Losing two jobs in one year
jbennetcodes.medium.com
jbennetcodes.medium.com
Work is now just work. Five years ago it had to be your passion it is what you wanted or at least i wanted to be defined by. After seeing how little any company cares about people work is what i try to spend the least amount of time doing. At 5 or ideally 4 i clock out and only respond if I am paged.
Additionally i have checked out of the tech scene and just spend work time on any needed continuing education. Am I a good developer anymore? Who cares. Im good enough to pass whatever the stupid circuit of interviews is and honestly that is all that matters anymore.
I think your cohort is just aging.
But it could also be aging, as nothing helps you understand life is short like seeing obituaries of people only a few years older than you (or even younger than you).
Doing the job then going home is not a new philosophy. The people living to work are just gullible.
No one I know, besides him, has job loyalty. Not the senior dev in Seattle making 400k, not the dog trainer, not the chef, not even my parents. And younger generations are just more and more cynical about it.
As they should be.
When you find a place like this, I advise hanging around for a while.
Like building a product so well made that it makes people say “I’ve searched for 15 years for this product”;
Like watching this self-absorbed geek grow from a 40-yo single to a polished mannered person with a girlfriend.
I mean no-one is excited to build an accounting software, but I’m excited when people grow. Actually, I’ve once heard that an army of psychologists will never take a man out of depression, but give them a hammer and they’ll get to work, get recognition and gain positive experiences. And the opposite: Being barred from working, from giving your labour, to a company that appreciates it, is an extenuating experience for men.
The fact that software is a "product" and not a "collective resource" tends to put a damper on that enthusiasm. After two decades in the industry it's abundantly clear we're condemned to rewrite the same software over and over again in the name of profits—a colossal waste of humanity's efforts.
I’ve gone back years later to a couple of ex-workplaces and seen with my own eyes how those uncertain (or over-certain ;-) folks are in their power and confidence and capability. Others I run into in professional settings and get feedback from others about them not just being great people but awesome professionals.
Knowing you’ve smoothed the way, helped out with existential fears, fed growth of good people when they needed it is the most awesome part of my career. Better even than much of what the paychecks bought me - blurry photos, fatty-liver and electronics in landfill.
Personally I find joy in two different settings
- the hard problems, where I have to go for a walk around the apartment, and think about it when I shover. These are rare.
- putting on some music, pouring myself some coffee, and just coding up something relatively easy while in the flow. Making something which did not exist before.
Of course there have been things that are fun and interesting but I don't drone on about it, pretending it is like I am getting paid to drink at a bar and flirt.
Haha, that's a poetic way to put it.
How do you set boundaries? Any tips?
1. Develop a strong network
2. Keep an updated career document with a list of your accomplishments in STAR format
3. Keep your skill set in line with the market
4. Live below your means and keep a cash cushion
5. Don’t be a “ticker taker” work on having projects with scope where you can talk about things “you led” or “you designed”
Now worse case, you can find another job quickly. I was PIPed from AWS last year and found another job within three weeks because I was prepared. I also lived enough below my means where I didn’t need “FAANG money” to be comfortable.
On the other hand, you need to know how to talk about trade offs within the holy trinity of any project - on time, on budget and meets requirements. When one changes, the others have to change.
The STAR format is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing. Here's what each component stands for:
1. *Situation*: Set the context for your story. Describe the event or situation that you were in. This could be from a previous job, from a volunteer experience, or any relevant event.
2. *Task*: After describing the situation, you talk about the actual task or challenge that was involved. This is the problem or issue that you were confronted with.
3. *Action*: Explain the actions you took to address the situation or task. This should be a detailed account of how you tackled the problem.
4. *Result*: Share the outcomes or results of the actions you took. Ideally, this should be a positive outcome that demonstrates how you effectively handled the situation.
Using the STAR format in a career document helps to clearly and effectively convey your accomplishments in a way that highlights your problem-solving and task management skills.
You didn't get hooked on dihydrogen oxide? That's the worst, a very difficult addiction to kick.
Hang in there!
You sir, were a wise man even when you were young (Not being sarcastic). A very rare trait among people young or old.
