Step outside of the news and step outside of cutting-edge tech companies and moderate success is basically the norm. There are many companies out there that are chugging along, doing okay but not really shooting for the moon. They're not making headlines or coming across your social media feeds as the hottest companies around, though, so you're not going to see them unless you go looking.
The catch, of course, is that the average moderately successful company pays a lot less than the average high-growth startup company. You might find that you're less pressured, of course, so it's not exactly unfair. However, many of us are drawn to high-paying companies, and high-paying companies generally correlate strongly with high-growth expectations.
The vast majority of tech companies are ones you’ve probably never heard of. They don’t pay spectacularly like the SV shops but they don’t underpay either.
I currently work for an digital agency in Ohio. You probably have never heard of them and you likely never will. They don’t make headlines but they’ve chugged along for over a decade, making a healthy business out of building applications for local companies in Ohio as well as some larger companies you have definitely heard of.
Companies like these are the majority, but you never hear about them because the media is focused on a few select companies, mostly consumer tech, that everyone’s heard of and generate headlines.
Sure, but Hacker News is a strange place to lament about that.
The country is full of exactly what you're looking for. Go work in an IT department in a medium size business, or a non-profit. Join a consulting group that does software development outside a major metropolitan area. Join a software company that's been around for 20-30 years running the same product. Join the software development team at a company who focuses on the development of their internal proprietary applications.
(I'm not insulting these place. I spent half my career at them. There's nothing wrong with them. They're just different. And they tend not to have the focus on growth.)
There's a lot of companies doing exactly what you want. They just don't make the headlines. And they're definitely not talked about on Hacker News. It's a bit like vegetarian showing up at a steakhouse & acting surprised.
In today's world of corporate growth via acquisition, having a modestly successful job with a modestly successful mid-sized company in no way insulates you from the economic forces of the outside world.
Legitimate modest success tends to result either in a series of endless acquisitions where a mid-size business gets absorbed into incrementally larger businesses time after time - or where the business gets acquired by one of the larger, monolithic players in the industry. With any acquisition, restructurings, layoffs and product changes have substantial impact on those moderately successful staffers.
Alternately, stagnation or modest decline typically results in vulnerability to market forces which results again in a buyout by another player in the market, or a buyout by a private equity group who cuts costs, lays off staff, and tries to leverage whatever assets they can to maximize their return at the expense of the business itself. The effects on the staffers are even worse.
Sure, you can find a boring, moderately successful job for yourself. It may last 5, even 10 years. But the days of being able to have a modestly successful, boring job with the same company for 30 years appear to be completely gone.
It being so "obvious", perhaps you could clearly state the problem. And then you might possibly also have a solution (as do so many commentators today)?
If you've studied complex social systems (e.g., the USA's socio-political environment) nothing is "obvious" about them and most "solutions" prove to be illusory.
-"Life is a bitch and then you die."
The problem being that every 3 month there is a mass shooting with about 20 casualties. Including schools.
How about you also read the first part of the sentence you cited me on:
> I'm not in for a political discussion about a solution
I explicitly stated that I am not in for that. For the exact reason you want to blame me for. Maybe read more careful next time or put up a little more good will. Especially on a delicate topic like this.
I certainly don’t lose sleep over what happens in Australia for example.
What's tiring (and turns people cynic) is, that even though a problem is visible for everyone to see, nothing ever (seemingly) changes. That seems like a universal behavior that can not only be seen in the US, but everywhere humans are involved.
If you’re trapped in that rut like tens of millions of people are in the US, a downturn hurts.
I’m currently not in that rut, but I count my blessings every day that I escaped and a feel for people who are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
Or are you in possession of the true meaning of the word 'suffer' and stand above us all to decide whether someone is suffering or not?
Without being actually affected by all this (not a US citizen), I can say that your comment is flawed either way.
People came up with the idea of good, being good is essentially acting in consensus with society therefore it is unsurprising that most people are good.
There are people who are genuinely good and almost without fail, they are people who have devoted their lives to helping others. Often they fly under the radar and aren't very well off. They don't make the news but you know one when you meet them and they have a huge impact on those around them.
There are also bad people, if you'll forgive the Marvel level depth of that proclamation. There are people who make the world worse, usually for their own benefit or entertainment.
Generally I think 95+% of people are neutral - just minding their own business. Is that virtuous, or just the minimum?
Maybe the idea of “goodness” is a layer on top of that, created by consciousness, but it’s not a completely invented thing by society just to make people conform.
But we have it much easier than previous generations. We've got better health, wonderful technology, more information than ever before. There's less poverty and less disease. Less racism. More empathy.
Consider the folks who were around for WWI. It was followed by a flu outbreak, huge stock market crash, Great Depression, then WWWII and Korean conflict.
Life is hard. But we don't have it so bad.
Life is relative. It's not an argument to say "yea but we're better than the Ancient Egyptians!" So what? That isn't meaningful.
Using World War 1 really tells. That was a century ago. No one is even alive from then anymore.
That doesn't mean that there aren't parties that are responsible for much of our current troubles - be it the state of the education/healthcare systems, the state of the housing market, the state of salaries/wages, environmental issues, human rights, as well as the ever growing trend of identity politics and a variety of other issues.
It is also not infeasible that these problems might have actionable solutions and that change for the better would actually be possible with lots of effort. Ergo, accepting things as they are because "it could be worse" isn't a valid stance that would motivate one for whatever actions are necessary to improve the world in whatever capacity possible - be it protests, exercising your rights to vote, or calling out problematic behavior.
The system works. (Maybe not as fast as we like sometimes, but it absolutely works.)
More like once in a decade, and recent ones are substantially smaller than in previous centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Recessions aren’t once in a lifetime?
