I'm not sure if you'd categorize it as a self help book, but i'd call my reading of man's search for meaning as genuinely lifechanging. I haven't read any other 'self help' book, so i suppose it worked!
During Covid when my entire routine process was disrupted by work from home where I couldn’t do my daily thing I basically became the least productive person on my team. On days where my morning is severely disrupted basically the whole day is shot.
I generally can adapt to long term new situations by inventing new routines but I fall apart without structure.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge it’s a bad thing but it is what it is. I’m sure the commenter above is similar
I’ve had the same experience. I actually took a 40% pay cut to work somewhere where I had to actually do something, because of exhausting and depressing doing nothing was
I have never heard that being brought up in a (serious) conversation about UBI tbh. I've had quite a few discussions about this, the most common things people were happy about would be
- Having a financial safety net and removing some degree of existential fear (note, this is in a country with an existing social safety net)
- Switching into a career with less pay but better interest alignment. Interestingly, most of the women I've talked to would strongly prefer a switch into more social careers while basically all men I've talked to (claim) they'd switch into trades.
- Having the option to obtain educational credentials one couldn't get earlier in life for a plethora of reasons, without too much financial concerns (that is in a country with publicly funded free universities)
Certainly there are people who would see not doing anything as a godsend, but I think we generally over estimate our intrinsic desire to do something by working and tend to assume this desire doesn't exist in other people.
The poster is creating a purposefully difficult situation to indicate the lack of interest they have with returning to office. In other words, they’d only return to office in a fantasy world
The idea of "free beer" is if I'm giving away free beer at my establishment during an event, there are restrictions around that free beer. I'm not gonna fill up a tanker truck for you, I'm gonna kick you out if you start trying to resell it, I'm gonna cut you off it you've had too much, you can't get any if you're under age, etc, etc, etc.
It's free, but you can't do anything you want with it. Really it's free to drink on my terms - and that's certainly "free", but it's not "freedom" (as in free speech).
The recipe for soda is also open source - anybody can make their own carbonated soft drink. But I think if someone offered you "free soda" it would be pretty clear that they are offering you a specific soda whose recipe you almost certainly don't know, not the umbrella concept of "soda".
"Free soda" and "free beer" are analogous, if that helps.
Or, since it seems to need explaining, the point is that "beer" is not one thing with one recipe and if somebody offers you "free beer" it is pretty obviously a specific kind and batch of beer.
A part of their success has to be dependent on millions of people not trying to do the exact same thing, no? What a disaster it would truly be if everyone had the same realizations
I'm not sure. Since I've never seen a situation where millions of people earnestly try for something they want, I would only be theorizing on the outcome. I think certainly there'd end up with more than 2 or 3 success stories, which is mainly my point though
I love the lack of sympathy for tech workers across North America or perhaps even globally, when tech hub salaries still don’t allow tech workers to even have a middle class lifestyle. Very few people I know get paid enough to buy a starter home within 2 or 3 hours of where they work. I get paid more than my non tech peers yet still functionally have less spending power than a 25 year old from 30 years ago, despite being a fair bit older than 25
In theory, those homes should start going down in value once people start selling because you can buy less home for a $2,000 per month mortgage payment. The market's weird right now because a lot of people with low interest rates can't afford to sell and buy something comparable.
Yup. Homeowners in the first world need to start to feel some serious tax pain, which should go directly to building as much housing as fast as humanly possible. And screw crying about home devaluation. You making a handy profit when you switch houses in a decade does not trump the basic need for people to have housing.
People have been saying similar about the cars purchased in 2021 because they sell for well above asking. As 36-month leases start coming due the prices of those cars is normalizing back to where it should be.
All of the boomers that refuse to downsize and plan to die in their homes are going to do the same with the housing market, but in a more spectacular fashion that causes the market to crash.
On the boomer front, it's hard to say because it'll play out over 20 years, and there's a genuine supply shortage. There's also a chance a lot of their kids take the house over and sell something less desirable.
> I love the lack of sympathy for tech workers across North America or perhaps even globally, when tech hub salaries still don’t allow tech workers to even have a middle class lifestyle
Do you have empathy for IBs, PEs, and other members of High Finance? The difference in TC between High Finance and the equivalent roles in Tech are not that significant.
Goldman Sach's IB Analysts starting salaries at the SF office were $90k with minimal bonuses in 2020. These same people could have worked at Google or Microsoft (and most of them legitimately had that option)
The overlap between Big Finance and Big Tech is massive, just like the overlap between random engineer and random corpdev drone in Dallas or KC.
>Goldman Sach's IB Analysts starting salaries at the SF office were $90k with minimal bonuses in 2020. These same people could have worked at Google or Microsoft (and most of them legitimately had that option)
When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171>
Of my offers I chose Goldman, where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735>
My GS starting salary was 40K. During that first year, because of the dotcom bubble, Goldman raised the salary to $55/65/75K for first/second/third-year analysts, and my end-of-year bonus in 2000 was close to 100% of salary. Then the full effect of the recession/market crash hit and the 2001 bonus was, well, much smaller.
The bonus plays a massive role in Analyst compensation, and during 2020-present, the bonus was slashed severely due to a lack of late stage dealflow.
The work hours at GS and JPM were still as crappy as before, but the bonuses were trash when factoring stock and bonus compensation their peers were getting.
A bunch of my mentees made the switch to PM, SWE, VC analyst, or Founding explicitly because of that.
