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What long term goal is slaving away at McDonalds or Wal-Mart accomplishing? All the people advancing society are being paid pittances compared to the true leeches (landlords and shareholders).

People should not be required to work to survive. People should be required to work to make the world a better place. Most people work bullshit jobs that do not advance anything but the wealth of the 1%.

There is nothing inherent in "basic economics" that postulates that fulfilling or fun jobs pay less.

I also find the idea of "basic economics" laughable given how impossible economics is in the first place. I mean, yes, if you assume spherical cows...

> While there are exceptions (eg tmux), I find most man pages are written for someone who already knows how the command works but forgot a particular detail.

Isn't that a function of how much work is put into man pages vs. the GUI? I'd be hesitant to claim that if you took the same number of hours in writing a GUI and put it into writing better documentation that we'd be in the same place we often are with poorly documented tooling.

> The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

Or that technical talent does not really contribute to success as much as the prevailing theories believe?

It is only worth it for companies beyond a certain size. Smaller companies will always opt for visas vs. figuring out remote taxes.

There are plenty of bootcamp grads across the companies I've worked and they all make 100k+ (and some are established senior engineers).

Like you are implying: status signaling from degree mills is pretty useless compared to actual competency.

Hence my question of whether the OP is prescriptive or descriptive.

A lot to unpack here.

> The common man isn't expected to understand tariffs, international banking, military theory, computer engineering, social justice issues, and food scarcity.

What better use is there of the common man's time than understanding societal issues like justice and scarcity? Are you describing how the world is or claiming how it should be? If you do not understand justice, scarcity, etc. how can you claim to elect someone who reflects your views--ignoring that a lot of politics is lesser evil voting?

An uneducated populace voting is a worst-case scenario for a representative democracy.

Echo use of the Mox library! I found testing in Elixir to be by far my favourite experience (outside of Scheme, I guess, but I haven't done production Scheme). The REPL is really nice as well for exploratory development.

helping your company save costs (at scale) is almost always stupid compared to selling that knowledge to other companies.

I've seen well over 20% improvement in developer velocity which is far more important than performance in most businesses

Is your answer: "try being rich"? People with what you have are rarely sitting in cubicles or open offices any way.

Is it awesome? It raises the cost of everything everywhere else (because for the majority of young, educated people there aren't _that_ many desirable cities). We are already seeing that in places like Austin or Colorado.

switching jobs is a promise of productivity. giving an individual company more productivity for free is bullshit -- get your comp adjusted as frequently as possible.

#1 is a non-starter for many managers in companies of all sizes. Unfortunately the personality-type that lends itself to accumulating power is not one that thrives off trust.

There is some irony in being a big fan of capitalism and then advocating for your own exploitation.

it's the difference between explicit and invisible force. people in favour of capitalism (in all its forms) consider the invisible forces "the way the world works".

I would argue significantly better than our current system. It would allow more diversity as well as bring knowledge about government back into communities.

In a sense if we can collectively agree that the future will be better... we're all fine. We are in a crisis but there is really no reason that if the world stopped improving _today_ we would not be fine as a species. Good, even, if we redistributed wealth from hoarders.

Alas, said hoarders are the ones who make everyone else believe that The Line means more than anything else.

> Capitalism is about weeding out the better companies from the worse -- not ones that are arbitrarily more or less hit by an unpredictable global catastrophe.

For the definition of better or worse implied by your above statements that is... almost entirely untrue. Given the entirety of the history of capitalism (and definition of capitalism) the only purpose of capitalism is to accumulate more capital within an existing system.

In fact we've seen many companies arbitrarily sink or swim -- and many successful business people will say as much. Otherwise there would be many more repeatable successes for businesses. Capitalism is not God.

I agree with criticism of governments in these instances but in order to be more thoughtful we should be critical of _how_ the governments ended up in this state. In other words: I do not think that the government (as a concept) is the issue here. I think that the current (and decades past) American government is the issue. They are 100% corrupt and culpable but it is not inherent to every government.

Note: I am NOT saying you are ignoring what I've said above. I have just seen many people make poor generalizations about government because of their experience with the American government's inability to prioritize citizens over the networth of the elite.

Incorrect. A free-market globalized world (I shudder at calling such a world "perfect") would see cars manufactured at wherever gives maximal marginal gains. Which is what we've been seeing...

Resources are finite no matter how much capitalism pretends otherwise.

A lot of "education" is just branding and prestige. For that, they will need a lot of money.

And before techies get up in arms about how much of a meritocracy their field is -- survey your FAANG/elite startup coworkers. See what school they went to.

I'm curious as to why you think China is to blame for American politicians ignoring precautions and prioritizing their own wealth over the well-being of their citizens?

Workers depending on their employers are wage slaves. It is particularly bad when in countries like America, a worker's _health_ is dependent on their employer.

But in general being "dependent" on the government is 100x better than being dependent on individual employers. I'd be much happier making 30% of what I do now if I did not have to plan for existing 30 years down the line when I'm automated, found non-essential, a victim of ageism, or simply invested in the wrong skills.

I also had harder internship questions, and a harder time passing, when interviewing at places like Yelp than I did full-time at most FAANG-tier companies (disclaimer: I did not interview at Netflix).

Extremely common. Interviewing is a tiring and arduous process and companies have all the power. They make the bet that the majority of people are not willing to leave (esp. once they have families).

Privatization and "efficiency" on all things of national interest do that. It is why deficit hawks are misleading their constituents with every sentence.

We should not pretend like we understand the "economic fallout", and that operating under the current "rules" is the only mode of existence. Economics and capitalism are social constructs after all. _Nobody_ understands economics well enough to make statements with any certainty. At least epidemiology is better understood.

Not to mention what happens when you take into account the positive effects a recession and drop in production has to: air quality, worker health, general mortality, and climate change?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00210-0

> People who are not neoliberals often agree that efficiency and innovation are important (though perhaps not of as paramount importance as neoliberals tend to portray them), but often disagree with neoliberals as to the optimality of neoliberal policies at producing them outside of the kind of simplified conditions that dominate the first couple weeks of undergraduate economics classes.

People who are not neoliberals often agree that efficiency and innovation are important _up to the point where needs are met for all_. No leftist uses efficiency/innovation as a target (and if they do chase it for the sake of productivity they are by definition not left of capital).