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I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. B

I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

lll-o-lll 3y ago
> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business. I do not get this attitude at all. It just smacks of entitlement. How about this for an answer “when the company makes money, they can pay your salary?”. Now, there are many more reasons why an ambitious young person should be invested in their companies success, but any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.
- kcplate 3y ago
  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.
  - godelski 3y ago
    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.
    - kcplate 3y ago
      > 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.
      - godelski 3y ago
        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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366924
  - courseofaction 3y ago
    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.
    - malablaster 3y ago
      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.
      - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
        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.
    - kcplate 3y ago
      > Working for a salary does not build wealth 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.
- cjcenizal 3y ago
  Instead of framing it subjectively (“People’s feelings are hurt by capitalism”), consider it objectively. What’s the effect on society when increasing your productivity doesn’t increase your wealth but instead is just a requisite for employment? Wealth accumulates with the wealthy, as the OP stated, and the rest of society grows poorer, sicker, less mobile, and less creative. Would you say that’s sustainable?
- antisthenes 3y ago
  The truth is somewhere in the middle. After getting to a certain level, I only care enough to get my work done, well. I voluntarily give up a portion of the added value I bring in order to reduce my risk of having to search for new clients every week. Ideally, this value isn't much higher than ~1/3 of whatever the revenue/employee the company currently has. > any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed. The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.)
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    > The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.) Sure, but the context here was a young person moaning about the “rich capitalist pigs” getting wealthy off the backs of the proletariat. If, as a young person, you get caught up in ideological thinking rather than just getting on and doing your “best”, you’re going to be replaced by someone who was actually willing to do the work.
    - savingsPossible 3y ago
      You want to believe that you have control where you do not, and that the world is fair where it is not. You might get fired because the boss is spending all the money travelling You might get hired to do not so much for 5 years The company might be rich because it is a monopoly It my be poor because a bigger fish has decided to do dumping for a couple of years You might, say, put a lot of effort on twitter right b4 the aquisition, and then, when recuperating, get fired You might take time off, during work hours, to learn a technology, and that advances the companies interest. Or it does not, but advances yours Your carreer is a complex thing, there are no iron reasons why the 'best' will always work, changing jobs is usually an option.
      - 3y ago
- whateveracct 3y ago
  > That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business. It's called being a sucker. If you're salaried, you should be leaving productivity on the table. You get paid the same no matter what. Finding the line is key. Years ago (around when I started working remote) I started quitting at 1pm every day. And then I started never working Fridays and even some Thursdays (I plan my week so I can push some "leftovers" those days to look like I worked). I use the spare time to sleep, play with my pets, found businesses, learn new skills, enjoy my marriage to the fullest. Also I don't have to give my best to stay employed. I have some factors working in my favor. It costs money to replace me. And it costs time to get someone to my level of onboarded. I've never given my best but they keep paying me 100s of Gs to do it - so I think you're off-base on that point ;)
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    I understand and am close to agreeing with you, but I feel an obligation to be difficult. It’s HN (and the internet) after all. Plato and others famously pondered over “why be good?”. If nobody sees you, if you get away with everything, why behave at all? And conversely, if all your good actions go unnoticed or even cause you harm, why do them? It is my experience this lifestyle changes and grinds your character and not in a good way.
    - whateveracct 3y ago
      > It is my experience this lifestyle changes and grinds your character and not in a good way. 1. It's not like I do a bad job. In the hours I do allocate to work, I do an excellent job. I am able to do this because I have been in this role for years and that experience justifies the salary if I just show up. It helps to be excellent - especially when the job is so effortless. 2. It's not a lifestyle. What I'm describing isn't a large part of my life or mindset. So it cannot degrade my character. Because my character is being enhanced by several other things going on in my life that I prioritize over work.
      - SanderNL 3y ago
        It’s your life so take my bullshit morality with a pinch of salt, but you make it seem like at least three of your workdays are dedicated to this job. That seems significant enough. I’m sure you do an excellent job and your boss is probably over the moon with you, but this is not about what “society” notices about you. This is about what you know. If I entered into contract and obliged myself to work a set number of hours (and not “productivity”) then I have honour-bound myself to that and all the mental gymnastics in the world cannot change that. I would know I could be more productive and that is actually contractually agreed upon, that’s the rub. If I thought otherwise I need to change the contract to “value of X” iso “X hours”. (And maybe you have such an agreement?) That’s just for me though, I don’t judge you and I’m sorry if I seem that way. Just wanted to offer a counter to the “sucker” narrative.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Your logic doesn't work because salaries are not attached to performance.
  - sowbug 3y ago
