or more) sides. The Kennedy strategy might help explain why the superpowers didn’t break out of the race sooner (though, really, arms races continuing until either one or both sides reach economic exhaustion or a geopolitical realignment through either war between them or intervention of a third power renders the race moot is fairly normal, so it’s plausible that the adoption of an obvious strategy by the more economically powerful power given an existing arms race did nothing.)
> I recommend watching some relevant Chomsky lectures on the matter.
There are things Chomsky might be able to convince me of, but effects preceding their causes isn’t among them.
Sorry. Kennedy administration says otherwise in their internal memos released to the public via FOIA requests. This may not fit the worldview that you constructed in your head, but reality is what it is. In between what the Kennedy admn. itself says and your 'interpretations', I'll go with the former. Thanks.
The 1% win no matter how we design the housing market. They don't need to thumb the scale
Can any software men/women here comment on how many votes they can buy?
In the software business, which government has so far not interfered with, prices have declined to zero (literally) with lots and lots of revolutionary software being developed.
Famously, software doesn't take any more resources to build and share than a few electrons and a laptop, so not quite the same market as homes which require a massive amount of resources to build.
but there's no reason why you'd expect that the price of anything would stay at the exact same ratio it was 30 yrs ago.
The increase in prices of real estate is demand and supply driven, which implies that way more people got way more richer than you in the intrim 15 yrs. And not to mention some bad gov't policies that prevented an increase in supply, while demand increased, and you see high prices.
I am specifically saying that homes in my area, and most others, have risen in price at a MUCH faster rate than incomes. My example was meant to describe that situation, not just "standard inflation".
Your last paragraph, I fear, is accurate.
And if you're going to say that it was just one country, why do you say that it was North Vietnam that was that one country? Why not South Vietnam? (And if you're going to say that they were both that one country, yeah, come live in reality for a while, it's not that bad here. They were two separate countries for thirty years, in the same way that North and South Korea are two separate countries, and in the way that Russia and Ukraine are two separate countries.)
And as for calling it an invasion... there was sure a lot of shooting for it to have been a political convention.
Her boss is asking her quarterly about her goals with the company and more specifically about taking over his director level job, to which she says "no way" every time. She can see how shittily bosses are treated at the company, they are forced to work insane overtime without pay, deal with personnel issues, eat shit from above constantly, deal with all issues, can't fire the dead weight (which is everywhere), are expected to work over lunch every day and be available to work on vacation, which they usually can't take. Yet they don't seem to grasp that anybody with a brain can see this is an awful trade off for like 10-30% more pay, which just gets taxed away anyway and which you never have time to spend.
You can see it in the faces of these folks, they look prematurely aged. You know how you see a picture of someone's face and say "they look like they had a hard life"? Yeah, go on facebook and see which of your colleagues took the management job and go back 5 years and be blown away at how they aged. It's both sad and shocking.
Misery loves company, why wouldn't young employees want to be as "successful" as us?
Is this in USA? I want this but haven't been able to convince any of my employers to let me do this. They said its a legal/HR issue and need approvals from those orgs within the company.
I have a question for you. Are you also doing this? Do you feel extra pressure to now climb up and be ambitious now that the spouse has let her foot off the accelerator.
The best way to get away with this is to find an employer who is open to it from the start (good luck), or be so valuable that if you threaten to quit if you don't get it, they'll relent and do it for you. In my wife's case, they can't afford to lose her so they'll push HR into making the change. It wasn't painless and there was some annoyances and nuances to fix in the HR system, but it was worth it.
I've been self-employed for almost 15 years so that I would never have to deal with this kind of bullshit. I do consulting and work on my own business ideas. I've run several startups in the past, some of which were funded, so I've seen the back end of all this kind of stuff. My wife makes more money than I do and I work on finding businesses that can free us both from having to work. It sucks that she is making less now and we can feel it a bit, but it's not a huge blow as we aren't big spenders. It was 100% worth it, she is by far happier than she has been in years. They did a very poor job of reducing her workload with her time though, so watch out for that if you can get your 20% reduction. They'll pay you less, but expect you to work the 5th day in the 4. This is mainly a staffing issue on her team however.
