Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Overflow | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Overflow

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277 pointsthm471 comments

I'm fortunate enough to be in one of the top percentiles of household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.

Like Atwood, I did not come from a well-off family; parents divorced in my early teens and father passed away in my late teens from cancer (smoking and alcoholism) and in many ways lucked into a very good career after attending a state university. My spouse's father -- a janitor in a public school -- and mother -- a crossing guard -- passed when she was in her 20's as well. There weren't any large fortunes passed down.

Some friends recently purchased a house in my township and I visited to drop off my kid for a play date. I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house" ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for a fraction of the price. It boggles the mind to consider when/how my kids will be able to have their slice of the American Dream.

There are clearly some fundamental things that have to be fixed in the US at a policy level, but there's seemingly no political will to fix them; everyone seems out for themselves and to enrich their own coffers. This is handicapping social mobility through the hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??). This is the sentiment that I feel Atwood is also feeling.

As a high earning software engineer (IC), I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to hire me either because of AI or because of age (early 40's now so I figure maybe 10 years of high earning as an IC?).

Look to the stagnancy of the UK to see where the US could be in a few more decades. They have the same high prices for housing, but far far lower wages. When the powerful political class (homeowners) has all their wealth tied up in their homes, they see little wrong with such broken basic arrangements, because it doesn't hurt them and they see their number going up for wealth. Canada and Australia have similarly destructive housing policies and outcomes.

And since the self-immolation of Brexit, they have far worsened their financial future. Similar politics of self-destruction masked as the appearance of strength are gaining a loooot of ground in the US as well.

Yes. Trump is looking like Brexit on steroids to me.

Are you accounting for things like free healthcare when comparing wages? (I wish I did't have to say this, but it's a genuine question, not snark). I always wonder when people compare other countries to the US.

Edit: I agree that Brexit was the most incredible piece of self-harm that I've seen a country do to itself. I certainly don't have rose-tinted spectacles about the state of the UK.

My US job comes with NHS level never seeing a bill. This is really easy to do in CA.

Saying “fuck you, I’m rich” is not a good look.

A health plan like that costs your company 25K/yr on the backend. They pay that as part of your compensation, you just don’t see it.

Even the most basic HDHP Bronze Kaiser plan currently costs over 1K/mo, and that increases about 10% per year.

If you’ve ever had a coworker (or yourself) decline COBRA coverage because it was “so expensive”, you need to understand that the price under COBRA was the price the whole time, you just didn’t see it.

$25k doesn't sound like a lot. Doesn't sound like it accounts for the difference in salary.

I’m not sure what your point is?

25K/yr IS a LOT.

Per the US Census, the median income in the US is a bit over 37,500, so it’s literally an entire paycheck.

Remember - the NHS is available to everyone, not just the rich.

Source: https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore...

You're misunderstanding how the ACA subsidies work.

According to article linked to below there are 48 million uninsured Americans. Fifteen percent of the UK population isn’t without coverage. The subsidies don’t work well.

$25K is a lot.

Respectfully, You're out of touch until you lost your 6 digits job.

> Saying “fuck you, I’m rich” is not a good look.

This is a pitch-perfect example of the Brexit-like self-destructive politics that come with the "win" of appearing strong.

Here is a person who has the typical experience, who could easily be convinced by their positive experience to say "everybody should have this." But instead of going that route you impute negative motivations and put very ugly distasteful words into their mouth. Which, even if they are highly supportive of your position, will likely turn them against you. Instead of using this opportunity to advocate for a really good thing, you use it as an opportunity to hit somebody you view as the enemy with a rhetorical hammer. End result: no more people in favor of better means of distributing health care, and perhaps a net negative.

Especially in the context of how to account for free-at-point-of-care healthcare, which started this. If the employer is paying the prices that are revealed to employees only via COBRA, should that be accounted for in part of the wages or not? The US chooses to put about twice the fraction of GDP into healthcare that the UK does, and that per-capita GDP is also higher, how do we account for that in terms of wages and individuals? The $1T that employers pay for healthcare should be accounted for how, exactly? It's a tough question, and most likely in any comparison of nations there's a couple different ways to see how it impacts the average person. And when the "average" person in the US has such varying experiences, that has to enter into any comparison too.

In California there is great healthcare coverage for those with extremely low to no income, due to subsidy. Those with healthy salaries and savings can weather the times of unemployment and pay the COBRA prices. Those who struggle the most are the ones in between, and improving that involves getting those on the high and low end to advocate for the in-between incomes. It does not involve making enemies of them.

> Here is a person who has the typical experience

This is bullshit: not seeing a bill is atypical in California. Parent is also bullshitting by saying it's easy to get a job with no-bills health insurance in CA, unless they are ignoring 98% of Californians.

Check out how Californians get their healthcare here:

https://www.chcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/HealthInsure...

Medicare and Medical are not going to see a bill ever (if the people I know on them are anything to go by), and that's almost 40% of the population. A huge majority of people on employer plans are in the same situation, so thats some fraction of the 47%. For example, nearly a quarter of Californians are covered by Kaiser. It's not some super rare privilege reserved for those making >$500k.

No the fee for service system results in bills. It's the quarter on Kaiser that don't see bills.

I never see bills from my employer based healthcare, and it's not anything super fancy, and it's not Kaiser, just BC/BS. I had a surgery that billed my insurance in the tens of thousands of dollars and I never saw a bill. My spouse sees bills but it's because she has her physician order tests that are a bit outside well established medicine that would never be covered by NHS in the UK or Health Canada.

My relatives on Medical never see bills.

It's not just Kaiser.

Medicare patients get bills. There are deductibles and 20% co-insurance on most services. Inpatient care has a hard limit on number of days.

https://www.medicare.gov/basics/costs/medicare-costs

It's Kaiser in northern California. This is an extremely common healthcare option. Yeah, we're rich. That's the whole point: even out of pocket prices for that plan are dwarfed by the gap in salary to the UK professionals.

Most people aren't professionals, though. Nobody's arguing that the US isn't set up for the comfort of people making $500,000+/year.

Kaiser was an option when I was making 130k a year.

You said it was "easy" to get a job with Kaiser upthread - what percentage if CA residents are on it?

roughly a quarter of California (9.4 in CA vs 38 for CA total)

$130K a year still puts you at the 87th percentile of income in the US.

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

> A health plan like that costs your company 25K/yr on the backend. They pay that as part of your compensation, you just don’t see it.

That's very true, but of course the NHS costs some amount of money on the backend, it's just abstracted away in taxes. The real difference is how much care you get for your money, not* which way of not directly paying for health care is better.

* You get more in the UK.

It’s also about predictability: medical bankruptcy is an American phenomenon. The average cost isn’t what worries people, it’s the possibility of having coverage denied, being hit with “out of network” charges like an ambulance taking you to the closest hospital or a specialist showing up at an in-network one, or having your health decline rapidly while you need to get a lawyer to convince your health insurer to pay for treatment your doctor considers necessary. It’s especially about what happens if your health declines to where you cannot work and lose all of the treatment that you’ve setup so far.

Not really, the US health system is so broken is just costs more. The system of who pays what is very different, but at the end of the day the cost of healthcare is much higher in US than any other country.

Yup, I feel that until someone has seen and understood the first graphic in this article, they really don't grok the situation:

https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low

I'm curious, did you see that little asterisk at the end of my comment?

That isn't the question in this thread though. The question is if you are on net better in the UK vs the US inclusive of taxes, healthcare expenses and salary differences. You get more for your money in the UK, but if you more than that difference for the same job (net of taxes), you could still come out ahead, as an individual. Society as a whole might be worse on some measures (due to the gaps in coverage for many in the US, or the hassle of the whole thing, the behavioral influences and impact of avoiding preventative care, the risk of falling into a scenario where you aren't covered and the anxiety of that risk). There are many downsides. But if you make enough then at some point that covers those risks. The salary gap has gotten sufficiently high that the break-even appoint seems to be somewhere at middle-level salaries now, not jut the high end.

That's not how it works for millions upon millions of Americans that are not fortunate enough to work at a job that provides tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare insurance as a benefit.

This line of thinking is exactly why the "American Dream" is falling apart; we increasingly place a handicap on some Americans and then wonder why some slice of America is not advancing generationally.

Americans who have jobs with health benefits that include Kaiser in CA is a whole lot of them in CA! It's a massive hospital system that covers 9 million people, a full quarter of the state.

You're tied to your job though. Not so in say, UK, Canada.

I was unfortunate enough to have a job that gave me Kaiser healthcare. My job was not my only source of income. Everything about the experience of Kaiser sucked so much that I often paid out of pocket to go to other orgs.

Example: I transferred my prescriptions to Kaiser, walked in and saw the dozens of people standing in line, and immediately transferred them back to CVS (where Kaiser doesn’t apply). They called me before I got home with my scripts ready for pickup. I walked in and it was one of the rare moments when no one was in line. But even when they’re busy, I’ve not seen more than ~10 people and mostly more like 1-3.

Kaiser sucks. It’s the worst healthcare system I’ve had to deal with in terms of my effort vs my satisfaction. I’m very happy to work a job that lets me choose again so that I can go where I please.

I am happy that the doctor calls me to schedule things instead of the other way around. My prescriptions come by mail order, and the few times I've had to get to the pharmacy it's been a very straightforward process.

That's not how it works for millions upon millions of Americans that are not fortunate enough to work at a job that provides tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare insurance as a benefit.

Wal-Mart provides pretty decent health insurance and they hire anyone. If you don’t have health insurance, it’s a choice.

Roughly speaking, when I've looked into this comparison, for near-median earners, they're better off in the UK, because of things like healthcare. But when you look at the higher-earning roles, especially engineering or software, then the different in pay more than makes up for the increased cost of living (i.e. a higher percentage of your pay may go towards cost of living, but the smaller percentage of money left over is still larger in absolute terms). There's other tradeoffs in terms of work culture and so on, though (e.g. you get much more holiday in the UK).

Can you share your research?

In the US, the average out-of-pocket healthcare spending was $1,424.6 per capita in 2022

Most people have insurance. They might have some high out of pocket maximum like $10k. So worse case scenario you're out an additional $10k.

But you pay a lot less in taxes

In US, a single filer, the 12% bracket covers income from $11,926 to $48,475. In UK it's 20%

So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes, not to mention VAT and others (although I am ignoring other US taxes like state, local and payroll). More than covers your out of pocket healthcare costs.

And pretty much any job in the US is significantly higher paying, for instance a typical accountant in US makes 80k while in the uk that 37k pounds. Pretty much every office job is like this. And note the US 80k figures includes benefits like ... you guessed it, healthcare!

Even if make the generous assumptions that taxes are the same, UK has same healthcare quality and everyone is hitting out of pocket max every year, it's still not close. The whole "but we don't have to pay for healthcare" strikes me as just a cope.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/484578/us-per-capita-out...

https://www.allbusinessschools.com/accounting/salary/

https://uk.indeed.com/career/accountant/salaries

I think if the health insurance situation was as rosy in the U.S as you make out there would not have been as much support for the killer of the United Healthcare CEO. The figure for the average out of pocket expenses hides a lot of pain.

People have lots of anger about healthcare for many many reasons. I can't tell you how many people I've met who are angry about "Obamacare" but don't realize how it helped them compared to the prior situation. There's also lots of anger at the prices for healthcare that we sometimes see, and that anger gets directed at insurance too, even if it's a hospital or other provider setting the prices. And then there's the anxiety of "will this be covered."

Even without out of pocket costs there's lots of reasons to be angry at insurers.

Whether you agree with the Affordable Healthcare Act or not, I feel like nobody remembers “lifetime maximums.” I have some relatively minor (but massively impactful) pre-existing conditions, and I would have exceeded my lifetime maximum by age 30 due to testing, procedures, hospital stays, etc. I have family members that would have exceeded theirs before age 1.

How does the concept of health insurance, risk pooling, etc., make sense if there are no lifetime maximums…?

Eventually 100% of the population will need healthcare of some type.

And without maximums to plan and set prices against, wouldn’t it just be a wealth transfer scheme from the relatively young and healthy to the particularly old and sick…? (With those in the middle roughly neutral)

At least I can’t see any credible way to insure against something 100% of all possible customers will need.

Health insurance is already a huge transfer to older generations (not that that's a bad thing). Medicare pays for older folks but it doesn't pay anywhere near the cost of the services that older folks receive. Prices are higher for everyone else to fill the gap at health care providers.

Health insurance is in many ways not even insurance, it's in many ways a price negotiation mechanism.

Anyway the whole system is overly complex, based off a tax credit from the 1950s, but the transition to a new scheme is nearly impossible while one political party is dead set against any improvement, especially if it might be perceived as a positive for the other political party, and also they have become so hyper partisan that they are not allowed to work with the other party in a bipartisan manner.

Huh I didn’t know that. I thought those on Medicare only got the bare minimum service that stayed within cost.

In that case, the upstream sources of why Americans accept this huge charade is going to keep on messing with even the best laid plans.

It isn’t a simple money in, money out system. You’re taking higher value money in one year, and paying out some money that’s worth less later (inflation)… while at the same time, you’re investing the pool of money you collected, and earning returns on that before you pay out claims - claims that you’ve already negotiated down in price. But by the time the healthier customers need to start making large claims, they’ve already both subsidized the claims of other customers, and made the insurance company more money than they’ll draw in claims.

It's a simple money in, money out system. Health insurance isn't like homeowner's insurance where the insurer accumulates and invests a pool of money in anticipation of occasional rare events like natural disasters that cause a spike in claims. Medical expenses across a large patient population are very predictable and there is no significant carry over of premiums from year to year. In fact, under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), it is actually illegal for most health insurers to do that. Any excess premiums collected must be returned to customers at the end of the year.

75% of Americans with employer-provided health coverage are satisfied with their current plans

For Americans overall, 71% rate the quality of healthcare they personally receive as excellent or good. Similarly, 72% give excellent or good marks to the quality of care they receive personally.

Regarding health insurance coverage, 65% of Americans rate their own coverage as excellent or good. Another poll found 63% rated their own health care coverage as excellent or good.

You have to get offline

https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-poll-strong-majority-...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-quality-...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/468176/americans-sour-healthcar...

You have to get offline

Perhaps. But if I weren’t online I wouldn’t know how widespread the support of Luigi is.

Only 75% of people on employer healthcare plans are satisfied? A great many people aren’t on employer plans.

From the third link you provided:

For the first time in Gallup’s two-decade trend, less than half of Americans are complimentary about the quality of U.S. healthcare, with 48% rating it “excellent” or “good.” The slight majority now rate healthcare quality as subpar, including 31% saying it is “only fair” and 21% -- a new high -- calling it “poor.”

Is the support that widespread, or is it a bubble created by social media?

I think there's great dissatisfaction with healthcare in general, but social media is not a good way of judging social attitudes across the US. It's great for finding a small niche, however.

He’s got a lot more support than any other murderer I know about.

Not to mention, they are satisfied compared to what? The situation they'd be in if they were unemployed and had to pay for the entire overpriced thing themselves?

