This is why I hate working as a regular salaried employee. After this happened to me a few years after college, I spent over a decade building up a consulting business. I always keep multiple clients at the same time and I'm not devasted if one chooses not to renew my contract.
It's interesting that you think this is lower risk. Maybe that's a US thing? Typically employees are harder to cut than simply choosing not to extend contracts with consultants.
In all the EU countries I know you can't be fired one day to another without a serious reason
I see what you are saying. I am an engineer-turned-EM and you don't know me, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt: > Your job is NOT safe. Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more. I think a better way to put it is: "A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. Yo…
For anyone reading this, please don’t subscribe to this level of cynicism. For SWEs at Google and almost anywhere else, the wind has blown very favorably for you and that’s something to be celebrated. The direction of the wind has shifted, but we can never expect it to stay blowing in one direction forever, even if others get lucky and catch one like that. You will no doubt set your sail and take it to new and wonder…
And funnily enough, the wind for the C suite just keeps blowing in that same direction.
It's just Goodhart's law. Our economy is profit centric. The way public companies are structured, the only metric anyone cares about is profit. Everything else just sloughs off over time.
Seems like a great argument for companies to remain private, no? Absolute control is the only way.
Or we could just build some sort of regulations into the market that protect workers and help encourage labor organization.
When it comes to large shareholders that wouldn't actually do anything. Nobody sells in these new blue chips; they just borrow against their positions. I've thought about this for a long time. If we wanted to actually tax this wealth, we should just make people pay capital gains on marked-to-market positions every 10 years. Now before everyone starts shouting "yea, but the valuations aren't value," you could easily t…
Why not treat collateralization the same as a sale? Bezos puts 1B worth of AMZN as collateral? Sure, but now treat that as a capital gains event and trigger appropriate taxes. When the loan is repaid and AMZN is uncollaterized, treat it as a new buy event with a new cost basis.
I have no expertise in the matter, but largely agree "realization" should be when "value is assessed and used for gain" and not a strict sale. That being said, I don't want the Pandora's box of redefining "realization" opened.
Google is almost a 2T company. The amount of wealth that big google shareholders hold in the 1T+ tech companies is mind boggling. Perhaps US should consider raising capital gains tax.
When it comes to large shareholders that wouldn't actually do anything. Nobody sells in these new blue chips; they just borrow against their positions. I've thought about this for a long time. If we wanted to actually tax this wealth, we should just make people pay capital gains on marked-to-market positions every 10 years. Now before everyone starts shouting "yea, but the valuations aren't value," you could easily t…
Derivatives would make what youre talking about not work. Or lead to very convoluted rules which is bad.
A lot of good comments here. I think there is a quote I learn from Thich Nhat Hanh that I wanted to share: "you could say you sacrifice a lot to be number one in your job, but it makes no sense to say you sacrifice a lot to be happy" There you go.
Being happy often requires tons of sacrifice though.
Atheletes winning championships are happy, they sacrificed to get there.
Watching my kids have fun at disney land makes me happy, I sacrifice my time and own interest to make it happen
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but these huge salaries of the past 5 years have really hurt technology. Instead of the best, hungriest minds working on the best problems in the most agile way, they're languishing in one of these gigantic megacorps working at a molassess pace on some improved way to sell you ads.
Are you suggesting that supply and demand market forces are somehow inadequate in allocating resources towards engineer salaries on HN? I am shocked.
I'm saying that the huge salaries in cushy jobs has disincentivized creativity and pioneering.
Patagonia is an example of a company that is trying to be "decent" even after its founder is no longer involved. So far, it seems to be working. In tech, I am not aware of any good examples. I feel like Apple is one of the less bad compared to others. They are at least making efforts to be good about privacy, even if their motivation may be less than pure.
Apple might be less bad than, say Oracle, but it's still an evil mega corp. Their privacy angle is little more than mere marketing. Authoritarianism is in their DNA. By no stretch of the imagination is it an ethical company, and people really need to stop treating it as such.
I would agree with you on most points; however, having worked within the fruit company directly on its chain of trust, I will tell you that the privacy angle runs extremely deep and is genuine. Regardless, that angle is obviously different and independent about being authoritarian within its privately-owned monopolistic marketplace.
> laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone. That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.
Google sells approximately zero Pixel phones. Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.
For people that care about vendor lock-in (which granted doesn't seem to be many), Pixels are great. They are supported on just about every network and you can root it if you desire.