    I think GP already addressed that point. If you perform, you help keep the company in business. If you don't, you increase the chances that the company will fail. Aside from the relatively recent innovations of stock options and their descendants, employee outcomes are binary: salary or terminated. That's the bargain employees make as employees rather than equity holders. Compensation still follows your performance*, even if your sampling function's bit depth is one. *On average.
- godelski 3y ago
  I think there's a difference in interpretation here that plays an important role. To put it simply, when you make $25k/yr, you care a lot about your CEO making $200m/yr, but if you are making $250k/yr I don't think anyone gives a shit. The parent specified a critical qualifier that I think supports this interpretation and many may be missing. Let's make sure we're speaking the same language before we start fighting. >> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and __ONLY__ goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. The use of "only" differentiates this from "a job." It implies that they feel not just undervalued, but excessively so. It is the feeling of doing all or most of the work in a group project and only to have someone else take all or the majority of the credit. I believe most of us have been in that situation at some point. I would be shocked to find that a single person that was in that situation wasn't resentful of that person. Either you're lying (to us or to yourself) or you're the chillest person on the fucking planet. I don't think anyone cares how big CEO compensation is when they're living a comfortable life themselves. The relationship between utility and monetary value does not increase linearly for essentially all metrics of utility. Most follow an S-like curve. When you don't have a lot, every fucking dollar matters and you'll be resentful of anyone stealing any credit from you (scarcity mindset) because the loss is very meaningful. When you're comfortable, then money is substantially less important to you and you probably won't care as much if credit is taken from you because the loss isn't as meaningful. It is actually quite difficult to spend a million dollars a year continuously (or some other Brewster's Millions like situation). You can even see this change in places like HN. When everyone was being let go comments about Pichai's bonuses and Google's stock prices increased. But go back 5 years when there was a bigger boom and all the free stuff and incentives were being given, no one really cared. In this respect I think people focus on the wrong parts of economic inequality. Rather than focusing on the ceiling, focus on the floor. The floor is not the dual of the ceiling because these are not zero sum games (they are for instantaneous or local times, but not in general). Courseofaction, correct me if I'm wrong.
- lumb63 3y ago
  Not to mention, a comment like this in a discussion about a profession where single people regularly make multiples more than the average household. I’m so tired of the crowd of software engineers (or any profession of similar income) that pretend to be middle class and share the struggle of the “common man”. Sure, the productivity goes to lining the pockets of the wealthy; and you are the wealthy.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    Some people here are paid a lot. But some are not.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    The average is still 100k. Acting like all engineers are somehow the rare FAANG hires who are making 250k+ is absurd. Further, you ignore the context in which "the wealthy" is used, which is describing those who profit directly from extracting value from labor of those who work beneath them. You know, the people who can offer someone 100k in salary because they know they'll make tenfold in profit back anyways.
    - kitsunesoba 3y ago
      And in some ways, the average SE is still in the same realm as someone making a third of what they do. Many are still just one particularly bad string of unfortunate events away from financial ruin, and it’s not even necessarily their fault with how high CoL is in many places now. In terms of planes of existence, most SEs live on a layer much closer to those inhabited by the average person than they are to the layer that big tech C-suites and the like exist on.
  - notduncansmith 3y ago
    When I first joined this website I was working as a programmer and barely above the poverty line. It took years for that to multiply, and my income and costs have both fluctuated heavily. I currently don’t struggle to make ends meet but I’ll never forget all the times when I did.
- courseofaction 3y ago
  I absolutely feel I should be entitled to live in a society where the vast majority of the wealth isn't held by a small group of people and actively used to subvert democratic processes. I feel entitled to enfranchisement, where the successes of the country are also my success, because I worked hard and paid my taxes. I'll fight for my entitlement, and I'll fight for yours too. But on a less philosophical level, motivated workers are productive workers. Enfranchised workers are motivated workers. Crushing workers' living standards isn't about productivity, it's about greed.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    Work the system, or revolution, but don’t sit next to me and blame your laziness on disenfranchisement. I’m a bit older, and if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that no one is entitled to anything. Work in the system or work to change the system, but don’t sit and do nothing while kvetching about it.
    - courseofaction 3y ago
      Motivation is not a conscious process, and enfranchisement absolutely does contribute to performance. My favorite example is how Napoleon could march his army around Italy at 3x the speed of Prussia, because his army was willing and motivated, whereas the Prussians were somewhere between prisoners and slaves looking to run away at any chance - there was nothing in it for them, why would they try? 'Honor', etc? lol. There isn't some great unconquered west that we can strike out into, there is a highly structured society where systems have been deliberately set up to capture value from workers, while giving them as little as possible. Doing nothing and refusing to fund your own oppression are different things, and I will ignore the ad hominem.
      - kubanczyk 3y ago
        Were these 3x soldiers (heh) in touch with reality though? Or did they just buy a bullshit story? It seems that the last time when the system wasn't set up to extract from peasants had been maybe before agricultural revolution?
- colordrops 3y ago
  Everytime I see the word "entitlement" bandied about, it almost always smacks of entitlement. The user of the word ignores or is ignorant of the various layers of assumptions about the arbitrary nature of the system that is rigged against the average person by the ruling class. You may be lucky enough to have found a way in the system, but it's not "entitled" to point out that the system is bullshit. You are entitled. As if "starting a business" is some fundamental law of nature like breathing or shelter. Most people don't have any other choice than to be an employee. It's like calling serfs entitled. Sheesh.
