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Gen Z does not dream of labor

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Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#271

Post by Forgeties79 »

immigrantheart wrote: post #258
Forgeties79 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok good to know that sort of makes this easier to respond to. So they’re not “rebelling against work” and the article as a whole is just so reductionist. What most are doing is questioning 1) what we find acceptable in a work environment and 2) what we find acceptable to pay people for a day of their labor. If you’re Gen Z, unlike middle to older millennials, chances are you weren’t raised with the “bootstraps” narra…

Okay, I think I sorta understand it, but I still wonder about how they will going to pay their bills. i.e, if they have their criteria on what is acceptable pay, won't the natural course of things is to quit on the unacceptable job and just find a better paying jobs, which means business as usual and wonder why there needs to be an article written on the first place. I was under the impression that the article seem t…

> I always wondered that my fellow friends graduated from expensive Ivy Leagues, still have student debt and still not making more than me.

Simply put? They were given a false bill of goods. We were all told that if we went to college, it would all sort itself out. Then the recession happened and all hell broke loose lol.

(Half) jokes aside, the answer is a lot more complicated and I want to address more of your response, but I am not at my computer and trying to keep track of it while writing on mobile is going to make me want to give up, so I’m going to take a look at this when I’m at my computer tonight or tomorrow for sure and get back to you. Promise!

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#272

Post by _-david-_ »

ushakov wrote: post #130
rtlfe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have to choose your specialization wisely The problem is that most people don't get to choose. There are few of these high paying jobs, so by definition most people are excluded. Either because they're not "smart" enough to get into elite training programs (e.g. medical school) or because they don't have enough money to spend years in training with zero or negative income.

that's in the US though in Germany even if you're poor you can go to the University and succeed my friends all studied and they were from normal working-class families everyone gets a chance and all you need is put some effort

You can go to college for free or extremely cheap in the US if you are poor as well. A lot of poor people don't know this which is a problem, but the option is still there.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#273

Post by rtlfe »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #250
rtlfe wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this person never has a kid. Enjoy your rent doubling to get enough space and either losing your partner's income or spending $3k a month on day care. Plus whatever crappy insurance you're getting for $400 a month is going to leave with $10k+ in bills for just birthing the kid.

From Kaiser's 2020 survey on healthcare plans, the average worker contribution for HMO/PPO plans for a family was $5000-6000/yr [1]. These are not high deductible plans (those are specifically broken out) so they're going to be pretty good insurance, especially PPO. So $400/mo is only underestimating the true cost by about $100/mo. You can't use ACA marketplace prices to judge what your average worker is paying. > sp…

> cost of child care in California, which has _the_ highest cost of labor in the US, is $956/mo

The link you provided says $1,412. And this shows roughly $2500 in LA County and $3300 in SF County.

https://insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/INSIGHT_C...

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#274

Post by ellen364 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #108
rtlfe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I quite like being a programmer. This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.

That’s the thing. I know this sounds glib, but the barrier to entry is so low ($20 5th hand laptop will do just fine to do first-steps development), I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders. So many people say “oh I could never do what you do”, and I’m like “I’m a shaved ape who wanted to play computer games and accidentally ended up learning stuff, you absolutely can”. Then they just go on saying…

Sometimes I wonder if it is, partly, due to how software development is framed. E.g. on HN I’ve seen people describe software development as basically maths. But Grace Hopper described programming as like planning a dinner party, requiring “patience and an ability to handle detail”.[0] A C++ dev I know, who has a languages degree, said learning to code was similar to learning a very unfamiliar grammar.

If more software developers used examples like those, maybe more people would consider software as a career? If nothing else, seems like I should give it a go when I have those conversations with people.

[0] Adafruit have an image of a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan, which quotes Hopper. https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/03/12/a-1967-cosmopolitan-art...

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#275

Post by true_religion »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #250
rtlfe wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this person never has a kid. Enjoy your rent doubling to get enough space and either losing your partner's income or spending $3k a month on day care. Plus whatever crappy insurance you're getting for $400 a month is going to leave with $10k+ in bills for just birthing the kid.

