I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.
This system tries to put into your head that you either are exploited (worker) or are the exploiter (owner), while we could try to arrange our society in a more cooperative way, e.g. with worker cooperatives. Unfortunately the whole system is stuck against such cooperative structures, because elites don't want these type of arrangements to become legitimized on a big scale.
Startups at their best are worker cooperatives. Not everyone has an equal share or say in the company, but with each person having a meaningful amount of stock options you can look at it that way. It's not clear exactly what would be the best distribution of ownership but definitely the less stock held by people not working at the firm the better if one is trying to get out of the exploited and exploiter mentality. How big can this scale? Would like to read a good study on this.
I can't agree, sure early employees have some stock (still usually muuuuuuuuuuuch less than founders) but a lot of the time there is a specific class of decision-makers/owners. Workers in big companies like Google get stock that through some fancy beaurocracy doesn't give them decision making-opportunities. I think workers-owners can agree to unequal salary, but even in startups they don't actually make decisions. The biggest known worker cooperative is Mondragon, so this can scale. I would probably try creating different type of structure to this from Mondragon (they still have director class that is chosen by majority vote), but it's an example of big worker coop. Motion Twin would be an example of a small worker coop, they have fixed equal salary which I think was a problem for them, they didn't want to scale so after they developed the game Dead Cells that was a fairly big success some people from this company created another company to be able to scale to develop the game.
> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.
That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business.
I do not get this attitude at all. It just smacks of entitlement. How about this for an answer “when the company makes money, they can pay your salary?”. Now, there are many more reasons why an ambitious young person should be invested in their companies success, but any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.
> That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business.
It's called being a sucker. If you're salaried, you should be leaving productivity on the table. You get paid the same no matter what. Finding the line is key.
Years ago (around when I started working remote) I started quitting at 1pm every day. And then I started never working Fridays and even some Thursdays (I plan my week so I can push some "leftovers" those days to look like I worked).
I use the spare time to sleep, play with my pets, found businesses, learn new skills, enjoy my marriage to the fullest.
Also I don't have to give my best to stay employed. I have some factors working in my favor. It costs money to replace me. And it costs time to get someone to my level of onboarded. I've never given my best but they keep paying me 100s of Gs to do it - so I think you're off-base on that point ;)
I think I understand where you're coming from, but it also sounds like you are making some fundamental decisions that I would not be comfortable with outside of the work/reward equation. I can't imagine a scenario where building a business during work hours doesn't violate an employment contract, or at least isn't very unethical. I'm not prepared to do that. I also want to be good (and get better) at my job, so "giving my best" is for me, not the company. Sure they benefit, but that's a side effect. It sounds like you've got a bit of a moat, which is great, but how deep is it? Calling everyone who isn't taking a questionable to dishonest path a "sucker" might make you feel superior, but your approach is not for me so I guess I'm a sucker. I'm OK with that.
I understand and am close to agreeing with you, but I feel an obligation to be difficult. It’s HN (and the internet) after all.
Plato and others famously pondered over “why be good?”. If nobody sees you, if you get away with everything, why behave at all? And conversely, if all your good actions go unnoticed or even cause you harm, why do them?
It is my experience this lifestyle changes and grinds your character and not in a good way.
I agree with this sentiment completely. Virtue is ultimately internal.
However, when did sacrificing all for 40h a week become the definition of honesty? I think the GP and other expressing the sentiment are pointing out that corporations would love for us to feel a moral imperative not to get distracted or do anything else during the day.
There are other honest frameworks for work. Why not measure output monthly? I would argue that’s it’s far more relevant, and one could choose when and how to work and still feel good at the end of the month with the body of work we deliver.
We do not owe our virtue to a corporation.
I took a few years off from work recently, and I realized that one of the things I missed most was having peers and stakeholders tell appreciate my work. I think that is what our virtue wants: to help those immediately around us and be appreciated and respected for it. You could theoretically take lots of time off and still do that.
My take is a little cynical, but I think, “I’ve never given my best” means that the poster takes some pride in what his potential best is, and it has the side effect of never challenging the idea of what your best is. Doing good work, and being good at the work are different.
In terms of philosophical perspective that seems to address intrinsic or extrinsic motivations for moral behavior, here being transformed into intrinsic or extrinsic motivations for excellence in professional work, not giving your best may be like simply avoiding difficult situations. That is, a king or general would have more opportunities and complex decisions where they even have an opportunity to be moral, compared to a peasant who has fewer opportunities to be immoral or even make decisions.
All that said, professional work isn’t actually equivalent to moral behavior, and the poster pretty clearly explained that the many other aspects to his life are a much greater priority.
I’m not seeing the “more” and “less” moral potential as clearly as you do. That’s probably because I’m somewhat of a peasant myself. The peasant in my eyes has the same conundrum but worse: why be moral if your life sucks? And quite possibly because of it? (You’d possibly be better off plundering)
Every situation calls upon your character, no matter what position.
