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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

> “My dad got a job straight out of high school, saved up, and bought a house in his 20s,” said Anne Dakota, a 21-year-old receptionist from Asheville, North Carolina, who earns minimum wage. “I don’t even think that’s possible for me, at least with the current money I make.”

I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car. People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years to get material rewards, but beyond that it feels pointless. Why be miserable grinding for two decades just so you can get one hand on the ladder? Instead people look for ways to have a life they find interesting or satisfying now.

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The problem with this narrative is that the job of the father isn't specified. He could've been a plumber/electrician/welder who would do really well in the current market. These jobs pay well above the minimum wage.

The world has changed - simple labor that requires a few days of training doesn't pay much. Most jobs, with few exceptions, that require a decade of training, do pay well. That's why there's such a huge gap between Amazon packers and electricians, and an even bigger gap with surgeons.

If you want to do well in the modern economy, you have to choose your specialization wisely. Most simple labor will be automated very soon anyway.

It seems like you’re just confirming the narrative

> He could've been a plumber/electrician/welder who would do really well in the current market.

False.

A plumber making $80k (US median seems to be around $60k) isn't going to be able to save up for a down payment if they're paying a typical mid-sized city's rent (~$1.2k a month). Not to mention housing costs going up during this period of saving up.

Are you joking? In this example rent is only a small fraction of income.

As another commenter pointed out, a 3.5% down FHA loan would make it feasible to buy a house with those numbers. But in any case, $80k is up there in terms of typical trades salaries, at least if cursory Googling can be trusted. Your median tradesman makes far less.

Where I live (Mpls), tradespeople make six figure salaries and are well above the median HHI for the area.

I lead a team that includes Zoomers and they are making six-figure salaries and are way ahead of where I was (accounting for inflation) when I was at their age.

This is more generational comparison garbage like the claims that Millennials were the downfall of our civilization. Just ignore it and move on.

I found a website that says average cost of living in New York (for 1 person) is $3200/month. That's around 40,000 per year. If the electrician is making 80k, that would mean they could save 25k/year after taxes and living expenses. 8 years of work and they would have 200k, enough for a down payment right? And this is assuming they live in new york, one of the most expensive places in the world

[1]: https://livingcost.org/cost/united-states/ny/new-york

Sure, if you save every cent and commit to being single without children for 8 years. But if you go to the dentist, drop your phone on accident, find an S/O, go to the gym, eat out every once in a while, buy some new clothes, pay off student loans, ...

It's just very silly to find a website, grab a number, and then conclude that saving 200k in 8 years is realistic

I think the living expenses include health expenses, but other expenses like phones and travel probably not

I doubt this hypothetical person making $80k has a Cadillac health plan. They could definitely be looking at costs like $1500 for a dental crown and $1000 for an MRI before they hit their deductible.

These numbers don't add up. Someone making $80k in NY will be paying at least 15-20% in taxes. This hypothetical person would have a max of like $400 a month for all their non-housing living expenses. That isn't happening in a high COL state like NY.

I assumed 15% taxes, so 80k - 15k (taxes) - 40k (living expenses) = 25k

I guess I misread what you said. I would have sworn you said housing expenses and not living expenses.

I'm sure there are plenty in NY that pay $3200 for just housing, so you wouldn't be far off

Growing, but still rural city in the Midwest I visited a few weeks back has decent homes for sale in the 50-80k range. This is not an outlier.

Roughly 2/3 of Americans own homes.

If you live in an area where homes are priced like luxury investments, then yes, you'll have a hard time buying when you also cannot afford other luxuries. If you live in an area where they are not, it isn't unattainable at all, especially if you combine income with a marriage partner.

Many people would consider a suggestion to live in the Midwest as about the same as a suggestion that they spend the rest of their life living in a decrepit sewer system.

Maybe you should try to understand why certain kinds of people (of, perhaps the non-white kind) would not want to move into an insular community?

Maybe if they visited, they'd find their assumptions to be unwarranted racism.

It isn't as diverse as some other parts of the country, but there's groups of people from all over the world. Within a 2 hour drive from me, you'll find enclaves from Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Mexico and others.

If not wanting to live in an enclave as a nominally second-class citizen is racist, then I don't know what to say. Let's not deny reality here, that's really what you end up being if you try to interact with the main racial group in a rural area, or at least the vast majority of them. It doesn't matter what race this happens to be, it's how people work.

I know an Englishman who lives in an Indonesian village (not an enclave). He is constantly reminded that while his presence is cherished, he isn't, and never will be "one of them." He still loves it, though, so there's that.

Most of the tightly closed enclaves are by choice (refugee communities tend to stick together harder than others, from what I can tell). Obviously, not everyone lives in an enclave.

What on earth makes you think they are second class citizens? They vote, attend school board meetings, own homes and live just like anyone else.

As an immigrant, individualist and severe introvert, I'd probably never be "one of them" anywhere anyway, why bother? I suspect that stuff is overrated anyway.

If you’re not very wealthy, and you’re living on the west coast, you’re a second class citizen there too. At least in Minnesota the rent is lower.

I went into an experience living in Wisconsin with exactly this viewpoint and was sorely disappointed at the shear amount of selfish, entitled, prejudiced behavior that exists only in these lands of strip malls and spoiled nature. I’m saying this so the next person reading your post isn’t swayed. And to those people: many of these towns are dead. They died long ago with the small farms and factories. The Houses are priced to sell.

I have been sorely disappointed by the shear amount of selfish, entitled, prejudiced behavior I observed in Bay Area, so what? The exact nature of prejudice may be a bit different, but it's still very much around here. OK, the difference in the Bay Area you pay 20x for it, I guess.

Have visited. The constant microaggressions are exactly what I expected.

Do you have black or Hispanic friends or colleagues that you know near you? Have you asked them about their experiences with race where you live?

Yup. We've discussed it a fair amount, as we also frequently talk about the news. One friend in particular has lived in a half dozen states, mostly in large cities but also smaller communities, and now lives here because it is where he wants to be. He was stabbed in a metro area by a skinhead. This illusion that big coastal cities of super expensive housing as a mecca of love and diversity that exists nowhere else is just that.

Have you tried being trans there? No? Okay then.

There are plenty of "non-white" kind of people in the midwest. Jeeze the racist stereotypes of the midwest is laughable

In my neighborhood I would say at minimum 25% of the home owners are non-white families, if not more.

Exactly. The racism and class prejudice is so blatant in this discussion it’s pretty wild.

Bunch of representative bias anecdotes, mostly be people who don’t live there, or haven’t in 20 years.

And yet, if the same environment were to be encountered in another country, it would be “culture”.

Spoken like a coastal elite. I’ve lived on the east coast, Midwest, and Cali. The Midwest is no more insular than anywhere else I’ve lived.

Insular? Now San Francisco isn’t that bad.

Fine by me; there's plenty of natural beauty and life style that would be utterly ruined by a massive influx of tech bro outsiders.

In the last year or two a locally-famous lighthouse went up for sale and was bought for cash by some guy from silicon valley. Instead of being turned into an attraction, or a house, or hell even an Airbnb spot, it remains untouched much to the chagrin of the locals. I guess the new owner can't be bothered to come out here and just liked the idea of bragging that he owned it.

I’m sure they had some plans for it, but a little thing called COVID detailed most plans. Who knows, maybe the owner isn’t even with us anymore and their heirs are still figuring things out.

I am confused: you are simultaneously complaining about the tech bros ruining the natural beauty and style but are then unhappy that this particular tech bro didn't do a bunch of development on this lighthouse?

And you'll get the politics and the religosity of the bible belt to boot.

There's a few islands of sanity here in the midwest, primarily around college towns. But... prices have doubled since 2016, at least in my area.

We're closing on a house. $375k. I'm one of the lucky ones. Like, super lucky. But it sold back in 2016 for $170k.

I am willing to bet that if those places had well paid jobs easily available, people would start to move in.

For all the cultural likes and dislikes, mass of people is generally moving when they have pragmatic reason to do so.

I hope they never think otherwise.

Every time the Midwest comes up on this site, you get these laughably stupid takes that it's some bombed-out shithole with no jobs other than crime, and where people kill minorities on sight. At least once every couple weeks, there will be a decently sized comment thread about how it's economically desolate and morally evil, and that no sane person would ever move here.

My only response to that is please don't ever stop believing that. Stay away. Don't come crush the housing market with your $200k+ FAANG salary so you can tut-tut the people that live here about how racist, sexist, classist, etc. they are despite having never actually talked to one of them in your life. For those that got dealt a bad hand in life, there is at least a chance for them in the Midwest. If keeping that chance alive means that somebody living in a coastal city thinks my community is human garbage, so be it.

And yet, it's only these coastal "livable" towns that I've ever seen somebody defacate on the sidewalk. In the midwest, at least people are potty trained.

40% of U.S. residents can be described as "coastal" so you're painting with a pretty broad brush.

Not a great suggestion if you’re not white. The Midwest is not place I would want to subject my children to.

The places I've seen with houses in the $50k to $80k range are in Rust Belt-esque areas whose time has long passed, or in places where a "career" means working at Walmart or cooking methamphetamine. Their economic prospects aren't that great, and their long term economic prospects are even worse.

Rural areas also tend not to be great places for LGBT people, either.

The Bay Area was nothing in the 80s either. NYC wasn’t even a desirable place to be during that time either.

People who pick just what’s attractive at the moment are pretty short-sighted and I have no sympathy for them.

> People who pick just what’s attractive at the moment are pretty short-sighted and I have no sympathy for them.

What's attractive and what's viable are often two separate things. NYC is not viable for someone making $40k a year, but neither is moving to the Rust Belt where their "options" are working part-time in department stores or literal crime.

Something tells me that this is a situation that can't be won in some people's minds. If someone makes the rational decision to not move somewhere that is not economically viable, in an area that's projected to become even more unviable with time, that's not good enough for some. If someone lives in a shitty area and moves elsewhere for better career prospects, but still can't make ends meet, well, according to posts like this, they should just have moved somewhere shitty instead.

If we applied the same to degrees, I doubt you'd feel the same about all of the "short-sighted" people who chose to study trades or liberal arts at a state school and now have poor economic prospects, instead of choosing what's attractive at the moment like STEM.

The most obvious solution is remote work. The main economic reason people even live in large cities is jobs. If the jobs can be done anywhere, that would certainly revitalize a lot of the US to points we haven't seen in decades. I'd much rather live in a quiet rural area than in a city with high traffic, high crime and high costs.