  - monnok 3y ago
    I file use of the word “entitlement” right alongside use of the word “respect.” The only people who ever use the words inflict them as asymmetrical projections of their own abusive characters. “I will respect you when you respect me,” always means: “I will respect your right to exist when you respect my authority over you.” “Your attitude is entitled,” always means, “standing up for yourself reduces the value of my entitlement.” People with the self-reflection necessary to use these words appropriately will also recognize them as currently abusive and over-spoken barriers to communication. They’ll self-select out of speaking them in the first place.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    “I’m not entitled you’re entitled!” Yeah OK. I think the reason we are all arguing with heat here is that it’s about different things. I’m angry at lazy people at work. I think you, and others in these comments, are angry at inequality. I’m angry about that too! I just don’t think it justifies slacking off at work.
- becquerel 3y ago
  Becoming the owner of your own business just means becoming an exploiter of other people. Not exactly inspiring for me :)
  - Madmallard 3y ago
    that's a pessimistic and for many types of businesses incorrect look at things
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    You can try creating a worker cooperative, then you are an owner, but you don't exploit anyone.
  - dasil003 3y ago
    By this logic any time you take a job at a business you're being exploited. This seems like a horrible psychological prison to put yourself in.
    - becquerel 3y ago
      Correct! Marx even had a term for it - alienation :)
- pokerface_86 3y ago
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- maxerickson 3y ago
  It's not entitled to think your job is a 2 sided relationship with the employer. The employer isn't doing you a favor by granting you an opportunity, they are buying your time and attention.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  I think you do understand this. If you own a business, do you charge the minimum possible price and deliver the maximum possible value, well above and beyond what is required to retain and attract customers, in order that your customers may maximally benefit and profit from your hard work? Or do you make every possible attempt to capture as much profit as possible for yourself? Economic theory and empirical study would both seem to suggest this is entirely determined not by your personal work ethic and level of entitlement, but by the amount of competition you face. If you're in a competitive industry just about anyone can enter selling a commodity good, you skate by on the tiniest profit margin necessary to survive. If you have a huge moat, regulatory burdens on competition, significant IP protection, you squeeze everyone you can and get rich. Why would employees behave differently?
sublinear 3y ago
> they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes This is the only thing I agree with. Thinking about work tends to get in the way of actually working and prevents ever knowing the benefits. People who think of work as a simple means to an end and live disjointed lives are basically unemployable. All of the value in everything, even beyond money, is the experience... which results in more money and experience. It compounds just the same.
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
This system tries to put into your head that you either are exploited (worker) or are the exploiter (owner), while we could try to arrange our society in a more cooperative way, e.g. with worker cooperatives. Unfortunately the whole system is stuck against such cooperative structures, because elites don't want these type of arrangements to become legitimized on a big scale.
- njarboe 3y ago
  Startups at their best are worker cooperatives. Not everyone has an equal share or say in the company, but with each person having a meaningful amount of stock options you can look at it that way. It's not clear exactly what would be the best distribution of ownership but definitely the less stock held by people not working at the firm the better if one is trying to get out of the exploited and exploiter mentality. How big can this scale? Would like to read a good study on this.
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    I can't agree, sure early employees have some stock (still usually muuuuuuuuuuuch less than founders) but a lot of the time there is a specific class of decision-makers/owners. Workers in big companies like Google get stock that through some fancy beaurocracy doesn't give them decision making-opportunities. I think workers-owners can agree to unequal salary, but even in startups they don't actually make decisions. The biggest known worker cooperative is Mondragon, so this can scale. I would probably try creating different type of structure to this from Mondragon (they still have director class that is chosen by majority vote), but it's an example of big worker coop. Motion Twin would be an example of a small worker coop, they have fixed equal salary which I think was a problem for them, they didn't want to scale so after they developed the game Dead Cells that was a fairly big success some people from this company created another company to be able to scale to develop the game.
Kon5ole 3y ago
>Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. Many people (young and old) don't realise that the value of increased productivity goes to themselves first, in the form of extra time. Being unproductive actually means they are wasting their own time, not their employers time. Being productive is the difference between finishing at 5 with an hour of twitter and reddit scattered throughout the day versus finishing at 4 and spending an hour learning a new skill, for example. That being said, if they are working for a place where they care so little about the work itself that they only see it as lining the pockets of the wealthy, they should of course change jobs. Being productive helps with that too.
throw10920 3y ago
This is a ridiculous comment devoid of any value whatsoever. Productivity has nothing to do with working for a company. The linked article is valuable for me for my personal projects that will never make a dime or be seen by anyone else except for myself. This statement: > any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy ...is both irrelevant to the article, and a fluffy "generic tangent" decried in the HN guidelines that is solely meant to start a political discussion.