It seems there is a lot of focus on external results. Like any of that changes the calculus. What I’m taking about is true no matter what the results, even if you are alone in the universe. You (and only you) know what agreements you entered in and what constitutes proper and honorable work. No amount of mental gymnastic will pacify your soul (permanently).
The king’s role is to make executive decisions. He can make them for good and bad reasons, and good or bad results for himself personally and for his subjects. Even if he decides he wants to make the best decision for the best benefit to his subjects, the decisions are still difficult.
A modern analog could be making medical decisions for someone you love. There are many ways that you can avoid having to make those decisions, deferring to the defaults that doctors will perform, or asking a spiritual advisor to make the decision for you. Having someone else make the decisions probably won’t be as good, but it will be easier.
That doesn’t have anything to do with how hard someone works at a professional job when they have other more important priorities. However, I think good moral behavior even with entirely intrinsic motivations changes with the magnitude of responsibilities.
I’m less interested in “objective good” and more in “I know I have agreed to something and I am not doing it for [reasons]”.
I wonder how the poster feels about telling his employer about his decision to stop working on some days? Maybe he would be fine with it?
Again I don’t care about his employer, it could be the biggest prick in existence and deserving of whatever ugly came to him. This is about your own soul, so to speak.
> It is my experience this lifestyle changes and grinds your character and not in a good way.
1. It's not like I do a bad job. In the hours I do allocate to work, I do an excellent job. I am able to do this because I have been in this role for years and that experience justifies the salary if I just show up. It helps to be excellent - especially when the job is so effortless.
2. It's not a lifestyle. What I'm describing isn't a large part of my life or mindset. So it cannot degrade my character. Because my character is being enhanced by several other things going on in my life that I prioritize over work.
It’s your life so take my bullshit morality with a pinch of salt, but you make it seem like at least three of your workdays are dedicated to this job. That seems significant enough.
I’m sure you do an excellent job and your boss is probably over the moon with you, but this is not about what “society” notices about you. This is about what you know. If I entered into contract and obliged myself to work a set number of hours (and not “productivity”) then I have honour-bound myself to that and all the mental gymnastics in the world cannot change that. I would know I could be more productive and that is actually contractually agreed upon, that’s the rub. If I thought otherwise I need to change the contract to “value of X” iso “X hours”. (And maybe you have such an agreement?)
That’s just for me though, I don’t judge you and I’m sorry if I seem that way. Just wanted to offer a counter to the “sucker” narrative.
I think you misundestand the purpose of your contract. Your contract is for you to produce value, not just to have your butt on a seat for 8 hours. The problem is that you cannot measure impact in a concrete enough way for a contract. So time is used as a proxy. If you cant deliver your impact in that time, you will get fired regardless. Just fullfilling the contract is NOT enough for the employer, so why take it literally yourself?
idk about all that morality stuff. At the end of the day, my job has become a minimal part of my life. When you can sleepwalk and do a Good Job [1] and get paid a quarter million, why blink?
[1] I just probably saved my company my salary and change in the last month, for instance.
I understand and I applaud you. It’s a good life you got going there (it seems). I’m just personally grabbed by the question “what is virtue” in a way that’s hard to shake. I can come off annoying and I try hard not to.
My parents bought me a little tongue-in-cheek placard when I was a kid that read, "genius is the ability to avoid doing hard work."
I know they bought it for me as a little joke, but I have strived to live up to that ideal every day of my life ever since. On days where I am stuck doing some hard work, I think to myself, I'll try to be more of a genius tomorrow.
There are extremely obvious productivity and impact differences between some employees, and this should ideally translate into pay differences. At some companies it does, sometimes it doesn't. But you seem to be suggesting performance never impacts pay.
Day-to-day you don't get paid more. An hour of extra effort does not convert to cash.
Promotions and stuff are more about getting assigned to good projects and executing. My core strategy is "do my job well - but check out at 1pm and work 3.5 days/week." That leads to promos and raises.
There is truth in the sense that it is pointless to overwork and ground yourself down, especially in a large corporate environment where recognition is very fickle. It's also totally fair and healthy to value work-life balance and draw a hard line.
That said, I disagree pretty strongly with this:
> Promotions and stuff are more about getting assigned to good projects and executing
As someone who is closely involved in the promo process at a high-paying company, this mentality hits a glass ceiling pretty quick. If anything I'd say your manager (and their cluefulness) matters more than your projects. To get to L6+ you've got to be identifying and solving problems beyond what is doled out by management. It also requires understanding the highest level business concerns, contributing to technical strategy, and a lot more collaboration outside your team. This can be done in a timeboxed way, but at a company with strong engineering talent it becomes harder and harder to half-ass your way through, because now you're surrounded by other top-tier folks who are not only smart but work hard as well.
That glass ceiling is still a lot of money and job security though.
