At my workplace we were hyped up for a special announcement during a company meeting. this is after, literally, years of layoffs, offshoring, cut after cut to benefits, and restructurings. Morale is incredibly low.
The big announcement is they are giving everyone one extra day off around a national holiday as a reward. We already have "unlimited" PTO but of course can't really use it. So their reward is letting us use a benefit we already supposedly had.
Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.
I've worked at the full spectrum from great to terrible (and eventually one that went legally fraudulent) companies.
You're right that there can be a problem at small companies when you hire someone out of a toxic company. Some people love the fresh start and are so happy to finally be in a healthy environment that they thrive.
Some people are so broken from toxic previous employers that they can't adapt. We hired a lot of people out of a competitive Big Tech office and it was probably a 50/50 flip of the coin if they were going to be great to work with or toxic political monsters. I had to have so many difficult conversations with people who could only see their coworkers and other teams as competitors who had to be defeated that I nearly had a prepared speech on the topic. The politics and attempted backstabbing was insane. It was also weird that they thought it was going to work at a small company where we knew the people they were trying to backstab for years.
Stop trying to hire folks from AWS and this won't happen. Micrsoft is famous for "rest and vest" and a far less toxic culture as a result. You could also try hiring from Intel, where the internal "great place to work" propaganda is known as "great place to leetcode" because usually the work pace is so lax that its seem as a stepping stone for further advancement on your own time...
Microsoft took a pause in some areas for a moment but has been a brutal dog eat dog environment for a long time and never really stopped. I tried to get the job there once and got back channel on why I was denied: the interviewer didn't believe I'd emotionally handle the psychological environment. They went with somebody far more aggressive.
These companies are not monoliths though. Statistics really matter.
>the well is now poisoned for companies that do care
Because there's no such thing. Or rather, there are until it's unprofitable enough that caring seriously threatens the bottom line, or the nice owners sell off to someone less nice.
I have this little insight into PTO that I keep saved, from the book "Algorithms to Live By" by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths (a nice read). I think of it often when hearing about people and their work schedules in modern salaried positions and these 'unlimited PTO' offers:
>All employees want, in theory, to take as much vacation as possible. But they also all want to take just slightly less vacation than each other, to be perceived as more loyal, more committed, and more dedicated (hence more promotion-worthy). Everyone looks to the others for a baseline, and will take just slightly less than that. The Nash equilibrium of this game is zero.
Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.
But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.
I don't understand. What is 'unlimited' PTO? And if it's so unlimited, why can't you use any of it? I've only had jobs with very specifically defined PTO that had no ambiguity in whether I could ever use it.
"Unlimited PTO" is a fiction created by accountants that sounds good on paper. When you need or want time off, you work it out with your manager. No debate about how many days you have left this year, or how many you have accumulated. It's undefined and technically you are supposed to work together and away you go.
Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a debt, especially in California where the company is required to pay it out when you leave (whether fired or voluntary).
But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system.
Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. But you know when I have never had a problem taking time off, even a long time off? When I could point to the corporate policy that says I have X days, and I was taking those days.
And now I'm not playing manager roulette on whether or not I have the time, or how kind they are feeling. Or how buddy-buddy we are.
It's one of those things that are great in theory, and terrible in real life.
Exactly- sounds great but in practice often not great. Depends on the culture. I once worked for a small but ultimately very successful start up, as a married guy with kids. Unlimited PTO sounded great. Until I planned my second week long vacation in a year and got a lot of side eyes. Two weeks per year of vacation was less then what I got when PTO was "limited". In practice under unlimited PTO you could take a week off but more than that resulted in a PIP for something else.
> But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system
> Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem.
That me! Except I don't think it has anything to do with my manager or company.
I've worked 5 different jobs over the last 12 years with 8 or 9 different managers and literally never had an issue with taking the time I want while taking 6-8 weeks of PTO a year. I've hit the point where when I'm looking for a new job unlimited PTO is kind of table stakes.
I manage a few teams now with some people in the US where my company does unlimited PTO and others in Canada where our company cannot give unlimited PTO. Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days. I have US employees who take a ton of PTO and Canadian employees who have burned through their entire balance and then some and I have employees in both places who take essentially none.
I get that if you're in that second group it's preferable to be in a place where you'll get paid out for the days you didn't take, but I'm pretty convinced that unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take.
> Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days.
If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount? That way, you get paid out if you leave or are fired.
I know quite a few people who use their PTO as a sort of emergency fund if they are laid off... they will at least get paid that amount to hold them over until the next job.
> If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount
For me, no. I take more PTO than most companies with limited PTO offer. Most big tech companies offer 20-25 days and I'm taking 30 minimum. I take 6-8 weeks a year and the year I got married, I took 10. A normal year of PTO for me is 2 weeks during the summer for a vacation, a week at Thanksgiving, a week in April or May since my family has multiple birthdays in that window, 2-3 weeks in the Christmas/NYE period, and then random days here and there for the rest of the year.
For my team, for the people on the low end banked PTO is probably better. For the people on the high end they often take more than the allotment for CA employees, so no.
Everyone's experience will be different, but in my career I've always found that unlimited PTO often means no one cares how much PTO you take as long as you're getting your work done. I value that freedom. I know it's not for everyone and I'm not saying that every company should be unlimited PTO, but I just hate this narrative that it's a scam.
So "unlimited" for you is literally one week more than 5 weeks tech companies cap at?
Why not take 10 weeks or 12 weeks? If it's unlimited?
And how many other employees are only taking half of what they would be taking because they feel silently pressured to - and do all of those missing weeks make up for the single extra week you're taking?
Some people do like it, and I'm glad it's working out for them--I really am.
But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level. For some, I suppose the benefit is worth it--but if "unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take", then people are giving up a lot of guarantees for very little benefit on their side. Especially the payout when you leave.
> But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level
I have never worked at a place where I didn't need manager approval for my PTO. That includes places where I had a set PTO balance.
In my experience, having banked PTO days doesn't actually give you any real protection from abuse. A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind. The only difference is that the company then needs to pay you out for those days, which isn't nothing, but it's also not a ton of protection from abuse.
>>A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind.
I was once on a team where the manager thought he was being tough by really discouraging PTO taking in their team, and it was all great until we got to the end of the year with pretty much everyone on the team still having 20+ days of PTO left. HR just made everyone take the entire december off to use those days up, after that once incident no one had any issues booking PTO the following year.
It reminds me of the Dilbert joke about asking to be put on 4-10’s and the boss replies why would I do that when I already have you for 7-12’s? With unlimited PTO, if you can only take it when there’s no work to do.. well in my business the work is never done. Demand outstrips supply so completely and consistently, it would be an impossible hurdle. I’ve worked in jobs where even limited PTO was near impossible to take beyond the occasional one or two days. Banked PTO was basically considered your severance package. Seems hard to set expectations correctly with unlimited PTO plans.
Never quite understood the “negotiation” bit. I, the employee, am offering you, the employer, the courtesy of letting you know I am unavailable for work on $DATERANGE.
Of course, it’s well in advance, and nearly always avoids big company plans.
at my “unlimited PTO” company i just put time off on the calendar when im planning to be out and management deals with it, i don’t ask for permission. i try to be fairly reasonable about the time im taking and no one has ever questioned it or pushed back
> i try to be fairly reasonable about the time im taking and no one has ever questioned it or pushed back
In other words, it is roughly the same way as regular PTO except "unused" PTO doesn't accumulate, and you won't get paid for any unused PTO at the end of your employment - which is the the whole point of "unlimited PTO"
You have to manage discretionary PTO. The problem has almost never been people taking too much but taking too little.
At some companies, the directive from the top to management was to make sure people took at least 3-5 weeks of PTO every year. For legal reasons you can't keep official track of this (it will be imputed as accrual) but managers would actively nudge people to take more PTO.
If you proactively manage it, it works pretty well.
> The problem has almost never been people taking too much but taking too little.
The management culture in the US (other places too, but I'm most familiar with the US) is such that any time the employee (particularly ICs/line employees) wants to spend outside of work is automatically considered suspect.