From Kaiser's 2020 survey on healthcare plans, the average worker contribution for HMO/PPO plans for a family was $5000-6000/yr [1]. These are not high deductible plans (those are specifically broken out) so they're going to be pretty good insurance, especially PPO. So $400/mo is only underestimating the true cost by about $100/mo. You can't use ACA marketplace prices to judge what your average worker is paying. > sp…

They aren’t really talking about day care, but a nanny who only takes care of your own children. It’s what’s comparable to having a stay at home parent.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#276

Post by pinot »

StevePerkins wrote: post #256
erosenbe0 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plumbers and pipefitters have a union that has plenty of power in current market. No health insurance and they won't work. Plumbing pays more than 80k in major cities. Plumbing contractors have to carry workers comp insurance.

Having grown up in a rural area, I assure you that any unions or health coverage is a strictly urban phenomenon. And $80k isn't all that great of a top-end, for people living in major cities with their cost of living.

jman plumber in my town earns $47/hr+$32/hr in benefits. Not bad total comp especially if you add in OT.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#277

Post by ghusto »

pedrosorio wrote: post #254
ghusto wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes. That's why the quoted factoid talks about "at this stage in their life". If you look back at boomers and genx, they had 4 and 2 times as much wealth as millennials do when they were the same age. I missed and am continuing to completely miss this. Do you mean in the article? If true, would that align with the difference in population size (distribution of a finite amount of wealth to more people)? It would be…

You have failed to show any reasoning to explain how some millennials getting fired (or not getting fired, apparently, in this last comment) for being "lazy" and "not wanting to work" led that generation to having a much lower share of total wealth compared to previous generations at the same age. As the comment above you stated, the lower decile/quintile performers getting fired (or lower salaries) because of their…

Wut? I asked two questions, one of which was me being genuinely interested to see where I missed the assertion that millennials have "4 and 2 times as much wealth as millennials do when they were the same age". I wondered if it was in the article, because I didn't see it.

If you want to talk about reasoning though, I actually did give a reason this could be the case (if indeed it really is), by suggesting it could be related to the difference in population size between when the baby boomers were around, and now.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#278

Post by cuteboy19 »

lilsoso wrote: post #60
falcolas wrote: post #18

Um, stupid question… Who TF “dreams” of being some billionare’s “labor”? Folks “labor” out of a lack of choice; so they might survive in this world. They labor for the chance to dream.

People routinely comment on this site about how they enjoy engineering and challenging problems, and how they dislike jobs with meetings, or not enough work, or fluff. Those people, perhaps without realizing it, often enjoy 'being some billionare’s labor'.

Much of the discourse around antiwork is bait and switch. What applies to manual labor intensive jobs does not apply to engineering jobs.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#279

Post by sangnoir »

zo1 wrote: post #219
eulers_secret wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still live there, a suburb of Portland OR. I locked in a cheap apartment years ago that's now rent controlled, which makes my situation possible. I currently pay about half what new renters pay. Without it, I'd be stuck in wage-slavery anyways and couldn't take the time to self-improve like this. Moving is an option (my partner has restrictions: No states with anti-abortion laws, which removes many inexpensive plac…

That is an oddly-specific restriction your partner is demanding.

It may just be a shibboleth/canary for a set of state politics the partner disagrees with.

Re: Gen Z does not dream of labor

#280

Post by ixtli »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #89
ixtli wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a millennial and I feel the same way, but I think a lot of this is due to a privileged position we have in the labor force. It’s the whitest of white color jobs. We’re still exploited as any trade, but it’s easier to be an architect or a lawyer than it is to be a construction worker. Especially over time and with contradictions sharpening as they are.

Software development is very much an exception. It’s one of the precious few fields with compensation that’s somewhat tracked with inflation and has a somewhat reasonable barrier to entry. As a millennial in my 30s I was fortunate to be able to break in and start earning a nice paycheck without a college degree, but even that possibility is deteriorating now due to a sudden flood of entry level applicants. Companies…

It’s interesting to read people like Marx when he was writing about the class society he lived in because you can see how much the bottom has fallen out of the middle. He describes the specialist artisans who are capable, sometimes, of upward mobility into “petite bourgeois”. Not much directly translates in the “middle” class any more but this resonated for me. We are kept happy but slowly we are becoming less and less capable of owning.
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