I do think I'm at a local maximum in terms of effective hourly rate. To make more I'd have to work more. And I'd have a lower effective rate. And my time and attention is more valuable than more money at this point. I don't want work to become a more major thing I pay attention too.
That's not how it works at all. Social value is what leads to promotion in the workplace. Productive work is actually the lowest form of value in the workplace. It has always been this way. Worker bees are the lowest on the totem pole in the hive.
They are. As I've said elsewhere, I am plenty productive - putting me in an office wouldn't make me work more. It would tire and stress me out and make me be less effective.
The point isn't that I'm shirking. It's that I'm hitting and passing the bar of "good employee" in that amount of work time.
If you wanted to own my time, you could've paid me hourly. But you wanted my skills.
Did you sign a contract that said you would work “X” number of hours minimum? If you did, you’re in violation of said contract and being dishonest.
It’s not black and white, I get it, but the proper thing to do would be to negotiate a new contract that actually reflects your working relationship to your employer.
Number of hours is not in my current contract and never has been for a salaried, at-will software development role (in the US). I believe this is the norm for such roles, so many HNers have similar contracts.
So if anything, my behavior is in-line with my contract. They are continuing to employ me at-will and are not exercising their right (per the contract) to terminate the relationship at any time.
I’m in Australia, and the contracts here always specify a min number of hours (normally 38).
I can’t see a problem with how you’re working at an individual level, and as you say, you are productive and working in-line with your contract. However, the original poster was talking about young people not feeling motivated due to inequality.
The fact that you’ve managed to find a job that works well for you as an experienced professional does not change the fact that a young person should be working hard (and potentially long). Would you have gotten to where you are if you’d done the minimum your entire career?
> Would you have gotten to where you are if you’d done the minimum your entire career?
I think so? Or at least somewhere like it. Because I've always been optimizing for working less. I got plenty of D's on final exams because a B or A was assured, for instance. It just so happens a software job in the 2010s was a juicy path of least resistance. I'm glad to have found it (part of that was luck and meeting some people who suggested I do it).
I absolutely feel I should be entitled to live in a society where the vast majority of the wealth isn't held by a small group of people and actively used to subvert democratic processes.
I feel entitled to enfranchisement, where the successes of the country are also my success, because I worked hard and paid my taxes.
I'll fight for my entitlement, and I'll fight for yours too.
But on a less philosophical level, motivated workers are productive workers. Enfranchised workers are motivated workers. Crushing workers' living standards isn't about productivity, it's about greed.
Work the system, or revolution, but don’t sit next to me and blame your laziness on disenfranchisement.
I’m a bit older, and if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that no one is entitled to anything. Work in the system or work to change the system, but don’t sit and do nothing while kvetching about it.
Motivation is not a conscious process, and enfranchisement absolutely does contribute to performance.
My favorite example is how Napoleon could march his army around Italy at 3x the speed of Prussia, because his army was willing and motivated, whereas the Prussians were somewhere between prisoners and slaves looking to run away at any chance - there was nothing in it for them, why would they try? 'Honor', etc? lol.
There isn't some great unconquered west that we can strike out into, there is a highly structured society where systems have been deliberately set up to capture value from workers, while giving them as little as possible.
Doing nothing and refusing to fund your own oppression are different things, and I will ignore the ad hominem.
Everytime I see the word "entitlement" bandied about, it almost always smacks of entitlement. The user of the word ignores or is ignorant of the various layers of assumptions about the arbitrary nature of the system that is rigged against the average person by the ruling class.
You may be lucky enough to have found a way in the system, but it's not "entitled" to point out that the system is bullshit. You are entitled. As if "starting a business" is some fundamental law of nature like breathing or shelter. Most people don't have any other choice than to be an employee. It's like calling serfs entitled. Sheesh.
I file use of the word “entitlement” right alongside use of the word “respect.” The only people who ever use the words inflict them as asymmetrical projections of their own abusive characters.
“I will respect you when you respect me,” always means: “I will respect your right to exist when you respect my authority over you.”
“Your attitude is entitled,” always means, “standing up for yourself reduces the value of my entitlement.”
People with the self-reflection necessary to use these words appropriately will also recognize them as currently abusive and over-spoken barriers to communication. They’ll self-select out of speaking them in the first place.
After getting to a certain level, I only care enough to get my work done, well.
I voluntarily give up a portion of the added value I bring in order to reduce my risk of having to search for new clients every week. Ideally, this value isn't much higher than ~1/3 of whatever the revenue/employee the company currently has.
> any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.
The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.)
> The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.)
Sure, but the context here was a young person moaning about the “rich capitalist pigs” getting wealthy off the backs of the proletariat. If, as a young person, you get caught up in ideological thinking rather than just getting on and doing your “best”, you’re going to be replaced by someone who was actually willing to do the work.
> You want to believe that you have control where you do not, and that the world is fair where it is not.
