I _know_ I have it really good. But I still feel unhappy and unfulfilled. I'm planning to have a sabbatical next year to see how that pans out for me. I honestly don't know how my parents worked until retirement.
Cognative dissonance because we know we are obscenely overpaid to build stuff that nobody really needs, while others work themselves into disability for a order of magnitude less pay doing things that are essential for civilized life.
We are not obscenely overpaid. We're relatively more well paid than other workers in our class, but we're still generally getting the short end of the stick.
Even people in my boat. I recently won a decent IPO jackpot at the company I have worked for a few years--have $3MM or so in investments as a result. The CEO has well over 100x that, and well over 10x any IC who's been at the company from day 1. There's no good reason for the CEO of this company to have benefitted to the tune of over $3Bn when ICs who've been at it as long and hard as he has might have cracked a few $10s of millions at best. Are these ICs disgustingly rich? Am I? Of course. But, relatively, we got shafted in comparison to the people who benefitted much more.
Everything following this line seems to point in the other direction. Just because a smaller percentage of higher-ups received more doesn't mean you / we are not obscenely overpaid, it just means "they" are phenomenally obscenely overpaid and at the top of the exponential scale of "what's wrong with shit these days".
Teachers and nurses, as the pandemic demonstrated, are essential to the daily functioning of society. I couldn't do what they do day-to-day, dealing with the full range of the bell curve - and their children - and their ailments and inability to see / relate to the world. Holy hell.
The annual inspection of the foundations of the ivory tower have been sub-sub-contracted to the lowest bidder, which is a company at the end of a series of shell corporations for whose ownership can only be determined with the cooperation of a string of people that have no legal obligation to cooperate.
Laborers at most levels in our society deserve better compensation and treatment. The lower on the socioeconomic ladder, the more so.
That some are underpaid compared to the value they deliver than others isn’t controversial to me. What is controversial is the suggestion that because some in the labor class are somewhat better paid they shouldn’t complain about also being underpaid relative to the value they provide.
I have more in common with the $35k/yr teacher than with the CEO of the company I work for. Not just because of relative economic position, but because I have personally been more or less homeless and impoverished in my life at various points.
Well said, and I definitely sledgehammered the nuance.
Are we going to see the pendulum gathering momentum in the swing towards unionization? Could be I'm already late on that call given that Amazon employees have already had a recent victory in pursuit of this.
The world at large* seems to be reaching a breaking point in their tolerance of the widening wealth gap, manifesting in this collective burnout / great resignation / cynicism of purpose. Interesting times...
*may just be projecting myself onto the rest of the world and / or my media bubble's limited view.
Better: *some* are obscenely overpaid to build stuff that nobody really needs
Some are obscenely underpaid to implement crucial software e.g. Boeing MAX, medical diagnostic stuff, industrial automation, FOSS libraries like OpenSSL, research tools, etc.
The correlation between social utility and income is... interesting.
Honestly I think part of the problem is that we are telling ourselves repeatedly how good we have it and self censoring the problems.
"try working in a call center" says someone below in this thread in an effort to belittle concerns.
"They just raised time off from 15 days a year for the new hires isn't that great! Besides its not googly to complain" says the Google employee.
"Yeah it is an evil megacorp but the pay and conditions are amazing." Says the FB employee trying to demonstrate how they have the best job I'm the world while the social status of the job falls due to scandals.
There's a bit of a need among people in tech to highlight success. "I was bullied in school but look at my job! Isn't my job amazing!". They'll say this and defend it to death even if it's not quite true. They'll even attack others who ask "but are you really enjoying it or just letting yourself be worked to death for a small perceived boost in social status your job may bring?"
And don't get me wrong the pay here is good. But the work life balance is amongst the worst in all jobs I've ever held. By far. If I'm being honest im just holding out for as long as I mentally can to get a nice financial boost in life then I'm getting the fuck out of here. The free food and onsite gyms feels like a cynical ploy to get you back to the desks sooner and to keep you there before breakfast and after tea. Even second world countries will have more time off per year available and they'll have that for much lower stress jobs.
I think we've all got to be honest with ourselves here. I met a friend who works 9 days a fortnight in a different industry. "Yeah we get free food high pay and good benefits too. I really like spending 5 days in a row with family every two weeks too!".
I sometimes forget that we're waaay past the golden age where the big tech companies were growing so fast and were unique. The benefits in the industry are becoming somewhat of a norm in any big corporate environment in any industry. But the whip cracking performance management honed by tech company metrics isn't a norm.
If you find yourself exhausted day after day and miserable while your explaining to friends and family that you have a special unique job with soo many benefits realize that you've been manipulated. You're doing the thing we nerds do where we want to show how successful we are but in reality we're leaving ourselves wide open to exploitation as we fight to maintain the illusion to others. No one in other industries works like I've seen tech workers in silicon valley work. It's not normal and not healthy. The pay is high but the cost is higher.
Sounds like your experience is very different than mine. Do you work at faang, maybe Amazon?
I feel my work life balance is absurdly nice, I’ve actually worked in a call center, I could go on… but my theory is that when I am feeling mini-burnout, it’s (well, (a) legit need to better attend to other pets of my life, and counteract being a homebody from Covid… but also)
.. but also one factor is when I worked for a call center, I knew I could do better. Now that I’ve ‘made it’—relative to my old position-it’s like, now what?
I agree but how many people actually get alignment in their jobs?
I’ve been trying to figure out how some people can keep going without that alignment. Some say to just treat it as a job, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me. I guess I’m one of those people who must get an aligning job.