1) You sound very anxious and/or nervous. Which is normal, interviewing isn't fun and can be stressful, but it does not come across great. See if you can relax a bit?
2) "Why do you want to work here?" is one of the most softball questions you can get in a phone screen... they want to know that you've done 5 minutes of research about the company, their tech stack, their values, basically anything. It doesn't have to be your dream job but you have to sound like you're somewhat familiar with what they do and at least partially interested in being a part of it.
"I don't actually know what your company does, sorry, I just sent my resume out to a bunch of places" is about the worst answer you can give here. Why would a company want to hire someone who doesn't know anything about the company and doesn't even pretend to care?
Sorry (to OP) if I'm jumping into conclusions, but the "I didn't want to have to relive them by listening through them again to add in the beeps." part makes me think that it might be more serious than "have you tried not being anxious?". Speaking from personal experience, a therapy for social anxiety can help a lot in such cases.
For #2, "how much do you know about our company? what do you think we do here?" is what I usually ask. If the candidate has no clue, it's not good. I mean, they can't take 5 minutes to look at a web site before the call?
Right, it’s a completely different vibe - the live experience is like no other, but the audio quality is often too loud and harsh and crap, whereas listening in the vinyl cafe would be at the other end of the spectrum
And if you're getting a $365k bonus you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not. I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...
> you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not
This is a great insight which unfortunately doesn't get much attention in the inequality debate. I'm now rich enough to be in the top 0.5% of the world. The marginal utility/value of money is so low for me that I've begun valuing my time and optimizing for it.
I, however, do think about it once in a while. I could give away a non-trivial amount of money without getting materially impacted. The same money though will make a massive difference to someone below or around the poverty line. E.g., sponsoring a student, helping a business loan, etc., The capital that's getting accumulated in the richest top 1% people is such a massive waste that could help a huge portion of humanity.
Purely from a utilization (of money), perspective inequality is a suboptimal state, a massive one at that.
Have you heard of Giving What We Can - an international community of people who pledged to give at least 10% of their income to charities they think are most effective at helping others?
That sounds ... dismissive, but I'm not sure what's actually supposed to be wrong about "non-religious tithing".
Should we give up not working at weekends because it's a "non-religious sabbath"?
10% is a nice round figure. It's small enough that many people can afford to give up that fraction of their income without getting into money trouble. It's large enough that many people will be doing a really substantial amount of good to the world if they give that much of their income to well-chosen charities. And, yes, it happens that some religions have used the same figure, which probably helps "give 10% of your income" seem like a reasonable thing to suggest.
Is there anything bad about any of that? If there is, I don't see it.
I don't claim that there's anything optimal about giving 10% of your income. But I don't see any reason to sneer at people for doing it, either.
I may eat some downvotes for this but I really need to say it. It's a bit off-topic, too.
Please, do not start believing you will be making a difference through charity.
I observed rich people in the past that out of some half-conscious guilt started thinking they need to give back in some way. But they don't want to be inconvenienced by doing it personally or by evaluating which people deserve a donation or have an important material problem solved, by themselves. They prefer to unload their guilt -- or the need to feel good about themselves -- through a 3rd party. Basically, buying goodwill and good conscience with money.
That's not giving back.
I have known several rich people and they go through a very similar process. It's very saddening to observe.
If you want to make a difference with money -- go out there. Physically! Meet people with less. Talk to them. Ask them what is the hardest thing in their lives at the moment. Ask them what's a regular concern for them. Do that 100 times, or 500 times. Understand their struggle. Many would just squander the money in a week, even if you gave them a bag of it. Try and aim your efforts and money where it will truly count.
It's not an easy thing to do. But it's a worthy cause to pursue, much more worthy that a random charity.
I strongly disagree. Financially supporting a charity is an extremely good way for someone with a lot of money to give back. The charitable person may not have expertise to distribute the money effectively, whereas a group who are familiar with the needs and thus where the money should go and how it should be used will use it well.
IMO, what you're saying is akin to saying: Criminals on the streets? Why pay to hire more cops when you can physically go out on the streets and BE the cop?
That’s a fascinating take. I interpreted the comment more as charities (in some cases) can be a poor startup vehicle for those getting into serious philanthropy. So why not spend some time getting to know an issue or a specific community affected by an issue, before donating. More like: Criminals on the streets, despite more cops? Why? Maybe this money can make communities safer or deter would-be criminals?
Very wrong analogy, sorry. You are misrepresenting what I said.
You are also very generously assuming that charities actually do what they are supposed to. Here in Eastern Europe where I live this has been proven to be false, many times. Are you convinced it's better where you live?
In the United States larger nonprofits have a great deal of public accountability. They have to file public financial statements and there are numerous watchdog groups which publish ratings on their effectiveness. Check out Charity Navigator for example. You can also give to organizations like GiveWell which are paid specifically to research nonprofits and direct funds effectively.
Have you ever known poor people for whom money and charity donations actually changes their lives? There are quite a lot of those all over this big world.
Serious answer: no. Never. And those who just received money like that squandered them in no time.
