The last time I was looking for a job at age 48, I interviewed at a bunch of startups and only got a second interview from one. It was clear that most of them were never going with someone my age unless I'd written a book or had patents or something (or was ex-FAANG), even if they didn't consciously realize that.
Of course, that's its own problem, but particularly in places where it's hard to get headcount, the management structures get wider and wider...
You shouldn't need a job. You should have FIREd.
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
https://research.com/education/average-time-to-repay-student...
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
Even at a relatively average college, debt repayment is often measured in decades.
As I understand it, tech employees are typically paid a small fraction of the revenue that they bring into the company.
Outside of tech, employees are underpaid, and wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s. Profit growth has greatly exceeded wage growth since the early 2000s, with the exception of the 2008 recession.
You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel.
I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years."
I'm not an economist, but I do know my electric bill has been thr exact same dollar amount for 12 years, and I've halved my usage twice in those years. That puts the dollar purchasing power for power at 25% of 2013.
Gasoline changes prices so much I can't really say, it's about twice as expensive for 87 here as 12 years ago, but 93 is 2.5+ times higher.
Food? Don't get me started.
I live in the rural south. I don't really care about price fixing in Los Angeles or silicon Valley.
There are many people who do jobs worth much less than $32/hour. That min wage would just make them illegal to employ.
>You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel.
You can't use economic indicators that track volatile commodities either. We use baskets of consumer goods and the inflation tracking is very accurate in short time frames but it becomes harder to compare the further out you get. A TV today is much better than a TV even 10 years ago but it is hardly even the same product as one from 1970.
>I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years."
What is wild about that? If you had 50c then and you had invested it in even relatively poorly performing investments it would be worth much more than $1 now.
>I'm not an economist, but I do know my electric bill has been thr exact same dollar amount for 12 years, and I've halved my usage twice in those years. That puts the dollar purchasing power for power at 25% of 2013.
That you are not an economist is obvious.
You are aware that dollars buy more things than energy from your energy provider according to your energy plan, yeah?
A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.
Glad you asked.
oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?
oh well.
This is called the Iron Law of Wages. As its name implies, it's neither prescriptive nor pleasant - but it is guaranteed to be liveable.
> Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.
The thing that trips people up is that the word "liveable" is a synonym for "subsistence," not "fullfilling." A wage that's only liveable would feel quite exploitative to most people.
The "iron law of wages" is instead an economic principle that wages tend to trend downwards until people are paid the minimum possible for subsistence. It's not meant to be a goal.
Regardless of what FDR said, a living wage is guaranteed because people will not accept anything lower.
The problem with a "decent" living is that reasonable people can disagree about what that looks like. Roommates? Children? An unemployed spouse? Vacations and retirement?
It's not the government's job to guarantee all of that stuff and I would rather we focus on stopping wage and tip theft and protecting the rights of workers (banning noncompetes, decoupling health insurance, etc.) instead of increasing the minimum wage towards some poorly-defined goal.
There's also the other side of the minimum wage debate, which is that most of the specific numbers people list as "liveable" do actually result in some folks losing their jobs and becoming unemployable. There was even a recent BERKELEY study that showed this!
Nonsense.
There most definitely IS a definition of a fair minimum wage -- it is the definition used when it was originally introduced into law:
The wage necessary for a full-time (40hr/week) worker head-of-household to support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc..
We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.
EDIT: typos, add referenced line
Food of what quality? That available in the 1930s?
Medical of what quality? 1930s medical care?
Education to primary level as most had in the 1930s or more than that?
You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.
>We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.
Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.
There are standards for virtually everything. Meet the current basic standards. For food, a basket of FDA/USDA-approved for distribution food to make a basic but nutritious diet for the family of 4. For housing, you could go with minimums for HUD housing. For education, through public high school. These are not hard to figure out (but may be a bit tedious). These are also minimums required to maintain a functional workforce in a modern society.
>>You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.
>>Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.
Right. So what you want is a Dickensian crabs-in-a-bucket labor market where the wage level is set by the most desperate person, who will work for hours to get a crust of bread for his/her next meal. A market where employers can abuse workers at will because there really are 500 others outside the gate who will take his job if he isn't willing to take the beating?
We are no longer living in a frontier society where 97%+ of the workers are producing food.
That insanely over-simplistic model has been tried, and it is a resounding failure, both for every society, every country, and every individual living in it. Those societies inevitably collapse or grow out of it with minimum standards for everyone. And while it is obviously awful for the workers, it is no day at the beach for the oligarchs either, who must live in secured closed-off areas, always frightened of everyone in the public as well as their rivals in power. Unproductive misery for everyone is what you want?
So, NO, the solution is not to just make the people at the bottom more poor, more hungry, and more desperate.
