[HN Gopher] Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Over...
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Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Overflow
Author : marban
Score : 224 points
Date : 2025-01-20 11:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| belter wrote:
| Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer
| technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell
| for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...
| ktallett wrote:
| That is how any social media website works including this one.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves
| rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing
| work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
| minitech wrote:
| And places like Wikipedia don't even give you internet
| points! What dummies these contributors are.
| swalling wrote:
| Except Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced
| is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the
| few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10
| website.
| minitech wrote:
| I agree that the Wikipedia model is better, but Stack
| Exchange posts are also under a Creative Commons license.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Nobody contributes to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow because
| of license. Most contribute because humans like sharing
| information with other people. If Wikipedia's eyeballs
| are low, people wouldn't contribute.
| LeonB wrote:
| Some people would still contribute. It's an intrinsic
| drive. (But I agree with your point in general)
| swalling wrote:
| "If Wikipedia's eyeballs are low, people wouldn't
| contribute"
|
| People were contributing well before it was a top 10
| website. That's how it got kickstarted in the first
| place.
| belter wrote:
| Except nobody is selling Wikipedia for 1.8 Billion. Do you
| see the difference? Congrats on totally missing the point.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| So what? That neither devalues the contributions nor the
| value given to other people through the content.
| belter wrote:
| Imagine this scenario:
|
| A group of volunteers builds a public park, putting in
| hours of work, landscaping, planting trees, and creating
| a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy.
|
| Years later, the park's manager fences it off, sells it
| for $1.8 billion, and pockets the money.
|
| When questioned, the manager says, "So what? The
| volunteers enjoyed building it, and people got value from
| the park while it was open."
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Your story about a park going from "public" to "private",
| with the manager tricking the volunteers into making
| something that is no longer public and pocketing the
| money, is a false analogy for multiple reasons.
|
| 1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about
| the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from
| the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the
| part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name,
| network, software and system.
|
| 2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about
| the content licenses, then the park is still open and
| public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but
| no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion
| dollars. It's just in the commons.
|
| Basically, while both the website and the content are
| valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining
| about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that
| for free. It was used to buy the website, which has
| always been private and proprietary.
|
| Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a
| non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow
| got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a
| single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's
| content into proprietary. But neither happened. And
| that's why it's a false analogy.
| belter wrote:
| You dismiss the volunteers' role as if their work was
| incidental to the platform's success.
|
| The brand, network, and proprietary systems you emphasize
| are valuable only because of the knowledge and content
| the community created.
|
| The "bait and switch" lies in fostering a community-
| driven mission only to commoditize the platform for
| personal enrichment.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| Many people landed good jobs that way. It was a good way for
| self-promo back in the day. Jobs stackexchange section was
| also way better than most other jobs boards at the time. It
| only went majorly downhill after the key people behind the
| site went away to work on other things and it got sold...
| arp242 wrote:
| I also learned a great deal from answering questions.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Not the least. Rational homo economicus pretty much doesn't
| exist in real life. The vast majority of us are driven by the
| essential motives and desires while the intelligence
| rationalizes already made decisions.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider
| themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be
| happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for
| internet points?
|
| Is this how you'd characterise open source software
| contributions as well (minus the points, of course)?
| brudgers wrote:
| Is that better or worse than the traditional route, wealth by
| birthright?
| layer8 wrote:
| Hobson's choice?
| pdntspa wrote:
| I remember reading Atwood's blog around the time he launched
| it, and from his writing, he seemed genuine in his desire to
| build a tool that would help developers write code. This was
| also right in the middle of the original gamification craze, so
| _of course_ internet points lol
| DanielHB wrote:
| I remember reading his rants about just how bad the current
| situation was (which was a terrible website called
| "developers exchange" or public phpBB internet forums). Never
| underestimate the passion derived from sheer hatred of the
| status quo.
|
| Also his backup strategies around 2008 were quite
| interesting.
| cyberax wrote:
| > "developers exchange"
|
| It was "expertsexchange.com" initially. Then they
| disambiguated it by renaming to "experts-exchange.com",
| just to be clear.
