The post was written by someone who works about the management and shareholders of corporations. If privilege and entitlement are qualities of the people working on death marches at companies the DOJ said were illegally colluding to keep wages down, then what are the qualities of the heirs collecting dividends from these companies - expropriating the wealth of the surplus labor time of those creating the wealth. The system is the creation of heirs who never worked a day in your life, but you make the case of the parasites - that those actually working and creating wealth are the ones who are entitles, privileged etc.

It does seem to be a feature of the American working classes that they are led to be persistently, easily and even violently divided over wedge issues. Abortion, gender, race, "coastal elites" vs. "flyover country", millenial vs boomer, heck, or even, as in this case, "1 paycheck away from bankruptcy vs. financially stable".

You'd think illegal collusion over wage suppression would unite people who... earn wages but it doesnt seem to. Not in the same way belonging to, say, an arbitrarily advertiser defined age cohort does.

Which is really weird if you step out of American culture and look at it from the outside for a bit.

Maybe this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about a lack of class consciousness.

All these ideological movements such as communism, inquisition or social justice warriors subserve the individual to the collective struggle, usually by force. Who loves to be spoon fed propaganda or cancelled "for the success of the greater cause"? They attack their own people even more viciously than the others for crimes such as original thinking which is nothing else than heresy to them. They reject the very basis of debate and logic-based reasoning, preferring to spread stories with emotional appeal and moral judgements instead. They cause a chilling effect on society, people live in fear of being persecuted for any reason, learn to be docile and lack the courage to change anything.

My wife works in healthcare, and agree that our "problems" are paltry relative to what they deal with.

"Instead of 6-3 your hours are now 6-to-6 3 days a week because we lost coverage in the evening. Tough noogies"

She gets paid 1/2 what those with 4 years of experience in our field get, and works on brains and spines.

One of my friend works at a major consulting firm, he knows they just grind new accounting grads until they burn out every. year. They just hire new ones the next year.

Banking analysts, actually pretty much everyone in banking is in what sounds like an unending grind. The exception I've heard is if you can somehow push through as an IB and make it into being a VP you can calm down.

So, yeah. Meetings are boring, the work is sometimes uninspired but things are pretty cushy for us right now.

You can safely dismiss almost every problem in the world with your approach.

"Our jobs aren't that bad – do you hear what they do to software engineers?"

I earn a decent chunk but I'd still have to earn my current wage for about a million years and pay 0% taxes to have as much as Jeff Bezos does.

But we have, by far, the most intellectually stimulating and flexible careers in the world. And nowadays, get paid ridiculous to boot.

So why is everyone complaining? What is everyone aspiring for?

I can only speak for myself here, but I know it's a valid point for many that followed the same path I did. The work I come about to do requires constant and intense mental activity on non-repetitive tasks. That takes a lot of energy. Twenty years ago, the computer engineering university faculty I've been through saw constantly the highest rate of dropout in its freshman and sophomore years, compared to any other kind of school out there. The touted reasons were mostly that there was simply too much work, that it was too grueling, too hard. The ones that prevailed weren't necessarily the smartest or the most diligent of all. They were, however, the most passioned about the computer engineering field. One had to have it to fuel the energy demand of the work necessary both in school years and after. The money is good, but that alone didn't seem to cut it. The work conditions in office are nice, but those weren't nor aren't what kept me in the game. (There were times when the space I worked in had no heating in the winter and was often smoked in, with me as non-smoker.) What I see in my peers' complaints nowadays is something that hits on the root of what made me wake up and continue every day. And the worst part is that the decision makers don't seem to be aware or caring. The mood is more like "I pay them, therefore I saddle them with whatever I see fit". So to answer you, what I aspire for? I aspire for a better fit, for both myself as someone good at something, which (from a self-development investment prospective) it makes sense to strive to do as much of it every day, as well as for the client benefiting my work/skills. I also think it's just ethical to rise awareness (even by complaints, if it has to be) when I see (my) resources misused and degrading of performance/potential in general.