> The poll by CloudResearch found that 27% of U.S. adults expressed “moderate” or “a lot” of sympathy for Mangione.

> A smaller but significant share of adults, 12%, said they were supportive of the decision to murder Brian Thompson, 50, who was shot in New York on Dec. 4.

12% is basically zero in this country. To give you a frame of reference, 14% of people think Obama is antichrist

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/1-in-4-americans-sympathiz...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/12-million-americans-believe-liza...

The former DHS head seems to think it’s a lot of people. Don’t know any other murderers who have 27% of the population having sympathy for them.

12% is not basically zero.

https://www.thewrap.com/luigi-mangione-discourse-alarms-home...

The thing about insurance is that the reason you purchase it is for managing tail events. And the only way to know if you are satisfied with your insurance company is to experience a tail event and see how your insurance company behaves. If you develop an expensive to manage chronic illness, is your insurance company prompt in paying claims? Does it try to deny all of them and require you to hire an attorney to get them to pay anything at all? Does it turn out that much of the treatments you need for recovery were never covered by insurance at all? And even if it is paying - how many hours a week do they expect you to spend submitting and resubmitting claims and calling various doctors to collect more information and submit more and more paperwork?

I've lived in the UK, the USA, and Australia. I've had excellent employer funded/subsidised health insurance in the latter two. The moment my wife & learned we were having our first child it focussed our priorities in an incredibly clear and sudden way, and healthcare was a huge component of that. It was immediately clear we did not want to have a raise a family with the US healthcare system given the other alternatives we had available to us. We saw out the pregnancy in the USA and moved home to Australia shortly after. Our second child was born in Australia. The out of pocket cost difference between the two countries was negligible. My wife would subjectively say the quality of care we got in the USA was slightly higher, though there was nothing wrong with the care we got in Australia either so it's almost splitting hairs just to declare a winner. The most obvious difference is how little planning or effort needs to be made around healthcare decisions in Australia. No worrying about if we're in network or not. No worrying about if the pathology lab that's doing the testing is in network. Is some out of network surgeon going to be attending/observing on the day? What are the financial impacts if there are complications? Do we need to pre-agree a plan of what's acceptable financially? Is the bill we receive at the end accurate? Are there risks of signification on-going medication or other costs for medications if there's a complication in surgery?

Just a whole swathe of anxiety and stress that doesn't exist anymore. I'm not sure I can put a price on how valuable that is for our family. I clearly priced it higher than the higher income and lower tax I'd be paying if I'd stayed in the Bay Area though.

> So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes

Your calculations don't take into account personal allowance, which is £12750($15680) in the UK.

At $40k the difference is much closer to $1.5k.

Also there's the question of costs of living. That same 40k buys you 30% more in the UK if you're including rent.

Total healthcare spending per capita includes insurance premiums too though, which is $8,951 for single coverage and $25,572 for family coverage[0], and needs to be added to that ~$1,400 to get the total cost. Some amount of this may be paid by employers, but is still theoretically money that could go to you otherwise.

[0] https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2024-section-1-cost-...

I think most Americans over-index on the cost of healthcare and the availability of insurance because it’s constant in our news and our system absolutely sucks. Most people don’t need regular medical care because most people are healthy (until they start getting older). It’s expensive, sure, but most people in the middle-class have employer sponsored healthcare, and retirees have government sponsored healthcare, and many low-income people have government sponsored healthcare. The difference in out-of-pocket costs is easily accounted for within significantly higher salaries.

Of course, the issue is not the actual availability of insurance, it is that there is a patchwork of laws and protections and it’s not universal to be covered at any point in your life. But many states have well above a 90% insurance rate. California, the most populous state, has 93%. Massachusetts is sitting at 98%. Even Texas, the worst state for health insurance, is at 85% of the population covered.

>The difference in out-of-pocket costs is easily accounted for within significantly higher salaries.

Any sources for this?

Salary Info (25k USD salary difference, before tax)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...

Cost of healthcare:

There are a bunch of numbers that are trivially accessible via Google, including government sources, but I couldn’t find any that match perfectly with the time range of the wage data.

Here is one quote, from a few years earlier…

> Median annual out-of-pocket spending on medical care ranged from $360 (Hawaii) to $1,500 (Nebraska). In four states, households in the top 10 percent of out-of-pocket expenses spent $7,000 or more on these items.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

I quit my job as a dev to care for my father who has dementia. Using COBRA and paying for the identical health insurance I had from my employer is $1,000/mo. I have no dependents. California minimum wage annual income is ~$32k. Almost half the income of someone who works a shit job. I'd say that almost 50% of minimum wage just for the privilege of going to a doctor when I have a problem is rightfully a pretty big deal.

No, that's not how it works. Poor people who lose coverage from employer-sponsored health plans don't pay COBRA premiums out of pocket. They spend much less to either buy a subsidized health plan on the state exchange or go on Medicaid. The system is a mess but let's not exaggerate the problems.

I can’t imagine getting Medicaid to cover the biologic that I take that costs $5,000 a month without a prescription to be anything other than a nightmare.

This is the issue with American healthcare - it’s super confusing and people don’t even understand that they have better options. And of course, living with a super pricy COBRA plan while being unemployed is not the normal experience for people, and also not the actual “optimal” way to get healthcare in that situation.

COBRA isn’t meant to be a full healthcare insurance, it’s meant to be a “bridge” care for people in between jobs (that’s why it’s tied to your prior employers plans). You also don’t even need to pay the COBRA premiums unless you actually use it, so you can save that $1K/mo while being implicitly insured (helpful in case you only really want to be insured against catastrophic accidents).

If you were not working because you were caring for a dependent (like a sick adult), or if you’re a minimum wage worker, you wouldn’t use an employer sponsored plan through COBRA, you’d use Medi-Cal (California’s expanded Medicaid) or the ACA marketplace, and could be “free” or ultra low (premiums). Medi-Cal is free, and the ACA plan for a 45yo male in SF making Cali minimum wage (34k/yr) would pay $18/mo.

Healthcare is absolutely a “pretty big deal” and absolutely the system is terrible. But if you actually made 34k/yr, it probably makes sense to spend 1hr googling for the actual programs that exist so you’d discover that you can get it for much cheaper.

I take a biologic that costs $5,000 a month without a prescription. $1k a month is honestly easier and I can afford it. I enjoy the luxury of being able to afford to not have to navigate the stupid “oh, so you’re poor” patchwork bullshit that exists. My roommate is not such a person.

It's not free.

Yeah both the UK and US are notorious for NIMBYism. People filing lawsuits as like a hobby, because they want to stop all development. In these countries it's far to easy for a small group of complainers to grind the entire system to a halt and burn endless amounts of time and money. It seems particularly bad in the anglosphere.

It's particularly bad in the anglosphere because we have common law legal systems that are built around resolving personal disputes in court.

This has upsides -- it was a good solution to the problem in the 1200s of people solving disputes by fighting it out -- but in a modern context the downsides are pretty high thanks to rent-seeking lawyers.

There are millions of people in the US that are making a lot less than you do who manage to buy houses, go on vacations, save for retirement and put their kids through college.

I’m 50 now, we purposefully “de-contented” our lives two years ago after our youngest graduated in 2020 and after Covid so we wouldn’t have to be in the rat race. I never made a lot as your standard enterprise dev and didn’t hit $200K+ until I was 46 and started working at BigTech remotely and we used the three years I was there to pay off debt, put some money in savings, etc.

I’ve turned down opportunities that would pay me close to $100k more in cash because I didn’t want the headache and definitely wasn’t going to ever be in an office. If you need me to be physically somewhere for a week, put me on a plane.

Even in 2020, I said no to interviewing as an SDE at Amazon because I didn’t want to relocate to Seattle after Covid lifted and I was only making $150K then. The remote position at AWS ProServe was then suggested.

We had the big house in the burbs of Atlanta in the “good school system” in 2016 built when I was only making $140K. True, when we sold it last year it was double the price. But we would have had to move further out if we were buying house in 2023. It would have been doable

Either way, we moved to a condo in Florida that is state tax free, we downsized to one car and now if I had to, I could pay all of our bills including our spending money with just my income and all I would need to make is $140K.

Making around $200k, I max out my retirement + catch up contributions + HSA and we have been on a plane to do something (mostly vacations, occasionally visiting friends) over a dozen times a year since mid 2022 and that trend is continuing for the foreseeable future

For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college and should be making way more than me in three years. I’m not bragging.

I have no other income besides my job.

I have no worries about “AI”, I moved into consulting working full time for consulting companies in 2020 (well then the consulting department at AWS). I just have to be able to sell and/or guide implementations of whatever the shovel du jour is. Right now I’m leading a Kubernetes + AI implementation.

Yes, but how is that 15 year old going to do the same? What about the ones who don't end up winning the career lottery?

We need this to be possible for two people making 40k a year, not 140.

A new college grad across all fields has a median earning of $65K - $75K (https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/average-college...). No you can’t buy a house straight out of school. But you move up in your career just like everyone else does.

From that same citation, look at the median starting salary in engineering disciplines - over $100K.

The median household income of homebuyers is around $110K. (https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-finds-typical-home-buye...).

Most homebuyers are not single (https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/in-the-news/single-women-ar...)

"Household income" is often a joint statistic. $110K comes out to roughly 55K each. You're not making the assertions you think.

Yes I am

- the typical college grad makes $65K

- the typical homebuyer is not single.

- the typical household has two earners.

I guess I'm confused by your take then, and the evidence you use to support it. You stated "But you move up in your career just like everyone else does" from a 65-75K starting salary as a college grad, when your own figures show that the average household income is oftentimes comprised of two people making even less than that, but have reached the stage of upwards mobility to buy a house, albeit oftentimes "house-broke" and in strife to pay mortgages.

These people didn't move up, as per your assessment. Most people need to combine salaries with someone else to even have a fair chance in this system, to get any upwards mobility.

When I was single until I was 28, I didn’t even want a house. I wanted the flexibility of being able to move. In fact, I hated the maintenances of owning a single family home and as I mentioned in my first reply We downsized to a condo as soon as we could.

If you are single with no responsibilities but yourself in many major cities, you can make it off of $65K. Homeownership is not the only metric of success

People making less than that aren’t homeless and starving.

> in many major cities, you can make it off of $65K

This is certainly not true in any of the cities near me.

I bet wherever you live, people making $65K a year aren’t homeless

In my opinion there is a large gap between "not homeless" and "making it"

And the original person I replied to was in the top percentile of income according to him and considered “survival” not being able to live his current lifestyle.

What do you consider “making it” for a single person?

Not sure what it proves to say, "People who own expensive homes have high incomes". higher prices filter out potential buyers with lower incomes.

I am not doing any such thing.

$110K is not a “high income” for two college educated people. It’s actually the combined new grad income.

And because of assertive mating, most college graduates marry other college graduates.

This is the home ownership rate by age

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...

> For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college and should be making way more than me in three years.

What bubble do you live in?

"US Tech Layoffs Continue In 2025 With Big Tech Scaling Worker Counts And Fintech, E-Commerce Sectors Reporting Total Shutdowns" - https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs/

"Computer science grads say the job market is rough. Some are opting for a ‘panic’ master’s degree instead." - https://www.businessinsider.nl/computer-science-grads-say-th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1fylku5/are_most_...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/15/why-is-it-...

Well, he (probably not she) is describing expected earnings once hired, not chances of actually getting hired.

And more to the point, when I mentioned what I was making, I didn’t want to get the response that “you know you could make $400K+ by grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG”.

You do know that these companies still hire people don’t you?

In other Continents :-)

Like North America?

I really don't know what to tell you, it's not 2020 anymore but people are still hiring people in the same places they've always been.

"Software Development Job Postings" : https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

I don't see earlier than 2020 data, is there another platform like that?

Yes, why don’t you “just” get a job at BigTech?

The chances of that are approximately 0%, despite being a much better than average developer/IT person.

I did a back of the napkin estimate before from all of the sources I could find and the best numbers I could find was that the top paying tech companies employ around 10% of all developers in the US.

On the other hand, the average CRUD developer in any major city in the US can make $140K-$170K within seven years of graduating with strategic job hopping

They specifically select against folks like me (on multiple dimensions) so 0 * any-percentage still equals nada. I might be able to swing the second one when the market improves.

I myself didn’t get in through the front door. I got in via the consulting division at AWS (Professional Services). Yes it was a full time direct hire under Amazons usual 4 year offer with base + large signing bonus + RSUs. I am no longer there.

There are all sorts of non tech white collar jobs at all of the BigTech companies that pay top of market. My best friend was hired in the finance department at Amazon Retail. He is now a director at a smaller place and is just now matching the comp of an L6 at Amazon five years later.

There is a better than 50% chance I could get into Google (GCP) doing similar work if I put in the work and learned and could speak about the GCP equivalent of the AWS tech that I know well and where I lead large implementations.

But they only do hybrid and I have no desire to work in an office.

Warning, just kind of rat-holing on terminology a little. You've used the phrase "can make" twice now. I've always found that way of expressing it kind of weasel-y. Yes, a software developer "can make" $140-170K, by the definition of "can" meaning a non-zero possibility. A new grad "can make" $100K+. A senior software engineer "can make" $1M/yr. All these things are true. I "can win" the lottery, too, and my kid "can be" president of the USA one day. Also technically true. It's more interesting to talk about typical cases, rather than best-case aspirational ones, which I see you are doing in other parts of the thread (great!). I think HN very often mistakes the best case for the typical case, especially when we talk about salaries.

Even using typical case, salary means and medians don't tell the whole story, as the distributions can be wild.

I posted sources at salary.com where you can filter by city and is more applicable to most developers than levels.fyi. I also mentioned what non tech companies are paying like Coke, Delta, Home Depot , etc in non tech hubs.

Median is not “best case”. I’m also well aware of the bi modal distribution of comp in the industry where a “senior” enterprise dev tops out at around what an entry level developer makes at BigTech.

Before the current shit show of the last couple of years in the industry, as a senior enterprise CRUD developer, I could throw my resume in the air and get a “full stack developer” job in Atlanta making $150k within a couple of weeks. This was the norm in Atlanta.

I’ve moved on since then. But the last time I was looking last year, my old recruiters were still saying if I lived in Atlanta I could make around that as just a C# developer. None of those jobs required any more than 5-7 years of experience.

“Enterprise CRUD developer” was my plan B.

I’m probably one of the few people commenting here who has been in both worlds recently and now purposefully on the tip top end of “enterprise” dev and still on the low end of BigTech.

Making $140K to $170k as a senior CRUD/franework enterprise “full stack developer” is the norm. I’ve moved to strategic cloud consulting now making more.

“People who get to work in the highly coveted, rather small, highest revenue-per-employee sector in human history should be just fine!”

Uhh yeah…

Well, first, the reply was to someone who doesn’t know how they will survive probably making five or six times what the median income is.

Second, I posted statistics where even the average college grad can still make it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42794546

"survive" typically means "maintain this quality of life".