I do feel some pressure to finally get something working so she can just leave her employment and in the last year I've managed to grow my latest business to twice her annual gross salary. If I can keep it up we'll be able to meet our goals, but a business is an ongoing monster with it's own risks and expenses, so it'll take some time before the leap can be made.
I hope you can achieve what you want, sometimes it takes some serious pressure to get your way, or you have to be willing to walk if they don't agree, but man that 3 day weekend every week is that much better and she still talks about how great it is a year later.
It's possible that your wife's boss is looking to get your wife into the job and then leave it. Precisely because they know that the job is that toxic and they are desperate to go. They may be looking for a replacement and have identified your wife as a good candidate.
>which just gets taxed away anyway
I don't know what country you are in, but in the US we have a tax system where rates only increase on dollars earned above certain thresholds. Unless y'all are jumping up from ~$83k or ~$340k, the tax increases are not that bad on the extra earned dollars
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-...
Startups are some of the worst abusers of people's time and effort and they hide behind the trope of extreme effort and long hours for little pay that people come to just expect with the territory. I imagine nowadays they are having a bit of a harder time then they once did, but there are always dreamers and fools and examples of those that did and came out very well.
After spending most of my career as your standard enterprise dev, I fell into a remote mid level role in the cloud consulting department of BigTech.
After a year and a half of finding my bearings, the next logical step was for me to work toward a promotion where I would have more “scope” and “impact”.
I soon realized that I didn’t want the headache. My wife and I had more than “enough”.
On top of that, my wife and I decided to become “digital nomads” this past year. We bought a professionally managed “condotel” in Florida so we would have some place to nest during the winter and fly across the US the rest of the year and stay in hotels.
We got rid of our house, cars and everything we own that couldn’t fit into three suitcases. It’s been the most freeing experience in the world to get out of the rat race while watching my coworkers chase after promotions.
The outsized impact of a bad employee is definitely a potential of a small team / company. Maybe I've just been lucky, but for the most part the closeness of a small team also invites more visibility and accountability from owners. Bad managers and employees, in my experience, tend to have shorter careers in small companies.
On the other hand, I've seen "staff" engineers at large companies who clearly have "leaves feedback on PRs" as a performance metric, because they would add trite, useless requests for changes that would conflict with feedback they left on other PRs, and would be exceptionally petty when confronted. These same people would be lauded because they lived up to artificial expectations, despite probably having a negative impact on the teams ability to deliver if anyone really looked at what they were doing.
On a small team, you can't get away with that for very long before it becomes apparent that something isn't working.
Most larger companies do performance management, where the bottom x% lowest performers are laid off every year or every few years. In my experience working in small companies, performance management has been nonexistent or very timid. HR almost always puts roadblocks when firing people, except for egregious acts like sexual harassment or stealing, making it next to impossible to fire bad performers. Likewise, bad people (who are basically somewhat competent or not incompetent) still run amok regularly and are actually given relatively free rein because of nonexistent HR, weak HR, nonexistent management, weak management, or just plain nepotism (knows the VP or founder, for example) or all of the above.
Larger companies have many defenses against this sort of thing, and they actually work a lot of the time. Of course, there are large-group politics wherein huge groups (200-300+) battle against one another, in large companies. But those are of a different nature and are considerably less nasty.
It’s not a time share. You own the full unit and you buy it and sell it just like you would any other commercial unit.
The property management company doesn’t charge the owner when they live there. So it is rented out like a hotel when we aren’t there.
Unlike most things you read on the internet. This is investment advice. Condotels are universally horrible “investments”. You should treat them as a second home where the rents might cover part of the cost of ownership.
