Some times I feel as if we are just building a larger, virtual, more complicated, and deadlier coliseum.
Why can’t we realize that in hyper competitive markets, sure, half (or some amount) win. But half also lose. And snowflake, you are probably in the wrong half.
You’re trapped in a job you may or may not want because if you leave, you lose your healthcare (and often that of your family)?
You’re trapped working a certain number of hours (at least 24 or 30, depending on state and employer, I think) because if you work less than those, you aren’t “full time” and, therefore, don’t get healthcare?
If we had healthcare not tied to our jobs, neither of these would be an issue in the slightest.
When I had to buy health care for a few months while under-employed, it cost the same as my mortgage for two adults. And considering if I hadn’t, this incident would have bankrupted me, I don’t feel like I have a choice.
Employer health care is a blight.
I’m sad that happened to you. So many hard working people have had their retirement and housing … their relationships and discretionary time … stolen by for-profit health care and insurance companies. So many are bankrupted by medical debt.
Thank FSM I came out okay. But holy mole it could have been bad if I hadn’t said, “sure, I’ll spend a chunk of savings on insurance”.
Single payer, nationalized care for emergencies and preventative is the only way. Elective? Want lasik? Want straight teeth? Yeah, that’ll cost you. Organ failure? I believe getting that fixed is a human right.
(I wish I could have lasik, but my eyes are malformed in the wrong way, so glasses it is!)
Speak for yourself. That sounds perfect to me.
I don’t, and never will, see my manager as my ‘superior’. He’s just a guy I work with whose job it is to do all that dull non-technical stuff.
I don’t think junior management pays as well as being a senior engineer anyway, so there’s no way I’m going for it unless I think I can get at least a couple of rungs up the ladder, and since I don’t like playing the schmoozing games, I doubt I could.
What are you, French?
Well, it’s not what -I- think either, it’s just the way that power and wealth are distributed.
And the point I was making is that junior management shouldn’t be more profitable/rewarding than junior engineering, and vice versa for higher tiers. How many large companies have executives that get paid less and rewarded less than their best workers?
Efficient 
At the last two companies I worked for, the owners worked pretty much unlimited hours. If they were awake, they were working. They did this because they started businesses in industries that fascinated them, and they loved their work. When your job is the same as your hobby, you cheat the system by making no sacrifices.
Now I started my own business, and I am taking a break from work on a Sunday afternoon to post this. I find that I am in the same position as my former employers. I love what I do, and so work is what I choose to do with my otherwise-free time. I’m not rich like my last two employers, and I also have no employees (technically I’m my wife’s employee, in fact. I think she’s watching Netflix right now).
I am posting this anecdote in support of the labor-of-love part of the hypothesis.
A lot of technical folks find out in their 40s that if their career path is “being a good engineer,” they’re looking at being unemployable by 50 (at the latest) if they ever transition jobs. There is a reason “over 40” is a protected class for termination, etc. I’ve known quite a few people that went from folks beating down their door to dismissing them as “has beens” because of their age, even though their skillsets had advanced.
A lot of folks wind up in management at this point because if you are over 40, you can be hired in management and it may even be seen as somehow appropriate or that your age is an asset. I have a coworker over 50 who is a super senior individual contributor who is pretty afraid of what happens if he tries to look for a job again before retiring.
In my current team, despite being a senior engineer, I’m the most junior by decades. All the others have 30+ years at the company. It’s definitely seems that it’s easier to move around when you have a little less experience. Right now I have 15 years of very specialized work that really only suits me for doing exactly the technical work I do now - which means either moving into some managerial role or trying to end up as one of the technical fellow types. Pretty much no promotions otherwise, so 25 more years of basically the same job.
I did actually get sent on a ‘transition to management’ course recently. I’m not especially convinced that I’d be very well suited to it though. Might be I don’t get a choice.
This is a really good point. I’ve got a couple of co-workers in my new digs that have said almost exactly that. It’s not that they’re not plenty competent, it’s that they’re justifiably nervous about their other options.
Feast and famine, that’s us. The only real advantage to our arrangement is that we don’t have to go to the office four time zones away.