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| Awesome! I didn't know that about the domain name.
| smitelli wrote:
| Ah yes, perpetually flagged by every corporate firewall
| that did substring keyword matching on DNS queries.
|
| Incidentally, the amount of sheer content-masking garbage
| on their pages was what originally prompted me to install
| and learn (IIRC) Greasemonkey and a bunch of DOM/CSS
| stuff.
| sien wrote:
| But my oh my, it was so much better than experts exchange.
| zem wrote:
| i feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its
| initial impetus, literally "let's get together and
| collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark
| patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"
| SnorkelTan wrote:
| Stack overflow was an invaluable resource for me as a
| developer. I got a wealth of knowledge about a bunch of thorny
| problems I was encountering with out paying anything. The
| people who answered the questions I had were able to help far
| more people than they ever could have individually without SO.
| I'm having a hard time being upset about his financial
| windfall. It's really only a bait and switch for people who
| answered questions with some other unstated expectation than
| helping others or receiving help.
| kijin wrote:
| In aggregate, Stack Overflow probably saved developers far
| more time than anyone ever put in, and saved companies all
| over the world far more money than the founders made in their
| exit.
| milesward wrote:
| Creating more value than you capture has ways been the jam.
| fakedang wrote:
| Also saved AI companies far more effort in gathering
| correct code for training.
| kijin wrote:
| Not just correct code, but also a whole bunch of
| incorrect answers, as well as votes and comments to help
| weigh the trustworthiness of each answer.
| belter wrote:
| Your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying
| to make.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| What was that?
| belter wrote:
| The founders monetized a platform where unpaid
| contributors built 99% of the value by answering
| questions for intangible "Reputation". The fact that
| contributions were voluntary doesn't negate the issue. It
| highlights it.
|
| A system designed to extract free labor for massive
| financial gain, while offering only gamified rewards,
| reflects exploitative design, not fairness.
| amrocha wrote:
| This is such an incomprehensible take. Every developer
| has benefited from SO. I've contributed to the site
| exactly because it's been so good to me. I don't need
| money on top of that. The website is the reward. Nobody
| cares about reputation.
|
| Websites cost money to run, and I'm glad SO was so well
| monetized that it didn't run out of money and get
| deactivated like so many of the old school forums we used
| to go to for help before.
| belter wrote:
| See my analogy below in this thread about the public
| park...
|
| What is incomprehensible is developers confusing the
| value created by the site, with the means of production
| of said value.
|
| While contributing to the site might provide you with
| some personal feelings of value, maybe even a rush of
| altruistic euphoria... :-) An illusory sense of digital
| sainthood...Your unpaid work directly enhances the value
| of a platform that profits from selling the collective
| output, including yours.
|
| This means you're effectively donating your expertise to
| a for-profit entity, with no equity or share in its
| success
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| The value of unpaid work always goes somewhere.
|
| Many sports clubs work with the help of many volunteers.
| If they were not available to help for free, the
| practitioners of the sports would need to pay more. That
| would mean, only the richer part of the candidates could
| do the sport. A side effect is as well, that the club
| itself gets bigger, more famous, and richer as a whole.
| All thanks to the help of volunteers. There is just no
| way around that.
|
| In SO/Jeff's case this was beneficial for him in the form
| of a huge selling price. I would say luckily he was, as I
| read in the comments, a great contributor to the SO
| organisation.
| zem wrote:
| for a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a
| gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a
| part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was
| still good.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The reputation was fun, but I saw it as a proxy for how much
| I'd helped people. That always felt good.
| LeonB wrote:
| You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping
| other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it's
| rewarding in a way that money can't buy.
|
| Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could
| answer a question, just once, and over time it could help
| dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.
|
| It's easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.
| belter wrote:
| As I said above, your argument has nothing do to with the
| point I was trying to make. You call it cynical I call it 1.8
| Billion.
| davidcalloway wrote:
| I sometimes feel this way even about Google maps. On some
| level when I make a small contribution I'm aware that
| everyone doing so profits Google quite nicely.
|
| But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from
| having Google maps as a resource, far more than the
| contribution I've made.
|
| It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place
| that people help share information useful to each other,
| which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus
| jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a
| way to monetize the sharing of this information.
|
| Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or
| horrid really is a matter of perspective.
| weinzierl wrote:
| There was a time when StackOverflow already had considerable
| size and it still felt as if Jeff knew and moderated every
| single post.
