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...and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that (sic) you become one of the top ten people in within your context

Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?

Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.

What happened is that it turned out that there are two billion people who can put in an honest day's labour and it no longer matters where they live.

But shouldn't we account for that and adjust accordingly so we aren't ruining society in a race to the bottom? It's all choices, we don't HAVE to allow it to happen.

Should we? I don't see why one guy making $70k and two guys making nothing is superior to three guys making $20k.

Economy is not a zero-sum game. There's no reason you can't have everyone making $70K.

Sure. And that's a no-brainer. We'd all agree on that. The interesting part is when there are trade-offs. So that's my position on the trade-off.

This is getting into a discussion of Universal Basic Income, which I am a big fan of.

But I'd posit that salaries are not a zero-sum game, in the microcosm or the macrocosm.

Within a company each department head likely gets a certain amount of raises to distribute within their department, maybe enough to give most people X%, but also enough to give 2 or three 1.5X%. The company itself has a limited amount it can spend on labor costs.

Within a country there is the monetary supply. There is approximately $1.5 trillion physical currency in circulation. That equates to about $5k per person. Yes there is money that is not backed by physical currency, but the more of that you create (or the more physical currency you create) the higher inflation goes. If we want UBI then we need to back it with something. The Saudis backed it with their annual oil profits, Alaskans the same, and the Norwegians straight out created an investment fund from oil surplus profits. Getting to a workable UBI is not going to be a stopgap fix, and will likely take around 50 years to implement correctly.

It's doable from a technical perspective, in a number of ways. I worry about the political perspective. Our parties are divisive and one party can tear down any of the works of a past administration. So what is to prevent the UBI investment fund being repurposed, similar to Social Security's outcome.

if everyone is making $70k, everything simply becomes more expensive (so it doesn't matter if they make $70k or $700k)

But if the model is built to support this then it isn't an issue. If you see my earlier post about hypothetical improvements we can make to our global economy. If everyone is making more and industry is growing within the country then more classical economics applies (e.g. the pie is growing). In this scenario it's not an issue. It's only when there isn't positive growth that inflation is a huge issue.

> so we aren't ruining society in a race to the bottom

Nope.

What is going on here is the person from India gets to now enjoy a much higher quality of life (because 50% of a U.S. salary gets you a lot in India) while the person from California sees their effective take home pay decrease (because their costs continue to grow but not their salary)

Definitely not a race to the bottom but it sucks to be the person from California.

On the other hand, the person in India will relocate thousands of miles for practically any job, while the person in California will pretend that life is hard because of someone else's doing instead of moving to a place they can afford better.

So in short what you're saying is yay globalism? Bring everyone down to a lowest mean existance possible, we shouldn't protect our interests?

> So in short what you're saying is yay globalism

globalization is happening whether we want it to or not.

> we shouldn't protect our interests

I made no comments either way.

... but, sure, let's think about this.

If you were to pass rules and regulations to stop globalization from happening, what would the top 3 be?

Well I won't claim to be the thought leader on this, however I'm happy to look at some hypothetical ideas. To be clear I'm not looking to reverse globalization completely or stop it.

Rule 1: International trade deals forbid offshoring of manufacturing. Example, cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price. This is universal and enforceable by dissolution of companies that don't comply.

Rule 2: Stringent regulations to prevent Tax and location based gaming of Rule 1. Ford doesn't get to pay taxes in Tahiti, incorporate a mailbox in Mexico so they can make their cars there, but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.

Rule 3: Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies, importantly those companies will be competing in similar regions. It's not like AWS and Amazon. It's like two Amazons. I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers. Maybe less for the MBA's.

EDIT: For rule 3 I forgot to add that the break up forces innovation as similar companies are competing now in the same market. It's an engine of growth built into the system.

> I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers.

This is the broken window fallacy.

> cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price

Sure, but then the buyers of said cars from Ford has to pay the premium.