Granted this is anecdotal evidence but my overlook on a number of average people flaws -- and I am including myself in this group, I am not pretending like I am on some sort of a moral high ground, mind you -- indicates that most people are not... ready to receive money, if that's even the right word.
It's more or less "OMG money money money!!!!" out of them and they just mess up.
But truthfully, and this is not sarcasm, I'd love to be proven wrong.
I'm not quite where you are wealth-wise but definitely I have had that moment several times recently where I am re-evaluating hiring out work I would have just done myself in the past. I didn't have some big windfall, but pretty much earned and saved my way to wealth. Now it is hard to not do things like fix my own cars as well as bring my own lunch. I do them out of habit now. That's the discipline. Anyways, you don't want idiots working on your cars and you don't want to eat at restaurants all the time.
It makes no sense to me why the CEO and higher ups of the company I work at still work there. They are already set for life many times over. I can only speculate that they share a character flaw that they all see as virtuous. However it isn't--they are impeding someone's chance to "make it" in life, especially the older executives who could have stepped aside a decade ago or more. Even if you just look at the absurd salaries, it doesn't paint a pleasant portrait of greed in America.
There is a great absurdity to life in America. We basically work for the appearance of something that ends up being eaten away to a large degree. Taxes and inflation keep the goalposts moving away but we don't rebel because it's a magic trick and who doesn't like magic?
I don't work because I enjoy it but because it is a means to an end that is a better formula than some other arrangement. I would happily volunteer my time, travel, read, or simply do nothing if I could.
“t makes no sense to me why the CEO and higher ups of the company I work at still work there. ”
My theory is that they simply like their work and get satisfaction from it. They get paid a lot but they also work a lot and I can’t imagine anybody doing this to themselves if they didn’t genuinely like it.
If that were the case, most executives would stay put for decades and take pride in their company. Executives are mercenaries, staying for a few years and moving once someone offers a bigger slice of pie. Lots of people are addicted to exponential growth and wealth and blinded by the damage this behavior wreaks on everyone else.
The work argument is bullshit too. I'm convinced with a few months of hands on training, any passionate and competant person can do the job of a CEO. It is really a job that lacks any qualifications beyond managing a small network of people. CEOs don't work 100x as hard as someone working full time and a second job to make 1% a CEOs pay.
We know the medically "sitting back, and enjoying your retirement" results in a quick death. Doctors now tell people entering retirement to "stay busy". It doesn't matter if you build birdhouses, play chess, or any of the other million things you can do, but don't sit back and relax.
I think most CEOs - used to working extra hours/hard have the least idea what they would do after they retire.
My sibling and their significant other are those sorts of people - both made it very high up their respective professions by their early 30's, but when it's time for the Christmas get together, it's a pissing contest about "Oh, I'm only working 70 hour weeks, so I've had some relaxation the last little while." There's little identity outside of work, amassing the cash, then taking vacations with the money, and turning around and doing it all again.
There is a much higher rate of sociopathy among corporate executives [0]. It’s still a small rate probably, but it also likely means that some fraction of the people seeking these positions are doing so to derive sadistic pleasure from authority and power. Yes, they also want wealth, but they may persist even after money is no longer important because the position gives them power to soothe narcissistic & sociopathic tendencies.
I think doing something and then learning that you are good at it is pretty intoxicating in general. People who make it to the upper levels of a company are extremely good at playing the games you have to play and there is a lot of external validation in it too. I am just a little tech lead but I also get a kick out of my team of a few performing well. I can't even imagine how exhilarating it is to have an influence on hundreds or thousands of people and to play with millions and billions of dollars.
> It makes no sense to me why the CEO and higher ups of the company I work at still work there.
I expect a large number of middle/upper-middle class people would already be made for life if they just moved to a low cost area/country and simplified their lifestyle.
> I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...
At very large-scale companies, it doesn't always work as well as coud be hoped. A company ten times the size of this company may not have ten times as many extremely-highly-paid executives, but it probably has ten times as many people further down the pyramid.
For example, the CEO of United Airlines is compensated $18 million-ish. There are 88,000 employees of United. That's $200 dollars per employee per year. You'd have to find a lot more money than that before you started seeing benefits to average employees on the same scale as here. Even if you assume all the highly-compensated execs can account for 5x-10x that, you're still well short of $14k/yr.
What if you were to add up the income of not just the CEO, but all high level management or, say, those who make more than 500.000 a year? Honest question that I'm not sure how to answer myself, but I suspect the benefit to the lower ranks would be much more than the $200 a year.
This says there are 24 executives at United (I counted). If you assume literally every single one of them is paid as much as the CEO is and redistribute all that money across the whole of United, then that's 24 * $200 = $4800. $200 was rouding a bit ($207 is ungainly to work with), so it's actually closer to $5000.
Now, $5000 a year isn't nothing. It's undoubtedly and unquestionably a life-changing amount of money for a lot of people struggling to get by on manifestly unreasonable and unfair minimum wages.
That said, $5k is also far short of the $14k number above. And we had to make several unreasonable assumptions to get here.
Realistically, the policy proposed here is freezing salaries and re-directing raises among executives. Most compensation would be unaffected. Further, not every executive will be paid as well as the CEO. Assuming generous 10% yearly raises and that other executives are paid around half of what the CEO is, you get a result that looks like $5000 / 2 = 2500 * 0.1 = $250 / yr.