Especially since Florida is very seasonal, even putting the required 25%-30% down, there isn’t a chance we would break even if we expected the income to cover the costs all year. But, we are staying there during low season. Since it is our only home, we would have live somewhere anyway and we pay our own mortgage and fees like we would anyway - which are about the same as our big house that we had in the burbs. April through September, we expect it to break even.
It is beginning to look like the start of a slippery (downward) slope for white-collar wages, I'm afraid.
Citation needed. I’ve seen this repeated without evidence several times here, but is it reality?
5h/week are equivalent to at least 4 weeks of PTO in a year.
Plus, vehicle maintenance costs, gas costs, and I can do chores around the house any time I want which saves even more time because I don't have to plan my day around the washing machine.
As someone who manages a team off highly talented offshore developers, who are working for a fraction of the pay that US developers get, it makes me concerned that this is all going to average out.
And if it averages out, US-based tech. employees will be in for quite the shock.
Andy Jassy, the former CEO of AWS and current CEO of AWS, has said repeatedly in public statements that less than 5% of all IT spend is currently on any cloud provider.
There is a long way to go
Those that take that job and succeed figure out how to do it in the same time.
Right now, I’m the master of my own fate. I either get small projects where I manage the entire project by myself or maybe with one junior consultant including managing the customer, the meeting cadence, when and how often I need to travel to the clients site (if at all) etc or I slice off one vertical “work stream” of a larger project and still keep it where I can manage it.
That means talking to the customer, gathering requirements, doing their own system design, presenting it to any facet of the business, doing the hands on keyboard work, automating the deployment and training the customer. You should also be able to manage your deliverables and the customer expectations and communicate the trade offs between time, budget and requirements.
Of course if any of the technical areas are your weakness, you are responsible for bringing the right people in.
An L6 is expected to manage multiple work streams and spend a lot more time in pre-sales.
The advantage of being an L5 is that there is nothing stopping me from performing L6 tasks. But I don’t have to. No one is going to tell me that I have to take on L6 level work. But I don’t have to.
On that same note “we control our schedule”. If I start routinely putting in more than 40 hours a week, my manager is going to talk to me and start asking hard questions like why am I not managing my customers expectations.
I love reading all these comments where people complain (not you specifically), and then throw around raise and bonus numbers that equal the median US household income.
Know and demand your value, but also recognize the position of privilege that many of us are in.
My dad is a retired factory worker. He got a degree in accounting after leaving the military. But then decided he liked factory work more. He also turned down plenty of promotions and overtime opportunities.
My barber in his 50s closed his shop two additional days a week after he started dating so he could spend more time with his significant other.
People make life decisions all of the time to prioritize other facets of life over money.
(As an aside, I find it interesting that Japan has had pretty low levels of unemployment over the past twenty years. One might even expect this in a paternalistic society that bolsters rent-seeking incumbents. Hence, individuals can feel "stuck" even as the media superficially assesses data to fit the narrative of a "hot economy.").
(Another observation, it's funny for the article to cite an executive comparing Americans to people in a country where menial workers are paid slave wages.)
* relaxed environment in huge enterprise
* absolutely never do overtime (except i used to do on- calls which they paid me reasonably well for)
* no major responsibilities
* easy to complete work
Guess what I'm going to do when i finish studying? The same job! I'll also start side projects on evenings/weekends and make investments.
It's not that I don't want to work more, it's just that I want my work to bring in money when I'm on the beach. Being a wage slave exchanging time for money is so obviously not worth it. Neither is getting 'promoted' to a job with more responsibilities, longer hours and barely any more money.
Probably because HR posts the job requirements on an internal website now, because every single person in the company asked about it.
Like... healthcare, for starters. But it's also a huge one.
You go to the dentist, and it used to be $20 co-pay. And that was that.
Now it's like a $50 co-pay... AND they send you a bill after the visit for gauze or something random that the insurance didn't cover. And the point is you have no idea if it's going to be $35 or $900. And even if you have the money it's all the time you have to spend figuring out how to pay the damn bill (like some random online payment system), and stress knowing a bill is never what you can predict.