If I were to be displaced by AI, I'm not sure how I'd the mortgage and two kids (that an average college grad doesn't have).

I could sell the house and net several hundred thousand dollars, but if I want to keep the kids in the same district, it's a wash because the township has been fervently fighting fair-value housing.

So your complaint is that because of AI, you might not be able to maintain the lifestyle that puts you in I assume at least the top 5% of earners and make around $350K (https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/)?

The average household is making less than $100k a year (same source) and are somehow surviving, you might have to make different life choices.

I hate to say but that's a 'boomer take' but you sound like a parody of a tiktok skit.

Are my statistics off? I quoted both the comp at BigTech and enterprise dev where most developers work.

And how many “boomers” have any clue about BigTech comp?

Are people who graduate from college who are “only” making 75K on average going homeless and hungry?

> For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college

Maybe, if new grad is defined as:

- A remarkable programmer on their own time. i.e. Impressive Github profile, side projects, leetcode expert, etc. Just going through Comp Sci isn't going to get you hired at BigTech today.

- Someone with a fantastic network. Better hope you've got friends in high places or family with connections.

Go to salary.com and select any major city in the US and see what a senior software engineer makes.

Anecdotally, I spent my entire career between 1996- 2020 working local jobs in Atlanta. Which is not exactly a tech hub. Look at the compensation of your standard non tech well known companies that are either based in Atlanta or have a large presence like Delta, Home Depot, Coke, GE (GE Transportation), State Farm.

I’ve never studied a line of leetcode nor have I had a GitHub portfolio my entire career until 2021.

Amazon/Microsoft/Meta all hire new college grads, and all will have a total comp above 165k.

You do not need an impressive Github profile, these companies are almost entirely leetcode interview based.

I am in a similar boat. Many of us in similar boats would be very thankful if you can expand on what are the names of these consulting companies and how can we breakthrough?

Honestly, there is no easy way. It was partially strategic and partially luck. I started down this path in 2016. The only actionable advice I can give is start taking on projects with greater scope, impact and that is closer to dealing with the “business”. Work on your soft skills and presentation skills.

My favorite book is “The Geek Leaders Handbook”

2016 - I chose a job that would give me a chance to lead my first green field major implementation from scratch over one that paid more. But I would have just been pulling tickets off the board. I was first exposed to AWS here. But “consultants” did all of the AWS setup. After I started learning AWS, I realized that they were just a bunch of old school operations people. I thought I could be a better consultant since I knew software development and could learn cloud.

2018 - this happened

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37446115

2020 - a job at AWS ProServe fell into my lap

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212

2023 - After getting Amazoned, I got a full time job at a 3rd party consulting company doing the same thing.

2024 - left there and got another job as a “staff software architect” at another consulting company.

And this is what I do now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709059

This is hugely helpful and one of the most helpful things I read. Thanks for your kindness. This is a very good blueprint on how to think about career advancement at our age. Thanks again

No problem

If you think software engineering salaries are low in the USA, try working in Europe. A 'good' salary can be 30K or even lower after tax per year, and electricity costs twice as much as in the USA. In some places, even bottle scavengers earn more than software engineers in Europe.

Yes, but my sense is that in Europe, you can "survive" easier than in the US.

There are several key differences.

In the US, everything is spread out so you absolutely need to own a car in many low cost of living (COL) places; there's no option for transportation. In the US, healthcare can absolutely destroy you and you cannot get quality healthcare at a decent rate without a job that provides it as a benefit. Access to transportation networks is also poor compared to Europe and Asia where trains are abundant, fast, cheap, and accessible by wide networks of public transport. The way the US has been built out is not amenable to that in low COL areas.

So I acknowledge that there are lots of problems world wide in different countries and wages are lower and taxes are higher in general in the EU, but there are more social safety nets compared to the US. The baseline "cost of existing" in the US is simply higher.

Europe is a big continent with very different countries.

Whether you're talking about UK, Norway, France, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, etc. that's a completely different story for each.

Europe covers everywhere from Switzerland with US-level salaries to Moldova. Be specific.

you are me; down parents issues with smoking/etc and current career/age.

> I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to hire me

My plan is simple: Retire. Avoid that 1m house when possible.

> I have no idea how my kids are going to make it

Same boat here, but I'm less concerned insofaras I'm doing everything I can to keep as many options/opportunities open to my kids as possible. This honestly significantly dampens the 'retire' plan; but what can you do? My parents would have no idea what I do if I tried to explain it; I expect the world to shift similarly by the time my kids are working. The goal is simply to give every advantage I can and keep as many doors open as possible.

> I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.

Brother, I feel the same way. The education system is broken, public discourse has degraded to illiterate thuggery and madness, and today's children and young adults are facing crushing economic rent-taking.

Regarding housing the problems are the same everywhere where the same "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea. We can all get wealthy by buying houses from each other with ever increasing prices. In reality the only winners in this game are a) banks b) early buyers who can cash out, liquidate and move somewhere cheaper.

In my country of origin housing is now so expensive that it takes 2 median income lifetimes to pay for it. Of course you can find cheaper housing in rural countryside or in some deadbeat towns but then there's basically no work either, so at minimum you need a car to commute. For someone making a below median income operating a vehicle is easily -300€ / mo cost.

And the funny thing the country is 93% forest. Unzoned land is plentiful and costs nothing but after zoning the price goes up to 20k € per each m². The townships and counties have a monopoly on zoning and use that to milk the constituents for money. Of course that money is all away from other spending so local communities and small time businesses (such as restaurants, hair dressers etc) are all taking a hit since (with the recent greedflation) people simply have no more purchasing power left over.

In my current country Germany, here in Bayern the situation is exactly the same. In Munich a small unit in is at minimum 1-1.5m € and it'll be bare bones. The cost is insane. At the same time there's a shortage of all kinds of laborers. How does a "bus driver" afford to live here. Well, they don't.

The whole economic system is biased against younger generations and while the older generations live longer they accumulate all the wealth. They are a large representative of the population (due to the upside down age pyramid) and active voters so they of course vote for politicians who will not topple this order.

In the past all empires have fallen when the middle class has fallen. When there's a critical mass of people with nothing to lose and who feel like the system has failed them the heads will roll and revolutions will begin.

> "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea.

Lending money for housing is not insane. Houses are durable goods where most of the cost needs to be paid up front. The builder of the house is paying for a structure that will house people for 50+ years. This duration mismatch is exactly what lending is supposed to help with.

Lending is not the problem. People were complaining it was when interest rates were at 0%. Now they are at 7%, but housing prices are still high.

Lack of supply is the problem.

Houses are not durable goods. Their value should go down as they get older (this is in fact how housing is valued in Japan for example).

And yes lending per se is not the problem, the problem is using lending to prop up this ponzi scheme that has artificially inflated prices due to constricted supply and then selling it to the citizens as a tool to "create wealth".

>"Their value should go down as they get older"

The average person needs a commodified asset that's useful to them from the onset - and builds value over time - in order to strengthen their possibility of upwards mobility now, and generational wealth in the future. A 401K does nothing for you in the 40 years you're accumulating it, a car depreciates substantially - as soon as after purchase, the stock market is oftentimes a playsake for the already well-off, there's simply nothing like housing for individuals in most sectors of the status quo "bell curve".

Upwards mobility? But that's exactly what younger generations can't do since housing is completely out of reach for them.

My example from Munich, a condo going for a 1m €. Median software engineer salary is around 66k € per year. Income tax ~40% so your take home is around 40k year.

That means that if you put all your net income towards your home you'd need 25 years just for the principle not counting interest or spending money on essentials such as food or energy.

So how do you do it? You don't. It's simply not possible unless you have exceptional circumstances (top %1 job, rich mom & dad etc).

This also means you now have no chance but to rent and and all your rent money just goes forward to the generations of individuals who invested in this ponzi scheme earlier or to the investment firms and businesses who operate in this domain. Regardless again all the wealth moves up the pyramid to the top.

Also even those older generations, all this "wealth" is imaginary. You can only realize your gains when you actually sell (so you realize the market price you sell on) and in addition you still gotta live somewhere, so to win in this game is to buy early and cash out by selling and then moving to somewhere low cost. (Perhaps retirement).

In summary, expensive housing is only benefiting those who already have amassed wealth and it's obstructing those who haven't from amassing any wealth.

We are completely in agreement. I'm in that younger generation, as well; I know.

> Income tax ~40%

Actual or marginal?

Makes a big difference to your calcs. I worry when I see people quote their marginal rate because it shows a fundamental ignorance of finance. I know nothing about Germany, but in NZ top marginal rate is 39% and actual tax rate is below that.

Depends on if you account for just tax, or tax, soli, social security, and given it is baveria - church tax.

Some back of the envelope calculations would put the effective rate for tax+soli+church at ~25%. Add another 20% for social security to make that 45%.

The marginal rate would be something like 42% tax + 5.5% soli * .42 + 8% church * .42 ~= 47%

The socials include pension+unemployment+healthcare+long-term-care

Houses do go down in value. The value of the land, and the permission to build a house on that land, typically go up (over the last decade an awful lot).

> Houses are not durable goods. Their value should go down as they get older (this is in fact how housing is valued in Japan for example).

Um, yes are you familiar with depreciation of the built structure? Durable doesn't mean immortal. Perhaps you don't know what durable good means in this context.

It's the lack of supply that is the reason why having a mortgage market is a bad idea.

You HAVE to live somewhere. This means any cash you can get your hands on, such as a mortgage, it's going to be used to compete with all the other people who need to live somewhere.

The problem can be solved in two ways. Either you make it really hard to get a mortgage, or you make enough houses that people are not competing over musical chairs.

The only solution is build build build. Preferably with good building (more modern, flame resistant with that in mind) and zoning codes (more like Japan's quality of life impact based ones).

this: "you make enough houses that people are not competing over musical chairs."

we just haven't built enough, in the areas with current demand.

As a non American, I've always struggled to understand the "American Dream".

It is about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and going from poor to wealthy by using the opportunities that the US provides. Is that a correct assessment?

The problem I have with that is that it doesn't in any way include bringing your community up with you or letting your wealth be reinvested back into the environment in which you were poor. It solves the issue only for that single person without addressing why the issue existed in the first place. It seems to be inherently "selfish", no?

Pretty much yes!

America has a long history of promoting “rugged individualism.” Community is hardly ever part of the conversation, unfortunately.

It's getting worse as time goes on, too. Things like Cooperation, "Common Good" and Community are not merely ignored. More and more they're being actively opposed. Individualism is no longer: "I don't need community and society." It's become: "I don't need community and society, and you shouldn't have it either!" Rugged Individualism has become Toxic Individualism.

Just fifty years ago you could buy a home by swinging a hammer for a few years. No degree needed. So it was a thing.

When you made it you would pay taxes, giving back to others. Not selfish.

That's still possible (and in some cases, plumber/carpenter/contractor is perhaps the best option still available).

What we're seeing is at least partially the result of everyone going to college for something like a few decades.

Deciding to be apprentice to a plumber at 17 is much different than having to do the same at 21/23 because the degree you went into debt for isn't panning out the way you wanted.

You're 4+ years behind, you're some amount of debt in the hole, and you're having to work hard.

(Average student loan debt is something like $37k, which isn't the cost of a house, but is certainly close to a down payment.)

You're right, my nephew bought a shack to fix up in Montana a few years back. But, I don't think that's what most people think of when they say the dream is alive.

You can still get an FHA loan and put 3.5% down.

> Just fifty years ago you could buy a home by swinging a hammer for a few years. No degree needed. So it was a thing.

Not even that far back.

I can't even match the standard of living my parents (and friends' parents) raised us in in the 90s/2000s. Exactly 0 of the people I'm thinking of were "professionals" or had any high-quality rigorous education at all.

All had condos/SFH with (gasp) a garage very close to where I still live.

Many of the wives didn't work at all, other than perhaps retail type jobs once we were old enough to be self-sufficient.

As an immigrant, I define the "American Dream" as "opportunity regardless of social class". I think Atwood also hints at this in his blog post (as this is the reason he called out his upbringing and family).

This is in contrast to the system of nobility and "old money" in Europe and why many immigrants sought to find their way to the New World.

The idea of public education started in the US and for a long time has been one of the key public services that enabled this social mobility. In the US, historically, there were opportunities even for immigrants to become self-made men and women and their children would be better off than they were. Immigrants might arrive in the US illiterate, but their children would at least have the opportunity to be educated and find better paths.

It's still possible, but it feels as if the cards are stacked higher and higher towards those that are already coming from some wealth. I increasingly feel like the chances that my kids are going to be better off than me are decreasing every year because the stepping stones to success are becoming eroded.

Housing is a massive bomb because for so many people is is the singular investment that their net worth and retirement is held in. This idea has been so deeply entrenched for so long that a reversal will wipe out millions of people's net worth.

At some point the bomb will go off, but there's no incentive to look at the long term of 10+ years out when the explosion will destroy people's political careers in the short term.

I know so many people 20 years ago who "I'll sell my CA house and retire elsewhere" was a majority of their plan.

As of now, I can only count a very few who actually did it, turns out it's hard to leave where you've lived your entire working life to move somewhere you've never been, and the price differential isn't as amazing as it once was (since Covid flattened that out somewhat).

The ones who did end up doing it ended up following their children (who were priced out of where they grew up).

Normally you'd expect measured, predictable, steady inflation to be the method to "defuse the bomb" but so far that hasn't been really tried (if houses keep going up 1-2% a year, but inflation is 5%, you have a 3% drop in value each year even though on paper, you have an increase).

20 years ago is when the bomb probably could have been diffused, but I think the recovery out of the GFC put it on the back burner and then it was too late.

Housing should have been getting built like crazy in places like CA so that those people thinking of selling had a reason to sell. By not building houses property values keep booming, and even if you plan to sell and move somewhere it's easy to endlessly delay that decision when you're getting rich as hell.

CA housing cannot be fixed without across the board reassessment. Otherwise the winner with an old property paying 2% of their 1980s purchase price will never sell. The immediate tax hit for moving to a similar house would be financial insanity.

And reassessing across the board is not going to happen either because it would price out grandma living on a fixed income.

I bought my house (in CA) in 2019, and my property tax bill is ~$30k/yr. My literal nextdoor neighbor's property tax bill is less than $1k/yr (it last sold in the 1960s and has been passed down within the same family).

And to fix the problem, they added Prop 90 and 19, which now let you transfer the base value around! What an amusing shell game.

https://www.boe.ca.gov/prop19/#FAQs

But more efficiently shuffling existing supply doesn't create new supply.

Tax deferral to the estate for anyone over X age or that has owned a property for more than Y years. Or some gradient on either age or property ownership duration would address some of the issue. Even if you mitigate things with some kind of blanket exemption either of the estate or just to for life for a small set of folks that qualify, you need to stop it from new homeowners getting locked in.

If we have supply start matching demand, we'd get closer to the the "houses keep going up 1-2% a year, but inflation is 5%, you have a 3% drop in value each year even though on paper, you have an increase" approach.