Which isn't far from the initial result. (And still includes some unreasonable assumptions)
Thanks for the calculation! I think limiting it to the 24 execs is still a bit on the conservative end of things (as far as equalizing pay goes), but it's interesting to think on.
I'm actually surprised how merely broadening the calculation a bit already results in a quite significant amount. 5k is quite a bit!
What I'd like to see is what the numbers look like if you:
1) Pegged the CEO <-> lowest-paid worker (or contracted worker, so you can't just contract out the janitors) to no greater than 10 to 1.
2) Balance out the next few layers of management to reflect that cap.
3) And see what pay looks like for the lowest-paid workers.
If you don't like 10-to-1, maybe we do 20-to-1. Find a nice low ratio, though, and if people want to make more, they can run the business such that everyone makes more.
Very minimally different, I rather strongly suspect. You'd probably get larger shareholder dividends, but not that much larger.
There's this idea we're dealing with here that there's massive, virtually untapped, make-everybody-well-paid amounts of money being wasted on management overhead. It's a very reasonable idea. Managers at the top get paid an amount of money that's clearly and obviously incredibly excessive and has absolutely no connection to anything!
Yet, it might be worth considering that this might not actually be true in the important broad sense. What if there isn't a vast pool of money locked up in management salaries that would dramatically improve the lives of workers? What if there isn't the "fix the car money" or "send a kid to college money" another poster was rhapsodizing about for every worker? Might it be worth considering that in most cases, managers aren't actually paid vastly more than their direct reports?
Besides, there are plenty of ways to structure businesses that would get around something as simplistic as a compensation ratio.
There will always be another "But what if we run the numbers differently?" scenario.
I have no reason to believe that it's minimally different, and I'm curious what reason you do, aside from it's comforting.
When 10 people own as much as half of the population of the country, there's something there. Calling it not "a vast pool of money" might be semantics, because there's definitely something there.
When 10 people own as much as half the population, there's definitely a lot wrong with society.
It's perhaps worth considering that most companies might not replicate that structure internally. Given the numbers above, this strikes me as good reason to suspect that the approach you describe - while definitely a good idea to promote equality! - might not have the the numerical outputs you expect.
You have to be wildly fantastical to get there, though. Meaning it's not a number that should be taken at all seriously as anything other than a work of numerical fiction. $250 is a number that's likely much closer to reality, though probably still too high unless you can find a much broader swath of people to freeze the salaries of.
Or, if you take a company like Google, give every engineer a 5% haircut, bring the chefs and cleaning staff and groundkeepers and building maintenance back into the company (rather than contracting out), and distribute the money and stock grants among the support staff.
That'd cause a big morale hit & big incentive for engineers to leave. Support staff are great, but at the end of the day they're not what drives growth for the company.
Eh, you take it out of the stock grant refreshes and the noise of stock fluctuations will make it rather difficult to notice in your total compensation.
EDIT: Also, you're taking income off the top of the tax brackets and giving it to someone at the bottom of the bottom, so you get a tax multiplier where you take $1 from me and give $1.50 to someone else. Also, you probably don't need even a 2% or 3% haircut off the engineers' salaries to make every support position a $100k/year job with full benefits and 401k matching, unless your engineer : support ratio is crazy.
EDIT EDIT: Yeah, pushing everyone to $100k/year is probably overselling the idea. You could still free up a life-changing amount of money for people making minimum or near-minimum wage.
Google's published numbers put their engineering headcount at below half their overall headcount.
I'm not sure a 3% haircut on engineers at Google would give them enough funds to make every support position $100k while also doing what you suggested and bringing all the contracted services in-house.
If we assume a 3% haircut on an average engineering compensation of $250k, and 45% of the organization, you have $6k and change per support headcount. And this is without bringing TVCs in-house.
Unless the support staff are all making right about 95k, this seems like it might not quite work out.
I actually don't have enough numbers available myself to support this, so this conversation is doomed to a lot of hand-waving.
However, one point of definitions, I am not using "support staff" to refer to "non-engineers", I am using it to refer to "workers who perform services that are not part of the company's operations, such as building maintenance, cleaning, and cooking". Most of the non-engineering staff at Google are not support staff, they are non-engineering employees doing non-engineering work equally related to the core operations of the business. Sales, partner relations, data center management.
I also don't know how much these individuals are payed, although I hope to god it is "well above minimum wage".
In any case, sure, you're probably right and you can't actually bring everyone up to SWE-minimum-wage (100k$+benefits) with a small haircut off the engineering staff, but a small haircut off engineering, distributed to the 10-20% of employees and contractors being paid the least is a life-changing amount of money. +$15k / employee / year to the bottom 20% of earners is "quit your second job" money, it's "get the car fixed" money, it's "have money to put aside for a rainy day" money, it's "send the kid to college" money, while $7.5k less per year is "retire three months later" money for an engineer.
A lot of the non engineering staff would still be other white collar jobs, no? Sales, admin, HR, etc. $100K is a high number OP reached for, but I’d think a vast majority of Google’s job total comp is in the 6 figures. Or close to it with some junior employees not in certain cities.