The solution is to stop giving benefits by ensuring that their employer pays the workers sufficiently that they do NOT NEED benefits to survive.
If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.
They have an exploitation model.
The exploitation model specifically violates your above principle saying that the employers have a natural right to the fruits of the workers' labor to whatever degree they can exploit the worker by their desperation.
You aren't saying the no one has a right to the fruits of anyone else's labor, you are only saying that no other worker has such a right, but the employers do.
You are saying that if someone has power or deception, whatever they can take is their right.
I say, NO, that is the most dishonorable and amoral of societies.
> If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.
> They have an exploitation model.
as i replied to someone else who asked "what does livable wage mean [to you]?":
A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.
Glad you asked.
oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?
oh well.
Of course there would need to be provisions that it not be abused and just used for all positions. E.g., it cannot be used for workers 21 years old or older, etc. And the rules against abuse need to be solid, as we can guarantee that whatever rules are made, employers will work hard to abuse and game the system to their advantage and at the employee's cost.
I really want to like what you're saying, but I see too many problems. I don't have answers.
Exactly that sort of scenario is why I included those phrases.
ANY large system will have imperfections, inadvertent waste, and openings for abuse. Of course these should be minimized, but that shouldn't stop us from making a system. Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.
> Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.
Agreed. Now consider that regulations exclude people, not include them, overall, by far. (I say this with a job that sees that daily, and where a frequent criticism is that implementing those regulations is government waste.)
What I'm taking away from this is, contrasting with an option I generally dislike, that option actually looks much better than I have previously thought, and it looks definitely better than raising the minimum wage. That is raising the corporate tax rate, which is at historic lows from what I understand, and increasing public benefits. You mentioned Walmart's profits being subsidized by benefit programs, but that valid and important complaint seems to be taken care of this way. This also starts to sound a lot like UBI, which I may have never really understood and have never supported. Maybe I should support it.
That could be a good solution to increase the corp tax rate and provide more benefits and more broadly. The problem is corporations, especially large corps, have historically bought favors from congress, with the result that the tax burden falls on the middle class.
UBI is an astoundingly good concept, especially when people get automated out of their jobs — tax every producing entity at a level required to distribute funds and services (e.g., healthcare) to everyone just above poverty level.
The cool thing is that with UBI, there is basically no need for a minimum wage. First, potential workers are already being supported above poverty, and second, corporations will need to offer a wage and working conditions that together are worth it for workers to bother getting up and going to work. UBI would essentially give everybody "F.U. money", i.e., the option to get up and walk out anytime without endangering their family's ability to live. Studies testing UBI also repeatedly show people consistently spend the money well and do not squander it. The principle once advocated by some conservatives that the people themselves know best how to spend their money is really true (not absolutely, but at a very high level).
So
this isn't really as difficult as everyone makes it. "Minimum wage is a company's way of telling you that if it was legal to pay you less, they would."
If a company can't afford to pay cashiers at different rates based on their tenure and skill, then i guess the company will have to deploy self-checkout, and some people don't like that, so they'll take their business elsewhere. If that means that all grocery stores go "self checkout" then i suppose farmer's markets will become a lot bigger.
This is all about grocery cashiers, please do not try to extrapolate my words to anything else, i am speaking to this very narrow thing.
I did not talk about paying cashiers at different rates. I addressed the single minimum rate from the earlier comment, where a household's single income can "support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc [without relying on assistance programs]". According to the back of this envelope, that would be $70,000/yr = $33/hr. In some areas or with other decisions, maybe only $50,000/yr = $24/hr.
A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.
for years^, i've been saying this, since 2018 or 2019. $33 an hour. So if you re-read what i actually said, i explain that i don't really care if a supermarket can't afford to pay cashiers at a livable wage. they can suffer from lack of staff, or go full self checkout and robots, or go out of business. I don't care, like, at all. "But genewitch, what about the families of the shareholders and CEO and board?" uh huh, luckily they can go get a job and make a livable wage somewhere else.
^i've only been posting on HN since 2020, but my point stands
> A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.
I'll take you at your word that you don't care to come up with a better answer, and that means I'll gain nothing further from discussing this with you. I'll bow out. Take care!
Sure there is. It's the amount you have to pay someone such that they can work a reasonable amount of hours (40/week), such that they can afford all of life's essentials while having a little extra to save for a rainy day, as well as have a little fun.
But certainly some people's poilitics ignore the human aspects of the world we live in, and think that the "free market" (something that doesn't actually exist) will sort it out.
The minimum wage doesn't make anyone be paid more. It only causes anyone paid less than it to instead be paid $0, and instead be paid an unemployment benefit. How is that reasonable?
When Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hour, everyone screamed it would lead to mass unemployment. That never happen. Suddenly the lower class had more money to spend, which boosted the economy as much or more than higher wages hurt bottom lines.
>which helps the working class so that they aren't working and on medicare, section 8, food stamps etc. - as many Wal-mart workers currently are. That saves us money in the long run.
A higher minimum wage leads to lower employment not higher employment.
>When Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hour, everyone screamed it would lead to mass unemployment. That never happen.
It has been shown many times that a higher minimum wage causes less employment. It is also obvious from first principles and basic logic. Price controls are a very bad idea, and wages are no exception.
Tech employees don't "bring in" the company's revenue. That makes the mistake of attributing the products and services of a business to its workers.
>wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s.
Propaganda. Productivity growth literally is just wage growth, by definition. It is impossible for them not to track each other.
The graph on this page disagrees, can you explain please? I haven't heard anyone say the two concepts are the same before.
As I have heard it "productivity" is roughly gdp/hour, which can be different from wages/hour (but you generally expect the two to be related / correlated).
I don't understand what you mean by this. If i own a business, and employee productivity increases but i don't increase wages doesn't that disprove your statement?
No, it is the opposite, whether you are measuring Units Per Worker Hour or especially Units Per Worker Dollar.
You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.
If you instead cut their pay to $22/hr their productivity in Units/WorkerHour is unchanged but productivity in Units/Labor$ has risen.
It is ONLY in the limited case where you are paying 100% by piecework that productivity tracks wages, e.g., if those workers are paid $6/Widget produced and they manage to make 50%more widgets/hr, then their pay rises with productivity. But that is uncommon and labor cost is rarely the only input.
Edit: typos
That is precisely how it is measured: by measuring wages.
>You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.
As is unlikely to surprise you, productivity as a macroeconomic indicator is not measured by lookikg at factories and the tools and techniques they use.
96% of the gap can be explained by the fact that these figures compare productivity growth of the whole economy with wage growth of some workers (the lowest 80% of them - leaving out... the most productive workers), count the productivity growth of the self employed but not their wages, dont take into account overtime, bonuses, or health insurance benefits, and intentionally use different means of measuring inflation across the two figures in an attempt to inflate the numbers.
At the end of the day they track very closely because they are both measures of wages. Productivity is just net output by hour worked and wages is just net output by hour worked. If you use different methods for calculating each you can make either look higher but it is pure methodology.
Again, NO.
Just go to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics and their description of how productivity is measured [0]:
>>"For a single business producing only one good, output would simply be the number of units of that good produced in each time period, such as a month or a year."
Notice not a single mention of wages
It then goes on describing how they measure aggregate output in sectors of the economy. Wages is only mentioned ONCE, for charities and government organizations (since their output is not sold).
>>Government services and the output of nonprofits are not sold in the marketplace, so these types of output can be difficult to measure. For example, what is the output of a charity? Often these outputs are measured by the wages and benefits - compensation - paid to workers producing these outputs.
and then they point out:
>>
Since productivity compares output to input, if the output is measured by the input, any time the input grows, the output grows by the same amount.
>>Measuring output by labor input is similar to including the same amount in the numerator as in the denominator of the labor productivity ratio.
>>This implies no productivity growth for that group of workers, dampening productivity change for the industry and sector. For this reason, BLS productivity measures exclude government, nonprofits, and private household production.
So the ONLY mention of wages is specifically EXCLUDED from measures of productivity.
Then the summary: Output is measured primarily as an index of product revenues, adjusted for price changes. Adjustments are made to ensure that output that is sold to another business within the same measuring unit (industry or sector) is excluded to prevent counting it more than once.
Again, no mention of wages.
I have no idea where you get your misconceptions, but you really need to study some actual economics before posting pages of obviously wrong nonsense.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-prod...
Sure they do. Every employee contributes to the revenue a company brings in. If they don't, then they should be fired.
> Productivity growth literally is just wage growth, by definition.
Completely false. You accuse a commenter in a sibling thread of not having a good grasp of economics, but that feels like the pot calling the kettle black, here.
By your logic, "cost centres" (like IT, HR, and office management) within a business are bad because they don't bring in any revenue. Except of course in reality they are the same: they provide a service to the business that the business makes use of in providing goods and services to its customers.
I am being pedantic but for good reason: there is no a priori reason why your pay should go up just because your employer has become more profitable, except that it is in the interests of employers to make use of resources efficiently. If they are profitable then hiring more people so they can make more money is good. But it isn't a matter of "deserving" to be paid more or something. Pay isn't based on what you deserve for many reasons, including that you can't attribute the business's profits to its workers and ignore, for example, the investment in capital resources (including IP) required to enable the workers to work effectively. Mainly though because of supply and demand.