Remote work would also have a cascading effect. Say 20 people move to a rural area, well they need food, and their vehicles fixed, and their house maintained, etc. They need to fund their hobbies and generally would bring more money to those areas. Big cities with a lot of power don't want that to happen because they will lose their tax base. I suspect some city governments are incentivizing businesses to bring employees back to the office because of this.

I don't really think remote work will end up in any meaningful rural revitalization. The main urban->other migration I've seen from remote work in my peer group (USA) has been from urban large urban area->smaller urban area or urban area->suburban area. If that holds, we'll have more large cities and bigger suburbs, but I don't know that it helps rural areas at all. I think many people want to be around other people, and if you remove them from other people most of the day (with remote work), they'll want to see people even more after work. Urban/suburban areas are better for this

> short-sighted" people who chose to study trades or liberal arts

People who chose to study trades would be doing well off, that’s a terrible analogy.

> liberal arts

Liberal arts has pretty much always had terrible prospects. That’s not short sighted, that’s just straight up blind.

Rural areas also tend not to be great places for LGBT people, either.

That may be true in some areas. I can only speak anecdotally. I brought a couple members of the LGBT community with me to a very rural area that is about as cowboy-midwest as it gets. Everyone has been very civil and even the "Good ol boys" have been very respectful with them to my pleasant surprise. There are plenty of openly LGBT working in the local stores.

All of that said I have advised them against hanging out in the local bars after listening to the scanner a bit. There are a few regular angry drunks. Perhaps I am too overly cautious.

Maybe individual people are nice to their face, but they'll still vote for the guys who implement "don't say gay" bills and the like, with is pretty anti-lgbtq

> Everyone has been very civil and even the "Good ol boys" have been very respectful with them to my pleasant surprise. There are plenty of openly LGBT working in the local stores.

Speaking from experience, they're going to be on good behavior around you and others. It's what happens when they think no one will notice or no one will hold them to account when real discrimination occurs.

I've met plenty of people who claim to be LGBT supporters in public, but have no problem harassing LGBT people, discriminating against them and calling them slurs when they think no one else is looking. Same thing goes for people in power, like bosses and owners, or police and judges. Discrimination doesn't always look like American History X or the Westboro Baptist Church, the vast majority of it is low key and insidious.

but have no problem harassing LGBT people, discriminating against them and calling them slurs when they think no one else is looking.

That's the very reason I suggested staying away from the bars. When people are drunk their inhibitions are gone and judgement is very poor. The LGBT hate crime that I know of happened about 23 years ago outside a bar.

Yeah, even bars in the suburbs can get sketchy for LGBT people.

In those places the wages are also considerably lower. The 2/3 are not the people buying, it's the people inheriting existing property: First-Time buyers only make up 33% of home owners.

Considering how long the average family stays in a home without moving, the first time buyer number sounds about right, sans the inheritance bit. I don't know of anyone who kept a home passed on by their parents except for cottages and cabins in the woods. Those typically aren't meant for year round residence anyway.

What if you want to live in an area with employment opportunities? I grew up in a small town in British Columbia. You can't even get a bachelor condo for $50-$80k there. There is nothing available for that price. There's also no industry at all outside of mining. You have to go where the jobs are and for a lot of people that means larger centres.

I honestly don't understand. When I bought a home I was literally making the US median income and bought an average priced house. My rent at the time was about a thousand a month. I had normal student loans and regular bills too. It wasn't easy but it didn't feel like a miracle either. Not saying someone making minimum can do this by any means, but there's a huge demand for labor in decent paying areas right now. I genuinely feel like I'm missing a big piece of this puzzle.

People post what they feel like, not what they’ve actually tried.

Even if you ignore first time homeowner benefits and such, the usual thing necessary is not living in the middle of California.

Often if you actually dig into it you find abject refusals to consider locations outside of a particular one, or the famous “spend less on candles. no” type of thing.

https://mobile.twitter.com/dril/status/384408932061417472

> My rent at the time was about a thousand a month.

Sounds like this was either a long time ago or in city/town where not many people want to live.

The cost of a house has spiked to over 7x median income in the US, in a very short time. That's put buying a house out of reach for many people. Hopefully the bubble will burst -- but who knows? It could drag on for a very long time.

Historically, the cost of a house has hovered around 4.5 to 5.5x annual median income. It's currently at the highest level it's ever been, at least according to this graph:

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco....

What about factoring in interest rates? After all, people ultimately care about the monthly payments than about the sticker price.

For those in the US who generally fix their mortgages for full-term (25-30 years), this will definitely be offering some relief.

In places like the UK we have the same phenomenon but most people are on 2-5 year fixed rates.

> Hopefully the bubble will burst -- but who knows? It could drag on for a very long time.

The median home price in Canada is $800k and rising, while in the US it is $400k and rising. Housing prices in the US could easily double.

> in the US it is $400k and rising

Actually the latest quarter median prices fell in the US, which may continue as interest rates increase.

Broadly speaking though, prices certainly are up over the last couple years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

House price to income ratio doesn't tell the whole story because that doesn't include cost of mortgage. A more informative value to compare would be monthly payment to income ratio.

For example, when I bought my first home the price was around 4.5x my income. But the interest rate on that first mortgage was 8.25%

What year did you graduate? It seems like most everyone who graduated in the past decade is screwed if they want to live near where the jobs are.

I don't agree. I made under $80k in household income when I bought my first home in 2014. This was in (well, just outside) Seattle, which was and remains one of the more expensive markets in the country. I saved up for a down payment; it took years. It wasn't my dream home, but it allowed me to build equity and continue saving for the one that was. I am not ready to say "kids these days want everything handed to them," but I will say that if you can't commit to a decade-long, multi-step process, then it may seem impossible, when it's just rather hard.

It isn't 2014 anymore and rents have doubled around here since then, cost of living has gone way up, while wages have stayed relatively stagnant.

This. My house has more than doubled since 2014. There's a huge gap between those who can afford a $300k house and those who can afford an $800K house.

Doubled if you're lucky. I checked the price history on the condo I bought last year. It has doubled in price since the pandemic started and more like tripled since 2014. Of course I'm living in a booming area but my salary sure hasn't increased that quickly.

The traditional rule for a mortgage was 20% down and the house itself was no more than 2.5 times salary.

Where I live, Boise, housing prices have shot up dramatically, over twice. Median house prices in Boise is $536k. So you would really need to make $214K/year to afford the mortgage under the old rules. And nobody makes that kind of money here.

The old rules don't apply because the old interest rates were so very much higher.

The prices are based on the ability to repay based on the income - with lower interest rates the same income and service a much larger loan, hence the increased prices.

The world has changed, from very high rates to current very low rates, and seems like it might be changing back to middle rates.

I think that's what the mortgage lenders of today want you to believe since they have cheap cash available through the fed. As long as house prices continue to skyrocket, they could still make money on the foreclosure.

It's flat out impossible to buy a house or even condo on that kind of salary in southern Ontario without significant outside financial assistance. I bought my condo in Oct 2021. Six months later it has appreciated in value by $200,000 judging by what other units in this building are going for. You simply can't save money fast enough. Housing prices in general have more than doubled around here.

You got lucky and bought when it was cheap. Don't act like anyone can do what you did.

At 80k your post-tax takehome is $5000/mo even filing single in a high tax state. Take out $400 for health insurance, $800 for car+insurance, $1200 for rent, and you've still got $2500 for food, miscellaneous spending, Roth IRA, etc. Even if all those costs come to $2000 - unlikely, since the Roth contribution limit is $6k / year - you're still left with $500/month in savings. And that's assuming your partner doesn't bring in _any_ income, which is exceedingly unlikely.

If your typical rent is $1200, that means property values in your area are almost certainly low enough to qualify for FHA loans, which only require 3.5% down due to government subsidies. 3.5% of $450k is $16k - so it only takes about 3 years to save for that down payment.

Home prices are high _because_ FHA loans allow people to have greater purchasing power (among many other reasons like NIMBYism).

I hope this person never has a kid. Enjoy your rent doubling to get enough space and either losing your partner's income or spending $3k a month on day care. Plus whatever crappy insurance you're getting for $400 a month is going to leave with $10k+ in bills for just birthing the kid.

From Kaiser's 2020 survey on healthcare plans, the average worker contribution for HMO/PPO plans for a family was $5000-6000/yr [1]. These are not high deductible plans (those are specifically broken out) so they're going to be pretty good insurance, especially PPO. So $400/mo is only underestimating the true cost by about $100/mo. You can't use ACA marketplace prices to judge what your average worker is paying.

> spending $3k a month on day care

It costs $3200/mo to pay someone $20/h for 40 hours a week, in what world does day care (where one caretaker takes care of multiple children!) cost $3000/mo? The average cost of child care in California, which has _the_ highest cost of labor in the US, is $956/mo [2]. If you use the infant care cost it's $1400/mo, still nowhere near $3000. Maybe in the middle of New York City it costs $3000, but that's not a realistic living scenario for a plumber.

If your spouse makes $3000/mo then the rent increase (call it an extra $800/mo to get to $2k/mo) and childcare cost ($1000/mo) are more than covered by their extra income.

Please just look at the data and take a moment to understand what expenses outside of SF/NYC/LA look like.

[1]: https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2020-summary-of-find...

[2]: https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/#/...

> cost of child care in California, which has _the_ highest cost of labor in the US, is $956/mo

The link you provided says $1,412. And this shows roughly $2500 in LA County and $3300 in SF County.

https://insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/INSIGHT_C...

Did you bother to look at it? Or read my post?

> The average annual cost of infant care in California is $16,945—that’s $1,412 per month. Child care for a 4-year-old costs $11,475, or $956 each month.

$1400 for an infant, $950 for a 4 year old. And that's in _the_ highest cost of living state in the country. If you put Michigan it drops to $905/741.

> And this shows roughly $2500 in LA County and $3300 in SF County

Your link comes off as incredibly biased. In literally the second sentence it says "Black and brown people and women of color experienced profound losses of health, community, income, and business at rates far more severe than white households" There's a clear ultra-left political lean to it.

I also literally said that SF/LA/NYC are not representative of costs in the rest of the country. If you're a plumber in SF you make over 6 figures, easily. A plumber makes $80k in a random Midwest city, not in SF/LA. The state of California reported median plumbers in the East Bay made $115k in 2021 [1]. You are fundamentally trying to mislead by using Midwest wages and San Francisco costs. Not to mention that the inflated cost of living is caused by a housing shortage which subsidizing healthcare and childcare doesn't fix.