What you're saying makes rational sense, but people's egos are not rational. It's the principle of the thing: why tolerate a pay cut when there's a long line of companies in the valley itching for your skills?
At least for Google, IMO I don’t think it would generate long term consequences if engineers with this mindset who also aren’t in love with their work left the company.
Let the sociopaths leave then, they aren't emotionally valuable for a company. Plenty of people in the world outside of engineering take large pay cuts to work on something they believe in vs. taking a job that gives them the most wealth.
Being offended by a pay cut doesn't make you a sociopath, just makes you selfish. And "emotional value" is much less relevant to a company than engineering value.
I know lots of people focus on less profit-driven motives for their career, but I bet even more do not, especially at places like Google.
That's a terrible mentality. Exponential growth is not sustainable. The worst thing about technology companies these days is that putting out a polished product and covering overhead + emergency funding is seen as a failure. Products must be modified to extract money from the consumer at every turn, and the market cap must rise and rise. If engineers would leave a company because its no longer growth driven, then our universites have failed to teach empathy in their engineering curriculum.
Last time someone tried to teach me empathy, all I learned is that they had a poor understanding of how emotions connect to actions. They assumed that if I had a real, true, genuine emotional experience of empathy then I would be compelled to take some specific action. Generally the action assumed is either something directly to alleviate the perceived pain or the one prescribed by the person evoking the empathy.
I find these notions curious, and rather at odds with how I expect thinking humans to interact with the world around them.
Perhaps there's something else you think our universities might be failing to teach?
Still not much. I didn't bother to look it up (it probably isn't public), but doubt more than 10 people at United make more than $500,000/year, so the amount isn't significant. Now if you said $200,000/year I would expect a significant amount of people make that. However now you are getting into the middle class where lifestyles have expanded to spend most of that money, and they would feel the pinch.
The latest SEC filing does not include executive compensation, having disclosed it at the latest shareholder meeting.
The 2015 SEC filing includes 8 named individuals in its executive compensation program. In 2015, they received between $500,000 and $1.25M in base salary, and between $1 million and $10.7M in long-term incentives. In addition, they received between 110% and 150% of their base salary in annual incentives (bonuses). Two of them received additional monthly cash payments of $100,000 and $40,000 for temporary duties in addition to their normal post.
Granted, that's only the top 8 individuals at the company, but if the lowest-compensated individual among those 8 is taking home >$2M I'm fairly certain that there are a lot more than 10 making more than $500k.
It's also still the case that that pile of money is not much divided among 88,000 people, but you could still raise the income of the lowest-compensated 10k employees by several thousand dollars, or fund employee daycare, or something other than give it to a small group of people.
At that point people don't value money for what it can buy them, they value it for what it looks like in their accounts. That's the problem.
I'm not rich per se, but I make enough that I can give away 10% of my pre-tax income to nonprofits without it materially impacting my quality of life, so that's what I do. If my society won't distribute wealth in a sane way, then I'll do it for them. If anyone else has similar feelings, consider taking a percentage off the top of your own salary and allocating it to charities that will help the less fortunate.
>In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.
Trying to take a single minor difference in behavior in a controlled setting and apply it to an entire demographic is bad psychology. Imagine someone doing this with a demographic distinction other than SES.
I agree that a lot of luxury is irresponsible, but at the same time I tend to view it differently depending on the situation:
An executive making a luxury purchase is different if their company is successful versus laying off lots of employees.
Buying a yacht can be part of an understandable (although expensive) hobby/lifestyle as opposed to something simply wasteful like buying solid gold toilet seats.
Building beautiful architecture, commissioning art, or adventuring/exploring (e.g. being the first person to climb X or to cross Y) can contribute to the vibrancy of society even if it isn't super practical.
I think most Americans have phones that are used, and not Apple, and not flagship. Europe is pretty divers so I don't know if you mean Greece ~€1000 or Norway ~€4000 but it still seems like a stretch
When I lived in the US I thought more Europeans lived in gorgeous architecture and had excellent public transport. Living in Europe, I find a lot of people think Americans are wealthier than reality (though if they're thinking of tech salaries, they're probably right - that EU/US disparity is enormous).
There are twelve countries in the European Union with an average net income of less than 1000 euro. The two poorest ones (Romania & Bulgaria) are at 515 euro and 406 euro. So it's not that of a stretch that Americans have phones worth more than a European monthly wage.
I understand that a popular philosophy is that they're rich because they deserve it; they're simply better people. There's no shame to be had; it's simply the natural order of things, it's morally right.
While I agree with the absurdity of rich people being "better" than the less wealthy, what makes someone "deserve" to be rich? I would argue that no one deserves to be poor, but whether or not it is morally correct to buy nice things doesn't sound to me like a debate worth having.
At what point does someone need to be ashamed of the money they make? Is anything over the $50k figure that is quoted as the maximum happiness per dollar figure considered shameful?
I don't think it's a matter of shame, but it's a matter of realizing that while it may have been hard work, it was also a fair amount of luck that got you to where you got to be, and that a lot of people put in the same amount of work, but due to the fates they don't end up in the same place.