|
| This is what made StackOverflow in my opinion. The excellent
| moderation in the beginning resulted in excellent quality.
|
| Now, not taking away from the other early moderators, Jeff was
| definitely a huge part of it and one thing is for sure: He
| busted his ass off for this site and he deserves the reward.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I don't think anyone deserves 1.8bln reward. Norman Borlaug
| perhaps. But good for Jeff. I think SO was immensly
| societally and economically valuable and most people who
| actually got 1.8bln are less deserving than Jeff is.
| davidcalloway wrote:
| I cannot help but think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven...
| "Deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it".
| belter wrote:
| I would say Jon Skeet busted his ass off :-)
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
| arp242 wrote:
| No one is forcing anyone to do anything, and everyone always
| knew what they were getting themselves in to. It was always a
| deal where everyone wins. That you don't like that choice for
| yourself is fine. No need to be so negative, dismissive, and
| cynical about how other people choose to spend their free time.
| belter wrote:
| It's no different from creating an open source project,
| profiting from the free work of thousandths and then cash in
| a la JBoss or Redis.
|
| If he wanted to give back he could have started with John
| Skeet.
| arp242 wrote:
| Stack Overflow Inc. was always a commercial company. No one
| ever pretended anything else.
| belter wrote:
| Now we are talking :-)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Do you think that the expertSexChange site that it was designed
| to replace had a more appealing business model?
| ktallett wrote:
| I enjoyed the site and found it useful to begin with however it
| became a playground for people who felt they were know it alls to
| get recognition. A little ego boost if you will and that ruined
| the point for me, which was to get a varied response on technical
| questions.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Removed: duplicate comment
| Salgat wrote:
| One nice thing about ChatGPT, they won't judge you as a fool
| for asking an easier question.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It also doesn't answer your question as if you asked a
| different one. So many stackoverflow conversations:
|
| Q: I am looking for a way to do X in language Y.
|
| A: You shouldn't need to do that. _What do you really want to
| do?_
|
| Argh. What I really want to do is exactly what I asked. If
| you don't know, fine, but don't try to steer me towards a
| question you do know the answer to. Just let someone else
| answer. Not everything is an XY problem[1].
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
| emptiestplace wrote:
| > Not everything is an XY problem
|
| Pretty close, though.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Sure, but I find that this phenomenon is just different
| people thinking at different levels on the abstraction
| continuum.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I do find those suggestions valuable 80-90% of the time.
| But in the fringes, on less popular questions, it's really
| frustrating because _I can't just substitute it in this
| way_ because the situation is just different.
| ithkuil wrote:
| OTOH I'd love to have a model trained to address XY
| problems.
|
| Of course ideally you should be able to ignore that
| suggestion and force an actual response
| smitelli wrote:
| It's a case-by-case thing. Sometimes in this big world you
| see people asking things like "how do I write a firewall
| wildcard rule that blocks all IPv6 addresses starting with
| the number '2'?" and you just want to reach through the
| screen and shake them by the shoulders and ask them if
| everything is okay.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'd rather a Q&A site have a specific and correct A for
| every specific Q, no matter how ridiculous some user
| thinks the Q is. If I was open to re-thinking my design I
| would have asked something like "Please help me re-think
| my firewall rules..."
| kbolino wrote:
| And, even when it is an X-Y problem, it may still be better
| to answer the question as asked, if only to then explain
| that maybe there is another problem that really needs to be
| solved.
|
| Looking at it from a pedagogical lens, it seems some
| learners (question askers) will fixate on X and be
| unreceptive to Y, stemming perhaps from some fundamental
| differences in conceptual understanding between the asker
| and the answerer. Trying to answer for Y will confound and
| frustrate; closing the gaps in understanding (and there may
| be gaps on both sides) is usually a lot more involved than
| just shifting the conversation from X to Y.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| One one annoying thing about using LLMs to answer technical
| questions is when you provide context like "I have tried X, Y
| already, and Z won't work because..." it does what LLMs do--
| uses all the words in the prompt to string together more
| words into an answer. It would make LLMs so much more
| intuitive to use for technical questions if this problem
| could be solved... sounds so obvious that maybe it does
| exist?
| _xerces_ wrote:
| I had mixed feelings about those that demonstrated their
| knowledge by answering the question extremely thoroughly with a
| lengthy treatise. On the one hand, their answer was a great
| resource for deeper understanding, on the other I just wanted a
| one-liner to solve my problem and go on with my day!
| abanana wrote:
| True, but that also sums up one of the junior dev problems
| often talked about on HN - those who use SO to get a direct
| answer that they can copy-and-paste, instead of an actual
| explanation to help them learn (and save them having to look
| it up next time).
