7 ms·

Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

102 points by myth_drannon 4y ago

HypoCast 4y ago
This reminds me of an article where the writer seems to be marketing themselves to sell their marketing skills. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/24-year-old-who-makes-8000-a-month-in-passive-income-shares-best-business-advice.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/24-year-old-who-makes-8000-a...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  Yeah, I saw this article too. Started reading it and then "...started to use my TikTok and Instagram accounts to market wealth-building tools and online programs", basically she is doing sales.
_aleph2c_ 4y ago
MLM: Multilevel Marketing scheme
- msla 4y ago
  It's the politically-correct term for pyramid scheme these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing > MLM salespeople are, therefore, expected to sell products directly to end-user retail consumers by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing, but more importantly they are incentivized to recruit others to join the company's distribution chain as fellow salespeople so that these can become downline distributors.[1][8] According to a report that studied the business models of 350 MLM companies in the United States, published on the Federal Trade Commission's website, at least 99% of people who join MLM companies lose money.[9][10] Nonetheless, MLM companies function because downline participants are encouraged to hold onto the belief that they can achieve large returns, while the statistical improbability of this is de-emphasized. MLM companies have been made illegal or otherwise strictly regulated in some jurisdictions as merely variations of the traditional pyramid scheme.[11][12]
  - gruez 4y ago
    >politically-correct term I don't get it. Were people getting canceled for saying "pyramid scheme" or something?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      The point is that they are not technically pyramid schemes - there is a product to sell. It just so happens that the product is worthless so it makes the system a pyramid scheme in practice, but its peddlers are very quick to point out that it's not a pyramid scheme because of this technicality. It's the same reason why they are still unfortunately legal.
    - pid-1 4y ago
      No. This term was created by pyramid scheme firms themselves to to categorize their business in a legit sounding way.
    - ucosty 4y ago
      People are more likely to avoid doing business with you if you call yourself a pyramid scheme. Calling youself a "multi-level marketing" business sounds far more benign.
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      Running a "pyramid scheme" is a crime in many places, so news organizations and such will prefer to use more neutral language that doesn't necessarily imply the groups they're talking about are criminal.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      AFAIK there are laws against pyramid schemes, but MLMs are okay. Also, MLMs are pyramid schemes with extra steps, so they are basically the designer drugs of financial hucksterism.
    - paxys 4y ago
      No, the previous commenter is incorrect. Pyramid scheme is a well defined category of fraud. A MLM/affiliate marketing company may be a pyramid scheme, or it may not. Courts have routinely ruled that the business category is perfectly legal.
- TwoNineA 4y ago
  Articles like this grind my gears when they mention an ancronym in the title and I have to read through 4 paragraphs before finding out what MLM means.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    I suspect that sometimes the person who uses the acronym doesn't know its meaning. Or the acronym doesn't even have a commonly accepted definition, even. For example, that's my experience from recently reading a number of articles on the "OSR" scene, or movement, or trend, in TTRPGs where "OSR" is variously explained as "Old School Revival" or "Old School Rennaissance" or even "Old School Rules", etc, but without any agreed-upon definition of what the hell it is. (Btw: TTRPGs = Table-Top RolePlaying Games :P)
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Men Loving Men, I always assume.
- daviddaviddavid 4y ago
  I was really hoping this would be about Medical Logic Modules / Arden Syntax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_logic_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_logic_module
- naveen99 4y ago
  Masked language modeling (Bert)
bitwize 4y ago
It reminds me of a song I sang to myself to the tune of the Lego Movie theme, surveying the tech job market at the time: Everything is adtech, Everything is marketing, surveillance, and spam...
- Spivak 4y ago
  If that's your view of the world you gotta stop working on B2C products and take some B2B jobs. You might start singing "Everything is enterprise sales" but at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same.
  - glenjamin 4y ago
    > at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same. Close, but not quite - because you end up selling to management or executives when it's the rank-and-file who actually use the software and don't get much purchasing power.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Something I find interesting about the B2B space is that since there are fewer customers, you can't A/B test everything to death since the sample size is too small--you need better product vision. You're also closer to customers, so you'll get more useful direct feedback.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  You're making me thankful I've spent all of my career working on various forms of tooling. I'd be sad if all I did was marketing, surveillance, and spam. Might very well go find another line of work.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Marketing being that important tells something really bad about innovation. (Just as high lawyer salaries tell something bad about a government.)
superb-owl 4y ago
There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subway franchises, academia, Amazon truck drivers, or any of your classic MLMs
