Hacker News Reader

Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

Young people will never be able to afford a home by working, no matter how much they produce for the economy. It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues. But they are never rewarded for it.

What they will get rewarded for though is getting (somebody) pregnant. Then the parents of both the father and mother will rush in to help them get real estate and to escape the dead end of working.

In short, they can't afford to move out from the city until pregnancy opens the doors for them.

View on HN

Lol this is the myth isn't it.

Reality is getting screamed at by a toddler while you single-handedly build a depression era shack in desert wasteland for 40k, while simultaneously working full time and somehow caring for your kids too. Spend your time tearing your hair out, essentially working 3 full-time jobs while paying for daycare, rent, and construction materials so despite all this work your financials go into a black hole.

My parents did send me a $100 Lowes gift card, so there is that. At least now I can do ghetto job of pretty much any building trade.

It's mostly that having a kid lites the fire under your ass, not so much others are helping because they usually don't.

My example is in the cases that young workers get any help at all. Some families do it old school and actually help their children without requiring pregnancy, but it's much rarer. And as you said, many families won't help at all.

> It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues.

This does not sound connected to any reality I have seen, and seems facially ageist.

Call it what you want. I see it all the time. And not many new slacker type jobs are being made, for young people to do the same. Every generation probably has the same percentage of people who don't do anything. The difference is that such a person who is young is a "neet" on unemployment, while such a person who is old collects a nice paycheck from a job.

I don't think that is true for older workers living today, but it was true on the 50s. The GDP per capita went up by more than 4x and yet it is those 50s people who have had an easy time owning a home.

>It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues.

Is this commonplace? This doesn't match my experience, not in tech but in finance departments.

In low margin or high intensity industries, you're not going to have anybody who doesn't pull their own weight, whether young or old. But for normal jobs, it's more or less the norm that a huge number of your long-time workers are doing hardly anything at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com