[1]: https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/OccGuides/Summary.asp...

They aren’t really talking about day care, but a nanny who only takes care of your own children. It’s what’s comparable to having a stay at home parent.

I wish. Nanny would be probably double that where I live.

> It costs $3200/mo to pay someone $20/h for 40 hours a week, in what world does day care (where one caretaker takes care of multiple children!) cost $3000/mo?

Tell me you have no children without telling me you have no children?

The daycare my child went to is $2500/month. Not quite $3K but I'm not in the most expensive areas. I have no doubt it can go over $3K in SF/Palo Alto/etc.

I saw in your post history you're also paying $2000/mo for health insurance. Maybe you're not making the wisest financial decisions? There's no world in which a rational person pays that much given the data and available plans. Even an ACA platinum plan (the top one) with zero employer or government subsidy is cheaper than that. I just looked and a Platinum plan in CA for a family costs $1400.

> I saw in your post history you're also paying $2000/mo for health insurance. Maybe you're not making the wisest financial decisions?

Not only an ad hominen, but changing topics?

> I just looked and a Platinum plan in CA for a family costs $1400.

I don't know where you looked but it's wrong.

I literally just went to https://www.coveredca.com/ and filled in details for a quote.

A platinum plan with Blue Shield is $2530.04/month.

With Kaiser, it is $2637.23/month.

gonna guess those averages include state-run programs where parents get vouchers for daycare

i'm not a parent and don't want to be one but know enough parents to know that daycare is bloody fucking expensive, usually thousands/mo, unless the parents have a support system, but even then it's a trade-off.

the silver lining of course is that it's a temporary expense.

also assumes no loans or credit card debt, both of which are unfortunately likely

also assumes that you are mentally strong enough to live like a pauper to hopefully afford the bare minimum required to scrounge up a downpayment.

doesn't assume building a maintenance fund (2% of home value per year), closing costs (2% of home value, one-time cost), purchasing stuff to fill the home (like furniture/appliances), etc.

Not to mention that plumber probably doesn't have health coverage. The people who love to talk about what a fine profession that would be (for other people's kids, of course, never their own kids) are the same people who fight tooth and nail against any kind of health care policy that might make a non-white collar career more viable.

Plumbers and pipefitters have a union that has plenty of power in current market. No health insurance and they won't work. Plumbing pays more than 80k in major cities. Plumbing contractors have to carry workers comp insurance.

Having grown up in a rural area, I assure you that any unions or health coverage is a strictly urban phenomenon. And $80k isn't all that great of a top-end, for people living in major cities with their cost of living.

This thread is about saving up to buy a house in a city though.

jman plumber in my town earns $47/hr+$32/hr in benefits. Not bad total comp especially if you add in OT.

I did some quick lookups from BLS and other salary sources for my (mid sized southern US MSA) sometime back and yeah the median and mean wages for a lot of skilled labor and trade positions are pretty damn close to what a lot of clerical type office jobs were paying. I.E. not great, probably livable. I’ll see if I can go back through and find my comment.

In my area United Association Plumbers get $42.77/hour and have great benefits including healthcare/pension. I agree though we need truly universal healthcare like medicare for all. The system we have now is hopelessly broken.

Doesn't seem like the rest of the world's universal healthcare did any better than ours?

You have farfetched dreams that government run anything would somehow be not shit. You'd hardly get any coverage and I doubt the deductible would be anywhere sufficient.

You don't get completely fucked if you lose your job and then get sick/injured? Is that not better? I pay literally $0 to go to the doctors or emergency room.

Someone pays, just not you at the point of service.

Everyone knows that "free" healthcare means that it's still being paid for via taxes, so points like this aren't exactly insightful. The OP's point was that their care cost them nothing to utilize or receive, not that there aren't costs in the system at all. Nobody actually believes that doctors are working for free, that assumption would be a strawman.

If you don't pay the bill, it doesn't cost you anything either.

I'm not sure everyone knows there's a no free healthcare, we may move in different cicles.

Having lived with socialized healthcare and still paying private insurance in order to access expedient, competent, comfortable care is especially frustrating.

> If you don't pay the bill, it doesn't cost you anything either.

In the US, you won't get the chance to have a bill, because you will be denied care if you're unable to pay for the care or are uninsured. The one exception to this is that emergency rooms are obligated to stabilize patients in crisis, but that type of care is limited. For example, they'll patch you up if you get stabbed and then send you a bill for it, but nobody is getting treatment for non-acute emergencies, like chronic conditions, or the insulin they need to survive diabetes, or life-saving chemo or radiation therapy for cancer.

Your creditors might feel differently about bills not costing you anything when they take you to court to collect on your debt. Those bills might cost you your savings, income and/or assets.

In the US you pay more IN TAX per person than other countries pay for their entirely otherwise free healthcare. Yet you have insurance, and have to pay premiums ON TOP of that!

If you lose your job then you qualify for Medicaid and get free doctors visits and emergency care. The people who get fucked the worst by our system are the working poor. The people who make just over the limit for Medicaid and have crappy employer sponsored plans.

I have family members on Medicaid and help them with their care. Medicaid covers 100% of everything, from doctors visits to specialists, ER care, surgery, dental, vision, medications, etc at no cost to the beneficiary. By law, Medicaid has to pay for everything, so patients don't get pushed around by providers or insurers about billing or additional costs. The headache surrounding billing and paying for care just doesn't exist. Policyholders can confidently see doctors and buy prescriptions they need without worrying about being sent mystery bills several months down the line, or being unable to fill medication, including brand name medication.

On the private insurer side, if you're prescribed an on-patent medication that has no generics, every insurer I've had has fought me every step of the way for coverage, and some plans just don't cover brand name medication at all. Even when you work with your doctor and insurer to get coverage for specific medications, insurers will decide 4 months later that they don't want to cover it anymore and you have to jump through those hoops all over again.

My "favorite" experience was having to cycle through several medications that I had been prescribed in the past that weren't effective in order to make my insurer happy so that they'd cover the medication that does work. Apparently the private insurer knows how to treat patients better than doctors do. Then I moved and had to switch insurers, and the insurer wanted me to go through the process of taking drugs that don't work all over again. I gave up and just pay for the actually-efficacious prescription out of pocket, and none of those costs go towards my deductible. I now pay $18 per pill for something that costs $34 total for a 30-day supply, which is about a dollar per pill, in other first world countries.

If it was possible, I'd drop my own coverage instantly for Medicaid. Doing so would make my life immeasurably better.

> Doesn't seem like the rest of the world's universal healthcare did any better than ours?

On every metric, other countries' healthcare systems outperform the healthcare system in the US, resulting in higher quality care and patient outcomes, all for much less than the US spends[1].

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

> If it was possible, I'd drop my own coverage instantly for Medicaid. Doing so would make my life immeasurably better.

I also care for a family member on Medicaid and, while it’s very far from perfect, I agree that in many every-day scenarios it’s remarkably superior to my employer-provided coverage.

Most of the downsides I’ve experienced are issues with getting specialist appointments in a timely fashion and providers creating unexpected reimbursement loopholes - which are thankfully rare, but remarkably abusive when they have occurred.

Eg: Medicaid will get you booked with an allergy clinic four months out and during the appointment they tell you “Oh by the way, Medicaid only covers ~5 basic allergen tests; if you want the standard regional allergen test that’s $150 up front and if you want the full spectrum test that’ll be $300.”

Meanwhile, half a year prior, I went to the same clinic, got my appointment booked for 2-3 weeks out, and wasn’t even asked about the test type - they hit me with the full spectrum and I just had to toss a minor copay on the way out the door.

I guess the overall moral of the story is that our healthcare system is broken and jammed up with perverse incentives at every rung of the ladder.

I lost my job due to illness and I am currently on Medi-Cal. There is no deductible. Pretty much everything non-cosmetic is covered 100% including dental. My previous health insurance from a Fortune 100 company was much worse with all sorts of byzantine rules. I think you have been seriously misinformed.

Us median _household_ income is 60k

The trick here is that you compare overall earning over the US (including rural Arkansas and such) with "mid-city" rent - i.e. only select places. According to https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-ren... at least half the states have median rent below $1000. And yes, you can't live in San Francisco on Arkansas salary, but if you ever tried to hire a plumber in Bay Area, especially for a job beyond "my faucet is leaking", you know very well it costs a real lot.

Sorry to be so blunt, but you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

The median household income = 67K[0]. >60% of US households own a home.[1] Clearly 80K is more than enough to safe up for a down payment.

[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

That is a logical fallacy: owning a home != buying a home, inheritance is a thing.

To reinforce this, if you follow the links it states

> The term "home-ownership rate" can also be misleading because it includes households that owe on a mortgage.

Depending on your credit score and your down payment, you can wind up functionally renting a home for many years even if you "own" it on paper. It isn't until the final years of a 30 year mortgage that you actually significantly pay down the principal.

As long as interest rates remain low and the credit requirements are lax, most of America can in fact "own" a home. Expect prices to skyrocket, as buyers become more and more decoupled from the cost.

This doesn't really contradict my point. How do these people have mortgages if they're incapable of affording a down payment?

Only ~30% of people receive an inheritance, at an average age of ~50. But folks in their 50s already have a homeownership rate of >60%. I doubt inheritance has much of an impact.

Perhaps you would find most plumbers wouldn't live in a city with a rent of 1.2k/mo?

Is that really all your definitive "false" relies on? Hell I know tradesmen that make well over that and live in more rural areas.

1) 80k/3 is 26.7k, 1.2k*12 = 14.4k. So, yeah, you can save for a downpayment by merely putting away your "comfortable housing spend" income, even before you move to a 1br apartment (1.2k median rent is for all units, even then I can only find 2019 numbers <1.1k), or save from the other parts of income.

2) Median house (not a Bay Area house) in 2019 was like 320k. Crazy house valuations are only from the last 1.5-2 years and wouldn't have affected generational norms (and we all know why the suddenly exploded). Even then, the median house is 410k, so all you needed/need you need to save is 65-80k in the /worst/ case.

3) Most people buying houses are/should be dual income, given the size of the median house. And given that you're competing against double income people (don't like it? you'd have to roll back the drive for emancipation/equality :)). If you double the income above you can save for a downpayment in like 3 years. I know families where neither partner probably makes 80k buying houses in boring cities e.g. in Texas - and not a starter house either... How? Dual income + non-coastal prices. And yeah, there are tons of jobs in the area.

