Earlier quoted context omitted.
There by the grace of my boss go I.
It's "BUT for the grace of", meaning "if not for".
Ah, thanks, I borked the punchline. :)
Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
371–380 of 414 posts
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was with you. I was genuinely nodding along ( including the other comment ) until this portion. That is a hard no. Notice how there is seemingly simultaneously not enough money in the budget for tech workers ( I do not want to limit this conversation to IT support, which is what many equate IT with -- did the use of that acronym change ? ) while there is indeed money for MS executives to enjoy the show[1], money fo…
> until this portion. That is a hard no. Ok, I accept your argument as valid. There are sufficient funds that could be used for salaries. Let's imagine for a second you are hiring me. You have $40 in bank and I cost you $1 a year. In past 5 years, I never made you a single $. I just cost you $1 a year, with slight increases. You paid me $5 so far. Would you keep paying me $1 a year or would you rather invest (the $5…
In the current state of AI? I guess it would depend heavily on the job at hand. My concerns with current iterations are privacy ( how do I know sensitive data ingested to feed the model won't be re-used ala co-pilot or gpt for other entities and some information should stay where it is ) and errors which necessitate human babysitting anyway.
There is a clear benefit to automation ( in fact, its usually my spiel ), but it is going to happen anyway so I am not sure what the argument is in this instance.
Would you be willing to elaborate?
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a good point on my individual control of a public company is quite small. Luckily, basically every single other stockholder has the same reason for owning the stock as me- making money. There is basically no risk that a different group of stockholders with more voting power want to run it as a public works jobs program
Yet the fact that shareholders want to get richer doesn’t mean that laying off people when a company is drowning in money is ethically right.
If you want to look at it simply in terms of ethics, I'm not sure layoffs are always unethical, even if the company is profitable.
I do think it is unethical to jerk people around (e.g. new hires), but I think generous severance goes a long way towards addressing this.
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easier to not care about anything if you decide your only principle is "the free association of people". It's one of the easiest ways to do whatever you want in your life and not give a damn about the impact it has on others without having to feel any guilt or cognitive dissonance.
Or maybe you don't know how I feel and I can come to different conclusions that aren't a result of me "not giving a damn" about people. Not everyone who disagrees with you is evil.
Why is it so easy for you to disregard any kind of power/leverage relationship about labour and employment?
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#375Amazing. There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, that I was let go from Adobe. My colleagues assumed that because of my position/tenure/knowledge that I was layoff-proof. I told them that I was just a number in a large organization, and that orgs of a certain scale don’t do layoffs in a way that looks at each individual. Sure enough I was let go and after 16 years at the same company, that was acquired by Adobe where…
But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?
The time between contracts is amazing. I spend loads of time with my kids and go on adventures.
I need to do about 4 months of work to cover my family's living expenses, then another 2 to make sure I've saved adequately for retirement, then ideally I take 6 months off.
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a poor faith argument that completely ignores any reality. These companies have had a massive last decade or so, and if what you're saying is really the case, then we would see booming levels of wealth in middle america among the elderly. Instead, we see most wealth going to the richest of Americans, with the lions share of wealth created during the last 2 years of resurgent economic boom going to the to…
Your analysis doesn't match the economic measures I've been reading, which indicate that lower income workers in the US have seen real wage gains and that homeowners have seen net worth increases, and are feeling wealthier. Unemployment is very low, despite the recent layoffs, and many categories of employment are still seeing upwards wage pressure. Social Security is pinned to inflation, so I don't understand why th…
I have no clue where you're finding that lower income workers are experiencing any real wage gains, let alone at a significant rate. Home ownership as a percentage of population has never recovered anywhere near pre-2008 levels, so on behalf of myself and most people in my generation and cohort, I couldn't care less if homeowners have more money, that fact is having less of a bearing on our real world with each day. And yes, social security is pinned to inflation so their situation hasn't changed much in 5 years, you're right, most elderly people in america are dying poor and increasingly alone in nursing homes seeking to extract profit from them. None of these points have anything to do with my original point, which is that since the 2008 recession, the tech industry has seen a massive influx of money, and to try and argue that the money put into that industry somehow makes it back to middle america because of some made up idea of who shareholders are is a bad faith argument, and ignores any reality of the situation. I have no idea what it is with people like you who just want to die on the hill of nothing being wrong and that we just have to keep doing what we're doing. A better future is possible, and only if we all start believing it is.
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your analysis doesn't match the economic measures I've been reading, which indicate that lower income workers in the US have seen real wage gains and that homeowners have seen net worth increases, and are feeling wealthier. Unemployment is very low, despite the recent layoffs, and many categories of employment are still seeing upwards wage pressure. Social Security is pinned to inflation, so I don't understand why th…
I have no clue where you're finding that lower income workers are experiencing any real wage gains, let alone at a significant rate. Home ownership as a percentage of population has never recovered anywhere near pre-2008 levels, so on behalf of myself and most people in my generation and cohort, I couldn't care less if homeowners have more money, that fact is having less of a bearing on our real world with each day.…
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/opinion/inflation-poor-in...
"The labor economist Arindrajit Dube has estimated hourly wage changes — by decile rather than quartile — over a longer period, since the beginning of the pandemic recession. He finds that real wages for the bottom 40 percent of workers have actually increased".
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Entrenched in-groups and institutions control access to the highest paid jobs. You need to become a part of those to be allowed to participate. That's the same thing as being difficult to replace. You gain "access" by being perceived as difficult to replace. The more difficult you are to replace, the higher your access.
Sure, it’s not easy to replace anyone. It’s often not even easy to replace cleaning personnel. But nobody is irreplaceable.
Good thing I didn't say that then
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?
The time between contracts is amazing. I spend loads of time with my kids and go on adventures. I need to do about 4 months of work to cover my family's living expenses, then another 2 to make sure I've saved adequately for retirement, then ideally I take 6 months off.
Seriously? Do you live off grid or something?
Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you
#380I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…
> So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Because their decisions make or break the company, and your's do not. For a well known example, Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. With the same group of workers, he took it to the biggest company in the world. Just by making different leadership decisions. That's why he made the big b…
Mr. Bright, are you hawking coffee shops again ;-) [1] A bit reductive, innit? :-)