This is projection. I am extremely aware of where I do and do not have control, that’s how you avoid excessive mental distress. As to fairness, of course the world is unfair, when did I ever suggest otherwise? You play the hand your dealt. I’m completely fine with people (outside of the workplace) working to improve things. Just don’t bring your politics into work.
> You might get fired because the boss is spending all the money travelling
You might get hired to do not so much for 5 years
The company might be rich because it is a monopoly
It my be poor because a bigger fish has decided to do dumping for a couple of years
You can always leave a company, and you should leave a company if it’s not helping future you. This is the bit you have control over.
> You might take time off, during work hours, to learn a technology, and that advances the companies interest. Or it does not, but advances yours
That’s called stealing. If you want to take time off for personal development ask, if you need it and they say no, leave. Don’t be dishonest; you only hurt yourself.
> Your carreer is a complex thing, there are no iron reasons why the 'best' will always work, changing jobs is usually an option.
Changing jobs, contracting, trying your hand at starting your own business. These are all things that are actually in your control. Changing the “system” to fit an idealistic view of how things “ought to be” is not.
I think there's a difference in interpretation here that plays an important role. To put it simply, when you make $25k/yr, you care a lot about your CEO making $200m/yr, but if you are making $250k/yr I don't think anyone gives a shit.
The parent specified a critical qualifier that I think supports this interpretation and many may be missing. Let's make sure we're speaking the same language before we start fighting.
>> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and __ONLY__ goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.
The use of "only" differentiates this from "a job." It implies that they feel not just undervalued, but excessively so. It is the feeling of doing all or most of the work in a group project and only to have someone else take all or the majority of the credit. I believe most of us have been in that situation at some point. I would be shocked to find that a single person that was in that situation wasn't resentful of that person. Either you're lying (to us or to yourself) or you're the chillest person on the fucking planet.
I don't think anyone cares how big CEO compensation is when they're living a comfortable life themselves. The relationship between utility and monetary value does not increase linearly for essentially all metrics of utility. Most follow an S-like curve. When you don't have a lot, every fucking dollar matters and you'll be resentful of anyone stealing any credit from you (scarcity mindset) because the loss is very meaningful. When you're comfortable, then money is substantially less important to you and you probably won't care as much if credit is taken from you because the loss isn't as meaningful. It is actually quite difficult to spend a million dollars a year continuously (or some other Brewster's Millions like situation). You can even see this change in places like HN. When everyone was being let go comments about Pichai's bonuses and Google's stock prices increased. But go back 5 years when there was a bigger boom and all the free stuff and incentives were being given, no one really cared.
In this respect I think people focus on the wrong parts of economic inequality. Rather than focusing on the ceiling, focus on the floor. The floor is not the dual of the ceiling because these are not zero sum games (they are for instantaneous or local times, but not in general).
It's not entitled to think your job is a 2 sided relationship with the employer. The employer isn't doing you a favor by granting you an opportunity, they are buying your time and attention.
I think you do understand this. If you own a business, do you charge the minimum possible price and deliver the maximum possible value, well above and beyond what is required to retain and attract customers, in order that your customers may maximally benefit and profit from your hard work? Or do you make every possible attempt to capture as much profit as possible for yourself?
Economic theory and empirical study would both seem to suggest this is entirely determined not by your personal work ethic and level of entitlement, but by the amount of competition you face. If you're in a competitive industry just about anyone can enter selling a commodity good, you skate by on the tiniest profit margin necessary to survive. If you have a huge moat, regulatory burdens on competition, significant IP protection, you squeeze everyone you can and get rich.
I think GP already addressed that point. If you perform, you help keep the company in business. If you don't, you increase the chances that the company will fail.
Aside from the relatively recent innovations of stock options and their descendants, employee outcomes are binary: salary or terminated. That's the bargain employees make as employees rather than equity holders. Compensation still follows your performance*, even if your sampling function's bit depth is one.
Instead of framing it subjectively (“People’s feelings are hurt by capitalism”), consider it objectively. What’s the effect on society when increasing your productivity doesn’t increase your wealth but instead is just a requisite for employment? Wealth accumulates with the wealthy, as the OP stated, and the rest of society grows poorer, sicker, less mobile, and less creative. Would you say that’s sustainable?
Exactly, it’s an alien attitude to me too. I’ve worked really hard and help make some people wealthy, but looking back over that time I certainly haven’t suffered at all. I traded labor for a regular paycheck. They took a financial risk and spent quite a few years of no income from it for a bigger payoff later.
I think there's a miscommunication happening. I'm happy to make people wealthy from my productivity and labor if I'm also gaining wealth. Their gains can even far outweigh mine. But if they are making excessive wealth off of my labor while I am struggling to make ends meet, I -- just like any other mammal (not even just humans) -- would be resentful. Very few people are "just happy to have a job" but we might also recognize that these attitudes are far more common in highly competitive areas and that there is a large tendency for these regions to not be the most prosperous. If everyone is struggling, it is easier to struggle.