> I'm tired of the world insisting that every company must be growing in order to be valuable
They don’t. It’s just the growth companies don’t pay dividends
> and then when growth stagnates, people ditch it to cause massive losses.
Because it’s price is speculation on future profits which would create future dividends
> Can we not just have moderate success?
Yeah
> Can we create a system that doesn't self implode every so often?
Not really, but we can make the implosions less severe
> Can we create a system where making money at all costs (including the decimation of the planet, the wage-slave workforce, and the engorging and toppling of governments through cronyism) isn't the the default?
No
> I have to remember that people are _generally_ good. I have faith in the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and doers. What will happen will happen, but I have hope that the youth who have seen wave after wave of "being at the brink" might be able to create a system where this isn't the norm.
Seems dubious to me. We will do better on some select issues but mostly otherwise the same
Depends on where you are. Parts of Latin America have been in an economic pit since the late 70s - I guess you could say “once in a lifetime” - for some people, their entire lifetimes have been spent in a state of economic crisis.
I remember the talk about "stagflation" in the 1970s, though I was too young to really understand it. The boom economy that started in the 1980s crashed in 2000. I remember that well as I lost my job. In 2008 I was working in the public sector and my employment was unaffected, I also didn't have any mortgages with stupid terms, and didn't need any of my retirement investments yet so I just rode that one out. So a recession in 2022, especially given the past two years, is maybe a bit early but not really surprising.
Meanwhile, what the U.S. should be doing is ruthlessly cracking down on de facto monopolies and oligopolies that are ripping off Americans and making record profits, like meat... baby formula... and most of all TicketMaster.
Oligarchies offer a way to buffer this effect, so that there can be several companies existing in an industry that slow-walk (disruptive) innovation and buy up competitors in their early stages. Hard to say how long an oligarchy can hold, though. Look at Intel & AMD, and how they're facing a serious test from ARM chips. Even further, what will the onset of Quantum Computing do to the market holds they have.
Free enterprise's nature as winner-take-all is what makes the difference here. Why was it that Friendster, Myspace, and Second Life could all co-exist, but when FaceBook came along they went defunct (mostly). In a more extreme example, consider robotics/AI and how it will replace humans. When robotic surgery is perfected, will 'manual' surgery even be considered 'safe' anymore?
All that would mean is a replacement of the world order and an even further degradation of quality of life.
Does not seem reasonable, tbh...
generally means they are average which means half of the people are even worse!
You still have a family unit, that's not too individualistic but also not too tribal. You have technological and military progression, and a fairly comfortable stable economy. You don't have to worry about billions of dollars in corruption or an aggressive president using nuclear weapons in negotiations. Nor are there the wars and tensions of the middle east or eastern Europe.
I've had several European co-workers express disbelief at the gross levels of corruption evident at all levels of large business and government (especially when the latter is buying something from the former and large sums are splashed about wastefully to line pockets of the pencil pushers).
Hopefully the recently elected new Labor-led coalition govt will follow up on their promise to implement anti-corruption trials of various members of the previous government, who were blatantly stealing taxpayer money, via their offshore Cayman Islands family trust accounts and similar.
After the recent election defeat, we now have an ex-cop opposition political leader who "somehow" is now worth $300 Million, not an inheritance, but most probably various corrupted kickbacks from giving out overly expensive contracts (it's been famously called "The Game of Mates"). And he is just one of dozens of obviously over-wealthy liars.
The list of people involved is huge at many levels, and I hope several of these people end up in jail, but the damage is already done (e.g. cancelled Fibre-to-the-Home rollout, and we already spent double the fibre costs to purchase Murdoch+Telstra copper cable instead, for only 1% the bandwidth capability).
Personal quality of life here can be excellent, especially if you earn 50% over the average wage, which is any 5+ years experience software developer role.
Just don't work for old bigbiz or govt if you want to avoid dealing with sleazy theiving weasels.
www.MichaelWest.com.au
and
"Friendly Jordies" (on YouTube)
are two of the best investigative journalists here, and helped sway the vote in the last election.
Change is coming and the exposed corruption will be a force for greater public accountability in the future (hopefully!)
You can go a long way with incompetent leadership if you can dig stuff out of the ground and sell it.
The world is getting "smaller". An ever smaller group of people can create bigger chaos than they could in the past, be it hacking, 3D printed WMD's, or Tweeting hate. We have entered the Century of Trolls.
You’ve been misled. While the exact details may be once in a lifetime, expect world shaking events every 10ish or less years.
Are you now, or have you ever been... poor?
There has been unprecedented money printing in tough times that doesn't revert to mean before the next economic crisis comes along. This results in huge misallocation of resources and a lot of long term negative consequences all to avoid short term pain.
At some point the developed governments on Earth will have their hand forced rather than playing god with the economic cycle.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/indiana-jones-collapsed-...
See why people don't say this even though it's true? Because the only reason to point this out is to imply causality and to point out that it's different than some other system.
I'm tired of the world insisting that every company must be growing in order to be valuable, and then when growth stagnates, people ditch it to cause massive losses.
Can we not just have moderate success? Can we create a system that doesn't self implode every so often? Can we create a system where making money at all costs (including the decimation of the planet, the wage-slave workforce, and the engorging and toppling of governments through cronyism) isn't the the default?
I have to remember that people are _generally_ good. I have faith in the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and doers. What will happen will happen, but I have hope that the youth who have seen wave after wave of "being at the brink" might be able to create a system where this isn't the norm.
That's a ramble, sorry. But it's just what I'm feeling. I have to ride this wave, take care of my partner and children, do what I can for others, and hope it ends soon.