Most metro areas are still not keeping up with demand. Even the ones that are doing better in things like zoning (such as in TX, NC, FL) are getting enough growth from other locations that the induced demand is still outpacing supply.

We need state and federal policies that can override the local NIMBYism. CA's recent experience is both a good start but also provides a bunch of lessons learned on how these policies can fail and should be improved both in CA in other jurisdictions - especially when localities are actively trying to work around them.

What is demand? People who want to live somewhere and people who want to park their money in land or real estate. Prices won't go down if you deal with only one kind of demand.

Technically multiple bombs explode here and there. Here's how:

* Family bought 1 house (assets), big mortgage (cause it's expensive), live until retirement

* Parents sell the house (lost the assets) to either a wealthier family or investors to downgrade

* Parents potentially share the proceeding to the kids to support their Housing endeavor but Kids will be forced to buy something smaller (usually Condos) because detached is expensive and kids wage just starting from the bottom of the paygrade.

Long-term, middle class will erode.

You just touched on another one of my big concerns – Condos.

I love condos, but the older generations have no idea what modern condo living is really like and what maintenance is required for these kinds of places. They get talked about like 'starter' homes for young people that can't afford a single family house and so often they nudge younger people to buy them and 'get on the ladder'.

Often they are TERRIBLE investments though. Property tax is relatively high in most cities, ongoing fees are huge, governance is normally terrible, and every now and then something major goes wrong and the current owners are left with huge extra bills.

'Getting on the ladder' in this way, along with student debt really cripples so many people into a life of debt payments while building very little wealth.

I love my condo that we downsized to from our big house in the burbs. But you are right, they are horrible “investments”. I knew that going in.

That is what eroding middle class looks like.

This is what happened when The Rich outcompetes the middle class.

The current global realpolitiks shows that unless you have a very heavy industry that you can invest in, to replace the cratering housing prices, no country is willing to blow it up on purpose. China is trying to strategically do it, but they still have so many more people that they can lift up, move around and put to work into different industries. It's just not really the case for developed countries. I'm assuming India will take the same course in the near future, but their challenges are a bit different.

Also, when supermajority+ have the same problem, it's in the interest of the government to do anything possible to delay the problem for the future generations. That's why I have reservations about US, Canada, UK, Australia and others doing the same thing. It also doesn't help when your entire population growth is depended on immigration, as you can, theoretically, keep the demand higher without many complaints, while limiting the supply.

There's also the Japan problem, but it's weird. In Tokyo we're seeing rental prices actually going up, as it's the only region where the population is growing for all the wrong reasons.

Oh well, good luck to us.

I think the root of many problems is housing costs

I'm somewhere around your age, and I also wonder what the future of software development work looks like. I don't know that I'd direct my kids towards the field; maybe this is just a temporary bumpy patch and it'll improve, but it is hard to say.

One thing I think is that being 40-50 or so means that there is plenty of runway for a second career. Could retrain for something, nursing, cpa, lawyer, trades? Just have to have the savings for making that transition

My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening and closing constantly.

But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?

There are several root causes we can potentially drill further down to, but making headway will likely require hard work and involvement in our communities. You could always try running for something and becoming a politician.

Yes, I think we need to reform zoning and build like crazy. With everything costing a million dollars on the west coast, I don't see why there isn't a crane every block putting up a new building

Other than NIMBYs, zoning and code

I really think we could have a boom

> Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?

The council and the mayor of Exampletown are elected by the residents of Exampletown.

The people who've been forced out of Exampletown by the high rents? And those who'd like to live there, but can't afford to? They don't get a vote.

My point is: when looking for the "root cause" of these problems, people shouldn't stop asking when they get to the rent being high, that's a symptom.

Additionally, if people care about helping younger generations, it's within reach to jump in and help shape the communities they'll be living in. E.g. If an issue is zoning, go to zoning meetings.

Totally agree about housing costs. After 10 years of paying high rent in the UK I've returned to Dublin.

Currently paying €1,300 per month for a tiny studio. (I'm told I'm lucky) So hard to build up savings.

The average price for a home in Dublin is now €600,000 according to our central statistics office. Unbelievable.

(The average annual salary in Ireland is €50,000)

Housing costs are both created by NIMBY and The Rich gobbling assets both Residential _AND_ Commercials.

Here's the thing: if housing cost goes up but wage goes up as well (wage is controlled by the Rich), then things will be fine.

But things aren't fine because Wage gets depressed, everywhere.

The problem isn't as much that wages are depressed as "The Rich" is the average person in the older generation that bought housing when an appropriate amount was being built, then lessened the amount of housing so that there's not enough for future generations.

Class analysis must account for the strongest political class being real-estate asset holders that don't set wages but do benefit from a shortage of that real-estate asset.

The rich that I refer here is Funds, REITs, or small group of Investors. All of them are financed by the Rich.

> then lessened the amount of housing so that there's not enough for future generations.

NIMBY definitely another issue but that house is still there and got bought by someone (person/entity) richer than the average.

Large capital is not controlling the housing supply, though. That's entirely done at the local level by the petit bourgeois, which are the NIMBYs. You can read their investment filings which openly state this, even. Or go to any local government meeting.

> "The Rich" is the average person in the older generation that bought housing when an appropriate amount was being built

That's one of the fallacies here, thinking that upper middle class is "The Rich". If you think of it as a whole, you will see that the current trajectory means that the overall amount of property that the middle class owns collectively can only go down. Any house that was bought for dime by the older generation but cannot be retained by the following will drop out of the middle class. And it's not going to be spread among the poor but goes up to those who can still afford it: the actual rich.

Thus the middle class slowly but surely bleeds out and all landownership will remain with the super rich. The older middle class is just a temporary place for assets. Once they have gone the situation I layed out will become more and more obvious.

> And it's not going to be spread among the poor but goes up to those who can still afford it: the actual rich

Which will be the children of the older generation of the middle class.

Lack of housing supply is fueling huge economic inequality that wasn't there before.

The situation you layout is not very clear to me, specifically what is meant by "super rich." How do the older middle class lose out and not become "the rich," specifically?

I think the best description of what I'm talking about is the book The Asset Economy by Adkins et al.

The older middle class have assets that they acquired when those assets cost a fraction of the new price. The older middle class die and try to leave it to their heirs. If asset prices are higher than what a middle class income can afford, the middle class can only own property if they have inherited it. No new property is going to be owned by the middle class as a whole.

There are plenty of ways, however, that property leaves the middle class. If your inheritance tax or property tax (both a percentage of the inflated asset "value"), e.g., exceeds what a middle class income can manage, the property will be sold. If you have used it for a loan to, e.g., start a business and you become ill or your plan fails, you might have to sell it.

Who is going to buy these properties? If a middle class income can't afford property prices anymore, who is left? The middle class can only afford those houses by swapping their property for it.

Therefore, the overall amount of properties owned by the middle class can only shrink. It baffles me that this isn't obvious to everyone.

Now, who is "The Rich" in this scenario?

Those of the middle class who own property will do so because they inherited it, not because they were able to afford it through their income. They might be able to swap it for another property and hope not to make a loss. Their income is still middle class, however. They can't use those inflated property values unless they sell which leaves them without said property.

The rich are those who have enough income to increase their portfolio of assets despite of inflated prices, solely to park their money somewhere. Those aren't your middle class mom and pop who bought a house in the 80s and then a flat in the 90s. And the rich are also not the ones who inherit that house or flat but still earn a middle class income.

There will be a sharp divide between the middle class that was lucky enough to inherit land and the middle class that wasn't so lucky. Reading comments like yours makes me believe that there will be a lot of finger pointing towards the lucky ones. Because those are the ones you can see. The ones who are inflating housing prices by their demand to park their vast amounts of money stay invisible. The ones that will be attacked are the upper middle class, just to pull them down. Like crabs in a bucket.

I think we agree, though I find your use of the term "class" very confusing. The ones who bought cheap are already rich in these high-demand low-supply parts of the country.

The fingers must pointed exactly at the ones who are keeping prices high by suppressing housing supply, namely the rich homeowners who still consider themselves "middle class" or even "working class" despite owning assets that none in the working class or middle class could ever afford. These are the rich people who are controlling the local policy that changes their social class. It is not REITs or bankers, it is the very folks with large assets who work to keep their prices sky high by keeping housing optkons limited.

This is absolutely not anything like crabs in a bucket, with people with less pulling down those who succeed. It is in fact the exact opposite, those with housing assets who work to prevent any more housing from being built have put people into the pot by making the game a finite sum with limited housing.

Unaffordable housing comes from inadequate supply, which comes from older generations not permitting enough housing to be built in the high-demand areas.

Where I come from, you do not become a millionaire by working an average job. If you don't happen to be at a C level position, you will never become millionaire level rich by working for other people. If you have a middle class income, it means you have no more than middle class maneuverability. It isn't enough to become a multi millionaire under your own power. You have to start your own company or repeatedly make very good investments to really move up.

Owning something that suddenly has an inflated value does not necessarily make you rich.

Let's say you own a car. You need that car (maybe to take care of a relative). You can afford your car with your middle class income. Over night it gets replaced by a golden car worth 1 million dollars. If it's the only golden car, you are rich. You can sell the golden car and replace it with a reasonably priced one and still have about a million dollars.

But it's different if in the same night all cars become golden cars, including every car leaving the factory. Even 20 year old cars in dire need of repair have become golden one million dollar affairs. Now you're not rich. You can only exchange your golden car for another golden car.

If you sell your car and use the money for anything else, you will never in your entire life own a car again, because your income just can't provide for it.

That's how people stay middle class with a middle class income even though the house they live in suddenly is worth a million. It's about maneuverability.

> Unaffordable housing comes from inadequate supply, which comes from older generations not permitting enough housing to be built in the high-demand areas.

Unaffordable housing has to do with demand and supply, yes. What many people overlook is that not all demand stems from people wanting to live somewhere.

Land ownership has become an attractive way to park money the last 15 years. And there is a lot of money that needs parking. The last burst of a housing bubble caused one of the biggest ways to park money - lending to other people - to shrink dramatically (mixing subprime loans as a marketable bundle turned out to be a bad idea). Interest rates went down, making it even less attractive. The money now gets put into an equally inflated stock market, some of it into Silicon Valley style venture capital bets, and another huge chunk into real estate. So there are a lot of very rich and influential people who would lose a lot of money if those house prices would start to fall.

And even if you would meet the demand of those people who just want a place to live, you will not satisfy the demand for investments.

The children of older generation will have even bigger mortgage, limiting their economy movement.

This is what an eroding middle class looks like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795925

Building more housing won't solve the problem if the demand continue to outpace the supply plus price is sticky.

Nobody wants to build more house if they knew the next project yield less income.

On the software side - I'm not sure I'd recommend CS as such, but I know plenty of software engineers that have some alternative kind of technical background and enough CS classes or self-taught knowledge that they were able to be successful. Like physics, electrical engineering. Disciplines like Aerospace eng or Biomedical eng have great systems engineering backgrounds and often CS coverage too.

I'd make a recommendation to hedge one's bets even if they wanted to go into software to see if they wanted thought an adjacent field with transferable skills would be a good fit and offer multiple opportunity paths.

> I think the root of many problems is housing costs

for us, family of 4, it's 1) housing, 2) healthcare (unless you're lucky enough to have a really good employer-sponsored plan that covers dependents or allows them to buy in at employee-negotiated rates, which I don't), 3) education (college for the kids, and the high cost of anything besides public school, I don't mean private schools but even just summer camps etc.)

I look to the future and have a lot of anxiety about how my kids are going to make it

Get them a Roth IRA. Put $7k in it each year as long as you can. Invest the Roth in an index fund, dividend fund, or straight up picks. Have them put into the fund as soon as they are able (summer jobs, etc)

If you have enough, buy another property. Your kids can live in it or manage it later.

Put stuff in trusts or be sure they can manage it effectively. The thing you most want (probably) is for them to be secure into their old age, long after you are gone. But they will start feeling secure by middle age, and you will all be happier.

The idea that most people just have an extra $7k a year sitting around to put into a retirement account they won't be able to access for decades seems pretty out of touch. A lot of people are just getting by. Additionally, if you live in a high CoL area, you might be prevented from contributing to a Roth even though most of your income goes to living expenses.

Some of the advice thrown around in this thread is so out of touch.

    "Just get a high paying job". 
    "I never worry about healthcare because of my employer". 
    "Just put $7,000 away into a retirement account and $10,000 into a 529 every year.  What's the problem?"

And even if I'm in a position to do that, the problem is that there are millions of fellow Americans (the majority) that don't have these "luxuries".

Your on hackernews, maybe you confused this place with Reddit?

This site's guidelines include "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. "

Generally speaking, that points to software devs, which points to a high paying job.

So when op said they don't know how their kids will save money, most commenters are replying with the assumption they're talking to a software dev.

Also please by all means toss out your own solutions.

I like a quote from Stephen Dubner when he closes his episodes of Freakonomics podcast:

    > "Take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too."

I'm on HN. I work at a Series-C YC startup. I previously worked at another VC-back SV startup. I've even tried numerous startups of my own. But I'm also a part of a broader community of Americans and I want all Americans (and all people, if possible) to do well.

It's really simple; I'm human first.

> It's really simple; I'm human first.

Thanks for that. It seems as if over the past 5 years or so, the tech industry in particular has completely lost the thread on this.

Also the "buy another property".

Like, this is part of the damn problem.

Not only that, but even if you could put $7K every year into an IRA, and even if the investment returned a steady 7% per year risk free (HAHA!), in 30 years, it's grown to ~$660K, which, sure, is a nice chunk of change, but at a 3% draw down rate, you'll need to live on less than $20K/year. You'll need to be really frugal. Move to a super low cost of living area and go back to eating ramen. And don't get seriously sick or injured. And don't have dependents to house, feed, and educate...

That's probably why he suggested a roth. $7k might be too much, but you can withdraw your own contributions from a roth without penalty. This makes it a great way to save for people early in their career, especially if they are in lower tax brackets that wouldn't benefit greatly from traditional ira deductions anyway.

The person you're replying to wasn't making a general point, but was specifically replying to someone who said their income was in the top percentiles. So probably not someone just getting by.

You can't put money into an IRA unless the primary holder of said IRA has income, and you cannot put more into said IRA than was earned by the primary holder of the IRA.

My young children earn $0 annually. I wish I could do this. 3 IRAs is cheaper than daycare by about half.

Yes because there are no downsides to managing rental property - vacancies, long eviction processes, maintenance, etc.

Considering your upbringing, you're making some confusing statements. Somebody who was brought up low income but is now wealthy ("one of the top percentiles of household income") should know better. It's called living frugally.

It sounds like you're fearful of losing your luxurious lifestyle if your income changes. Most Americans are fearful of affording clothing, food and shelter if their income changes.

You're reading it all wrong.