All the more reason to adopt the bohemian philosophy and pursue other pleasures if one finds working these modern jobs unfulfilling, only so much time on this earth.

Anecdote: I am Gen Z. This story holds true for my parents and I.

My dad was a solider in Latin America, my mom, a nurse. Their job required, at most, 2 years of education beyond High School.

I am a data analyst, with a Bachelor's and a Master's. I earn more than they both did together, adjusted for inflation. My friends are in "specialized jobs" as well -- some even being doctors and lawyers. We still have zero hope of affording a house, let alone retirement.

Edit: for anyone wondering, my education was completely free as in my country college is free and I took my Master's in a Nordic country, where education is also free (I worked there to support myself too).

How much do you earn? Sorry if it’s rude, I’m genuinely just curious, I figured you’d make enough as a data analyst in any decent-COL living city to be fine

In the US many data analysis jobs are at tech companies, so they require living in expensive cities and competing with software engineers for homes, but pay only like 1/3-1/2 of what software engineers make.

Affording a house in which geographic market?

I am late late GenX, and I have no higher education, own my car out right (late model pretty nice), I will pay off my home in the next 5 years, and I financially support one of my parents. I make less than 6 figures so I would not consider myself to be "rich"

I think the key for me is the fact I choose not to incur educational debt getting a BS and/or MS, I also choose to live in a non-coastal region that does not have crazy housing prices. I also had lots of support from my parents* when I was younger so establish myself financially (like enabling me to be able to save for the down payment on this home)

I worked very hard and now make a pretty decent wage after decades of working lower wage jobs.

* To be clear this is just basic support like a stable roof over my head, the were lower middle class as well, their combined income was less than 6 figures, we had a basic home, food, etc but no luxuries, no vacations, one of the reasons I did not go to college was I did not want debt, and the family had no money for tuition

> * To be clear this is just basic support like a stable roof over my head,

Over the course of a few years that's well into 6 figures of support

I agree, but I struggled with the wording to covey that I did not come from a wealthy family with a trust fund or something like that

We are a "normal" midwest 2 parent household, in the 50th percentile of income band for the region.

My over arching point is there has to be some personal accountability. it is easy to be a victim, blame the system, blame rich people, blame everyone but yourself for your own circumstances.

Life is hard and often unfair, and I freely admit I am one serious illness away from bankruptcy, there are things we need to do change the system in many ways

However alot of the talk I see about "solutions" will in reality just make things worse and further push victim culture that i see today.

I don't have all the answer, but "woe is me, life is soo hard and unfair" attitude I see I can assure people is not a solution

>it is easy to be a victim

When you are one major accident or illness away from losing everything you have saved is kind of makes sense to blame those who have fought so hard to make sure typical people don't have access to effective health care at a reasonable cost.

illness or injury yes, as that would prevent me from working, and earning the money I do today

Medical costs however would not the cause of my problems as even in the worst case I would be protected by bankruptcy laws would would allow me to discharge my medical debt while keeping my primary home, and a significant chunk of my personal possessions.

Not if you are injured or dead because you couldn't afford the medical care necessary to fix you / cure you / treat you on an on going basis.

> We still have zero hope of affording a house, let alone retirement.

This is ridiculous. If that’s actually true, move. Lower your expenses. Figure out something else.

Moving thousands of miles sucks. Leaving all of your family, friends, and work is an enormous disruption to a life.

Life isn’t easy. Sometimes you have to make hard choices. What’s your point?

It is still reasonable to call it a broken system even if "move to Idaho" is an option.

It’s not broken just because it fails to deliver a luxury you want, when and where you want it, for the price you want to pay.

Having unreasonable expectations would be okay, but people are calling it broken because a generation before this had this luxury but pulled the ladder behind them. We are supposed to progress forwards, not backwards.

Housing prices were unreasonably low, people realized it, and now we ran out of housing inventory in the very desirable parts of the country. Still plenty of housing in other areas.

Manhattan used to be very cheap, but it hasn't been that way for at least 30 years. Too many people want to live there now. Basic economic rules of supply and demand dictate the prices.

The only solution is to not play the game. You want a house, buy it where you can afford. There's no magic fairy that will sell you a standalone house in Manhatten on a cashier's salary.

No house in Manhattan on a cashier’s salary has always been the case, that is not something that has regressed. You should check what areas people complain about being unaffordable before dismissing it as “of course NYC and California are expensive”.

You've inspired me, I'm going to make the hard choice and knock over a bank to build a better life. The police can't deal with all the crime these days, so I'd say the cost/benefit analysis is pretty good.

Leaving your support network while already struggling means that things like free childcare from family now needs to be made up for with professional childcare, career prospects can be lower without your professional network, and should you fall on hard times, like being laid off, divorced or getting sick/injured, you can end up in a much deeper hole than you would in place with a support network that can help you get back on your feet.

Okay, then if the solution to unsustainable circumstances isn’t making changes to your own circumstances that are well within your power, what is the solution?

Discouraging home buying as an investment, which seems to be behind the crazy rise in home prices over the year, would be a good start.

He literally just said “my dad was a soldier in Latin America”.

Apparently moving countries is good enough for his dad but another city in the US I asking too much?

Wow, I had actually never considered "figuring something else". Thanks for this amazing insight. It's almost as useful as telling someone with depression to "just be happy".

Rent in my town is one of the cheapest among bigger cities and I already live very frugally (public transit, only shop for groceries on sale and healthy food, don't go out to parties, don't drink, no addictions, no online subscriptions, only free hobbies + gym). GenXers and Boomers left a shitty world for Gen Z and, for some, life is just not the fairy tale you are used to - sorry mate.

They expect you to go move somewhere cheaper where your career prospects are stocking shelves at Walmart or serving food. Maybe if you're lucky, you could get a job for $36k from the one company in a 200 mile radius that's still hiring in your industry, but is on life support and won't be around in a decade. Also, please ignore the fact that its competitors have all gone out of business or left for better prospects in higher CoL areas, as well.

It's not so much a solution as it is a sneering dismissal of real problems that they don't want to hear about anymore.

Do you believe people deserve an easy office job, high pay, and the ability to buy a home in the cultural epicenter of their choosing?

How, exactly, are we going to supply all of that to the firehose of people graduating with mostly-useless degrees and job skills?

Yes of course people deserve that. There is incredible wealth everywhere. Society increased productivity and efficiency so much that workweek should be 3 days.

All the fruits are going to small number of people in the top. You say mostly useless degrees… what about all the mostly useless things - the lamborghinis? the never ending houses? the gimmicks, gadgets, iphones every 6 months…

Why do we supply that and dont supply basic living conditions to everyone?

How are you going to provide everyone ever bigger and bigger single family homes in ever smaller and smaller parcels of land? You must push some people out. That's the nature of big things. They expand and repel.

Why? Because the medium of exchange function stops the moment economic growth stops growing at the rate of productivity. This is because the richest individuals are hoarding employment opportunities and get to save money against the will of the rest of the population. If one guy is doing the work of two, then one person has nothing to do. We grow the economy two fold, so there is enough to do for everyone, even though there are enough products and services for everyone. It's that stupid.

> cheapest among bigger cities

You’re not forced to live in a bigger city.

You weren’t forced to uselessly over-educate yourself.

You aren’t forced to stay where you are, in a dead-end, complaining about how it’s everyone’s fault but your own.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic of you genuinely believe this..

Either way, telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstrap when a house costs over a million dollars and wages have stagnated for decades is very uncharitable.

I live in Canada, at this rate owning a house is a dream long gone for many people include me.

You realize there are areas with houses well under a million dollars? I live in a very nice area, and even here there are $450K houses. And if you go further away, there are much much cheaper houses.

Go on Zillow and do some basic research.

You realize those areas are nowhere close to the jobs? If you're looking for a job in Toronto, the closest place with an actual house under $450k is likely Windsor, which is around five hours away. Across southern Ontario right now the average price of a house is roughly a million dollars. Five hours is much too far to commute for work on a regular basis and a lot of jobs still require you to be there in person. Some things simply can't be done remotely.

I know things are tough right now but it will get better. Prices won't stay this high forever. They always come down eventually. Be patient and save your money. You'll find something when the time is right. I gave up on a house years ago and set my sights on a condo. Those are relatively affordable in comparison.

You are right. I chose to stay in a middle size city because there are jobs and rent is not too high.

My education is none of your concern, especially because I actually got paid both for my Bachelors and Masters, due to academic performance scholarships. It cost me nothing and still paid better than most jobs.

I’m not in a deadend, I do very well, I just have zero prospects of retiring or owning a house. I’m not complaining though, I got it better than many people. I’m grateful for that, and especially even more grateful for not having to be someone so bitter like you. Have fun dying soon of old age in your rich life, with no friends or family bc none can stand your boomer personality :)

> you have to choose your specialization wisely

The problem is that most people don't get to choose. There are few of these high paying jobs, so by definition most people are excluded. Either because they're not "smart" enough to get into elite training programs (e.g. medical school) or because they don't have enough money to spend years in training with zero or negative income.

that's in the US though

in Germany even if you're poor you can go to the University and succeed

my friends all studied and they were from normal working-class families

everyone gets a chance and all you need is put some effort

I thought that in Germany you were essentially hand-picked by age 10 what educational track you would wind up on.

if you didn't get picked you can still unlock the University track

you'd need to study 3 years to get your Abitur, however (which is only 1 year more than Gymnasium folks would)

ps. this may be different by state

Literally everyone goes to the gymnasium nowadays.

The US isn't different for 'regular' poor people. Two years of community college to be a nurse and you're good to go with a job in any city.

Except in the US there are enclaves of destitute poverty, generational poverty, extreme levels of incarceration, job prohibitions for low-level convicts (which can be 1/2 the men in some areas), high crime, schools with low graduation rates, weak access to things like dental care, poor transit options for medical care, pollution, insufficient care for the elderly, lack of mental health care, opioid addiction, children with high rates of lead poisoning, etc. Those people have the deck stacked against them.

You can go to college for free or extremely cheap in the US if you are poor as well. A lot of poor people don't know this which is a problem, but the option is still there.

There are other jobs than doctor. You can become a registered nurse with only a bachelor's ($100k+ salary). Engineering pays well. The trades pay well.

What doesn't pay well is zero-effort required jobs like Starbucks barista or social media influencer (is this even a job?). If anyone can do it with no pain required to pass some sort of schooling then it's not going to pay well. Nursing pays well because people are too lazy to make it through 4 years of schooling.

