Is my advice too mercenary?
jacobian.org
jacobian.org
The very essence of this website is not amenable to workers coming together to discuss things like the propriety of employment-tied healthcare, or what we should expect from our managers, but mostly for aspiring and current startup leaders to, probably, discuss everything but that stuff. It is a forum attached to a startup incubator after all, and I can't imagine much VC money goes to those companies that are worried about their own labor related issues/externalities, at least those that they don't need to legally be worried about.
I don't think anything is lost here, there is no problem per se, discussions are of course not being diminished by this ultimately demographic point; but just... if you come to these threads and feel a little disappointed that there is not a more universal solidarity towards the basic decency of the worker, just remember it is because not everyone here is a worker!
I wonder to what extent this is true. I've been on HN several years without even knowing that it has anything to do with start up. A lot of contributors don't even work in tech.
A good point. And I think the reason this article is so fraught is that the writer is basically arguing even that if you met all of their demands and tried to make the world a better place, they will fundamentally remain hostile to you.
I've been reading HN for years and I would assume 90% of the comment section or more is people who only want to be employees.
I hate to say it, but HN isn't a great place for genuine startup, management, or operation advice. At all. Even product discussions are very customer-centric rather than company-centric, and companies will get roasted here for making good business decisions that don't directly benefit the users.
For example, years ago the common refrain on HN was "charge more" and encouraged businesses to raise prices, fire problematic customers that weren't contributing value, and otherwise focus on the company's bottom line. Now whenever a company pulls a "charge more" and raises prices, reduces the free plan, or discontinues services for non-paying customers it's nothing but rage and pitchforks in the comment section.
HN comments can still be useful, but it's definitely not a friendly place for actual founders and business owners making tough decisions.
Thus it makes rational sense for capital-disinterested labor to maximize what they get out of a job, much as corporations are criticized/observed to try and extract as much labor as possible out of employees. Hence it's become en vogue for labor in software to loudly criticize companies for any small slight to extract as much value as possible much just as corporations make decisions to maximize shareholder value. Just as companies can treat their workers badly, labor can malign capital unfairly.
It's the end result of corporations with disinterested labor. The two sides try to fight a war while extracting as much value as possible. Labor isn't interested in joining capital the way it once did when software was newer and sees them as permanent adversaries. It's also probably why we're seeing increased attempts at software unionization despite software being so well compensated; labor doesn't see itself as being similar to capital.
1. By broader macroeconomic trends, I was suggesting that HN commenters might be criticizing "charge more" simply because consumers in general, who may not be able to afford as much as they used to, would be adversely affected. Of course, tech companies who monetize by pursuing any number of alternate policies (adding ads, selling data, F2P loot boxes) would be just as roundly criticized. Lose-lose.
2. I'm not sure how feasible it is to expect the amount of labor crossing into capital to be on par with how it was in the dot-com bubble, or even just a decade before. Sure, a large amount of dumb money continues to slosh around in tech so long as interest rates and other economic conditions remain favorable for investing, but that doesn't mean the number of entrepreneurs will increase proportionally
3. Tech industry trends have shifted over time, and corporations don't simply make decisions at the expense of labor only for the sake of shareholders, but also for the founders themselves (who are also technically shareholders, sure). Witness this rather curious pre-pandemic thread from December 2019 where the HN commentariat almost overwhelmingly denounces joining startups, in favor of joining FAANG or starting one's own startup instead. (Though the latter would seem to contradict the 'less of software labor wants to join capital' idea.) As the second comment puts it pithily, "the math changed."
That is correct, I've also noticed over the years. I'm sure the public of HN broadened over the years.
I use HN as a more selective/to the point source of tech news without all the karma-whoring that's present on reddit.
I'm delighted to read the comments of really smart people around here, mostly more than the article itself.
This seems rather pro-worker to me.
Though he is of course very pro-business as well. Maybe the difference is that some people think you can be both?
Not originally. It was about operating a SaaS and charging your customers more. Straight from the man himself back in 2006: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...
The pivot toward salary negotiation stuff came later, presumably because there's a much bigger audience for employee-directed writing on Hacker News than there is for startup founder advice.
Say what you want about lawyers, they will say "not my area of expertise immma shut my mouth" at the drop of a hat.
I'm pretty sure they are really a minority.
I do think the “the company doesn’t care about you” type advice does require some nuance.
Different companies make different choices and just because someone moves from mega corporation to mega corp doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust anyone…
There’s space in between giving your entire self to a company and imagining everyone is out to get you.
I’ve worked with folks who are absolutely obsessed with protecting themselves from being stomped on by a company, and nobody wanted to work with people who ooze cynicism like that / talk about taking a better job all the time . They of course interpret the results (not being put on some team or another) that as being punished because they “know” / are willing to express what they thin the truth is…
Probably something like: The company doesn't care about you regardless of the individuals at the company who might care about you. (Unless one of those individuals is the CEO, I guess. More nuance!)
The cynical approach does seem to lead people to … the places that make them cynical.
1st experience: Told my boss I am leaving. My boss’s boss calls me in a room , tells me he has some great projects for me and that we will work together on them. I agree. Turns out it was his last day!
2nd experience: Similar situation, told my boss I am going to a startup. Boss’s boss calls me and gives me a lecture about how it is a bad idea to go to a startup. I leave. A few weeks later I find out he also left for a startup.
Some time later I met the boss from the 1st experience and he told me “sorry, but it was not personal. I was just doing my job”
If you are in a megacorp your job should be to extract as much money as possible while doing as little work as possible. Because your boss's job is exactly the opposite.
Your coworkers are not out to get you but your managers are. Don’t fucking ever trust them.
That said i never say things like that on comms. And usually preclude them with things like "this conversation never happened" etc.
But i feel like part of my job is to give them career and life advancement advice and if that means leaving my team...so be it. That said ive made it pretty clear my style (on a few fronts, this being one of them) may not be all that common. Things like encouraging people to use their PTO, even for mental health days to prevent burnout etc. I do find that style engenders more trust and generally a less combative interaction. I have even had some tell me when they are looking for jobs. I usually tell them not to make a habit of telling someone at work that type of thing.
It's sad that a manager saying to the employee "you have to look out for #1" has to be off the record.
Hopefully there aren't too many orgs left out there where a manager would be having to do this off-the-record; certainly it feels like the orthodoxy for some time has been that workers do their best work when they're well-rested and have had breaks, and at a systems level, people being away is important for identifying bus number issues.
All that aside, my company's accountants get antsy about what overhanging PTO does to the balance sheet, so there's a very explicit top-down mandate around fiscal year end time to get people using up their vacations.
My impression is that in the modern world, most workers consider their personal network to be of much greater value than any ways that their current employer could reward them for "loyalty". Having been a manager and had people quit on me, my response has always been pretty candid and along the lines of, "yeah, obviously this is tough for me as I've really valued your contributions over the time we've worked together. However, you've been clear about your expectations as far as comp/projects/tech/mentorship/career/whatever, and although we've tried to do what we can, I can understand that the role is no longer a great fit for you, so the decision to move on makes perfect sense. Best wishes with your next gig."
Point being not all management is like this and I hope you've found somewhere that respects you.
I think collectively too many of us are too willing to ignore red flags and it let's people/companies like this succeed.
I got an offer for a lot more (+60%). My company immediately matched. Don't trust management.
I know because I am one of them. In my experience, the people who don’t understand are the ones who don’t create anything and are generally mediocre. Most employees do not design new ideas, programs or strategies. They act bewildered when their colleagues do create novel innovations and then seem to want to “own / run them.” Your reaction signals you are probably not in the creative sector, which is typical.
The people in the very upper 1% of the talent pool are most disadvantaged by corporate systems. If you create some new program that gets a lot of attention, management often can’t wait to divide the credit between you and others who didn’t do anything and then say it was “team work.” The one who produces all the inventions and ideas knows otherwise.
I have been burned so many times I am now deeply cynical and refuse to create anything new for anyone other than myself.
Example: I designed a program which got $20 million in funding (this is not a made up number). The project was then given to a lifelong veteran of the company. He got to “do the strategy.” That meant he took my exact slides and reformatted them. Then he was put to “manage” me because I was only allowed to be “an execution person” due to my seniority.
He got all the credit, I got all the work. That is one example of the benefits of being creative in these environments. Learned my lesson several times: Don’t create IP for corporations. Ever.
Best case scenario is they take it away from you Later rather than Sooner.
I really think this is a large part of the trend towards overt ruthlessness in the USA, no one has their back so they have no ones back, as people age and experience medical bankruptcy (or narrowly avoid it at great cost) they are realizing this ruthlessness in our system.
I think "annoying" is a better description. It's not shocking at all, it was a fairly predictable outcome given the situation. It is really annoying that we haven't managed to walk it back to something more reasonable since then.
historically Protestant work ethic + unrestrained pursuit of profit + weak labor protections and domination of corporate interests in the halls of legislation = predictable outcome.