Like Atwood, I understand my good fortune in life and I am ever grateful and humbled that I have achieved what I have starting from a 1 bedroom apartment where my entire family slept in one room.

Like Atwood, I want an America where the path of upward mobility and opportunity is available to all and not so blatantly biased towards the privileged and those that are already well-off.

I'm not concerned so much for myself, but for the two lives I've brought into this world and for the lives of the millions of Americans and immigrants that did not have my good fortune (and I'd say much of my own current status is a result of luck and opportune moments in life).

Like Atwood, I worry that we no longer have the will to create and pass legislation that benefits the masses at the expense of the few because those few now control so much of the channels over which our discourse flows (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, et al).

Atwood's solution and approach is to use his accumulated fortune to donate to organizations that seek to help other fellow Americans. Ostensibly, that's what good policy and taxation should solve instead.

Get involved with local politics. Join community planning boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for relaxing rules around zoning.

One of the small cities close to Seattle (Shoreline) just announced radical changes to their zoning laws! Change can happen. Right now Seattle is going through loud public debates over this, with NIMBYs going to meetings and shouting crazy accusations about what building more houses will do (recently: building dense housing will cause vitamin D deficiency...). Go spend an hour a month shouting back at them, it makes a real difference!

    > Get involved with local politics. Join community planning boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for relaxing rules around zoning.

I think the takeaway from the last few election cycles is that this really isn't effective anymore now that the channels of information and communication are controlled by a small handful of corporations who's objective is to simply make more money.

But even besides that, I feel that defeats the spirit of the American Dream. What good is making just my community better when the kids one town over are falling behind because they don't have the property tax base to fund better programs and wealthy parents that can pay for better early childcare, private tutoring, and more resources? I already live in a fairly well-off enclave; my concern is for the rest of my fellow Americans who are not so fortunate -- the same concern as Atwood; we've "made it", but we want a society that leaves behind stepping stones for others to make their way up.

So I am compliant when it comes to paying taxes and do not shun paying my fair share because in my view, taxes and government -- you know, of the people, by the people, for the people -- are supposed to be used to make all of America better and not just better for some Americans. But we've seen decades of policy bifurcating on this point. You may point out that spending on social programs have increased. Yes, but so has rent-taking on that spend and siphoning and accumulation of those funds in a few coffers.

> information and communication are controlled by a small handful of corporations who's objective is to simply make more money.

Local elections are where that small handful of corporations have zero impact. Even the real estate investment trusts and private equity don't bother with local elections, because its hopeless. Local elections are entirely determined by small networks of highly connected individuals, which is almost always homeowners looking to protect their biggest asset, their home value.

And that's why local politics has resulted in a housing shortage, because the big bad villain isn't a man in a tophat with a gold watch in a corporate office, it's the next door neighbor that really hates the idea of seeing an apartment building when they drive to work each morning, and especially hates the idea of mere renters living nearby and thinks that they'll bring crime and reduce his property value.

I've been doing that for 8 years, and organized into local groups with others (the lone voice has little impact, but a contingent of people that politicians think will vote a certain way and tell their friends to vote a certain way have a much bigger impact). However, it's not been very successful, because there's an even larger contingent of people with more wealth, more time, and more experience. The tide is turning, but it's slow.

Minnesota is an example where it worked really well, and I wish that the people in my California town were as big-hearted and progressive as those in Minneapolis. Maybe we'll get there here some day.

In the meantime, state-level efforts are overriding the local NIMBYs far more effectively than the local efforts. It turns out that nearly every single local politician wants to override the NIMBYs, but can't due to the way that local elections work (small number of highly motivated folks usually determine the outcome). However, when elected to the state level, there's a broader electoral base and the politicians can finally start to force housing into cities.

I still recommend getting involved locally, whether or not it has a big effect. It is rewarding in its own way, and has lots of benefits in areas other than housing too.

Wages have been flat against productivity gains since the early 1970s in the US. The only way to make it here is to invest heavily over a long time horizon.

> I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house" ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for a fraction of the price.

Thankfull, Trump's new EO regarding housing has it covered. The cavalry has arrived.

Land value tax!

The more I sit with it's long-term policy implications, the more I think it would solve the lack of productivity, progress, and prosperity with modern society. It also has supporters from across the political spectrum because it represents a tax shift rather than a tax increase(even Nobel prize winning economists Milton Friedman(libertarian) and Paul Krugman(modern keynesian) are both fans - and they're pretty far apart when it comes to most policies!)

Short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg

Long version: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...

This is the problem, we don't agree on the solution. You said

> e hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??).

Except the USA spends more on education than most other countries.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

That would argue the issue is not about spending, at least for education, it's something else (not sure what)

I agree though on the general idea that something has to change. Housing in unaffordable.

I said "hostile policies", not "lack of spending"; you jumped to your own partisan conclusion.

Policy and spend have to align to make progress. Spend alone is useless as is policy without spend.

> there's seemingly no political will to fix them

It's not no will, it's no incentive, and usually incentivized to not fix them. The same people keep getting voted in. What other message should they hear than their constituents are happy with the job they're doing? Over half of the American people just voted for someone who lied to our faces and promised they'd make things better when they posses a track record that proved otherwise the last time (and also now a felony record, but I digress). If I decided my career was going to be politics, and I kept getting elected, why on Earth would I ever change what was working?

> top percentiles of household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going to make it

It might not be too late to change this. I also lucked into being in the right place at the right time (interested in computers and programming when graduating in the 2000s). But from the start my goal has been to take advantage of this extraordinary luck and become independently wealthy. My wife (who's not in tech but has a solid $80k - $100k job) and I have lived very cheaply saving more than half of our takehome pay for more than a decade now, investing it in simple index funds.

I, too, don't know what the future will hold for my kids or my career, but I'm relatively confident I've got 10 more high-earning years in me. And my spreadsheet tells me that will be enough to generate generational wealth such that my kids won't have to work if they don't want to.

This obviously isn't a solution for everyone, and I realize much of your post is about US policy. But I just wanted to point out the potential blindspot that you may have from your upbringing where "independently wealthy" people are those people over there, and not me. But with a high income and the magic of compound growth, it's not so unattainable.

Buy Bitcoin if you value your children's financial future

or not, because it's a massive gamble

Not that I'm saying Bitcoin is a solid long term investment, but you could say the same about the stock market.

the stock market is a lot more predictable than bitcoin, even accounting for recessions

Bitcoin has been the best performing asset for the last decade. The gamble you're making is losing out on is attaining intergenerational wealth.

Your kids must found a company etc, day to day job isn't going to keep up with basic necessities like housing,healthcare,lifestyle etc

luckily we have more diverse job in the future

no need to stress once the purge is over things will go back to normal just gotta do everything to not be a sub human like me :)

Hey Jeff! If you are reading this comments, I just want to say thank you! Thanks just for being a nice person. In this over individualistic world, you just shared what you know and helped other people.

I'm your fan since the beginning of Coding Horror. Shared dozens of your blog posts. Stack Overflow changed how everybody programmed. I started coding in a pre-Internet time, when you got stuck, you just got stuck. I'm from Brazil and never went to USA, but I hope someday I can buy you a beer or a coffee.

I know that this post will be piled under thousands of others arguing about housing and health care in the USA.

Thank you! We did it together. More news will be coming soon ;)

Interesting, it seems that extremely rich americans are discovering what scandinavian countries solve through taxation and effective government.

They used to have it in some form with 'new deal' and 'great society' until ~1970, but now they can't because of the very same reasons that are making them extremely rich.

Plus there's some fetisishation of efficiency of the private sector vs public one and distrust in public institutions, while in some areas I don't think it's warranted, it's just that public insititutions are more transparent than the private sector imo.

Yes, these sorts of posts strike me as rich people learning that being rich doesn't solve everyone else's problems. Better late than never.

America has a lot of taxation. Fortunately for the Scandinavian countries it spends it on "protecting Scandinavian shipping lanes" and "medical research grants that benefit Scandinavia", rather than solely on local welfare spending. The America First lot are learning a lot from Scandinavia there, though. I'm not sure we're all going to like where that could lead.

It is very difficult to compare or extrapolate US with Scandinavian countries. US is socially super-heterogeneus, huge, and big population while Scandinavian countries are socially homogeneus, small size and population. And this is just the beginning.

This is just wrong, on many levels. If you look where tax revenues go, it's mostly defense (military industrial complex) and middle-class entitlements.

That's just wrong. Defense spending is 13% of the budget: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727

Federal taxes are mostly spent on welfare like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, & SSI.

You just said that "the budget is mostly Y" in response to, "the budget is mostly X + Y"

Huh?

adamc said "budget is mostly A + B" and the response was "no, its mostly W + X + Y + Z"

The things he cites are mostly middle-class entitlements. That's where a lot of social security and medicare spending goes.

After… age 65. Right? Depending on when you draw SS.

So the middle class is now the 50+ age group?

This explains everything.

That isn't welfare. Most of those are middle-class entitlements. And defense is the second highest category: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Calling Social Security "welfare" is some weird political stance.

I though America spends its taxation on destabilizing Middle East and flooding Europe and Scandinavia with migrants.

If Europe tried to do what America does for Europe it should dump military equipment onto various central and South American countries so they can fight among themselves and create droves of refugees traveling North.

The US has been destabilizing South and Central American Nations quite well on its own.

I can't immediately think of a major US naval deployment in the North Sea outside the big NATO exercises every 1-2 years. Were you thinking of a specific shipping lane?

Scandinavia (like most countries; it's not specific to them) benefits from a relatively piracy-free world, and a constrained Russia. This takes a giant amount of money to achieve, and it's mostly funded by the US taxpayer.

US keeps the 6th fleet in Europe / Mediterranean sea. It costs a pretty penny to defend Europe's seas - about 40 ships,175 aircraft and 21 thousands people.

https://www.c6f.navy.mil/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Sixth_Fleet

This is a common misunderstanding. The US doesn’t send its military around the world because they want to protect freedom and democracy. The US does this to protect open markets that it then gets first right to exploit.

The US has benefited from this situation since WW2. It’s one reason why the US economy has been so successful.

It’s also only now that the US has exploited these markets that they can question the purpose to continue their military imperialism.

TLDR: the US military across the globe wasn’t done out of altruism. It was to expand US economic power.

Arguing intentions seems foolish. The result is the world gets free trade defended basically at zero cost, which was my point. If Scandinavia had to pay for that, it would have far less money available to spend its money on Scandinavia First policies.

>the world gets free trade defended basically at zero cost

At zero cost? Ask the families of those who have been killed by american millitary.

>If Scandinavia had to pay for that

Other than the Scandinavian soldiers killed, and millitary gear lost in the different wars? Other than the thousanda of refugees scandinavia and europe have taken in from the destabilized middle East?

>it would have far less money available to spend its money on Scandinavia First policies.

There are no Scandinavian first policies.

Again, why should Scandinavian countries pay for Americas geopolitical activities more than is already done?

You're being too general, in my opinion. Piracy is almost completed stopped just by presence, not by combat. American also engages in and their taxpayers fund foreign wars, which perhaps it should stop doing, but that is very separate to economically bouying up a global economy via and global R&D via global grant awards and open sharing of American research findings. Trump is right now pausing NIH funding and detaching from the WHO. All the funding that paid for benefited other countries is now gone, partly because people globally laughed at America for not spending enough on its citizens, and eventually enough of its citizens didn't think it was worth keeping on doing that any more.

I prefer my higher wages and lower taxes, thanks. We need to get a handle (moratorium) on mass immigration into US before we care about handing out more of our money for welfare. Why would I want my hard earned wages to be given to an endless influx of poor foreigners? The problem with higher taxes is the money is not spent well. Solve that and people are more willing to contribute.

Look at how badly run are the high tax cities and states in the US. Talk of taxing more without discussion of bad governance is a non starter.

I was raised in a low tax American state, and now live in a high tax one. The quality of life is so vastly better here that I could never go back.

Turns out those taxes actually build nice places to live.

Is it better for the people who live in the rural areas of whatever state you live in? Are the better areas affordable?

I’m far from a “disaffected rural White American Trump supporter” (yes I’m purposefully using a cliche). None of those adjectives describe me besides “American”. But a lot of people on the left (which I am when it comes to social issues) are very self unaware.

Being on the left, but specifying on social issues suggests you want someone else to pay to solve those social issues.

No, I have no problem paying taxes or government requiring business to pay taxes.

I don’t agree with the over and mostly dumb regulation of tech from the left and I think they over index on the wrong issues and the reason we are where we are now is because old folks on the left wouldn’t exit the stage when they should have - Supreme Court justices and Biden specifically.

I’m pro Vax and have been shot up with every vaccine imaginable including multiple Covid boosters. But the anti-vax movement was exasperated by Democrats trying to force the Covid vaccine on people

What are those states?

As a counterpoint I moved to Massachusetts where the roads are among the worst in the country. My taxes apparently do not buy infrastructure maintenance.

I don't really get Mass in general. On paper it seems like it should be quite a bit nicer than it is in reality. I live in the Hudson Valley and feel like it would be a downgrade in a few ways. And for being a deep blue state they are pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.

>pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.

I know that state and local governments are responsible for inspecting restaurants. Also I know that NYC banned transfats in restaurant food. Is that what you mean by "food safety and health guidelines"?

Although there is probably support for immigrants besides welfare, I believe that welfare itself is reserved for citizens.

And this is not a statement for or against immigration, but in response to what some people have said (not PKop, to whom I am replying): non-citizen immigrants do pay at least some taxes, in the form of sales tax. And, depending on how they are paid (cash or paycheck) they will also be paying taxes on their own pay. If they are getting cash it is easier to avoid taxes. It is harder if they're receiving a salary.

Immigrants from certain locations, which the vast majority of the waves of immigration we are getting in recent years, are net negatives in terms of budget impact, takers vs contributors to tax revenue. And yes, I agree with you on the perfectly logical and common sense position that welfare should be reserved for citizens.

Housing migrants in Hotels in US cities, paid for by citizen tax revenue, or guaranteed emergency health care, paid for by citizen tax revenue, among other examples are bad policy and unfair to Americans.

With at least one major exception: I want to non-citizens, whether here legally or not, to get healthcare. In the spirit of enlightened self interest, if someone has smallpox or tuberculosis or COVID or anything else deadly and communicable, IDGAF where they're from, I want them to get treatment.

What are you talking about? Non-citizen immigrants pay the exact same taxes as citizens. Not just "some" taxes.

Taxation is based on where you live, not your citizenships. (Well except US citizens who have to pay federal taxes even if they live abroad but that's an exception).

I was mostly thinking that poorly paid agricultural workers or other people doing periodic manual labor may be getting paid in cash, and perhaps they are not paying taxes on the money, even if they are legally required to. The wait staff and bartenders I used to know did not pay tax on their cash tips.

So what I am talking about is not what the legal requirement is, but to what degree it is followed. But to the degree these people pay taxes while here they are not getting a completely free ride when they take advantage of our tax-supported services.

On a related note, I would be happy for illegal immigrants to get at least some medical support, such as vaccinations and treatment for communicable diseases, as that benefits everybody.

