181–190 of 263 posts
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If I don't have a dedicated desk where I can leave stuff, I won't be coming to the office. Simple as that. Wasting time commuting is bad enough, but if I'm not even worth 2 square metres, why would I want to work for those people?
Because you are worth $250k per year? I won’t claim it makes any sense.
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Or get this, a bike (in case you live under ~10 km away). Just rolls the gym hours into the commute for double efficiency, and you can be always on time since traffic can't really affect you.
And bring a change of clothes and find a shower at the office for when you show up all sweaty.
If you force me to hot desk I will come into work as infrequently as possible and may or may not be "present" for work whether I'm at home or in the shared-space environment at the office.
But the "fully present" metric doesn't show up on the bean counters' spreadsheets as a quantifiable metric, so here we are.
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Median incomes have outpaced inflation over the last several years. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/05/wages-outpacing-inflation
And at the same time people struggle to pay rent. Official inflation numbers doesn't correlate how 'median' earner spends its salary.
While they have gone up (almost certainly faster than inflation), they are not part of the inflation numbers that we hear in the news.
For the longest time, we tech workers have convinced ourselves we're special. We believe we can act on our own behalf against our employer on equal footing. We start to believe in the myth of meritocracy. Remember the "Day in the Life" vidoes? When was the last time you saw someone showing their amazing workspace, the free food, the amentities and all that? A few years ago they were everywhere. Now? Nowhere. We are n…
> For the longest time, we tech workers have convinced ourselves we're special Because we are. In the sense that we own the means of production: our education and experience are the tools we take with us wherever we go. We own the process of (for example) software development like the craftspeople of old used to own production processes of material things. We can dictate terms, because when we walk away, we take our…
One side, the software engineers, can withhold their labor or sell it to somebody else. Nobody is irreplaceable. Large companies in particular have spare capacity to replace you if what you do is actually important enough. A lot of the time, withholding your labor is simply an opportunity cost to the employer.
The employer on the other hand has the threat of violence to coerce you. Without a job, we lose shelter, food, transportation, health insurance, schools for our children and so on.
You, as an employee, are an inconvenience to the employer. They want to replace you with an automated system that doesn't leave, doesn't require pay raises, is predictable and so on. And sure, for now, an AI system can't replace a software engineer. I suspect it won't be able to for a very long time. But the jobs around you will disappear. The flood waters are rising.
Your relationship with your employer is adversarial. If they could get rid of you they would. Currently they can't. That's all that's going on.
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Median incomes have outpaced inflation over the last several years. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/05/wages-outpacing-inflation
I don't love the game of "someone posted a random article with some numbers that they found from a 5 minute Google search, but now I have to do the much harder & longer work of verifying if it's legitimate or misleading"
What would prefer me to do? Post a dozen links that all the same thing, arguably less obviously?
I have not seen a single one yet that shows a decline in real wages.
My problem is that I quite like working with other people. It’s really hard to build relationships with other human beings when not in the same physical location- sharing jokes, lunches, walks and just shouting across the room about the weird code change . It’s vital. Most large companies think that as they are hiring “the best from around the world” that leaving them around the world is fine. Look leaving people on…
>My problem is that I quite like working with other people. Which is fine as long as you understand that the rest of us don't. Most of the push for back to the office is being pushed by extroverted people that miss being about to chat with people and not because of any results driven data.
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And at the same time people struggle to pay rent. Official inflation numbers doesn't correlate how 'median' earner spends its salary.
Does the median earner when considering the entire country struggle to pay rent? Or is it just the median earner in certain extremely expensive metro areas that happen to get a lot of focus in the media because that's where the journalists live? The numbers OP cites can be 100% accurate and reflective of reality while it is still also true that people in the Bay Area struggle to pay for housing.
However, the person to whom I was replying used cheap and not-so-cheerful language to suggest that it was possible to talk about this en masse. Assuming that to be reasonable, I replied with an en masse response.
Certainly if you break it down at the county level, I expect you'd find multiple different patterns, and would then be faced with which ones to call "typical" or "indicative".
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No, wages have been falling since 2021 when accounting for inflation. https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-has-outpaced-wage-gro... Maybe this isn't that Axios journalist's field, but that huge spike of 9.1% annual inflation in 2022 won't be made up for by a 1% difference in 2024. Showing only the current rate and not the cumulative effects seems disingenuous.
> Maybe that Axios journalist isn't the smartest You're both right. Real wages are down from the pandemic, but that's because they spiked massively due to the stimulus spending [1]. Real wages today are where they were in Q1 2020, which was the highest they had been since at least 1982. Both the Axios and Journal charts are confusing because they're taking the first derivative of a complex curve. [1] https://fred.stl…
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If it is just corporate profits the state and county sure piled on by increasing my property taxes 40% over the past 3 years. That's an extra $300 a month for me which is more than my car payment. edit: changed country to county
Did the value of your property also increase over that time period?