lll-o-lll 3y ago

> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business. I do not get this attitude at all. It just smacks of entitlement. How about this for an answer “when the company makes money, they can pay your salary?”. Now, there are many more reasons why an ambitious young person should be invested in their companies success, but any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.

kcplate 3y ago
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.
- godelski 3y ago
  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.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    > 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.
    - godelski 3y ago
      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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366924
- courseofaction 3y ago
  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.
  - malablaster 3y ago
    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.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      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.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    > Working for a salary does not build wealth 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.
cjcenizal 3y ago
Instead of framing it subjectively (“People’s feelings are hurt by capitalism”), consider it objectively. What’s the effect on society when increasing your productivity doesn’t increase your wealth but instead is just a requisite for employment? Wealth accumulates with the wealthy, as the OP stated, and the rest of society grows poorer, sicker, less mobile, and less creative. Would you say that’s sustainable?
antisthenes 3y ago
The truth is somewhere in the middle. After getting to a certain level, I only care enough to get my work done, well. I voluntarily give up a portion of the added value I bring in order to reduce my risk of having to search for new clients every week. Ideally, this value isn't much higher than ~1/3 of whatever the revenue/employee the company currently has. > any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed. The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.)
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > The word "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I am definitely not at my best every day that I work for a company. But I will do my "best" given the constraints I am currently facing, which could be numerous (too many meetings, headache, personal issues, technical issues, etc.) Sure, but the context here was a young person moaning about the “rich capitalist pigs” getting wealthy off the backs of the proletariat. If, as a young person, you get caught up in ideological thinking rather than just getting on and doing your “best”, you’re going to be replaced by someone who was actually willing to do the work.
  - savingsPossible 3y ago
    You want to believe that you have control where you do not, and that the world is fair where it is not. You might get fired because the boss is spending all the money travelling You might get hired to do not so much for 5 years The company might be rich because it is a monopoly It my be poor because a bigger fish has decided to do dumping for a couple of years You might, say, put a lot of effort on twitter right b4 the aquisition, and then, when recuperating, get fired You might take time off, during work hours, to learn a technology, and that advances the companies interest. Or it does not, but advances yours Your carreer is a complex thing, there are no iron reasons why the 'best' will always work, changing jobs is usually an option.
    - 3y ago
whateveracct 3y ago
> That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business. It's called being a sucker. If you're salaried, you should be leaving productivity on the table. You get paid the same no matter what. Finding the line is key. Years ago (around when I started working remote) I started quitting at 1pm every day. And then I started never working Fridays and even some Thursdays (I plan my week so I can push some "leftovers" those days to look like I worked). I use the spare time to sleep, play with my pets, found businesses, learn new skills, enjoy my marriage to the fullest. Also I don't have to give my best to stay employed. I have some factors working in my favor. It costs money to replace me. And it costs time to get someone to my level of onboarded. I've never given my best but they keep paying me 100s of Gs to do it - so I think you're off-base on that point ;)
- SanderNL 3y ago
  I understand and am close to agreeing with you, but I feel an obligation to be difficult. It’s HN (and the internet) after all. Plato and others famously pondered over “why be good?”. If nobody sees you, if you get away with everything, why behave at all? And conversely, if all your good actions go unnoticed or even cause you harm, why do them? It is my experience this lifestyle changes and grinds your character and not in a good way.
  - whateveracct 3y ago