It takes energy to worry about this shit. And by the time you're done stressing, the last thing you want to do is go back and work a weekend for an employer who's just going to find a way to make your insurance suck more the next year, all while blaming insurance companies for raising rates.
And it's shitty fucking mortgage companies that sell your loan every 6 months to a different shitty fucking mortgage company. And make you switch payment systems. And it's just like, "Man, I thought auto-pay meant I didn't have to stress about this shit or ever check my mail or read messages from companies I didn't recognize..." But any more, that's how you get late fees.
And it's all the fucking upsells on things. Nothing feels good by default. And finding anything that feels like a good deal is impossible. All the fucking "optimizations" companies have made over the years all just make life miserable. More shit to stress about... I can't just hop on a plane, if I forget to upgrade to the right plan (which varies by airline), or change flights mid-trip, I then it's another bill for bags, or meals, or so my knees don't get crushed by the seat in front of me.
Meh, all this just ends up sounding like some cranky old person complaining shit used to be better. The perpetual state of American decline. "Get off my lawn!" But like... bottom line, as a Gen-X-er I want to work, and do my best, and I get annoyed when people don't buy in to the shit I've been sold. But I also get why a lot of people younger than me are over this shit.
Life just feels way too unpleasant with all the BS, nobody has your back. Why would anyone want to work harder than they have to in the system we've built?
> Where have all the go-getters gone?
Oh please. Pay more.
Such behavior easily spread to the rest, that then also become complacent - Why clean up from others that have a good time at home? If someone wants to work less than 5 days a week, fine by me, just make that expectation very clear instead of allowing quiet quitting, not just between manager and employee, but also to the rest of the peers, to not raise any such bitter or envy.
And yes, the offenders were eventually fired for this. Drawing the line of how far it can go can be tough, post above is obviously exaggerated and more an accumulation of multiple smaller situations at different assignments.
Of course it didn't. But how else would the "why do you ask for more pay when I ask for more work" managers shame their workers into unpaid overtimes?
Quiet disagreement of any kind is just building tension and ends up harmful for all parties in the end. This should only be last resort after other options run out. Keep everybody’s expectations aligned. If that’s what quiet actually means here, I am a bit out of touch with tiktok.
But that's not always practical, so it's simpler to just reduce your output to just enough that you don't get fired. Yes it hurts the team but it's the best outcome for the quiet quitter
I received a job offer in finance and for almost double my salary….told my employer I was leaving. They asked what can we do to keep you and I said you can double my salary…and the project manager said yes..to be honest I didn’t believe them.
Since then I’ve gone on to work at different companies for good pay but little upside since the companies were not growing (often shrinking!). This makes it difficult to get promoted as quickly since the organisations are not growing so senior management ranks stagnant and no one leaves and new roles are not created. Right now there’s no incentive to me working hard…it won’t make a meaningful difference.
It was an almost impossible amount of work and I managed to do it just 2 days before the near-unreachable deadline.
My reward? 500 EUR bonus.
I mean I was 41 at the time already and was mostly immune to illusions but still felt bad.
But I guess the media will never stop with the propaganda how the workers must try ever harder. Meh.
Working weekends was never sustainable. I don't understand why companies think that they can deliver for their customers by forcing their employees to work weekends.
That said, America has a huge problem. The way American laws are written, it causes a lot of red-tape. The only reason anything gets done is because there are time bounds on the red-tape.
But getting through more and more red-tape with fewer and fewer people, in a time limit, is extremely hard. This shows up in pressures on workers to finish what appears to be solved problems, such as payroll, compliance and, taxes.
The result of American red-tape is:
> The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, recently moved about 20 remote engineering and marketing roles to Canada and India, where she said it’s easier to find talent who will go above and beyond.
America needs to reduce red-tape before the labor force declines in this decade.
