Failure makes you dead, unless you have the means and support to try again.
There's no dismissal of agency. Deciding to compromise your principles to keep earning money is just as much an exercise of agency as making the opposite decision.
There are people for whom the circumstances of their employment, whether it is strict visa rules or the fact that they are being employed illegally, or some other extenuating circumstance such as disabilities that do not give them the freedom of action that being able to leave one job and move on to another. In this we are completely in agreement. The fallacy here is to extend this circumstance as if it will never change.
It is absolutely true to say this advice does not apply to every living breathing human on the planet. However it does apply to a lot of people in the workforce today.
In many economies, the number of people who lose employment and are always having difficulty finding employment again is relatively small[1]. And I have been grateful that I happen to have opportunities and have supported financially organizations such as Homeboy Industries[2] that work to address that. It is inspiring to meet the people who have taken that step to invest in their own employability and versatility so that they can increase their options and live a life they are proud of. Are their periods in their life where losing a job would be really challenging? Absolutely. Does it have to always be like that? Absolutely not.
So in the general sense, I don't think it is a simple point. I think it is a state of mind. Either you take responsibility for your failures and your successes, or you only take responsibility for success and blame your failures on things outside of your control. I get the whole learned helplessness thing, it's a real problem. But it can be overcome. The motivation for that change has to come from inside a person. I do not believe there is any amount of coaching or cheering or reward/punishment cycles will force it.
[1] The most common situation that I've personally interacted with are ex-felons.
It’s not just as simple as “finding a new job”. Runway for bills, the time it takes to find the right opportunity, etc, are all definite resources that are required to make the switch - which I’d argue far more people have trouble affording as opposed to your proposed statement that few people have trouble finding new jobs within their space.
I feel that your point of view makes more sense for someone who finds consumer capitalism and the tech industry ethical on a fundamental level, bar occasional aberrations. Not everyone sees it that way.
I really wanted to make a point only about the ethical issue. I think it's fair to say that most of your comment is fairly generic "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" advice. The efficacy of such advice has already been debated a thousand times over. In the midst of the present economic crisis it strikes me as less helpful and relevant than ever.
I'm wondering if the ethical compromises you feel/felt ever inspired you to try something to avoid them.
For example, one of the people I knew at Sun was pretty depressed about the sort of crap that went on in tech companies. Her response was to create a company that she felt aligned with her views of ethics. Took her a long time to get to "Raman profitability" but that work was offset by the benefit of knowing that the place where she worked didn't subscribe to the kinds of ethical compromises that make people uncomfortable.
I agree that this sort of advice is less actionable during a crisis, whether it is a pandemic or the Great Recession. Just like it is never helpful to tell someone in a car crash that if they had been wearing a seat belt they wouldn't currently be on the way to the emergency room. That said, large unlikely stresses to the system, like the pandemic, tend to "light up" areas of risk[1]. It is why in operations at a tech company you will stage mock outages (with real equipment failures) to be able to "see" whether or not your mitigation processes work and where they can be improved.
I still think it is always good advice to learn from adverse circumstances, regardless or origin, to create additional resiliency in your life. That's how I started figuring out what to put in my "go" back in my car[2]. Looking at disasters that hit the Bay Area and asking myself the question, "Okay, when this hits and I'm in my car somewhere, what will I want to have?"
[1] Using the pandemic as an example, the pathetic capacity for the US to manufacture PPE was not widely understood (visible) until the pandemic.
I can't think of one business who has pure ideals and has successfully implement them without inventing something new.
One way to interpret this comment would be to imply the author of the quoted statement, having overwhelming advantages conferred upon them by circumstances out of their control, cannot possibly expect that their so-called "experiential wisdom" would have any applicability whatsoever to the masses for whom those same circumstances were not conferred.
If that was your intent, I do not think it serves you well.
I say that because attributing survival, much less success, to a vague notion of privilege is dismissive of an individual's agency. What is more, as a salve for the jealousy of the success for others, it really doesn't work all that well.
I have met many people who have come from many backgrounds and with their own challenges. In that time, the quality of "success" was strongly correlated with fundamentals, not with where they started.
There is a great saying, "Success makes you stupid, failure makes you smart" which speaks to the value of failing in order to better understand success, and why some succeed and others do not.
In the majority (perhaps all but I really couldn't say that as a definite) the ability to fail, take ownership of the failure and then seek the understanding to not fail again, results in success. In contrast people who fail and then externalize the reason for failure to some aspect of the situation that was out of their control and do not seek out a better way, invariably continue to fail.
Privilege exists, that is painfully obvious to me as a white male who is not habituated into getting nervous when a police officer approaches. Privilege exists in toxic organizations where friends of the boss are evaluated differently than everyone else. And privilege exists when people who conform to behavior, dress, and language norms of a group are treated differently than people who are different.
In spite of that, it has been my experience that complaining about what other people have done more easily than you did, and attributing it to privilege, doesn't actually help. Not that I'm saying you would do that, I am saying that in my life I complained about a lot of things, one was a kid my age who was interviewed by the local news station for building a robot, FROM A KIT HIS PARENTS BOUGHT HIM, as if he was some genius robot builder. Was that privilege? Of course it was, his parents could afford it and mine were trying to make sure we had some money left over at the end of the month to save for those future problems that always took money. But it didn't help me get any better to focus on him having these advantages and me having none. I befriended the owner of the TV repair shop (yeah I'm that old :-)) who would give me broken TVs and radios to take apart and learn from. I built a complete Shortwave receiver out of a couple of otherwise non-working AM/FM radios and some additional tuning components scavenged from TVs and other radios. As a result, when I got into college on a scholarship as a EE candidate I already knew the basics of how electronic circuits worked and to analyze them. The kid with the kit robot may have entered college knowing no more than how to solder according to someone else's directions.
My point is that one should not dismiss the power of one's own agency to make a better future for themselves. And I see complaining about privilege as a crutch to avoid doing the work, just like training wheels on a bike means you don't have to do the work of balancing. It is important to recognize privilege exists but it would be wrong to let it define you.