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Does anyone still use Stack Overflow post-2022?
| burgerrito wrote:
| Many including me
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Not that many judging by the two answers. Even 100k is too
| little relative to the number of English speaking devs in the
| world
| glitchc wrote:
| The answers are only 18 minutes old. Give it time.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I had to write a powerscript last week. I lifted 90% of it from
| 2 or 3 posts in SO
| danpalmer wrote:
| Yes, for non-work things I find it vaguely useful. My workflow
| is to first google search, often see Stack Overflow answers,
| and then move on to an LLM or actual documentation if I don't
| get anything through search.
|
| I do it this way around because I can search far faster than I
| can write out reasonable english sentences that head-off bad
| LLM responses.
|
| Sometimes when I'm confident enough that the LLM will be able
| to give me the "right answer" faster than search I'll do it
| first, but that's mostly when I have something I can copy/paste
| in.
| recroad wrote:
| My experience with LLMs has been different. I give it trash
| prompts and it gives me reasonable responses. I think it's
| figured out the space between what I type and what I want.
| That's great. Until we get an input which allows it to figure
| out the space between what I type and what I think. That
| doesn't even sound too bad, because now I can just think and
| it'll happen. I look forward to this future, sounds
| wonderfully efficient, which would finally give me the time
| to do that thing I really want to do but don't have the time
| right now because we're not efficient enough.
|
| But no, my experience is different with regards to the ratio
| of quality of input versus output. I think we all do a
| subconscious ROI of whether typing that little extra will
| yield an output that's going to be that much better that it
| was worth the time and effort.
|
| Or much more likely I'm just lazy.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| If I know what I want, just not exactly where, I'll go
| straight for a search. But if it's more fuzzy then LLMs has
| totally changed how I acquire knowledge.
|
| Now I find it more productive to ask an LLM to get some
| keywords or similar which I might search for afterwards.
|
| The great thing about LLMs is that, unlike a search engine,
| you can tell it "no, not quite like that, more like this"
| to guide it.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Then why not just tell the LLM to do the search for you?
|
| ChatGPT has had built in web search for over two yeass
| for paid users
| password4321 wrote:
| OpenAI
| croes wrote:
| Sure, why not?
| Terr_ wrote:
| I search it for things that are outside regular documentation.
|
| However any contributions (answers, questions) are directly
| related to something I'm working on. There's no community (or
| certainty that your work will not be marked-as-duplicate) which
| would justify a more-general kind of helping-out.
| bluedino wrote:
| I don't think I find any useful, recent answers
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Yes, I still answer some few questions if I know the answer.
| epistasis wrote:
| Today I had a small amount of Google Sheets work to do, to
| extend somebody else's work, and I had both Claude and ChatGPT
| hallucinating mythical function names, and not understanding
| array functions with utter confidence and certainty.
| StackOverflow results from a web search gave me the answer
| faster, in the end.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Not to mention, such sites often have a discussion, with pros
| and cons of certain tacts, why some methods may be pitfalls,
| and more.
|
| Such sites help you understand why, far more than a distilled
| down response of a LLM. Such sites help you learn.
|
| Knowing the why, is often far more important than the how.
| epistasis wrote:
| Ironically enough, the LLM was better at explaining trade
| offs and new syntax, and I learned more about the topic
| from the LLMs, largely from observing the unintended
| effects of their incorrect instructions. It was just dead
| wrong on several key details and when it didn't know how to
| do something it answered with BS with just as much
| confidence as the insightful parts, which would be
| infuriating from a human, but merely time wasting from the
| LLM.
| ncruces wrote:
| LLM are the reason I get bug reports like...
|
| Them: "why doesn't this thing work I your OSS lib, whereas it
| works in this other OSS lib?"
|
| Me: "does it? it's not supposed to."
|
| Then: "oh idk, ChatGPT told me so."
| arkh wrote:
| > hallucinating
|
| I hate the use of this word to describe when a sentence
| completer gives a wrong result. To hallucinate you have to
| have a concept of reality. Which those models don't have.
| They're just mathematical tools which some times manage to
| give a result humans think as human-like.