Recall the intense pressures on FDR from both sides. Eventually the unions won some important concessions, but the corporations still had sufficient representation to ensure the system calcified into one that continues to funnel capital upward.
But man, when you do have a medical emergency, it's great not having to think about whether you're going to have to remortgage your house, sell your kidneys, put your kids up for adoption or reconsider all of your life plans.
Personally I think Canada is a little bit over-dogmatic about rejecting a parallel private system entirely: I know there are problems with running two systems (mainly around inequity and brain-drain incentives for healthcare workers to move out of the public system), but IMO, nothing that can't be fixed by sufficiently high prices/taxes.
Keep in mind that medical bankruptcy isn't unknown in Canada either - not being able to work is a bigger cause of medical bankruptcy than medical bills themselves.
Tying your personal health and that of your loved ones to your employer gives your boss unduly leverage over yourself, particularly when there are life and death decisions to be made.
And the most obnoxious part of it all is that you knew this.
It's not clear to me that most employees do know that, actually. I see a ridiculous number of people that oppose nationalized healthcare "because they'd have to pay taxes", not realizing that there is already a deduction from their total compensation to pay for their healthcare (i.e. a tax).
He sold it each time to a group in NY (MetLife each time if memory serves). He told me that his insight was that construction companies would have variable revenue and compensation requirements across TX building contracts (private vs government mostly) and to avoid discontent they would dump the difference into life insurance and other alternative compensation because as long as the take home paycheck was the same no one really complained about being put on lower compensation jobs.
Not sure if that was a similar origin for health insurance but I've always assumed it was.
Also, note that you can buy your own health insurance in the US. You are not required to use health insurance provided by an employer.
As someone who purchases insurance from the NY marketplace, that hasn't been my experience.
Initially, I had a plan from one of those (Anthem/BCBS), which provided pretty good coverage because they increased my premiums by more than 50%.
Now I have a local (New York State) provider (Fidelis Care) which costs less and has a (fairly) low deductible through the state's marketplace.
That said, many providers are actively hostile to marketplace plans. Back when I still had an employer-based plan, my company changed insurance providers. I called up my GP to make sure they accepted insurance from the new company, but before I could even describe the scenario, the office person at my doctor's office raised her voice and said, "We don't take any Obamacare plans!"
Which was quite interesting, since back then many of the major national insurance companies were offering such plans, including the companies (both old and new) my employer was contracting with.
All in all, I've been fairly satisfied with Fidelis Care, although I wish I could do database queries of their "Explanation of Benefits" records rather than having to wade through PDFs for each visit to a provider.
All that said, I don't know your circumstance (none of my business) so you may have needs that I don't. I wonder what those might be that a "national" insurer might offer than an in-state provider doesn't, especially since the ACA specified requirements for all health insurance plans, not just those on marketplaces.
Although I'm not sure how no insurance could be better than some, unless you're against medical care in general. But my use case isn't yours and I'm sure you make decisions that are best for you.
Edit: Added a few thoughts to address parent's issues, clarified my point about coverage to be more clear that I'm emphatically not calling anyone a liar.
So have I, and I stopped purchasing insurance because I cannot find the coverage I want. I need a specific variant of a certain operation which is only performed by a few surgeons in the country, and the one surgeon in New York who offers it only takes Aetna for that operation. Aetna reentered marketplaces starting 2022, but I'm moving and the operation has a year-plus waitlist, so I'm SOL. It has made a ton of sense for me to have no insurance because I'm fairly young and in fantastic health, making it cheaper to just pay out-of-pocket for primary care once or twice a year. Please don't call people liars.
That seems reasonable. As I said, "my use case isn't yours and I'm sure you make decisions that are best for you."
>Please don't call people liars.
My intent wasn't to call you (or anyone else) a liar. My apologies if you felt I was attacking you. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've edited my comment to explicitly reflect that.
I'm glad.
My initial statement was categorical and not specific only to me. You were right to call me out on that. Thanks.
It's sad that we have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to get the medical care we need. Which is often the case even when it isn't an edge case like yours (or mine with my PT -- my situation was, of course, much less consequential since there are many PT providers out there).
And yes, it's a red state.
Pre-ACA, I was once a much healthier early-twenty something applying for private coverage. I have a genetic condition that has never manifested in a health consequence that has required treatment, and technically it was illegal even at the time to reject someone based on their genetic information. Despite that, I was denied coverage by every private insurer in the market because I had a preexisting condition. The only reason the private market functions at all for anyone with so much as a history of a sprained ankle is because of the ACA.
Insurance companies would routinely (and retroactively!) deny coverage and payment based on preexisting conditions. They would accept premium payments for years, then when you came down with breast cancer would dig up an old photo of you with a cigarette in your mouth and refuse to pay for your treatment because you claimed to be a non-smoker when you applied for coverage. This was considered normal.
If that was the only or even dominant reason, then the removal of those controls in 1945 would have seen that tie rapidly unravel, instead, health care has become more, not less, tied to employment since the end of that policy, reinforced by deliberate policy choices like tax policy and explicit mandates.
The historical reason a thing first became common and the reason the thing is still common are often not all the same.
One might rationally assume that, but human brains are weird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
Compare Cignas global plan with and without US coverage. Somehow they can easily cover essentially all of the rest of the world for far less than the US.
Per capita numbers can be misleading on healthcare as health is labor intensive, so countries with higher wages will have higher per capita costs with otherwise similar systems.
OTOH, the US spends the second highest share of GDP on healthcare, globally, behind Tuvalu, and about a time and half the GDP share of the second highest large, developed state (Germany). [0]
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
Canada? Switzerland? Germany? Yes they pay a lot worse for some jobs (software developer, and, more relevantly, doctor) but ordinary fully-loaded employee costs aren't that different from the US. Admittedly, the countries more comparable to the US tend to be more in the 60-70%-of-US-spending range, than on the lower end.
That does mean that even allowing a generous premium over the most-comparable peers, we should be able to cut total healthcare spending 20% while covering everyone and removing a major drag from our economy, and a major factor reducing overall US QoL. As it is, we're struggling (and largely failing) to even keep cost increases to merely the inflation rate.
I could get approximately equivalent insurance for about 40% cheaper if I went on the individual market. But, my employer pays 75% of my employer sponsored plan.
Now, there's a whole administrative system that drives up prices and puts a ceiling on availability and quality of care; with most Americans being (relatively) ill-traveled, ill-read, and fed a news product that beneath the packaging is some combination of entertainment and fear-mongering, it's easy for one to believe there's just something in the air that makes an NHS-style or even a German-style system impossible here.
Then, if you were around for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections, you'd have seen presidential candidates arguing about whether someone should have to pay for someone else's well-being. And it's not a debate along the lines of class—it's tied up with identity politics and a broader debate around the welfare state. Advantaged and disadvantaged communities alike are full of people who see how things are, and, knowing that it takes a lottery win to move up the economic ladder and a bad week to fall down, are skeptical that next time it'll be different.
Doesn't help that most Americans will never have the opportunity to get even an hour of education in macroeconomics, unless it's buried in disconnected lessons about individual economic downturns, nor that education on probability doesn't happen until second-year calculus (which is similarly rare in high schools), nor that most Americans don't learn about the mechanics of Medicare until their fifties or sixties
I think enforcing the law has been a government function from the times the first laws were laid down. Fire services were a private function, and this actually works fine in sparsely populated areas where fires are not likely to spread in temperate climates. The only reason fire services are public is because of the inherent risk to everyone that a fire poses in a dense, substantially flammable, city.
If a fire affects you and only you, then why not cover it under normal, optional, property insurance like every other disaster?
This is generally the model of government intervention I support - intervene when the actions of one group of people directly affect others. This covers regulation around rights of way, fire services, environmental protection, waste management, water supply, pandemic/disease control, police, and the military. It however does not cover supplying the personal necessities of life like food, shelter, clothing, medical care, entertainment, companionship, sex, fulfillment, etc.
These are fundamentally individual needs, and I therefore hold that meeting them should be an individual responsibility. Any cooperation to meet these needs should be strictly voluntary and consensual, not compulsory. I think this is where, to greatly simplify, "the left" and "the right" fundamentally disagree. For instance, in spite of the now well-studied and crushing effects of loneliness, it would be absolutely tyrannical for the government to mandate friendship. Similarly it is tyrannical for the government to mandate participation in public health care/insurance. Let people figure out how to meet their needs for themselves, and let them figure out how to cooperate voluntarily. Charity is exactly the virtue of helping those in need, but mandatory charity is indistinguishable from slavery.
Edit: also a much more significant factor only in densely populated areas
The idea that people who set bones and cure cancer should be included in this category is a more modern take, one that requires much more careful discussion of what should and should not be a "public service".
> people feeling entitled to a service they previously resented as soon as it's useful to them
I think we should expect people to prefer suffering and death with dignity, rather than greedily and desperately peering into the pockets of strangers, but that's just my take.
There were only private police until 1838 in Boston:
https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
And only private firefighters until 1853 in Cincinnati:
http://www.fireserviceinfo.com/history.html
Ben Franklin offered America's first fire insurance. Privatized insurance and firefighters in Phili in those days:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/08/am...
