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The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

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Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#341

Post by gmadsen »

alisonatwork wrote: post #205
usrbinbash wrote: post #53

It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…

I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their g…

its also the case that people want different things. Even if all work could be remote, there will still be people that will pay most of their income to live in NYC or SF, because when you are living in those places you are not just paying for a roof over your head. You are getting opportunities professionally and culturally that do not exist elsewhere

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#342

Post by lopkeny12ko »

cognivore wrote: post #208
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #58

As a tech lead, the big problem I see now is that people are not hungry anymore. The best engineers I've ever worked with were consistently asking for more and leveling up the team at the same time. Now, the post-covid hires, especially the junior engineers, just do the bare minimum to scrape by, and they seem totally unbothered by it. One new hire on my team spends upwards of 2 hours per day "walking her dog." I eve…

I see this too, and not just post-COVID. 10+ years ago we used to have "Let's Learn This Now!" where the developers would agree on particular subject and then learn and discuss it on our own time, and occasionally it would lead to improvements in our development. We went through Ruby (on Rails), Angular (nope, not even) to React (meh), queuing (ZeroMQ mostly), Asp.NET MVC, Redis, Docker, Octo, NoSQL dbs - the list go…

Couldn't have said it better myself!

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#343

Post by eli_gottlieb »

alisonatwork wrote: post #205
usrbinbash wrote: post #53

It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…

I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their g…

You talk about the "relative privilege" of middle class people in developed countries as though the cause for their declining standard of living was other people having more, as if their "slice of pie" was being cut in pieces and given away. That's not how economic growth works. When China and India grow, the total productive power of the world economy grows. So now the world ought to be able to support "luxurious" standards of living for more people, but in fact we see fewer people enjoying such lives. So where's the output of all our work going, eh?

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#344

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jl6 wrote: post #317
usrbinbash wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimme a good argument why good conditions should diminish, or deteriorate, despite the fact that workforce productivity, as well as corporate margins, have been growing steadily ever since.

It was only ever good conditions for some . If wealth redistributes faster than wealth grows, those some will experience loss while society at large experiences net gain.

> If wealth redistributes faster than wealth grows

And can we see this in any dataset, that the post-WW2 boom eventually gave more away in charity than it produced?

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#345

Post by Aurornis »

usrbinbash wrote: post #307
kaashif wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is funny, people somehow think that a momentary episode of utter economic dominance after all other economic powers had been bombed into dust should be the norm. And the 50s and 60s weren't that great for e.g. black people or women in the US either.

Gimme a good argument why good conditions should diminish, or deteriorate, despite the fact that workforce productivity, as well as corporate margins, have been growing steadily ever since.

If you look at average living conditions across the world, they did actually increase dramatically!

This is what people miss about the conversation: That temporary period of brief prosperity was partially due to some of the relative differences across the world. Raising living standards across the world came at a small price of popping that bubble.

Although median disposable income of Americans is still significantly higher than the rest of the world.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#346

Post by Aurornis »

usrbinbash wrote: post #329
kaashif wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether they should or not, but it's clear that there was a very unusual set of conditions and it is unsurprising it didn't last forever, right or wrong.

On the contrary, it is VERY surprising these conditions didn't last, given that productivity only ever increased since then. If favorable, but short lived conditions were behind this sudden change, then it would affect the entire economic system, not just the workforce. How well people are off is a function of how many resources there are to go around. Since the end of WWII, these resources only ever increased. So di…

> How well people are off is a function of how many resources there are to go around. Since the end of WWII, these resources only ever increased.

This is a very US-centric view.

Demand for resources across the world has increased dramatically as everyone’s living standard increased.

The situation isn’t going to make sense if you continue to ignore the rest of the world and try to understand the United States as if we lived in a perfectly isolated bubble.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#347

Post by thethimble »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #333
treis wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not worse than their predecessors. That belief is a combination of looking at the past with rose colored glasses and extrapolating the issues of a handful of cities to the entire country.

By objective standards, it isn't worse. Unfortunately, people don't care about objective standards, once they're not hungry cold and in pain they mostly derive their happiness from how well off they are compared to other people they encounter. By that metric more are worse off now.

This is what we should be discussing - the blatant taking-for-granted of how good things objectively are in favor of a cultural delusion that we are oppressed.

We are living in the best of times as measured by infant mortality, lifespans, literacy, poverty, and technology.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#348

Post by nine_zeros »

djangelic wrote: post #340
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider a fair pay for junior engineers in order for them to contribute at the capacity they're expected to? Our fresh college grads are paid a total compensation higher than $200K. Is that not enough to expect working, at minimum , 8 hours a day?

I think the distinction being drawn here is that there is a disconnect between hiring managers and workers. A hiring manager has an expectation that 200k will incentivize someone to work for 8 hours a day consistently and constantly where work is the point, not the tasks themselves. They expect the worker to figure out what additional tasks are to be done for that price and work at the upper limit of the time expecta…

This is on point for me. I don't come into work to "invent" my own work. Management is expected to know what workers should work on, make sure it has the right ROI for the company, and that the rewards of that work flow to the workers.

At many FAANG-like companies, engineers are supposed to find "scope" themselves to keep their own job? Are you crazy? What the fuck is management doing in these companies?

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#349

Post by Tycho »

muro wrote: post #319
Tycho wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true? Subscriptions £30 pm Starbucks £40 pm Phone contract £20 pm ISP £30 pm That’s £120 pm, or £1440 annually. Doesn’t seem like it would make that much of a dent. Probably the number one thing you’d need to do is cut down on food costs, which is doable, to be fair, as it’s quite easy to spend 10x or 100x more than what you need to stay fed.

Sorry for the pedantry, but 1 coffee at Starbucks per day is closer to 120pm alone.

I was thinking more what would a typical Starbucks regular spend in a month. Like I don’t think they would but a £4 drink every day.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#350

Post by bluGill »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #303
bluGill wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were lucky. Many did not get a pension at all though. And many others had a pension that went bankrupt so they go nothing. The 1980s (starting before then) were reforms on a system that wasn't working well for many.

Time will tell whether the individual solution works better. I suspect 401k saving will not provide many people a stable retirement.

Unfortunately only about a third if Americans have a 401k, if we subtract those young it gets a little better (the young can pay off student loans then redirect that money to retirement, at least in theory), but still almost half of Americans don't have one.

I don't know how to find numbers, but I think that is better than pensions every were. It still isn't very good though.

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