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't work in LLMs, but I use a ton of similar tools to
| model biology, and I really like the term "hallucinate." I
| would argue that the LLM does have a concept of reality, in
| the form of a probabilistic distribution over sentence
| structure. And that probability distribution does not match
| the reality that I live in, even if it matches the LLM
| training data and training procedure fairly well. I would
| argue that even a simple random forest model has a concept
| of reality, or maybe _is_ a concept of reality, though a
| faulty one.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Do you also hate when prooor use the terms like debugging,
| serverless, non relational databases (all databases model
| relationships), etc?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yes, of course I do. Why wouldn't I?
| Salgat wrote:
| At least for me, I've found chatgpt to be a good Google
| replacement. It might be helpful beyond that occasionally,
| but it really excels in spitting out existing data.
| shric wrote:
| For me it depends on what I need.
|
| Google -> stackoverflow is typically much faster than
| chatgpt.
|
| If you are a fast typer and can formulate a short question
| then you can often get from thought to answer in well under
| 10 seconds.
|
| With chatgpt there is a small thinking delay then often a
| long token sequence of filler before you get the few lines
| you're looking for.
|
| ChatGPT shines compared to stackoverflow for something you
| know that requires a dialog of prompts or you're asking it
| to write some specific code instead of just finding out how
| to accomplish a small task with very clear syntax.
| Salgat wrote:
| It sounds weird but google seems like it used to be scary
| accurate back in the day, but results for me seem a lot
| muddier than they used to be in the past few years.
| cyberax wrote:
| For me, Google started to fail when they decided to start
| dropping parts of the query. And inevitably, the crucial
| ones.
|
| E.g. I wanted to search for "CUDA on Fedora 41" and
| Google "helpfully" drops the "41" number from the query!
|
| So I have to notice that and click on "41" to force the
| search.
| jiniux wrote:
| I still do. Personally, I only use LLMs to generate boilerplate
| code and for inline predictions. Sometimes is just faster for
| me to lookup an answer on SO than trying to ask something to a
| LLM that may be outdated or wrong (at least on SO I can see the
| date of the answer and what other people think about it).
| lemper wrote:
| yea, mate. i still use it to read some questions and answers.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Deleted all of my accounts. It's not worth it anymore.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Yes, several times a week. The process of just searching for
| something and reading SO answers is still just as good as ever.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I still use to find answers to problems, but less often than I
| did a few years ago (thank you chatgpt et al) and I search via
| my browser (thank you Kagi search adjustments) not via the
| site's search.
|
| I haven't posted questions or answers for years. Too many
| petty, officious people and general toxicity.
| abanana wrote:
| Is there a psychological term for the self-centred thinking
| where a person thinks "I've stopped using X, therefore
| everyone's stopped using X"?
| ge96 wrote:
| That's a thing on YT comments "Does anyone else [insert
| generic thing everybody does]" boom many thumbs up
| layer8 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes and people still watch TV even though you haven't owned a
| TV in 20 years (tm Slashdot 2002)
| ge96 wrote:
| I do, I don't use co-pilot to code or LLMs much other than for
| work until I find a personal use for it. I like other fields of
| AI more eg. ML/computer vision.
| donatj wrote:
| Comes up in my Googling sometimes.
|
| I don't really have the time I used to have to try to answer
| things these days.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| Instead of worrying about how hard it is to give away their money
| effectively these billionaires should be working to fix a
| political system created specifically to funnel money to
| billionaires. Without fixing the actual problem giving away money
| is just virtue signalling.
| Terr_ wrote:
| A fairly tame start (i.e. not overtly against their own money-
| making interests) would be to support voting-reform to one of
| the many _many_ options that are superior to plurality /first-
| past-the-post voting.
|
| Insofar as regular-businesses like predictability, this would
| actually be good for them. Fewer dramatic changes from slim
| margins every election cycle.