I don't think I could have ever lived that feeling working for someone else.
If you ask from a financial perspective, mostly trough our social system. I wasn't able to work, when I was again nobody stressed me to do so and now I am back, happily paying back into the system, at my own pace.
I was a manager for 25 years. It was soul-sucking. I think I was a very good manager, but I hated it.
I did code on the side, mainly to stay sane (not sure if it worked -Ed.).
When I was finally let go, after almost 27 years, I ran smack-dab into SV’s notorious ageism. It was humiliating, humbling, and infuriating. I fairly quickly gave up looking, as the search was way more soul-sucking than being a manager. I had the means to retire early. I hadn’t planned for it, but we make plans, and God laughs.
As it turned out, it was probably the best thing that could have happened. I have been furiously coding, ever since (solid green GH Activity Graph). My family also had some rather serious medical issues, and it was good that I could stay home. I live in a state with great health coverage, so I’m grateful.
I just don't care anymore, don't give a rat's ass about tRPC.
It’s understandable that a failing business lays off a bunch of people to try and stay afloat, to survive.
But companies thriving, making a bunch of money and seeing their share price increase… and still laying off a bunch of people?
If that’s the game companies play, it’s understandable that people will adapt sooner or later.
Nothing like seeing how arbitrary layoffs are to seeing how shallow leadership decisions can be.
This is the period that actually defines good leadership. A good leader, at least to me, won’t be led by investors to making largely short term decisions. They will define how their organization needs to evolve and challenge them to make it happen. But what I mostly see, are leaders doing stupid things like RTO then layoffs (goodbye, loyalty!), and then shrug and whine about having to maintain margins while cutting money losing projects that shouldn’t have been started in the first place. And then turn around and say “the future is AI” without really having much of a plan.
The leadership BS really stinks during these times, and it’s something that the younger generations haven’t really experienced.
I found that getting more invested in my 9-5 and my coworkers made it easier to get through the day, cause if not, good god it would be hard.
But now oh don’t get too invested as a guard against getting laid off…
Like I said, it’s tricky.
I do agree on signing off latest at 5 unless absolutely needed to tho, you’re just punking yourself otherwise
Surely you jest. The Dilbert comic strip started in 1989 and even then people were remarking about how eerily realistic it was about how uncaring, lacking in loyalty, stupid, and generally soul crushing corporations and corporate life was. It was tremendously popular for just that reason.
I know at least one couple close to retirement that is waiting until one of them can get onto cobra for the months before they can get onto Medicare. (They just budgeted for cobra in their planning.)
I like how the Aussies do it (or at least how they did it last I looked): basic public healthcare plan provided by the government, then supplemental plans offered by the employer as a benefit.
Do you fall back into Medicare if you start earning less afterwards?
By massive inefficiencies being removed from our economy.
Also, it'll literally be cheaper if you look at any other country that has implemented it.
There will be a huge wave of innovation whenever the USA implements nationalized healthcare.
I just don't understand why citizens of such a rich country would want to live so precariously.
You might wait a year for a knee replacement.
This is such a mischaracterization of the Swedish healthcare system, which is much more a lottery than your 'personal experience' suggests.
I have my own experience of a service that is plagued by delays, inefficiency and outright dystopian suffering alongside other people who have had fast and efficient help.
It's very much the luck of the draw - although sometimes I get the impression that social standing and even 'blondeness quotient' may help to get better care.
I was replying to a response that was specifically about Sweden.
> Erikun
> This was my thought exactly (I’m Swedish). It sounds so brutal, and it was not just her own but her entire family’s!
> adastra22
> Then she would have waited 10 months for a CT scan instead of 10 days.
I noticed that adastra22 was downvoted for this. I'm really not sure why, as it very closely mirrors a lot of people's experience with Swedish healthcare.
There have been a lot of stories in the news over the last couple of years, but here's just one at the top of a simple google-search, about a kid that died because their scans were postponed (in Swedish):
https://www.dagensmedicin.se/specialistomraden/cancer/barn-d...
> Due to a lack of capacity at Karolinska University Hospital, the examination of a previously cancerous child was postponed. The child subsequently died of metastatic cancer.