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- monkeybutton 4y ago
  Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you Counterfactual: franchises.
    - antisthenes 4y ago
      Franchises offload the risk on the franchisee and collect their percentage fee regardless of the performance. There was a segment on John Oliver's program about Subway being particularly predatory about this, as well as deliberately maintaining information asymmetry to mislead franchisees. In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here?
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here? Plenty of franchises have sustainably made money for the franchiser and the bulk of their franchisees. That stands in stark relief to the history of MLMs.
rlili 4y ago
> That’s what happens when an industry is fully enveloped by capitalism Yep, I'd say that capitalism itself is an MLM.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Can you elaborate as to why you think so?
  - superdisk 4y ago
    It requires ever increasing growth to function and the world's resources are finite.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      These are facts but don't explain why OP sees it as a pyramid scheme*. I'm not say it it's not (or that it is), but I think an explanation could be helpful. If you said the stock market or something was a pyramid scheme then okay I can see that, but what does it mean for capitalism to be one. > *A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products
  - sky-kedge0749 4y ago
    Not GP, but here's an answer to your question in the form of a jigsaw puzzle: https://www.etsy.com/listing/739198964/crimethinc-pyramid-of-capitalism-1000 https://www.etsy.com/listing/739198964/crimethinc-pyramid-of...
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      That's equivocation between a pyramid as hierarchy and a pyramid as a specific business model. As far as I know, capitalism doesn't require constant recruitment because growth can be achieved in other ways like reducing product quality, reducing wages, deteriorating working conditions, increasing technological efficiency, enclosing commons, privatizing public goods and services, etc.
dehrmann 4y ago
And I thought this was going to be about venture-funded companies up until right after their IPO.
- stevenalowe 4y ago
  Or crypto-whatevers
Zigurd 4y ago
The analogy doesn't work. MLMs are outright fraud. Even worse than "gig economy" "jobs" that are really just stealing your car's value to pay a large fraction of your supposed income. They exploit people who are not intelligent enough to escape their come ons. in both these cases you end up with nothing. Outside of for-profit and lower-tier schools that really have no business issuing postgraduate degrees, the worst that happens to postgraduate degree holders is that their income model takes a ding for not having been in industry since getting their undergraduate degree. but they still mostly have a prosperous future. Grad students get exploited as cheap labor when they could have been making more, and advancing industry careers, for sure. But that's not nearly as sad as turning people of low education and low attainment into pyramid scheme victims. That's outright evil.
- some-guy 4y ago
  There's definitely a spectrum, and the big difference (my wife is a PhD student) is that the vast majority of PhDs _know_ it's all bullshit, but do it anyway. MLMs tend to have some kind of buy-in.
synthmeat 4y ago
It has already been said, but it bears repeating: "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941
mandevil 4y ago
My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours are worse, the tech hours are worse, etc.- because pharmacy school is selling the same dream of respectable, well paying work. Law school has already done one cycle of boom, massive overproduction, bust, and is starting to boom again. I know a couple of airline pilots who face similar problems- very slippery rungs at the lowest ends of the ladder, with a lot of the feel of a pyramid scheme (generally to get enough hours to get to the higher rungs you need to be an instructor teaching other people to fly) and for the few who can grab one of the highest rungs (senior pilot at a major) quite a bit of job security and well-paid respect. If she hadn't become a pharmacist, my wife's back-up plan was to be a chemical engineer, which generally means she would be working for an oil company baby-sitting a machine in a refinery. Over the same period that pharmacists job quality declined, ExxonMobil went from the largest company in the US by market capitalization to the 12th biggest in the US, and from what I've read the quality of life of ChemE's has declined a lot in step with that. So this clearly isn't something where "STEM jobs will save you." I remain puzzled as to why software engineering seems to be immune to this overproduction problem. Is it just that since software is still eating the world, we haven't found a natural limit to the demand for our kind of engineers yet? Is it that we are so unproductive and failure-prone that we guarantee ourselves full employment?
- paxys 4y ago
  > I remain puzzled as to why software engineering seems to be immune to this overproduction problem. Few reasons: - While an ever increasing number of prospective students enter the field, a much lower number actually graduate. - People that do graduate quickly get weeded out in technical interviews. This is why you see a high disconnect between unemployed devs and companies who claim they can't find talent. - Of course the number of competent engineers in the field is going up as well, but that is matched by increased demand, as pretty much every company is now employing programmers for some business process.
- 4y ago
thriftwy 4y ago
It is likely that life itself is non-ergodic. It has some returns on capital but eventually a catastrophic event will wipe all gains.
ruined 4y ago
even MLMs are an MLM
789itsfine 4y ago
