[hirvi74]

> The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share.

You are absolutely correct from a business perspective. However, I just cannot shake the feeling that I am so 'over' this society that we have created. I'm near my breaking point, I swear. Each passing day, I just think living off the grid sounds better and better.

Again, I am not trying to dog you or anything. It's just that reading statements like yours reminds my how unfit I am for this society. It's a 'me problem' not a 'you/them problem.'

I know life today provides an abundance of boons. However, I sometimes wish I could live in a time where I could be the town blacksmith, cooper, tailor, etc.. My job would be to provide a role for my small community and we would all know and rely on each other. I'm not cut out for this hyper-optimized world.

[DrewADesign]

I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing.

However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/day plus materials for four days to make him nails, but you personally think you made four days worth of nails in one day, you might ask him if this was enough and then if so move on to the next job… but if he finds out you charged him for four days work while you were making horseshoes for someone else, you’re gonna have a real big problem.

The real problem is living in a society where extracting as much as possible out of everyone you deal with is not only acceptable, it’s expected.

[anarticle]

Software isn’t real, and your employer would sell you for meat if they could. It is only that your current value is worth more than your meat value.

The value of your product is much more scalable than a pile of horseshoes to your employer. It all depends on who is capturing that efficiency. How else do you end up with billionaire CEOs?

Do everything right in your career, get RIF’d, live through an era like 2008, and watch people who have zero qualifications get promoted over you and you’ll change your tune.

The world is not fair and I will no longer be on the losing end. It’s not nice but neither is my old CEO buying their second boat and bragging about doing yoga on it at Cannes while people are living in basement apartments in NYC during COVID. I think we’ve all seen enough.

See you on the battlefield.

[DrewADesign]

I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are on top because they either started on top or were extremely lucky. Hucksters that find themselves one step in front of the curve, trying to claw themselves a double portion of scraps will always do better than their immediate peers in the short term, and almost universally think they’ve figured out some grand secret to gaming the system. But gaining depth and credibility is what makes people actually successful in the white collar world. We’ll never be on the same battlefield for many reasons. Good luck on yours.

[anarticle]

No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful.

All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular.

I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. https://layoffs.fyi

I deliver. It is as simple as that.

If you're here, we are peers whether you believe it or not. You're certainly right.

[DrewADesign]

Used to be peers. Unless you start making very precise physical objects out of metal for the aerospace industry, our professional lives are very deliberately several degrees of separation apart.

[anarticle]

You'd be surprised! I was a custom microscope parts maker during my time in academia, mostly one offs but a couple fun things that we shared with our collaborators. Surely not at your level of precision, but I did my tour of duty in academia for ~10y, and was none the richer for it. I can only imagine the toys you have, We had a great machinist who was an ex-tool and die guy in our department, was a dream to work with. This work was my first love, but the American student debt system caught up with me. So it goes.

[gretch]

I'm not sure where you live, but you can probably still do this.

Although the internet has globalized a lot of services, there's still local, labor intensive jobs that can never be scaled up like this.

To name a few:

- Garbage man - bus driver - child care provider - teacher

Tailors still exist. I went to one last week to get an inch off my pant legs.