Exactly, it’s an alien attitude to me too. I’ve worked really hard and help make some people wealthy, but looking back over that time I certainly haven’t suffered at all. I traded labor for a regular paycheck. They took a financial risk and spent quite a few years of no income from it for a bigger payoff later.
I think there's a miscommunication happening. I'm happy to make people wealthy from my productivity and labor if I'm also gaining wealth. Their gains can even far outweigh mine. But if they are making excessive wealth off of my labor while I am struggling to make ends meet, I -- just like any other mammal (not even just humans) -- would be resentful. Very few people are "just happy to have a job" but we might also recognize that these attitudes are far more common in highly competitive areas and that there is a large tendency for these regions to not be the most prosperous. If everyone is struggling, it is easier to struggle.
> But if they are making excessive wealth off of my labor while I am struggling to make ends meet, I -- just like any other mammal (not even just humans) -- would be resentful.
I’d say that if you are struggling financially, don’t feel valued, and are resentful in your job then you should change to a more compatible arrangement for you. In my situation, I did not have those issues within my career. If I found a job incompatible with me, I changed jobs to one that was. Where I think the recent attitude shifts have been and what I find really strange is this entitlement attitude that the employee feels that the employer should be forced to be compatible with the employee.
This all ties together, I promise. It is long, but feels necessary in order to communicate. Bear with me. I apologize in advance.
In my other comment[0] I note how there's an S-like curve. The reason this is important because there's some dependencies in the "get a new job" argument that may not be experienced depending where you are on that curve. There is a certain threshold on the low end where this is quite difficult. Getting a new job has a time, risk, and energy component to it. Worse, there's often a compounding factor: employment history. That creates momentum and it is a powerful force. There's also environment (good luck getting a good job in a small town) but we'll leave that out (also note some areas have very low density: see American and Canada). You can probably see how the model complexifies quickly even just accounting for a few things. This is important to think about because the truth of the matter is that we're both products of ourselves as well as our environments. If you counterfactually took extremely successful people and placed them in different environments the likelihood that they achieve success (not even of the same level) changes dramatically.
But again, my comment tries to turn a focus to the floor rather than ceiling. You say force, as if this imposition is always bad, but there's many things we're forced to do. There's also positive (imposition required to grant you these rights: e.g. access to education, access to food, access to a job) and negative rights (imposition is required to take away the right: e.g. life, liberty, property, free speech). I bring this up because your language suggests a potential inconsistency that is not very apparent. All societies are composed of positive and negative rights, with America particularly focused on negative rights. But we need to recognize that the right to a job is a positive one in the first place. You don't naturally have a job and naturally you don't have the right to be paid for by someone that asks you to work, even contractually. Positive rights are required for essentially all things that are punishable. Ponzi schemes are illegal because you have a positive right to not be swindled. Theft (swindling) is where things get complicated (hang on, I promise we're going somewhere). From the perspective of a thief, they have a natural negative right of free will that must be imposed upon to criminalize their actions. But from the perspective of the victim they have a negative right to their own property who the thief imposed upon them to take away the god given right of property. The negative right of free agency vs the negative right of possession of property! Both are god given! A doozy, I know. We can even see our solution is a positive right, where the victim has a right to protection (police)!
So coming back to that forcing of compensation, and why I focus on the floor. We have the negative rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But from above, we can see that these can be viewed as both negative rights (typically) AND positive rights! This is because for an individual to maintain their negative right to these things the government (society) must provide a positive right of protection wherein a malicious actor's right to free agency must be imposed upon! And that's where we're at with this issue of compensation. Society has imposed upon us certain conditions wherein money is essentially necessary for the majority of us to live in the majority of social situations (rabbit hole) and so to balance the important god given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness the federal government imposes a minimum wage for fair compensation such that labor is appropriately compensated, people are not swindled, and liberty is maintained (not a binary option of freedom vs slavery, there is a spectrum).
You may say that the employer has the right to free agency, and I can respect that god given natural right, but I also believe that the employee has the right to liberty, a different god given natural right. But there's also a spectrum here. I believe the employee has a positive right to fair wages (imposition to obtain) necessary to achieve their god given rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At the same time, I do not think they have a positive right to excessive wealth, and that such a right would be too much of an imposition on the employer's god given right to free agency, which was even necessary to protect the the employee's right to liberty and PoH. This is is what my initial response to you and the other comment[0] are about. The miscommunication is happening because people are viewing different perspectives of these rights, which we can see as from the employee or employer. You're viewing the employer's natural right to free agency, requesting that it not be imposed upon, and seeing the employee's positive right to compensation. Totally understandable! We want to protect natural rights and free agency is an important one! But you need to _also_ view the perspective of a employee's natural rights to liberty (spectrum!) and PoH! Society has imposed upon us things that remove those rights, and you can argue that positive rights through the government returns these to us (but at a cost).