> But if they are making excessive wealth off of my labor while I am struggling to make ends meet, I -- just like any other mammal (not even just humans) -- would be resentful.
I’d say that if you are struggling financially, don’t feel valued, and are resentful in your job then you should change to a more compatible arrangement for you. In my situation, I did not have those issues within my career. If I found a job incompatible with me, I changed jobs to one that was. Where I think the recent attitude shifts have been and what I find really strange is this entitlement attitude that the employee feels that the employer should be forced to be compatible with the employee.
This all ties together, I promise. It is long, but feels necessary in order to communicate. Bear with me. I apologize in advance.
In my other comment[0] I note how there's an S-like curve. The reason this is important because there's some dependencies in the "get a new job" argument that may not be experienced depending where you are on that curve. There is a certain threshold on the low end where this is quite difficult. Getting a new job has a time, risk, and energy component to it. Worse, there's often a compounding factor: employment history. That creates momentum and it is a powerful force. There's also environment (good luck getting a good job in a small town) but we'll leave that out (also note some areas have very low density: see American and Canada). You can probably see how the model complexifies quickly even just accounting for a few things. This is important to think about because the truth of the matter is that we're both products of ourselves as well as our environments. If you counterfactually took extremely successful people and placed them in different environments the likelihood that they achieve success (not even of the same level) changes dramatically.
But again, my comment tries to turn a focus to the floor rather than ceiling. You say force, as if this imposition is always bad, but there's many things we're forced to do. There's also positive (imposition required to grant you these rights: e.g. access to education, access to food, access to a job) and negative rights (imposition is required to take away the right: e.g. life, liberty, property, free speech). I bring this up because your language suggests a potential inconsistency that is not very apparent. All societies are composed of positive and negative rights, with America particularly focused on negative rights. But we need to recognize that the right to a job is a positive one in the first place. You don't naturally have a job and naturally you don't have the right to be paid for by someone that asks you to work, even contractually. Positive rights are required for essentially all things that are punishable. Ponzi schemes are illegal because you have a positive right to not be swindled. Theft (swindling) is where things get complicated (hang on, I promise we're going somewhere). From the perspective of a thief, they have a natural negative right of free will that must be imposed upon to criminalize their actions. But from the perspective of the victim they have a negative right to their own property who the thief imposed upon them to take away the god given right of property. The negative right of free agency vs the negative right of possession of property! Both are god given! A doozy, I know. We can even see our solution is a positive right, where the victim has a right to protection (police)!
So coming back to that forcing of compensation, and why I focus on the floor. We have the negative rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But from above, we can see that these can be viewed as both negative rights (typically) AND positive rights! This is because for an individual to maintain their negative right to these things the government (society) must provide a positive right of protection wherein a malicious actor's right to free agency must be imposed upon! And that's where we're at with this issue of compensation. Society has imposed upon us certain conditions wherein money is essentially necessary for the majority of us to live in the majority of social situations (rabbit hole) and so to balance the important god given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness the federal government imposes a minimum wage for fair compensation such that labor is appropriately compensated, people are not swindled, and liberty is maintained (not a binary option of freedom vs slavery, there is a spectrum).
You may say that the employer has the right to free agency, and I can respect that god given natural right, but I also believe that the employee has the right to liberty, a different god given natural right. But there's also a spectrum here. I believe the employee has a positive right to fair wages (imposition to obtain) necessary to achieve their god given rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At the same time, I do not think they have a positive right to excessive wealth, and that such a right would be too much of an imposition on the employer's god given right to free agency, which was even necessary to protect the the employee's right to liberty and PoH. This is is what my initial response to you and the other comment[0] are about. The miscommunication is happening because people are viewing different perspectives of these rights, which we can see as from the employee or employer. You're viewing the employer's natural right to free agency, requesting that it not be imposed upon, and seeing the employee's positive right to compensation. Totally understandable! We want to protect natural rights and free agency is an important one! But you need to _also_ view the perspective of a employee's natural rights to liberty (spectrum!) and PoH! Society has imposed upon us things that remove those rights, and you can argue that positive rights through the government returns these to us (but at a cost).
This is why we keep fighting about these things, because we've limited our perspectives and the truth of the matter is that this is a complicated fucking mess (understatement). We have to look at a lot of different perspectives (these are arguably the most important two), but we humans aren't great at that and our conversations encourage us to view only from one side. The point of social structures like governments are to balance these impositions in an agreeable way. From this framing we fail when we binarize those impositions, as reality is that the extremes don't exist in practice.
This is also why I place focus on the floor, as it is an important point for such a discussion of balance. It asks "what the _minimum_ positive rights that must be granted to an individual to restore an acceptable amount of the negative rights that have be removed from them." That's a complex question, and not universal either. It doesn't ask to maximize negative rights either (but we can frame it that way if we add constraints). Many people try to address the underlying issue here through a different perspective, such as taxation, which I think we'll agree is an imposition to one's right to property. But this is not the dual of the problem I presented, and don't make that mistake. The dual is "what are the minimum impositions on free agency that must be imposed to grant an individual an acceptable amount of negative rights that have been taken from them?" Note that there are two more dual problems as the discussion above should illustrate that even from the perspective of one side we can frame a negative right as a positive right, so these typically have 4 equivalent statements when discussing 2 agent systems.