Edit:
> The duties of the Watch, as appears by the order, were to be performed in turn by the inhabitants; they were not "citizen soldiers," but citizen Watchmen, and having an interest in their work, no doubt did it well.
- A chronological history of the Boston watch and police by Savage, Edward H.[2]
Savage seems to indicate that the night watch was performed in turn by the inhabitants of the community, by order of the government, and there is no mention they were paid. This doesn't seem like a private service to me.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Watch
2. https://archive.org/details/achronologicalh01savagoog/page/n...
Companies had to include extra benefits beyond wages to compete on hiring. One of those extras was health care.
That's the original "design."
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/469739-the-employer-h...
...and obedient to corporations.
Such mechanism give corporations the power to decide who gets terminated and loses health insurance. It's very effective at discouraging people from doing anything that goes again the grain, like getting into an union.
Maybe don't generalize from a few personal anecdotes to the functioning of the entire 4 million employee federal government?
But to directly answer your question: if you want your dollars spent effectively, you should care about fraud rates in services you pay for (public or private).
https://www.cfo.com/risk-compliance/2021/03/ubiome-founders-...
The US government spends about as much per capita on healthcare as say France, but doesn't cover everybody and without part B is pretty incomplete.
American government is a uniquely incompetent form of government. Despite being one of the largest & most expensive governments it gets little to nothing done. Anything that is 'done' is often done far over the original projected budget.
And yes, SS is absolutely welfare and it is extremely effective. It reduces the poverty rate of the elderly by nearly 30%. It also reduces, directly and indirectly, child and young adult poverty by meaningful amounts as well, 1.5% and 3% respectively.
Regarding your first point, I disagree. I think the intention is clearly to provide a direct benefit, but that isn’t always the effect. One example which seems to be entering the zeitgeist now is student aid. The presence of additional student aid has a high correlation with the rise in tuition over time, but I think we’d all struggle to say it was commensurate with to the cost.
Addressing your second point re: social security and perhaps generalizing my first point slightly, I think the statistics you cite are reductions in poverty vs simply abolishing the benefit. I don’t think they measure the counterfactual scenario of there never having been social security to begin with, and those current seniors having had their take home pay increase by some portion of the 15% of their gross pay which otherwise went to SS. Additionally, it doesn’t take into account the future debt servicing cost of current SS recipients on future generations.
Also, education is rather interesting special case in that it's a highly price-insensitive good in the modern economy.
SS also has always been a Pay Go system and doesn't have any debt servicing, actually the reverse is true, SS is owed money from the US government. That is, SS lent the US government money. That government debt would exist with or without SS as federal government spending is not constrained in any way by tax receipts, so SS's impact here is moot.
To your point about student aid, that is far more complicated. While it is likely true that the existence of the aid has resulted in some upward pressure on tuition, it is not the only factor. Increased demand both in quantity and quality of services, reduction in direct public aid to institutions, and increasing administrative costs among other things all play a part. Without student aid, it is likely true that prices would be lower, but probably not nearly as much as one would assume, and we would have a far less educated populace. The latter being a substantial negative in a world where the best paying work is and continues to be more knowledge based.
Objectively untrue by any serious metric you'd like to go for, and in particular government-run health insurance programs (Medicare chief among them, but also the VA) are notably well-run and have low incidence of fraud while maintaining remarkably low overhead.
It's a very similar system, the real difference is that it's illegal to not have insurance, so you are "forced" to always be insured, and unemployment support is more generous.
This sounds more like a hypothecated tax.
See this plan for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Americans_Act
It would transition away from employer-provided health insurance, to employer-subsidized insurance, having instead individuals choose their health care plan from state-approved private insurers. It sought to make the cost of health insurance more transparent to consumers, with the expectation being that this would increase market pressures to drive health insurance costs down.
Health insurance is one of the least concerning things for the government to get involved in with healthcare, really. Worst thing that happens is they don't insure you or the procedure, and you have to pay for it yourself somehow.
I would question the viability of government for handling many things, but collecting taxes and distributing funds is one of the things they usually are pretty good at. Some of the leanest health insurers in the US in terms of overhead are public enterprises, e.g. the VA and various state assistance programs.
What employers do have is the ability to sell you health insurance with pre tax dollars, which is also available to self employed individuals. But the people who are screwed are those who are employed by employers that do not offer health insurance. They have to buy insurance with post tax dollars.
There is similar bullshit with retirement funding, where employer sponsored retirement account limits are drastically more than individual ones (401k vs IRA), and especially if you are a married couple with 1 spouse with 401k access and one spouse without.
You can also buy a platinum level BCBS health plan yourself, without an employer, and get the same low deductible and low oop max.
https://www.healthcare.gov/choose-a-plan/plans-categories/
It is evident then that health insurance is NOT tied to employment. Buying it with pre tax dollars is tied to the type of employer you have.
NJ has a very nice pdf where you can basically see how much your insurance will cost based on your age and level do coverage you want:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Out of curiosity, I went and looked up the plans in NJ for a 32 year old person(56k salary). This is someone in a lower risk pool. The bronze plans are in the upper ~280$/month and include a $6000 deductible. There are three plans out of 36 that are ~380 a month that have a $2500 deductible. Everything else is more. This is NJ, one of the better states and definitely not a shitty state. These plans are garbage. Every time someone on HN extols the virtues of Healthcare.gov, I recheck my options and they always come back much worse than what I get working for a private employer (typical S&P 500 corp). I wish people would look up their possible plans on Healthcare.gov before tossing it out as something other than a scam.
When I got quotes for insuring my employees in NJ, they all matched up with the premiums on healthcare.gov, also seen here:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
ACA compliant health insurance pricing is pretty commodified since all the rating factors are codified in law (age, location, smoking status, and that is it I think).
Edit:
>These plans are garbage
The plans simply reflect the cost of healthcare. The companies that sell the healthcare have profit margins in the sub 5% range. Mechanisms to bring the cost down would be to have taxpayer funded medicine in the public domain so the medicine is sold without patent, increasing number of doctors by greatly expanding residency positions and reducing training requirements so that you can start practicing before age 28, reducing the need for "certificates of need" so more hospitals can open and compete, etc.
Anyone who works in healthcare and looks at billing can tell you this is not actually the case, prices are not based on any reasonable metric and are rarely actually paid by insurers anyway.
>The companies that sell the healthcare have profit margins in the sub 5% range.
Point of contention here, these companies aren't selling healthcare, they're reselling it. Which is a service which should ideally not have any profit margins, and would be best suited for a large, collective entity that everyone paid into according to their financial ability, as opposed to smaller social-class exclusive pools.
Seeing as how that is not politically possibly, middlemen with sub 5% profit margins was the compromise. Obviously not the best situation, but still better than before.
Is there any evidence that these companies are concluding to increase revenue by making the system less efficient?
Low profit margins plus multitude of competitors generally means there is not much juice left to squeeze.
>Seeing as how that is not politically possibly
Basically every other liberal democracy has taxpayer funded healthcare, and even many US states have successful programs. It's extraordinarily silly to call that impossible, or to call what we have now a "compromise" rather than a clear case of corporate welfare being put before the welfare of the citizens.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-art...
Seeing as how Republicans have zero interest in taxpayer funded healthcare, and they have held enough Senate seats to stymie any Democrat led effort for the past 20 years and probably next 20, I do not see why it is “silly” to call it politically impossible.
Yes but they get to deduct this, unlike an individual for whom no such deduction exists. Repeat after me: "a tax deduction is a subsidy." That is, welfare. An extremely biased, discriminatory welfare at that.
Furthermore you cannot use the exchanges if your employer offers plans IIRC. So your employer can control which plans you have access to.
The subsidies should just be given directly to the person who needs healthcare. There is no need to involve a third party. It just complicates the situation for no gain.
I do not think this is true. Everyone can sign up on healthcare.gov. Employers will want you to opt into the subsidized plans they offer, especially if you are a lower compensated employee, in order to pass their non discrimination testing requirements, but they have to make the portion they are paying for high enough to make it enticing enough, they cannot force you.
> The subsidies should just be given directly to the person who needs healthcare. There is no need to involve a third party. It just complicates the situation for no gain.
Absolutely. The whole employer tax benefit situation should be abolished, and all individuals dumped on healthcare.gov. Same with retirement benefits. Employers should not receive any beneficial tax treatment for providing benefits, and it would make compensation much more transparent and easier for employees to compare from one employer to another.
Then one of two things happened, the owner died with no capable heirs and the company was sold. Or after NAFTA the company wasn't competitive with low priced foreign labor and folded. If the company was sold a couple of MBA's came in to run the store and ruthlessly ran it exporting all the profits. Eventually the jobs would go overseas or to another part of America with lower wages like the South.
Either way the people eventually lost their jobs and entire towns would collapse. I have seen it here in Michigan happen over the past forty years again and again.
Today its a footnote in a merger, place is closing down.
