Many of our parents had better lives overall despite less education, fewer hours worked, shorter commuting distance, etc.
Yes, tech is better than most other jobs, but most tech jobs just give you the middle class life many people had 20-30 years ago (aside from the tech gadgets that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago that even the poor have now). In terms of large expenses and free time rather than gadgets, we’re no better than the middle class of the last generation.
Which is and should be disappointing given that it’s one of the best jobs available.
I work in education, so not highly paid, bought a car and a house by myself, and easily manage to save £500/month.
I just don't waste my money on stupid things like paying other people to make my sandwiches and drinks, or gadgets that are priced as 10x what they cost to make.
My house is better than my parents where I grew up to start with, my car is electric, I have free electricity from the sun, a TV larger than anyone could imagine back then (with films for £1 with the same quality as a cinema), I can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, via video, for free (including free translation), I can buy a computer like on Star Trek that I can talk to for £20, life is magical.
Thanks for sharing! I'm happy it worked out for you.
At the same time, I wonder if this is a bit of survivorship bias? I'm sure there are many people who do manage to live better than their parents, but is that common or the exception?
I was raised by a single parent who was in the "working poor" class, who managed to own their own home. I am a bit disappointed that it would be far more difficult for me to own a home anywhere within even 1 hour driving (each way) from the job centers, than it was for them to own a home. Despite longer working hours, more education, and so on.
I think that comment was aimed at web publishers and legacy news corps.
However, I think there's still a bunch of niches that can be exploited, to both personal and societal benefit, if you explicitly give up on becoming a billionaire with a monopoly over locked in users.
Basically, find something that would be a Billion dollar global business, and then do it on a small local scale in a non-user hostile way.
Think about all the negative things you (or rather the self-directed corporation you create) would do once you've locked in your audience to get those billions (more intrusive ads, clickbait, adding gambling elements to your kid focused app etc.) Then actively prevent yourself from doing them via some kind of organisational structure, like a B corp or non-profit. In game theory terms, this is burning your boats to force yourself to go in a specific direction even if tempted to retreat.
This lets people buy into the idea without the feeling that they're going to get stabbed in the back later.
Do all the things a genuinely user focused company would do if they weren't afraid of going out of business.
You might not be able to employ thousands of marketers, salesmen etc. but can you make a decent software salary without slaving for an ad business? Being able to locate anywhere, work for yourself and possibly have tax benefits of running a charity may swing the decision.
If enough geeks do this, you could end up with some co-operative federation of small independent orgs, like a version of GNU, Linux, Unix for replacing the current web's Facebook's and Amazon's, just as they did to Solaris and Oracle.
I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him or small scale version of him.
At the moment most of that energy seems aimed at VC backed small companies that use the "changing the world" motivation and then later sell out.
Co-ops in a variety of industries, fair-trade, ethical makeup and others have developed similar models with reasonable success, someone just needs to perfect the formula for user facing web apps.
Making it in free software is like making it as an author. You need to achieve some kind of fame to get paid. You need to be an internet celebrity. Then you can raise money.
> I have no idea how rich Linus is for example, but I'd guess 99.9% of nerds would happily switch to being him
LOL, yes, this represents the 1 in 1,000,000 extreme of programmer celebrity that is far more than anyone could reasonably hope for.
Yes, tech is better than most other jobs, but most tech jobs just give you the middle class life many people had 20-30 years ago (aside from the tech gadgets that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago that even the poor have now). In terms of large expenses and free time rather than gadgets, we’re no better than the middle class of the last generation.
Which is and should be disappointing given that it’s one of the best jobs available.