| slg wrote:
| If you click through to the original blog post[1], you will
| see him advocating for exactly this.
|
| >Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question.
| We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote,
| such as making election day a national holiday, universal
| mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all
| votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen
| institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as
| state and local election boards, as well as the Federal
| Election Commission.
|
| [1] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Without morally condemning them:
|
| Accumulating that much wealth means you were in a frenzy. It's
| good he snapped out of it. Take someone like Elon or Bezos, 10
| billion is not enough, 100 isn't, 200 isn't. We have people
| that are still in a manic greed phase.
|
| It's karma that the ghost of Hitler possessed Elon's body.
| Simple greed can destroy a soul too. You have no idea the
| supernatural forces that will dock in your soul if you make it
| a comfortable nesting place.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Why would we expect someone to not only have the insight on how
| to fix society, but actually be able to reshape it, just
| because they are a billionaire? Giving resources to those who
| need it might be the best way to help for some.
| LeonB wrote:
| Jeff is specifically donating money to causes which improve the
| political system, enfranchise (not dis-enfranchise) voters.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Unless you are among the uber wealthy -- wealthy enough to
| control communication channels -- it's very hard to change the
| political system.
|
| Today, many Americans consume their information from social
| media and an shrinking number of "traditional" media sources
| that are largely controlled by a few entities.
|
| It is _very difficult_ to affect discourse in a meaningful way
| that can then move policy by getting people to vote.
| iterance wrote:
| Would that it had been a public benefit corporation or nonprofit;
| maybe I would still be contributing today.
| epistasis wrote:
| This uber-cynical and uncharitable smearing of the story is
| unhelpful at best.
|
| May I never be subject to this sort of misreading, and I hope
| you never are either.
| iterance wrote:
| meh. you're probably right. I edited and distilled it down to
| the main point. I just wish it were a nonprofit at the end of
| the day, I guess. It would've been the right thing to do.
| That he chose not to makes me sad. That he was rewarded
| richly for it, sadder.
| arp242 wrote:
| > That he chose not to makes me sad
|
| I'm not sure if it was really up to him; I doubt he owned a
| majority of the company?
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Sure was better than ExpertsExchange, though :)
| iterance wrote:
| True enough. I guess it's probably not beyond saving, either.
| It does have a pretty good core idea.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Oh, it wasn't ExpertSexChange?
| anoncow wrote:
| Making Stackoverflow the Wikipedia of QnA was a missed
| opportunity in hindsight.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I encourage everyone to read his actual blogpost linked in the
| article, it's pretty good.
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
| ofrzeta wrote:
| It's great. I'd suggest to make it an HN submission on its own.
| salviati wrote:
| What do you mean "suggest"? To whom? You should do it
| yourself if you think it's a good idea.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Obviously my suggestion was targeted at the person
| "Toutouxc" who has posted a comment I replied to.
| unwind wrote:
| It has been submitted five times [1] already, so that's
| covered. :)
|
| [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefi
| x=fa...
| suraci wrote:
| Interesting
|
| In the article:
|
| > 34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to
| vote. Why?
|
| In the referenced news:
|
| > ... "Currently my biggest issue with U.S. politics is the
| response to the Palestinian genocide," Rojas said. ...
|
| Back to the article:
|
| > I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us
| they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping
| America fair for everyone. Our status as the world's leading
| democracy is in question.
|
| > We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote,
| such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail
| in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry
| more weight.
|
| Is there any serious polls show how many Americans choose not
| to vote for the same reason? is it a number so small that it
| can be ignored?
| uludag wrote:
| There is a poll about this that was recently released:
| https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
|
| Here's a quote from the poll: When Biden
| 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024
| were asked "Which one of the following issues was MOST
| important in deciding your vote?" they selected:
| 29% - Ending Israel's violence in Gaza 24% - The
| economy 12% - Medicare and Social Security 11%
| - Immigration and border security 10% - Healthcare
| 9% - Abortion policy 5% - Don't know
| Larrikin wrote:
| So completely unrelated poll to the question?
| uludag wrote:
| Yeah, not directly related. Interesting though that most
| people who abstained from voting did have a issue they
| could name, and only 5% put down "Don't know" so this
| particular demographic may fall in this category
| (probably more complicated though).