Regarding long waits for care. You want to be the patient who has to wait for ages. It means you’re going to be fine. You don’t want to be the person who gets rushed past the queue.
Just because the UK and Canadian systems are poorly resourced doesn't mean they can't work
At no point in his various medical emergencies did he need to wait 10 months for a CT scan... Or any other life-saving treatment.
While both are single payer, the Canadian Medicare is federalized so Vancouver Island can target its members in a manner different than Fraser Valley.
The NHS is much more top down, and the facilities seem less updated than in Canada.
Salaries also largely kept up for medical professionals in Canada compared to the UK (and plenty of BMA members have begun moving to Canada for that reason).
When I was a kid on Vancouver Island, it wasn't uncommon to see Brits doing specialized work (eg. Doctors, Skilled labor, Civil Service) because they'd get paid way more and spend way less than in the UK.
This is called 'strangle it then save it', and its the method that was used to privatize healthcare services in the West since the 80s. Starting with the US one...
You are also free to make wild, entirely off-base assumptions about what I believe.
I wouldn’t take a job that didn’t offer it (it’s pretty standard in our industry)
It’s annoying that it’s taxed at your highest income tax band (20/40/45%) as if it were some kind of super luxury. Maybe 20 years ago, sure. I think the company has to pay insurance tax on the premium too!
But yes it’s reassuring to know an emergency won’t ever bankrupt me.
Getting re-hired itself can be another random event - and again, not making it through interviews may be more a reflection of the kind of morons running the hiring pipeline in whatever company than you or your abilities.
I'm in a pretty decent sized FAANG-adjacent tech company right now, and for example, the one team we have that's doing lots of hiring is run by the two biggest jerks in the place. Whether it's unconscious bias, or just straight-up discrimination, I've noticed that all the folks hired to this team all (mysteriously) happen to come from Texas and to have worked in a certain re-insurance company the jerks came from.
So you come along and interview with that team, with a good background and abilities, and don't get that job, and some bozo with a geographic handicap gets it instead of you - that's what's going on. But all you see is another rejection.
On another note, your value as a human is not the same as the economic value you produce, and it's too easy to conflate the two
To some extend. But I spend a lot of time with my loved ones. I would regret losing that the most, but I can totally imagine myself also feeling sad about that feature or project I never got to finish.
You can’t just “live a nourishing life”, you have to do both
I have a family and IMO you sir are correct.
If your argument is about providing enough to have a roof over your head, then that doesn't equate to "substantial economic value".
I find such obsession with wealth very unhealthy.
Unfortunately that is how we are seen and thusly treated by the government and by corporations
Beautiful piece. I feel this very deeply these days. Loved ones are all that matter in life (including ones no longer in my life).
The ideas here remind me a bit of the book "Man's Search for Meaning."
I’m currently unemployed and I am lucky to have a generous runway, but that runway will run out eventually.
The idea that nothing matters outside of family, friends, etc is tempting but I have made sacrifices in relationships with others and myself to be a more employable candidate.
For example I’m taking LLM classes on Sunday mornings which precludes me from interacting with loved ones. I can try to schedule things around that-but sometimes that isn’t possible.
I’m also working on other things, my health, my fitness, my spiritually.
Finding balance has been hard. I’m in a good spot now, but I do find myself wondering if my ratios of time invested are correct given the fact that I also agree that loved ones are all that matter in life.
"Today is your last day." "Meh, whatevs, going home to my family."
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dy...
(20+ years in tech, have been laid off twice, fired once, aware none of it really matters, we're all dead eventually, a blip in the cosmic timeline)
It won’t matter, so get drunk with your friends and stack some rocks.
Good to take a balanced approach, but my thoughts too a lot of the time. I am most likely going to go to Patagonia in the next few weeks/months, a dream of mine, and then go home and see grandparents while they are still around.
The links are wonderful, thank you.
I appreciated the part about caregiver burnout:
"They are the shadow soldiers in the battle, where all the attention and support goes to the patient."
