41–50 of 65 posts
Start of my junior year in chemistry at Alabama, went in to talk to my adviser (his fifth year teaching there). He was sweating over paperwork, said it was the first time he made enough to file a tax return. I said, "Excuse me, I've got to go change my major." And I did. Never looked back.
That doesn't make sense. I thought the IRS required tax returns to be filed for any amount of income over $600.
I think ageism is too overstated in tech industry. If graduates with zero experience can get work, then it doesn't make sense that senior software engineers should struggle in the job market. Personally, I see the opposite with many job posts asking for minimum X years of experience. If a programmer with many years of expertise is jobless it says more about their personality and their ability to fit culturally speaki…
Two people are applying for the same job. One is a guy with 2 decades experience in relevant technologies, the other is a fresh graduate who did an internship at a tech company. One of the big differences here are expectations. The experienced individual is going to demand substantially higher pay. They also are going to be less willing to live their job than a fresh grad due to a better understanding of the employer:employee relationship along with the fact that they likely also have more obligations outside of work, such as family. The fresh graduate is going to underestimate his own worth, be eager to please, and have fewer obligations as well as likely being more willing to put those aside for the job.
Because of this you're going to end up paying substantially more for the more experienced employee. How will that affect your product? It'd probably be good, but that's not a given. And even if it does result in a better product or a more efficient deployment time, how does that contrast against your increased labor costs? And this is all talking about things in terms of a meritocracy. In software, hype and marketing play a huge role in many product's success, meaning there's even less reason to optimize for the most capable teams.
As an aside this is also the reason for the huge push for getting [x into computer science]. It's great optics for public relations, but increase the labor pool and guess what happens to labor prices? Mega corporations such as Google and Apple are pushing upwards of 100,000 employees. Reduce average labor costs by 10,000 a year and that's well over a billion dollars of recurring profit per year - keeping in mind that when a company pays an employee e.g. $10,000 they end up paying substantially more than that in various compensation-scaling taxes and other disincentives.
As our capable labor market has exploded relative to the quantity of desirable jobs, many wages have stagnated. Tech is the exception. It's a field where demand is still in line with supply which keeps wages going up. This [1] is an archive link to Glassdoor's reporting on Google salaries. The inflation there is remarkable. In 2010 a senior software engineer made $125k. Today, 9 years later, they make $165k, a 32% increase. Inflation during that period has only increased by about 15%.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20100601000000*/https://www.glas...
I wouldn't call it common. People with advanced degrees are less likely to end up in low paying jobs: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/ But, it can happen for a variety of reasons, including mental illness, illness or other issues with family that result in the loss of a position. Did you ask this delivery guy why he's doing this job if he used to be a chemist? Believe it or not, sometimes…
You need about 8 figures generating passive income by most estimates.
Suffice to say, by your passive income alone you'd be in the top 1% of all American earners.
Start of my junior year in chemistry at Alabama, went in to talk to my adviser (his fifth year teaching there). He was sweating over paperwork, said it was the first time he made enough to file a tax return. I said, "Excuse me, I've got to go change my major." And I did. Never looked back.
Of course it can. Fancy advanced degrees aren't worth anything - that's just the lie colleges tell you so you'll part with more money. You're supposed to be the valuable part. If you aren't valuable, no matter what that means in your modern market, then you could be living in the streets.
And so the truth is laid bare. Capital > humanity This is why people is not free to move where they can find the most benefit, but capital is. Priorities.
Is this UofA as in University of Arizona? As in Tucson, Arizona? Tucson is one of the most economically depressed regions in the nation, for a major city (see: https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/economy/2018/... ). I imagine this man just might be overqualified for an already poor job market, and is doing whatever he can in the mean time to make ends meet. Side note, I did attend UofA for undergrad. Loved…
Maybe his kids are doing well because he has a lot of time to be a great dad and coach them? Life happens. Shit happens. Kids happen. Enjoy the ride and don't terrify yourself about money or what your life should look like. We all get 24 hours a day on the planet and from a long term perspective, almost nothing of what we do really matters. Maybe by moving boxes instead of schlepping in a lab for some deranged sociop…
>from a long term perspective, almost nothing of what we do really matters.
So what? Yeah, in the long run we're all dead, so what? I imagine someone walking up to you, punching you in the face, and if you object, saying "Woahh! Calm down. From a long term perspective, almost nothing of what we do really matters. Don't you understand?" The things in peoples' lives matter plenty. What else is there. There is no other kind of 'mattering'. (Sorry if I misunderstood you.)
There was a survey in Silicon Valley some years ago that showed that this kind of fear goes pretty far up, plenty of millionaires fear falling off the gravy train. I do my family's grocery shopping, and I have several times noticed new clerks at the checkout, men in the 40-65 age range who are a little too well dressed -- very nicely ironed and starched white shirts, fashionable ties and watches. They seldom become f…
Edit: Began as EE, hence my connection to HN . There isn't anything close to this community anywhere else.
Maybe his kids are doing well because he has a lot of time to be a great dad and coach them? Life happens. Shit happens. Kids happen. Enjoy the ride and don't terrify yourself about money or what your life should look like. We all get 24 hours a day on the planet and from a long term perspective, almost nothing of what we do really matters. Maybe by moving boxes instead of schlepping in a lab for some deranged sociop…
Reminds of Heinrich Böll's wonderful anecdote concerning the lowering of productivity. [1,2] I would recommend anyone reading this comment to check it out. It's an entertaining and enlightening short story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei... https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/media/_migrated/content_upload...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mexican%20fisherman&sort=byDat...