With that said, I think most people recognize that there are some jobs where the goal is to make maximal money first, morals second. Like, oil executives for example I think most people would agree don't have the benefit of the doubt that they were just trying to make an honest living.
Its a sliding scale, and for some people I think 'tech bros' end up on the greedy / immoral side. I know that for me at least, anytime I'm outside of a tech hub, the response to saying that I'm a software developer is often 'oh . . .'
In my short lifetime computer nerds have gone from losers worth making fun of, to rockstars making gobs of cash, to villains ruining whatever place they live or hobby they take up. Pretty wild.
> I get paid more than my non tech peers yet still functionally have less spending power than a 25 year old from 30 years ago
This seems like some non-generic case specific to your situation and not representative of the average experience.
The median income in 1994 for over-25-year-olds (men only!) was $25,465 [0], women was less than half of that. Let's go with the figure for men for the sake of discussion.
$25,465 in 1994 is the buying power of $55k today [1]. $55k is the 56th percentile [2], so right where we'd expect it to be.
---
1994: median home price $142,200 [3], interest rate 30-year fixed: 8.38% [4]
Principal balance $113,760 @ 8.38%, payment (P&I): $865, or 3.4% of annual income
---
2024: median home price $384,500 [5], interest rate 30-year fixed: 7% [6]
Principal balance $307,600 @ 7%, payment (P&I): $2,046, 3.7% of annual income
---
Opinion incoming: I think there are 2 things that make 'today' seem more expensive than 'back then': implacable consumerism, and the natural change of places over time (ie, gentrification & co).
w/r/t consumerism, the load on both 'necessary' and discretionary spending has increased big-time - people were not generally paying for broadband, smartphones, gaming consoles, home espresso machines, soundbars, portable speakers, media players, printers/copiers/scanners, I could go on forever. Look around you and count how many things straight-up didn't exist in 1994 (or were reserved for the ultrawealthy or for business). We could do without them today, but it would feel really bad, as if we're not participating in society or making use of its advancement.
w/r/t gentrification, many places today are more desirable than they used to be, and their increase in price is a function of demand rather than of inflation, so it feels like the economics of living got away from people who weren't already bought in. But it's not that "everything" got so much more expensive, it's that, for example, Akron OH used to be more expensive than San Jose (!!) because farming was the center of industry. Now the world changed and what used to be a pretty rural town full of fruit trees is the most expensive metro in the country. It's not because "houses got more expensive" per se, it's that the world changed.
I'm Canadian for what it's worth. My mother who had a GED was able to purchase a house by my age. I can't purchase a house anywhere in southern Ontario at the moment. This fact is echoed across the majority of the country. My brother had to move to northern Alberta to be able to afford a house that had enough capacity for his family. And that naturally also changed the availability of social and job options
I dunno what qualifies as south ON, but I see 144 houses for sale from $50-300 CAD south of Huntsville.
Your point however is (less charitably) put as "I can't purchase a house where I want the house to be, with the specs that I want", which is different than not being able to afford any house anywhere.
My parents also purchased a house with modest income when I was young. But it had fraying electrical (knob & tube!), peeling paint, 1 bathroom, no A/C, a wood-burning fireplace for heat, and was 45 minutes from where they had rented/liked to live. The place had its charms, they put sweat equity into it for many years, and I think of it fondly - but it was still a huge compromise, and by today's strict lending standards was probably not even able to be financed based on hazards alone. I am sure they would have preferred to purchase a house with bay windows overlooking the ocean like they had been renting, but they could afford something that was inland and needed a lot of work. I do not think they were unique in this way - I wager a lot of 'my parents bought a house in the 80s, dad was an artisanal pencil sharpener and mom was a ferret breeder' stories are actually more like this one.
My point is, I am by default unconvinced when an otherwise seemingly successful person says they can't afford to buy, even in an expensive place like Toronto or SF. As far as I can tell it just means they haven't lowered their standards enough yet. I have compromised on every home I've bought; in fact I entered the market a lot later than I should have because as a first-timer I wasn't ready to compromise enough. That probably cost me half a mill in appreciation over the years.
Huntsville is a 2 and a half hour commute to my in person job, limiting me to only remote work(there’s not exactly a booming tech economy in Huntsville). I would have to commute 5 hours a day to live in Huntsville.
I had family members who bought in “mixed income” neighborhoods in Toronto where you’d have broken piping, excessive mold in the attic, and meth heads ringing your doorbell at 2am to see if anyone’s home so they could break in. That 2 bedroom bungalow is selling for around 850k.
On top of all this houses even in Huntsville regularly close for between 50-200k over asking depending on location and the insanity of the buyer
No offense but based on this conversation I get the impression that you don’t really have enough context to comment on at the very least cost of housing in Canada.
I literally meant south of huntsville as in, draw an E-W line on the map at huntsville, and look everywhere south that's still within ontario.
2.5 hour commute sucks and wouldn't be long-term sustainable, but if it's what you'd have to do to get into housing it's something to consider. I know; that was my commute when I bought my first place in the bay area. I did it long enough to build equity & sweat equity, then used the profit to buy closer to work.
The first artist to use Auto Tune for a distinct effect (rather than just pitch correction) was Cher in her 1998 single Believe. Only a year after Auto Tune was released.
T-Pain absolutely was the one who popularized it through. To the point that among the general public "Auto Tune" is associated more with "electronic voice effects" than it is with "pitch correction."
