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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

Most people need money to eat. I don't know if you can ever really have a fair negotiation with an employer when "the rent is due" is involved. You know those companies that buy settlements from people in exchange for a fraction of their value immediately? You could say that this is a fair trade in an econ 101 sense that body parties rationally entered into a mutual agreement. But you could also notice that one person just got laid off and doesn't have enough money to pay rent and is therefore pressured by circumstance to accept extremely unfavorable terms because the alternative is homelessness.

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> Most people need money to eat. I don't know if you can ever really have a fair negotiation with an employer when "the rent is due" is involved.

Your definition of "fair" is questionable.

If you're negotiating from a position where you've taken on debts and rent that you can't afford to pay, and time has run out to the point where you're desperate for a paycheck as soon as possible, that's unfortunate. But that's not the fault of the person you're negotiating for a job with. Exceptional cases aside, 95% of the time that's likely due to your own risk-taking, neglect, poor decision-making, or financial mismanagement. And you had a "fair" chance to not get into that situation to begin with.

But regardless of blame, it's certainly not the fault of the counterparty in your employment negotiations in that you're in that spot. Nor is it their responsibility. Nor should we want it to be! What kind of system would that be, exactly? A brutal one where many more people fall through the gaps than would otherwise. A much better system is the one we have, where people pay taxes, and do so at higher rates the more fortunate they are, and that tax money goes into programs like unemployment, which helps people in exceptional situations.

What's so unfair about this, exactly?

Actually it's probably more 99.99% likely due to the family you're born in.

> What's so unfair about this, exactly?

We don't roll the same dices at birth.

No one's saying we roll the same dice at birth. That doesn't mean that people who are so desperate that they can't risk negotiating a job offer are 99.99% in that situation because of birth rather than decisions made subsequent to birth.

Especially because in America at least, over 200 million people are born middle class or above. An even lower class in America is doing much better than many other countries in the world.

At what point in your mind does personal accountability come into play? How prosperous does a nation have to be for people to have some responsibility for the consequences of their own actions? Or are people never responsible?

Regarding personal responsibility, at an individual's level it's your responsibility to improve your life, because that's the only lever you have and you don't have the time to wait for societal changes that take decades or centuries to arrive.

When we're discussing policy for our society however it's too easy to blame people for the choices they made so we don't have to think harder. The world's complexity is beyond what the humans brain can hold at any single time. Some people are dealt bad hands, born in a difficult family, born in a body that slow them down or drag them down. Some people make one bad choice (even something mild like a financially unprofitable carrer choice) at 18 because millions of parameters that played since their birth compulsed their brain to make that choice at that moment in their life. Not even mentioning meeting the wrong people. You can do everything well and cross the path of someone who breaks you.

Truly and without getting too philosophical,looking back and learning about people's stories I've come to realize that we have little agency and by the time we understand how the world works and what we should have done instead it's often too late to change the outcome drastically.

To tie it all back to the topic of this thread, the 19 year old who's been pushed by his parents all his life to get good grades, study well, get involved in the right extracurriculars, ends up at Stanford, starts a startup because that's what people do around him, is told to apply to YC, is accepted, is taken care of by YC, tell me how much is he responsible for his success?

I don't disagree with you. I think there's an even argument along these lines that we don't really have free will, since our initial biology and environmental circumstances aren't within our control, and yet every subsequent decision and choice follows inexorably from those initial conditions.

To me, this inspires empathy and care, and it's why I believe that society should have a very high floor. But discussions like these, and the current "eat the rich" zeitgeist seem to focus so much more on lowering the ceiling. Which to me is the wrong focus.

Not really? If the same value and wealth is being created - the redistribution of it raises the floor as well.

Capping the ceiling would be a tremendous mistake. It would eliminate the "if" in your scenario. The same value in wealth would not be created. You would be massively disincentivizing people to stay here and innovate, and that innovation would flow elsewhere or simply diminish.

Luckily, we've never actually capped the ceiling, and it's unlikely we ever will.

If there's no cap on a ceiling, is it fair or humanly okay when someone's wealth is Epstein-enough to own other people's lives? Wealth is a proxy for power, when someone has more power than legal systems or enough to swindle all of it, is that a better world?

There should be a ceiling or we reach the current state where accountability is nothing a million dollars can't buy.