| ericjmorey wrote:
| That data is about people who voted in both elections,
| it's not about people who didn't vote in 2024.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Interesting though that most people who abstained from
| voting did have a issue they could name, and only 5% put
| down
|
| Nope. The poll is about people who _did_ vote - not those
| who abstained.
| pbiggar wrote:
| Good Drop Site News article about the poll providing
| context https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kamala-harris-gaza-
| israel-bid...
| BeetleB wrote:
| The article is wrong/misleading. It starts by talking
| about Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and who did
| _not_ cast a ballot in 2024. Then it cites this poll,
| which is of a completely different demographic: Those who
| voted Biden in 2020 and _did_ vote in 2024 (but not for
| Trump /Harris).
|
| As I pointed out elsewhere, those numbers are so tiny
| they would not have impacted the election results at all
| if every single one of them voted Harris.
| throwaway243123 wrote:
| So anecdotal, but I think you have to consider the
| depressed turnout. From my circles, it's clear that
| plenty of Gen Z people (not just Muslims) either stayed
| home because of Gaza or (as in Dearborn, MI) voted Trump
| to protest Gaza. Gaza was a IMO a huge enthusiasm
| dampener for Harris.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This has never made sense to me. If you are worried about
| the treatment of people in Gaza, and your choice is
| between a party who supports the current mistreatment and
| a party who supports even worse treatment, why would you
| protest-vote for the party who supports even worse
| treatment?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > why would you protest-vote for the party who supports
| even worse treatment?
|
| It's all anecdotes - how many protest voted for Trump vs
| a 3rd party candidate or simply not vote at all (which I
| think was the ultimate factor)?
|
| For the latter category: The same reason Arab Israelis
| often boycott their local elections. Playing a long game.
| Playing the short game means almost no real gains for
| Gaza (it hasn't, after all, in all these years).
|
| They likely don't believe Republicans will ever see it
| their way, but have more influence with the Democrats.
| Had they voted for Harris, they felt it was a vote for
| the status quo. If Harris won, it would mean the Gaza
| policy would continue as the Democrats feel they'll get
| their votes anyway. If they voted Harris and Trump won
| anyway, then that's worse - they "sold out" to Harris,
| and they still ended up with Trump. Either way, they'd
| feel the genocide would continue.
|
| If they voted 3rd party or no one else, and Trump won,
| the thought process would be:
|
| "Yes, the bad treatment for Gaza will continue for
| another 4 years. Maybe it'll be worse, but it was
| intolerable with the Democrats anyway. Now the message
| has been sent to the Democrats and they may be willing to
| come to the table in the future".
|
| Also, keep in mind that the impact to the _voters_ is
| miniscule either way. It 's not as if their livelihood is
| at stake with Trump.
|
| I was not very sympathetic to them in the beginning, but
| as the election proceeded and when the pro-Gaza crowd
| actually made a lot of moves to appease the Democrats
| (lowering their demands, etc), and get pretty much
| nothing in return, it made total sense. For all practical
| purposes, the Party leaders were not willing to even come
| to the table, let alone negotiate. On the whole, exposing
| the Democratic Party for who they are was a notable
| achievement.
|
| The whole flaw in all of this is: It's really not clear
| if Gaza impacted the election at all. I haven't seen a
| good study that indicated this factor would have been
| enough to bridge the gap between Harris and Trump.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I don't doubt many were motivated due to Gaza. But it's
| not clear that those numbers are significant enough to
| affect the outcome. If all of them had voted Harris,
| would she have won? We'd need a better study to know
| that.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides
| Harris in 2024
|
| These people were "irrelevant" to the election outcome.
| Isn't it the case that if every 3rd party vote went for
| Harris, Trump would still have won?