If an improvement in productivity makes you more efficient then there should be higher demand for you and you should be paid more. And indeed that is exactly what happens: people in industries that have productivity improvements are paid more afterwards than before.
Only if the following conditions are true:
1. You spent your entire career in the US, ideally on the West Coast
2. You entered the industry early, ideally right after (or in!) university
3. You did not spend significant time in low-paying segments of the industry, such as in academia, hardware, games, idealistic open source, or the public sector
4. You did not need a significant career break, such as for major medical issues, being a SAHP, or caring for sick family members
Even if all of the above applied, certain wealth-destroying events such as an expensive illness, legal trouble, or bad divorce, might have made FIRE infeasible.
If you're single and have no responsibilities, sure. The second you have a mortgage, medical conditions that need health insurance, or need money because you had a family emergency and had to dip into savings, it's not "funemployment" at all.
During dot-bomb I was relatively lucky if not necessarily super-well compensated but I knew a lot of people who basically dropped out of the professional labor market.
Access to cheap labor is what really drives economies. Market forces are what drive labor salaries. More people cheaper labor.
It used to be in the 60s, 70s, and to some extent the 80's a single wage earner was enough in a family. By the end of the 80's it became clear that 2 wage earners was how people got ahead in life.
Oh, and not doing 2 trillion in tax cuts for the rich would help.
A significant portion of the world population works themselves to the bone while barely scraping by. This is not the mark of a successful civilization. It's gross.
Maybe as a start, we put limits on the ratio of executive compensation to the lowest paid jobs in a company. And require that a significant percentage of profits be distributed to employees rather than shareholders.
Yes, that will slow economic growth. But even as someone reasonably well off, who depends on investments for his future, that seems much more fair than what we're doing now.
Tech "layoffs" are something of a euphemism for terminating (rather than pausing) employment for business reasons.
Some businesses are seasonal, so it might make sense there as well.
"Originally, layoff referred exclusively to a temporary interruption in work, or employment"
Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens...
I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health.
I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of.
And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.
The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.
The alternate interpretation, that you do understand and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less generous to you.
I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.
I think helping one another to build empathy is a good thing, and even if the person I replied to is unable to do so, it's possible that observing them tell a disabled person that they don't think their life is any harder will help other third parties such as yourself build that empathy.
I did not flag their original comment, but it's not for no reason it was flagged to death.
In other cases downvoted posts are often the most interesting precisely because they trigger people with points they don't want to consider. I certainly wouldn't cite it as proof of any position.
As for bringing up children, I did make the leap that that is generally a big difference between younger employees and older employees.
It sounds like what you think you wrote, is not in fact the words of yours that everybody has been reading.
A double negative is risky without typos, though.
In my follow up comment I attempted to clarify my comment in response to giantg2's reply. "I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise)." I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult. I simply added that it is not the only thing that makes life more difficult. All of these things need to be considered when making career/job decisions.
> In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.
> I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult.
Do you not see how it's hard to square the first statement, with the second? You do not agree that life is much harder for some people, but you do agree that a disability makes life more difficult?
It sounds like you have very little experience with people outside your socioeconomic class. (Or you do have that experience, but have drawn the wrong conclusions from it.) It is an obvious, proven fact that life is much harder for some people than for others.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A former boss and good friend who is incredibly smart and effective in the work place asked why the two of us had never gone the PE route and been more successful. While he is very successful by most standards, he sees people flying private jets all the time who do not appear more skillful, yet have been more successful. As I think on this, I feel I simply was never willing to go all in on the risk required to achieve that level of financial success. I tried co-founding a company once when I was 28 while engaged and importantly, before children. I felt I could take the risk and if I failed, could bounce back. I did fail - company did ok but my I ended up disliking working with my senior partner - and I did bounce back, ending up at GE.
After that, I did not feel comfortable taking that level of risk until my children were off to college and no longer dependent on me an I had enough money saved that my wife and I would be ok for a long time. The people I know who have been jet-money financially successful took huge risks. They were all in on their venture(s). Frequently this cost them their marriage and/or relationships with the children. This was their choice. Their cost/benefit analysis to optimize their success criteria. Some regret the decisions - they underestimated the effort and impact on those they cared about. However, most have not. They are happy with how things have turned out.
Different strokes for different folks.
Many people do not fall on the good side of that random chance.
Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make, will only be possible if some other people don't make those same choices.
Many also don't have the choice to start a family, no matter how badly they want it.
As for starting a family, I agree not all can. My mistake was jumping from their assertion that I must be young to mean I did not have the responsibilities of an older worker such as taking care of a family. The less generous interpretation of that accusation is what? I am stupid? Ignorant of life? Not suffering from the impact of issues that I did not choose?