As someone looking for a job, can corroborate. I can't tell you how many listings I see are for positions at recruiting firms. What kind of recruiting firm, you may ask? Why, the kind that finds technical recruiters for other companies, of course. In this case, the problem is the overblown enthusiasm for 10x-type employees - because no one trains anymore - and the lengths companies will go to find them. Contrary to the situation described in the article, the end goal is to find singular workers who can be paid exorbitant salaries (but still less than the cost of the teams they'd replace). It's a very difficult problem, so if you're unsuccessful, the next best option is to simply outsource responsibility. The MLM-ization of society is something akin to cancer, in that the causes are multitudinous.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
javajosh 4y ago
This is, I think, better to think about with the "meme" idea[0], that ideas function like organisms that land in your brain, have a lifecycle, reproduce, and so on. You can apply all kinds of useful intuition from the biological world about reproductive fitness, selection, mutation, and so on. MLMs are the ideas that are like viruses because they are minimally simple (the content is not the point), they spread easily, and they use all the hosts resources (time and money) to reproduce themselves. MLMs are delightfully devious critters because they use your greed against you, promising great wealth while simultaneously sucking you dry. They are poetic justice on wheels. What is astounding is that the victims of MLMs never see it, not even after the fact. If greed drives the spread, delusion prevents building herd immunity. It's the weaponization of Mark Twain's old saw about the American poor believing they are just millionaires down on their luck. I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS) which services those enterprising folk who see the only way to profit from an MLM is to make a new one, and so start at the top. Make it easy and factor out everything but branding and sales. The customer would pick their product archetype (vitamins, cosmetics, whatever), pick a name and a logo that gets put on the boxes at the factory, and be on your way. Enrollment, payments, shipping, and all of that is all taken care of. For a small fee, of course. 0 - https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/ https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/
- TheDong 4y ago
  > I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS) Arguably, the ICO boom was a realization of this end-game. There were guides to create a new etherium-backed crypto token in minutes, services to help create and manage them, and so on. Each ICO functioned as its own MLM, with the differentiating factor usually being branding, sales, and whitepaper quality.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    I'm sure it's a great comment but "ICO" doesn't signify. I pretty sure I used to know what it meant, but when I try to retrieve the knowledge, it's like peering through a hazy fog in the moonlight, and the meaning just slips away...
HidyBush 4y ago
I think an MLM business can be described as a business model that is mathematically proven to not work and is intentionally employed to make the founders rich off the money of other people. A business that simply needs to reach a certain scale to be profitable by itself is not an MLM. For example a new chat application might require 10.000 users to pay off for the computing power needed to run the servers, so until you reach those 10.000 users you need to lure them in promising everything will work just fine. If you reach that threshold then everything will indeed be fine, but if you don't and run out of money you'll have to let a lot of people hanging. An MLM cannot possibly reach that threshold.
- 789itsfine 4y ago
  That's a pyramid scheme. An MLM is (supposed to be) when product sales can still sustain the business at a marginal level, even while employing the same model of worthwhile profit being based on how many people you recruit. Of course, it's probable that many businesses that pass themselves off as MLMs are, in actuality, pyramid schemes that are able to hide their non-viability well.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710398 (285 comments)
anm89 4y ago
I spent some time doing the "digital nomad" thing in Bali. The joke amongst my friend was the circular digital nomad economy. Programmers / designers pay yoga teachers for yoga. Yoga teachers pay the drop shippers to learn drop shipping. The drop shippers are all paying crypto gurus to learn crypto trading And the crypto gurus are all in bootcamps to become programmers. And everyone is simultaneously trying to become a yoga teacher. It's a big circle of everyone trying to make money by selling a way to continue to be a nomad to other people who are already nomads but are running out of money by claiming that their thing is the stable way (which it isn't because they need to pyramid scheme it to get by). edit: forgot to throw in, there is a lot of "life coaching" going on in all of this
Der_Einzige 4y ago
The title of this post would be just as pertinent if MLM had refereed to "Masked Language Models" rather than multi-level marketing...
ARandumGuy 4y ago
I think a lot of this stems from the complete removal of social safety nets, which means that employers can demand just about anything from potential employees. Low wage jobs have shitty wages and conditions, because "at least you're not living on the street". Professional jobs (and the academic institutions that support them) can demand insane requirements for their candidates, because "at least you're not flipping burgers." This leads to young people flocking to different degrees in a desperate attempt for some level of security. There pushed by the promise that if they bust their ass with a degree, maybe they'll get a decent job that allows them to eventually retire. Ultimately, this isn't a college problem, or an "MLM" problem. Conditions won't improve unless people have the ability to say no to unreasonable demands.