If you're going to come in and claim life circumstances prevent people from getting a 4 year degree, a public school costs at most $120k including living expenses for 4 years. Even if you get _no_ financial aid - which doesn't happen as FAFSA exists - $120k is an entirely manageable sum to pay off over the course of 20 years. And that calculation assumes you don't work at all during summers or during the school year.

Social media influencer is not a job, its a business, and the people doing well at it are making serious money, more than most software engineers. However it's more of a winner takes all market, akin to e.g. acting.

I'd get absolutely chewed out as a Starbucks barista or working in food service in general. I don't think it's fair to say it's a job that requires zero effort.

>You can become a registered nurse with only a bachelor's ($100k+ salary).

Where are you getting this number, that is not even remotely close to any of the nurses and lower level health practitioners I know

>Most simple labor will be automated very soon anyway.

It's not clear if there's a simple correlation between "training required" and "automation ready". For example, people have been talking about automating radiology for years, although I'm currently finishing up a study on one such system and we certainly aren't there yet. Meanwhile, the relatively "low skill" job of construction is considered very difficult to automate due to the high variability in environments and materials.

This uncertainty means that reluctance to join professions that "may" be automated in the coming years might be interpreted as a result of risk-aversion, and that risk is higher when the job training is longer.

Yes. You've never been able to buy a house or raise "a family of four" on minimum wage. Minimum wage was never intended to provide that level of income.

Here's what FDR said about the minimum wage:

> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

Minimum wage, as part of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, was described as a means to prevent "economic slavery". If you aren't capable of raising four children on it then it's not living up to it's original intention

Guess it depends on where you live. I live in Amsterdam Area and there is a shortage of plumbers in my city. The family owned business always have their agenda full, and they do well (even after taxes). You don't learn such a trait in a day or week. These guys are professionals, learned it via trait school. Its a different league compared to stuff like package or food delivery (though even for package delivery you need a drivers license). They are self employed family business while the food and package deliverers also have their 'own business'; in reality its to pay them less, have no severence package, no insurance, arrange their own tooling and vehicle, etc (ie. all the shit from gig economy). The problem is the government allows it while they could easily say if you don't get twice or triple minimum wage plus a top-down hierarchy you are not self employed. This clearly excludes the real consultant business as they earn more and also don't fall under top-down hierarchy. Another thing these deliverers should be allowed to is deliver for multiple companies. A self employed consultant picks their own clients, not the other way around unless there is things like confidentiality / conflict of interest.

Even jobs that pay horribly expect you to subject yourself to 10s of thousands of dollars in debt to have a degree now. It's ridiculous.

Yes, obviously there are still _some_ jobs with decent pay that do not require extensive higher ed. The point is there are far fewer. Demand for plumbers, etc has not grown to fill in the massive gaps left by deindustrialization.

The problem is that life isn’t a nice linear distribution of truth the way data heads think.

Continuing to play the “optimize myself based upon some meta game as see it” is not a viable strategy.

There is no science that says Musk is certainly on the right path to human longevity.

None of the rich are infallibly and unassailably correct; pointing at them as correct is an appeal to authority which is ludicrous when we have plenty of evidence to show politics is corrupted such that elites are “too big to fail.”

I’m not obligated to make choices based upon your view of the problem and your solution is more of the same “boot straps”.

This culture is a joke. Moral relativism it is; if my choices screw any of you, oh well. Free market.

This is part of why I left my job. I had the realization that my dream (homeownership/2 kids) was untenable with my income (~$135K TC) in my area. I could certainly get the credit for it, but my life would be one long hardship living under wage slavery, being house-poor, having little free time, paying exorbitantly to watch others raise my kids, and not having the opportunities I currently have...

I kinda gave up on that dream, being priced out. So I quit, either to make a TC which can afford that life (>$200K/yr) or to live the rest of my days in a hedonistic manner. Current plan is to grind leetcode/sys design and apply to high-TC companies over and over until I can afford the life I want, or die trying.

Where do you live that is unaffordable?

I still live there, a suburb of Portland OR. I locked in a cheap apartment years ago that's now rent controlled, which makes my situation possible. I currently pay about half what new renters pay. Without it, I'd be stuck in wage-slavery anyways and couldn't take the time to self-improve like this.

Moving is an option (my partner has restrictions: No states with anti-abortion laws, which removes many inexpensive places), if I go remote. Seems like every other dev has the same idea and that's helping drive prices up everywhere - along with other factors, of course.

Friends of mine who make a combined way less than you bought new construction across the river in Vancouver, WA.

Even staying just in the State of Oregon finds places under $200k (perhaps not the most desirable of building types, but certainly above a mobile home). But that may really put you in the "sticks" - south middle of Oregon is some of the most unpopulated land in the USA.

Rent-control may end up trapping you in another way; fear to move because of your current deal. Had a friend stay in a three-bedroom apartment long after he should have moved up to a house for just this reason.

That is an oddly-specific restriction your partner is demanding.

It may just be a shibboleth/canary for a set of state politics the partner disagrees with.

Seems very reasonable to want women to have access to healthcare they might need in worst case scenarios. I would even throw in requirements of parental leave, amongst other basic protections. Assisted suicide comes to mind too.

If abortion law, something you can simply drive to another state for a once in a lifetime event is in your requirements for where you can live, don't be surprised when people roll their eyes at you when you bitch about housing costs. Penny wise pound foolish.

One may also not want to contribute to those leaders on principle, and instead reward the other leaders even though it costs more.

Also, this type of stuff is costly to deal with, in terms of emotional and physical health, and probably even monetary costs:

https://www.thecut.com/2022/04/texas-woman-charged-with-murd...

> She miscarried at a hospital and allegedly confided to hospital staff that she had attempted to induce her own abortion and she was reported to the authorities by hospital administration or staff,”

Here, you have precedent being set that a woman should play it safe and withhold information from their healthcare provider, lest they be put through an ordeal like this.

> One may also not want to contribute to those leaders on principle, and instead reward the other leaders even though it costs more.

Of course, just don't expect me to care about your housing costs if that is your reason you choose to stay in a high COL area.

And I'm not sure what precedent that example sets relevant to me because nobody I know would try and induce their own abortion in an anti-abortion state instead of just driving out of state and going to a professional clinic.

Unless the state you're living in has made it illegal to transport someone across state lines for the purposes of getting an abortion. It has been done in a few places.

I wouldn't choose to raise my daughter in a place that would penalize or prevent her from getting the healthcare she needs because of other people's feelings about that care, and I certainly wouldn't want to be penalized for helping her, either. Same would go for any female in my family.

Look into equal work, equal pay companies (was trending on twitter like yesterday)

That I can remember of: Vercel, Gatsby, Gitlab, and much more.

Move to somewhere cheaper if you can?

Sounds like you haven’t given up on your ‘dream’ if you’re currently still grinding to attain it.

Hate to break it to you, but many, many people raise kids and own a home with way less than $135k, even in your area. If you don’t want to attempt it because it’ll be hard, stressful, risky, etc.; maybe that’s worth reflecting on? Sometimes your standards/expectations are what need to change.

Maybe it should not be risky to have 2 kids for an average person.

And also simultaneously, especially American culture is super judgemental of people whonhave kids and struggle financially in any way. It is big in personal responsibility in relation to having them, paying health care or ensuring school or even supervising etc. I find it unfair that in same environment people end up blamed for having too high standards when they internalize all that and insist on being responsible and financially well off.

COL and everything, 135K is like the 1% in Spain.

On topic: I have the same feeling. I'm trying to get a dev job, that would be a huge jump of income for me. But I'm 34, how much should I grind just to get "entry-level" stuff?

I was pretty unmativated in my job, just coasting by and pretty much doing the bare minimum that allowed me to be in peace with myself. Remote work increased my productivity and my hapiness overall, but it's still insufficient to buy a home, I'm basically a rent slave.

If I get a dev job, it will probably mean 30-40k to me, here in Spain. Maybe 50K if I manage to climb the ladder, given I'm 34.

With that income I can buy a flat (not a house) in my mid-sized spanish city, but that's about it.

135k is closer to 1% in the US than you’d think.

Not in the Bay Area, this is article from 2020 and even then $384k got you only in the top 10%. $105k was basically median.

Source: https://amp.thecalifornian.com/amp/4625295002

The national percentile doesn’t really matter when your income is not portable, and you can’t just move and take it with you.

As another post said, it’s doable on $135k but it’s not easy in the SF Bay Area.

> The national percentile doesn’t really matter when your income is not portable, and you can’t just move and take it with you.

With remote work, it's a lot more portable than you might think.

For some, yes. Unfortunately, this is not as evenly available as one might hope or even as widely as it was used during pandemic.

In any given city the number of homes for sale is a small percentage of the population, and even then most of those homes will trade between incumbent owners. Prospective first time buyers are competing over the number of new housing units & units freed by out-migration, downsizing, and death. People are living longer. Boomers are aging in place. It’s pretty ordinary that would-be buyers outnumber these units more than 99:1. So merely being in the top 1% of prospective buyers is necessary, not sufficient. And since prices have gone up recently, prospective buyers are higher income than the city as a whole.

As far as I know, most people who do "FP II" (vocational training) in Spain usually stays in those companies which they were doing their internship, so there are job opportunities. Usually are those known as "cárnicas" (companies that are in a lot of boring projects and pays enough), like but at least you can have a couple years of experience before hopping into a better company.

I have not too much experience in that sector, but I would say earning 30k-50k is only possible if you live in a city with good communications with the bigger ones, like Alcalá de Henares (near to Madrid, or Manresa (near to Barcelona). In some places with lower COL, like Andalucía, this is really difficult.

Don’t give up hope. Someone I mentored at a coding bootcamp just got a job as a junior software developer at age 33. It’s hard going but it works out for some people. If the career change would mean a lot more money for you, it might be worth it to keep trying.

Best of luck, whatever you decide.

Spaniard here. Over 50k is definitely possible, particularly now with so many remote opportunities available. Unfortunately, those positions are highly-coveted, so prepare for long interviews with multiple stages.

I think becoming a software engineer is totally possible for you, you are only in your mid-30s. However, I think you need to like the field, at least a bit. Do you enjoy it?

I do think so, yeah! I only seems a vast field and a daunting task to build stuff that I like. I can do some front-end stuff with no so much complexity all by myself, but I have to put quite a lot of work because I forget some syntax and I spend time debugging.

When I see experienced people in videos etc they do everything so much quicker. I know this is normal but it feels that it will take me a lot of time to get there.