This is why we keep fighting about these things, because we've limited our perspectives and the truth of the matter is that this is a complicated fucking mess (understatement). We have to look at a lot of different perspectives (these are arguably the most important two), but we humans aren't great at that and our conversations encourage us to view only from one side. The point of social structures like governments are to balance these impositions in an agreeable way. From this framing we fail when we binarize those impositions, as reality is that the extremes don't exist in practice.
This is also why I place focus on the floor, as it is an important point for such a discussion of balance. It asks "what the _minimum_ positive rights that must be granted to an individual to restore an acceptable amount of the negative rights that have be removed from them." That's a complex question, and not universal either. It doesn't ask to maximize negative rights either (but we can frame it that way if we add constraints). Many people try to address the underlying issue here through a different perspective, such as taxation, which I think we'll agree is an imposition to one's right to property. But this is not the dual of the problem I presented, and don't make that mistake. The dual is "what are the minimum impositions on free agency that must be imposed to grant an individual an acceptable amount of negative rights that have been taken from them?" Note that there are two more dual problems as the discussion above should illustrate that even from the perspective of one side we can frame a negative right as a positive right, so these typically have 4 equivalent statements when discussing 2 agent systems.
I apologize for the wall of text. But unfortunately it felt necessary so that we can reframe and discuss on the same page. I'm pretty open to disagreement, so feel free. But I'm also not sure I made a clear mark in the sand as I haven't said where that balance should be (but note that your framing has), and honestly I don't know. But I do think we should figure that out as a collective, but we need to first accurately describe the problem.
I think I get what you are saying and appreciate the detail and time you took. Hope you will similarly excuse my lack of brevity.
Here on HN there is a huge level of entitlement with some and some of these folks with that attitude are certainly not at the earning floor. There is the large degree of difference between an Amazon SWE making $200k in a WFH arrangement complaining about exploitation because of aggressive release deadlines as compared to the Amazon driver pissing in a gatoraid bottle because he can’t afford the productivity stat hit to stop at a restroom while making $35k a year. One might have a point and one might want to probably look at things a bit more pragmatically. Perhaps both need to quit and move on, but one of those folks certainly has more justification to bitch about their lot in the life of Amazon. Of course this is just my opinion. So in terms of my framing…I was speaking to the HN audience, not the floor earners.
However, consider this about the floor. The government’s use of minimum wage laws should protect those workers. Employers are forced to comply with that minimum or face legal issues. You can certainly argue that minimum wage is not enough but isn’t that is a government problem and not an employer problem?Government sets the policy. If the floor is not protected the government has failed in its responsibility. An employer complying with minimum wage and successfully staffing that position at that wage is not really exploiting a person per se, if anything they are exploiting a law. The onus is on government, not the employer to make sure the employee is not exploited.
Now if the employer is unable to staff the position at that minimum wage rate, the onus is on the employer to set a rate that staffs the position. Still no real exploitation by the employer here since they are exceeding the legal requirements. The floor is protected but the job market then sets the rate higher for the position. If anything the market of workers now exploit the employer’s need for an employees.
However, if there was no minimum wage law and the employer takes advantage of a captive market (that small town) and sets the salary rate low—that would be exploitation of the person. Where that tends to exist (in US) is in industries that employ undocumented workers. I think you could make the argument that these workers are the true floor and are really the only folks in the US that are exploited in an employer/employee sense.
I definitely agree that there are a lot of entitled people here. I will not argue against that. But I also believe we have different estimates of the proportion and who are making these comments. Maybe you think I am one of them, maybe not? I can say I am a grad student and as far as wages go it is better than the memes but even if I do get a summer internship (this summer not as lucky) my income is substantially closer to that of the driver than the SWE. But we've also seen HN grow exponentially over the last few years. It has really caused the tone to change around here, for good and bad. One of my particular frustrations is that in this growth that noise expresses itself as shorter and more pointed comments. At least in my experience, it feels like it has significant decreased the number larger and detailed conversations, like these, that drew me in in the first place. So I do appreciate what you wrote, even though we disagree. But then again, disagreement is in part how we learn. Maybe you feel differently or the same. A larger audience also means far more priors and viewpoints, which often makes communication difficult in the first place and frankly gives bad actors a larger edge to increase noise. I think if my experience is representative it does also suggest we may be speaking to a wide audience at large, which would result in an increase of entitled SWEs but also in laymen and people simply interested in tech at large. Maybe someone has scraped the list of front page articles and through categorization there could be hints to if this feeling is true or not. Maybe the experience is just the environment changing? It is hard to know. So I can't reject your estimation outright either and with respect to the framing you have specified, I think your comment is fairly agreeable.