102 points by myth_drannon 4y ago

This reminds me of an article where the writer seems to be marketing themselves to sell their marketing skills. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/24-year-old-who-makes-8000-a-month-in-passive-income-shares-best-business-advice.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/24-year-old-who-makes-8000-a...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
myth_drannon 4y ago
Yeah, I saw this article too. Started reading it and then "...started to use my TikTok and Instagram accounts to market wealth-building tools and online programs", basically she is doing sales.

_aleph2c_ 4y ago

MLM: Multilevel Marketing scheme

msla 4y ago
It's the politically-correct term for pyramid scheme these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing > MLM salespeople are, therefore, expected to sell products directly to end-user retail consumers by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing, but more importantly they are incentivized to recruit others to join the company's distribution chain as fellow salespeople so that these can become downline distributors.[1][8] According to a report that studied the business models of 350 MLM companies in the United States, published on the Federal Trade Commission's website, at least 99% of people who join MLM companies lose money.[9][10] Nonetheless, MLM companies function because downline participants are encouraged to hold onto the belief that they can achieve large returns, while the statistical improbability of this is de-emphasized. MLM companies have been made illegal or otherwise strictly regulated in some jurisdictions as merely variations of the traditional pyramid scheme.[11][12]
- gruez 4y ago
  >politically-correct term I don't get it. Were people getting canceled for saying "pyramid scheme" or something?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    The point is that they are not technically pyramid schemes - there is a product to sell. It just so happens that the product is worthless so it makes the system a pyramid scheme in practice, but its peddlers are very quick to point out that it's not a pyramid scheme because of this technicality. It's the same reason why they are still unfortunately legal.
  - pid-1 4y ago
    No. This term was created by pyramid scheme firms themselves to to categorize their business in a legit sounding way.
  - ucosty 4y ago
    People are more likely to avoid doing business with you if you call yourself a pyramid scheme. Calling youself a "multi-level marketing" business sounds far more benign.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    Running a "pyramid scheme" is a crime in many places, so news organizations and such will prefer to use more neutral language that doesn't necessarily imply the groups they're talking about are criminal.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    AFAIK there are laws against pyramid schemes, but MLMs are okay. Also, MLMs are pyramid schemes with extra steps, so they are basically the designer drugs of financial hucksterism.
  - paxys 4y ago
    No, the previous commenter is incorrect. Pyramid scheme is a well defined category of fraud. A MLM/affiliate marketing company may be a pyramid scheme, or it may not. Courts have routinely ruled that the business category is perfectly legal.
TwoNineA 4y ago
Articles like this grind my gears when they mention an ancronym in the title and I have to read through 4 paragraphs before finding out what MLM means.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  I suspect that sometimes the person who uses the acronym doesn't know its meaning. Or the acronym doesn't even have a commonly accepted definition, even. For example, that's my experience from recently reading a number of articles on the "OSR" scene, or movement, or trend, in TTRPGs where "OSR" is variously explained as "Old School Revival" or "Old School Rennaissance" or even "Old School Rules", etc, but without any agreed-upon definition of what the hell it is. (Btw: TTRPGs = Table-Top RolePlaying Games :P)
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Men Loving Men, I always assume.
daviddaviddavid 4y ago
I was really hoping this would be about Medical Logic Modules / Arden Syntax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_logic_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_logic_module
naveen99 4y ago
Masked language modeling (Bert)

