I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#91

Post by sigstoat » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

vitaflo wrote: post #64

hallway_monitor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about moving to remote work is that it will enable people to live in these smaller communities while having the increased income of the city. I hope this will bring more money back to local economies and revitalize rural areas.

All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals. Remote workers also don’t fully contribute to the economy of the rural area because their place of employment is not in that area. If the company the remote worker works for does well and grows, that won’t grow the rural community.

> All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it

when you stop competing for the same strip of land, 10 miles from the pacific ocean, it turns out there's a sort of stupendous amount of land.

while, yes, there will technically be some competition, in the areas under discussion i don't think it will meaningfully effect housing prices.

(i could divide the amount of land in rural america by the number of possible work-from-home employees and we could figure out what it'll do to the average population density. but, hell, i've lived in these areas, i don't need to.)

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#92

Post by diordiderot » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #76

phreack wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so as well, but then I started offering jobs to people I knew hated their jobs and also worked unpaid overtime constantly, with the smallest salaries. But for some reason, when offered a 6x salary freelancing, for less hours, with guidance, and the road paved as much as possible, everyone refuses. Turns out there are people who take shitty jobs on purpose, out of a sense of... I don't know, fear, embarrassm…

They want something stable. Freelancing is not.

Kids, car, rent, healthcare = Need something stable

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#93

Post by user-the-name » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #84

> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits. Had they not been locked in by the pension, I'd imagine most of them would've quit, and Frito-Lay would've been force to improve conditions. I wonder if unions prefer pensions pretty much for the same reason--it all…

You read this and your first instinct is to attack unions?

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#94

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #52

hallway_monitor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about moving to remote work is that it will enable people to live in these smaller communities while having the increased income of the city. I hope this will bring more money back to local economies and revitalize rural areas.

If remote work really takes off, it won't be long until most employers adjust salaries down to each employee's local cost of labor. Why pay someone a Bay Area or NYC salary when they work in rural Montana, when they could pay a rural Montana salary to get someone who works in rural Montana?

> Why pay someone a Bay Area or NYC salary when they work in rural Montana, when they could pay a rural Montana salary to get someone who works in rural Montana?

Because you can't get anyone in rural Montana who is capable of getting a job paying Bay Area or NYC salaroies to accept that offer. Adjustment will result in meeting somewhere in the middle but whether that's 25% or 95% of Bay Area salaries is an open question.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#95

Post by rufus_foreman » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

knuthsat wrote: post #2

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work. For example, there's year long touri…

Time consuming?

I worked in a factory for years when I was younger, not too different than what he is describing.

There are some jobs, like the one I have now writing code where you think about them even when you aren't doing them, they invade your dreams. I feel like I am writing code all the time, even when I'm not logged in to the work laptop actually doing it.

There are other jobs where you don't think about them when you aren't doing them, you go home after work and then you stop thinking about work.

The factory job I had was not like either of those, I did not think about work even while I was doing it. My mind was free while my body was getting paid to do work. I could be thinking about anything else other than the physical work I was doing.

I'm getting old, won't be able to write code much longer. The factory job that I used to do doesn't exist now, it's been automated. Save your money, kids.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#96

Post by hosenten » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

bserge wrote: post #53

raffraffraff wrote: post #35

America needs an equivalent to the EU working time act.

People like that work the same hours in the EU.

You have even mandatory holiday as intern.

You have health care either through your family or through any normal job including flipping burgers.

You have min 20 days holiday as burger flipper as well.

It's a shame how unfair humans get treated in the USA or let's say disgusting.

And no federal maternity leave in the USA.

Country of freedom for the rich and social shit hole for the rest.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#97

Post by diordiderot » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

mcculley wrote: post #39

samatman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it is super weird that you put caffeine on that list. I assume, because you did it, that you're one of those mutants who doesn't use it nor like it much. Good for you and all, but caffeine made the modern world , the majority of the population uses it every day, and industrial society wouldn't function without it. It's also super-cheap even on a modest salary, and most workplaces give it away for free because of…

I am aware of Pollan's recently well-publicized assertion that caffeine made the modern world. I am unconvinced. I quit caffeine a few years ago. I'm not an unusual mutant. I have the genes on markers rs4410790 and rs2470893 that indicate a typical reaction to caffeine. ( https://enki.org/2017/08/13/quitting-caffeine/ ) Most people experience a temporary increase in productivity until they build up a tolerance for ca…

What was your experience quitting like. I want to but am afraid

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#98

Post by baron816 » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

user-the-name wrote: post #93

baron816 wrote: post #84

> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits. Had they not been locked in by the pension, I'd imagine most of them would've quit, and Frito-Lay would've been force to improve conditions. I wonder if unions prefer pensions pretty much for the same reason--it all…

You read this and your first instinct is to attack unions?

Why is your first instinct to assume unions are wholesome, benevolent actors? Unions have a long history of corruption, racism, and being associated with organized crime.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#99

Post by jrockway » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

vitaflo wrote: post #64

hallway_monitor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about moving to remote work is that it will enable people to live in these smaller communities while having the increased income of the city. I hope this will bring more money back to local economies and revitalize rural areas.

All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals. Remote workers also don’t fully contribute to the economy of the rural area because their place of employment is not in that area. If the company the remote worker works for does well and grows, that won’t grow the rural community.

> All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals.

Rural America is huge. If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).

Housing is expensive in cities because 10 million people want to live in the same square mile. The US, however, has 4 million of those square miles. (Everyone in New York City could move to California and have 10 acres of their own. I did the calculation with the intent of showing that everyone in the country could have their own square mile, but that's not true -- I didn't realize how big a square mile actually is.)

Remote workers probably aren't going to raise the cost of living that much. It is certainly possible that they could all move to the same place (i.e. turn Aspen, Colorado into New York City), and that would be a problem. But if people randomly move into rural areas, there just aren't enough people buying 1 million dollar apartments in the same place to "gentrify out" farmers.

I'll also point out, that remote work doesn't necessarily imply that it's possible to move to the middle of nowhere. You still need a good Internet connection, and many people want to live closer than an hour's drive away from a grocery store or hospital. I work remotely but I'm happy to live 3 minutes away from Manhattan. There are factors other than commuting to work that account for where people live.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#100

Post by hogFeast » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #87

gwright wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is something interesting in here but the finance jargon and writing style is obscuring it for me.

It was unclear for me too. Though the gist of what I understood around the jargon: Overvalued companies are driven by the stock market to have unsustainable growth, always more than before or at the very least always going up over time, even with complete market dominance. Therefore once a company caps out a market only cutting quality or civic duty corners are left and it becomes a knife-fight to the death for all i…

Yes. Almost.

But the point is explicitly not that the issue is short-termism. I am not going to go over everything again, but the issue is not solved (as everyone today thinks) by bailing people in.

Look at Tesla's exec package: Elon's package is what...$100bn? He will lose money if the stock goes to zero, but that is still a very one-sided risk for him. So doing long-term packages makes no difference because the reward is all one-sided, no risk, and the fundamentals usually aren't changed. It actually makes it worse because you dangle $100m in front of someone on a base package of $500k salary...they will believe anything to get that money. So timescale isn't relevant (again, the market isn't short-term...every investor wants a "one decision stock"...you buy, hold for the rest of your life).

As an example, this is why you see so much M&A...it makes no sense but you buy revenues from another company, you get growth. Execs don't care about the price, you just need growth, you just need to hit your targets. Whether they are short or long, the issue is with the incentives and target (although are wrong for a few different reasons I have already mentioned, and I haven't yet seen a company that has managed to structure pay perfectly...most just wildly overpay for very mediocre execs who add nothing).