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Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

HN comments about profits, CEOs, share holders and executives are increasingly resembling twitter takes.

Because HN is increasingly realizing they're actually a part of the working class.

Bingo. After about a decade of tech workers thinking we were part of some global aristocracy just because we could afford payments on a Tesla and could (briefly) get multiple job offers from companies... The minute we get into a bear market, suddenly we're all César Chávez, fighting for the working class. How the turn tables!

How can you count yourself as working class? Even outside top US salaries most of us could probably take several years off the job without any huge issues due to savings/investments.

I mean of course we are providing labor for money, but this is very different than a blue-collar worker living paycheck to paycheck doing hard manual work.

We have far more in common with blue-collar workers living paycheck to paycheck than we have with an socialite whose inheritance grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.

Fundamentally, almost all of us are N missed paychecks away from bankruptcy. For a lot of people, that N is 1, for some, it's 2 or 3, or even higher if you managed to save wisely. But we all have some number N. And the fact that we have that number should unite us against the few people on the far side of the derivative curve whose N is infinite. Tech workers had their relatively brief moment in the sun where their N was maybe 10-20, it got to our heads a little, and we started thinking we were "very different than a blue-collar worker".

I agree, of course, that tech people are closer to the worker class than the capitalist class and there are many common interests.

On the other hand, as long as you manage your finances sanely, even in Europe you can reach a FIRE state (maybe not 100% retirement, but very close to it) in your 40s without too many issues.

If someone in tech is close to bankruptcy, due to missing a couple of paychecks, I really have a hard time to understand how they accomplished that. Of course, that may be different, if you just started your career.

Nevertheless, I know exactly 0 blue-collar workers (and I know quite a few) that could do FIRE in their 40s, and with sane financial management decouple themselves from the whole runmill in like 2-3 decades.

Developers increasingly see those factions as being opposed to them, so you're seeing that in aggregate sentiment. You can view this dispassionately as a kind of empirical signal.

Squeezing people doesn't make them like you. Who knew.

I'm so bored with these comments. Companies care more about profits than people - can we put it on a banner somewhere so we all get over it?

Shareholders care more about profits and than people. Coops and nationalized companies do just fine at caring about people.

Nationalized companies care about the hierarchy that ends in the parliament or political system of the country they're in, which can be a mixed bag and doesn't really involve caring about their employees beyond the basic decency of their overseers.

That sounds exactly like anti-nationalization propaganda, I wonder why, and doesn't actually make sense if you understand what nationalization actually is.

Basically.

Profiters of stocks are evil, and take advantage of the poor developers!!

Why don't you own stock then, it's public?

ANGER

Because executives get issued an order of magnitude more stock than you could ever reasonably buy?

That doesn't prevent you from trading the stock and making (or losing) money.

Sure, but there is a clear disparity between how much you make on the amount of stock you can reasonably have versus how much executives make on the amount of stock they have. The parent comment implies there is some kind of level playing field here, which there really isn't.

that is moving goalposts. The CEOs will have more stock beause they have larger wealth and earn more money.

Cool, could they start paying dividends so that I can keep my shares and get money each year instead of having to sell them?

You can sell X% of your stock every year and pretend it’s a X% dividend. It’s the same thing. It’s not like you get any voting rights.

But at the end of the day I'd be left with no stock.

Dividends could be paid out indefinitely as long as the company is profitable.

No, you wouldn’t because the stock price would keep going up so you would sell less and less each time and when the price got too high, the stock would do a split. Every time a dividend is paid out, the stock price drops by an identical amount. It’s the same thing as selling. This wouldn’t be a problem unless you have BRK.A, for the other 99.99999% of stocks it’s fine. Do the math yourself and see.

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