bitwize 4y ago

It reminds me of a song I sang to myself to the tune of the Lego Movie theme, surveying the tech job market at the time: Everything is adtech, Everything is marketing, surveillance, and spam...

Spivak 4y ago
If that's your view of the world you gotta stop working on B2C products and take some B2B jobs. You might start singing "Everything is enterprise sales" but at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same.
- glenjamin 4y ago
  > at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same. Close, but not quite - because you end up selling to management or executives when it's the rank-and-file who actually use the software and don't get much purchasing power.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Something I find interesting about the B2B space is that since there are fewer customers, you can't A/B test everything to death since the sample size is too small--you need better product vision. You're also closer to customers, so you'll get more useful direct feedback.
rootusrootus 4y ago
You're making me thankful I've spent all of my career working on various forms of tooling. I'd be sad if all I did was marketing, surveillance, and spam. Might very well go find another line of work.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Marketing being that important tells something really bad about innovation. (Just as high lawyer salaries tell something bad about a government.)

superb-owl 4y ago

There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subway franchises, academia, Amazon truck drivers, or any of your classic MLMs

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
monkeybutton 4y ago
Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you Counterfactual: franchises.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    Franchises offload the risk on the franchisee and collect their percentage fee regardless of the performance. There was a segment on John Oliver's program about Subway being particularly predatory about this, as well as deliberately maintaining information asymmetry to mislead franchisees. In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here? Plenty of franchises have sustainably made money for the franchiser and the bulk of their franchisees. That stands in stark relief to the history of MLMs.

rlili 4y ago

> That’s what happens when an industry is fully enveloped by capitalism Yep, I'd say that capitalism itself is an MLM.

guerrilla 4y ago
Can you elaborate as to why you think so?
- superdisk 4y ago
  It requires ever increasing growth to function and the world's resources are finite.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    These are facts but don't explain why OP sees it as a pyramid scheme*. I'm not say it it's not (or that it is), but I think an explanation could be helpful. If you said the stock market or something was a pyramid scheme then okay I can see that, but what does it mean for capitalism to be one. > *A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products
- sky-kedge0749 4y ago
  Not GP, but here's an answer to your question in the form of a jigsaw puzzle: https://www.etsy.com/listing/739198964/crimethinc-pyramid-of-capitalism-1000 https://www.etsy.com/listing/739198964/crimethinc-pyramid-of...
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    That's equivocation between a pyramid as hierarchy and a pyramid as a specific business model. As far as I know, capitalism doesn't require constant recruitment because growth can be achieved in other ways like reducing product quality, reducing wages, deteriorating working conditions, increasing technological efficiency, enclosing commons, privatizing public goods and services, etc.