What makes someone deserve to be rich, under this philosophy? I understand that's not part of it. Maybe some of them deserve to be rich for being clever, some deserve to be rich for working hard, there are many reasons. The point is that they clearly do deserve it because they are rich.
That's the thing, once you reach a certain level of net worth it's actually relatively hard to become poor again. You have to actively make really poor financial decisions over a long period of time.
Buy a boat for $100,000 and it'll cost you money to maintain and run.
Buy a boat for $100 million and it'll earn you money if you lease it out or take passengers during the 11 months of the year that you're not using it.
Maybe. It is hard to making money leasing your boat. You need to pay the crew and such. If the market of people wanting to lease a boat is down one year you still have to pay those people.
Note that a boat is a bad example on your part. There are lots of other things you can do that are more likely to earn money.
For that matter if you can afford a $100 million boat, the crew cost is a line item that you can ignore and thus your boat sits in port 11 months just so you can have your boat. If you really like that boat it isn't a big deal that you are losing that much money.
If you invest it directly you support whatever you invest in. (you might or might not get it back depending on if the investment is successful) The best case you supported a new things that everybody buys, thus creating a company that employees a lot of workers.
If you buy luxury goods you directly support all the employees of the companies that make those goods, keeping them in a job.
Even if the investment choice was a life saving drug, the luxury purchase means those employees have money and they are likely to donate to research of life saving drugs.
Consider what happens to the actual resources in the different cases:
1. You spent the money on consumption. By definition, consumption means that whatever you buy ends up being less valuable after you are done with it (otherwise we would consider it investment - note that unsuccessful investment is also a form of consumption under this definition). Consider an extreme example, where you commission a massive yacht to be built for you, then use the yacht recklessly and sink it. All of the time of many people, all of the materials that went into building it have been wasted. In aggregate, we are all poorer as a result.
The fact that the yacht company now has more money just means that they now have a relatively larger claim on a smaller overall economic pie than they did before.
2. You invest. Instead of spending money on yourself, you instead use the resources you have a claim to that the money represents (e.g. the people and the resources that could have resulted in a yacht for yourself) to create real value for others. This makes the overall economic pie larger (and also changes the distribution of claims on this pie that people have).
3. You donate money to other people, burn the money - neither consume nor invest. The overall economic pie is unchanged, but the distribution of claims on this pie by various people has changed.
Of course, there are caveats and nuances, but in general option 2 makes society richer in aggregate, option 1 makes it poorer, and option 3 merely changes who gets to decide what to do with the resources that we have while neither growing nor shrinking this resource base.
Please stop this. Instead of insults, why not ask a clarifying question and contribute to an intellectual conversation? Your instant conclusion is not always right.
Money for luxury things doesn't do nearly as much as money for necessities, because luxury things are optional. The person with the money can easily decide to postpone the purchase and save the money instead. Or spend the money abroad, which doesn't do much for the local economy.
People who are short on necessities will immediately buy them when they get the money for them, because they are necessities. Money for the poor is an extremely reliable way to stimulate the economy, much more so than money for the rich.
Maybe saving money is as important as "stimulating" the economy? Maybe the type of economy is important too, i.e. luxury items that push the envelope wrt novel manufacturing methods or R&D
Maybe, or maybe not. I think the first concern is that everybody should be able to eat, have a roof over their heads, and have the freedom to focus on other things. I think it's definitely healthy for a society if the poor are able to save some money so their life doesn't immediately collapse on a rainy day. Once that's sorted, I'm all for investigating all the maybes.
Depends. Maybe not all "poor" are the same. Some choose not to stay in school, what do you do then? Guarantee food and shelter anyway? Why work my way up through the humiliation of McJob when I can stay home and prove my worth in Xbox?
Are we still talking about stimulating the economy? Then yes, making sure they have money to spend will ensure they spend it, increase demand, and grow the economy.
But yes, reject humiliating jobs. I'm not sure why you'd actively want people to be miserable.
But if you want a bigger picture: create better opportunities, and make sure they are accessible to everybody. The whole reason people withdraw from society into either drugs or gaming or whatever, is that, from their perspective, society has nothing to offer them but humiliation and misery. Heaping more humiliation and misery on them is not going to fix anything.
And if rich kids drop out of school and spend their time partying, they're also guaranteed food and shelter, and quite a bit of wealth on top of that.
If the money if free, distributing it will stimulate the economy. But since that money comes from somewhere, any growth due to that distribution competes with the lack of growth due to wherever you took it from,
e.g If you took it via taxes, people have less money to spend because of the higher taxes.
If you took it from the rich because they don't spend it on things, they also don't invest it, meaning banks have less capital.
> reject humiliating jobs
serving fast food is humiliating to people with people who think of themselves as better
> create better opportunities, and make sure they are accessible to everybody.
like free school? and those people who choose not to attend?
You seems to think the only problem is lack of opportunity, it isn't. For example, if a community has a drug problem, a better economy isn't going to fix that.
> The whole reason people withdraw from society
people don't withdrawn from society fully, they just stop contributing to it. They need society for food, shelter etc. You are suggesting they get these things unconditionally, ensuring their withdrawal is indefinitely viable.