> America needs to reduce red-tape before the labor force declines in this decade.
That's more due to the deregulated free market sucking people dry in the US over basic needs, forcing them to live with outrageous rents, childcare, healthcare, living costs. The corporations that profit from basic necessities are literally, actually, physically damaging the interests of every other corporation and sector in the economy. And when the cost of living is so artificially exaggerated, outsourcing job to a remote location where deregulated corporations cannot suck people dry over their basic needs becomes cheaper for every corporation.
Housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, communication, education, military, justice, police, food, heating et al are social infrastructure. They must be prevented from profiteering. Otherwise the profiteers destroy the society while maximizing their profits over those.
Hilarious. Those are all expensive because of government constraints -- the profit-seeking free market is unable to drive prices down because regulations have raised barriers to entry and dramatically reduced competition and innovation. Meanwhile more lightly-regulated sectors show clear negative inflation.
But even before getting to the mechanism, I don't think the actual reality totally matches what you've deacribed. Rents in the US are generally not "outrageous" (obvious exceptions excepted), and living costs are low -- fuel is cheap, electricity is cheap, food is cheap. Far from "sucking people dry" the corporations in those industries are providing for people much better than any government agency.
See this famous chart for the receipts -- which things government interferes with, and which are becoming more expensive: https://inflationdata.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2019/1...
There are even more government constraints in Europe, China, Japan. The real estate sector, healthcare, education etc are not out of hand in those places like they are in the US.
> the profit-seeking free market is unable to drive prices down
The profit-seeking free market is unable to drive prices down because driving prices down is anathema to profit-seeking.
> See this famous chart for the receipts -- which things government interferes with
A blog post from Randians in contrast to actually existing reality does not an argument make.
Let me reiterate:
There are more government constraints everywhere else around the world. Nowhere else those critical sectors are out of hand.
Family members typically moved the patient since orderlies were an additional charge.
What the hell?
The prices weren’t regulated. The CT machine was a hand me down. The place operated with basically no management. It worked like a food court in Singapore.
If the US switched to the Chinese system for healthcare, the socialist minded people would cry themselves to death.
> The Chinese system
Are you saying the Chinese government does not interfere with the factors of production in their country? I was under the impression China was a hybrid of a centrally-controlled economy, and if so that absolutely does mean they interfere! Please correct me if I am wrong, because I would love to learn how China does the free market better than the USA and how we can change the USA to be more like China in this aspect.
So why are we fighting the Chinese? Let them take over and bring this so famous Austrian economics now!
They are not. They make social democracy. A transition system from capitalism to socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy#Political_par...
It was literally developed by socialists (in late 19th century it meant the same with 'communist') and advocated in the First Socialist International at the end of 19th century. To top that, it was the president of the first socialist international who revealed the new system. Every single plan and method that you equate with 'capitalism' above, comes from that advocacy.
In the cold war era when Western countries were also using social democracy, the cold war propaganda allowed people to get self-deceived into thinking that all of those were the fruits of capitalism. But Reagan & co knew what was what. They spent no time in discarding all those pesky socialist practices and bringing back good old fashioned capitalism. The dystopian hellhole that you are experiencing today is capitalism itself.
Well, obviously there is still some ways to go until child labor, 14 hour workdays, total removal of labor protections, abolition of weekend vacation, social security etc are completed, but hey - they sure will get rid of those pesky socialist stuff in no time.
Open market prices in a first world country (New Zealand) are much less: https://www.aucklandxray.co.nz/Home+Links/Price+List.html https://radiology.co.nz/services/ct https://broadwayradiology.co.nz/our-services/ct-scanning
There is a lot of reasons for variation, but I thought you might be interested in what the private free market price might be.
Aside: when I visited Shenzhen in China years ago, it felt like the most hyper-capitalist place I have ever been.
> Government matches the amount paid, and poor people get a card that is very discounted.