dehrmann 4y ago

And I thought this was going to be about venture-funded companies up until right after their IPO.

stevenalowe 4y ago
Or crypto-whatevers

Zigurd 4y ago

The analogy doesn't work. MLMs are outright fraud. Even worse than "gig economy" "jobs" that are really just stealing your car's value to pay a large fraction of your supposed income. They exploit people who are not intelligent enough to escape their come ons. in both these cases you end up with nothing. Outside of for-profit and lower-tier schools that really have no business issuing postgraduate degrees, the worst that happens to postgraduate degree holders is that their income model takes a ding for not having been in industry since getting their undergraduate degree. but they still mostly have a prosperous future. Grad students get exploited as cheap labor when they could have been making more, and advancing industry careers, for sure. But that's not nearly as sad as turning people of low education and low attainment into pyramid scheme victims. That's outright evil.

some-guy 4y ago
There's definitely a spectrum, and the big difference (my wife is a PhD student) is that the vast majority of PhDs _know_ it's all bullshit, but do it anyway. MLMs tend to have some kind of buy-in.

synthmeat 4y ago

It has already been said, but it bears repeating: "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941

mandevil 4y ago

My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours are worse, the tech hours are worse, etc.- because pharmacy school is selling the same dream of respectable, well paying work. Law school has already done one cycle of boom, massive overproduction, bust, and is starting to boom again. I know a couple of airline pilots who face similar problems- very slippery rungs at the lowest ends of the ladder, with a lot of the feel of a pyramid scheme (generally to get enough hours to get to the higher rungs you need to be an instructor teaching other people to fly) and for the few who can grab one of the highest rungs (senior pilot at a major) quite a bit of job security and well-paid respect. If she hadn't become a pharmacist, my wife's back-up plan was to be a chemical engineer, which generally means she would be working for an oil company baby-sitting a machine in a refinery. Over the same period that pharmacists job quality declined, ExxonMobil went from the largest company in the US by market capitalization to the 12th biggest in the US, and from what I've read the quality of life of ChemE's has declined a lot in step with that. So this clearly isn't something where "STEM jobs will save you." I remain puzzled as to why software engineering seems to be immune to this overproduction problem. Is it just that since software is still eating the world, we haven't found a natural limit to the demand for our kind of engineers yet? Is it that we are so unproductive and failure-prone that we guarantee ourselves full employment?

paxys 4y ago
> I remain puzzled as to why software engineering seems to be immune to this overproduction problem. Few reasons: - While an ever increasing number of prospective students enter the field, a much lower number actually graduate. - People that do graduate quickly get weeded out in technical interviews. This is why you see a high disconnect between unemployed devs and companies who claim they can't find talent. - Of course the number of competent engineers in the field is going up as well, but that is matched by increased demand, as pretty much every company is now employing programmers for some business process.
4y ago

thriftwy 4y ago

It is likely that life itself is non-ergodic. It has some returns on capital but eventually a catastrophic event will wipe all gains.

ruined 4y ago

even MLMs are an MLM

789itsfine 4y ago

As someone looking for a job, can corroborate. I can't tell you how many listings I see are for positions at recruiting firms. What kind of recruiting firm, you may ask? Why, the kind that finds technical recruiters for other companies, of course. In this case, the problem is the overblown enthusiasm for 10x-type employees - because no one trains anymore - and the lengths companies will go to find them. Contrary to the situation described in the article, the end goal is to find singular workers who can be paid exorbitant salaries (but still less than the cost of the teams they'd replace). It's a very difficult problem, so if you're unsuccessful, the next best option is to simply outsource responsibility. The MLM-ization of society is something akin to cancer, in that the causes are multitudinous.