And drug addicts aren't simply poor, that's an entirely different issue.
> And if rich kids drop out of school..
So what? The state, and by extension the taxpayer, don't fund that, so it's none of our business how that works out. The state shouldn't micromanage all of society to ensure equal outcomes for all, and if it did it would need far more power than it has now.
A "rich" kid isn't guaranteed anything beyond what their rich parents decide, and I'm not going to tell someone how to spend their money.
In this case, we're comparing giving money to the rich to giving it to the poor. It's coming from the same place in both cases. In this case, it's quite likely that the financial problems of the poor people in the company has been hurting their productivity (the article doesn't really go into that, but it starts with that the company was stagnating). For the rich, their growth is just a number; they don't really need that extra money for anything, because they already have plenty of it.
Of course in general, it's best to use the money wherever it will give you the best growth. I think that in general, that will be where the most growth is needed; where the most shortages are.
> serving fast food is humiliating to people with people who think of themselves as better
Well, you were the one calling it humiliating. I've got nothing against serving fast food, but in general, I think jobs shouldn't be humiliating, and I feel strongly that people should have the freedom to reject humiliating jobs. A job is a major part of your life. It shouldn't be sucking your soul out, it should stimulate and/or empower you.
> You seems to think the only problem is lack of opportunity, it isn't.
It's not the only problem, but a lack of opportunity is absolutely a problem. And a very real one, for a lot of people.
> For example, if a community has a drug problem, a better economy isn't going to fix that.
No, but that drug problem comes from somewhere, and humiliating or punishing people isn't going to fix it. If anything, that seems likely to make it worse.
Yes and no. Give someone earning $7.50/hour more money and it gets spent and put back into the economy like you said. Give someone earning a base salary of say 500k more money and it gets put into a bank to earn them even more money, taking it out of the equation.
Invest the money with a payday lender to loan it out to your under-paid employees so you can grab even more of their paycheck!
Buy a block of housing that houses your under-paid employees and raise rents so you can get even more of their paycheck!
Invest in sub-prime auto loans so that your underpaid employees can get to work. Make money on them while the commute! Of course make sure that you diversify if you need to lay them off!
Invest is short term unsecured credit card debt of your under-paid employees. To goose the returns put them on a high deductible health plan and leverage what you lend to them with their own health account savings (free money). If you are generous give them a 401K match (which is required by law if you have the same) and leverage up using that money too!
Many of your underpaid employees will be on food stamps and located in areas without those fancy suburban grocery stores. Invest a quicky-mart and rake in the food stamp money at high margins! Don’t forget the liquor and lotto tickets as income boosters! If you underpaid employees can’t numb at least you can sell them a bit of hope!
Lastly have you thought about the medical field? A lot of your under paid employees are on Medicaid and I’m hearing good things about insulin!
I don't support trickle down economics, but it's not the case that money in banks is just sitting around in a vault. The banks actually do stuff with the money. For example it's loaned out to real world businesses.
They don't take money and lend it out. They create money, lend that, and then remove that money as the capital (loan amount) is repaid - or when the loan goes into default.
Hypothetically here you would invest the 500k which is putting money into the economy.
Your right that socially its better for society for a lower paid person to have the $ how ever certainly in the UK some of that increase would get clawed back by reduction in benefits.
How does buying $500k worth of stock ("investing the money") stimulate the economy? Haven't I just purchased a paper asset from the seller? I guess you could argue that the seller who liquidated their position is now free to spend that cash on something productive.
That’s the argument for buybacks and dividends. If companies don’t have any NPV positive projects to take then the cash must go out to shareholders who do.
As far as investments, I'm no economist, but I'm skeptical that the money spent purchasing securities has an equal impact as someone buying goods and services locally. It seems like a disproportionate amount would go right back to other members of the investor class, who are going to use it on other securities, or else high-margin luxury items, and very little of that is actually going to escape that bubble.
I think you could argue that replacing benefits with direct income is still a "win" for society. If they're able, it's more efficient for people to meet their own needs than to be provided for through a bureaucratic process with lots of administrative overhead.
This shouldn't be downvoted, because Trickle-down economics, or rather politics, is a big part of today's world, and it needs to be discussed. It tries to justify socioeconomic stratification and deregulation, which is nuts in this late-stage capitalist society. It shouldn't be supported, in my opinion at least, but it should be critiqued and discussed. It's too important to be downvoted out of the thread.
How did you get into freelancing, specifically in Germany? Do you get most work from Linkedin? I really don't like that site for various reasons but if it's necessary for freelance work I might have to sign up...
I was not happy at my old job any more and decided to try if freelancing works for me.
At first I was struggling a bit. You have to get projects, figure out how everything works, get insurances and so on.
Now I mostly work for a recruiting agency. They get a cut from what I make (quite a huge cut actually), but they in return make sure that they have work for me.
I am still figuring things out. What I most struggle with is finding a good work-life balance. I work way much than I did before.
Before starting to freelance you should make sure that you have enough money to survive ~3 month without any gigs. It will also take a while until your first gigs are paid. Something to keep in mind.