How is government paying healthcare in a country that regulates prices so heavily that the cost of healthcare operations and medicine literally amount to dimes, is anything capitalist.
Consumer choice about which products and services get purchased isn't a feature of "capitalism". Perhaps one could say it was a "free market" situation, but only if different nurses charged different amounts... Perhaps this is just a well-regulated industry in which the regulations aren't written by capitalists?
Did you see any concentration camps in Urumqi?
I think it would have been better if the autonomous regions had been left alone, but that option disappeared in the west due to natural resources, and from the Chinese perspective “Free Tibet” means NATO weapons in Tibet. That is why they built an absurdly expensive railway to Lhasa.
The CCP is incomprehensible from an American perspective, but painfully practical and predictable from a Chinese perspective.
In the US healthcare is regulated like crazy, entirely broken by government intervention. Probably other places have governments that have broken their systems less badly. I won't argue that systems with some private actors involved are necessarily better than those that have none at all.
And as for education, America's private and charter schools are better than its public non-charter schools even controlling for funding and student quality. And it has among the best tertiary education in the world, and yeah it's not a bad thing that the students who can afford to pay for it have to pay their own way. (American tertiary education costs are largely means-tested.)
As for the rest of the argument, I think the fact that nobody can afford to buy a television because we're all being gouged by unregulated, excessively profitable technology manufacturers is the best demonstration of your point. Everyone can at least agree with you that competitive pressures never lower prices.
There isn't any megapolis on the planet that does not have 'government interference'. That's what makes millions over millions of people in a tight place actually be able to live and work.
> In the US healthcare is regulated like crazy, entirely broken by government intervention.
Prices. You need to regulate prices. Irrelevant regulation doesn't do anything about prices.
And you're saying the industries with government intervention are the expensive ones? What's going on with fuel, electricity, and food; all of which have heavy government interference
There isn't a huge amount of government involvement in fuel in the US. Some bad ethanol requirements, some taxes, but still less bad than elsewhere. And fracking is legal where it matters, thank God.
There is truth to this. A lot of red tape is patchwork lawmaking attempting to close loopholes from some fraudulent activity.
That said, patchwork fixes are no good. It is only increasing compliance burden year-over-year. Life with government bureaucracy is getting harder, not easier.
An example is healthcare. One of the reasons the cost of healthcare is high exactly because of shitty regulations, which limit the number of healthcare workers graduating per year. And then, there are compliance burdens tacked on to them every year. Then nurses and doctors are asked to take tests every few years to keep their license. To what end? Are lifetime outcomes better? Is our healthcare system better for it? No.
The ideal solution would be to reduce regulatory burden to a point where we can have unlimited doctors, nurses and healthcare workers. Said doctors, nurses etc. should be able to open a private practice easily, in every corner of a town, much like a McDonalds. Insurance should be forced to pay claims out fast, easy and for every treatment under the sun, recommended by the doctor. None of this CPT code nonsense. If the insurance company can't handle this, they should be free to go out of business. There should be intense competition among insurance providers, which doesn't happen because startups cannot compete with the regulatory burden.
Make simple laws. Make life easier. We need an abundance of services, not abundance of regulatory burden.
The sole reason why healthcare is out of hand is because it is in the hands of the private sector and the people have no option but to subject themselves to it. This happens whenever a critical social infrastructure is privatized. And that sector will not stop maximizing its profit with deregulation. Its anathema to profit-making.
> Said doctors, nurses etc. should be able to open a private practice easily
There isn't any profitable sector in which individual professionals or small outfits can compete with massive conglomerates. Less, in healthcare. The amount of healthcare services and technology that a private individual can muster are incomparable to what is needed today in modern medicine. Legions of general practicioners will not fix anything - preventing profit maximization from something related to survival is.
Private healthcare is just slightly less brutal than privatization of air: If it was possible to privatize air, there would be no escape from its consequences. With private healthcare, you can escape the ransacking profiteering for some time as long as you are healthy.