Dan Pink - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Imagine explaining this to a dirt poor Hatian:

"You will have unimaginable wealth, but sometimes you have to sit in a meeting and do nothing. It's really hard"

I don't know why you think the average tenure across FAANGs is 2 years but it no doubt varies heavily by company. As another comment mentioned, Google has notoriously good WLB, and any individual team will be more predictive than the company as a whole. You'll hear plenty of "first-hand accounts" of high-pressure work environments because hundreds of thousands of engineers work at those companies!

Everyone desires self actualization, and that is different for each person. If you are highly creative and technically competent, then yes, endless meetings are a detriment to that goal. A starving Hatian doesn't negate that.

Edit: that's why people make FIRE exists and start physical jobs instead, become farmers etc, it's not as simple as a job being hard or easy, but stressful, irrational, alienating and in other ways unhealthy that doesn't necessarily make it obviously "hard".

I mean, I love my job, but I still plan to FIRE and become a machinist or something.

Alternatively I might try to get into management and see if I could make it more competent. I did that for a stretch at a Big Co, and I think I was able to really help my team to deep work and get a lot done. But then I was personally in meetings for roughly 40 hours a week and I got sick of that, so I changed jobs.

[1] - https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...

The biggest joke in the military was danger pay, which was $7.50. $7.50 if I was working in an active warzone that day. I still stood in formations, pointlessly, for hours. I still watched people who shouldn't have been promoted get promoted over people who should. I still watched people fuck each other over. I still sat though pointless and grueling training videos. I still had 8-12 hour workdays. I still lived with the idea that my life would end early through mental or physical health issues. I could go on.

The biggest difference I have is pay and the security to try and improve the system myself. I know if I get fired for trying to do the right thing that I'll find another job, whereas in the Marines as a four year corporal with one year total combat experience I made $20k and had no career prospects should the military see that I am a problem.

Those were the negative examples. More positively, engineers are motivated by many of the same things Marines are and I use these aspects in my day-to-day leadership as well. I exercise transparency, when I know the team is shouldering a burden I acknowledge it and steps were taking to minimize it over time. Marines and engineers like knowing their purpose and place in the world. They both desire a framework that establishes a domain for their autonomy. They both desire leaders who are scrappy enough to fight in the trenches but with the tactical persuasion to have vision from above while leading from the front. They're both willing to put in whatever it takes to accomplish the mission but they want to be recognized for doing so, and not necessarily monetarily. Again, I could go on.

It's not that I disagree in principle with what you're saying, but I think you're describing the top 10% range of programmers.

Edit: and herein lies the danger in dismissing the complaints of entire swaths of people with concepts lile "privilege". It's just a socially acceptable form of prejudice that never applies to all people from the group.

I worked as a supermarket janitor in high school and college. Most of my work in tech has been for government contractors. Most days I feel like I'm still a janitor, only I'm coping with other people's tech debt instead of scrubbing toilets. The thing is, if scrubbing floors and toilets paid as well as coding I'd go back to pushing a mop in a heartbeat because at least janitorial work has a better-defined scope of work and definition of done than most of the development projects with which I've been involved.

Not quite. Actors and musicians have it better, once they've established themselves.

I'm not being facetious here - with people trying to "break in" to programming and endless auditions in the form of whiteboard interviews, I can't help but feel like we've ended up in a career with most of the downsides and few of the upsides of an entertainment career.

    Not quite. Actors and musicians have it better, 
    once they've established themselves.

It's more like a freak statistical accident -- like "being born into a royal family", getting hit by a meteor, or winning millions in the lottery.

citation needed

> once they've established themselves.

BIG if; the ones you're thinking of represent the 1% or less. Survivorship bias.

I only recently learned about the term "strawman argument", and I think this is one. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Parents post was not about SW devs who established themselves, but about SW devs in general. That you don't need to establish yourself to still live a good life is exactly one of the advantages of being a SW dev.

Besides that: Establishing yourself as actor often involves attending partys of Harvey Weinstein kind of people.

So here maybe more "survivorship bias": the bias of looking only at the top performers / the most visible ones, or here "those who made it". Ex: "Interviewer: How did you get to your position? Politician: I worked hard! I spend countless hours doing XXX etc...". Many other persons might have worked just as hard or even harder, but lacked the connection or simply the luck to make it.