It's a non-starter to talk about having government do something that uses taxes like stopping people from moving past the line in the dirt.

It's a non starter to raise my taxes, fix your reading comprehension. Certainly, you wouldn't be surprised to know I think there's enough money to do this, and that I oppose the government doing other things but support the government doing this yes? It's just common sense.

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/elon-mu...

"Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.

So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."

This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think folks who don't live in America don't understand how dramatically different and worse the implementation of government is in America from many other countries who sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if the goals are similar.

This happens in private corporations, too. Most of us have gotten clearly bullshit resumes forwarded by HR.

I don't think you understand how bad it is in literally any large organization ever.

I don't know your background, so I won't say I don't think you understand - but in my experience, government is multiple times worse than any private organization. Yes, the same problems exist - but without any of the pressures that force private business to adapt or fail, so the problems are worse by far.

You cant use your ideology as a proof that it is worse.

Same exact thing (or worse) happens in private orgs. But we don't even have access to it.

I mean, we don't have to go far to see this. Nepotism is illegal in many countries for public institutions, and rampant on private ones.

This narrative that private corporations are better "just because" is so silly. We simply see the inefficiencies of the government and can't see the same ones on private entities. Especially the big ones.

I've never worked at a company that didn't have many absurd processes, incompetent people, useless bureaucracy and so on.

I’m at a private company and the process of resume screening done by clueless HR people is the exact same. I referred a friend for a job position, he got turned away because he didn’t have Java Version X with Springboot on his resume, I told him to re-submit with that on there and voila he got an interview. (For reference, he was a Java backend dev for 10 years and already had that on his resume)

Policymaking is never discovered. It’s forced. Like class struggle forced the hand of actors like FDR during his presidency.

Then that was forced away by the reaction (class struggle) of the most right-wing capitalists and ideologues which ultimately lead to neoliberalism.

So sure, there are some set of relatively enlightened capitalists that want more of a social democratic status quo for the stability it brings. But the material conditions are not there.[1] So people like Jeff Atwood will write opinion pieces and give what is the grand of scheme of things token material support. But it can’t realistically happen right now in the US.

Of course the same principles apply to Scandinavian countries. They’re (our) false ideology is called the Nordic Model.

[1] Look at Bernie Sanders. The Independent senator who ran for the ostensibly left-wing Democratic Party as a mere social democrat and was shot down by the Establishment. Now that he is too old to run again and the presidential election is done for you see people in the Establishment say things like, huh I think that guy had a point!

This is downvoted, but its true.

Actual change will not come easily and it is opposed mightily by the ruling class

I encourage everyone to read his actual blogpost linked in the article, it’s pretty good.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/

It's great. I'd suggest to make it an HN submission on its own.

What do you mean "suggest"? To whom? You should do it yourself if you think it's a good idea.

Obviously my suggestion was targeted at the person "Toutouxc" who has posted a comment I replied to.

It has been submitted five times [1] already, so that's covered. :)

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

Interesting

In the article:

> 34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote. Why?

In the referenced news:

> ... “Currently my biggest issue with U.S. politics is the response to the Palestinian genocide," Rojas said. ...

Back to the article:

> I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question.

> We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight.

Is there any serious polls show how many Americans choose not to vote for the same reason? is it a number so small that it can be ignored?

There is a poll about this that was recently released: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling

Here's a quote from the poll:

   When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024 were asked “Which one of the following issues was MOST important in deciding your vote?” they selected:
   
   29% - Ending Israel’s violence in Gaza
   24% - The economy
   12% - Medicare and Social Security
   11% - Immigration and border security
   10% - Healthcare
   9% - Abortion policy
   5% - Don’t know

So completely unrelated poll to the question?

Yeah, not directly related. Interesting though that most people who abstained from voting did have a issue they could name, and only 5% put down "Don't know" so this particular demographic may fall in this category (probably more complicated though).

That data is about people who voted in both elections, it's not about people who didn't vote in 2024.

> Interesting though that most people who abstained from voting did have a issue they could name, and only 5% put down

Nope. The poll is about people who did vote - not those who abstained.

Good Drop Site News article about the poll providing context https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kamala-harris-gaza-israel-bid...

The article is wrong/misleading. It starts by talking about Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and who did not cast a ballot in 2024. Then it cites this poll, which is of a completely different demographic: Those who voted Biden in 2020 and did vote in 2024 (but not for Trump/Harris).

As I pointed out elsewhere, those numbers are so tiny they would not have impacted the election results at all if every single one of them voted Harris.

So anecdotal, but I think you have to consider the depressed turnout. From my circles, it's clear that plenty of Gen Z people (not just Muslims) either stayed home because of Gaza or (as in Dearborn, MI) voted Trump to protest Gaza. Gaza was a IMO a huge enthusiasm dampener for Harris.

This has never made sense to me. If you are worried about the treatment of people in Gaza, and your choice is between a party who supports the current mistreatment and a party who supports even worse treatment, why would you protest-vote for the party who supports even worse treatment?

> why would you protest-vote for the party who supports even worse treatment?

It's all anecdotes - how many protest voted for Trump vs a 3rd party candidate or simply not vote at all (which I think was the ultimate factor)?

For the latter category: The same reason Arab Israelis often boycott their local elections. Playing a long game. Playing the short game means almost no real gains for Gaza (it hasn't, after all, in all these years).

They likely don't believe Republicans will ever see it their way, but have more influence with the Democrats. Had they voted for Harris, they felt it was a vote for the status quo. If Harris won, it would mean the Gaza policy would continue as the Democrats feel they'll get their votes anyway. If they voted Harris and Trump won anyway, then that's worse - they "sold out" to Harris, and they still ended up with Trump. Either way, they'd feel the genocide would continue.

If they voted 3rd party or no one else, and Trump won, the thought process would be:

"Yes, the bad treatment for Gaza will continue for another 4 years. Maybe it'll be worse, but it was intolerable with the Democrats anyway. Now the message has been sent to the Democrats and they may be willing to come to the table in the future".

Also, keep in mind that the impact to the voters is miniscule either way. It's not as if their livelihood is at stake with Trump.

I was not very sympathetic to them in the beginning, but as the election proceeded and when the pro-Gaza crowd actually made a lot of moves to appease the Democrats (lowering their demands, etc), and get pretty much nothing in return, it made total sense. For all practical purposes, the Party leaders were not willing to even come to the table, let alone negotiate. On the whole, exposing the Democratic Party for who they are was a notable achievement.

The whole flaw in all of this is: It's really not clear if Gaza impacted the election at all. I haven't seen a good study that indicated this factor would have been enough to bridge the gap between Harris and Trump.

This is pretty accurate and matches my understanding and what I've seen arab friends explain as their reasoning.

Yeah, I probably should summarize my whole comment with:

It's not really about the current crisis in Gaza. What they want is a seat at the table to influence future policy.

They believe they won't get it with Republicans. If they voted for Harris, they know they won't get it with the Democrats either. Their only hope for a seat at the table in the future is by hurting the Democrats now.

But as I said - they probably didn't hurt the Democrats much, so all of it won't matter in the near future.

> But as I said - they probably didn't hurt the Democrats much, so all of it won't matter in the near future.

This is probably what we disagree on. The raw Muslim vote was probably not enough to matter anywhere besides maybe MI (and Harris needed way more states to win). But the "allies" and depressed turnout caused by lowered enthusiasm esp in Gen-Z and below IMO could've swung more states than just MI. She might've still lost, but it would have been a lot closer.

Regardless, it's still the only lever the Gaza people had to pull, so they pulled it. It was that or pulling nothing at all, which they thought was a worse option.

> But the "allies" and depressed turnout caused by lowered enthusiasm esp in Gen-Z and below IMO could've swung more states than just MI. She might've still lost, but it would have been a lot closer.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying I haven't seen any good polls/studies to indicate this is true. At the moment it sounds more like wishful thinking.

I don't doubt many were motivated due to Gaza. But it's not clear that those numbers are significant enough to affect the outcome. If all of them had voted Harris, would she have won? We'd need a better study to know that.

Yeah I don't have numbers, but anecdotally a decent chunk of Gen Z in my liberal leaning circles sat about because of Gaza. Like, the Muslims I expected, but the number of non-Muslim "allies" who sat out surprised me.

> When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024

These people were "irrelevant" to the election outcome. Isn't it the case that if every 3rd party vote went for Harris, Trump would still have won?

"someone besides Harris" means Trump too, not just 3rd party candidates.

Fair point - but I suspect the outcome was more due to non-voters who voted Biden in 2016 than those who voted for someone else.

If someone has good data on this, it would be great to see it.

>These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and housing are not compatible with the American Dream.

Yep, it's dead. Someone please make it official already. Don't worry about the autopsy or time/date of death - just get the death certificate already and let's move on.

Whether they want to replace it with something equivalent is frankly up to the rich people, college institutions, and home owners/sellers. Just guessing based on the trend, but that will also be a No.

Right now, it's really called "The American Survival Games". This isn't just fear mongering, you have to change your mindset. The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work. Now that is not the case and you constantly have to reassess what your work trajectory is going to get you and if it will be enough to survive the next day, but also survive the volatility of a very polarized nation changing its policies on a whim. You also need a backup plan for your job in case you just get laid off due to no fault of your own. And a backup plan for the backup plan because the hiring landscape might change.

> "The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work."

I've never thought that was a common interpretation of the American Dream.

I've never thought it was anything but that. Work hard and be rewarded, that's the American Dream.

The distinction that ericjmorey is making (I believe) is that the reward is not guaranteed, only the opportunity.

That's close to what I have gleaned. You'll recall in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, HST goes on and on about the American Dream, as if the duo could locate it in a physical place, like finding the source of a river. In this case, Las Vegas.

I do not believe that was a selection based on convenience.

The American Dream has a sense of social and/or financial mobility to it, but most of all, from what I can extract, it is about an ever-present opportunity to "make it." Fail miserably? Try again. Bankrupt? Maybe you'll make a go of it this time. Effort is part of it, yes, but an acceptance of the role of pure luck is also a vital component. You can bust your ass and it will likely turn out better for you than not busting your ass, but there are no guarantees. You can only approach the table and go again. Another role of the dice or the hope that you haven't drawn a bad beat.

I will not bore you with how that works into the novel, but one point to take away was the sense that the Dream was moribund, if not already dead. A sense that credit scores, background checks, and "I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record" mentality is a noose slowly drawing shut. No more second chances, or third, or fourth. You screw up, bucko, that's it. The American Dream is now a taxidermied carcass whose silhouette we can see in the window of a house on a hill: referenced as if it were still alive, but never met.

Now, we see people who have made it big, but some section of them are products lifted from the mud and polished for public consumption. Others, when investigated, come from surprisingly fortunate backgrounds. Sons of senators' sons, as Jello Biafra put it. This has been sensed on an unconscious level since perhaps the mid-eighties.

As much as I might like people like Jello Biafra or Hunter S. Thompson, those shouldn’t be the _only_ people informing you on society.

You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce back and even prosper. I’ve seen it happen with bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.

I think an important difference is: are you in dire straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck? If you consistently make poor decisions, you’ll eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out of the hole.

If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I definitely believe there are good people out there who were never able to make it. But that doesn’t mean that nobody good will ever make it.

To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be. Something other than a caste or feudal system, or religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a risk to try something new, and then propelling general society upwards with each breakthrough.

Gracious, I never said that they were the only people informing me on society. They make for some interesting seed quotes and ideas for further discussion. The American Dream as a concept is probably worthy of a series of books, not really something I can cram into even a page.

They’re the only ones you mentioned, so I participated in the conversation you seeded.

Care to weigh in on the other 98% of my response?

Come on, haven't you heard that Trump has declared the start of a new American Golden Age? You gotta have some faith!

No seriously, this reminds me of another "Golden Age" which according to the propaganda happened under Ceausescu in Romania when I was growing up (https://princetonbuffer.princeton.edu/2014/01/30/tales-from-...), while in reality everything was falling to pieces. I just hope Trump's age won't last as long as Ceausescu's (24 years).

Actually life was pretty good for Romanians during the "Golden Age" compared to the rest of the communist period. The problem was that we lived on credit just like Americans and when it came time to pay it, things started falling off. Ceaușescu didn't invest wisely the money from the IMF, so he started exploiting everything and everyone to the max until the debt was paid off. Just a few months afterwards the Revolution happened and he was trialed and sentenced to death.

Selling StackOverflow for $1.8B in 2021 seems like a great deal now, doesn’t it?

Makes me wonder which founders should be selling now...

Unless you're already minted beyond measure, selling anything at any time for $1.8B is a great deal, you and everyone you ever cared about are set for life.

OP was refering to SO being on a massive decline since then.

Has there been any large business more decimated by the rise of LLM's than SO? Traffic in the tags I follow there dropped off a cliff pretty much the same day that ChatGPT was first released.

chegg was destroyed

Yeah, good timing. Just about a year before the release of ChatGPT.

HN comments at that time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370026 | 2330 points | June 2, 2021 | 852 comments

Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...

That is how any social media website works including this one.

Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?

And places like Wikipedia don’t even give you internet points! What dummies these contributors are.

Except Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10 website.

I agree that the Wikipedia model is better, but Stack Exchange posts are also under a Creative Commons license.

Nobody contributes to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow because of license. Most contribute because humans like sharing information with other people. If Wikipedia's eyeballs are low, people wouldn't contribute.

Some people would still contribute. It’s an intrinsic drive. (But I agree with your point in general)

“If Wikipedia’s eyeballs are low, people wouldn’t contribute”

People were contributing well before it was a top 10 website. That’s how it got kickstarted in the first place.

But people knew that the content is easily accessible over internet and the usage would grow. If the content is only available in say one library in a random city, people wouldn't contribute for free.

Except nobody is selling Wikipedia for 1.8 Billion. Do you see the difference? Congrats on totally missing the point.

So what? That neither devalues the contributions nor the value given to other people through the content.

Imagine this scenario:

A group of volunteers builds a public park, putting in hours of work, landscaping, planting trees, and creating a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy.

Years later, the park’s manager fences it off, sells it for $1.8 billion, and pockets the money.

When questioned, the manager says, “So what? The volunteers enjoyed building it, and people got value from the park while it was open.”

Your story about a park going from "public" to "private", with the manager tricking the volunteers into making something that is no longer public and pocketing the money, is a false analogy for multiple reasons.

1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name, network, software and system.

2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the content licenses, then the park is still open and public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion dollars. It's just in the commons.

Basically, while both the website and the content are valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that for free. It was used to buy the website, which has always been private and proprietary.

Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's content into proprietary. But neither happened. And that's why it's a false analogy.

You dismiss the volunteers’ role as if their work was incidental to the platform's success.

The brand, network, and proprietary systems you emphasize are valuable only because of the knowledge and content the community created.

The "bait and switch" lies in fostering a community-driven mission only to commoditize the platform for personal enrichment.