deleted 4y ago

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javajosh 4y ago

This is, I think, better to think about with the "meme" idea[0], that ideas function like organisms that land in your brain, have a lifecycle, reproduce, and so on. You can apply all kinds of useful intuition from the biological world about reproductive fitness, selection, mutation, and so on. MLMs are the ideas that are like viruses because they are minimally simple (the content is not the point), they spread easily, and they use all the hosts resources (time and money) to reproduce themselves. MLMs are delightfully devious critters because they use your greed against you, promising great wealth while simultaneously sucking you dry. They are poetic justice on wheels. What is astounding is that the victims of MLMs never see it, not even after the fact. If greed drives the spread, delusion prevents building herd immunity. It's the weaponization of Mark Twain's old saw about the American poor believing they are just millionaires down on their luck. I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS) which services those enterprising folk who see the only way to profit from an MLM is to make a new one, and so start at the top. Make it easy and factor out everything but branding and sales. The customer would pick their product archetype (vitamins, cosmetics, whatever), pick a name and a logo that gets put on the boxes at the factory, and be on your way. Enrollment, payments, shipping, and all of that is all taken care of. For a small fee, of course. 0 - https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/ https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/

TheDong 4y ago
> I think the end-game will be an MLM-as-a-service (MaaS) Arguably, the ICO boom was a realization of this end-game. There were guides to create a new etherium-backed crypto token in minutes, services to help create and manage them, and so on. Each ICO functioned as its own MLM, with the differentiating factor usually being branding, sales, and whitepaper quality.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I'm sure it's a great comment but "ICO" doesn't signify. I pretty sure I used to know what it meant, but when I try to retrieve the knowledge, it's like peering through a hazy fog in the moonlight, and the meaning just slips away...

HidyBush 4y ago

I think an MLM business can be described as a business model that is mathematically proven to not work and is intentionally employed to make the founders rich off the money of other people. A business that simply needs to reach a certain scale to be profitable by itself is not an MLM. For example a new chat application might require 10.000 users to pay off for the computing power needed to run the servers, so until you reach those 10.000 users you need to lure them in promising everything will work just fine. If you reach that threshold then everything will indeed be fine, but if you don't and run out of money you'll have to let a lot of people hanging. An MLM cannot possibly reach that threshold.

789itsfine 4y ago
That's a pyramid scheme. An MLM is (supposed to be) when product sales can still sustain the business at a marginal level, even while employing the same model of worthwhile profit being based on how many people you recruit. Of course, it's probable that many businesses that pass themselves off as MLMs are, in actuality, pyramid schemes that are able to hide their non-viability well.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19710398 (285 comments)

anm89 4y ago

I spent some time doing the "digital nomad" thing in Bali. The joke amongst my friend was the circular digital nomad economy. Programmers / designers pay yoga teachers for yoga. Yoga teachers pay the drop shippers to learn drop shipping. The drop shippers are all paying crypto gurus to learn crypto trading And the crypto gurus are all in bootcamps to become programmers. And everyone is simultaneously trying to become a yoga teacher. It's a big circle of everyone trying to make money by selling a way to continue to be a nomad to other people who are already nomads but are running out of money by claiming that their thing is the stable way (which it isn't because they need to pyramid scheme it to get by). edit: forgot to throw in, there is a lot of "life coaching" going on in all of this

Der_Einzige 4y ago

The title of this post would be just as pertinent if MLM had refereed to "Masked Language Models" rather than multi-level marketing...

ARandumGuy 4y ago

I think a lot of this stems from the complete removal of social safety nets, which means that employers can demand just about anything from potential employees. Low wage jobs have shitty wages and conditions, because "at least you're not living on the street". Professional jobs (and the academic institutions that support them) can demand insane requirements for their candidates, because "at least you're not flipping burgers." This leads to young people flocking to different degrees in a desperate attempt for some level of security. There pushed by the promise that if they bust their ass with a degree, maybe they'll get a decent job that allows them to eventually retire. Ultimately, this isn't a college problem, or an "MLM" problem. Conditions won't improve unless people have the ability to say no to unreasonable demands.