My wife asked me what was the plan. I told her nothing is changing, we went to our 14th city, I interviewed for three companies remotely and had two offers in three weeks. I accepted one and flew from there to meet my cousin in NYC for the US Tennis Open and met my wife in Chicago where my new employee shipped my computer.
I flew back home to end our year long trip, had Amazon ship the box to me to send my work computer back to them.
One monkey don’t stop no show.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302
This has been my mindset since leaving my second job in 2008. I’m now on my 9th.
If anything the detachment is powerful for those of us that have been raised to be people pleasers and expect loyalty to be repaid in kind.
It's much easier to realize you're a cog, it's not personal, and like a lot of things in life the pretense and fear of failure is often a huge upfront limiter.
I've had similar, in the 2000s (dot-com bubble) I was laid off from around 3 jobs in 2 years while trying to buy a first home.
In 2018-2020 I went through 3 jobs whilst caring for a severely ill hospitalised child and some very selfish work colleagues.
Work sucks sometimes, but it's unimportant in the grand scheme of things when personal and life issues show up.
Unfortunately companies often don't care, or anyone outside of your family to be fair, so treat them like they treat you, throw them away when you no longer get benefit from them.
With so many being let go lately I think the sentiment is also changing a bit. You’re hired to make money for the employer, or solve problems to reduce costs. But now, even if you meet all of your requirements you can still be let go because the company’s shareholders aren’t seeing the growth they want despite the company being wildly profitable anyway.
So what’s the point in giving your free time (after work hours) to a place, or sacrificing real life things, when the company will just drop you whenever for whatever anyway? The illusion of loyalty is breaking and I think that’s a good thing.
Loyalty to a company, IMO, largely results in holding your career back if you’re shirking better things for the “good enough” thing you have now because you’re loyal. But the company isn’t loyal to you, and specially not if they’re under some sort of pressure to cut costs. Not saying don’t work to your fullest or apply yourself, or never go beyond, because those things are kind of part of work, but the undying loyalty is wilting.
Add to that the difficulty of finding jobs because companies made stupid short-term decisions (probably knowing they were gonna need to drop people later) in the name of quick money during COVID, and you’re left feeling pretty dejected about the whole thing.
Work, get paid, look after you. Company will look after itself. If they don’t, move on and make sure you’re okay. The company’s health is not your problem (assuming you’re doing your work) unless you’re one of the folk responsible for its life.
The flip side to “work isn’t your identity” is I find that I do my best work when I’m fully engaged and care deeply about my coworkers.
I believe strongly that we should start more anti-work movements. No not like the one at reddit.
E.g. in no particular order: metal smith (silver gold etc), welder, carpentry, plumber, mechanic, fine artist, sculptor, textile. Basically the 'real trades' that have been around and should be around for many years.
The type of jobs that the white collars can't do without.
Either you outperform other CEOs and get rich on your own business, or you go this other path as I exemplified :D.
Now the gray zone is your regular 9-5, probably good co-workers, you make good living and work to live. The downside is that flexibility. So you need to think about what trades are you willing to make. I didn't mean to sound so 'dramatic' and pretend it's all black and white.
Industrial production has had a huge impact on many of those and will continue doing so. It‘s wrong to romanticize these jobs, they are just a likely to be automated.
I think it's much more likely LLMs become good enough to replace programmers before we have robots replacing plumbers.
That would be utopia.
Might as well say to get a real job like hunting, foraging for berries or animal herding.
Granted it might be still cheaper for humans to do the labor for some time, but eventually we will have most houses manufactured (home printing) or done as a prefab and assembled. For luxury some could be custom made by AI powered robots, based on user prompt.
I don't think that AI can reach such a level to install and measure everything without a carpenter. The gap is quite big and requires data which doesn't exist in the real world to feed into a model that can power AI to such an exact degree.
Look at how far we've come with LLM, that's only because we have so much texts readily available to train those models. In real life you'd have to manage a dataset combining different configurations of installations, even within prefab and assemblies you cannot reach the accuracy in my opinion without carrying a huge risk.