    > It is my experience this lifestyle changes and grinds your character and not in a good way. 1. It's not like I do a bad job. In the hours I do allocate to work, I do an excellent job. I am able to do this because I have been in this role for years and that experience justifies the salary if I just show up. It helps to be excellent - especially when the job is so effortless. 2. It's not a lifestyle. What I'm describing isn't a large part of my life or mindset. So it cannot degrade my character. Because my character is being enhanced by several other things going on in my life that I prioritize over work.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      It’s your life so take my bullshit morality with a pinch of salt, but you make it seem like at least three of your workdays are dedicated to this job. That seems significant enough. I’m sure you do an excellent job and your boss is probably over the moon with you, but this is not about what “society” notices about you. This is about what you know. If I entered into contract and obliged myself to work a set number of hours (and not “productivity”) then I have honour-bound myself to that and all the mental gymnastics in the world cannot change that. I would know I could be more productive and that is actually contractually agreed upon, that’s the rub. If I thought otherwise I need to change the contract to “value of X” iso “X hours”. (And maybe you have such an agreement?) That’s just for me though, I don’t judge you and I’m sorry if I seem that way. Just wanted to offer a counter to the “sucker” narrative.
waboremo 3y ago
Your logic doesn't work because salaries are not attached to performance.
- sowbug 3y ago
  I think GP already addressed that point. If you perform, you help keep the company in business. If you don't, you increase the chances that the company will fail. Aside from the relatively recent innovations of stock options and their descendants, employee outcomes are binary: salary or terminated. That's the bargain employees make as employees rather than equity holders. Compensation still follows your performance*, even if your sampling function's bit depth is one. *On average.
godelski 3y ago
I think there's a difference in interpretation here that plays an important role. To put it simply, when you make $25k/yr, you care a lot about your CEO making $200m/yr, but if you are making $250k/yr I don't think anyone gives a shit. The parent specified a critical qualifier that I think supports this interpretation and many may be missing. Let's make sure we're speaking the same language before we start fighting. >> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and __ONLY__ goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. The use of "only" differentiates this from "a job." It implies that they feel not just undervalued, but excessively so. It is the feeling of doing all or most of the work in a group project and only to have someone else take all or the majority of the credit. I believe most of us have been in that situation at some point. I would be shocked to find that a single person that was in that situation wasn't resentful of that person. Either you're lying (to us or to yourself) or you're the chillest person on the fucking planet. I don't think anyone cares how big CEO compensation is when they're living a comfortable life themselves. The relationship between utility and monetary value does not increase linearly for essentially all metrics of utility. Most follow an S-like curve. When you don't have a lot, every fucking dollar matters and you'll be resentful of anyone stealing any credit from you (scarcity mindset) because the loss is very meaningful. When you're comfortable, then money is substantially less important to you and you probably won't care as much if credit is taken from you because the loss isn't as meaningful. It is actually quite difficult to spend a million dollars a year continuously (or some other Brewster's Millions like situation). You can even see this change in places like HN. When everyone was being let go comments about Pichai's bonuses and Google's stock prices increased. But go back 5 years when there was a bigger boom and all the free stuff and incentives were being given, no one really cared. In this respect I think people focus on the wrong parts of economic inequality. Rather than focusing on the ceiling, focus on the floor. The floor is not the dual of the ceiling because these are not zero sum games (they are for instantaneous or local times, but not in general). Courseofaction, correct me if I'm wrong.
lumb63 3y ago
Not to mention, a comment like this in a discussion about a profession where single people regularly make multiples more than the average household. I’m so tired of the crowd of software engineers (or any profession of similar income) that pretend to be middle class and share the struggle of the “common man”. Sure, the productivity goes to lining the pockets of the wealthy; and you are the wealthy.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Some people here are paid a lot. But some are not.
- waboremo 3y ago
  The average is still 100k. Acting like all engineers are somehow the rare FAANG hires who are making 250k+ is absurd. Further, you ignore the context in which "the wealthy" is used, which is describing those who profit directly from extracting value from labor of those who work beneath them. You know, the people who can offer someone 100k in salary because they know they'll make tenfold in profit back anyways.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    And in some ways, the average SE is still in the same realm as someone making a third of what they do. Many are still just one particularly bad string of unfortunate events away from financial ruin, and it’s not even necessarily their fault with how high CoL is in many places now. In terms of planes of existence, most SEs live on a layer much closer to those inhabited by the average person than they are to the layer that big tech C-suites and the like exist on.
- notduncansmith 3y ago