But the next two paragraphs I find a bit confusing. I had originally started with a discussion of possible miscommunication, which in the current response I believe you agree with. But your response to that comment was about how you do not believe an employee should be _forced_ to compatible. I took this to mean with respect to wages and with that respect a minimum wage is that forced mechanism. But it seems you agree. Maybe I'm too primed in the thinking that it makes interpretation difficult. At least in this regard to this, I do not think the federal standard meets the demands of the current environments. Nor do I think many states. I think this issue is rather complicated though because the minimum requirements are highly non-homogeneous across even a singular state. I'm not quite sure what the solution to this is, but maybe you have some ideas. There is some balance in there that prevents low wage workers from being priced out, required to bus/train in with long commutes, and maintain high wages for SWEs and C-suite. The oversimplification of the problem I think makes the solution difficult as first order approximations or narrow framings aren't "good enough."
But thinking carefully, I can see that that interpretation may be wrong, or wrong enough. Because I think we're close in position (ironically not an uncommon case in people that disagree). Maybe you meant that there should not be tight restrictions in maintaining that employee, such as we see in more European structures? I think we'd at least both agree that the government's role in this is mainly to ensure that there is healthy and strong competition within the market. I think it matters where on that scale of employer/employee market we are, where people think we are, and where they think we're headed. We should want that employee market, as I think everyone benefits the most here (even that top 0.01%, but not visible through their bank accounts). I do think 5+ years back SWEs was clearly an employee market, which likely even built a lot of entitlement. But I think we quickly shifted to an employer market, making people's stress go up, and even causing overestimation of that scale.
I do think these changes cause resentment regardless of the income level. I can understand someone being frustrated even making $200k/yr WFH when they see friends let go, the company say they have to tighten the reigns on perks/income/employees, all while seeing stock and C-suite compensation go up or even be the same. These are conflicting signals. Static friction is quite a force too. In this respect I don't agree that an employer should be forced to do anything either. In fact, we are on an incubator website and I would encourage those people to take their frustrations out by competition rather than regulation. After all, this was the game being played between the capitalists and the soviets: a market economy vs a planned economy. But I think too that people underestimate the heavy hand that was being used. Not so much the invisible hand of Smith, but rather invisible because it tilted scales and purposefully hid. Maybe the market is too captured. Maybe not. I will at least say it is easy to get caught up in one of the two dominant narratives that has permeated our culture with respect to wealth inequality. But I don't think either of those narratives are particularly helpful as they do not capture the complexity of the issues we are facing and themselves end up only being noise and even make conversations like these difficult as we are now primed so well it is easy to misinterpret and jump to each other's throat. Especially when we see these conflicting signals, they do give each narrative evidence to their claims. Possibly even saying the same thing in different ways and building frustration as we feel unheard. Most of language is implicit after all, and it is hard to know intent or reception through a screen. I do appreciate your comment though, as I think you have brought up things I wasn't thinking about and made me think deeper. I also think conversations like these do start to heal our community. I appreciate the lack of brevity. The world is complicated and language is imprecise, I'd rather slow down and truly communicate, even if it is harder.
Well we are at very different points in our careers—-I am approaching my fourth decade in tech and have been from entry level all the way up to senior leadership levels at orgs, been an owner/founder, and am now serving in more sales engineering position. I did an intentional step downward because I want to work to still fatten my bank account a bit, but no longer want to manage people before I take that long walk in the cursed earth to bring law to the lawless. Also prior to my entry into tech, I held some shit minimum wage jobs so I come at my opinion from a pretty holistic and pragmatic position. A floor to ceiling one if you will.
My opinion boils down to the following: Just because you feel you are exploited doesn’t mean you are actually exploited. Exploitation should be protected by the government. If the company is following the law, they are simply not exploiting their employees. However, if you can’t get over that feeling of exploitation you have a couple of options: You can quit and that ends the perception of continuing exploitation. Alternatively, you can convince enough fellow coworkers of the grievance and unionize to try and force change.
If you cannot or will not do either of those things, you are choosing to trade your labor for a paycheck.
