I work at least 50 hours a week. A teenager at MacDonalds now earns a good fraction of my income if they work the same hours. Despite my 4 year degree, near decade of experience and the responsibility's that I hold.
But, if you must, take heart in the fact that the teenager will never make more than $minimum in that job, where presumably your income will continue to rise commensurate with experience.
I do think it's OP fault for not taking action though, not the govt. It's like my dad who has complained he is underpaid for the past 10 years yet still doesn't switch job..
I'm not sure I would have done that now.
Don't get me wrong I love to code and would probably find my self doing that again but every crunch time of an unrealistic deadline that had nothing to do with the effort required to complete the project has me fantasizing about spending six months in the summer picking fruit.
People who work full-time deserve to not live in poverty.
You make it sound like having a society where hard working people can feed their family is unfair to you.
It's not. You're wrong.
Everyone who works hard has a right to live comfortably and not in fear of some giant cost coming forcing them to squirrel away piles of money.
Stem should be about building tomorrow and making a better society, the personal fortune building has polluted the field and is distracting us from more important problems. Having a $500,000 stock portfolio shouldn't be mandatory for a decent life.
There's a reason for our technological stagnations mapping to the rise in inequality.
If someone without a degree is making $20/hr and you're making barely more than that, why the hell did you waste 4 years to get a degree? I know someone who is in this exact situation.
The economics don't make sense.
I'd honestly still be a programmer if the pay was poor. In fact, I do it for free quite a bit and I enjoy it more.
People are motivated by more than mindless greed and universities shouldn't be transactional skills training camps. It should be about building an enlightened and educated society.
College tuition in New Zealand are not structured like the United States. It's much more reasonable
The fact that your debt is interest free is nice, but it's still debt.
Whether you would like to admit it or not, higher education is at least partially an economic decision.
But I refuse to be confined by the structures intentionally legislated by decades of Austrian economic policy to try to convince me that there is no alternative.
The debt could be erased, for example, if someone chooses a position of high societal ROI, such as say, an urban planner. Reward people if a need of society is satisfied.
Things can trivially be reshaped to encourage what we want instead of us always feeling pressured to do what we don't. Conforming our laws and incentives to a particular ideology wasn't necessary, it was a choice we can change.
The fact that you mentioned Austrian economics is actually quite relevant here. All economic theories are ideologically driven because there is no meaning of life. There is no objective metric to optimize for. Austrian economics' goal is the minimum possible economy. Inflation driven ideologies have the maximum possible economy as their goal. We get to choose what we want for ourselves and we definitively should use that power.
You are playing exactly in the game that the extremely wealthy want you to play. Being disdainful or even hateful of the teenager that flips burgers all day long, while they delegate their entire work, do nothing but lines of cocaine and jet-ski while you kill yourself working 50 hours a week (most likely for them, too), earn hundreds to thousands of times your salary, yet the shit job that is making burgers is the problem?
The extremely wealthy probably don't care that much - they aren't reducing their income to afford an increased minimum wage, they're reducing yours.
(Assuming, of course, that you are not part of the extremely wealthy).
When a business's costs increase, they pass it on to the consumers (you). When they can't pass it on any further they reduce their costs, with the easiest cost to reduce being employee costs. Since they can't reduce the cost of minimum wage, they'll reduce the costs of the other employees.
You can't rein in the excesses of the extremely rich by mandating minimum wage. You might be able to do so by regulation (tax rules, maybe? Clamping down on tax havens would do more to even things out than any other step you may wish to take).
Despite my comment I like life here. I wasn't really trying to give more than a data point from another part of the world.
My personal view is that a strong enough economy should be able to provide most people with a better than minimum wage job. But if you bump the minimum wage too high you simply raise the price of everything.
When you compare SF tech salaries to NZ tech salaries it's just ridiculous though. I would say SF TC is 4x or more than NZ salaries (Stock grants are not common) for similar positions.
I am actually surprised SF did not lower salaries exactly for this because there's nowhere else to go if you want to at least keep your SF salary.
From https://www.payscale.com/research/NZ/Job=Software_Engineer/S...
That's the funny part about the minimum wage. The psychological effect causes people to seek better jobs, but that is about it.
Alternatively, if you think flipping burgers for a "good fraction" of your current income is a good deal that you are envious of, then maybe you should go flip burgers. If not, what are you complaining about?
In the case of McDonald's the kiosks only generated more throughput, actually adding work, so all the staff assigned to taking orders was put into other work.
Meanwhile self-checkout, while actually reducing throughput somewhat, made it possible for the workers to take on other tasks in the store - of which there are many.
Amazing.