The knowledge and content are licenced for the community. You can start a new Stack Overflow today with that content. Nothing about that changed with the sale.

Many people landed good jobs that way. It was a good way for self-promo back in the day. Jobs stackexchange section was also way better than most other jobs boards at the time. It only went majorly downhill after the key people behind the site went away to work on other things and it got sold...

I also learned a great deal from answering questions.

Not the least. Rational homo economicus pretty much doesn't exist in real life. The vast majority of us are driven by the essential motives and desires while the intelligence rationalizes already made decisions.

> Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?

Is this how you'd characterise open source software contributions as well (minus the points, of course)?

Is that better or worse than the traditional route, wealth by birthright?

Hobson's choice?

I remember reading Atwood's blog around the time he launched it, and from his writing, he seemed genuine in his desire to build a tool that would help developers write code. This was also right in the middle of the original gamification craze, so of course internet points lol

I remember reading his rants about just how bad the current situation was (which was a terrible website called "developers exchange" or public phpBB internet forums). Never underestimate the passion derived from sheer hatred of the status quo.

Also his backup strategies around 2008 were quite interesting.

> "developers exchange"

It was "expertsexchange.com" initially. Then they disambiguated it by renaming to "experts-exchange.com", just to be clear.

Awesome! I didn't know that about the domain name.

Ah yes, perpetually flagged by every corporate firewall that did substring keyword matching on DNS queries.

Incidentally, the amount of sheer content-masking garbage on their pages was what originally prompted me to install and learn (IIRC) Greasemonkey and a bunch of DOM/CSS stuff.

Ah, good ol' Expert Sex Change

I don't miss that site one bit!

But my oh my, it was so much better than experts exchange.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its initial impetus, literally "let's get together and collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"

Stack overflow was an invaluable resource for me as a developer. I got a wealth of knowledge about a bunch of thorny problems I was encountering with out paying anything. The people who answered the questions I had were able to help far more people than they ever could have individually without SO. I’m having a hard time being upset about his financial windfall. It’s really only a bait and switch for people who answered questions with some other unstated expectation than helping others or receiving help.

In aggregate, Stack Overflow probably saved developers far more time than anyone ever put in, and saved companies all over the world far more money than the founders made in their exit.

Creating more value than you capture has ways been the jam.

You just need to be working class to fulfill that dream.

Also saved AI companies far more effort in gathering correct code for training.

Not just correct code, but also a whole bunch of incorrect answers, as well as votes and comments to help weigh the trustworthiness of each answer.

Your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make.

What was that?

The founders monetized a platform where unpaid contributors built 99% of the value by answering questions for intangible "Reputation". The fact that contributions were voluntary doesn’t negate the issue. It highlights it.

A system designed to extract free labor for massive financial gain, while offering only gamified rewards, reflects exploitative design, not fairness.

This is such an incomprehensible take. Every developer has benefited from SO. I’ve contributed to the site exactly because it’s been so good to me. I don’t need money on top of that. The website is the reward. Nobody cares about reputation.

Websites cost money to run, and I’m glad SO was so well monetized that it didn’t run out of money and get deactivated like so many of the old school forums we used to go to for help before.

See my analogy below in this thread about the public park...

What is incomprehensible is developers confusing the value created by the site, with the means of production of said value.

While contributing to the site might provide you with some personal feelings of value, maybe even a rush of altruistic euphoria... :-) An illusory sense of digital sainthood...Your unpaid work directly enhances the value of a platform that profits from selling the collective output, including yours.

This means you’re effectively donating your expertise to a for-profit entity, with no equity or share in its success

The value of unpaid work always goes somewhere.

Many sports clubs work with the help of many volunteers. If they were not available to help for free, the practitioners of the sports would need to pay more. That would mean, only the richer part of the candidates could do the sport. A side effect is as well, that the club itself gets bigger, more famous, and richer as a whole. All thanks to the help of volunteers. There is just no way around that.

In SO/Jeff's case this was beneficial for him in the form of a huge selling price. I would say luckily he was, as I read in the comments, a great contributor to the SO organisation.

Sure, they made money off my work, I don’t mind that. That’s fine.

Your analogy about the public park is wrong btw. A better analogy is if someone ran a private park for years where musicians can come and collaborate with each other and expertly exchange ideas, and then after 20 years of running the park they sell it and move on with their life.

for a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was still good.

The reputation was fun, but I saw it as a proxy for how much I’d helped people. That always felt good.

You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy.

Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.

It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.

As I said above, your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make. You call it cynical I call it 1.8 Billion.

Yeah I haven’t seen anyone in this thread being able to fit the square of selfless contribution to the developer knowledge pool with the for-profit round hole of StackOverflow.

I sometimes feel this way even about Google maps. On some level when I make a small contribution I'm aware that everyone doing so profits Google quite nicely.

But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from having Google maps as a resource, far more than the contribution I've made.

It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place that people help share information useful to each other, which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a way to monetize the sharing of this information.

Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or horrid really is a matter of perspective.

> You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy.

So Jeff took that money instead.

There was a time when StackOverflow already had considerable size and it still felt as if Jeff knew and moderated every single post.

This is what made StackOverflow in my opinion. The excellent moderation in the beginning resulted in excellent quality.

Now, not taking away from the other early moderators, Jeff was definitely a huge part of it and one thing is for sure: He busted his ass off for this site and he deserves the reward.

I don't think anyone deserves 1.8bln reward. Norman Borlaug perhaps. But good for Jeff. I think SO was immensly societally and economically valuable and most people who actually got 1.8bln are less deserving than Jeff is.

I cannot help but think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven... "Deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it".

I would say Jon Skeet busted his ass off :-)

https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet

No one is forcing anyone to do anything, and everyone always knew what they were getting themselves in to. It was always a deal where everyone wins. That you don't like that choice for yourself is fine. No need to be so negative, dismissive, and cynical about how other people choose to spend their free time.

It's no different from creating an open source project, profiting from the free work of thousandths and then cash in a la JBoss or Redis.

If he wanted to give back he could have started with John Skeet.

Stack Overflow Inc. was always a commercial company. No one ever pretended anything else.

Now we are talking :-)

Do you think that the expertSexChange site that it was designed to replace had a more appealing business model?

Wait till you see YouTube.com, they literally got millions of people to make videos for them, most of them for free!

Back in the early days of SO, I listened to many of the podcasts by Joel and Jeff. Jeff always came across as an overall good dude. He seemed to want SO to be a helpful tool for developers, and wanted to do the right thing, regardless of the monetary implications.

The median wage for full time workers in the USA is ~60k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

The median house price is 357k.

https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/

So, on aggregate, for a couple who both work, a house is affordable.

And things aint gonna get any better..... The USA has the best economy in the world, and wealth redistribution is not on the agenda.

Median where — housing and income aren't evenly distributed

Only 35% of Americans have a full time job. Also likelihood of being married falls and rises with income. The median of those full timers would be the 17.5% of that group. It would be generous to say there are 2.5% of retired Americans making more yearly income than that median couple, but let us say that. It would still be only 1 in 5 Americans that can afford that $357 thousand dollar house.

Also - around 50 is when earning power peaks. People in their 20s and 30s make less on average. So this median couple might eventually be able to afford a house, but they may be 50 when that happens.

$357000 house for a couple in their 30s. Both put $35k down - or have to pay PMI on top of principal, ~7% interest (if their credit is good!), taxes, home insurance, and in many places an HOA.

Also this is onerous even with two parents working full-time who may have to figure out how to manage raising 2.1 kids. Decades ago in the US, plenty of people were doing this on one income.

Lets just hope those medians is at the same geographical location.

I enjoyed the site and found it useful to begin with however it became a playground for people who felt they were know it alls to get recognition. A little ego boost if you will and that ruined the point for me, which was to get a varied response on technical questions.

Removed: duplicate comment

One nice thing about ChatGPT, they won't judge you as a fool for asking an easier question.

It also doesn’t answer your question as if you asked a different one. So many stackoverflow conversations:

Q: I am looking for a way to do X in language Y.

A: You shouldn’t need to do that. What do you really want to do?

Argh. What I really want to do is exactly what I asked. If you don’t know, fine, but don’t try to steer me towards a question you do know the answer to. Just let someone else answer. Not everything is an XY problem[1].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

> Not everything is an XY problem

Pretty close, though.

Sure, but I find that this phenomenon is just different people thinking at different levels on the abstraction continuum.

I had to think about this for a minute because the abstraction levels idea is very appealing, but ultimately I think this comparison is specious and misses the core issue entirely.

XY problem is a communication and problem-solving anti-pattern where someone has already decided on an approach and is just asking about implementation details, rather than being open to potentially better solutions that might emerge if they just explained wtf they are trying to do first. Framing it as different abstraction levels obscures this real issue and incorrectly suggests it's just a natural variation in thinking styles rather than a specific mistake in problem-solving approach.

I do find those suggestions valuable 80-90% of the time. But in the fringes, on less popular questions, it’s really frustrating because I can’t just substitute it in this way because the situation is just different.

OTOH I'd love to have a model trained to address XY problems.

Of course ideally you should be able to ignore that suggestion and force an actual response

It's a case-by-case thing. Sometimes in this big world you see people asking things like "how do I write a firewall wildcard rule that blocks all IPv6 addresses starting with the number '2'?" and you just want to reach through the screen and shake them by the shoulders and ask them if everything is okay.

I'd rather a Q&A site have a specific and correct A for every specific Q, no matter how ridiculous some user thinks the Q is. If I was open to re-thinking my design I would have asked something like "Please help me re-think my firewall rules..."

And, even when it is an X-Y problem, it may still be better to answer the question as asked, if only to then explain that maybe there is another problem that really needs to be solved.

Looking at it from a pedagogical lens, it seems some learners (question askers) will fixate on X and be unreceptive to Y, stemming perhaps from some fundamental differences in conceptual understanding between the asker and the answerer. Trying to answer for Y will confound and frustrate; closing the gaps in understanding (and there may be gaps on both sides) is usually a lot more involved than just shifting the conversation from X to Y.

One one annoying thing about using LLMs to answer technical questions is when you provide context like “I have tried X, Y already, and Z won’t work because…” it does what LLMs do— uses all the words in the prompt to string together more words into an answer. It would make LLMs so much more intuitive to use for technical questions if this problem could be solved… sounds so obvious that maybe it does exist?

I had mixed feelings about those that demonstrated their knowledge by answering the question extremely thoroughly with a lengthy treatise. On the one hand, their answer was a great resource for deeper understanding, on the other I just wanted a one-liner to solve my problem and go on with my day!

True, but that also sums up one of the junior dev problems often talked about on HN - those who use SO to get a direct answer that they can copy-and-paste, instead of an actual explanation to help them learn (and save them having to look it up next time).

I like Jeff. Way back when, I was a front page posteron SO, and #1 on the C++ tag. I got really fed up with the whole SO thing and I asked Jeff to delete my account and all associated posts. This really screwed up their SQLServer system (not at all my intention, I had a lot of posts) but he plodded ahead with it anyway, despite me saying not to bother. A good guy, IMHO.

He used his platform to help me promote a sale of programming themed t-shirts for charity.

I think he had a bit of a thing about t-shirts. I got a free SO one for something like being a top-100 poster (can't remember exactly what) and I was quite proud of it. Those were quite fun days, unlike the sad mess SO is now.

    A $1.8B startup sale made him wealthy—now he plans to donate half his net worth

My first reaction of the title was - that's pretty much every tax payer if you think about it :D

On a more serious note - huch respect for SO, and props for Jeff for being so inspiring and now - generous.

Would that it had been a public benefit corporation or nonprofit; maybe I would still be contributing today.

This uber-cynical and uncharitable smearing of the story is unhelpful at best.

May I never be subject to this sort of misreading, and I hope you never are either.

meh. you're probably right. I edited and distilled it down to the main point. I just wish it were a nonprofit at the end of the day, I guess. It would've been the right thing to do. That he chose not to makes me sad. That he was rewarded richly for it, sadder.

> That he chose not to makes me sad

I'm not sure if it was really up to him; I doubt he owned a majority of the company?

Sure was better than ExpertsExchange, though :)

True enough. I guess it's probably not beyond saving, either. It does have a pretty good core idea.

Oh, it wasn't ExpertSexChange?

Making Stackoverflow the Wikipedia of QnA was a missed opportunity in hindsight.

Compared to Stack Overflow, I think the Discourse forum software is just as great (if not greater) Jeff Atwood-related tech contribution.

Discourse has made it easy to create unique communities and avoid the social media algorithm hell. And it's open source and free.

Discourse is single-handedly rescuing the web forum concept from oblivion. Without Jeff, Facebook and WhatsApp would be ruling the roost, with scant competition from decades-old PHP forum software.

Discourse is pretty easy to self-host, and you get fully-featured software with no "freemium" limitations.

The Discourse team are also very generous to new contributors. If you want to get started with open source contribution, please contribute to these guys.

Advice from a 40-something programmer: Learn how to spend responsibly, invest, and plan for your financial future. One way to do that is to work with a financial advisor. The sooner you start in your career, the better. Look for “advice only” fiduciaries who are not otherwise incentivized to promote certain investments. Start here https://adviceonlynetwork.com/.

A lot of this stuff isn’t taught in traditional schools. Sure, you could teach yourself, but I find this is an area where I prefer to have an expert in my corner.

Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people that he has spent billions in “philanthropy” to destroy the public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools.

The point is that even something noble-sounding like giving away your fortune still tends to enforce the current system and simply create more wealth inequality. In this case, charter schools are simply a massive wealth transfer from government to the private sector.

Atwood left StackOverflow years ago but he’s been there for years. We can only speculate as to what he made from the sale. I’d guess 10-15%.

I just hope his altruism goes to something of public benefit.

"Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people that he has spent billions in “philanthropy” to destroy the public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools."

Many public schools are shit and I applaud his effort to come with alternatives instead of forcing everyone to get a poor education, until these problems are actually fixed.

That's by design. It's a strategy pioneered by Ronald Reagan called "starve the beast" [1]. Basically, you starve a public institution of funds and then use the inevitable failure for gutting it entirely and likely privatizing it.

We're seeing this in real-time in Texas [2] in particular with Abbott's takeover of the Houston ISD and the blatant corruption and racism going on with the Keller ISD.

Also, charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry pick students. Public schools don't have that luxury.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[2]: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/campaign-to-sabot...

The public school funding models in the USA are variable, even by county, they can't be controlled or set by the top down, and the fact that the USA spends more than the OECD average disputes everything you are saying.

That's false [1]. USA is like #6 in per-student spending. It's even lower in terms of GDP [2].

[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/policy-issues/education-finan...

[2]: https://webfs.oecd.org/els-com/Family_Database/PF1_2_Public_...

How is what they said false?

US is above on all counts.

> On average across OECD countries, USD 11 900 is spent per primary school student per year. For higher levels of education, spending increases: USD 13 300 is spent per secondary school student, while USD 20 500 is spent per tertiary student. This reflects that fact that higher levels of education often require teachers to have more advanced qualifications and specialised knowledge, which are usually accompanied by higher salaries.