> If the company is following the law, they are simply not exploiting their employees
I do take issue with this line. Law is slow moving and reactionary, not proactive. Courts frequently update the law and redefine that abuse by nature of someone being abused and having the capacity and willingness to sue. The law defines things through historical action. That is, someone has to be wronged first.
I do agree that perception isn't reality though. But that's a whole other issue. Were law proactive I'd be in more agreement with your sentiment. But laws follow the culture just like markets follow the economy. There's a delay
There is a delay, but can’t that delay also be explained by the difference in perception too? For instance…until the government perceives or recognizes the exploitation…who is to govern against it? Only the employee can by exercising their freedoms to change jobs can fully protect themselves from an exploitation that is not legally recognized.
I realize that this timing disconnect is a slippery slope especially in a historical context, but I think in modernity the recognition is much quicker and frankly at this point there is probably not a lot of truly exploitive things that need additional regulation going on by companies in the US who corporately are trying to follow the law.
I'm unconvinced. If the phenomena is real, it is clear that there is always a delay. There's no mechanism for immediate reaction. Government is purposefully slow as this is also a defense mechanism against abuse. This is the downside of that. Everything has loopholes though (hence why I keep ranting on HN about complexity and embracing the noise).
For employees protecting themselves, if things are happening at a larger scale, would that not also exhibit as distress at first? Assuming the abuse does exist, we also think about what the societal "immune response" would look like. A meme is just an analog to a virus in social thought, not necessarily bad, and it means we can create analogies to the immune system. What's hard about all of this is that you're right that sometimes the immune system attacks itself unnecessarily.
Arguably we agree that we see the immune response acting up. Now we have to ask if the immune response is appropriate or not. This is hard, because we ourselves may or may not have come into contact with the infection and the system's response is extremely noisy. But determining that determines how we resolve the problem. And no matter the conclusion, a problem exists. Sometimes the immune system attacks the right thing, we just can't see what it is attacking. Sometimes it attacks the wrong thing, so we need to look at why they look alike and how to differentiate. But in no case does it attack itself with no reason. (even a bad reason is a reason)
And yes, historically we see both this and an extremely slow response from the government (idk, virologists in our analogy? Doesn't matter). In the gilded age we saw tons of abuse run rampant before they were addressed. Things were considered normal and common that we'd see as horrific (e.g. per-adolescent children working in factories and losing fingers). There's a reason we got labor unions and many workers rights from this time. Even if you believe the defenses degraded and malformed over time, that's why they came to be. And if you do believe that, it is even worrying because it means we're not ready to handle the next infection. Even if this isn't an infection, we are humans and can think proactively and want to address things when they are small issues and build defenses before they become big issues. So even small infections are worth scrutiny. Just the same way maintenance of any system (biological, mechanical, software, social, etc) reduces overall costs and prevents larger damage from ever happening in the first place (but counterfactuals are fun...).
So from this standpoint, I'd just say "listen." I'm not sure what the real problem is (got some ideas), but it is clear there is a problem and I'm afraid the way you frame it is dismissive. Even entitlement itself is a problem and we'd still have to listen carefully to address that.
If you want to take that immune system analogy to the logical conclusion that I see, its this: An immune response can be good or in some cases very bad. Entitlement mentality creating an assumption of exploitation where one doesn’t actually exist feels to me is more akin to a allergic response or an autoimmune response which creates a harm more than a help. It’s an inappropriate response.
That is no longer the reality for young people. Rapidly rising wealth inequality means investors have more capital to purchase vital assets (particularly houses), putting financial security way out of reach. You simply can't invest in the things you absolutely need to live on anything but a temporary basis, and those who control those things can change the price at any time.
Working for a salary does not build wealth. Work is inherently valuable, we need stuff and skills, but we have to recognize clearly that the taxation and wealth systems in the modern world are absolutely bonkers, and that it is directly crushing workers' standards of living.
To build wealth you need capital—either to invest or to cover expenses while you pour swear equity into whatever you are building. A salary providing an excess over your expenses can certainly help provide a saved nest egg to make that step.
Otherwise you better have a solid idea and the ability to convince someone with capital to keep you fed and sheltered while you build it…and for that patience and investment they deserve a piece of the pie that you are baking.
This North American belief that financial stability has home ownership as a prerequisite is incorrect. Consider as a counter example Germany where much of the population rents their primary residence. Germans don’t feel marginalized for it. They save and invest. They raise children and participate in society and aren’t ashamed of being renters.
The tenancy laws are a major driver of this. My understanding is that the tenancy laws are much more favourable towards renters in Germany relative to the US or the broader Anglosphere, and this changes what people need to feel secure.
