Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.
It pretending that it's creating value, while never showing where the value comes from. Often it comes from extraction from other places. What the OP is experiencing is merely one of the many ugly heads of the very much real process of extracting value in pursuit of profit. There are many other sides:
- Your cheap t-shirts are often created with child labor, and at tremendous cost to the environment.
- Their cigarettes and pain relievers are your addiction and your death.
- Your meat-for-everybody-everyday comes at the expenses of destruction of native habitat, immense animal suffering, toxic runoff and deforestation.
- Your consumer electronics come at the cost of toxic levels of PFAs in your and your children's blood.
- Your convenient transport comes at expense of choking cities, rising sea levels, and dying habitats.
- Your ChatGPT/Dall-E convenience robs hundreds if not thousands of people from their livelihood, and has been trained of others' work without their permission or consent, and the electricity and pollution bill will astound you.
- Coca cola and their plastic producing friends and its convenient packaging created an obesity epidemic and an island of garbage in the pacific.
- Teflon and 3M and their amazing, revolutionary non-stick surfaces created our future cancers.
What's happening with the layoffs in the industry is just another facet of extracting $$$ without looking where the "extraction" comes from, yet another logical level of "optimizing", disguising the fact that it's all a race to the bottom. Yet another group is going to be replaced by automation or less workers doing more work for less pay, simply in pursuit of "value".
> Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.
Yes, it's the excess before the imminent end, it's the idea you can infinitely grow in a finite world with finite resources. This idea is mirrored by the corps and their gambles on the stock market, pretending to create a value in the millions more than they actually do create. It's unhinged, unstoppable, unsupported by reality, grotesque growth, very much like cancer.
You can disagree, protest and twist and shake your logic like an eel trying to deny the undeniable: the only thing capitalism is hand-delivering is the collapse of society, the mass extinction of nature, and the end of a livable Earth.
The fact that the OP, a more than talanted dev, can't find a job easily atm is very much connected to the extraction of value, and the insidious exploitative character of capitalism. Take your growth and keep it to yourself.
My honest motivation for writing the message was that I understood (maybe misunderstood) ath3nd to be saying that they had lost a job one year ago, and then I saw a very long list of political grievances. It matched a pattern I have observed in my career where a person on the team seems to have very strident political opinions, but when you talk to that person it becomes clear that the person is angry about something in their own life and is using political discourse as a way of being angry all the time without acknowledging to themselves the issue in their own lives.
I put these two things together and thought perhaps I could help a fellow engineer who may have fallen into a pit of despair. Based on ath3nd's response, it doesn't sound like that's their situation. Maybe my comment helped another person who was reading the thread. Maybe it helped no one. I'll never know.
I'm not going to going to offer counterarguments because it was never my intention to engage ath3nd on any political matters. I don't necessarily even disagree with the person, but I also don't think HN is at its best when people use it for political debates.
My comment was posted with a good heart on the theory that it might or might not help someone else. That does not preclude the possibility that my comment reflects my own insecurities or failings. I think almost anything you do or say is in some way a reflection of who you are, and like anyone else I surely do have various insecurities and flaws.
I've had non-stop employment for the last 17 years.
I think you get the wrong idea. I am happily employed for the moment. I am lucky to be in a very senior (VP of Eng) position in a company that I helped start. I am also able to hire and retain engineers for my teams so, luckily, I am not at the mercy of risk-averse hiring managers "scared to work with me". My point is that not everybody is that lucky, and that now even great people with great skills like the OP are struggling to find employment, and it's not their fault, but it's the system's.
One of capitalism's great ploys is the: "suck it all up and grid, it all depends on you" attitude where all emphasis is on you and your skills, but no emphasis on the problems of the system iself. It's like lottery, somebody got rich playing it, so you must be doing it wrong.
- If you didn't make it, you didn't grind/hustle hard enough. Must be something wrong with you
- There is a great garbage island in the Pacific ocean. Must be that you, the consumer didn't recycle well enough. Totally nothing to do with the corps created non-recyclable materials that are cheaper to throw away than reuse.
- The cities are choking with air pollution. Must be YOUR fault for not using a bike, and not the government which didn't make the infrastructure for biking or quick and efficient public transport, nor the corps which didn't invest in alternative fuels when it was the time.
It's always the individual person's fault in capitalism, and all attempts to question the system are explained away with the individual sucking at it. Even individuals within the system are likely to turn on other and say: "oh, if you just did this harder or better, you'd be richer". There is a lot of survivor bias there and not understanding that success in that system is often based on pure luck, where you were born, and who your parents were. In reality, for the majority of people, unless you are very rich, or live in a country with at least some amount of social security (i.e not the US), they are one chronic condition or long sickness away from homelessness.
We shouldn't close our eyes and see how the world is for others, and realize that we are one of the few lucky ones. But we could easily, as you said, have been out of a job, despite a very impressive amount of skills, similar to the OP.
And while there are for sure things that they can do to get some employment, the fact that the OP is actually a legend in some communities but is still struggling to find a job, that should be ringing alarm bells for all of us. Because I don't think all of us here have the same or comparable accolades as the OP.
> "They're getting away with it because everybody is doing it. And they're getting away with it because now it's the new normal," he said. "Workers are more comfortable with it, stock investors are appreciating it, and so I think we'll see it continue for some time."
> Interest rates, sitting around 5.5%, are far from the near-zero rates of the pandemic. And some tech companies are reshuffling staff to prioritize new investments in generative AI. But experts say those factors do not sufficiently explain this month's layoff frenzy.
They are simply bumping up their stock price. They were hiring and growing like little malignant cancers when that was the signal of "success", and now they are "streamlining", which is the new signal of "success".