What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
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Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#2Is it better to have """low pay""" in San Jose or low pay in Tijuana?
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#3Is it better to have """low pay""" in San Jose or low pay in Tijuana?
Depends on how low the pay is in Tijuana; the rent down there is much much cheaper too.
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#4Is it better to have """low pay""" in San Jose or low pay in Tijuana?
Tijuana. Is there any question?
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#5Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#6It's interesting to note that this guy NEVER gets more than 30 hours. This is most likely to make sure the employee can't be considered full-time. I'm sure Google would rather hire 15 guys at 40-60 hours instead of 40 guys at 20 hours, but the sad reality is that the costs of compliance for a full-time employee are just not worth it.
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#7I don't think it's a bad thing that Google treats each employee differently.
There's no reason why contractors should have the same benefits as regular employees. Google is a business, not a charity. When Google gives engineers to-go boxes, they don't do it because they like them better than other employees, they do it because it's a competitive market out there, and they want to keep the best.
Besides, maybe letting contractors take food home is too expensive for the company. Maybe they couldn't afford free food at all if they give to EVERYONE.
If the security guard wants to earn more, he should either start a business on his own or improve his skills to get a better job.
People who make this argument tend to make it sound as if it were a discrimination issue, it's not. The reason engineers get paid better isn't because they're white, taller or prettier, it's because they're more prepared and thus add more value to the company.
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#8This is explored to a degree in a pop psychology book by Daniel Gilbert called "Stumbling on Happiness". There are certainly better sources, such as the papers Gilbert uses as his primary sources, but the book is an accessible way to learn about the high degree to which our happiness depends on subjective interpretation of our self-comparison to others.
There's a theory out there that we evaluate ourselves mostly against people we can reasonably consider our peers (e.g. college classmates or the kid who grew up down the street, not Barack Obama or Steve Jobs) because they are the best proxy for what our lives could have been like had we made different choices with the same starting point (e.g. medical school instead of starting a business). These peers represent our best experimental data given a world of singular outcomes.
The double-edged sword of you achieving success is that those hundred or so people you compare yourself to sit high up on an asymptotic curve of outcomes. That is, if your peer group all has advanced degrees and decades of experience, the outcome-difference between the least and most successful will be extreme. "Low success" peer groups sit at the flatter part of the curve, so peers you compare yourself to will "look more like you", thus avoiding the unhappiness of comparative failure when you judge yourself.
I'm forgetting whether this particular idea comes from Gilbert's book or another source, like perhaps "Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton.
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#9I don't know, maybe some people who lives there might find some sense in the story, but to me it just doesn't make any sense (I'm east European living in London). Seems just like another try to blame someone else for his own choices how to live a life.
In the end, if you want to be equal with other employers, maybe it is time to consider what makes them being more equal and try to reach it yourself instead of just telling the world how unfair the world is.
But that just my personal opinion, maybe now it is considered O.K. to act like that.
Re: What It's Like to Live on Low Pay in a Land of Plenty
#10It's interesting to note that this guy NEVER gets more than 30 hours. This is most likely to make sure the employee can't be considered full-time. I'm sure Google would rather hire 15 guys at 40-60 hours instead of 40 guys at 20 hours, but the sad reality is that the costs of compliance for a full-time employee are just not worth it.
but the sad reality is that the costs of compliance for a full-time employee are just not worth it.
My heart bleeds for these poor, hamstrung corporations.