It made all of insignificant and constantly having to fight over scraps in sea of insecurity, offering nothing of substance, a doomed society.
not the case here. i really appreciate her attitude. i raise a glass to health and success.
i think it's true that skills and being a good engineer may not necessarily keep you safe from a layoff, but a tough smart person with the right attitude will often be a great engineer too. and that kind will always be appreciated and will survive.
My work is only part of my identity.
I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer, it should be the least important part of your identity.
I've never let work be more than the tiniest facet of my existence that provides the resources necessary to well... not die.
I understand this isn't the easiest thing for most people - tribalism and pack identity is a powerful thing.
It's why we have entires throngs of people who follow celebrities / twitch streamers / influencers / voice actors / etc. It's why things like the "reality distortion field" around Steve Jobs exists. And well, it's why when people suddenly find themselves let go from a job, it apparently affects them in a powerfully and I would argue irrationally emotional way.
In a way, these things have sort of acted as a de-facto substitute for more traditional tribalism (patriotism, national pride, etc) for a lot of Gen Z / Millennials. Shrugs. Or maybe this is just a personal observation.
Note: Just to be fair, I think her breakdown was FAR FAR more understandable than many people who are let go given that:
Her job provided health insurance for her family
She has kids who depended on her
Needing surgeryBut, to be fair, work != your specific company. It's stupid to tie your identity to the people hiring you.
If you spend a large part of your waking hours working on something enjoyable, absolutely embrace that. Conversely, if your work is drudgerous but you enjoy the simple things in life - like food and shelter - and it provides that then maybe some separation of identity is a good option too.
These two concepts may seem related but they often aren't.
Knocking your ego down to a reasonable size is nice, but it probably also means not making very much money.
I often think about that Isabel Fall attack helicopter story [1], where pilots of the AH-70 Apache Mystics must have their brains rewired to include the helicopter as part of their gender, so that they'll fly by intuition. Otherwise they wouldn't be good enough to fly.
I thought this was an interesting premise already, but now I wonder how much of my programming skill is really ego. How much of my code takes up space in my brain where gender or religion or joi de vivre or something was supposed to be stored.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...
I certainly agree about the apathy part. I can’t sustain mediocre or poor performance for long without having it spill into other areas of my life.
As for the impossibility of compartmentalizing software work… I hope you’re wrong. But my experience doesn’t exactly contradict you. Whenever I’ve felt good at my job it’s also been quite all-consuming.
In 1963, Kurt Vonnegut called it a _granfalloon_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle#Bokononism
- _karass_ – A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.
- _granfalloon_ – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers." Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common. They really share little more than a name.
You are probably going too far. You are spending a reasonable fraction of your waking life at your career. So you can make it a reasonable fraction of your identity.
I ask this as a thought experiment because I personally believe that we THINK people care about our jobs more than they really do. True friendship should (and does) transcend "jobs".
Maybe I'm an outlier - but I believe most folks just want to have a good time with their friends - specific careers be damned!
Granted having Google on the CV looks good to recruiters, but my friends didn't care that much.
I think there's some crossed wires there. You both could be correct, but arguing different specific points.
You can make your skillset/vocation/etc a part of your identity. You should never make your position at a company a part of your identity.
"I write software" is something that will be true even when I am no longer employed. "I'm a principle engineer at a FAANG" is a transient thing that is only incidental to my identity.
https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e...
> The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description.
> The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered.
> In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.
It's just obvious there's a chip on their shoulder. By default, no one cares about these things.
One of my friends cares most about her family, her husband cares about that but work is a much stronger part of his identity.
Many of my smartest friends work remotely very successfully. Others like me, just as smart, work in person well.
Our friends and family who work in restaurants and factories and driving buses are often happy, though some are not. And more of the knowledge workers are happy because they're wealthier but some are unhappy regardless.
But the most striking thing is the difference between the ones who are choosing their path and secure vs. the ones who show other signs of insecurity: it's the statement of their choices as being their own without the obligatory put down of the other. This mechanism of justifying their choices. Insecurity pervades. The person choosing other than them is always flawed in some way they are not. The other's choices alloyed by some sin.
Around age 12 I discovered software development and became my greatest passion. It helped me escape MMORPG addiction and being happy (have a family, buy a home, pursue my hobbies).