This is because non-management employees are considered to be inherently lazy and constantly seeking to get as much out of the organization as possible for as little work as possible. And when they do work, they're considered to be incompetent and malicious (requiring constant supervision).
we have "unlimited" time off, with the recommendation of taking off at least 1 week per quarter. This seems to work pretty well, and I'd rather have this than 20 days PTO. I usually try to take 1 week off, as well as 1 day here and there for an extra long weekend.
Is it really a financial liability part really pushing companies for these policies? I never heard this argument before and compared to salaries PTO is minuscule liability...
Seems much more likely companies just trying to squeeze employees into taking less PTO.
Pretty much every article on a naive Google search lists "reduced financial liability" as one of the corporate benefits. Even the ones that talk about more complicated financial scenarios deal with "unexpectedly short-staffed" rather than, "We have a big financial liability on our books."
"Cost efficiency. Traditional PTO policies can result in financial liabilities due to unused vacation payouts when employees leave the company. With unlimited PTO, these liabilities are eliminated. This can be particularly advantageous for companies looking to manage their finances more effectively."
I mean I can understand why an accountant would be happy his one metric is down when the company implements unlimited PTO, or maybe the stock market responds to the (slightly) reduced liability levels.
But surely it can't be a significant amount of make sense to implement this kind of police only for this unless the company has insane turnover (so "unpaid" PTO is not paid out as cash). The reduced amount of PTO staff takes must be the main reason.
Unpaid PTO is (assuming that the employee _doesn't_ leave the company) essentially debt in the company books with 0% interest rate.
From the perspective that a company is an amoral profit-seeking automaton, it's not a "terrible system", it's a successful initiative to reduce compensation.
Most companies use the term "discretionary PTO". That means that there is no set limit on PTO. The positive take on it is that this means employees can take time off within reason so long as they're getting their work done. The negative take is that it means you have no guaranteed days you can take, and cultural or managerial pressure will prevent you from taking even a normal amount of vacation.
It also means that employees don't accrue PTO days, and therefore don't have to be paid out for that time when they're fired.
Does this unlimited PTO still have to adhere to any legally required minimum PTO limits? If not, what prevents them from just not giving their employees any time off ever and bypassing the peer pressure part entirely?
PTO regulations are created by the individual States. None require PTO to exist. They do regulate accrual of PTO if it exists, sometimes with unintended consequences for employees.
The origin story is that "discretionary PTO" was created to enable people to take longer vacations than was feasible within the regulatory constraints of accrual-based PTO. It can be abused in other ways but the intent of the people that invented it were employee-friendly.
Maybe in the US, but in countries with minimum holiday time you get the minimum in your contract (or a bit more) and the employee handbook says you have unlimited. Companies can’t shirk their responsibility here legally by saying they give unlimited vacation.
The shift from the tem "Unlimited PTO" to "Discretionary PTO" has happened because early proponents realized it wasn't really unlimited, and they didn't want workers to think that way. But the "unlimited" term is still used to sell it, and still often appears in informal recruiting conversations.
"Well it's not a deceptive trade practice because no rational person would take such a hyperbolic or outlandish claim literally - much like 'best ISP in the UNIVERSE!' or advertisements suggesting that beer will make you fit and attractive."
Yeah, the current reality of it isn't great at a lot of companies. I've been places where it was done well though. For instance, having a mandatory minimum number of days of vacation helps combat pressure to not take time off, and leaders who openly encourage people to take their time helps combat a culture of not taking time.
It started as a positive thing, intending to trust the employees and give flexibility. Unfortunately, like a lot of things, sleazy leaders turn flexibility into manipulation.
Normal PTO is earned in increments of hours per pay period. Each person has an accrued PTO balance that they draw down from when they go on vacation. From the accounting perspective, the company is not paying them for work during this time, they are paying the employee out of their earned PTO balance.
This creates some complications for the company where the accumulated PTO can be a liability on the books. It's a number that represents something they have to pay out with no labor in return. Depending on laws and circumstances they may also have to pay out the PTO balance when someone departs the company.
Some companies skip all of this by switching to untracked PTO, which is often sold as unlimited PTO. Employees don't accumulate a PTO balance and when they go on vacation they get paid normally, not out of a separate bucket. No extra liabilities on the book.
The trick is that PTO is now up to your manager's approval and judgment. At good companies you can actually take advantage of this for a more relaxed and flexible PTO schedule if you get your work done. I have done it and it's great when the company is good.
At bad companies, it becomes a trick where your manager always says "I don't know, now isn't really a good time to take that much time off" and then everyone gets less vacation time than they had before. I have also experienced this and it's very depressing.
How would you characterize the functional differences between the good and the bad companies that allowed for a great implementation of unlimited PTO? For instance, is it more overlap in job responsibility, less silo’d single points of failure? Better project management? I mean, it seems to me it’s never “a good time” since most of us could work 24/7 if just based on demand.
I have unlimited PTO, called DTO (discretionary time off). The only downsides in my case are that since it’s not accrued hours you are not owed it on termination and we are limited to two consecutive weeks. Otherwise I have never once been denied DTO, even when I’ve had bad overlaps with my coworkers. I would guess I take somewhere around 6 weeks off per year plus holidays. A few vacations and then odd days and long weekends here and there. I’m not really sure though, I don’t think about it, I just take off when I want. It’s absolutely wonderful.
I’ve heard horror stories about unlimited equating to zero. But I’ve also heard plenty of horror stories about PTO and unpaid time off getting denied as well. There is not much for employee protections in the states.
Maybe the hate for DTO in well compensated circles like this comes from people who were already getting 6 weeks of PTO. I would imagine they’re not comparing DTO against the 4 weeks my sister has as a senior dev in a marketing firm with an extra day per year of service or the _3_ weeks my mother had at 65 working as a data analyst for a healthcare company. Or maybe my company is just a unicorn in a sea of companies abusing it with people not being able to get any time off at all.
People are talking about how it’s always busy, there’s never enough time etc. That’s true almost everywhere. The work never stops. There’s always a project, always a critical bug, always a new initiative, always the next sprint. There’s more work than could ever be done with twice the employees. Good culture just mandates that you work around peoples absence and so is fine if people are out. Likewise as a good employee you don’t abuse unlimited and take off half the year.
It's unlimited in that you can request time off at any time with no balance or speed limit. The first order justification is that it saves some money from having to pay out unused time off balances at the end of the year / tenure or have people burst time off at random synchronous periods. However the second order effect is that the "how much time off is too much time off" is never defined and is a moving target. "If I take four weeks this year and things get tight next year will I show up on a filtered list for layoffs?"
It's uncomfortable for employees but employers tout how comfortable it is.
Its a way for US companies to avoid paying money. When employees get real PTO, companies have some legal and tax obligations. With fake "unlimited" PTO, they just pretend the person is working as usual.
I work in the media industry, there hasn't been any hiring in years, since before covid and certainly not after. Sometimes there are layoffs and they shake up middle management, but my boss doesn't even want to be come a SVP because those are the ones they axe when they restructure.
I've found it's always best to calibrate around expecting something like the ice cream sandwich episode of The Office. Never feel too much of a letdown this way.
Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors:
As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.
There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.
Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.
Also, sometimes, the next level up is something that not everyone will actually want to do. And, depending on personal circumstances (and what the company's expectations are; many will have a level that there's no expectation people progress beyond), that may be _fine_.
Another aspect of being promoted: many of us see what the next level has to do/is doing and isn’t interested in doing that. I’ve seen people get promoted and then immediately implode because N+1 started involving lots of politics that they couldn’t or didn’t want to handle. Even senior IC roles get more and more exposed to non-technical and organizational issues.
This is very true. I think it takes a while in your career to recognize what your ideal terminal role is because you have to get close enough to some roles to realize that you never want to do them. Nonetheless, some people have a strong drive toward the status of promotion that seems to take priority over liking the job.
Finding a level that suits you and being satisfied with it is an important life hack.
The usual solution to "The Peter Principle" is to give the promotable employee the additional responsibilities first without the job title (or salary) and see if they rise to the occasion. If not then it's easy to dial back assignments without going through a demotion or termination.
During the interviews for my last three jobs, I explicitly said that my career goal was to never become a manager. I guess I started saying that when I had about 20 years of experience.
> Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails.
> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit
Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."
Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.
What OP said is definitely true on the micro level-- not "even/might/some aspects", but the whole thing. It's true that in any given organization there are fewer senior roles because of hierarchical nature, it's true that as you progress up the ladder the demands change and increase, and it's true that many people fail or choose not to adapt.
The macro argument seems right as well. If you measure it longitudinally the numbers don't stay constant. It's 1 in 4 today, maybe it was 1 in 10 fifteen years ago. Anecdotally there is definitely something strange going on with the labor market that's new, and that you can't explain by micro realities alone.
Another thing I tell people is if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Many people do a job well and make themselves too critical in a certain position thinking it will make their job more secure. First, the way layoffs typically work, they are likely not more secure. And second, it makes promotions much harder.
In a hierarchical organization, there's a lot less room at the top: There's only one CEO, only a handful of executive positions, ect. Not everyone needs to be a leader to be successful.
Past a certain point there's also a diminishing return on the effort put in to get a raise/promotion and it mostly becomes about managing "up or out" expectations.
I'm about maxed out for development roles compensation wise. By saving most of this compensation and investing it in the S&P 500 and similar indices, I get way more of a return for far less effort. There are days - not months, days - where I'll earn about $7,500 in stock appreciation. The long term trend has me about matching my monthly salary in earnings.
Raises are inflation adjusted so there's no erosion of the underlying capital going into investments.
Why try harder when I'm paid enough to just invest it in the stock market? The biggest problem I have right now isn't how to get a promotion or raise, it's coming up with increasingly contrived excuses to avoid up-or-out and being pushed into more responsibilities.
When you control what work means you can live much more cheaply. Unless you love the high COL areas and high burn lifestyle, it might be time to work on something more personally and emotionally worthwhile.
I'm a bit cynical :) there are other reasons to stay in a job, but the definition of market value is how much you can successfully interview for. So yes staying in a job signals that nobody wants to give you more money.
There's no reward for loyalty any more, and it's caused everyone to job hop (at least while that was possible), including me. At the time, employees complained about it, and in the same breath refused to give out any promotions and/or reward employees. Or they'd reward them with some shitty voucher.
The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.
It is a trade off that also helps US companies be more efficient. If you want more job stability, try working in France where companies can't lay off workers as capriciously. But then they also don't staff up as fast, don't take as many risks. Pick your poison.
I prefer employment to be transactional. I think it always ultimately is. There is a role for government to not let employers unfairly take advantage of workers or cheat them, but beyond that my loyalty is to people and what I have equity in.
I am perfectly for less job stability in the US but only if it comes with a strong safety net. Losing your job after a year or six months is whatever broski if you have robust healthcare and are unlikely to go homeless. I see SpaceX and Anthropic aiming for IPOs in the trillion range of valuation and all I can see is, how come these companies are benefitting from the "increased efficiency" but the regular guys are not feeling the same kind of optimism? I wanna cheer for them because a rising tide lifts all boats. Instead I feel less and less secure while I have anonymous online people "well actually"ing me about how broadly my life is supposedly better in aggregate average. The cognitive dissonance makes no sense to me.
There was famously an inflection point 40-50 years ago where wages decoupled from productivity to the downside. I'm sure it wasn't perfect before then, but things did change.
The last time we hit this low point was in the Gilded Age, when the economic producers essentially revolted and forced governments to regulate against capitalistic greed. As you correctly identify, in the early 80s U.S. leadership figured out that if you issue debt more freely then you can get the economic growth of ‘household spend goes up’, ‘production and GDP goes up’, and ‘foreign currencies weaken versus the dollar’ without having to force* corporations to pay out profits as wage increases against their will. One bonus outcome is that you end up with lifelong debtors who are forced to accept work circumstances that they wouldn’t have to accept if they still had wage negotiating power. Too bad about the demonization of unions in tech, eh?
* A tax on (gross revenue – wages – cogs) with rate (cpi + fedrate) ^ 0.9 would be an excellent start, with an exponential factor that halts ‘shift the tax to consumers through simple price increases’ — the more you earn, the more you have to raise prices, which raises inflation, which raises your future tax by more than your price increase; the more revenue you pay out as wages instead of shareholder dividends, the lower you can set prices, which lowers inflation, which lowers your future tax — and adding the FFER lever allows the Fed to perform their mission to control (price) inflation not only with banks but also with businesses. For example, (8% inflation + 4% fedrate) ^ .9 is ~14.8%, which is a completely acceptable surcharge for businesses having raised prices so high that it caused an 8% inflation year!
When I looked at this, the first thing which popped into my mind came from the 95th percentile graph... third one I think.
If you're a CTO, CEO, CxO, you have direct, in depth knowledge to how the company is doing. You also likely have insight into how that translates into free capital to spend on wages. Many companies are not public, and even when companies are, earning reports aren't easy for a line worker to fully understand.
So if you have that knowledge, it's much easier to push back when someone says a wage increase isn't possible. Such as the board, or the CEO (eg, if CTO, or whatever).
This by no means "makes it fair", it's simply that the inequality may be from knowledge, and therefore bargaining power.
Another aspect of things, is that every CxO class worker can agree, their knowledge is very very important, irreplaceable in fact! Upper management, you see, is quite valuable, as of course (from their perspective) "I'm irreplaceable and valuable!". Who doesn't think they have value, after all?
But.. those line workers, or even those engineers, well.. they're like cogs. One as another.
Some might attribute malice to the above thoughts by CxO class individuals, but it can also simply be driven by self-belief in innate value, and by good old ego.
Obviously wages and productivity had to decouple. Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry.
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.
Yeah, that's one specialized piece of automation in a long line of automation throughout history. I'm not sure why taking humans off of the assembly line is a larger deal than taking humans out of agriculture, textile production, or printing?
The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world — having less reliance on external factors limiting what humans could produce. Once humans reached peak human productivity their human-based measures stagnated, but productivity itself did not stop as automation advances have kept that ball rolling. Taking people off the assembly line saw them move into jobs, mostly "knowledge-based" ones, where there was no way to become even more productive. You can only sit around in so many meetings each day, so to speak.
Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.
> You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing.
I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.
This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.
Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.
This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.
What limits the length of the lever? The agricultural lever is already crazy long, the manufacturing lever, same. We could be doing the same with less, not more with the same.
If this is what i think it is, then yes. Life for humans has rarely been fair but that inflection point is startling. It tracks the wealth gap growing too irrc.
My theory is: when it started being a bad thing to have any cash reserve.
With some reserve on the side, a company can survive bad times and not fire people. This is the kind of behavior employee will appreciate and make some diehard loyal.
But this available money is money not making more. So that's a bad thing these days and so the only easy variable available to survive is to remove excess workforce. It took some time for people to understand loyalty has been one-way only but now employers are reaping what they've sown.
Is there any data to support your theory? Because most of the companies at the top of the S&P 500 have enormous cash (and equivalent) reserves.
It makes sense to burn reserves and keep good employees around through a temporary cyclical economic downturn. But most of the large layoffs lately have been driven by secular changes that management expects to be permanent.
The balance of power between capital and labor fluctuates; qualitatively it definitely felt different ten years ago. For whatever reason labor seems to have much less power today. Not zero, just less. It isn't that companies used to be more loyal out of some moral obligation. They were forced to be more loyal by market dynamics that used to be more favorable to labor.
30 years ago and prior for a generation or two. Employees had pensions instead of 401ks where tenure built up a guaranteed fixed income payment at retirement. Now we're all tied to the stock market.
Oh, and back then a single income could support a working-class family to buy a decent house, two cars and maybe send a kid or two to college.
Those pensions could also be tied to the market, or more often the profitability of the company that ran it. There are many, many cases of underfunded pensions by bankrupt companies causing issues. All being equal, I'll take the job hopping and my own retirement account.
I agree it's more expensive than ever to afford to raise a family, though. There's also a malaise in the air that I don't think broader society has felt since the late 1970s, too.