The heavy growth of Amazon, Walmart has proven that the U.S. customer does not care about well paid workers, their benefits or their health - why would they agree to pay more for cars?

> but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.

Fair enough. This point is basically Ford gaming the system by taking more out (take advantage of US infrastructure) than what they put in (taxes, local worker compensation)

> Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies

You and I can do this already.

You and I can get together today and force Google or Amazon to be broken up.

However, a broken up Google or Amazon is more powerful than Google or Amazon itself.

There's a practical limit to how expensive a share can get before majority can't afford it anymore. "NYSE: BRK.A" is not the norm, it's an exception. If BRK split itself up, they would, overnight, become way more valuable.

Google has already broken itself up because of this.

The only reason Bezos has not broken Amazon up is because its tremendously profitable AWS and Amazon's North American retail operations allows it to fund and offset the not so profitable (yet) international retail businesses.

Once those are profitable, Bezos will happily break them up before you or I get to it.

Regulations never help.

It cannot. It can, at best, move issues around.

The day we regulated minimum wage, we removed the only tool an unemployed, untrained but happy-to-be-employed-if-possible person had to entice an employer.

When given a choice between an unemployed, but trained person vs. an unemployed, untrained person both at minimum wage, I know who to choose every time. The unemployed, untrained person cannot even get on unemployment!

When people say they want to break up the big tech companies they are not talking about making them do a stock split. They are talking about dividing them into separate entities. This comment seems to conflate these two actions. Amazon or BRK could do a stock split if they thought it would raise their market cap, and it wouldn’t be a big political controversy. It would increase the number of shares but not change the corporate structure or affect any monopoly concerns.

> Regulations never help.

BIG RED FLASHING CITATIONS NEEDED SIGN HERE

Who is the "our" here? My identified in-group is rootless cosmopolitans, so I am happy to see globalists of any nationality take jobs away from protectionist xenophobes.

Do you recognize that your in-group is not widely represented? It's not xenophobia, you're trying to dog whistle something about my character that is untrue. Can you acknowledge that you're being protectionist of your privileged class?

You're suggesting that we should erect artificial barriers to prevent certain groups from accessing lucrative jobs to protect certain privileged classes from competition. It's morally equivalent to (although more socially acceptable than), e.g., banning the hiring of non-white people or women so that white males can make more money. If you can discriminate on the basis of nationality then why not race and gender and religion also?

> > ...and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that (sic) you become one of the top ten people in within your context

> Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?

That doesn't sound very interesting.

`an honest day’s labor` never really existed, you were never going to get paid the amount of profit a practically unskilled repetitive job delivers to the person of company you work for.

At the same time, there are plenty of jobs (in the USA) you could do 16 hrs a day and still not make enough money to provide for your basic needs.

I don't think people have to be top ten or something like that to be useful, but being a meat-based robot is hardly compelling for either side anymore. You need to have at least some skill and you need to make sure you keep developing as the world around you also develops. With human expansion the rate of change itself has changed, and not even a luddite would be unaffected by that.

You can put in a normal amount of effort if you want, but then you don't have the right to demand a more than a normal amount of compensation (~$50k/household in the US). I don't think it's unreasonable to demand extra effort for a FAANG salary.

An honest day's labor only existed in the middle of the 20th century. Before the New Deal you had to work hard on a farm or a factory to make ends meet. After the Great Stagnation in the 1970s, the economy cannot sustain widespread growth in prosperity for all classes of American society. The Post-World War II economic expansion was a 1 time miracle enabled by the picking of several low hanging fruits.

"These figurative "low-hanging fruit" from the title include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land; the application and spread of technological breakthroughs, particularly during the period 1880–1940, including transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, and sanitation; and the education of large numbers of smart people who previously received none."[0]

The party is over. Americans are at the top but they aren't getting any higher, and everyone else in the world is catching up. That means Americans have to compete with the rest of global middle class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation

that may be true, but i think the parent posters point still stands regardless:

> We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.