I apologize for the wall of text. But unfortunately it felt necessary so that we can reframe and discuss on the same page. I'm pretty open to disagreement, so feel free. But I'm also not sure I made a clear mark in the sand as I haven't said where that balance should be (but note that your framing has), and honestly I don't know. But I do think we should figure that out as a collective, but we need to first accurately describe the problem.
I think I get what you are saying and appreciate the detail and time you took. Hope you will similarly excuse my lack of brevity.
Here on HN there is a huge level of entitlement with some and some of these folks with that attitude are certainly not at the earning floor. There is the large degree of difference between an Amazon SWE making $200k in a WFH arrangement complaining about exploitation because of aggressive release deadlines as compared to the Amazon driver pissing in a gatoraid bottle because he can’t afford the productivity stat hit to stop at a restroom while making $35k a year. One might have a point and one might want to probably look at things a bit more pragmatically. Perhaps both need to quit and move on, but one of those folks certainly has more justification to bitch about their lot in the life of Amazon. Of course this is just my opinion. So in terms of my framing…I was speaking to the HN audience, not the floor earners.
However, consider this about the floor. The government’s use of minimum wage laws should protect those workers. Employers are forced to comply with that minimum or face legal issues. You can certainly argue that minimum wage is not enough but isn’t that is a government problem and not an employer problem?Government sets the policy. If the floor is not protected the government has failed in its responsibility. An employer complying with minimum wage and successfully staffing that position at that wage is not really exploiting a person per se, if anything they are exploiting a law. The onus is on government, not the employer to make sure the employee is not exploited.
Now if the employer is unable to staff the position at that minimum wage rate, the onus is on the employer to set a rate that staffs the position. Still no real exploitation by the employer here since they are exceeding the legal requirements. The floor is protected but the job market then sets the rate higher for the position. If anything the market of workers now exploit the employer’s need for an employees.
However, if there was no minimum wage law and the employer takes advantage of a captive market (that small town) and sets the salary rate low—that would be exploitation of the person. Where that tends to exist (in US) is in industries that employ undocumented workers. I think you could make the argument that these workers are the true floor and are really the only folks in the US that are exploited in an employer/employee sense.
I definitely agree that there are a lot of entitled people here. I will not argue against that. But I also believe we have different estimates of the proportion and who are making these comments. Maybe you think I am one of them, maybe not? I can say I am a grad student and as far as wages go it is better than the memes but even if I do get a summer internship (this summer not as lucky) my income is substantially closer to that of the driver than the SWE. But we've also seen HN grow exponentially over the last few years. It has really caused the tone to change around here, for good and bad. One of my particular frustrations is that in this growth that noise expresses itself as shorter and more pointed comments. At least in my experience, it feels like it has significant decreased the number larger and detailed conversations, like these, that drew me in in the first place. So I do appreciate what you wrote, even though we disagree. But then again, disagreement is in part how we learn. Maybe you feel differently or the same. A larger audience also means far more priors and viewpoints, which often makes communication difficult in the first place and frankly gives bad actors a larger edge to increase noise. I think if my experience is representative it does also suggest we may be speaking to a wide audience at large, which would result in an increase of entitled SWEs but also in laymen and people simply interested in tech at large. Maybe someone has scraped the list of front page articles and through categorization there could be hints to if this feeling is true or not. Maybe the experience is just the environment changing? It is hard to know. So I can't reject your estimation outright either and with respect to the framing you have specified, I think your comment is fairly agreeable.
But the next two paragraphs I find a bit confusing. I had originally started with a discussion of possible miscommunication, which in the current response I believe you agree with. But your response to that comment was about how you do not believe an employee should be _forced_ to compatible. I took this to mean with respect to wages and with that respect a minimum wage is that forced mechanism. But it seems you agree. Maybe I'm too primed in the thinking that it makes interpretation difficult. At least in this regard to this, I do not think the federal standard meets the demands of the current environments. Nor do I think many states. I think this issue is rather complicated though because the minimum requirements are highly non-homogeneous across even a singular state. I'm not quite sure what the solution to this is, but maybe you have some ideas. There is some balance in there that prevents low wage workers from being priced out, required to bus/train in with long commutes, and maintain high wages for SWEs and C-suite. The oversimplification of the problem I think makes the solution difficult as first order approximations or narrow framings aren't "good enough."