Being on Linkedin is absolutely essential imo, if you don’t have a network already. I just use the site to answer to recruiter-messages, that’s it.
Similar process for me. I worked in a few startups in Berlin and didn't enjoy it so switched to freelancing out of frustration.
There's a lot of react contracts on LinkedIn which you usually find through recruiters that take around 25%, they pay well but the work isn't as interesting or engaging to me (usually big corporations in generic markets).
The best work for sure is through referrals. My first gig was through an old boss, and I'm starting to learn that letting your friends and old coworkers know you're looking for work in the near future is often better than taking something more 'secure'. Clients often want someone immediately and aren't willing to wait two or three weeks while you finish up a previous project, especially if the project is more attractive (and the competition is higher).
Thanks for sharing. I am exploring freelancing, and I am seeing a lot of demand for React (and similar projects). Full stack POCs with mobile clients seem like a good way to go.
Would you mind describing your path from deciding to freelance and where you are you now? You mention networking and unpaid/low paid gigs. I assume that you found projects in your near network, these projects were lower risk / with trusted connections, then you eventually built a portfolio and got the mechanics of freelancing down. Then made a connection with the agency and have continued your success inertia.
My path to freelancing went something like this:
I used to have some small gigs on the site while being employed—projects which were not interesting for the company I worked at the time anyway. This way, before I actually quit, I already was able to write invoices and did not have to figure this out as well (but it is not that hard).
My first project was a web-experience for a venue which was paid okay, but resulted in a lot of back-and-forth with the client. I am still working for that client every now and then. I was applying to a job-offer of a small agency on a job-board looking for a freelancer for that project. I spent a lot of hours initially to go through all available freelance jobs on that (German) platform, made a selection what I would be able to do and wrote some messages. I don’t know any more how many messages I wrote, but it were less than five until I got a gig.
The second project was a big Vue.js one for an agency, which is still ongoing part-time. I got this gig via a freelance consultancy. Everything is quite personal. No corporate. Remote work okay.
At first I spent a few weeks working from their office, then enough trust was built for remote work. I now track my time and write an invoice each month.
Being billed by the hour gives me some peace of mind to not make wrong estimations. It is still hard for me to realistically guess how much feature xyz or a whole web applications will be. I guess that comes with time and involves to look at projects in retrospect more.
Since starting to freelance I noticed a few changes:
I say “no” more often. I had to say no to a few projects in between. Mostly interesting, badly paid short term projects. If I did not have to care about money I would have loved to work on these, but right now I prefer “stable”, well-paid projects. This is also because I come from a creative background, where projects are often interesting, but chaotic. Finding the balance between interesting and stable is not easy and everybody has to decide on their own what is important to them. Working on better paid (maybe less creative / interesting) gigs gives me more time to work on my own projects (in theory, if I would reject more client-work).
It is very important to spend enough time writing proposals. It happened a few times already that the client and I had different views on the final outcome of a project. If you took your time to put everything in writing in the proposal, it will be much easier, because there is no ground (or very little) for ambiguity. At first I just wrote something like “Design and build website”. Now it will be much more detailed. I will write how many pages the website has, if there is animation, if xyz is involved or not and so on.
My productivity in general increased. When being employed you usually know that e.g. at 5 PM you can go home and do whatever you want. If you don’t feel like working between 3–5 you have to look busy or just do some work somehow. When you are freelancing you can listen more to your body and decide on your own when working is okay. If I notice that I am not productive I will most likely stop working and continue at a later point. This way I get more done in an hour of freelance work than an hour of work in my old job, which gives me a better overall feeling.
One last thing about the biggest down-side from my perspective: work-life balance.
You have to decide for yourself when it is enough. For me it is not easy to tell myself: “You worked enough today, now you should do something fun”. There is always more to do. Also if you get more done today, less work will be there tomorrow. Right? Nope.
I personally need to find rules to restrict myself regarding working hours. Having some (personal) rules might make things easier.
I'm fine with outrage-inducing propaganda against people who have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars since that class as a whole spends so much time putting out propaganda in their favor. I'm not particularly interested in the details as long as it elevates consciousness about the inherent problems with a society that allows Jeff Bezos to have more money than he could spend in ten thousand lifetimes while millions of people aren't entirely sure how they're going to afford food next week
Out of all the rich people we could talk about, Bezos is actually one of the ones I have the least problem with. Bezos has a lot of money, but he doesn't have tens of billions of dollars of "money". His net worth is mostly tied up in Amazon ownership, and if he tried to liquidate more than a small fraction of it then it'd suddenly be worth much less, both because of increased supply, and because Amazon's value is very tied up in his ability to drive the company. Maybe we could talk about problems with a system that allow Amazon to be worth as much as it is, but for the founder of a company to be worth a lot because they built a big company, that doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Amazon is not Jeff Bezos. Taxing him would be a whole different topic of conversation. Probably more on the topics of executive compensation, taxes for high incomes, and a bunch of other possible subjects.
Interesting discussion to be had, for sure, but not what the article is really about.