401k became a thing in part because of deep structural problems with employee pensions. Pensions don't "guarantee" anything in practice and many people lost them or had steep cuts. It is a promise, not a law of physics. 401k/IRA wasn't created for no reason. Pensions are exposed to much more idiosyncratic risk than a 401k and companies are poorly positioned to manage those risks.
Some people might not want to take responsibility for retirement savings in the same way they might not want to take responsibility for providing themselves housing but the alternative is strictly worse.
The only pensions that kind of work is government pensions because they can paper over the structural deficiencies with taxation. But even that has significant limitations as we've seen.
A 401k isn't required to be invested in the stock market. It is advisable but not required.
Defined benefit pensions schemes ultimately need heavy regulation and a government backstop otherwise failure is inevitable.
That said, they can work great in tandem with the stock market.
The Kensington & Chelsea local government pension scheme in London, here in the UK, is an example.
The local authority (not central government) ultimately has the responsibility on paying out these liabilities, but it's one of the few councils that just dumped their pot in to global equities, and as a result they are 200% funded relative to their commitments and have stopped making further contributions.
The money that was flowing into the pension scheme can now flow in to local services.
Pensions are mostly a pyramid scheme scam. It’s why basically all government run pensions have more liabilities than assets and effectively keep taking from taxpayers to not collapse. And why many company run pensions disappear in a bankruptcy.
I prefer having the money under my control, personally.
I'm having a hard time finding data on employee tenure that would support this. There seems to be a recent dip but it's only significant relatively, not in absolute numbers based on what I expected. Which was something like 25 years tenure not that long ago but that wasn't the case, more like 5.
The thing that changed was perception. People no longer believe loyalty to employer is worthwhile, just as they no longer believe hard work is what gets people rich.
They no longer believe it is worthwhile, because the landscape changed: companies found they no longer needed to treat their employees was well as they had. (Driven largely by the shift around that time toward quarterly results over long term sustainability, as I understand it.) And thus began a race to the bottom.
Globalization played (plays) a huge part in this timeline too. If I can outsource your job to a place that really does treat their employees as disposable, you should just be happy to be employed. And even if I don’t want to offshore, how does my product/service succeed or remain sustainable if my competitors are all offshoring (or indeed come from offshore)? I’m not defending this attitude just distilling and illustrating through extreme language what I see as a reality of global competition.
Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.
It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.
The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.
YMMV but I've never seen a tech company give less than 2 weeks pay when doing layoffs.
I'd rather take the money and not have to work while I find a new job than to have a warning that my job is going to end in 2 weeks while I'm expected to keep working.
Another "America vs Europe" (well, UK): I have my notice periods written in my contracts, whether that's one month or three months, and it is always bi-directional.
Giving up to 3 months of notice to change jobs is wild. What are the consequences if you tell them you're leaving in 2 weeks instead of the notice period?
Typically in US tech companies layoffs don't give employees a notice period, but they do give severance pay. So you stop working effective immediately but you either get a large check or continue to receive paychecks for a period. That period depends on the company but it's usually within the range of your notice period. You don't have to work during it, though.
The flip side is that other employers understand that you can't fill a position immediately. There's not many circumstances where a unique opportunity really appears on no notice.
In situations where you are in dispute with your employer and want to walk off, the traditional solution is to file a number of disputes and get yourself signed off as sick with "stress", then quietly negotiate a mutually agreeable exit.
For very senior staff they can get an injunction against you, stopping you from working elsewhere. For lower staff they can withold unpaid wages and charge you for the cost incurred of getting the temp cover up to the notice period. Given how high temp/contractor wages are compared to employee costs, this can be an insane number, especially in tech where an employee might be on £200 a day, but a contractor might charge £500-1000 or more.
If you're getting fired for cause then it is not an amicable breakup and the norms for when you're trying to maintain a relationship obviously don't apply. Layoffs for any reason other than "the company is out of money and is shutting down tomorrow" which only pay two weeks severance would be unusually stingy.
this could be because the business have all the power in the relationship, especially in bad job markets like today. When they hold all the cards they can make us dance for them and they never dance for us
If you have desirable skills, why does the business have all the power? If you don’t have desirable skills and yet remain employed, how could you expect otherwise?
well personally I think the people you hear complaining about being abused by their employer are more unskilled, otherwise they would leave for greener pastures as you said. But unskilled people are people too! And they have rights and should be treated fairly
Depending on the size of the market in your area, or the market in general, not giving two weeks is effectively blackballing yourself. The city I work in is small enough I might have trouble in the future after leaving a manager in a lurch or burning a bridge.
Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.
Just being real here though, hiring flaky employees is enormously expensive. Every hiring manager / business owner would just as soon not waste their time on it. So there are these heuristics that have organically developed for how to spot good employees vs bad. Not having the stability, foresight, or courtesy to (be able to) give notice is merely an indicator of whether you have your shit together. Similar example: an HR director once told me early in my career that drug tests (back when those were a thing) are basically just IQ tests - the company doesn’t give a shit if you smoke pot, but if you can’t control yourself enough knowing you have a test coming up or you can’t figure out how to engineer a workaround, you’re probably dumber than the candidates we want.
The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.
The fact that 1 in 4 white collar workers are not getting raises or promotions might not be a bad thing. As white collar workers get older they frequently stop optimizing for money and start optimizing for time, flexibility and other things and be totally OK with no promotions as the trade-off.
I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.
There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.
> now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore
I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.
Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.
Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.
> I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange.
Isn't the US significantly more meritocratic in this regard than other large economies? I.e. compared to Europe or Asia it would seem that Europe has much more rigid comp rules, Japan has formal mechanisms to ensure that older people are paid more. And this is a tech forum obviously where i.e. the right ML engineers are making 7 figures + right now in their late 20s.
On US being more meritocratic in tech -- completely agree. US tech space is very dynamic and very competitive which gives many younger folks a leg up.
But pure tech is a small part of all white collar jobs (the linked article references "white collar jobs", not "professionals" which the title substituded for it). And many non-tech white collar jobs are not nearly as meritocratic as those in the pure tech (I also agree that in Asia or Western Europe those jobs might be even less meritocratic, but this does not change the point above). My 2c.
The reason there are no raises and no promotions is because of this "just be thankful you have a job and income at all" mentality that exists in the current environment
It’s wild how different things are at different levels over time. When I started about 8 years ago, any technical skills and experience on your resume / LinkedIn would have recruiters reaching out non-stop. That died out over the last 3 years and I didn’t have anyone reaching out for jobs. Recently I updated my profile to state I’m a staff engineer and suddenly I’m getting messages like nothing ever happened. Senior engineer? Maybe one recruiter every 3 months.
This works because so many benefits are tied to work requirements. It's a systemic issue. Our employers enjoy the backing of our policy makers. If your health insurance (let alone you + your kids') becomes too expensive, it means taking time off to do things like train for a better job, risk starting a new job, etc., are untenable.
I want to view this from the other angle but have a hard time.
Lets say your company breaks even. There's a savings jar, people's salary are being met, everyone's happy, and idk, you bought your first yacht or whatever.
Shouldn't you calculate expenses on the assumption that people will get a salary increase? Or is that a weird thought? Is that just a fixed variable, and when someone asks for a raise you can say "sorry, our budget is tight"
I have a feeling many Founders/CEO's aren't honest about expenses and earnings. If my company made a million and someone earns on average 50k, then I can hire a lot of people with that money. If they all cost 60k (big promotion imo), then I need to hire like they'll earn 60k.
Maybe this is all bs, but I feel like a lot of founders can pay but won't.
I've sort of reached this point, because I've reached the highest point for an "individual contributor". I do not want to be a manager, and don't think I would be good at it. But at most companies, once you reach a certain point, that's the only way to move up. And I've seen people who are good engineers get promoted to managers where their skills are less beneficial.
Thankfully, my company is pretty good about still giving me raises.
If I can just hold at this role for 6 more years, I'm happy. I chased promotions for a decade and regretted all but the first two, which brought me to this level.
There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.
Well they may think you should do extra work without extra pay, but you shouldn't think that.
If you want to grow the company, (and all companies want to grow), or new companies want to start, we gotta train new people. That means you, too. Knowledge transfer and good culture is how the industry changes for the better. Otherwise it's all the pointy haired ones exploiting useful idiots.
Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.
It's not that promotions should be given out indefinitely but I think a pay raise in line with inflation should be the minimum, unless you are under performing. It's funny when a company excitedly shares a pay raise with you are it's below inflation...
Merit raises are typically based on market rates as a baseline. The employees' costs in terms of consumer price inflation are not a factor. If every employer gives out raises in line with inflation that also creates a positive feedback loop which contributes to higher and higher inflation every year (I do understand that's not the only thing which drives inflation rates).
If your wages are falling behind then look for opportunities in higher growth sectors.
As an employee I don’t care about the reasons that inflation exists, I care about getting the same real money over time (only counting inflation raises, not counting merit or other kinds). And citation needed about inflation raises driving inflation, there are much bigger factors that contribute to it.
No one is forcing you to care or to produce any particular level of work. If your job has no growth opportunities and stagnant compensation then you might want to look for other opportunities.
I think the issue here is that you're trying to frame the issue in terms of some sort of concept of fairness. But in reality that has nothing to do with it.
Because people are not perfect incarnations of idealized concepts. Employers are people who exist in society who have concerns beyond the bottom line. That many or well more than most employers have forgotten this fact is at the core of what is wrong with work, corporate America, and capitalism in general.
I always look at inflation when I get a raise. Or if they are skipping raises because of the economy - I compare to inflation. I accept that as a staff level engineer I've reached about the top of what I can make - but I still expect my income to match inflation, and I have left when it doesn't.
There is a dual ladder setup. Where you can have Administrator, Systems Engineer, Sr. Systems Engineer, Lead, Architect, Sr Architect, etc. These will have parallel tracks to equiv. management positions for benefits and perks (bonus levels, etc).
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
> Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers.
YoE only gives potential, but are not necessarily sufficient in any career. I've interviewed engineers who learned the narrow job they were doing in 6 months, and then only did that for a few years. Do they have 6 months of experience or 3 years? I'd argue closer to 6 months unless they were doing more. I imagine surgeons are similar, where I'd rather see X number of successful surgeries performed than YoE.
This issue with YoE is also why I'm bothered when HR uses YoE too heavily to base salaries around.
There is a handover premium that you pay when you churn which often exceeds whatever savings you think you might find. Inertia and institutional knowledge are two of the biggest drags, not to mention morale, hidden costs recruiting fees, ramp time, and customer relationships.
It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.
I was at my previous company for almost 10 years, I had annual promotions and I roughly 4x'd my annual income in this period, which averages to about 15% of year-on-year pay increases. Part inflation, part growth in skills.
Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.
In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.
I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.
"Work hard and it will be recognized" is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice. "Tit for tat" is the most generous to the company anyone should ever be: try working hard, if it's recognized then continue, if it isn't see if you can politic until it is, and in the very likely circumstance that it continues to not be recognized either jump for a pay bump or work like you're paid.
I didn't say work hard. But if you keep contributing what you already contributed previously and nothing changes, your salary likely also doesn't change. Changing that doesn't necessarily require working hard, I haven't made any such claim. In fact my salary inversely correlated with my effort. But I do recognize that when I stopped changing things (i.e. my role in the company became stagnant), my salary also remained stagnant.
Your reasoning implies that specific people within an org are not getting raises, but in practice it is entire orgs going without raises or promotions, regardless of what any individual is doing.
If you had annual promotions for 10 years and you 4x your salary, you pretty much got what I got job hopping twice in 4 years, and it had nothing to do with hard work or my skills. Good market conditions, luck and leaving when you’re getting short changed is what got me that.
Kind of a silly article. If you're working in education administration or local government then why would you even expect career progression? These are not growth industries.
I work as staff at a state university in what as been ranked as the highest cost of living city in California. In my field, I have the highest classification I can get. I am on step 20 out of 20. My salary is $88,000 a year. That is considered “low income” where I live. There is nowhere I can go higher in my chosen profession. The union is more interested in bringing up the lowest paid members than helping people in my situation, which is probably the right thing to do. The university is still attempting to hire people at $55,000 a year (ridiculous), and wondering why they have so much trouble filling positions. About half of the search committees I have been on ended with a recruitment failure.
Career progression is of course nice, but the larger issue is just being paid a living wage. In my case, I have money, I can walk away from my job any time that I want to, but I love what I do. Most people aren’t so lucky. The politics are hard, because there is this characterization (and I have seen it here at HN) that state employees are lazy, incompetent, inefficient, have huge pensions, collect large amounts of overtime, and more. In my experience, while there are exceptions, this really isn’t true.
I don't think that white-collar state employees are necessarily lazier or less competent than employees in other sectors. The problem is with the surrounding system, not the individuals. Much of their work could be automated away, or done more efficiently, or simply not done at all. It's time to take a step back and assess how many government employees we really need. Why has total government employment (federal + state + local) been growing faster than the rate of population growth? Something doesn't add up.
Those have always offered career progression, though. Whether the industry is growing is a different variable to whether someone is growing in competence.
Some environments require progression as a sort of anti-stasis measure. Famously including army officers, not exactly a growth industry either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
Always? Growth in educational administration and local government employment is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon. Fortunately that's now starting to turn around as the level of waste is enormous: the majority of white-collar workers in those fields produce very little value that contributes to the organization's core mission. They're not directly teaching students or fixing roads. Some level of administrative overhead is necessary to keep things running but in general we're way past the optimal level. Ideally there should be huge cuts to save costs and negative career progression with some management employees being moved back to individual contributor roles.
To be fair to the parent, jobs require capital, and big tech owns a big chunk of the capital, and thus do own a big chunk of the job market even if they aren't putting it to work. Which is part of the underlying problem. Those with capital don't really need workers and the areas of the economy who could put workers to work in a bigger way don't have the capital to do so.
It's systemic when you consider policymakers penalize you for not working. So many benefits are tied to work. The fed also adjust rates to make sure unemployment doesn't get so low to ensure employers always have max leverage. The biggie here is health insurance. Especially if you have kids, it's a huge risk to take time off to train for a better job or to risk taking a new job. Even having different insurance from a different employer means you may have to start over with different doctors.
I've been in the industry for 30 years. "UNIONIZE" has always been the suggested answer. Always. But nobody ever steps up and actually does it, even despite the people being already socially united through platforms like HN, making formalization about as easy as can be possible.
Isn't it a natural pattern in empire? Everything grows, there's a huge administration class employed who manage to live in relative luxury from the profits, then as relative power and influence recedes, those jobs are the first to get cut.
It's an international market and everybody's using the same skills and tools. It's insane to think that 6 digit salaries would forever be sustainable when the rest of the world is doing the same stuff.
Developing tech to knock down barriers also paves over moats. I think the west is going to be in for some very trying times in the coming decades. The UK is a fascinating place to look at in this regard.
Well it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the capital class, the "responsible" owners of the economy. Everyone knows that credit goes to capital and blame goes to workers!
I'm pushing 50 now and I hit the wall almost 10 years ago. No real raises, new opportunities pay less. Inflation has been ratcheting down on me constantly, and my family has to make continual changes to stay in the black.
This has been the case for most of Gen X's career: there was very little mentoring, very little succession planning and career shaping. Instead Boomers (who came into an economy where these things, along with pensions, etc. still existed) took over early and have stayed in leadership roles longer than previous generations. A look at congress provides a template.
It may be better for workers to stick to six month contracts at a good hourly rate. Note that there must necessarily exist a clause in the contract that requires an early termination of the contract by the employer to result in 50% of the wages for the remainder of the period being paid immediately to the worker. A worker may terminate the contract early only for a documented medical reason, failing which the worker owes 50% of the wages for the remainder of the period to the employer. All of this together is meant to everyone honest, transparent, and non-exploitative.
The youngest baby boomers are in their early 60s. I doubt it will make a difference in tech, but traditional industries, or what is left of them, should see a lot of senior roles open up as baby boomers begin to retire. Then, as they begin to pass away, a lot of their accumulated wealth will pass to their heirs as well.