If I lost my job I would be sad, no doubt, but I would still be me, a passionate software developer. If you told me I wouldn't be able to write code anymore because of some illness, I would be in a very bad spot, way worse than if I lost my job.
My profession is part of my identity in a strong way, my job is business (although I do love the place I work at).
By the time o graduated from college in 1996, I programmed as a hobbyist in assembly on four architectures - 65C02, 68K, PPC and x86.
The last time I programmed as a hobbyist was 1996.
For the next 15 years my hobby was teaching fitness classes, running and lifting weights.
I got married in 2012 and became a father to a 9 and 14 year old.
When the youngest graduated in 2020 and a year after Covid lifted, my wife and flew across the US from October 2022 to October 2023 visiting over a dozen cities while I worked remotely,
Software development supports my passions.
I would spend more time in the gym and go back to teaching fitness classes and do personal training.
I would learn a couple of foreign languages.
My wife and I sold everything we owned and bought a unit in a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp) it is our legal official “home”.
From 10/2022 - 10/2023 we traveled around the US taking one way flights and rented our place out.
We would do more international traveling. I was limited to traveling mostly in the US since I had to fly to client’s sites, restrictions on logging in outside of the country for some GovCloud work and time zones.
Besides: If your one and only goal with work really is "do as little as possible to not die", this is easily accomplished in the modern world by working for a year or two in the US and then moving to, e.g. rural Nepal to live off $1-2000 a year for about 3 or 4 decades, zero work required. Indeed the "4% rule" in FIRE circles says this should be permanently sustainable with savings of only about $20-40,000. (Arguments like "but what happens when you get older" willfully ignore the fact thathaving a year of prime healthy adulthood totally free is almost certainly worth quite a bit more than having a year of elderly, ill adulthood "free" in a nursing home.) Yet we almost never see people do that.
There are plenty of people doing that (until their funds run out, which always happens faster than planned).
"My work is how I directly make the world a much richer place than it would be without me "
And richer in real ressources? Numbers of money are a arbitary thing and do not necessary relate, if they actually make the world a better place.
(How annuities work, roughly: Say you have $100,000 in that nest egg. I'm sure you could find some financial firm willing to take it off your hands today and give you $4,000 per year for 50 years, and maybe even in perpetuity. That's because $100k sitting around in their index funds will likely have ballooned to $1m+ over that timeframe, whereas the payout to you would be a mere $200k.)
The fact such annuities aren't very common suggests your phantom population isn't either.
Well, just travel a bit through south east asia then and you will meet quite some (white) folks living there, but not working.
"I'm sure you could find some financial firm willing to take it off your hands today and give you $4,000 per year for 50 years"
I surely could find such a company, but not sure if I could find one I would trust(not that I am rich anyway). And africa can be quite unsafe for rich people, too.
Also, like I said: the main issue those people have, who want to retire in poor countries is, that wealth goes away quite fast. Even when you don't want to buy a house and have a family which most people want at some point etc. and which is something that is expensive as a westener in those countries, too. But for some time, you can live like a king there, sure.
This is not an easy task when many (most?) adults spend the majority of their waking hours either working or going to and from work.
Stories like this are also why a lot of women now are embracing the tradwife trend.
> Stories like this are also why a lot of women now are embracing the tradwife trend.
Lol, sources please
The phrase "death panels" though is unfortunate. Nobody has death panels, nobody wants death panels, no health system anywhere private or public has death panels. It's just a scary phrase used in a political context.
Ultimately all health systems make choices at every level of care. Triage is a thing. Organ recipient lists are a thing. Hospital occupancy, and theatre usage are things.
In a perfect world we'd all get perfect medical care the instant we needed it. There'd be scores of doctors sitting around doing nothing just waiting for my call. There'd be an endless supply of organs, replacement parts, hospital beds, theatres and surgeons.
We don't live in that world. Hence our systems have imperfections. Not everyone gets an optimal outcome. There are no "death panels". There doesn't need to be. Limitations and resource constraints force decisions at all levels every day.