It all falls under the same umbrella, which as you accurately described as "rich guys who don't share anything" and as far as I'm concerned any amount of elevated consciousness around that is a good thing, even if strictly speaking taking money from Bezos the man and Amazon the company are two separate types of taxation and two different discussions. Bezos and his company Amazon both make almost unfathomable amounts of money and don't pay anywhere near what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society. As Amazon's PR people point out this is legal, naturally, but this article does a good job of contrasting Amazon using every tax trick in the book with normal human beings who aren't able to deduct their expenses for cancer treatment. Likely because the lobby representing the financial interests of individuals with cancer is not all that strong.
"Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, but I pay taxes" is a very good sound byte from this, even if the reasons why that's the case are obviously more complicated.
How about we don’t encourage outrage inducing propaganda against anyone? If you have an issue with some someone has actually done (like for example putting out their own propoganda) then by all means be critical of that. What value is there in accepting vapid nonsense, just because it targets someone you dislike?
Given that slaves built most of America, he kind of has a point, but not for the reasons he wants to have a point. It's so laughable to see venture capitalists appeal to some imagined moral imperative ("democracy vs. communism," which as DHH points out might have been a bit scarier in 1950) when in reality they're just arguing for shaping the system in a way that will ultimately make them more money.
"America was built on slavery" is obviously a bit of hyperbole, but given the economic boost to agriculture in the south built on the backs of African slaves, or the literal building of the east-west infrastructure on the backs of Chinese ones, I don't think it's an unfair claim.
Prior to the civil war, slaves were the single largest asset, by value, that America held -- more than it's land or agricultural exports; more than it's railroads, banks, or factories. Cotton was the number one export across all of America, not just the south, at that time. And it's not like this value was destroyed by the civil war -- post-slavery institutions were extraordinarily effective at restoring or keeping pre-slavery conditions long after the end of the civil war. The slaves may not have physically built most of America -- but it's silly to suggest America's wealth isn't largely, perhaps primarily, born from the fruits of slavery.
For sources, feel free to examine any modern history book.
There's a difference between these tests (has this person smoked weed at any point in the last month, roughly?) and breathalyzer tests (is this person currently drunk?)
Showing up to work drunk vs. showing up to work two weeks after smoking weed are relatively different scenarios, to say the least.
Hair tests for alcohol indicates average consumption over a period of months. It can also be detected using blood/urine tests over shorter periods of time, but similarly testing for usage rather than 'are you drunk right now' which hardly needs a test.
I've been using Mac products since I was a child (thanks, dad) more or less happily and the removal of the headphone jack and the requirement that you have these adaptors has been the first thing to make me seriously consider going elsewhere. I probably won't, due to years of lock-in, but to rephrase it's the worst experience I've had with anything Apple in my lifetime. I've had three adaptors, two Apple ones that broke in separate ways (one would keep firing commands randomly from the control buttons on my headphones, the other lost the right channel entirely) and a crappy third party one that just fell apart. Even when the adaptor works, having a dongle sticking out of your pants pocket is a total pain that nobody really asked for. It solves no problem, it's in no way better than the previous alternative, and it really just reads like a massive "fuck you, pay me" from Apple to their customers.
I settled on non-Apple bluetooth headphones, which have their own set of problems but at least I can reliably listen to music during my commute (for the most part).
Kind of, but not for the reasons they want me to like it. The redesign itself is terrible in almost every way, but in being so terrible it really drives a point home I've been thinking about for a while: the "best practices" of modern SPA design and implementation can really lead to drastically reduced functionality.
It might look slightly easier on the eyes (debatable) but other than that, actually using the redesign is worse in almost every way. It's slower than the previous version and there's way less information on a page, yet this is the app you'd get if you followed all the "common wisdom" about building a web front end in 2019.
Compare this to something like craigslist, or pinboard, or HN, which are all theoretically "ugly" but all very fast and very easy to use. Content notwithstanding the user experience on craigslist is infinitely better than the one on new Reddit.
So yes, I like the redesign, but only in the sense that is has highlighted all of the bad parts of modern web design to me in a very concrete way.
A couple million dollars a year [1]. It's always interesting to me how relatively little money it takes to make life objectively worse for everyone else in the country while making a small number of people richer. For the cost of a nice house or a low-budget indie film you can make sure taxes are difficult to file for everyone. Of course there's more to the influence these companies have than the dollar value they spend per year but still, it ain't that much money.
That makes me wonder if there could be a model of some sort of "People's Lobby" where one could set up a fund that individuals could contribute to in order to lobby for/against something.
Probably more complicated than that and corporations would respond in kind. But it does seem like giving citizens the ability to compete in the lobbying space only makes sense.
1) You sound very anxious and/or nervous. Which is normal, interviewing isn't fun and can be stressful, but it does not come across great. See if you can relax a bit?
2) "Why do you want to work here?" is one of the most softball questions you can get in a phone screen... they want to know that you've done 5 minutes of research about the company, their tech stack, their values, basically anything. It doesn't have to be your dream job but you have to sound like you're somewhat familiar with what they do and at least partially interested in being a part of it.
"I don't actually know what your company does, sorry, I just sent my resume out to a bunch of places" is about the worst answer you can give here. Why would a company want to hire someone who doesn't know anything about the company and doesn't even pretend to care?