  When I first joined this website I was working as a programmer and barely above the poverty line. It took years for that to multiply, and my income and costs have both fluctuated heavily. I currently don’t struggle to make ends meet but I’ll never forget all the times when I did.
courseofaction 3y ago
I absolutely feel I should be entitled to live in a society where the vast majority of the wealth isn't held by a small group of people and actively used to subvert democratic processes. I feel entitled to enfranchisement, where the successes of the country are also my success, because I worked hard and paid my taxes. I'll fight for my entitlement, and I'll fight for yours too. But on a less philosophical level, motivated workers are productive workers. Enfranchised workers are motivated workers. Crushing workers' living standards isn't about productivity, it's about greed.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Work the system, or revolution, but don’t sit next to me and blame your laziness on disenfranchisement. I’m a bit older, and if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that no one is entitled to anything. Work in the system or work to change the system, but don’t sit and do nothing while kvetching about it.
  - courseofaction 3y ago
    Motivation is not a conscious process, and enfranchisement absolutely does contribute to performance. My favorite example is how Napoleon could march his army around Italy at 3x the speed of Prussia, because his army was willing and motivated, whereas the Prussians were somewhere between prisoners and slaves looking to run away at any chance - there was nothing in it for them, why would they try? 'Honor', etc? lol. There isn't some great unconquered west that we can strike out into, there is a highly structured society where systems have been deliberately set up to capture value from workers, while giving them as little as possible. Doing nothing and refusing to fund your own oppression are different things, and I will ignore the ad hominem.
    - kubanczyk 3y ago
      Were these 3x soldiers (heh) in touch with reality though? Or did they just buy a bullshit story? It seems that the last time when the system wasn't set up to extract from peasants had been maybe before agricultural revolution?
colordrops 3y ago
Everytime I see the word "entitlement" bandied about, it almost always smacks of entitlement. The user of the word ignores or is ignorant of the various layers of assumptions about the arbitrary nature of the system that is rigged against the average person by the ruling class. You may be lucky enough to have found a way in the system, but it's not "entitled" to point out that the system is bullshit. You are entitled. As if "starting a business" is some fundamental law of nature like breathing or shelter. Most people don't have any other choice than to be an employee. It's like calling serfs entitled. Sheesh.
- monnok 3y ago
  I file use of the word “entitlement” right alongside use of the word “respect.” The only people who ever use the words inflict them as asymmetrical projections of their own abusive characters. “I will respect you when you respect me,” always means: “I will respect your right to exist when you respect my authority over you.” “Your attitude is entitled,” always means, “standing up for yourself reduces the value of my entitlement.” People with the self-reflection necessary to use these words appropriately will also recognize them as currently abusive and over-spoken barriers to communication. They’ll self-select out of speaking them in the first place.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  “I’m not entitled you’re entitled!” Yeah OK. I think the reason we are all arguing with heat here is that it’s about different things. I’m angry at lazy people at work. I think you, and others in these comments, are angry at inequality. I’m angry about that too! I just don’t think it justifies slacking off at work.
becquerel 3y ago
Becoming the owner of your own business just means becoming an exploiter of other people. Not exactly inspiring for me :)
- Madmallard 3y ago
  that's a pessimistic and for many types of businesses incorrect look at things
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  You can try creating a worker cooperative, then you are an owner, but you don't exploit anyone.
- dasil003 3y ago
  By this logic any time you take a job at a business you're being exploited. This seems like a horrible psychological prison to put yourself in.
  - becquerel 3y ago
    Correct! Marx even had a term for it - alienation :)
pokerface_86 3y ago
[dead]
maxerickson 3y ago
It's not entitled to think your job is a 2 sided relationship with the employer. The employer isn't doing you a favor by granting you an opportunity, they are buying your time and attention.
nonameiguess 3y ago
I think you do understand this. If you own a business, do you charge the minimum possible price and deliver the maximum possible value, well above and beyond what is required to retain and attract customers, in order that your customers may maximally benefit and profit from your hard work? Or do you make every possible attempt to capture as much profit as possible for yourself? Economic theory and empirical study would both seem to suggest this is entirely determined not by your personal work ethic and level of entitlement, but by the amount of competition you face. If you're in a competitive industry just about anyone can enter selling a commodity good, you skate by on the tiniest profit margin necessary to survive. If you have a huge moat, regulatory burdens on competition, significant IP protection, you squeeze everyone you can and get rich. Why would employees behave differently?