This is very untrue. The reason why healthcare is expensive is because of regulatory gatekeeping which prevents new players from outcompeting incumbents. I know from first hand experience in family that pill makers have captured the market so badly that we are paying 100x for the same pill as compared to a generic manufactured in India, simply because generic manufactures are prevented by law to manufacture in America.
> There isn't any profitable sector in which individual professionals or small outfits can compete with massive conglomerates. Less, in healthcare. The amount of healthcare services and technology that a private individual can muster are incomparable to what is needed today in modern medicine. Legions of general practicioners will not fix anything - preventing profit maximization from something related to survival is.
Again, the main reason there are giant private companies is because smaller players are blocked by regulatory burden. If the playing field of compliance were cheap, many more players would compete for the same set of customers, driving prices down.
Would you stop buying drugs from America?
Look. In ENTIRE world except the US, that is not happening. There are far more regulations everywhere else. They also regulate prices. They work. Looking at the situation, only one of the below possibilities can be true at any given time:
1 - The US exists in a totally different space/time continuum in which what you say is true 2 - The US exists in the same continuum with the rest of the planet, and you people are being totally scammed
This is a false, unresearched claim. I can prove the fallacy with examples from Asia: China, India, Indonesia, all have low regulation and high availability.
I would suggest thinking about it as "better regulation" than "low regulation". American regulation is Kafkaesque. A better system is needed.
That said, America is heading to a shitty future much like EU, unless America gets its act together.
It's so backwards. It is easier to enter illegally than legally.
> Many workers say they see little connection between working hard and being rewarded. About half of the 1,071 respondents to a May survey by The Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago said they don’t have a good chance of improving their standard of living, compared with 27% who said they do. The 27% figure was a 20 percentage-point drop from a year earlier. About 60% said they were pessimistic about most people’s ability to achieve the American dream.
It appears that lately there is less of those who seek to define themselves through work, and care more about their life(and identity) outside of work. For such people, trying to incentivize them through money and career growth will likely not work.
American capitalism has become too irrational for real work.
https://www.compassprep.com/new-sat-has-disadvantaged-female...
I don't think that's true either
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1000wnk/profits_m...
Are you expecting me to work 80 hours a week? are you paying me twice a 40 hour a week job?
People aren't "becoming less ambitious" they're becoming less willing to work for free - this seems like a new version of the "silent quitting" posts from a few months ago where a bunch of abusive companies were calling people only working the contractual terms normally used to abuse them as somehow "quitting".
Corporates have been squeezing employee who give a damn…with little in the way of pay rises. Corporate profits and stock prices have been off the charts while people struggle to look after their families if they can even afford to start one altogether!
Companies need to adapt and start actually rewarding hard work…and I don’t just mean giving out employee of the month awards..I mean cash money…
As both a manager and contributor myself, I can say from experience that (perhaps obviously) management of highly motivated persons is much easier than those putting in the work strictly for a paycheck. There is a clear "us vs them" mentality for a growing group of contributors burned-out from capatalism (see r/antiwork) and the vicious cycle for this cohort is that the more apathetic a person becomes, the more mamagement intervention they're likely to receive, putting them more at odds with the same forces they oppose.
1. What work are they doing (unspecified in article)
and . .
2. How well are they paid (factor in COLA if you'd like some extra fairness monkey wrench)
Also . . .
3. Why the *@#!$(&#? should I care about how bosses do or do not adjust?
Apologies. I forget this is "manager news" and not "hacker news."
My real job is to be highly employable and sought after at all times, not fulfilling the needs/wants of my current company.
No. We're not less ambitious. We're more balanced. We're also not all that interested in working for no pay to enrich somebody else.
At the same time, in most tech companies I see a lot of backpressure against performance reviews, which is exactly the instrument of rewarding hard work.
- George Carlin
I don't respect anybody as long they need me more than I do them i win all the time.
The implication being that founders don't understand capitalism? You get what you pay for.
what an out of touch statement..