Want to import cheaper drugs from Canada, that's illegal! Yeah sure they might have been produced in the US in the first place but it might be dangerous!
Want to get a degree in a country where the price of education is lower? We won't honor it.
Want to hire the services of a Kenyan clinic doctor who has experience in everything from treating runny noses to gunshot wounds? Illegal he's unqualified according the the national doctors union (AMA).
Yeah you can get cheap crap from places that hire children to work in their factories, but the stuff that is really expensive we are 1700's Japan all of the sudden.
Nationalism, something to be avoided, occurs when the underclass is not represented in a political system.
I have no idea where the "companies used to take care of their employees" commenters are coming from. There's plenty of counterexamples.
"The toxicity of concentrated TEL was recognized early on, as lead had been recognized since the 19th century as a dangerous substance that could cause lead poisoning. In 1924, a public controversy arose over the "loony gas", after five[94] workers died, and many others were severely injured, in Standard Oil refineries in New Jersey.[95] There had also been a private controversy for two years prior to this controversy; several public health experts, including Alice Hamilton and Yandell Henderson, engaged Midgley and Kettering with letters warning of the dangers to public health.[17] After the death of the workers, dozens of newspapers reported on the issue.[96] The New York Times editorialized in 1924 that the deaths should not interfere with the production of more powerful fuel.[17]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Initial_controv...)
See also radium, polyvinyl chloride, assorted mine disasters, etc.
The companies I know who are still benevolent make money hand over fist. Management, employee, shareholders are all happy as peas in a pod.
It’s when the money stops flowing that hard decisions are made.
Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive.
If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.
The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident.
As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.
This is not entirely untrue, but it's not particularly supported by the rest of your post.
Even if it's hard to completely define what "paid and treated fairly" mean, it's crystal clear that a very large percentage of employers today don't meet even the lowest possible bar—that being a living wage and not actively abusing the employees.
That's not an even trade.
Often, it is layers of government, way over you, who have no clue of the local needs, and it gets much worse.
Not only does it not know the local needs, it has no expertise in the subject area itself, and so an unelected unnamed bureaucracy rules the roost, and over time, gathers so much power, that regardless of which government comes to power, the true power rests with these bureacrats.
Democracy, as has been said, is the worst political system, except for all the others, but let's not lie to ourselves and ignore that in some contexts it is, in fact, strictly worse. The classic example, of course, is an army led by direct democracy. When a thing must get done, and damn the consequences, then there really is no substitute for autocracy. It's just unfortunate that the people who eventually end up as autocrats are rarely there to benefit the community. Building systems of accountability and responsibility through culture and non-systemic factors may better this (see, for example, the 85 terms of Roman dictators who did not try to seize any more power than they had been given by the Senate and in fact often returned their powers before their term was over), but culture-crafting to accomplish that is unfortunately beyond us at the moment.
Who the hell wanted either trump or biden in the last election?
There is simply no choice because the political elites offered us this and we need to vote our guy not to let the other guy win.
The game is rigged and your vote is not worth much.
When you're buying a product instead you're effecting real change and telling society you want more of that. If only we could control law making in the same way we would have a decentralised society which better approximates what people want.
Let's just dismiss the millions of votes cast in 2020, then?
Ranked choice would show a lot more nuance in people's beliefs that US politics would have to address. I haven't looked into it in some time, though. It seemed to work where implemented in Europe.
I estimated the PP was getting at a more conspiratorial notion of "other preferences" in the sense of both parties being equally bought out, etc.
Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.
The whole point is that larger entities are shielded from some of these repercussions because of their size and power, and in some cases are almost completely untouchable by this system.
The legal system is there to catch extreme cases the social system can't feasible handle well enough. We don't just let murderers go and ostracize them, we incarcerate them and forcibly remove their rights. Some things are too important to allow social norms to be the ultimate arbiter of.
You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum.
That's just how this human thing works.
Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry.
You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it.
That's just childish thinking, sorry.
Often that means putting in some safe lower bounds. Laws, as you noted. You put safeguards at the bottom preventing the worst behavior. That's the whole reason there are laws preventing child labor, because people decided that some things should not be tolerated.
Nothing prevents a company from still being a good employer and helping where they can, but that should not be required for our society to function. The goals of a company diverge from what is best for the people (both short term and long term) too often for that to be a good idea.
Your axiom is democracy and what sounds like dozens of other conditions.
My axiom is highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power. That's it.
My position is trivially superior, for many reasons, if only because your exact position is just one of many possibilities that highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power can choose to implement.
That is just your unsupported claim. I don't agree.
Perhaps having a feasible path to the desired outcome actually matters, rather than just assuming those are unimportant details... otherwise we'd already have off-world colonies and faster than light travel.
1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner.
2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.
One big observations:
This is what US government spending has done in the last 2 centuries: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...
That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.
take out lobbying and id agree
Not particularly common. Social mobility is low even in developed countries, and getting lower.
Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity?
If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?
I think it is quite possible that you were more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord (partially because incentives were more directly, and forcibly, aligned) than find a corporation willing to put profits as anything other than first.
Business greed has capped out since approximately the first 48 hours after the establishment of the first business back in Mesopotamia or wherever.
Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.
It is like the madness of people who think inflation is because businessesmen suddenly got extra greedy. If they could raise prices to that level they'd have done it in 22AD, not 2022AD. Prices are always as high as businesses can charge, if they go up something that isn't greed has to have changed. We can argue about what.
I also think greed, or perhaps better described as flaunted greedy behavior, has increased over the past several decades. While capitalism has of course always been greed driven, different periods of time and different cultures have set guardrails up as to what level of greedy behavior is and isn't acceptable.
In the US the culture during the prime time of the industrial revolution, capitalism had technology progress propping its greedy appetite up. Those gains have been largely consumed and greed shifted over more and more towards optimizing on labor. We live in an environment now where we no longer assume your employer has your interests at heart and everyone listens to HR and leadership propoganda selling pictures of families and care for their employees while everyone rolls their eyes. We assume our employer will try the pay the least for us and get us to do the most for the least. We assume that they'll replace us the second they have a quantifiable cheaper alternative. Many decades ago these practices weren't as accepted, they certainly occurred, but they came with bad image and cultural rejection that harmed businesses. That isn't the case anymore. Businesses can basically do whatever isn't explicitly restricted by law or more profitable than penalties law sets and its just the accepted state of affairs. After all, it's legal, what are you going to do? Meanwhile through aggressive lobbying businesses are basically writing the law as they see fit.
I don’t agree with this premise, at least not in the context of the United States. You can even see in recent history where the greed amplified in the 80’s with the phrase “greed is good” becoming popular or that myth about how businesses have a legal requirement to pursue profit over everything got into the American psyche after that case against Henry Ford.
Fuck, charging interest on loans used to be considered a sin in western culture. We explicitly have seen greed change in magnitude.
If I need to give 40% of my profits (and your salary) to the government and there is an avenue for getting some of that money back when you're in trouble, then go and ask for the government for help.
The mistake is in allowing the government to gather more resources and in turn making people dependant on them.
Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).
Indirect democracy is a fancy name for "electing" with your 1/100M vote an elite which gets to decide how to spend half of your salary.
All I needed to read to dismiss this
The statistics show significantly lower marriage rates among black families (moreso correlated to poor families, in which black folks over-represent). The thing not shown in the statistics is the number of families where parents are together, but unmarried (and oftentimes reporting different addresses) because they get SIGNIFICANTLY more benefits that way. So...the family unit is there, but just not formalized. And people are just responding to the incentives in front of them.
Yes, companies spend money on social events to make the employees feel good about the company.
But they won't spend any significant amount of money to keep valued employees, which of course makes said employees look elsewhere.
As an employee you are nearly always better off switching jobs every 18 months, as staying in the same job loses you money.
I wish companies would be more focused on this.
Isn't it rather the other way round: you should be very careful to invest too much money into employees who are willing to quit?
But what if we don't train them and they stay?
Given that this has already occurred, why would any employee agree to a system where now they have a financial obligation to their employer if they leave?
I get your sentiment but the employers already cut all the benefits out of the system when it comes to skill development. They’ll need to start adding back in investments to employee’s skills without any sort of guaranteed payback for a while before the average employee would extend them any trust
You sure it wasn't selective enforcement of the War on Drugs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_war_on_drugs) and the criminal justice system in general (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/08/racial-dispariti...), and redlining (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)?
I'm grateful to entrepreneurs and companies for innovating so much, while the USA is turning into the largest employer in the world (bigger than China).
Yes, that's what I said. ;p
From gp: > There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
Oh really? I'm somewhat familiar with German companies and the extreme regulation and worker-focused rules they endure as a good comparison to American businesses which I am intimately familiar with. My takeaway is that while it's much much harder to operate and innovate in Germany, the citizens are better off in immeasurable ways. Spectra, pendula, all that...
Is this a joke? Nepotism is a huge problem in every step of the executive pipeline. The children of executives are often groomed to become executives themselves from basically the time they can talk.
Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.
There will be good companies and bad companies. There will be good politicians and bad politicians. One is easier to steer than the other.