sublinear 3y ago

> they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes This is the only thing I agree with. Thinking about work tends to get in the way of actually working and prevents ever knowing the benefits. People who think of work as a simple means to an end and live disjointed lives are basically unemployable. All of the value in everything, even beyond money, is the experience... which results in more money and experience. It compounds just the same.

TotalCrackpot 3y ago

This system tries to put into your head that you either are exploited (worker) or are the exploiter (owner), while we could try to arrange our society in a more cooperative way, e.g. with worker cooperatives. Unfortunately the whole system is stuck against such cooperative structures, because elites don't want these type of arrangements to become legitimized on a big scale.

njarboe 3y ago
Startups at their best are worker cooperatives. Not everyone has an equal share or say in the company, but with each person having a meaningful amount of stock options you can look at it that way. It's not clear exactly what would be the best distribution of ownership but definitely the less stock held by people not working at the firm the better if one is trying to get out of the exploited and exploiter mentality. How big can this scale? Would like to read a good study on this.
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  I can't agree, sure early employees have some stock (still usually muuuuuuuuuuuch less than founders) but a lot of the time there is a specific class of decision-makers/owners. Workers in big companies like Google get stock that through some fancy beaurocracy doesn't give them decision making-opportunities. I think workers-owners can agree to unequal salary, but even in startups they don't actually make decisions. The biggest known worker cooperative is Mondragon, so this can scale. I would probably try creating different type of structure to this from Mondragon (they still have director class that is chosen by majority vote), but it's an example of big worker coop. Motion Twin would be an example of a small worker coop, they have fixed equal salary which I think was a problem for them, they didn't want to scale so after they developed the game Dead Cells that was a fairly big success some people from this company created another company to be able to scale to develop the game.

Kon5ole 3y ago

>Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. Many people (young and old) don't realise that the value of increased productivity goes to themselves first, in the form of extra time. Being unproductive actually means they are wasting their own time, not their employers time. Being productive is the difference between finishing at 5 with an hour of twitter and reddit scattered throughout the day versus finishing at 4 and spending an hour learning a new skill, for example. That being said, if they are working for a place where they care so little about the work itself that they only see it as lining the pockets of the wealthy, they should of course change jobs. Being productive helps with that too.

throw10920 3y ago

This is a ridiculous comment devoid of any value whatsoever. Productivity has nothing to do with working for a company. The linked article is valuable for me for my personal projects that will never make a dime or be seen by anyone else except for myself. This statement: > any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy ...is both irrelevant to the article, and a fluffy "generic tangent" decried in the HN guidelines that is solely meant to start a political discussion.