The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.
i suspect based off some light readings around this that there will be even more of a wealth transfer in the coming 20-30 years as the boomers fall off. medical costs for advanced age, asset prices like housing falling off in certain areas, mismanagement of retirement funds, and even just continuing the mentality of “i can’t take it with so might as well spend”
It's all going to be taken by end of life care companies who charge $20k a month (yes really) to put you in a small room and have a teen with barely a highschool diploma check in on you every now and again, for minimum wage.
Every dime of wealth the boomers collected will be captured by a few private capital orgs who prepared for this. It will never flow down.
In 2024, the Silent Generation and baby boomers represented 25% of the population, but held 65% of all wealth in the US.
The healthcare industry will profit a great deal, but there is no way they will capture 65% of all wealth in the country. And supposing they did: ultimately, all this wealth ends up on some household's balance sheet unless it goes abroad.
Yet we have ample evidence that extremely little of the massive increases in wealth, value, and productivity of the past 50 or so years has ended up in the hands of normal people.
Why would this be any different?
You can make all sorts of hay about "Oh that money will be invested so it will still benefit normal people" but no, the vast majority of the wealth the boomers gathered will be controlled by the new aristocracy. They will do with it as they please and thus you should expect it to almost entirely benefit them first and foremost.
Private equity prepared for this windfall. Even if they scoop up only ten percent of it or so, that's an enormous transfer of wealth from average families to the hyperwealthy. That's another entire chunk of the pie that is just removed from the continually shrinking normal person economy.
A giant fraction of that wealth is in real estate: Homes. Those homes should be passed down to the next generation, alleviating our insane house prices somewhat, but instead they will come under ownership of the same companies who currently monopolize specific rental markets to ensure the price goes up as much as they want, and they will absolutely rent out those new properties, in such a way that they do not reduce prices.
That housing stock is completely and totally captured by these private equity firms that own the end of life care companies.
The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money.
Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.
Every few years companies give a large raise to everyone when they notice they can't hire people and the ones they have are leaving. So if you don't manage to find a new job it isn't hopeless, so long as enough people are leaving.
Of course if you don't leave they may lay you off at any time. However assuming that doesn't happen they will eventually give you a large raise.
"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.
Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.
I did not say don't look for a new job though. I said that if you can't find one. Sometimes you can't find a better job - better is more than just pay, there are other factors that may apply to you personally (ethics of the job, working hours, where they need you to work, how much travel...)
Holding out isn't ideal, but it might be the best for you.
Increasingly exhausted GenX'er here... I'm just happy to come into work these days. I no longer have any desire to push for promotion and early retirement is a very tempting goal right now.
My eldest is now 18 and starting to to into the workforce and my youngest is still about 3 years from that.
if (and thats a big if) we dont have a GFC part 2 in the next 10 years I'll be fine I think... but jeez Trump/AI is making it hard to get there.
Interestingly, I've heard that job hopping no longer pays better than staying in place. I can't say if this is true (and no matter what's true, I'm sure that people have anecdotal exceptions!) but it would be quite discouraging if so.
There are too many "it depends" to make any statement. The economy isn't running hot now, and that means those who are forced to job hop (laid off) provide enough potential hires that companies don't need to try to pay someone more to leave.
The real question is will this change? Will companies start valuing long term employees thus making it not worthwhile to leave? Only time will tell (I wouldn't bet on it though).
Anecdotally it's true imho. accrual of benefits, sbc and wage-indexing, ... job hopping puts you at the ground floor of each, and salary jumps have narrowed.
Anecdotally it seems like anywhere I’d hop to pays about the same unless I can get to the next tier up. If you want to move up a level they expect you to have at least 3-5 years already being at that level so the only way forward is to get promoted and THEN hop.
The big announcement is they are giving everyone one extra day off around a national holiday as a reward. We already have "unlimited" PTO but of course can't really use it. So their reward is letting us use a benefit we already supposedly had.
You're right that there can be a problem at small companies when you hire someone out of a toxic company. Some people love the fresh start and are so happy to finally be in a healthy environment that they thrive.
Some people are so broken from toxic previous employers that they can't adapt. We hired a lot of people out of a competitive Big Tech office and it was probably a 50/50 flip of the coin if they were going to be great to work with or toxic political monsters. I had to have so many difficult conversations with people who could only see their coworkers and other teams as competitors who had to be defeated that I nearly had a prepared speech on the topic. The politics and attempted backstabbing was insane. It was also weird that they thought it was going to work at a small company where we knew the people they were trying to backstab for years.
These companies are not monoliths though. Statistics really matter.
Because there's no such thing. Or rather, there are until it's unprofitable enough that caring seriously threatens the bottom line, or the nice owners sell off to someone less nice.
Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.
But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.
Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a debt, especially in California where the company is required to pay it out when you leave (whether fired or voluntary).
But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system.
Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. But you know when I have never had a problem taking time off, even a long time off? When I could point to the corporate policy that says I have X days, and I was taking those days.
And now I'm not playing manager roulette on whether or not I have the time, or how kind they are feeling. Or how buddy-buddy we are.
It's one of those things that are great in theory, and terrible in real life.
> Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem.
That me! Except I don't think it has anything to do with my manager or company.
I've worked 5 different jobs over the last 12 years with 8 or 9 different managers and literally never had an issue with taking the time I want while taking 6-8 weeks of PTO a year. I've hit the point where when I'm looking for a new job unlimited PTO is kind of table stakes.
I manage a few teams now with some people in the US where my company does unlimited PTO and others in Canada where our company cannot give unlimited PTO. Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days. I have US employees who take a ton of PTO and Canadian employees who have burned through their entire balance and then some and I have employees in both places who take essentially none.
I get that if you're in that second group it's preferable to be in a place where you'll get paid out for the days you didn't take, but I'm pretty convinced that unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take.
If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount? That way, you get paid out if you leave or are fired.
I know quite a few people who use their PTO as a sort of emergency fund if they are laid off... they will at least get paid that amount to hold them over until the next job.
For me, no. I take more PTO than most companies with limited PTO offer. Most big tech companies offer 20-25 days and I'm taking 30 minimum. I take 6-8 weeks a year and the year I got married, I took 10. A normal year of PTO for me is 2 weeks during the summer for a vacation, a week at Thanksgiving, a week in April or May since my family has multiple birthdays in that window, 2-3 weeks in the Christmas/NYE period, and then random days here and there for the rest of the year.
For my team, for the people on the low end banked PTO is probably better. For the people on the high end they often take more than the allotment for CA employees, so no.
Everyone's experience will be different, but in my career I've always found that unlimited PTO often means no one cares how much PTO you take as long as you're getting your work done. I value that freedom. I know it's not for everyone and I'm not saying that every company should be unlimited PTO, but I just hate this narrative that it's a scam.
Why not take 10 weeks or 12 weeks? If it's unlimited?
And how many other employees are only taking half of what they would be taking because they feel silently pressured to - and do all of those missing weeks make up for the single extra week you're taking?
But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level. For some, I suppose the benefit is worth it--but if "unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take", then people are giving up a lot of guarantees for very little benefit on their side. Especially the payout when you leave.
I have never worked at a place where I didn't need manager approval for my PTO. That includes places where I had a set PTO balance.
In my experience, having banked PTO days doesn't actually give you any real protection from abuse. A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind. The only difference is that the company then needs to pay you out for those days, which isn't nothing, but it's also not a ton of protection from abuse.
I was once on a team where the manager thought he was being tough by really discouraging PTO taking in their team, and it was all great until we got to the end of the year with pretty much everyone on the team still having 20+ days of PTO left. HR just made everyone take the entire december off to use those days up, after that once incident no one had any issues booking PTO the following year.
He was taking roughly a third of his time off.
Fired inside 6 months, and amazed it took this long.
Of course, it’s well in advance, and nearly always avoids big company plans.
In other words, it is roughly the same way as regular PTO except "unused" PTO doesn't accumulate, and you won't get paid for any unused PTO at the end of your employment - which is the the whole point of "unlimited PTO"
At some companies, the directive from the top to management was to make sure people took at least 3-5 weeks of PTO every year. For legal reasons you can't keep official track of this (it will be imputed as accrual) but managers would actively nudge people to take more PTO.
If you proactively manage it, it works pretty well.