I'm currently in a self-paced bootcamp (open-bootcamp) and so far I'm happy. I went with beginner knowledge on Git, CSS, JS and Python, and I improved a lot of my OOP understanding which was very lacking, and their full-stack path touches also Java. I plan to take some compiled languages too, purely out of interest.

They also have projects, although I'm not sure how they structure that, but I hope that takes me up to speed to be productive.

I bought a house with 3 kids in the bay area (San Leandro) on slightly less than $135k (wife stays at home), but I had a rent controlled apartment in SF for 9 years. I bought at a good time (August 2020) and was able to use 403b without penalty. Kids go to public schools. All three kids are in one room, but it’s a very large room, and we have a cottage which is my office for now but the teenager can go there later.

It’s possible but not easy (and harder now), and you have to be patient and careful and a bit lucky.

I currently have enough money saved to travel the world for 5 years. That's a long time. Imagine how much more fulfilling that journey would be than putting this money towards a lowend 1-bedroom condo in Vancouver and then working 20 years at a high-end career to pay it off. Insane proposition. VHCOL cities are not appealing anymore. I want out.

If your perspective on housing is "just need a place to live", then paying off a mortgage for 20 years is hardly a problem. You are tied down, yes, but if you have friends and family in the area and like where you live, it's hardly a problem - it's just a life.

(Of course this is different if the intention is "buy a place, wait until it rises in value, flip it, and repeat")

That said, you need to want to put down roots, and you need to like where you're putting those down. I love Vancouver, I've been here 20 years, I left for 5, and came back. This is where I want to raise my kids. But this is a highly privileged perspective backed by having a good well-paying job that lets me afford to live here (in a 3-bedroom condo in east van).

Still, travelling the world for 5 years sounds like a fantastic plan to figure out what you want to do in life and scouting out parts of the world that you can imagine living. That could mean finding something more rural, or finding a city more off the beaten path that you identify with that doesn't have international prestige and ridiculous VHCOL.

honestly, "hey, spending 20 years of your life paying to "own" the roof over your head" sounds sad to me...unless you have dependents and need the stability

not everyone has dreams of planting roots

If you don't want to plant roots, then you don't need to own a house, and then the whole debate about housing prices does not apply to you.

Rent, travel and see the world, and be free!

That won't solve the problem. Soon you will complain that you can't live in a mansion on your $300k/yr salary.

> > “My dad got a job straight out of high school, saved up, and bought a house in his 20s,” said Anne Dakota, a 21-year-old receptionist from Asheville, North Carolina, who earns minimum wage. “I don’t even think that’s possible for me, at least with the current money I make.”

This anecdote is presented as the norm, but it’s actually far from it.

“Minimum wage” is the tip off that the journalist went out searching for the most extreme anecdote they could find. For all the talk about minimum wage jobs, only around 1% of jobs actually pay federal minimum wage. That number is falling rapidly as it becomes trivial for anyone to walk into a $15/hr job with benefits almost anywhere except the smallest towns.

Of course it’s not possible for someone earning minimum wage to save up money and buy a house in their 20s. Minimum wage jobs are literally the lowest paying jobs a person could possibly find. Anchoring expectations that no job should exist unless it pays enough to buy a house in your 20s in any city you want is blatantly unrealistic.

> For all the talk about minimum wage jobs, only around 1% of jobs actually pay federal minimum wage.

I see this stat a lot and it leaves me wondering how many people are within, say, 50 cents or 5%[0] of minimum wage. The percent of workers earning minimum wage doesn't seem that useful (and I guess neither would the figures returned for my request).

In any case I'd find hours required to live alone within ~30 minutes of work a more compelling statistic. It adjusts for CoL and represents a reasonable lifestyle to shoot for.

0: not suggesting these are equivalent figures

Also note that state/city minimum wage is often higher than federal minimum wage, so using only federal minimum wage stats is not a full picture. e.g. Washington's minimum wage is ~$14.50/hr, so nobody in that whole state is making federal minimum wage, but I doubt anybody is living well on "double the federal minimum wage" in most of the state.

It's not just the wage that matters but the consistency of the wage, and the benefits that go with it (or more often don't at that level), and the expenses that go with it. Consider two examples.

* Person A is making minimum wage, but with good benefits, consistent hours, and a reasonable cost to live within walking distance of the job.

* Person B is making minimum wage plus a buck per hour, but is technically not a full-time employee so no benefits at all. Shifts are often changed with little notice, sometimes to hours that are not very transit-friendly, and living within walking distance is utterly off the table for anyone short of a rich techie.

Who's really better off? It's easy for full-time internet commentators to look at simplistic stats and draw simplistic (self serving) conclusions, but your metric is much better and closer to the ones used by people who actually study issues such as poverty.

> Minimum wage jobs are literally the lowest paying jobs a person could possibly find.

That is incorrect. There are whole categories of jobs that are exempt from minimum wage, and that doesn't even count gig work.

>There are whole categories of jobs that are exempt from minimum wage

I'm presuming you're talking about tipped jobs? It seems reasonable to presume that they earn close to minimum wage when factoring in tips, otherwise people would switch to non-exempt jobs.

> otherwise people would switch to non-exempt jobs.

But we're seeing this in the US, between covid restaurant layoffs and closures; Tipped dining service is struggling to recruit.

Tipped employees are required to be paid minimum wage if their tips don’t equal 7.25/hr. Their employer is federally mandated to make up the difference.

Having said that, most tipped employees are doing much, much better…which is why they aren’t clamoring to go wash dishes in the back.

There are far more exemptions than that.

https://www.minimum-wage.org/articles/minimum-wage-exemption...

Trucking is a big one.

Gen Z's parents are my age or younger and IME there were few people who graduated with a high school diploma and bought a house. I bought my first house at 39 though obviously the housing bubble had a lot to do with that. I never felt particularly worried about my lack of home ownership. Pre-kids it allows for a lot of flexibility, one can easily move around as desires and job opportunities change. I'm not sure why anyone would want a house in their 20s honestly.

It seems like younger generations view of their parents times are getting rosier and rosier.

>It seems like younger generations view of their parents times are getting rosier and rosier.

I think so. Next will be Gen Alpha (apparently) who will complain about how easy Gen Z had it or maybe they'll blame Millenials.

I'm Gen X and in a small town I was never able to afford a home. And now rent is nuts people are being kicked out for "reno-victions". My parents born in '43 and '44 managed to buy a house but with help a program similar to Habitat for Humanity only a local organization. And then the early 80s inflation hit but they had a locked in mortgage but many people lost their homes.

It's always the same thing history repeats. But now people have so much more opportunities with the Internet they can choose almost any job. Even for me working from home was futuristic fantasy if it was even that. I think the trend to dehumanize and blame previous generations for the current generations' problems is a dangerous trend.

>dehumanize and blame previous generations for the current generations' problems is a dangerous trend.

It's been going on since as long as I've been alive. I'm mid-late GenX and I remember the news constantly telling me my generation is lazy. I remember them doing the same thing with GenY, and now GenZ, neither of which was true outside the norms of every generation. Modern news is a blight on society.

If my kid had this mindset I would consider myself a failure as a parent. I grew up edge of starvation poor, my wife is also from low income family. Both of us are multiples of median income now and can provide a stable home for our son in mid 30s. It took 10 years of doing stupid shit and wasting time because I didn't have support or direction in life. Realistically, if I had better role models for success, I could have reached my current level of income 5 years earlier, and be much better off in life now. If my kid expected to have everything sorted out at 20 I would think hard about how I failed to give him enough reality checks.

"I suffered so my kids have to learn to suffer too" is not a good line of thinking if we want to improve the world and the economy for the next generation

Removing every obstacle from your child’s life will cripple them for life.

Giving your children unrealistic view of how the world works is a recipe for suffering.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of our modern economy. We have rockets that go to space. We have nuclear weapons. We have automated industrial facilities. We have advanced healthcare. We have the internet and computers. We have basically everything, except the basics.

The reason for that is the same and will stay the same, for the entirety of humanity. Land is a finite resource that must be shared with other humans. Money is a public utility that must be shared with other humans. Humans don't like sharing these exclusive types of things.

You have these people complaining that India should "fix poverty" instead of doing a miniscule (by international standards) space program. The solution to homelessness requires existing landowners to give up their land. They don't want to give up their land, so instead, homelessness acts as the pressure relief valve/externality. In fact, homelessness is considered a price worth paying.

The same is true with money. People like having more money than they actually need. The ability to save against the wishes of other people and thereby indebt them is exactly what they want, the resulting unemployment is considered a price worth paying.

Since around the 1960s, we've had large economic forces greatly increasing the supply of labor affecting wages:

  1. Women entering the workforce, essentially doubling the labor pool.
  2. Immigration - at least a million a year, every year.
  3. Globalization - instead of local workforce, many companies can now outsource labor to cheaper countries without regulation.
  4. Manufacturing - due to NAFTA, companies who once manufactured in the US can now get much cheaper labor to Mexico. This is related to #3.
  5. Automation - The amount of labor needed to perform a task has been greatly reduced.

To sum it up in my mind, US companies have more or less fixed poverty at a global scale while making a profit at the expense of US workers. #3 and #4 are largely a result of removing tariff and trade regulations. #2 is also a result of government policy. Easing any of these things over decades, one at a time would have been preferred, allowing the economy to adjust. Unfortunately they all happened in a roughly 30 year period between the 1970s and the 2000s, and have accelerated since.

As more of the American workforce voice their opinions and try to win the WFH battle, #3 will re-accelerate.

The wfh battle won't be impacted. USA Immigration process is absolutely horrendous and hiring remotely essentially concedes their wfh position (role is able to work remotely) . Globalization implies labor will be cheaper opting for remote foreign labor, but there will be constraints to doing so and I suspect the best companies will adapt by capitalizing on wfh as a "benefit" rather than come to conflict with opinions of talent.

US benefitted significantly from being the only major power that didn't have its labor pool and industrial base crippled by WWII.

Absolutely correct. And if you look out share of the global GDP has been steadily declining relative to the wealth of other nations since then. The days of American hegemony are numbered, thank god.

Land is finite but there is more than enough if we fix our stupid policies.

Yes but what about landlord feelings? Have you considered those??

Cool it marx. This just comes off as an angst ridden teenager throwing up his hands shouting "I give up!". Rather than evaluating what careers can get them where they want to be.