Do you seriously believe the by limiting people's wealth, we'll solve problems like this? Humans used to have thousands of times less wealth than we do now, yet people still had power and influence, harems and slaves, cults and gangs.

Solve? Likely not. Improve? Of course. Policies that improve the state of problems even if they remain unsolved are good.

More than one million people die of TB annually. We have a cure for it. Elon Musk could pay for testing and treatment distribution for the entire world without noticing a change in his wealth.

A million people a year.

I feel like you should read about systems thinking. You're ignoring so many potential side effects, so much history, so many statistics, incentives, human psychology. The idea of capping wealth in order to try to prevent certain power imbalances like sex trafficking, is similar to firebombing your house to fix a leaky pipe. Not only would it mess up a ton of stuff, but it wouldn't even fix the problem.

Of course there are side effects. The question is whether those side effects are worth the benefits we'd get.

Millions dead every year from TB. A curable disease.

The idea of capping wealth is to cap power imbalance, without power imbalance many things would not be able to happen within a system, alas there are as you say many potential side effects, implementations of how a cap could work would have to be discussed by society, right now I do feel people are very mad about inequality as is, what solutions are there for it?

I have never met a founder who was motivated, even in part, by the possibility of being a mega billionaire.

You can believe that’s fair. I don’t. I don’t believe that one party needs to be at fault for an economic transaction to be unfair.

I live in a country where “oopsy doopsy your insurance denied this so now you owe us 20,000” isn’t terribly uncommon and your employer can fire you without any warning or severance. “I need money for the rent this month” is not consistently some moral failing.

If you’re an early employee at a startup, you almost certainly had other options for employment

I don’t think you can assume this to be the case, especially outside of the Bay Area.

My first startup was one where I was hired because I was young and cheap. I could be paid in free lunches rather than 401k matching and decent healthcare plans.

Big companies often pay better salaries.

There are plenty of people who would consider themselves extremely lucky to work at a startup, even for cheap. I know many older people working much worse jobs. I think it's fair to assume that most startup workers have other options, and that generally those options are worse.

Could you imagine this perception you describe playing into being underpaid?

Your last sentence you’re saying it’s fair to make this assumption that most other jobs are worse.

So that means if a non-startup offered you a better pay package your assumption and bias might steer you away and take worse compensation to do the same job.

I ask you this question because I made a similar mistake in my youth. I took a pay and benefits cut for a startup because it sounded a lot more fun. 6 months later and the company was going under and I was out of a job.

There are also plenty of employees who just didn’t get a job offer elsewhere. When I took my first startup job I didn’t have a competing offer.

I too have worked for startups that failed. And when I took those jobs, I had many thousands of alternative opportunities I could've taken instead that I considered to be worse, or at least not worth pursuing compared to the startup jobs. What's your point?

Here's an example that could help make my point: Glimpse is hiring a Security and Compliance Lead in New York City and is only paying $150K - $225K.

Meta is paying a Security Engineer (not a lead) $271,000/year to $347,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits across the following locations: Bellevue, WA, Menlo Park, CA, Washington, DC, New York, NY

I find it hard to reconcile that salary difference, and I think the only way to explain it is that startups offer dreams of upside like a smoky Vegas casino.

Working for Meta [1] is "boring" and corporate, but it's also objectively a better financial decision unless Glimpse becomes the next Uber. My point is that I am hypothesizing that tech culture encourages people (especially young people) to prefer objectively worse financial outcomes to do the exact same work at a more "exciting" startup company.

At the time you joined those startups, you considered those other opportunities to be worse, but I wonder if that was true or if that was perception? Of course, I don't intend to tell you that you were wrong, in fact I think it's highly likely you were right. I only mean to say that it's worth introspecting on the concept.

[1] Or insert any other large and slightly more ethical company, if we want to disqualify working for Meta due to its "evil empire problem."

Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, I don't disagree with you. I think it's a matter of perception. What's better or worse will always be subjective. And there will always be gaps in the market where people make genuine mistakes, because of a lack of knowledge, or an error in judgment due to inexperience, etc.

But there are also genuine advantages that others simply might not see. For example, many would rather apply to work at a startup because it's an easier job to get than one at Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, etc., and not having to study as hard for interviews is a genuine advantage to some that's worth the money left on the table. Or for others, maybe they want a more casual work environment. Or others might just want startup experience because they hope to start a startup someday. Etc.

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