when I was very young, one could be promoted simply by demonstrating a willingness to learn and be better when others were not. now, if you are not doing at least that, you are not considered for a raise.
last year I got a perfect yearly evaluation, and a 0.6% raise, which equaled inflation for the same year.
a raise is supposed to be a raise. a reward. incentive to continue the good work.
it used to be that if you could perform well that you were rewarded. now, if you perform well, you stay afloat. that's it.
I really hate this planet because of things like this. if humans were a decent species, money would not work it's way toward people who already have more.
honestly, I can't wait to be done with this life. the black abyss is better than working harder than anyone else simply to keep your head above water.
Having said that, historically we're still at a "high point". It's a cold comfort, but still..
The sobering reality once you understand things is that we are never more than 1 generation away from living in caves and losing all civilization. The delusion of durability of The Cloud (compared to physical books) is one of the saddest things.
I used to be a vendor for both Seagate and WD - and they'd regale us about how NO HDD can store data forever even if it's not running. Everything fails as long as it at 300K rather than 0K. And the lifespan of most electronics and computer is FAR shorter than most people imagine.
Yes, we'd be much better off if we'd just stop progressing at some arbitrary point, and just accepted:
- 35 years of life expectancy
- no running water
- famines every decade
- zero modern technology, like electricity or even healthcare
So? That's still the definition of life expectancy. Moreover, being able to live to 90 if everything went right doesn't mean much when you die at 20 because of a treatable illness/injury, or seeing your wife/kid die in childbirth.
that "law of the jungle" thing is a myth. people believe it because it makes sense, but it isn't real for humans or almost any animal species.
what really exists is that people feel very good when they view themselves as superior to others, and they come up with an insane amount of mental gymnastics to justify what they do to attain that feeling.
one of the great myths of nature is that predators have some sort of instinct to screw over their social group at every opportunity. even most animals know that there is strength in numbers and in fairness. we humans have taught ourselves that fairness and consideration of others are weaknesses and that feeling like a badass at the expense of others is very positive.
humans are literally an irredeemable species at this point, because all of the evidence of what I say is available to anyone with an internet connection, but it's easier and more fun to feel like a badass occasionally than it is to change your view of society, so the facts get ignored and humanity continues to destroy itself over smaller and smaller things.
Speaking of humans: Their social group, no. Other social groups, absolutely.
We know this as "ingroup bias".
Pre-internet, your ingroups and outgroups were largely restricted by geography. Moreover, you got this sort of "ingroup boosting" effect by being part of a town, county, state, and country, so you had a lot of overlaps with other people.
Interestingly enough, each of those geographic entities actually occupies a "slot" in your social graph -- unconsciously, you think of them as people.
Without a forcing function providing behavioral moderation through discordant groupings, ingroups and outgroups become increasingly monocultural, tribalistic, and behaviorally extreme.
Citation on this? Your claims are contradicted by wikipedia articles like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
We are a decent species, that's why we've survived this long.
There is also more at play than just humans being "decent". I recommend this short (3min) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k_FfS1kHfY
TL;DW it's almost a natural law that things accumulate in a pareto distribution.
I think they even used to have a patched kernel that would disable faulty RAM so that they wouldn't have to replace single DIMMs.
I think it follows a common pattern of replacing medium skilled labor with low skilled laborers augmented with very few high skilled laborers.
Also the biggest DCs are in low cost-of-living/cost-of-labor areas. E.g. South Carolina, Iowa, and Oklahoma have the federal minimum wage ($7.25).
It has always been a PITA to be the low person on the totem pole, but these days the pay isn't there, the benefits aren't there, and the treatment can be rather appalling.
The story is full of the standard paradoxes: a) She's being paid 'reasonably' but probably not for such a rich company/area b) She's entitled to 'talk about comp' but people slamming the company publicly on Facebook posts are not going to last, it's reasonable that the company wold be upset buy that c) Google is full of actually quite nice people wanting to make a difference, there's a lot of moralizing about 'equity and diversity' but in their relentless pursuit of profit they create a 'tiered class system' of people, of completely secondary status and they grind them with every bit of the massive power they have.
Google is not rich because they 'nickle and dime' people, they're rich because they create a globally useful product, and have enormous market power.
Some things Google could do:
1) They're stinking rich. Pay good wages and give awesome benefit packages.
2) Don't intimate people but let them know if they're leaking information to the press or posting publicly that they're going to be let go.
3) Make every single person from CEO to the servers at lunch 'part of the company' and let them come to company events, and see the 'invited speakers' etc. if they want.
The reason they should do that is because their supposed to be 'good people' i.e. communitarians first. It's hypocritical to virtue signal publicly if they can't make their own beds.
$15/h is unlivable wage in Bay Area or Seattle but actually ok money in many parts of the country.