Life is Short

Would you take a job that offered you $1/year of wage, or a job that offered literally zero vacation days? No? Well then it means you don't need any job, but rather you are in a hurry to select some job that still meets certain minimum criteria.

You probably at least require that the job pays well enough for you to support yourself, and maybe others too, and that the job offers you access to affordable medical, dental, and life insurance. You probably also expect the job to have some range of regular hours, approximately 40-50 hours working per week, with an expectation that you do not usually need to work overtime or on weekends.

You probably also require that while you're working, you are shielded from dangerous situations (e.g. you're not writing code while dangling from a helicopter, and there's not a hole in the roof over your desk, ...).

This is a lot of stuff that you require. In fact, out of the space of all possible jobs, you're actually looking for jobs that fit into an extremely tiny niche.

These things just happen to be the most common norms around employment in the developed world. We don't have to negotiate as hard for them now, and you know why? Because people in the past negotiated extremely hard for them, and refused to take 'no' for an answer, and led strikes, lock-ins, demonstrations, bargaining agreements, and political diplomacy in order to secure either laws or strong social norms to protect these things.

When those people approached employment, they didn't say, well, I'm a beggar with few options, so I had better subject myself to anti-human treatment and just take whatever I am given.

Instead they said, I am a human being with talent and skill (and if you earned a degree in CS, you have a lot of talent and skill compared to vast sections of the working population). They said because I am a human being, I deserve to be treated with some types of basic respect and dignity and not sold bullshit excuses for anti-human conditions.

And now, the battle for employee-protecting laws or social norms (at least for developers) has shifted to be about protection of workplace privacy and productivity (get rid of Agile/Scrum and get rid of open-plan offices) and the respect to be paid fair wage and compensation for your skills (don't fall prey to start-up bullshit which argues that you ought to view certain sets of experiences or chances as valuable and be willing to trade compensation to get them).

You don't need any job. You need a job that meets your goals. When you're young you might fool yourself into thinking that sitting in an open floor plan or agreeing to be bound by Agile aren't a big part of your goals. Then you realize that managers, executives, investors, and so forth, who put you in the open-plan office and tether you to Agile/Scrum fundamentally see you as commodity labor, perfectly easy to replace, and have stopped caring whatsoever about your career progress from almost the first moment they hired you.

It would require a massive, short-term discount factor on your own personal value to make that worthwhile -- such an incredibly self-deprecating amount of discount that it realistically could only be due to a literal emergency situation -- like you need a paycheck today or you will literally die.

And I'd argue that if you have minimum salary requirements, or some fuzzy idea of regular working hours or minimum vacation requirements, then you're not at all in a situation where you need wage as a literal emergency necessitating you to deeply undervalue yourself. And even if you did, you could simply compromise on the field of labor, and do something besides CS jobs if you had to.

At any rate, I do not agree that simply being young and needing a first job is any excuse at all for being willing to tolerate open-plan offices, Agile/Scrum, or the false promises of start-ups. Just say no to all that shit and you'll ensure the first job you get actually helps you in terms of having an actually prosperous software career.

Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.

In many ways this is a solidification of a lot of what I have been thinking

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