Duty, loyalty and trust are good to have. What do you do if the large local company that has outsized influence on the community is lacking those? What do you do if the local elected officials are lacking those? Neither is easy to deal with, but I think one is a far more manageable problem.
The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust.
OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
You never have to lay anyone off, pay raises come regularly, no huge pressure to perform, management gets big bonuses and shareholders watch the stock rise.
See the big US automakers in their hay day.
But when competition heats up, other companies take you business and profit growth has to be fought for, anything and everything is on the table.
The companies back then were never really loyal, they just never had the need to be ruthless, but they certainly would have been.
Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output.
> When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse.
I'm not sure that's ever been the norm anywhere in the world throughout history. I definitely don't think it was the reality in the Norman Rockwell like idea of what you think it was like.
We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Things were always bad, just in different ways. Those same companies that gave to the community and were the main employers in an area also set the working wage in the area with little market competition, and faced less scrutiny from the local law enforcement (who wants to be the prosecutor or police officer responsible for hurting everyone employed there in the community).
If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.[1]
> OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
I wasn't really making a countering the OP, as much as expanding on a point they noted. Those situations that were good or appeared so are unstable and there's little the local community can do to change it. But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.
1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
No, you don't get to change what I said to fit your worldview. The 70's and the 80's had tons of multinational companies that didn't treat their employees like cattle, and that treated each of their branches as its community.
> We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses (...) If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.
It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...
Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.
> But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.
There are a lot more "ifs" here:
- If the local representatives are not in the pocket of the corporations. - If the local representatives are not part of the elite with different interests from the common folk. - If the local representatives are not just using their current term as a launching pad for a bigger point. - If the community is cohesive enough to not have individuals just thinking for themselves, or (worse) divided into polarized feuds and make them waste all their political energy into hurting each other.
And were those companies acting as stewards of small communities, taking some of the role of local governments? If not I'm not sure how it applies.
> It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...
> Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.
It does, and I agree. The difference is that with elected officials you have a mechanism to do something about it. How do you change the agenda of a company that controls the economy of the town you live in? You're not on the board, you can't feasibly get enough of the stock (if it's even public) to sway their strategy.
I will lay out my argument very clearly, again, so there's no confusion, and I will make some parts explicit that I left out that people seem to be making assumptions on.
- For any group in power, you cannot control their future actions. Any person that acts in a way you agree with today, may not act that way tomorrow. That extends to all politicians and all management of companies.
- Because of this neither a company, or interest group, or individual, whether elected or not, can be relied on to work in your interest in perpetuity. I do not view a governing body or a company in any way as superior or inferior to each other because both can go bad.
- Having some way to incentivize or change those in power is important because of the above.
- Citizens of a democracy have some power to do this. People that rely on a non-governmental body for this are thus relinquishing some of their control to affect whether those in power if they are working against their interest.
- Therefore in the absence of evidence that a specific governing body is better or worse than some company in meeting the needs of a community if given the resources of that community (e.g. lessened tax burden and favorable treatment by the community and local government), choosing the apparatus that you have more control over is the better choice.
I am not making any claim that an elected government at any specific instance of time is inherently more likely than a company to act beneficially for a community, but I wholeheartedly believe that since the community can change that local government, they are a better choice to have the power.
I think I got it, but it still seems that you were talking past the point from OP.
You are trying to make some statement about how individuals have more power with functional democratic institutions vs the despotic-like nature of the "town company".
What OP seems to be getting at is the point how communities before had higher levels of inner trust, and how this relates with TFA.
In a time where things were not globalized and people actually knew and interact with their neighbors (instead of getting stuck on Hacker News talking with people on the different side of the planet), the idea of the "town company" as the institution that coordinated the society vs "the government" didn't matter so much, as long as there was some sense of community and high-trust.
It was this local community with insular trust that we lost with globalization, and this why it makes no sense to talk about "company loyalty" anymore.
You cannot expect the current conditions to persist indefinitely. Ceding what power you have to control parts of that, or even just to control tools which themselves affect that (such as politicians), just because right now things are good and you trust your community and the companies in it is a losing strategy.
Even back in the past when people had much more trust that a company would not treat them badly, any actions to make that the status quo (by weakening methods which those people had active input and ways to influence) was a bad choice, but possibly a less understood one.
Additionally, my response to rmason was meant less as a rebuttal, and more as an aside to do with the entire concept that relying on a company was ever a good idea, regardless of whether it often turned out okay for people during a certain time period. Not all replies are counters directly to what was stated, even if we are sometimes primed to view them that way. I didn't view myself as rebutting someone when I wrote that, but instead exploring the idea of why relying on a company was always a bad idea.
I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.
You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion. If the company is large enough to be a majority employer in the area and much of the social works of the area are provided by the company, then regardless of whether you work for them you are beholden to them in some way. The local government will not want to upset the local economy by be antagonistic with them, they'll set the local pay scale based on whatever they pay as everything will be in relation to it, and there will be immense social pressure to not cause problems that would be bad for the whole community.
Do the people involved have more options for getting out from under the control of a company like that in an area? Yes, but far less than I think your statement would lead people to believe. To actually get out of control you'd have to completely leave the area. That's far easier now than in the distant past, but it's not easy.
> I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners.
I'm not saying every one of these companies was horrible, nor that every ruler was horrible. I'm saying that ceding your power to control who governs you to them leaves you at a disadvantage when inevitably a worse ruler or bad management comes into place, because nobody lives forever, and nothing is static.
Put another way, what if you contracted with someone to provide all your meals and you paid them $1000/mo. Maybe you're extremely happy with the quantity and quality of the food provided initially, but eventually, years down the line, the quality has changed to sub-par and the quantity is lower than your got previously as well. You'd want to renegotiate that contract, right? Well what if it was a lifetime contract? That would be a problem, and you'd probably see that as a major red flag initially and be wary of entering a lifetime contract where the future was uncertain.
That's what allowing a company to control the local economy and be the provider of social works is like. By allowing the company to take over the job of the local government, the people have ceded their power to enact change through their elected representatives, and they are stuck with whatever they get down the line. Elected representatives aren't perfect, but at least there's the option to change them or pressure them to change based on the community needs. What pressure can the community honestly exert on the company when if decides that it's so much cheaper to move the factory two states over that they have to do so?
I'm not sure what that adds to your post besides to antagonize. I'd respectfully suggest rethinking that as an opener on future comments.
I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced. Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.
Then you interpreted my statement as more harsh than I intended, and I'll own up to my side of that, so I apologize. I don't necessarily take it as an insult for someone to say I misunderstood their point (if my statement to them comes across as a non-sequitur, I expect something like that), not that I've misunderstood some of the conversation. Sometimes comments are building on the context of a few prior comments in the chain, and seeing just the last two or three gives a distorted view of the context in which the current argument is being made. I'm not saying that happened here, but it is a reason I generally don't consider that statement to be very aggressive, but honestly it depends on the state of mind of the person hearing it.
> I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced.
My point was about control. No simile is going to be perfect. There will obviously be differences to being a fief than being a citizen in a democracy where the local company controls a lot of the resources and services.
That said, perhaps fiefdom wasn't what I was going for. Perhaps a Duchy is more appropriate? I admit to not being confident enough in the structures to know whether colloquially one implies more specific behavior than the other which might confuse the point (whether or not that implication is accurate).
> Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.
Yes. And I think adding power to this structure to reinforce those problems rather than a structure you have more control over which might alleviate them is the rational choice. I'm honestly surprised and confused that so many people are against that in this discussion.
That said, before that happened the place was kind of a "company town" and the big manufacturers with all the money essentially ran the place. Only good news if you were in their favor. Lots of stories about being harassed by police if you were on their bad side. They were the kind of people that would have still been using child labor if it weren't outlawed.
Allow me to remind you the manner in which child labor was outlawed:
Industrialization progressed to a point where it was no longer economically viable except in a few tiny niches. It was then outlawed, to much back patting.
Sure, some people would probably use it if it was viable, but don't pretend like it was some great accomplishment to outlaw it. It was basically a case of writing law after the market had made a decision.
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Also, the products they made were kind of crappy and expensive. It's very easy for a company like the one the GP described to stagnate and rot. Especially when unions get thrown into the mix.
Not that this didn't happen. But I should add that it wasn't any benevolent plan on the part of the owners that made things that way. It was a combination of the presence of New Deal, Unions, the threat of so-called-communism, etc and the lack of hyperdeveloped capital and commodity markets, that pushed things in that direction from the 1930s to the 1970s. And then what you describe pushed things the other way.
The point is that same owner probably supported all the innovations, because they were about the owner having more flexibility. And by the token, you can't get back to this point, probably not ever but certainly not without outside intervention.
I do agree it isn't good to rely on the beneficence of overlords in general though, since they aren't obligated to continue to be beneficent.
The problem with these advice columns is that they aren't saying "don't give your all to a company".
