341–350 of 451 posts
I turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k for my education.
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$20,000 a year income puts one in the top decile of income worldwide. At $50,000 you are richer than 98.5% of the global population. That’s less than the median American worker ($54K) or the mean ($74K). A lit more than any investor class are rich by any historical or global standard.
Until you actually start equating cost of living and buying power. You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had. If you're willing to move to a rural Indian slum, you're sure to live the most regal life one can afford there, but you will lose out on a lot of the value that…
The picture does not change substantially if you look at measures of income adjusted for purchasing power parity. The West is far richer than the Rest and the latter much more populous.
> You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had.
I eat better, fresher, cleaner food than they did most of the year, have far more variety in it, have access to vastly more cultural artefacts, and I have access to modern healthcare. I’d be dead but for antibiotics. The same is probably true of one of my children. My housekeeper lost a sister to illness at 21. More than likely she’d have survived if she’d had access to even the level of care standard in Shanghai twenty years ago. Being rich is in fact better than being poor and living in a rich country better than living in a poor one for the large majority of people.
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> Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s I would kill to retire. All I want to do is make art, music, cook, hike, kayak, and travel on the cheap. I have about.... 1/20th of the savings needed.
I retired in my 20s. It's a fun novelty, but it wore off quickly. Your friends and family aren't around in most of your free time, and those things you used to enjoy in your limited free time now can't stretch to fill the new 10+ hours a day you have. Like most things, the grass is greener on the other side.
I think we need to redefine retirement as “financial independence and free to do what you want”. I could honestly fill several hundred years of retirement with things I want to do. The people who get bored really puzzle me.
We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs. Here's the summary: - 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022. - Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company. - 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups. See the full blog post here: https://nubela…
Even in a time of layoffs, hundreds, if not thousands, of people leave Google every month for their own reasons.
> On March 14th Meta, the tech giant Mr Zuckerberg runs, announced it would fire 10,000 staff—on top of the 11,000 it laid off last November.
Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, cust…
A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade. My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 e…
I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you.
I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying.
But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow.
In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works.
Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
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Wow that’s a lot of money. Did you have master’s/post doc degrees?
No way, since any such degree wouldn't cost any money, instead it would pay you. Spending 500k on a degree is absolutely insane and indicates that there's a lot more to the story than what's being told. The only exception I can think of is if this person attended a top 10 university, like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, in which case they likely have nothing to worry about.
Here's a quote from MIT [1]
>Nine months' tuition for 1994-95 is $20,100. In addition, undergraduate room and board ranges from $4,530 to $6,075, with a standard of $5,975; actual costs depend on the student's housing and dining arrangements. Books, materials and personal expenses (including clothes, laundry, recreation and optional medical insurance, but excluding travel) are approximately $2,325.
I turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k for my education.
I don’t mean to be rude, how could you have possibly spent that much on your education?