firstplacelast

You don't have to unionize in a set way, just like there's no one way to write an employment contract.

If anything, the tech industry should be leading the world in new ideas and methods (and dare I say it...technology) to organize labor.

I was reading murder Wikipedia the other day and one of the guys got out of prison the second time and was able to pick up a job making 1k/week in the late 70’s (49-50k/year) in SoCal.

That’s what I was making a decade ago in SoCal with a college degree (slightly more with OT).

Ohh to live the life of an uneducated violent offender in the 70’s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bittaker_and_Roy_No...

I would love to just see a hyperlocal minimum wage set in CA that's tied to housing prices. Live in enclaves with an average home of 10M dollars, your house cleaner will need to be paid $500/hour type thing.

Or we could not do that and mint more millionaires.

It seems like the best course of action is to tie minimum wage to housing costs (on a per-county or city basis), this would help ensure the ownership class has to balance the costs of assets and labor.

If you want cheap labor, housing costs must go down. If you want expensive real estate, labor costs must go up.

Disagree. People are paid based on value-extraction, not value-generation. They are correlated, but are vastly different metrics.

Yep, and the kicker is these are the types that put “good communication skills” on their job requisitions.

Upper management can’t communicate anything worthwhile, mid-levels have varying levels of English from varying first-languages and never develop good short-hand ways to communicate.

Seeing “good communication” on a job req is a red flag at this point, might as well say can do basic math or use a computer.

I make salsa once a month and have noticed this the last couple years. Occasionally get a spicy batch, but more often am adding habaneros to bring up the heat.

I made a verde for the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago and tried to keep it mild since I didn't know everyone's preferences. Even after 3 jalapenos in a small batch of salsa, it had almost zero spice (commented on by party goers - still tasty though).

Last week on the show Chrissy and Dave Dine Out, the chef of an Ethiopian restaurant in LA commented how she quit using jalapenos because they're not spicy anymore and opts for serranos in her dishes instead.

Anyway, I kept thinking I was getting weak batches/unlukcy in my jalapeno selection, but I guess I need to start going for serranos.

I started an interview at fly like 1.5 years ago.

Figured I’d give it a shot, they were very responsive, gave me the challenge and I spent more time than was suggested. They had a few core technologies I was not familiar with at all, but figured I could hack it…I could not.

Anyway, I really appreciated it. Walked away with nothing but positive feelings.

I have spent enough time applying/interviewing over the last decade that I am often in a dilemma when I get an offer that I don’t want bc the process is so fucky/I already have negative feelings. From HR setting expectations and then not meeting them, the laid-out interview process not lining up, remote/hybrid changing, inability to describe actual projects I would work on, not meeting people I would work under/with, made to feel like I lack intelligence by interviewers, etc.

I’m not a “rockstar” programmer and never have tons of offers, but I have turned down offers because of screwy interview processes/interviewers just to stay at the evil I know.

Hopefully next time the tech market is in an upswing, we can unionize?

I took a fully-remote position a month before lock-down started. Didn’t ever think it was a possibility before that position, but those positions have been out there for a long time.

It works really well when companies/departments are setup to do it that way. More people are now being clued in that it works insanely well with the right setup and the right line of work.

Even with RTO and massive lay-offs, we’re just going to see more start-ups coming around that are completely remote.

Tech-giants can keep in-office. Things will shake out over the long term.

I’m personally not opposed to being in office, but the benefits of remote are many.

This is what I'm hoping for the future, so many will be so poor we won't have mortgages or kids, nothing to lose. But I doubt it.

Hey, pretty things are hard. Why isn’t half of HN looking their best at least once a week?

It costs money and time. I work with people in shirts that are only befitting for elementary school kids.

You can have the niceties, just have to pay for them.

But I think this is about where the market is going. People (with the money for homes) don’t care, so that’s how they’re catered to.

That is interesting, worth a think. Thanks for sharing.

Even 5 years ago, friends that are physicians have been balking at their wages. Even as specialists, they’re very well compensated, but living in any decent sized city has left them feeling ripped off.

I mean, they’ll be fine. They’ll have lives above 95% of people, but they’re disappointed because their 300k salary (and some with a physician spouse, So 600k) isn’t buying them what they thought they would get even in places like Dallas, Memphis, and Charlotte.

Absurd and not looking to garner empathy for these folks, but just to say no one’s feeling accomplished or stress free monetarily. Seems extremely fucked up, but maybe I don’t have the higher level context. Maybe highly paid physicians, tech workers, etc always felt poor in the 70s-80s-90s.

Years ago I was hiring a mechanic to look at a used car. Car and him were in a city a few hours a way, so I lined him up to meet me at the dealership.

Website and reviews went back years and had good reviews (which can always be manipulated), but he was so difficult to deal with over the phone. Was polite, but could not give me definitive answers even when it came to payments. i.e. I told him I could pay him cash or credit and it came to this 5-minute back-and-forth where he would not just tell me what he wanted.

Before I hung up on him, I realized if he has been in business this long he's got to be great at what he does because he is a terrible business-man.

I think I was correct. Guy put the car through its paces, checked everything under-the-hood, did the weirdest test drive I've ever experienced, and wrote up a thorough report. Even the sales-guy was like, where the hell did you find this guy (in an impressed way)?!?

7-years later and he was 95% spot on about everything...one thing he thought I would have to replace ended up being an easy fix instead.

I shadowed at the county morgue for a few weeks a long time ago. When there was not an autopsy to observe, I was given access to their case files, which were color-coded by cause-of-death (natural causes/homicide/suicide/etc).

