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Comment by captobvious | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how most comments here are dancing around the issue trying to point out factual errors and counterexamples.

Bottom line: Young adults today have it way worse than their parents.

In most developed countries in the world. How should this issue be dealt with?

In my opinion you can't just call it bad luck, and tell people to deal with it and adapt.

Personally I think the biggest motivation of all is the sense of change for the better, and a future to look forward to. I simply can't accept that my generation got the bad future, and all the good future was used up by our parents.

Looking at my parents generation I think they lived pretty subservient lives, which were also quite stressful, with lots of stress related disease, heart attacks, blood pressure issues etc..

And if I work really hard and study, best case scenario is that I get the same jobs as my parents, only twice the workload and half the pay.

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> best case scenario is that I get the same jobs as my parents, only twice the workload and half the pay

Unless you're way out of the target demographic for HN, this is preposterous. Even semi-competent programmers are way under-supplied; you can name your price, location, and working conditions.

Ok I'll name my working conditions: A work environment with peace and quiet to be able to concentrate. Have enough time to be able to deliver though-out quality work. Having reasonably specified tasks, and if not, have the decision power to fill in the blanks as I see fit. Not being constantly interrupted.

Not being under constant stress and pressure to the point where I feel that my health might be suffering.

From my experience these (common sense?) demands on working conditions would rule out pretty much most programming jobs.

Do you think low stress heart surgeon jobs exist?

Work conditions in tech have more to do with what those jobs are than economic conditions. Companies are desperate to fill positions and you see many going out of their way to create as low stress office environments as possible but after a certain point you just have to come to grips with that's just what the job is.

That said, low stress programming jobs do exist, but in my experience they tend to exist in companies you would not normally look at for programming jobs. Damn near every sizeable company has programmers but we tend to only look for jobs "in industry" at the Googles, Microsofts, Facebooks, etc. Think east coast, foundations of the company not in tech, non-glamorous. Basically the equivalent of your heart surgeon working in some sort of research instead of in a hospital on live patients.

Most surgeons spend the great majority of their time in a regular doctor's office or making the rounds in a hospital. I've worked for surgeons and have spent hundreds of hours in the operating room. Tense moments happen but on the whole keeping a busy webserver up and running is probably more stressful for the staff.

Fair enough, I was under the impression that surgeons had particularly stressful jobs. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of inherently stressful jobs though. Maybe table waiting, depending on levels of business.

Stress in the workplace seems to be to be a function of responsibility and activity. Speaking from experiance, lifeguard jobs have very high responsibility but (you hope) very very low activity; meanwhile jobs like being a farmhand are high activity but usually very low responsibility. Both of these were the lowest stress jobs I've ever had. Stress seems to go up when both of those factors are up, jobs with neither activity nor responsibility probably don't really exist (or at least pay well).

Do you think this is also true for people who need H1B's?

Bottom line: Young adults today have it way worse than their parents.

Except we really don't. In most ways we're similar to or better off than our parents, as they'll no doubt tell you if you listen to them.

Ok I'll go with that, let's say we're similar to or better off.

But just to be prepared, if it should turn out to be the other way around, or if this would happen in the future, what would you do if conditions suddenly are comparably a lot worse for non-established younger people?

How would you keep them motivated? Would you divide the economic hit equally? Start tearing up old rent controlled apartment leases? Lower pensions?

I think it's an interesting political and moral issue which seems not to have been considered.

If we are having economic problems and decide to raise the retirement age from 65 to 70 (as discussed in europe), should people who are 66 and just retired go back to work? Or should it only affect the younger people, and if so, why?

How would you keep them motivated? Would you divide the economic hit equally? Start tearing up old rent controlled apartment leases? Lower pensions?

As a parent in such a situation I'd start redistributing my own money to my children before I die.

From a societal point of view the best thing to encourage that would be to get rid of any gift taxes et cetera which might discourage it.

Actually, a lot of parents I know talk about how ridiculously expensive it is to put their kid through college/university and to help pay for housing when compared to when they were young.

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