The management culture in the US (other places too, but I'm most familiar with the US) is such that any time the employee (particularly ICs/line employees) wants to spend outside of work is automatically considered suspect.
This is because non-management employees are considered to be inherently lazy and constantly seeking to get as much out of the organization as possible for as little work as possible. And when they do work, they're considered to be incompetent and malicious (requiring constant supervision).
I wondered how real those stories were, but that is probably what companies are thinking everyone is like.
Seems much more likely companies just trying to squeeze employees into taking less PTO.
A somewhat random example:
https://www.higginbotham.com/blog/unlimited-pto-pros-cons/
"Cost efficiency. Traditional PTO policies can result in financial liabilities due to unused vacation payouts when employees leave the company. With unlimited PTO, these liabilities are eliminated. This can be particularly advantageous for companies looking to manage their finances more effectively."
But surely it can't be a significant amount of make sense to implement this kind of police only for this unless the company has insane turnover (so "unpaid" PTO is not paid out as cash). The reduced amount of PTO staff takes must be the main reason.
Unpaid PTO is (assuming that the employee _doesn't_ leave the company) essentially debt in the company books with 0% interest rate.
It also means that employees don't accrue PTO days, and therefore don't have to be paid out for that time when they're fired.
The origin story is that "discretionary PTO" was created to enable people to take longer vacations than was feasible within the regulatory constraints of accrual-based PTO. It can be abused in other ways but the intent of the people that invented it were employee-friendly.
It's just so slimy.
Anytime something is marketed as unlimited, it's not.
It started as a positive thing, intending to trust the employees and give flexibility. Unfortunately, like a lot of things, sleazy leaders turn flexibility into manipulation.
This creates some complications for the company where the accumulated PTO can be a liability on the books. It's a number that represents something they have to pay out with no labor in return. Depending on laws and circumstances they may also have to pay out the PTO balance when someone departs the company.
Some companies skip all of this by switching to untracked PTO, which is often sold as unlimited PTO. Employees don't accumulate a PTO balance and when they go on vacation they get paid normally, not out of a separate bucket. No extra liabilities on the book.
The trick is that PTO is now up to your manager's approval and judgment. At good companies you can actually take advantage of this for a more relaxed and flexible PTO schedule if you get your work done. I have done it and it's great when the company is good.
At bad companies, it becomes a trick where your manager always says "I don't know, now isn't really a good time to take that much time off" and then everyone gets less vacation time than they had before. I have also experienced this and it's very depressing.
I’ve heard horror stories about unlimited equating to zero. But I’ve also heard plenty of horror stories about PTO and unpaid time off getting denied as well. There is not much for employee protections in the states.
Maybe the hate for DTO in well compensated circles like this comes from people who were already getting 6 weeks of PTO. I would imagine they’re not comparing DTO against the 4 weeks my sister has as a senior dev in a marketing firm with an extra day per year of service or the _3_ weeks my mother had at 65 working as a data analyst for a healthcare company. Or maybe my company is just a unicorn in a sea of companies abusing it with people not being able to get any time off at all.
People are talking about how it’s always busy, there’s never enough time etc. That’s true almost everywhere. The work never stops. There’s always a project, always a critical bug, always a new initiative, always the next sprint. There’s more work than could ever be done with twice the employees. Good culture just mandates that you work around peoples absence and so is fine if people are out. Likewise as a good employee you don’t abuse unlimited and take off half the year.
https://www.businessinsider.com/unlimited-pto-vacation-scam-...
It's uncomfortable for employees but employers tout how comfortable it is.
We're all just hunkering down.
Maybe next they’ll give you housing from the company property, and sell groceries from the company store, and see a company doctor.
As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.
There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.
Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.
Finding a level that suits you and being satisfied with it is an important life hack.
> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit
Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."
Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.
What OP said is definitely true on the micro level-- not "even/might/some aspects", but the whole thing. It's true that in any given organization there are fewer senior roles because of hierarchical nature, it's true that as you progress up the ladder the demands change and increase, and it's true that many people fail or choose not to adapt.
The macro argument seems right as well. If you measure it longitudinally the numbers don't stay constant. It's 1 in 4 today, maybe it was 1 in 10 fifteen years ago. Anecdotally there is definitely something strange going on with the labor market that's new, and that you can't explain by micro realities alone.
> create a new promotion-like role
I do this for people on my team when I can.
I'm about maxed out for development roles compensation wise. By saving most of this compensation and investing it in the S&P 500 and similar indices, I get way more of a return for far less effort. There are days - not months, days - where I'll earn about $7,500 in stock appreciation. The long term trend has me about matching my monthly salary in earnings.
Raises are inflation adjusted so there's no erosion of the underlying capital going into investments.
Why try harder when I'm paid enough to just invest it in the stock market? The biggest problem I have right now isn't how to get a promotion or raise, it's coming up with increasingly contrived excuses to avoid up-or-out and being pushed into more responsibilities.
I don't get this framing. No one is owed a promotion. (Unless that was explicitly promised of course!)
Me, I'm worse than stalled out: I'm earning one tenth of what I used to. And I'm happy with my job! Imagine!
The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.
I prefer employment to be transactional. I think it always ultimately is. There is a role for government to not let employers unfairly take advantage of workers or cheat them, but beyond that my loyalty is to people and what I have equity in.
* A tax on (gross revenue – wages – cogs) with rate (cpi + fedrate) ^ 0.9 would be an excellent start, with an exponential factor that halts ‘shift the tax to consumers through simple price increases’ — the more you earn, the more you have to raise prices, which raises inflation, which raises your future tax by more than your price increase; the more revenue you pay out as wages instead of shareholder dividends, the lower you can set prices, which lowers inflation, which lowers your future tax — and adding the FFER lever allows the Fed to perform their mission to control (price) inflation not only with banks but also with businesses. For example, (8% inflation + 4% fedrate) ^ .9 is ~14.8%, which is a completely acceptable surcharge for businesses having raised prices so high that it caused an 8% inflation year!
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
I mean, it's cherry picked, but still funny to see all those charts.
If you're a CTO, CEO, CxO, you have direct, in depth knowledge to how the company is doing. You also likely have insight into how that translates into free capital to spend on wages. Many companies are not public, and even when companies are, earning reports aren't easy for a line worker to fully understand.
So if you have that knowledge, it's much easier to push back when someone says a wage increase isn't possible. Such as the board, or the CEO (eg, if CTO, or whatever).
This by no means "makes it fair", it's simply that the inequality may be from knowledge, and therefore bargaining power.
Another aspect of things, is that every CxO class worker can agree, their knowledge is very very important, irreplaceable in fact! Upper management, you see, is quite valuable, as of course (from their perspective) "I'm irreplaceable and valuable!". Who doesn't think they have value, after all?
But.. those line workers, or even those engineers, well.. they're like cogs. One as another.
Some might attribute malice to the above thoughts by CxO class individuals, but it can also simply be driven by self-belief in innate value, and by good old ego.
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
Where did you get that idea from?
Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.
I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.
> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?
part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.
This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)
When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.
Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.
This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.
Until we have sentient robots, all that automation is simply a lever with a human laborer at the end of it.
When do we stop?
With some reserve on the side, a company can survive bad times and not fire people. This is the kind of behavior employee will appreciate and make some diehard loyal.
But this available money is money not making more. So that's a bad thing these days and so the only easy variable available to survive is to remove excess workforce. It took some time for people to understand loyalty has been one-way only but now employers are reaping what they've sown.
It makes sense to burn reserves and keep good employees around through a temporary cyclical economic downturn. But most of the large layoffs lately have been driven by secular changes that management expects to be permanent.
The British Army passed on promoting George Washington. Twice.
Nothing changes.
Oh, and back then a single income could support a working-class family to buy a decent house, two cars and maybe send a kid or two to college.
I agree it's more expensive than ever to afford to raise a family, though. There's also a malaise in the air that I don't think broader society has felt since the late 1970s, too.
Some people might not want to take responsibility for retirement savings in the same way they might not want to take responsibility for providing themselves housing but the alternative is strictly worse.
The only pensions that kind of work is government pensions because they can paper over the structural deficiencies with taxation. But even that has significant limitations as we've seen.