They end up saying "your company is the enemy". The original article that this blog refers to was titled "Exit interviews are a trap", which many pointed out was a gross exaggeration. It assumes that every company performing an exit interview is doing something malicious, which is a ridiculous claim.
Yes, it's possible that some companies somewhere are using exit interviews as some sort of trap to get dirt or leverage over employees, and it's also true that you shouldn't rush in and use it as an opportunity to complain about everyone you hated at the company. However, it's unreasonable to assume that it's a trap and that the company is interested in nothing more than revenge.
That's the problem with these advice blogs. They cater to an idea that managers and HR are "the other", and once someone crosses the line to management or HR, they become evil and incapable of doing anything other than abusing you for no good reason.
We should warn young people about abusive employers, but it's not helpful to teach them that employers are universally malicious.
Loyalty ties are still important, but not something you will find in most employer-employee relationships. Better to have a more "extractive" vision of companies and build loyalty ties somewhere else.
The company, not really. Beyond startup size, every employee is just a number on some spreadsheet.
I read the article and I disagree. It does not say it either explicitly or implicitly. The article only urges the reader to think of the benefits to themselves first.. like a company would.
I don't think it is an unreasonable approach.
This article is a response to criticisms of a previous article where the author was definitely very mercenary and suggested the only purpose of the exit interview was to “trap” the employee into giving information that their managers could use against them later… somehow.
It seems this article was meant to walk back some of the aggressiveness.
And definately do not go in to air your grievances.
But I generally agree with the mercenary approach, my personal ethos when working for a company is - take as much money from them as possible and provide my best estimate of (money+some reasonable extra) back in value.
The reasonable extra is an investment of time and effort with the goal of paying out as more money later.
No one says they're evil. Corporate leadership, like corporations themselves, are amoral, which means they have no compunctions to actions that to them, are without intention, but for translates to the recipient as maliciousness.
People in general just aren't community or socially minded in the way they used to be[1], and the bosses of companies or leaders of government are all people too.
[1] To be specific, people are still charitable, but we don't have the same culture/institutions where everyone gives and takes in the same way we used to. Things like working bees, community sport, or even just general behaviours like helping out friends/family/neighbours are all getting rarer by the day.
Long story short, I think it's simply a cultural shift more than an adaptation to any lifestyle changes.
I believe the phrasing should be "had to give your all to a company." This is the time period when you would retire from the same company you started at, right? And if you had more than a few jobs on your resume (or the infamous missing time), you would have a hard time being hired because you were unreliable.
You have a very rose-tinted view of the historical business world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strikes#Twentieth_cent...
Indeed. We're only a few generations removed from a time when we had companies enlisting private armed security forces and militias to violently break strikes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
The idea that power was only used exploitatively after financialization of industry seems incredibly naive to me, or just an extreme warping of history and reality to fit a rose-tinted, romantic worldview.
Letting that level of power and resources consolidate to a few people at the top and crossing your fingers that they'll be "benevolent" is foolish. Historically speaking the % of times these rulers would graciously cover a health crisis out of pocket, or meaningfully donate to democratically chosen local causes was slim to none. Better to distribute the fruits more equally in the first place, but I'm guessing these kind and benevolent leaders would not have happily allowed their workforces to unionize. That expectation of trust only seems to go one way.
It works both ways: if you're leaving in hopes that it'll be a wake-up call to management that a valuable person left, then it probably won't be. And, if you leave your workplace to improve your own life, you've also necessarily chosen not to try and improve the workplace. Leaving means giving up on trying to improve them.
With that in mind, the exit interview isn't a trap so much as pointless: all you can do is hurt yourself here, you can have them remember you fondly or not, but you can't get them to change things in the exit interview.
If I didnt make issues clear while I was at a company then it was a failing on my part. If they didnt care or make any change when I shared about issues than its their fault.
Apparently all the staff that actually knew how to layout the magazine, run the online content, and print the publications were important. A sales staff with no ad-space to sell can't do much.
-- "So and so is toxic." Maybe they are. But this is the last sort of thing I'm going to get into during an exit interview because this is the sort of thing that could actually come back to bite you.
-- "The company has gotten so big and bureaucratic/isn't doing well/etc." Don't you think they probably know?
-- "I don't agree with the strategy any longer." Well, this might be a data point for some higher up you know well over a beer or whatever but probably isn't going to help anything in an exit interview.
>The goal should be for you to part on good terms, not to take a last shot at them, which will only make them hate you.
Absolutely. Any satisfaction from bomb tossing in an exit interview or twitter thread is short-lived and the consequences may not be.
My impression is that the FAANG companies have a relatively small part of the company that makes them insane amounts of money (e.g. search ads) and then the rest of the company is just soaking up a lot of that money. In this model of the universe FAANG companies are just over paying software developers and the other companies out there without their own infinite money machine shouldn't actually be learning the lesson that they need to pay their developers more because maybe, as a business priority, they shouldn't be.
This reminds me of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirshchman [0]. The gist is that you have two options Voice or Exit. Voice means staying and fighting for things to change. It having any effect is predicated on the ability to Exit, to opt out of the situation and leave. Staying and fighting means you may push for change. But quitting and bringing others with you means that you may force change.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit%2C_Voice%2C_and_Loyalty
If anything, removing yourself from its workforce it's one of the most impactful things you can do!
I worked in academia for quite some time, and you would think, "Well, this ought to be less of the kind of horror you can get in the private sector," but no. It was everything you could expect from any other environment.
I didn't comment in the exit interview thread, but I absolutely chortled inside when my direct manager was present for my last exit interview -- kind of a big no-no -- but these folks just lack any kind of shame. You will hear the same "A five is given for outstanding performance ... WORDS ... but we will never give fives ... MORE WORDS ... it is expected that everyone try for outstanding performance" doublethink. Watching a sixty-three year old employee get shuffled off despite decades of loyal work, well ...
Working for family? Even worse.
Currently, I expect any employer to sell me to the knackers for a Jell-O cup later on and not feel the least bit bad about it. Assume that at least the first couple levels of management are dead-eyed lizard people wearing human costumes and you'll probably be safer.
Honestly, start gathering dirt on day number one. It goes bad after a while (but doesn't decay with the rapidity that gratitude does), so make sure to update your map of where the bodies are buried. Keep your resume fresh. Make sure you can put the hurt on someone if you suddenly get the boot, fairly or not. You don't have to use any of this, but it is nice to have on hand when you find a knife in your back.
I see this at my company sometimes. Mid level engineer will switch from Stream to Google and be surprised that the comp is higher. Of course it's higher, what you're sacrificing is career growth. Early on in your career thats usually not the right move. (of course some people crush it at google. google is probably not the best example, while slower than a fast growing startup its still doing well. Someone else joined the FT or some public companies that literally don't grow.
https://www.saastr.com/why-if-you-quit-every-year-you-wont-m...
If you care about total comp the best options are.A. Grow your expertise so that you can join a FAANG company at a director level. B. Join a series A/B company and hope you can impact it enough to reach a good outcome.
The other thing people dont get it is that you're not negotiating salary once. You have to continue to deliver that value to the company. So if you sell yourself really well, get a massive salary, at some point the company will notice that you're not driving that much value. As an example see the people who joined Fast. I'd look for companies that share their revenue numbers with their team and are transparent.
Sometimes companies that pay the best are also under water in their stock options since they raised at a 200x revenue valuation. It gives them a lot of resources to pay top dollar, but its also more similar to joining a company where you don't get upside.
Not to be misunderstood, in general it's good to take the higher salary. Some people just don't negotiate well and some companies take advantage of that. (Still many engineers in the EU at <40k). You just want to make sure you understand the full picture and not focus only on salary.
After that I think you have a point. I work at a FAANG as a SWE (15 YOE) and want to move into management, but it requires a SWE promotion first to staff engineer I don't think I'm capable of getting at this company. (I've been a staff engineer at a previous firm though).
I could switch to a lower tier company and definitely find a way to move into management and develop my career on that ladder but I would likely have to take a big pay cut. I think the trouble is people with 10+ years of experience are like me and have families and a mortgage. It's just not an option to make less for me even if the future was bright.
EDIT: As someone pointed out, 10 years entirely in FAANG is probably not as good as a varied career that includes FAANG.
Today's world offers so many more paths for talented builders, beyond joining the currently hot company as a cog in the giant ad-tech machine and hoping for the best. As a data point, go read last week's article on how Sidekiq has made $13 million for a solo developer.
But you know how I’ll be introduced? They’ll say I was “ex-FAANG”. None of that other stuff matters in comparison.
I’m not at all saying it’s the only path, I’m saying it’s the best and certainly most reliable one.
Working for a smaller, fast-growing company will give you faster feedback loops, and a closer connection to the business that will give you a broader perspective on what is truly necessary vs FAANG best practices for scale. Ironically this makes you more fit for leadership because you can then see patterns which repeat themselves in all companies, but are obfuscated by specialization and huge org sizes. By contrast, if you join a big company you'll get better at the corporate jargon and cultural games, but you won't have the same visceral understanding of what really matters and why.
