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Is my advice too mercenary?

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Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#171

Post by mikepurvis »

croutonwagon wrote: post #147
tomerv wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine what would cause a person to act like that, and on his last day/week of work! Some kind of psycopathy?

Yeah I am manager. I am pretty honest with my employees. One of my normal sayings is "you have to look out for #1 " (#1 = yourself its not a Star Trek reference) That said i never say things like that on comms. And usually preclude them with things like "this conversation never happened" etc. But i feel like part of my job is to give them career and life advancement advice and if that means leaving my team...so be it…

> encouraging people to use their PTO

Hopefully there aren't too many orgs left out there where a manager would be having to do this off-the-record; certainly it feels like the orthodoxy for some time has been that workers do their best work when they're well-rested and have had breaks, and at a systems level, people being away is important for identifying bus number issues.

All that aside, my company's accountants get antsy about what overhanging PTO does to the balance sheet, so there's a very explicit top-down mandate around fiscal year end time to get people using up their vacations.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#172

Post by bin_bash »

sgustard wrote: post #110
bin_bash wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's early in your career ( After that I think you have a point. I work at a FAANG as a SWE (15 YOE) and want to move into management, but it requires a SWE promotion first to staff engineer I don't think I'm capable of getting at this company. (I've been a staff engineer at a previous firm though). I could switch to a lower tier company and definitely find a way to move into management and develop my career on th…

For much of the past century, the best career advice in the world was: go to IBM, General Motors, General Electric. Climb the ladder for a few decades, get a pension, retire at the top 1% of the income pyramid. That worked great until it didn't, and millions of people got left with no savings or useful job skills. Today's world offers so many more paths for talented builders, beyond joining the currently hot company…

I’ve published 2 books, created a significant open source project, and was staff engineer at a Fortune 50 company. Was reasonably well known as a blogger and speaker in the JS community too. (I’ve given up on OSS since FAANG)

But you know how I’ll be introduced? They’ll say I was “ex-FAANG”. None of that other stuff matters in comparison.

I’m not at all saying it’s the only path, I’m saying it’s the best and certainly most reliable one.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#173

Post by nobody9999 »

replygirl wrote: post #121
nobody9999 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I haven't had insurance for five years because the (major, national) providers who cover what I need aren't available on my state's marketplace (NY). As someone who purchases insurance from the NY marketplace, that hasn't been my experience. Initially, I had a plan from one of those (Anthem/BCBS), which provided pretty good coverage because they increased my premiums by more than 50%. Now I have a local (New York St…

> As someone who purchases insurance from the NY marketplace, that just isn't true. So have I, and I stopped purchasing insurance because I cannot find the coverage I want. I need a specific variant of a certain operation which is only performed by a few surgeons in the country, and the one surgeon in New York who offers it only takes Aetna for that operation. Aetna reentered marketplaces starting 2022, but I'm movin…

I'd also add that I had a similar experience with physical therapy (PT) after surgery. When I changed insurers from BCBS to Fidelis (just a month or so after surgery), I found that the PT group I was using didn't accept my new insurance.

It's sad that we have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to get the medical care we need. Which is often the case even when it isn't an edge case like yours (or mine with my PT -- my situation was, of course, much less consequential since there are many PT providers out there).

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#174

Post by downrightmike »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #85
dangerlibrary wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medicare (single payer healthcare in the US for everyone over age 65) has a lower fraud rate than private insurance, serves millions of seniors and has for decades, and as an American there is a big discontinuity in actuarial data where your life expectancy literally goes up at 65 because you get access to it. Maybe don't generalize from a few personal anecdotes to the functioning of the entire 4 million employee fed…

Why would I care about the fraud rate of anything? I'm not a fraudster.

Why would I care if you were on fire, if I'm not on fire?

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#175

Post by creaturemachine »

melony wrote: post #130
hobs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely true and it happened all over, my dad worked for a place for 40 years and the last 10 the MBAs moved in, they were profitable, had profit sharing, and a great company. Today its a footnote in a merger, place is closing down.

What happened to "company towns bad"?