I spent one afternoon going through a couple handfuls of suicide cases and while I don’t remember many nitty gritty details, the thing that surprised me was seeing a lot of older men.

Their suicide notes were also primarily instructions on what their family should be doing with their assets/finance talk, that part has always stuck with me 2 decades later.

Society does not do that. They can extract more capital, so they’re considered more important.

If gardeners were paid 500k/year, they would be exalted. It has nothing to do with the work or the value provided to society.

People just love money and praise those that have it.

Look, lots of people are just…stupid. Ignorant. Uninformed.

The median IQ is 100, it’s calibrated that way. Meaning half of people have an IQ lower than that.

A lot of money is spent to convince/coerce people of all sorts of bull-shit.

Unless you’ve spent a lot of time around poorer/lesser IQ people, it is probably hard to understand. You think they should just try harder, think better, etc.

Also, other very informed and intelligent people vote for all sorts of policies on different sides of the political divide. And have at least decently thought out reasons for doing so.

I’m moreso politically aligned with the HN/reddit crowd, but have lots of family and friends across the political spectrum. You just have to talk to people in a non-judgmental way to learn a LOT.

Best tip if you’re feeling like passionately arguing politics in good faith, befriend some lawyers with differing political leanings. They’re the best for this over beers and won’t make things personal (if you don’t).

Maybe we should all learn from real estate agents and price our labor at a % of the median home price within 1 hour commute to our offices?

While I do think RE agents are overpaid in expensive markets, I also kind of think...good for them. Pegging your wages to your most expensive living cost is a supremely intelligent move.

While true, we kind of need those people to die every year.

More people living contributes to a greater labor pool, which reduces wages. It leaves a greater demand on housing, increasing costs and making so many peoples’ lives more difficult.

If you’re working class, an extra 40k deaths/year is making the world better for you.

As far as I am aware, it is time at the hospital. So they can sleep a bit, but it is not much.

These are smart people, they do not want it to change. Their income would decrease if more people were trained/brought in. Have a lot of physician friends, it's awful and they complain, but are worried about wages. They do not want to make less.

A big part is the expense of undergrad+med school+low residency wages+most grew up upper-middle class and have big expectations. They're very worried about losing ground wage-wise. which is fair in my opinion...they have a de facto union/guild (like most smart people who earn a wage try to do).

That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think.

I'm an introvert, I remember craving friendly interaction 6-months in and then being worried about my extrovert friends. If I am feeling crazy about the lack of human interaction, I KNEW some friends that must be having a hard time. I made it a point to call those people to catch up.

I do agree about the weird "hero/essential workers", the same "salt of the earth" BS that has been spouted for decades. Essential people that we want to pay like crap to keep our society running. They should all stop, be willing to die, until they are paid enough to buy a crappy home. Essential means they have big negotiating power, organize/unionize and stick the screws to society. Think like a CEO.

Also saw all the crazy bad actors, the insane takes on social media (on both sides- though more so on one side), the insanity, the lack of nuance, the shit throwing...I lost a lot of respect for humanity.

As a person that was working in biotech in an R&D department at the time, something in my brain broke. Could not care anymore about making the world better, helping people live longer, contributing to coffers of multi-millionaires bc I was "making the world better". Just done with it.

There's no global moral compass, otherwise you would jump off a bridge, just a local one, as far as I'm concerned.

As someone that worked in biotech/pharma for a decade, they LOVE to roll out the sick-people porn and talk about how we’re all making the world a better place…it helps them pay people less.

They can occasionally do some good things, but the large companies are no more ethical than Comcast. The small companies vary, but often have little real goals other than making the C-suite a few extra million no matter what.

The last small pharma I left discontinued all of their RNA sequencing experiments because they were worried about the data existing and it causing issues with FDA clearance down-the-line. Basically, don’t study it because it could show bad side-effects…but all of these PhD’s are making the world a better place, good job! Make sure to get married so you can afford a crappy townhome.

Gross.

No, I don't. It is about bottom-up accountability. Expecting top-down accountability is stupid and a recipe for an unhappy life.

We need to teach people to stand-up for themselves, not expect those above them to eventually accommodate them.

I've thought about his often, too, but I am of the opinion we can all thrive together or die together. As much as I would love to have 20-million in the bank, live off interest, and have the working class cater to my every need, it's an absurd dream.

I want the bottom of the barrel to lead a dignified life if they're willing to work a full-time job. If the upper, upper-middle, and even middle class have to readjust, then so be it. The working poor need to stop subsidizing others.

It IS a difficult problem, but if the answer from anyone in leadership is others should work full-time and not be able to go to the doctor when needed or buy a crappy condo or worry about food...then those people need to step aside from their positions and allow someone else to at least try (and when I say leadership I'm talking about those that allocate capital and pass laws/policies).

I am a big believer that work for work's sake has no virtue, it is better to die on the side of the road than work for peanuts (it's anti-labor and makes the world worse).

I feel it. I’ve been looking at the FBI. It would still be 80% desk work, but better than 100%.

Wage is still a step back and I’m nearing the age cut-off, so would have to jump on it pretty soon.

Have one. Doesn’t solve the problem. I need to move and context switch (ideally).

Yep.

Spent a summer working in a blue collar fashion for a small company. It was fun-ish, but the owner was at a desk all day.

Easier said than done. Outside of sales, what job on your feet pays 200k+/year?

Hate sitting at a desk, been diagnosed, and not into sales.

Not trying to be combative, would love suggestions. I partly want to go bar-tend or be a plumber, but the wage isn’t there.

I should have gone into medicine, but it’s too late for that at this stage.