I heard that a lot early in my career, having started out in startups. To some extent it's true for the first ~4 years: you gain a lot more background knowledge, problem solving ability, and confidence by wearing lots of hats and owning lots of problems end-to-end.
But I think you have to be realistic about how experience transfers. FAANG-level companies typically discount basically all experience in startups and small businesses they haven't heard of. You might be a senior developer in a small startup, but you'll get downleveled to an L3 new grad level at a FAANG. And you'll make more money, so they figure you'll take it. Or you might be a C-suite founder and (assuming you still have your technical chops) end up as a L6 eng manager (again, probably with better comp, assuming your founder stock isn't going up).
I've never once seen a Director hired from the outside without a.) coming from a Director position at a peer company, eg. Facebook -> Google or b.) having enough money that they don't need to work ever again. By far most Directors at FAANGs are promoted from within after delivering a big win for the company; the next largest category is founders whose startup is acquired; following that are Directors jumping from a peer company; and finally there are former founders and executives that are retired or hanging out as an EIR at a VC firm waiting for their next gig.
Even funnier is when it's not a money issue, some middle manager just thought they could find better or wanted to make room for some of their own hires.
In all of these cases, the company held "exit interviews", in some of these cases myself being one of the few or many others, and I have to say, there's nothing you can tell them that will benefit anyone, even your old co-workers who you're not trying to actively harm.
Not telling the entire truth during the very last phase of employment, the exit interview, is but a drip in a bucket of lies that is called employment.
You lied to get in. By emphasizing your strengths and hiding your weaknesses. The employer did the same thing.
You lie constantly about the work or its conditions being fine, as complaining about it is kind of a taboo. You lie to your peers and superiors all the time when they do or say things you disagree with, especially when the cost of conflict is too high.
You lie about the company drink being so much fun, whilst you really don't want to go. You lie about how much effort that task really costs, as you want to build in some security. You lie about how much time you're not really working.
You lie about being a well behaved human being whilst the minute you arrive home, you burp, fart and swear all over the place.
...yet you won't at your mother-in-law.
Conclusion: any human relation that is involuntary (you do not directly pick your manager, colleagues or mother-in-law) is diplomatic, which is a fancy word for not genuine. You keep up appearances and tell people what they want to hear, because the downside of the truth is too large.
So silence or lying is fine. Unless some massive humanitarian thing is at stake based on your input, which I figure to be rare. Alternatively, one can learn how to criticize in a non-damaging way.
One of the most powerful tools I use when interviewing senior candidates is being brutally honest about the company's weaknesses. Implicit in the act of hiring is the reality that you have a problem you need an employee to solve for you. Pretending those problems don't exist is bizarre.
Other than anxiously hiding weaknesses, the other bizarre thing in business is the idea that any and all weaknesses must be addressed.
To use the sports analogy: one can conclude that the star attack player is terrible at defense, but it really makes zero sense to invest a lot in defensive skills.
One I did with BigCo I was leaving was all just box checking yes/no questions like, Are you leaving because you felt discriminated against, are you leaving because you were harassed, etc.
During another one the HR person asks me, "At what point did you realize you had no future here?"
And at my most recent one I was asked if the client I was assigned to had anything to do with it, and I said yes. They were actually working on ending the relationship as far as I know.
Don't waste your time trying to be collectivist in an inherently individualistic system. You need to play the game by its rules if you want any results. And less stress.
But I think it's still the advice people need to hear despite that. I agree with your article that people have rose-colored glasses on when going into those meetings and speaking their mind.
On a personal note: Jacob and I worked at a company that to me fits the description of the one in the article. I'm very curious if it's the same one.
I 100% agree you should be a mercenary at work. Look out for number 1, HR isn't your friend, etc. But being so paranoid you can't even speak your mind in a nearly zero stakes situation of talking to your company before you leave speaks to a very negative outlook on work that seems honestly exhausting.
And more to point, if you are a good mercenary, unionization only harms you.
There is so much interesting critique to make of our current system, sad to see people going for these lazy, of the moment, arguments.
It just turns out that getting mine involves helping others
He also lost me at `late-stage Capitalist` as if that were a real thing.
FWIW I'm intentional & clear to my peers about priorities.
Exit interviews are a trap...because everything you say and do at your company has little landmines built into it because they are constantly trying to use humans like cogs in a clock and when you wear out you are no longer helpful to the clock maker or the people who use the clock everyday...then you get removed from the clock and replaced quickly.
While that article mentions game theory, and describes one situation where it seemed safe to provide feedback, it then focuses on that feedback being unproductive. The author could have offered advice on /how/ to provide feedback. If enough people leave for the same reasons it may start to turn the ship - so let's consider why the feedback was not well received.
Providing negative feedback to the company follows similar patterns to the company providing negative feedback to employees. We're still talking about humans communicating with each other - emotional, flawed, egotistical (aka fairly normal) humans. Decide which one or two points are most important to communicate. Offer genuine positive feedback to make it easier to accept the negative feedback, and try not to present other topics in a negative manner. Let the 1-2 negative points stand out among other positive language.
Some companies care. Some bosses care. Some don't. Some are combative, dysfunctional, or selfish. Some care but are misguided. Rather than blanket "never do this" advice, let's focus on learning when to offer vs withhold feedback, and how to offer negative feedback when it is warranted.
Taking all questions of labor law fairness aside (you won't solve them alone in a workplace anyway), reality is what it is and while it's still imperfect, hedge yourself against those imperfections to your own benefit as well as you can, legally.
Secondly, companies that vomit platitudes about "we're all a family here" and "we look out for each other" are by default spewing lying, superficial PR bullshit. They should never be trusted for a second on such nonsense unless you've secured a written contract of provisions for how you'll be treated, have your healthcare taken care of or be compensated if dismissed for any reason. If you can't secure those things, then tread carefully and keep hedging.
edit: couple extra words.
I will work for a company and try my best as long as they provide me with good yearly raises and benefits and don't require insane hours. Fail on any of those points and I am gone. There are plenty of opportunities for a 20% raise somewhere else. I know that as soon as times get tough they will cut whatever heads are required while being sure to give the execs or in-crowd a golden parachute and the rest nothing.
I've got the impression very quickly that absolutely nobody cares about me in this company and that employees mostly don't love what they do. Specifically - There's a high turn-over - Everybody is focused on their performance, compensation and on improving evaluation metrics - Right after joining, I found the form explaining how to resign. Extremely easy. - People do get fired: including a skilled, friendly, colleague of mine (didn't meet expectations for two semesters). - Management knows how to keep the pressure high (in a friendly manner) - I can't like my project: there are too many things to do and broken things to fix, also no feeling of ownership, no incentives to refactor or redesign.
Excellent advice. I also read the linked article about exit interviews and I concur they're a trap. I've dealt with vindictive former employers like that. Frankly, the easiest way to get over it is to pretend you never worked there and forget the place exists. When asked to explain the gap in my employment I just partially lie and say it was health related. Because of HIPAA in the US they can't pry too much, and as long as I can prove I'm healthy now and otherwise qualified they legally aren't supposed to deny me the job because of it.
In my little corner of the world, a good chunk of the team quit over the past few weeks leaving a skeleton crew. I know for a fact that each and every one of those, who quit indicated very clearly why they quit ( money, benefits, limited chance of promotion ). To the best of my knowledge, nothing changed ( we didn't suddenly get a better working environment )..and, realistically, this is the best case scenario: nothing changes.
If anything,as employees we are not being mercenary enough. All the niceties employers enjoyed worked only one way..
Companies want us to make them money and we only care about the company's success when it benefits us. But in this 'arrangement' there's an alignment of values: an agreement that we both want the company to make money.
More problems arise when companies succeed but don't share the success or when employees demand high compensation but do nothing to earn it. As long as everyone's honest about their own greed it can work out.
If nothing happens, try to spearhead some change. It's your job! Sometimes the lower levels can see value that upper levels can't.
If you can't change it, cope.
If you can't cope, then leave.
Anything you want to say in an exit interview, you should have spoken up about already in step 1.
If there's something you haven't spoken up about, then it's probably for a reason. Just leave it. No need to be a martyr for your ex-colleagues, as it's only perceived. You have no idea the complexities of running a multi billion dollar tech organization.
To an extent. The key is to have a limit.
Depending on the organization and your position in it, it can take a tremendous amount of mental energy and effort to accomplish anything, having a negative effect on your mental and physical health. Is that cost worth fixing something that doesn't even belong to you?
I've learned this lesson the hard way, both successfully and unsuccessfully. Now I have a much lower threshold of what effort I am willing to exert to help a company change.
It rarely is. Not only that but it isn't wanted most of the time.
> I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are [...] I’d love to live in a world where less mercenary advice wasn’t dangerous, but that’s not our world.
If you are going to say something on exit it is best to say it to someone who has power who you trust. If you have access to a VP or CEO, for example. HR’s job is to quickly make problems go away and minimize risk to to the company. Them passing along helpful information to impact change is the opposite of making something go away, it creates a complication. No one hires HR people to create complications.