Yes, Cowen's follow up to "The Great Stagnation" is "Average is Over" that follows the same line of thought.

I'd argue you don't need to truly be top ten, you need to be sufficiently good that finding someone better isn't worth the marginal cost (hiring is really expensive!)

Another way of thinking of this: can you be considered top 10 within a pool of 100 applicants?

Also, who is "top ten" is extremely subjective, based on the company, who is evaluating, and niche. I would guess that within a 100 developer cohort there's not a lot of overlap between the top ten embedded c++ developers and the top ten react developers, and even the top ten that can do both c++ AND react.

You don't, it's the same psycho advice US tech people have been giving each other nervous breakdowns about for two decades now. Thousands of people have solid jobs that pay well where they can learn at a normal pace, do interesting work and put it down at 5/6pm.

If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.

Your recommendation to become the top 10 in something is either impossible, or only achievable by narrowing definitions down to inanity. I can easily be the top 10 in <industry> <feature> written in <specific language version> <specific framework version> run on <specific infrastructure>, but who cares? Recommending that people become the top 10 in their industry is an impossible recommendation; as there might be hundreds of people in my company who perform a similar role, let alone within my industry.

It’s a bit like recommending someone become one of the top 10 basketball players to make money; someone will do it, but the chances are so slim that it’s a bad recommendation.

Also, how do you define “top 10”?

'Top 10' is a convenient label. It's more about the answer to the question 'who are the most respected experts in X within the Y', and maybe even make X be instead 'X using Z'. Several careers having been made by being known as a leader using a particular technology, or a co-creator of the technology from the beginning, though it always comes with other things to back it up as well:

* Tim Berners-Lee - the web, W3C

* Peter Saint-Andre - XMPP, messaging RFCs

* DHH - Ruby on Rails

* Martin Fowler - Design Patterns

..and many more.

Yes, getting to the Tim Berners-Lee level of industry recognition is unreasonable to expect for most. But I think it is reasonable to think that this is doable, with the depth of the expertise niche needed to be outstanding being inversely proportional to the talent of the expert. One person might have an expertise niche of messaging, while another has RabbitMQ as their main niche. Both are viable to base a living off of.

At a certain point you’re talking about programmer celebrities and trying to draw general career advice from them, which is silly. We can’t all be celebrities, and any career advice based on that is kind of pointless.

Now talking about having a niche is a fair argument, but that’s literally a completely new argument. “Be in the top 10” and “specialize” are not the same pieces of advice, at all.

> Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate,

This where immigration restrictions make a difference. A Brazilian developer has trouble working in SV, but no trouble working remote.

You vastly underestimate the tax and legal implications of an American company hiring and paying a Brazilian in Brazil.

You vastly underestimate the difficulty of immigrating to the United States (or even just _visiting_ it legally).

That really seems like something that can be figured out, especially if the result is 3x less in wages. Unlike immigrating to the US, which is sometimes plain impossible.

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

Interesting, what are they?

They don’t hire that Brasilian to be their employee. The Brasilian is a one-man company. They contract the company to render whatever service. The Brasilian company does whatever Brasiliantaxes and procedures are necessary.

I know a first-world company hiring third-world people. All the taxes are handled by the contractor himself. There are no legal issues to speak of, you only need an invoice from the contractor, or from an intermediator company, such as fiverr.

>>> And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.

Basically, you're saying only the top 1% will be employable.

This is going to be a new experience for a lot of devs in the bay area that have been spoiled with job offers. Those days are over. I'd say it's time to hunker down, save as much as possible because future employment will be scare. And, there's already a vast oversupply of talent. I'd hate to think what it would look like in 5 years time.

Relocation is a big barrier to those already married, and even more if they have kids. That's a large portion of senior guys.

Most of the senior people will have already relocated during their junior years though.

Anyone can already take your job, but currently they require local level wages to live with your local cost of living.

Outsourced people can take your job, for much less money.

In a world where everyone has about the same skills, more or less after some onboarding period, network is everything.