Don't confuse your misunderstanding of their comment as anything else.

Further, the $ amount spent per student in the US has almost universally never gone done since the 1950s. It has always gone up. Don't even need to include tertiary education in this calculation.

> That's by design. It's a strategy pioneered by Ronald Reagan called "starve the beast" [1]. Basically, you starve a public institution of funds and then use the inevitable failure for gutting it entirely and likely privatizing it.

I’d argue that if public schools across the board were doing their job and educating students then there wouldn’t be anything to starve.

> Also, charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry pick students. Public schools don't have that luxury.

My kids have gone to one of the bigger charter school chains in my city for around a decade and this is not true. They employ lots of specialists to assist struggling students like my youngest. I’m not sure if they would tolerate the worst troublemakers at public schools but I also don’t think those children’s parents would be looking at better options for education.

"charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry pick students"

The schools in my area have a lottery system. My daughter got in, but we ended up keeping her in public schools, which are still really good. This would have at least given us a choice if the schools were terrible.

Many of the students in our charter schools come from terrible districts and those students would otherwise not get a good education. The reason the districts are terrible? Local corruption. They get more money than ever and they always seem to have a short fall at the end of the year.

Sounds good and noble to me. Most public schools are terrible and should be destroyed.

It is too bad with any type of philanthropy, somebody can find a reason why it is a negative for someone else.

Jeff Atwood is a mensch. It shines through in his writing and his work. And well done to him for giving away a significant part of his wealth to help others, rather than spending it on trinkets and baubles.

This is very cool of Atwood. Also…my guy sold SO at the absolute peak.

I realized seeing the picture on top that I have actually never seen his face before, only his well known avatar. Despite having read his stuff and following him for a decade.

Same here! I thought when I saw it, "ah, so that's what Jeff Atwood looks like".

I miss the SO podcast that was fun

Side note I watch this guy's livestreams sometimes who was a big developer for Firefox can't remember how I relate these two together

Does anyone still use Stack Overflow post-2022?

Many including me

Not that many judging by the two answers. Even 100k is too little relative to the number of English speaking devs in the world

The answers are only 18 minutes old. Give it time.

I had to write a powerscript last week. I lifted 90% of it from 2 or 3 posts in SO

Yes, for non-work things I find it vaguely useful. My workflow is to first google search, often see Stack Overflow answers, and then move on to an LLM or actual documentation if I don't get anything through search.

I do it this way around because I can search far faster than I can write out reasonable english sentences that head-off bad LLM responses.

Sometimes when I'm confident enough that the LLM will be able to give me the "right answer" faster than search I'll do it first, but that's mostly when I have something I can copy/paste in.

My experience with LLMs has been different. I give it trash prompts and it gives me reasonable responses. I think it's figured out the space between what I type and what I want. That's great. Until we get an input which allows it to figure out the space between what I type and what I think. That doesn't even sound too bad, because now I can just think and it'll happen. I look forward to this future, sounds wonderfully efficient, which would finally give me the time to do that thing I really want to do but don't have the time right now because we're not efficient enough.

But no, my experience is different with regards to the ratio of quality of input versus output. I think we all do a subconscious ROI of whether typing that little extra will yield an output that's going to be that much better that it was worth the time and effort.

Or much more likely I'm just lazy.

If I know what I want, just not exactly where, I'll go straight for a search. But if it's more fuzzy then LLMs has totally changed how I acquire knowledge.

Now I find it more productive to ask an LLM to get some keywords or similar which I might search for afterwards.

The great thing about LLMs is that, unlike a search engine, you can tell it "no, not quite like that, more like this" to guide it.

Then why not just tell the LLM to do the search for you?

ChatGPT has had built in web search for over two yeass for paid users

Mostly because I'm not a paying user. I use local LLMs for easier stuff, so not often I need to reach to ChatGPT.

Besides, I guess I want to have some control over the search, like which sites to visit. Sometimes the search might retur something tangential, but interesting for example.

OpenAI

Sure, why not?

I search it for things that are outside regular documentation.

However any contributions (answers, questions) are directly related to something I'm working on. There's no community (or certainty that your work will not be marked-as-duplicate) which would justify a more-general kind of helping-out.

I don't think I find any useful, recent answers

Yes, I still answer some few questions if I know the answer.

Today I had a small amount of Google Sheets work to do, to extend somebody else's work, and I had both Claude and ChatGPT hallucinating mythical function names, and not understanding array functions with utter confidence and certainty. StackOverflow results from a web search gave me the answer faster, in the end.

Not to mention, such sites often have a discussion, with pros and cons of certain tacts, why some methods may be pitfalls, and more.

Such sites help you understand why, far more than a distilled down response of a LLM. Such sites help you learn.

Knowing the why, is often far more important than the how.

Ironically enough, the LLM was better at explaining trade offs and new syntax, and I learned more about the topic from the LLMs, largely from observing the unintended effects of their incorrect instructions. It was just dead wrong on several key details and when it didn't know how to do something it answered with BS with just as much confidence as the insightful parts, which would be infuriating from a human, but merely time wasting from the LLM.

LLM are the reason I get bug reports like…

Them: “why doesn't this thing work I your OSS lib, whereas it works in this other OSS lib?”

Me: “does it? it's not supposed to.”

Then: “oh idk, ChatGPT told me so.”

There should be reputation points on bug reports where somebody loses the ability to file after a certain amount of bad behavior like that...

> hallucinating

I hate the use of this word to describe when a sentence completer gives a wrong result. To hallucinate you have to have a concept of reality. Which those models don't have. They're just mathematical tools which some times manage to give a result humans think as human-like.

I don't work in LLMs, but I use a ton of similar tools to model biology, and I really like the term "hallucinate." I would argue that the LLM does have a concept of reality, in the form of a probabilistic distribution over sentence structure. And that probability distribution does not match the reality that I live in, even if it matches the LLM training data and training procedure fairly well. I would argue that even a simple random forest model has a concept of reality, or maybe is a concept of reality, though a faulty one.

Do you also hate when prooor use the terms like debugging, serverless, non relational databases (all databases model relationships), etc?

Yes, of course I do. Why wouldn't I?

At least for me, I've found chatgpt to be a good Google replacement. It might be helpful beyond that occasionally, but it really excels in spitting out existing data.

For me it depends on what I need.

Google -> stackoverflow is typically much faster than chatgpt.

If you are a fast typer and can formulate a short question then you can often get from thought to answer in well under 10 seconds.

With chatgpt there is a small thinking delay then often a long token sequence of filler before you get the few lines you're looking for.

ChatGPT shines compared to stackoverflow for something you know that requires a dialog of prompts or you're asking it to write some specific code instead of just finding out how to accomplish a small task with very clear syntax.

It sounds weird but google seems like it used to be scary accurate back in the day, but results for me seem a lot muddier than they used to be in the past few years.

For me, Google started to fail when they decided to start dropping parts of the query. And inevitably, the crucial ones.

E.g. I wanted to search for "CUDA on Fedora 41" and Google "helpfully" drops the "41" number from the query!

So I have to notice that and click on "41" to force the search.

I tried CUDA on Fedora 41 (no quotes) and got exclusively results around Fedora 41 without any changes required, weird.

There's a bug/feature in DNF resulting in strange resolution problems, if you enable RPMFusion repositories for CUDA and install the `nvidia-container-toolkit` before installing `akmods`.

You get a lot of unhelpful errors during the DKMS build. Which you shouldn't even _have_ because of akmods. Will publish details in my blog once I get the MD renderer to cooperate.

Sorry, long day.

Google is not consistent with its "suggestions". Funnily enough, your message is now near the top of the results.

Just another example from a few seconds ago, I tried to look up "ghcr egress cost". Google changed it to "gcp egress cost".

I still do. Personally, I only use LLMs to generate boilerplate code and for inline predictions. Sometimes is just faster for me to lookup an answer on SO than trying to ask something to a LLM that may be outdated or wrong (at least on SO I can see the date of the answer and what other people think about it).

yea, mate. i still use it to read some questions and answers.

Deleted all of my accounts. It's not worth it anymore.

Yes, several times a week. The process of just searching for something and reading SO answers is still just as good as ever.

I still use to find answers to problems, but less often than I did a few years ago (thank you chatgpt et al) and I search via my browser (thank you Kagi search adjustments) not via the site's search.

I haven't posted questions or answers for years. Too many petty, officious people and general toxicity.

Is there a psychological term for the self-centred thinking where a person thinks "I've stopped using X, therefore everyone's stopped using X"?

That's a thing on YT comments "Does anyone else [insert generic thing everybody does]" boom many thumbs up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

Yes and people still watch TV even though you haven’t owned a TV in 20 years (tm Slashdot 2002)

I do, I don't use co-pilot to code or LLMs much other than for work until I find a personal use for it. I like other fields of AI more eg. ML/computer vision.

Comes up in my Googling sometimes.

I don't really have the time I used to have to try to answer things these days.

Offline, yes. I selfhost it now.

Everything that came after the mod strike kind of made things worse anyways, so there's not that much change in knowledge requirements for me.

There's also kiwix and zim files available in case you don't wanna self host but still be able to have it offline on your desktop machine.

I work in the .NET space and was very active for many years on some niche topics (my account is now 16 years old).

I still support some older .NET applications, and I’ve had the situation several times where I’ve ended up on SO via a Google search and started to read the answer, only to feel as if the writing style is familiar. Then noted that I myself answered it and I’m reading my own text for the solution.

I’m always amused that a) I keep having the solve the same things over and over again, and b) I can’t remember the solutions.

Maybe I’m just old.

I don't understand why they don't just pick 1000 people and give them $200K. See what happens.

Is that a case where a rich person sets up a fund to transfer his wealth to, but still have control over it? Like the founder of Patagonia did.

I asked and answered some easy questions as a student to learn more, then when I became a professional and got certified in Kubernetes and a lot of on the job experience I started answering kubernetes questions, getting quite a bunch of points and feeling good I was giving back something. They then decided kubernetes was not part of the main website and all questions should be asked somewhere else where you started from scratch. I never used any of their websites again.

I don't see any interview in the linked article, only some quotes. Am I missing something?

The American dream is not at risk, nor is it fading out. In fact is has been entirely dead for sometime. Society is solidly rigged by long time rich and established players.

It would take a revolution to revive it.

The amazing part is that the constitution does cover how to go about this, with little actual combat.

The only thing that is needed is for a good majority of voter to tell the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans that their services are no longer wanted then clean house by voting in a new set of players from a new set of political parties.

It is totally legal, and it is even not that hard, IF you could pierce the indoctrinated dogma that Rs or Ds are the only choices or you are throwing your vote away.

Just getting the citizens who do not vote (141 million??) to become active would bring it closer.

You dont need a BILLION dollars to run for election. It is needed when you have to make someone utterly corrupt and removed from reality palatable to voters.

But even after a revolution brought about by an election the fight would be tremendous against the entrenched / swamp / deep-state / oligarchs / 1% / enterprises / lobby organisations etc etc .

But it is there for us to do.

StackOverflow has a very successful gamification model. People just give them free labor voluntarily because they like to ask questions and even moderate. Perhaps also fueled by the naive libertarianism of the Californian Ideology.

Instead of worrying about how hard it is to give away their money effectively these billionaires should be working to fix a political system created specifically to funnel money to billionaires. Without fixing the actual problem giving away money is just virtue signalling.

A fairly tame start (i.e. not overtly against their own money-making interests) would be to support voting-reform to one of the many many options that are superior to plurality/first-past-the-post voting.

Insofar as regular-businesses like predictability, this would actually be good for them. Fewer dramatic changes from slim margins every election cycle.

If you click through to the original blog post[1], you will see him advocating for exactly this.

>Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.

[1] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/

Without morally condemning them:

Accumulating that much wealth means you were in a frenzy. It’s good he snapped out of it. Take someone like Elon or Bezos, 10 billion is not enough, 100 isn’t, 200 isn’t. We have people that are still in a manic greed phase.

It’s karma that the ghost of Hitler possessed Elon’s body. Simple greed can destroy a soul too. You have no idea the supernatural forces that will dock in your soul if you make it a comfortable nesting place.

Why would we expect someone to not only have the insight on how to fix society, but actually be able to reshape it, just because they are a billionaire? Giving resources to those who need it might be the best way to help for some.

Jeff is specifically donating money to causes which improve the political system, enfranchise (not dis-enfranchise) voters.

Unless you are among the uber wealthy -- wealthy enough to control communication channels -- it's very hard to change the political system.

Today, many Americans consume their information from social media and an shrinking number of "traditional" media sources that are largely controlled by a few entities.

It is very difficult to affect discourse in a meaningful way that can then move policy by getting people to vote.

I’ve seen the goalposts on “the American Dream” move a lot. It used to be, everyone can work hard and have a good life. Buy a house, car, raise kids on a single income with free high school education. It might be a historical fluke but that’s what it was.

Then it somehow became “anyone can become rich” and we celebrated the middle class origins of our billionaires.

Now it seems to be “we have the richest billionaires”.

People are being gaslit with metrics like GDP and stock index prices that measure the performance of corporations and the wealthiest Americans. But the reality is that American life expectancy has plateaued or going down, while the EU has blasted past us.

You can see the through-line if you read it as "if you work hard, you can improve your situation." That's the part that's changed.

> I’m not saying we’re socialists here

I understand that this is obligatory to say for an American, but at some point you have to stop dancing around the topic so much and acknowledge that you kind of are socialists.

Imagine a world if more of the centi-billionaires were more like Gates trying to cure diseases and make the world a better place.

I’m not advocating for the compelling of folks to be forced to give up their riches (Ill gotten or not) just imagine if people were better versions of themselves.

Many of them are. Scroll through Wikipedia's list of wealthiest charitable foundations.[1]

And instead of starting their own foundations, a lot of wealthy people quietly give to existing ones. To pick one example: The founders of Netflix, GoPro, WhatsApp, Microsoft, and Facebook have all donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.[2]

In terms of both absolute dollars and percentage of GDP, the US is the most charitable country on the planet. In 2016, Americans donated $258.5 billion to charities, or 1.44% of GDP.[3] The next most charitable country was New Zealand, which donated 0.79% of GDP. Since then, the US has become even more charitable. In 2023, Americans donated $557.16 billion to charities[4], or 2% of GDP.

And this doesn't include non-charitable improvements in the human condition such as better internet access, new drugs, cheaper solar cells, cheaper batteries, and increased adoption of electric vehicles. I agree that there's plenty of room for improvement, but quality of life today is better than it ever has been.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Community_Found...

3. https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-polic...

4. https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-g...

Thank you for the research and the facts. My mind has been changed.

He sounds like a prig to me /s

The fish stinks from the top

"A fish rots from the head down" is the saying. And since neither Jeff nor Joel are the heads at SO anymore I'm not sure of the relevance here.

But we can all agree that they made a wonderful fish that has helped millions of developers (including myself) over the years.

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