While I agree with many of the points made not only in the article, by Cory, and by many of the comments, I’d add one wrinkle. For myself, an important culprit is technology itself. I will use myself as example (knowing that it’s a flawed example but using it just for illustration purposes). I teach art history. Back in the 1990s I used 33mm slides in slide projectors, a technology limiting the number of slides I could discuss in class. Today I use digital projectors, images taken from the internet and different digital sources, and Powerpoint, and the number of slides that I feel I need to show has increased exponentially. In a way, I think the relationship of technology to work hours is similar; the more technological capability we have as workers, the more work we’re expected to do and the more outcomes we’re expected to produce. To put it another way: if I can produce X number of results as a part of my job, and technology makes it 20% easier to produce those results, then I should be producing 144% of X. No, my math isn’t wrong, because if I can’t produce 120% at a cost of Y, someone else can then produce 144% at the cost of Y, so I better start using these technological tools that make my job “easier” to compete with that someone else. Yeah, I’m starting to sound like a Luddite, and doing weird things with analogies and metaphors, but that’s okay… I’m becoming more and more like a Luddite every day.
Can you please stop fucking reminding me of that!?
(Yeah it is constantly on my mind)
I think you’re on to something here. Keynes’ prediction assumed, as so many other predictions do, that everything else would remain the same, but productivity would increase.
In fact, technology means more possibilities. If we were still trying to accomplish the same number of tasks as 1935, we could have a one hour work week. Consider Henry Ford’s production line for a Model T, and compare that with today’s Ford Focus. How many parts went into a Model T? How many parts go into a Ford Focus? How many different companies and how many different workers are involved in the production of a modern vehicle? There’s a webbing company making seatbelts, and a different company making buckles, there’s an electronics company making the radio, and a different company making the explosive capsules that inflate the airbags. No one had even conceptualized those things during the days of the Model T.
Sure, we do everything more efficiently now, but there are so so many more things to do.
(Breathe, japhroaig, breathe)
One of the reasons ive made the choices ive made the last few years is because I see that wall coming. And very few people ‘get it’. When I turn 50 in 13 years I may well be unemployable in my trade. My mortgage has 20 years left. That’s a hell of a gap.
I’m not belly aching, but I simply didn’t prepare for this. I didn’t make all the right choices. And now I have to work my rear off even more.
hey 20 year old Japhroaig, you know that 401k you never contributed to? You’re an idiot.
As a Canadian, let me rain on the “Universal medical care would solve much of the problem” paradigm that I see in the comments. Universal medical care does mean a whole lot, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but the net effect is mostly freedom from a lot of fear, rather than a whole-scale change in worker’s mentality.
When I compare the working environment of the US and Canada, it simply doesn’t look all that different.
To be honest, I think we’re simply looking at the natural outcome of North American culture. As a society, we simply are unwilling to see the drop in living standards that a significant cutback in hours would mean. The respect we accord to strangers is (to a point) strongly correlated with their perceived wealth. Sure, there’s the odd book about people who live very cheaply, but there’s no great rush to follow suit, at least after looking at what that lifestyle entails.
Even worse, because the willingness to live more cheaply is so rare, doing so means that you end up living in communities with a much higher rate of dysfunction. When almost anyone who can make a better living does so, you get left among those who for one reason or another, can’t. Combine that with the lack of respect both people and the government pay to those who are not economically successful, and we have a culture that keeps almost all of us towing the line.
The only other thing I can add is a question I often ask myself. Why shouldn’t I be worried about losing my job? From the global perspective, I’m the rich guy. Wouldn’t it be better for the welfare of the world if my $60K salary is performed by 6 Indian or Chinese workers earning $10K? They’re as dedicated and hard-working as I am, even if (for the moment) somewhat less productive. What makes me so special that I deserve to earn so many times their salary? I have a feeling a lot of my dismay at my job insecurity is “I was king, so I deserve to continue to be king.”
The caveat that universal health care does permit freedom from fear swallows up the rest of the question. People in the U.S. who worked hard their entire lives are bankrupted by medical debt and then hounded to death by debt collectors in their impoverished old age. That’s a scary outcome that can impact literally anyone, without warning.