A 401k isn't required to be invested in the stock market. It is advisable but not required.
That said, they can work great in tandem with the stock market.
The Kensington & Chelsea local government pension scheme in London, here in the UK, is an example.
The local authority (not central government) ultimately has the responsibility on paying out these liabilities, but it's one of the few councils that just dumped their pot in to global equities, and as a result they are 200% funded relative to their commitments and have stopped making further contributions.
The money that was flowing into the pension scheme can now flow in to local services.
Asset allocations:
https://www.ft.com/content/87c321ab-e5ac-4a1d-a637-c1f7befcc...
Cutting contributions:
https://www.ft.com/content/67254bff-0e6c-407a-a24a-c34ee217d...
I prefer having the money under my control, personally.
Losing your job is bad; losing your job and your retirement is a nightmare.
Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.
It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.
The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.
- Job security is getting lower.
- Insurance is getting spotty, will this be covered? Maybe?
- Companies are testing dynamic pricing.
- The rise of prediction markets.
Eventually the economy is going to be constantly gambling on our lives. Every ounce of certainty is a potential money making opportunity.
I'd rather take the money and not have to work while I find a new job than to have a warning that my job is going to end in 2 weeks while I'm expected to keep working.
Typically in US tech companies layoffs don't give employees a notice period, but they do give severance pay. So you stop working effective immediately but you either get a large check or continue to receive paychecks for a period. That period depends on the company but it's usually within the range of your notice period. You don't have to work during it, though.
The flip side is that other employers understand that you can't fill a position immediately. There's not many circumstances where a unique opportunity really appears on no notice.
In situations where you are in dispute with your employer and want to walk off, the traditional solution is to file a number of disputes and get yourself signed off as sick with "stress", then quietly negotiate a mutually agreeable exit.
I’m tired of all the excuses for shit leadership. They all can go to h** when they die.
out of curiosity, why would you censor that word?
Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.
The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.
I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.
There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.
I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.
Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.
Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.
Isn't the US significantly more meritocratic in this regard than other large economies? I.e. compared to Europe or Asia it would seem that Europe has much more rigid comp rules, Japan has formal mechanisms to ensure that older people are paid more. And this is a tech forum obviously where i.e. the right ML engineers are making 7 figures + right now in their late 20s.
But pure tech is a small part of all white collar jobs (the linked article references "white collar jobs", not "professionals" which the title substituded for it). And many non-tech white collar jobs are not nearly as meritocratic as those in the pure tech (I also agree that in Asia or Western Europe those jobs might be even less meritocratic, but this does not change the point above). My 2c.
They forgot the “More work, Constant threat of Unemployment” part
The reason there are no raises and no promotions is because of this "just be thankful you have a job and income at all" mentality that exists in the current environment
It’s wild how different things are at different levels over time. When I started about 8 years ago, any technical skills and experience on your resume / LinkedIn would have recruiters reaching out non-stop. That died out over the last 3 years and I didn’t have anyone reaching out for jobs. Recently I updated my profile to state I’m a staff engineer and suddenly I’m getting messages like nothing ever happened. Senior engineer? Maybe one recruiter every 3 months.
So yeah, definitely the "more work" part.
Lets say your company breaks even. There's a savings jar, people's salary are being met, everyone's happy, and idk, you bought your first yacht or whatever.
Shouldn't you calculate expenses on the assumption that people will get a salary increase? Or is that a weird thought? Is that just a fixed variable, and when someone asks for a raise you can say "sorry, our budget is tight"
I have a feeling many Founders/CEO's aren't honest about expenses and earnings. If my company made a million and someone earns on average 50k, then I can hire a lot of people with that money. If they all cost 60k (big promotion imo), then I need to hire like they'll earn 60k.
Maybe this is all bs, but I feel like a lot of founders can pay but won't.
Not trolling, genuine question.
Thankfully, my company is pretty good about still giving me raises.
There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.
Why? Why should I become an example, or a leader? To be blunt: why do companies think I should do that additional work, without additional pay?
If you want to grow the company, (and all companies want to grow), or new companies want to start, we gotta train new people. That means you, too. Knowledge transfer and good culture is how the industry changes for the better. Otherwise it's all the pointy haired ones exploiting useful idiots.
If your wages are falling behind then look for opportunities in higher growth sectors.
Put another way, if they aren’t matching inflation, should I reduce the work I do correspondingly?
I think the issue here is that you're trying to frame the issue in terms of some sort of concept of fairness. But in reality that has nothing to do with it.
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
YoE only gives potential, but are not necessarily sufficient in any career. I've interviewed engineers who learned the narrow job they were doing in 6 months, and then only did that for a few years. Do they have 6 months of experience or 3 years? I'd argue closer to 6 months unless they were doing more. I imagine surgeons are similar, where I'd rather see X number of successful surgeries performed than YoE.
This issue with YoE is also why I'm bothered when HR uses YoE too heavily to base salaries around.
It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.
Innumeracy with a finance vocabulary.
Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.
In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.
I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.
Career progression is of course nice, but the larger issue is just being paid a living wage. In my case, I have money, I can walk away from my job any time that I want to, but I love what I do. Most people aren’t so lucky. The politics are hard, because there is this characterization (and I have seen it here at HN) that state employees are lazy, incompetent, inefficient, have huge pensions, collect large amounts of overtime, and more. In my experience, while there are exceptions, this really isn’t true.
Some environments require progression as a sort of anti-stasis measure. Famously including army officers, not exactly a growth industry either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
Unionizing is just part of the fighting back. Only splitting the big monopolies can bring back competition and healthy salaries and promotions.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, but they are also bad for employees when that monopolies control most of the jobs of the industry.
Big tech employs less than 1% of the people in the country.
UNIONIZE
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324499
https://code-cwa.org/
It's an international market and everybody's using the same skills and tools. It's insane to think that 6 digit salaries would forever be sustainable when the rest of the world is doing the same stuff.
Developing tech to knock down barriers also paves over moats. I think the west is going to be in for some very trying times in the coming decades. The UK is a fascinating place to look at in this regard.
Well it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the capital class, the "responsible" owners of the economy. Everyone knows that credit goes to capital and blame goes to workers!
ALDI is great though!
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/pig-python-baby-b...
https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/boomer-reaction-economy-feel-...
The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.
It's all going to be taken by end of life care companies who charge $20k a month (yes really) to put you in a small room and have a teen with barely a highschool diploma check in on you every now and again, for minimum wage.
Every dime of wealth the boomers collected will be captured by a few private capital orgs who prepared for this. It will never flow down.
The healthcare industry will profit a great deal, but there is no way they will capture 65% of all wealth in the country. And supposing they did: ultimately, all this wealth ends up on some household's balance sheet unless it goes abroad.
Why would this be any different?
You can make all sorts of hay about "Oh that money will be invested so it will still benefit normal people" but no, the vast majority of the wealth the boomers gathered will be controlled by the new aristocracy. They will do with it as they please and thus you should expect it to almost entirely benefit them first and foremost.
Private equity prepared for this windfall. Even if they scoop up only ten percent of it or so, that's an enormous transfer of wealth from average families to the hyperwealthy. That's another entire chunk of the pie that is just removed from the continually shrinking normal person economy.
A giant fraction of that wealth is in real estate: Homes. Those homes should be passed down to the next generation, alleviating our insane house prices somewhat, but instead they will come under ownership of the same companies who currently monopolize specific rental markets to ensure the price goes up as much as they want, and they will absolutely rent out those new properties, in such a way that they do not reduce prices.
That housing stock is completely and totally captured by these private equity firms that own the end of life care companies.
The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money.
Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.
Of course if you don't leave they may lay you off at any time. However assuming that doesn't happen they will eventually give you a large raise.
"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.
Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.
Holding out isn't ideal, but it might be the best for you.
My eldest is now 18 and starting to to into the workforce and my youngest is still about 3 years from that.
if (and thats a big if) we dont have a GFC part 2 in the next 10 years I'll be fine I think... but jeez Trump/AI is making it hard to get there.
The real question is will this change? Will companies start valuing long term employees thus making it not worthwhile to leave? Only time will tell (I wouldn't bet on it though).