Now personally I think a well managed public health system us the most equitable. Failing that private insurance has a role to play in combination either public health. Employer paid health insurance has grouping advantages, but also means you lose your income and health at the same time.
Steps for affordable personal health insurance are good. There's some way to go yet, but its a step in the right direction. Having at least some part of the health system be available to the uninsured (ie non-profit) would also be beneficial.
So yeah, the US system, as it is, is great for those who can pay, terrible for everyone else. It favours the few with good jobs, and secure tenure. If you're in that group, well done.
Other countries with national health have their own resource constraints. Not all individual outcomes are optional. And being rich doesn't necessarily jump you to the front of the queue. There are good outcomes, and bad outcomes, but they don't align to wealth or status (in theory.)
In the US its hard to change the status quo because the country is governed by the rich, paid for by the richer. The system currently favors the rich. QED.
The phrase "death panels" is intentionally sarcastic mockery of the kind of people who unironically repeat Republican lies, by way of pointing out how even if the lie was true, it would be less harmful than the current state of affairs. I would have thought that was pretty obvious, but I guess not.
Arguably this is just a description of private insurance, ironically. A group of people decides who gets treatment and who doesn't—except the scarcity here is "profit", not a real resource.
Address the lack of trained healthcare professionals in all communities. Grow public health services. Increase funding to medical research and education. Lower the cost of individual medical care. Bring attention to the loss of income when severe illness takes hold.
Source https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/presidential-inquiri...
Profit is only a small part of the overall costs.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/20/the-amish-health-care-... for what's possible in the US right now:
> Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them?
> Patients sometimes went along with this, being indifferent between spending $4 of someone else’s money or $2000 of someone else’s money. Everything in the US health system is like this, and the Amish avoid all of it. They have a normal free market in medical care where people pay for a product with their own money (or their community’s money) and have incentives to check how much it costs before they buy it. I do want to over-emphasize this one, and honestly I am surprised Amish health care costs are only ten times cheaper than ours are.
People voluntarily getting together to do stuff and not forcing anything on anyone is pretty compatible with capitalism (whether it's 'capitalist' by itself is a question of definition).
The main thing I take from the article is: you can lower costs dramatically, if you can avoid some of the more onerous regulations. And as a second point: if you can build up a reputation for being honest and trustworthy, you can bring down transaction costs a lot.
The point about Amish never suing doctors mixes both: they are capitalising on that point via reputation; but in principle you could also sign those rights away with a contract. But while we allow companies to sign these kinds of contracts with each other, regulations doesn't allow patients to sign those rights away.
you can rationalize that it's not however you wish but that won't change the fact that the amish community is very much at odds with capitalism, and the way they do healthcare is very anti-capitalist.
> People voluntarily getting together to do stuff and not forcing anything on anyone is pretty compatible with capitalism (whether it's 'capitalist' by itself is a question of definition).
this is how anarchism works, too. anarchism is an anti-capitalist political theory and one of the fundamental premise is free, voluntary association. people always see the words "free market" and conflate free market with capitalism when a free market can be a component of any economic structure.
it's okay if you agree with anti-capitalist solutions, i swear that the capitalist gods won't smite you. i appreciate scott alexander's slimely writing skills to get capitalists to think that an anti-capitalist solution is a good idea.
That's pretty silly. By the same token, you would have to argue that companies are anti-capitalists, because they are largely run on a command-and-control model. Or families are anti-capitalist.
also, some amish communities even call it "mutual aid" which is very anti-capitalist.
Then, employers noticed, "you mean offering them healthcare makes it harder for our employees to leave? And public perception of healthcare means it will probably always be a tax advantaged way to allocate our expenses?"
And here we are, eight decades and change later.
Note: I think public perception of healthcare as a moral good in principle is correct. It's just that there's a wicked mal-alignment of incentives which leverages that perception to cement a bad solution in place.
The average person is not very smart and half of the population isn't even that smart so of course they fall for these intelligence insulting tricks invented by politicians.
That is everywhere now. Birth, education, courtship/marriage, employment, ... all the way to death - everything is analyzed, pessimized, and stripmined for every last penny. "Enshittification" is all over HN and with good reason.