But thinking carefully, I can see that that interpretation may be wrong, or wrong enough. Because I think we're close in position (ironically not an uncommon case in people that disagree). Maybe you meant that there should not be tight restrictions in maintaining that employee, such as we see in more European structures? I think we'd at least both agree that the government's role in this is mainly to ensure that there is healthy and strong competition within the market. I think it matters where on that scale of employer/employee market we are, where people think we are, and where they think we're headed. We should want that employee market, as I think everyone benefits the most here (even that top 0.01%, but not visible through their bank accounts). I do think 5+ years back SWEs was clearly an employee market, which likely even built a lot of entitlement. But I think we quickly shifted to an employer market, making people's stress go up, and even causing overestimation of that scale.
I do think these changes cause resentment regardless of the income level. I can understand someone being frustrated even making $200k/yr WFH when they see friends let go, the company say they have to tighten the reigns on perks/income/employees, all while seeing stock and C-suite compensation go up or even be the same. These are conflicting signals. Static friction is quite a force too. In this respect I don't agree that an employer should be forced to do anything either. In fact, we are on an incubator website and I would encourage those people to take their frustrations out by competition rather than regulation. After all, this was the game being played between the capitalists and the soviets: a market economy vs a planned economy. But I think too that people underestimate the heavy hand that was being used. Not so much the invisible hand of Smith, but rather invisible because it tilted scales and purposefully hid. Maybe the market is too captured. Maybe not. I will at least say it is easy to get caught up in one of the two dominant narratives that has permeated our culture with respect to wealth inequality. But I don't think either of those narratives are particularly helpful as they do not capture the complexity of the issues we are facing and themselves end up only being noise and even make conversations like these difficult as we are now primed so well it is easy to misinterpret and jump to each other's throat. Especially when we see these conflicting signals, they do give each narrative evidence to their claims. Possibly even saying the same thing in different ways and building frustration as we feel unheard. Most of language is implicit after all, and it is hard to know intent or reception through a screen. I do appreciate your comment though, as I think you have brought up things I wasn't thinking about and made me think deeper. I also think conversations like these do start to heal our community. I appreciate the lack of brevity. The world is complicated and language is imprecise, I'd rather slow down and truly communicate, even if it is harder.
Well we are at very different points in our careers—-I am approaching my fourth decade in tech and have been from entry level all the way up to senior leadership levels at orgs, been an owner/founder, and am now serving in more sales engineering position. I did an intentional step downward because I want to work to still fatten my bank account a bit, but no longer want to manage people before I take that long walk in the cursed earth to bring law to the lawless. Also prior to my entry into tech, I held some shit minimum wage jobs so I come at my opinion from a pretty holistic and pragmatic position. A floor to ceiling one if you will.
My opinion boils down to the following: Just because you feel you are exploited doesn’t mean you are actually exploited. Exploitation should be protected by the government. If the company is following the law, they are simply not exploiting their employees. However, if you can’t get over that feeling of exploitation you have a couple of options: You can quit and that ends the perception of continuing exploitation. Alternatively, you can convince enough fellow coworkers of the grievance and unionize to try and force change.
If you cannot or will not do either of those things, you are choosing to trade your labor for a paycheck.
> If the company is following the law, they are simply not exploiting their employees
I do take issue with this line. Law is slow moving and reactionary, not proactive. Courts frequently update the law and redefine that abuse by nature of someone being abused and having the capacity and willingness to sue. The law defines things through historical action. That is, someone has to be wronged first.
I do agree that perception isn't reality though. But that's a whole other issue. Were law proactive I'd be in more agreement with your sentiment. But laws follow the culture just like markets follow the economy. There's a delay
There is a delay, but can’t that delay also be explained by the difference in perception too? For instance…until the government perceives or recognizes the exploitation…who is to govern against it? Only the employee can by exercising their freedoms to change jobs can fully protect themselves from an exploitation that is not legally recognized.
I realize that this timing disconnect is a slippery slope especially in a historical context, but I think in modernity the recognition is much quicker and frankly at this point there is probably not a lot of truly exploitive things that need additional regulation going on by companies in the US who corporately are trying to follow the law.
I'm unconvinced. If the phenomena is real, it is clear that there is always a delay. There's no mechanism for immediate reaction. Government is purposefully slow as this is also a defense mechanism against abuse. This is the downside of that. Everything has loopholes though (hence why I keep ranting on HN about complexity and embracing the noise).
For employees protecting themselves, if things are happening at a larger scale, would that not also exhibit as distress at first? Assuming the abuse does exist, we also think about what the societal "immune response" would look like. A meme is just an analog to a virus in social thought, not necessarily bad, and it means we can create analogies to the immune system. What's hard about all of this is that you're right that sometimes the immune system attacks itself unnecessarily.