Who told you a new car and owning a house is an "entry level" thing? If you expect somebody to give that to you you're up for a disappointment. A new car is an expensive thing, and a house is even more. You need to work a lot to be able to afford expensive things. Sure, you can make the life satisfying right now - e.g. by buying some drugs. But it will become very unsatisfying pretty soon after that. Because there's no such thing as getting expensive things without working - for most of the people. Sure, tiny minority gets lucky. But the majority works - and gets those expensive things after a long time, because it takes a long time to earn them. And one of the reasons it may be harder to earn them now is that a lot of people have a desire to consume, but no desire to produce - but somebody has to produce what they consume. It's no wonder it becomes harder for the people who produce something to get by - the unearned consumption has to come from somewhere.

It is interesting to me that relatively few people respond to this situation—housing constraints leading to high prices (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388)—by working to remove the regulatory constraints that prevent people from being able to buy or rent housing units.

I think things would be better if interest rates were higher as well. Inflated home prices are from high demand, but also because so many people can get loans for 350k. People would be less willing to deal with that price tag if they had to deal with 5-7% interest. You'd start having smaller homes being built and lower competition in the market. It would also incentivise people to save for down payments instead of the pay as you go model we have now.

Those regulatory constraints are there because people want them to be there.

> Why be miserable grinding for two decades just so you can get one hand on the ladder?

Simply put, because the alternative is worse. What is your BANTA? Living in destitution? You don't have to go extreme into the "enjoy life now" end either; it's a balance.

I just want to point out that this attitude is actually strictly rational.

Suppose you have a credit card that is not yet at its limit, and you are not accumulating late fees... you can buy a $200 TV in exchange for paying $5/mo in perpetuity, at a 30% APR. Interest rates connect the indefinite future back to the past and in fact they set an equivalent time horizon. So you can phrase the exact problem as asking what cancelling an unused $5/mo Netflix account is really worth to you, and the answer is again $200. The indefinite future of payments is just 1/r, a conversion factor of 40 months in this case.

If you are getting into late fees those can triple interest or so, you might have a time horizon only a year off. Or if you are into payday loans and 400%/year interest, the indefinite future is literally only 3 months away, you cannot rationally “think past tomorrow.” At 30%/year your rational time horizon is a little over 3 years. If you then have debt paid back and a retirement account in an S&P index fund and we call that 10% year on year, your indefinite future is 10 years away.

“People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years” indeed, 5-10 years is financial eternity for most people!

There is a lot of confirmation bias in these stories.

Half the issue is that people have been indoctrinated to expect home ownership and long for some golden age seen on TV that never existed.

Home ownership was never universal in the US. It has been within a few percent of 65% since the 1960s[1]. It was always out of reach for the lowest earners, like those that make minimum wage.

Some people whos parents owned houses will inevitably be unable to afford them themselves. Some people whos parents couldn't will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

> people have been indoctrinated to expect home ownership

Expecting to own the building and land on which you live and from which you contribute to society is a product of indoctrination? That makes sense if you're completely against land-ownership (which is, on the surface, a reasonable idea), but surely accepting the only current alternative (paying rent) is the product of an even more sinister form of indoctrination?

Maybe indoctrination isn't the best word for it, but people came to expect something from their lives that has never been true for any generation in this country in the past. I'm for homeownership, but that doesn't mean the expectation is based in reality. People grew up on media that had a distorted picture of life that was never true or a broad swath of the population

It seems to me like there’s a big difference between “since the 1960s” and “always.” Is there no good data going at least 100 years further back?

I found this data going back to the late 1800s. It looks like 25% was the rate at the turn of the 20th century climbing to present levels after ww2

https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state...

That largely conforms to my gut that the urbanization concomitant with the Industrial Revolution would have led to a nadir in home ownership. I wish it went back earlier!

Unmotivated people were always in this same boat, and always will be.

Counter narrative: Nigerians come to the US and have excellent upward mobility. The ones I know are willing to work hard, defer gratification, and sacrifice for their children.

You are literally comparing the cream of the crop vs average people.

Remember: this was the plan for decades. You will own nothing. And you will be happy.

American boomers grew up in lot of privilege after winning world war 2. Now is a different time where the world is more competitive. A lot of jobs in manufacturing have gone to China, in the services sector to India. Dancing off on Tiktok and working at Starbucks won't give you a comfortable life like your parents had. So better start grinding those leetcode questions like the rest of the world does. American hegemony is all but over.

some people on Tiktok making good money with product placement, same for YouTube. Starbucks however is dead-end.

I wonder how many people spend significant amount of their early working life doing low-wage jobs whilst trying to "make it big" as an influencer.

And I wonder what percentage of Starbucks managers started out as Starbucks wage-slaves.

The YouTuber / professional gamer scene is hyper competitive these days. I know someone who has spent the last 5 years trying to make it on YouTube and has not really made any progress.

I believe store managers do tend to come from on the floor staff but there is likely no path from store manager to Starbucks corporate.

Programming is almost uniquely privileged where you end up interacting with higher up corporate positions frequently and you will pretty easily be able to learn their jobs and jump over if you want.

While retail workers don’t see at all what goes on in an office separate to them. They just get instructions dictated down.

YouTube personality/gamer star is this generation’s Hollywood. People used to move to LA and work jobs whilst trying to get a break into the industry — and of course very very few ever succeeded.

Asheville is an increasingly trendy and prestigious resort town for very rich people from all over. It is not a place I would expect anyone to buy their first home.

> ______ is an increasingly trendy and prestigious ____ town for very rich people […] It is not a place I would expect anyone to buy their first home.

I've heard this about pretty much every place, at this point.

("Move somewhere cheaper!" … and get "geographic multiplier"'d into a lower salary, and you're right back where you started.)

I am currently remote, but considering tactically moving to NYC because the increase in pay is better than the increase in rent / col. It serves no benefit to the company (even harms it) but that's HR for you.

Historical median inflation-adjusted incomes have increased around 14-16% in Asheville since 2005 [0]. So there is something to the idea that this person's father probably went and found a home in a then-unknown location, rather than starting out with the expectation that he'd be able to live in a trendy, high-cost locale as an entry level laborer.

0: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/north-carolina/ashevill...

Urban and productive places should just build a ton more housing. It is frankly insane that people feel entitled to pastoral scenes 20 minutes from SF. But I’m not sure that applies to these mountain getaway towns that only exist in the first place because they are not the city.

It's very difficult for me to believe they're making $7.25 in Asheville like the article says. If you're making that, it's a matter of choice.

I’m a gen Zer (albeit on the older side) and I don’t feel this way about work. Probably depends what field you’re in, I quite like being a programmer.

I’m a millennial and I feel the same way, but I think a lot of this is due to a privileged position we have in the labor force. It’s the whitest of white color jobs. We’re still exploited as any trade, but it’s easier to be an architect or a lawyer than it is to be a construction worker. Especially over time and with contradictions sharpening as they are.

High-skill tradespeople often make more than architects. Not at the star level, of course, but architecture is generally a poorly-paying field for the amount of schooling and intellect it requires.

unless we start seeing trillion-dollar building contracts, this will not change. Tech jobs pay so much because the stakes are so high when we're talking trillion dollar companies, first-mover advantage, and network effects. Architecture is the opposite of tech in this regard.

True yeah. I was just thinking of other sorts of “high qualification” high paid trades which require lots of investment to create.

Software development is very much an exception. It’s one of the precious few fields with compensation that’s somewhat tracked with inflation and has a somewhat reasonable barrier to entry.

As a millennial in my 30s I was fortunate to be able to break in and start earning a nice paycheck without a college degree, but even that possibility is deteriorating now due to a sudden flood of entry level applicants. Companies are now seeking mid-level-to-senior candidates almost exclusively because they don’t want to bother with training and mentoring a newbie, they want someone who can hit the ground running. There are still some possibilities for one to get one’s foot in the door with barely paid or unpaid college internships but from my perspective the gates are slowly closing.

It’s interesting to read people like Marx when he was writing about the class society he lived in because you can see how much the bottom has fallen out of the middle. He describes the specialist artisans who are capable, sometimes, of upward mobility into “petite bourgeois”. Not much directly translates in the “middle” class any more but this resonated for me. We are kept happy but slowly we are becoming less and less capable of owning.

> I quite like being a programmer.

This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.

That’s the thing. I know this sounds glib, but the barrier to entry is so low ($20 5th hand laptop will do just fine to do first-steps development), I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders. So many people say “oh I could never do what you do”, and I’m like “I’m a shaved ape who wanted to play computer games and accidentally ended up learning stuff, you absolutely can”. Then they just go on saying that they’re helpless.

Out of the hundreds I’ve had this conversation with, two that I’m aware of took my advice and just tried to start making stuff. One now runs a dev shop, the other is at alphabet making bank.

I think, more than anything else, learned helplessness is crippling people. so many are mollycoddled from cradle to grave and never understand their own capabilities.

> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

I was able to excel at CS in college because my parents shoved a DOS computer in front of me when I was 5 and challenged me with math and general problem solving at every opportunity. My whole childhood was basically debugging and critical thinking. If you didn't have that growing up, it's really hard to start learning the skills when you're 30.

As a counterpoint, I never even had a computer until sophomore year in college. I made it through CS and then about 20 years writing code. Now I’m more of a manager but still save a few things in the sprint for myself from time to time.

I know plenty of people who learned to code and never cracked that entry level job.

I almost left programming because I couldn't get past the interviews or deal with no one wanting to hire juniors. I don't have a cs degree. What a night mare. Dumb luck I am where I am now

Congrats on making it through the great bottleneck.

Yeah for the average adult without much experience debugging and hacking other things, "learned to code" probably means something more like "can write fizzbuzz in 30 minutes with significant effort" than "can debug complex systems under pressure" or "can turn business requirements into production code efficiently." The former will obviously open far fewer doors than the latter two.

> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

let me guess: because not anybody wants to be a programmer? different people have different ambitions, not anybody needs to be a coder

and life would be pretty mundane if all people were doing is writing code

> because not anybody wants to be a programmer?

Almost anybody who works in retail, manual labor, etc would jump on a job offer for 5x more money, better hours, and better working conditions. The reason they don't is they can't get the offers because the skills are hard to learn.

Try volunteering to teach some college courses on an entry level technical subject. It'll help develop some empathy for why not everyone can code. For me it was physics. I was optimistic. I thought I could teach anyone physics. After investing many hours in some of the lower ranking students I realized my mistake. Not everyone has the kind of process oriented thought processes needed to think about math or coding. Nobody knows how to teach it. All technical subjects assume you can think in this manner because they don’t know how to teach it.