This is different from a company town which is created and governed by the employer, rather than, let's say, adopted by a predominant employer.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#176

Post by lotsofpulp »

ghaff wrote: post #134
lotsofpulp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACA did not ossify it. If anything, ACA allowed non employers to purchase insurance. Previously, the options were to work for a deep pocketed employer or just not have insurance.

Plans that would cover pre-existing conditions was one very important change for a lot of people. What ACA didn't really solve was the "affordable" part for people who aren't fairly high income. Between the marketplaces in most states and COBRA for those in between jobs or near 65, insurance is available but it's expensive with no one else chipping in a big chunk of the premium.

Nothing will solve the affordable part other than massive wealth transfers (which ACA did, but obviously not massive enough), and increased supply of healthcare (more docs, hospitals, medication manufacturers - or medicines in public domain), and tort reform.

But ACA did what it could with the political compromises that had to be made at the time. It provided out of pocket maximums, maximum age rating factor (age 64 only pays 3x age 21), and required coverage for all applicants (removing risk of disqualification from pre existing condition).

It is unfortunate the mandate was repealed and state level participation in functioning marketplaces was politically hampered.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#177

Post by yodsanklai »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #163

Small aside, reading all these conversations: I just think a lot of static gets injected into these discussions about wage/employers/comp on HN because a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those. But there is also a huge contingent of people who do regular waged labor here, whether FAANG or freelance. Beyond any political differences, I t…

> a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those.

I wonder to what extent this is true. I've been on HN several years without even knowing that it has anything to do with start up. A lot of contributors don't even work in tech.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#178

Post by downrightmike »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #53
sidewndr46 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American who has worked closely with the Federal government, I'm significantly more afraid of the idea that the government would be responsible for my medical care.

Medicare (single payer healthcare in the US for everyone over age 65) has a lower fraud rate than private insurance, serves millions of seniors and has for decades, and as an American there is a big discontinuity in actuarial data where your life expectancy literally goes up at 65 because you get access to it. Maybe don't generalize from a few personal anecdotes to the functioning of the entire 4 million employee fed…

And the management cost is only 1%, vs 17% for healthcare comapnies. A lot of waste that could be helping people.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#179

Post by dangerlibrary »

kube-system wrote: post #41
agentdrtran wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are free to buy your own (expensive, much worse) health insurance rather than through an employer, sure.

Having had both, this is not my experience. My experience is that employer plans have fewer choices and similar or higher rates. They're cheap because my employer is paying most of the bill.

Just a note for those who may not know, either because they've grown up under a different regulatory regime or they never shopped for private insurance before the ACA:

Pre-ACA, I was once a much healthier early-twenty something applying for private coverage. I have a genetic condition that has never manifested in a health consequence that has required treatment, and technically it was illegal even at the time to reject someone based on their genetic information. Despite that, I was denied coverage by every private insurer in the market because I had a preexisting condition. The only reason the private market functions at all for anyone with so much as a history of a sprained ankle is because of the ACA.

Insurance companies would routinely (and retroactively!) deny coverage and payment based on preexisting conditions. They would accept premium payments for years, then when you came down with breast cancer would dig up an old photo of you with a cigarette in your mouth and refuse to pay for your treatment because you claimed to be a non-smoker when you applied for coverage. This was considered normal.

Re: Is my advice too mercenary?

#180

Post by drewcoo »

thegrimmest wrote: post #138
replygirl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because previously all social services, including police and fire safety, were privatized, and were only taken over by the state when it became clear there wasn't enough economic incentive to keep such services running without the operators doing stuff like roughing people up, burning down buildings, etc. But everyone decomposes as they age, and people fear illness and death enough that you can charge them however mu…

> all social services, including police and fire safety, were privatized I think enforcing the law has been a government function from the times the first laws were laid down. Fire services were a private function, and this actually works fine in sparsely populated areas where fires are not likely to spread in temperate climates. The only reason fire services are public is because of the inherent risk to everyone tha…

We're talking US, right?

There were only private police until 1838 in Boston:

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

And only private firefighters until 1853 in Cincinnati:

http://www.fireserviceinfo.com/history.html

Ben Franklin offered America's first fire insurance. Privatized insurance and firefighters in Phili in those days:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/08/am...

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