I don't want to be one of those "back in my day" types but it use to be up-or-out. You came in at the bottom and either went up the corporate ladder at the proper rate or you were fired. That was sociopathic and bread ruthlessness in the workforce. Today it is touchy feely to the point of being confusing on what the actual expectations of the job are.
I got fed this narrative that the corporate environment was ruthless and cutthroat, but I found it highly resistant to even profitable, labor-saving new ideas or practices in favor of ego management, image management, and non disruption.
Maybe it's a false expectation on my part, but I would have at least expected ruthless people to be pragmatic and open minded toward things which may be of benefit. That's not to say they're without fault or downside, but that's certainly not generally characteristic of the corporate environment I've experienced.
OTOH, I've found smaller employers with a more direct connection to market forces much better in this regard. I don't think those two things are unrelated.
We had a "leadership training" thing a few weeks back where one of the segments involved a breakout session with a random coworker who you may or may not already know, with the expectation that you share something deep and revealing you've never told anyone else.
The person I got paired up with and I were both incredulous about the exercise, specifically the "something you've never told anyone else" part, and shared a couple of surface level phobias "I'm afraid of spiders", I told him. He told me he was scared of sharks. We spent the remaining 5 minutes of our breakout talking about local sports.
Companies need to back the hell off with this stuff. I pay a therapist for those kinds of conversations.
I'm fine being friendly and even making friends with my coworkers over drinks for a little bit work before we all go home, if it happens organically and in a way where people get to choose their level of interaction and disclosure about their personal lives, but a lot of this "top down camaraderie/management facilitated team building" going around feels like a toddler smashing a Barbie and Ken doll together making smooching noises at best, at worst it feels like mommy and daddy making play dates.
Like my other phobia...clowns.
Look, I know. Okay, I know. But still.
Less ruthless and less sociopathic, my ass. If that were true, Justine Sacco would not have lost her job for making a dumb joke on Twitter.
All this touchy feely bullshit matters right up until the point where the company is even in the slightest way negatively effective monetarily, then all your happy happy joy joy horseshit goes right out the window.
If anyone wants me to believe we live in a society that actually holds the values you claim are on display, then the next time someone makes a faux pas on Twitter or Facebook or in the office, the company stands strong against public sentiment and says, "So-and-So is one of our own, and we're not going to throw them to the wolves to appease a mob. Period." And then actually back it up.
Then I'll agree that things have actually changed. And if that ever does happen, then things will actually have changed.
[1] Who knows, maybe they'll be one of the lucky few who don't get burned.
The general salary advice is also not new at all. The specifics of which tools to use is pretty helpful.
If the company treats you well, treat them well. If it treats you and others poorly, return the favor.
If you're in a hypercompetitive and/or toxic environment, you'd better be very careful about what advice you give (and everything else you say).
Please stop using this phrase unless you want to further alienate me from the position you are trying to make.
That'd be a good trick, given that there were no Nazis until 1920.
It was in a work published starting in 1902 (though the part concerning late-stage capitalism was published in 1927) by a German Marxist [0] (at the time he wrote coined the term) who became a nationalist in the Weimar era to the point that some of his writings later in the early 1930s apparently aligned to a certain extent with Nazi ideology, but who was putting out anti-Nazi writings (actively suppressed by the Nazis) by the late 1930s.
So, while “by a Nazi over 120 years ago” is not really accurate at all, it has some recognizable connection to facts.
Non-US-dweller here: isn't that system entrenched since always? - i.e. that way of treating workers has been present in the US ever since there's been an "US"? Somehow Europeans managed to make life easier on themselves like mandatory vacation, a lot of sick leave, etc., but the US just didn't sign up for that.
This was all you needed to write:
>I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are.
That is really the issue in a nutshell.
I have no sympathy for workplace advice that attempts to coddle someone who cannot psychologically operate in a world told more truthfully. “Mercenary” advice works in this environment, being more like a mercenary, a “sell sword”, is a pragmatic approach than being gaslit by the company’s “were a team” chant. This is why Netflix’s older culture document resonated with so many people, its appealing! Intruiging! Truthful! Refreshing!
Many of us can psychologically operate in a world so unforgiving and its a more effective tool for improving financial and healthcare stability, whether that includes an employer or [eventually] doesnt.
There are selective pressures towards people that can perceive reality accurately and use it to their advantage. another population relies on not perceiving reality at all to maintain a view that makes them happy enough to tolerate the mundane, and another population perceives reality accurately and it exacerbates chemical imbalances in their mind such that their chronic depression keeps them useless to society, which by definition means selective pressures against those traits.
Society improves when more people have more chances to contribute positively. There is so much underutilized talent out there. To block off those opportunities hampers the development of society writ large.
Still have an obsessive attachment to acting purely selfishly? Then think of it like this: acting to close off others' opportunities prevents them from inventing and producing things that you could benefit from. Would you act differently knowing that giving someone else a chance may lead to the development of a medicine that will save your life a few years down the road?
Also, that last paragraph makes me think you don't really interact with real human beings that often.
"Taking up space" in society corresponds to collecting and storing resources beyond the share which makes you productive, such that an opportunity cost is incurred. Insofar as there is a teleology to capitalist economic organization, it does not include a distribution of resources which optimizes opportunities. The profit motive ensures this.
Delineating the private sector from society at large is an artificial distinction that does not reflect the material realities surrounding resource distribution and utilization. We are all part of one big network, and the boundaries described above are not obeyed by the chaos of self-emergent organization at these scales.
For the people who don't know they can operate this way, now they have advice on how to.
Society wont be worse off because more employees are looking out for themselves instead of falling for company rhetoric. Just as the article said, if you aspire for something else, support a unionization effort.
Unions are necessary but insufficient. Why is there no discussion about further alternatives in your replies? Cooperative ownership structures are prevalent and successful by multiple metrics. Do you wish to limit the conversation to only those defensible by your preconceptions?
Sure, no, I don't like false dilemmas and am only pointing out that everything you're talking about is aspirational. It means, it doesn't currently exist in the US in any reliable fashion so a current employee that isn't a labor rights activist cannot assume they'll encounter those environments.
I'm a fan of things I've seen in developed countries, such as the employee union having a board seat by law, which also relies on such union existing, this thread isn't about those structures.
In the present, in the US, the dichotomy you summarized is what I perceive.
Even the Nordic so-called "socialist" countries are actually market economies, with private ownership of the means of production, and they channel the results of capitalism rather than opposing it. They channel it into a somewhat larger safety net than the USA has, but fundamentally they are doing the same thing, because they know that's the only approach that really brings prosperity to a society.
This not a zero-sum game either. Underutilized talent now has more opportunities to be recognized and contribute than ever before. One person's success does not prevent another person's success. We are not just dividing up a pie -- we are growing the pie too. Who is closing off other's opportunities by pursuing their own success?
Big statement, unsubstantiated.
> the alternatives are clearly worse for everyone in a society, including the poor.
Big statement, unsubstantiated.
> they channel the results of capitalism rather than opposing it
This perspective is conspicuously self-serving, but it doesn't seem to be a very clear or elucidating one. What parts of capitalism are being "channeled"? What outcomes are you referring to?
Certainly the poor don't see benefits except where the rich are forced to pay back into public funds for redistribution. It seems to me that the results of capitalism are tempered by more regulated economies, considering the natural end state of capitalist pursuit is feudalism if left unchecked. The profit motive guarantees this.
> that's the only approach that really brings prosperity to a society
This was the popular narrative for describing the failings of Soviet-style communism re: economy. But it stinks of essentialism. Actually, your whole argument does. The reason the CCCP crashed has been studied in more detail now that we have the benefit of hindsight. The rest of the global economy was capitalist, and furthermore, was shaped and organized by a select few power players to engineer the demise of CCCP by creating conditions of brittleness, so that relatively small disruptions (eg localized famines) would cause knock-on effects. There is a direct throughline to today: see all the talk of sanctions vs "the West's" enemies, which amounts to nothing more than exactly what is described above.
> One person's success does not prevent another person's success.
An unqualified notion of "success" seems to be used here. It is not clear even what you think is "success". Seems to be some abstract Enlightenment-style ideal that has a murky-at-best connection to material reality.
One person's consumption prevents another person's consumption because we are limited by the law of conservation of mass-energy. One must consume to innovate. Hoarding and asymmetric investment limit the distribution of these resources to those who may be able to utilize them more effectively, because they can contribute their own IP. This, in the language of basic economics, is called an opportunity cost, and the point of economies (insofar as there is a point) is to minimize that cost. Seems pretty obvious to me, interacting with people from varying levels of class and societal rank, that this cost is harming our progress.
To think we have reached any kind of pinnacle of societal organization demonstrates a depressing lack of imagination. Conservative philosophy has a long way to go to properly argue its side -- and unfortunately for conservatives the work done to advance systems science over the last couple decades has done a lot to tear down the fundamental tenets thereof.
A counterargument to this is that I’d personally pick today over tomorrow almost every time. So yes, not gambling on the future, but doing what’s right for yourself today is +ev.