Anyone talented at something thinks everyone is like them. Some singers think this too, they’ll say all you have to do is X, Y and Z and you’ll be a great singer like me, easy!

Given the right teaching materials, it seems like almost anyone can learn programming. But the difficulty lies in motivation and discipline.

It’s like saying “I don’t understand why not everyone is fit, all you need is to eat less and go walk outside for free”.

I have taught a few people programming and almost everyone started picking up the basics and moving along well but some would just completely give up once no one was prodding them. This usually correlates with other things like health and general life situation. Some people just aren’t motivated to get up, go run, eat healthy, and learn a valuable skill.

To add to the other answers, it's also because most persons are bad at coding. They do understand the basic of an if/else/loop but can't create any kind of process with them.

No one starts our understanding it. I remember I spent at least a year reading Java books and tutorials without understanding it at all until I eventually stumbled on some content that was simpler and ground through the learning process.

If you are motivated and have the right material to learn from, you can do basically anything. This seems pretty true for me. I haven’t found any skill I can’t just grind through learning if I put the time in.

Sometimes I wonder if it is, partly, due to how software development is framed. E.g. on HN I’ve seen people describe software development as basically maths. But Grace Hopper described programming as like planning a dinner party, requiring “patience and an ability to handle detail”.[0] A C++ dev I know, who has a languages degree, said learning to code was similar to learning a very unfamiliar grammar.

If more software developers used examples like those, maybe more people would consider software as a career? If nothing else, seems like I should give it a go when I have those conversations with people.

[0] Adafruit have an image of a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan, which quotes Hopper. https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/03/12/a-1967-cosmopolitan-art...

> I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders

The market is flooded with coders, which is why you see coveted companies have the exhausting interview processes that they do. And that's where the big bucks are made.

Smaller companies with low or inexistent barriers to entry may appear appealing to your average bootcamp coder that lacks deep understanding that comes with a CS degree and/or years of experience, but they come with their own severe drawbacks one of them being the fallacy that one can jump from these to the FAANGs, another being the veneer of a career while in reality you're as expendable and replaceable as a minimum wage worker.

not everyone finds programming interesting. and not everyone is interested in learning. got to have both to really make it in this field.

Yeah but frequently when I tell people they could program if they wanted to they just respond by saying they’re not looking for a grind or whatever. I think some of this is just young people being young people and that attempts to recast it as some huge shift are misguided. Wasn’t it gen X that was supposed to be the slacker generation? This is all low-grade pop sociology.

hard agree. the number of times people have asked me about getting into tech and failed to follow up on "connect with me on linkedin" or "email me so i can give you links" is way too damn high.

I think today, there is much more variance compared to 50-70 years ago. Those who have high intelligence and 'drive' have much more opportunity for advancement and to become wealthy ,compared to smart people of 70 years ago. But, opportunities for people who are not so smart may be more limited. Nowadays, you got plenty of smart people making money with high-paying white collar professional jobs, right out of college, whereas 50-70 years ago, such jobs didn't really exist and pay was lower relative to inflation and even after accounting for student loan debt. There was no equivalent of $400k tech job in the 70s. There were plenty of manufacturing jobs, but the pay even then was not that lucrative. Same for being a doctor, a lawyer, or a consultant. Those jobs payed more, relatively speaking, but not like we see today.

I recall thatvstats say the opposite - social mobility went down. Smart people with drive had better chances to improve 50-70 years ago.

>> “My dad got a job straight out of high school, saved up, and bought a house in his 20s,” said Anne Dakota, a 21-year-old receptionist from Asheville, North Carolina, who earns minimum wage. “I don’t even think that’s possible for me, at least with the current money I make.”

> I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car.

This makes sense if the father were also a receptionist in a similar sized company.

There's also a bit of over romanticism regarding being depressed and everything being shit which I think throws boomers a curve ball. They see the existential dread response to lack of prospects and think people are like this because they don't have avocado toasts, when the only way out is to breadth first search for Google. If you don't want that, I don't know what your prospects are nowadays coming out of university. I don't envy the kids that had covid high-school or university either, that must've been a terrible experience.

The average house sold in 1946 cost $5.25K. The median salary at the time was $3K.

The average house sold today costs $374K. The median salary is $51K.

You can argue that those houses that were sold back then were smaller, but they were also made of vastly better materials than modern home construction, and it's not like people even have the opportunity of buying those smaller homes unless they want to live in a slum.

I agree with the sentiment, but what was the median house price v. the average?

A median is one such average. By wanting to know the mean or the range shows that you're trying to cherrypick the result you want.

> The average house sold in 1946 cost 1.75X. The median salary was X.

> The average house sold in 2022 cost 7.33Y. The median salary is Y.

Its clear from all the communications, unionizations, Great Resignation, and more that wages are completely broken.

And that above shows what it looks like.

We're one of the lucky ones. We're finalizing our recent house purchase. First time homebuyer. $375k , which was at the top of our budget. I make $150k, which is still a 2.5 factor differential... Which is .75 ABOVE what it would have been in the post-war boom 1946.

Im in my 40's, and its taken me 20+ years to actually get enough of a footing to even look at a proper house. I feel immensely sad for all younger. Can't afford a $600/mo mortgage so they're stuck with $1000 rents.

Loans are for people to borrow money when they don't need money.

> A median is one such average. By wanting to know the mean or the range shows that you're trying to cherrypick the result you want.

I think GP is just trying to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. To me it almost comes across as you cherry picking data (average house price vs median salary).

It's just the data that's available.

The median house price so far this year is over $390K, by the way. The earlier value was for last year.

Q1 of 2022 is just shy of $430K according to the St. Louis Fed.

That's where I was going, yeah.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=OBTh only has data for median house prices from 1963, and household income from the mid '80s. The spread growing isn't heartening.

While housing has indeed gotten more expensive you can't compare absolute prices.

First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946. Consumer demands are far higher too.

Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay. When measured this way it's been hovering around 30% for the past 40 years in the UK.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-house-prices-unlikely-cra...

The data is inherently skewed. You only have a mortgage if you can afford the down payment in the first place and so of course it’ll follow the age old rule of 1/3 of your income. This doesn’t capture how housing supply hasn’t followed population growth/ all the people stuck paying rent in perpetuity.

>> First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946

Is that true? Something like 40% of the UK housing stock was built pre-WW2. Sure they’ll no longer have a coal bunker and they most likely have had insulation upgrades etc. but a pre-WW2 house in 1946 is still a pre-WW2 house today. The modern build will have less living space, predominately through smaller room sizes but should be cheaper to heat.

>> Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay

That lops off all the people who can’t afford a mortgage so i dont think that logic works.

Yes its true, see details in this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31156040

> First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946.

Are you? You're getting a place to live and property you own.

You are likely getting lead free, asbestos free, central heating(cooling), double pane windows, vastly better insulation, more fire resistant, better and more appliances, and depending on locations things like: full basements, attached garages, screened in patio/porch, or pools.

> While housing has indeed gotten more expensive you can't compare absolute prices.

Horseshit. Homes built in 1946 are selling for millions of dollars, even if they're going to be torn down and rebuilt for marginal cost. You're not buying a house, you're buying the land and taking responsibility for everything on it.

And even then, the lumber you get out of such an old house is quite valuable virgin oldgrowth, a better quality product than you can buy at a lumber yard today.

And, to pick a nit... comparing the median income to median house price is an examination of relative price, not absolute.

In 1946 that house was in the styx with bugger all facilities and infrastructure about it. Fast forward 76 years of development and that house is now in the center of a large city full of facilities and opportunity.

To compare the 1946 houses location you need to pick something with the same level of amenity, which will be probably a country town.

The problem is that a cheaper house in the country no longer has jobs. Americans don't earn enough in average to afford to support local businesses, so every dollar made gets basically exported from the town to walmart or amazon.

That $150k house in the boonies, even if it was built yesterday, has less value, because the community it is in is in the process of dying and has no opportunity. That same house in the same town sold for $60k in 1989, while that very town was much more functional, alive, and happy than it is now.

>but they were also made of vastly better materials than modern home construction

No way this is even close to being true. Newer houses with all the advancements in materials and construction science are much better than the post-war garbage that was spewed out.

I made a small fortune in my early 20s fixing and renovating those post-war houses. They're almost universally junk in comparison.

>People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years to get material rewards, but beyond that it feels pointless.

Let's test that theory. So assuming that person in their 20's doesn't want to move to the Bay Area/Seattle/Austin/NYC they can find a nice house in a metro area within a 20-30 minute drive of plenty of medium-high paying jobs, for around $200k.

So assuming they're smart enough to put 20% down on that house, they need to save around $40k. In your 5-10 year time frame that means they need to save $4-$8k per year.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the generation dropping $1,200 on iPhones and having an average of 50 games in their Steam account can probably save like $5k per year if they really try.

> So assuming that person in their 20's doesn't want to move to the Bay Area/Seattle/Austin/NYC they can find a nice house in a metro area within a 20-30 minute drive of plenty of medium-high paying jobs, for around $200k.

Maybe in 2000. I don't think that's true in any major metropolitan area (say over 1 million). Which is also coincidentally where most people live.

You would be wrong. I just pulled up Metro Detroit (4.5 million people) on Zillow and set my filter to $200k or less and there are hundreds of homes available within the metro area. Hmmm...maybe that's cheating let's check again with - Cincy, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St Louis, KC, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Albuquerque etc. Working my way down the list of metro areas exceeding a million and there are tons of homes under $200k in every single one of those.

You left out the "within 20-30 minutes of a high paying job" limitation. I looked on Zillow as well, it wasn't uncommon for those houses (if they were within 30 minutes) to be in such disrepair they needed to be leveled and rebuilt. It's disingenuous to look only at a sticker price.

But yeah, within the hour and a half commute zone of a metro area, you can find affordable housing.

>You left out the "within 20-30 minutes of a high paying job" limitation.

Nope, again using the Detroit example you have Warren, Oak Park, Southfield etc literally sharing its border and within a 20-30 minute drive of anywhere in downtown Detroit or further out in ritzy Oakland county. Same goes for Arlington, Irving and several other suburbs of Dallas. I'd keep going down the list, but you get the point. Pretty much every major metro areas has housing under $200k with less than a 30-minute drive of downtown or major job centers in suburbs.

I know California is a different world, and that's fine. But the US is quite large with many large cities where you can find good careers and affordable housing. It just may not look as cool to post on Instagram...which I guess is the bigger problem.

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