Arguably we agree that we see the immune response acting up. Now we have to ask if the immune response is appropriate or not. This is hard, because we ourselves may or may not have come into contact with the infection and the system's response is extremely noisy. But determining that determines how we resolve the problem. And no matter the conclusion, a problem exists. Sometimes the immune system attacks the right thing, we just can't see what it is attacking. Sometimes it attacks the wrong thing, so we need to look at why they look alike and how to differentiate. But in no case does it attack itself with no reason. (even a bad reason is a reason)
And yes, historically we see both this and an extremely slow response from the government (idk, virologists in our analogy? Doesn't matter). In the gilded age we saw tons of abuse run rampant before they were addressed. Things were considered normal and common that we'd see as horrific (e.g. per-adolescent children working in factories and losing fingers). There's a reason we got labor unions and many workers rights from this time. Even if you believe the defenses degraded and malformed over time, that's why they came to be. And if you do believe that, it is even worrying because it means we're not ready to handle the next infection. Even if this isn't an infection, we are humans and can think proactively and want to address things when they are small issues and build defenses before they become big issues. So even small infections are worth scrutiny. Just the same way maintenance of any system (biological, mechanical, software, social, etc) reduces overall costs and prevents larger damage from ever happening in the first place (but counterfactuals are fun...).
So from this standpoint, I'd just say "listen." I'm not sure what the real problem is (got some ideas), but it is clear there is a problem and I'm afraid the way you frame it is dismissive. Even entitlement itself is a problem and we'd still have to listen carefully to address that.
If you want to take that immune system analogy to the logical conclusion that I see, its this: An immune response can be good or in some cases very bad. Entitlement mentality creating an assumption of exploitation where one doesn’t actually exist feels to me is more akin to a allergic response or an autoimmune response which creates a harm more than a help. It’s an inappropriate response.
That is no longer the reality for young people. Rapidly rising wealth inequality means investors have more capital to purchase vital assets (particularly houses), putting financial security way out of reach. You simply can't invest in the things you absolutely need to live on anything but a temporary basis, and those who control those things can change the price at any time.
Working for a salary does not build wealth. Work is inherently valuable, we need stuff and skills, but we have to recognize clearly that the taxation and wealth systems in the modern world are absolutely bonkers, and that it is directly crushing workers' standards of living.
To build wealth you need capital—either to invest or to cover expenses while you pour swear equity into whatever you are building. A salary providing an excess over your expenses can certainly help provide a saved nest egg to make that step.
Otherwise you better have a solid idea and the ability to convince someone with capital to keep you fed and sheltered while you build it…and for that patience and investment they deserve a piece of the pie that you are baking.
This North American belief that financial stability has home ownership as a prerequisite is incorrect. Consider as a counter example Germany where much of the population rents their primary residence. Germans don’t feel marginalized for it. They save and invest. They raise children and participate in society and aren’t ashamed of being renters.
The tenancy laws are a major driver of this. My understanding is that the tenancy laws are much more favourable towards renters in Germany relative to the US or the broader Anglosphere, and this changes what people need to feel secure.
Not to mention, a comment like this in a discussion about a profession where single people regularly make multiples more than the average household.
I’m so tired of the crowd of software engineers (or any profession of similar income) that pretend to be middle class and share the struggle of the “common man”. Sure, the productivity goes to lining the pockets of the wealthy; and you are the wealthy.
The average is still 100k. Acting like all engineers are somehow the rare FAANG hires who are making 250k+ is absurd. Further, you ignore the context in which "the wealthy" is used, which is describing those who profit directly from extracting value from labor of those who work beneath them. You know, the people who can offer someone 100k in salary because they know they'll make tenfold in profit back anyways.
And in some ways, the average SE is still in the same realm as someone making a third of what they do. Many are still just one particularly bad string of unfortunate events away from financial ruin, and it’s not even necessarily their fault with how high CoL is in many places now.
In terms of planes of existence, most SEs live on a layer much closer to those inhabited by the average person than they are to the layer that big tech C-suites and the like exist on.
When I first joined this website I was working as a programmer and barely above the poverty line. It took years for that to multiply, and my income and costs have both fluctuated heavily. I currently don’t struggle to make ends meet but I’ll never forget all the times when I did.
>Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.
Many people (young and old) don't realise that the value of increased productivity goes to themselves first, in the form of extra time. Being unproductive actually means they are wasting their own time, not their employers time.
Being productive is the difference between finishing at 5 with an hour of twitter and reddit scattered throughout the day versus finishing at 4 and spending an hour learning a new skill, for example.
That being said, if they are working for a place where they care so little about the work itself that they only see it as lining the pockets of the wealthy, they should of course change jobs. Being productive helps with that too.
> they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes
This is the only thing I agree with. Thinking about work tends to get in the way of actually working and prevents ever knowing the benefits.
People who think of work as a simple means to an end and live disjointed lives are basically unemployable. All of the value in everything, even beyond money, is the experience... which results in more money and experience. It compounds just the same.
This is a ridiculous comment devoid of any value whatsoever.
Productivity has nothing to do with working for a company. The linked article is valuable for me for my personal projects that will never make a dime or be seen by anyone else except for myself.
This statement:
> any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy
...is both irrelevant to the article, and a fluffy "generic tangent" decried in the HN guidelines that is solely meant to start a political discussion.