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| "someone besides Harris" means Trump too, not just 3rd
| party candidates.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Fair point - but I suspect the outcome was more due to
| non-voters who voted Biden in 2016 than those who voted
| for someone else.
|
| If someone has good data on this, it would be great to
| see it.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and
| housing are not compatible with the American Dream.
|
| Yep, it's dead. Someone please make it official already. Don't
| worry about the autopsy or time/date of death - just get the
| death certificate already and let's move on.
|
| Whether they want to replace it with something equivalent is
| frankly up to the rich people, college institutions, and home
| owners/sellers. Just guessing based on the trend, but that will
| also be a No.
|
| Right now, it's really called "The American Survival Games".
| This isn't just fear mongering, you have to change your
| mindset. The American Dream meant you were assured some level
| of survival in exchange for work. Now that is not the case and
| you constantly have to reassess what your work trajectory is
| going to get you and if it will be enough to survive the next
| day, but also survive the volatility of a very polarized nation
| changing its policies on a whim. You also need a backup plan
| for your job in case you just get laid off due to no fault of
| your own. And a backup plan for the backup plan because the
| hiring landscape might change.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| > "The American Dream meant you were assured some level of
| survival in exchange for work."
|
| I've never thought that was a common interpretation of the
| American Dream.
| titusjohnson wrote:
| I've never thought it was anything but that. Work hard and
| be rewarded, that's the American Dream.
| Zanni wrote:
| The distinction that ericjmorey is making (I believe) is
| that the reward is not guaranteed, only the opportunity.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That's close to what I have gleaned. You'll recall in _Fear
| and Loathing in Las Vegas_ , HST goes on and on about the
| American Dream, as if the duo could locate it in a physical
| place, like finding the source of a river. In this case,
| Las Vegas.
|
| I do not believe that was a selection based on convenience.
|
| The American Dream has a sense of social and/or financial
| mobility to it, but most of all, from what I can extract,
| it is about an ever-present opportunity to "make it." Fail
| miserably? Try again. Bankrupt? Maybe you'll make a go of
| it this time. Effort is part of it, yes, but an acceptance
| of the role of pure luck is also a vital component. You can
| bust your ass and it will likely turn out better for you
| than _not_ busting your ass, but there are no guarantees.
| You can only approach the table and go again. Another role
| of the dice or the hope that you haven 't drawn a bad beat.
|
| I will not bore you with how that works into the novel, but
| one point to take away was the sense that the Dream was
| moribund, if not already dead. A sense that credit scores,
| background checks, and "I hope you know that this will go
| down on your permanent record" mentality is a noose slowly
| drawing shut. No more second chances, or third, or fourth.
| You screw up, bucko, that's it. The American Dream is now a
| taxidermied carcass whose silhouette we can see in the
| window of a house on a hill: referenced as if it were still
| alive, but never met.
|
| Now, we see people who have made it big, but some section
| of them are _products_ lifted from the mud and polished for
| public consumption. Others, when investigated, come from
| surprisingly fortunate backgrounds. Sons of senators '
| sons, as Jello Biafra put it. This has been sensed on an
| unconscious level since perhaps the mid-eighties.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| As much as I might like people like Jello Biafra or
| Hunter S. Thompson, those shouldn't be the _only_ people
| informing you on society.
|
| You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce
| back and even prosper. I've seen it happen with
| bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge
| off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars
| and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It
| takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is
| a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.
|
| I think an important difference is: are you in dire
| straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck?
| If you consistently make poor decisions, you'll
| eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out
| of the hole.
|
| If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily
| turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when
| the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I
| definitely believe there are good people out there who
| were never able to make it. But that doesn't mean that
| nobody good will ever make it.
|
| To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be.
| Something other than a caste or feudal system, or
| religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in
| their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a
| risk to try something new, and then propelling general
| society upwards with each breakthrough.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Gracious, I never said that they were the only people
| informing me on society. They make for some interesting
| seed quotes and ideas for further discussion. The
| American Dream as a concept is probably worthy of a
| series of books, not really something I can cram into
| even a page.
| rob74 wrote:
| Come on, haven't you heard that Trump has declared the start
| of a new American Golden Age? You gotta have some faith!
|
| No seriously, this reminds me of another "Golden Age" which
| according to the propaganda happened under Ceausescu in
| Romania when I was growing up
| (https://princetonbuffer.princeton.edu/2014/01/30/tales-
| from-...), while in reality everything was falling to pieces.
| I just hope Trump's age won't last as long as Ceausescu's (24
| years).
| ciupicri wrote:
| Actually life was pretty good for Romanians during the
| "Golden Age" compared to the rest of the communist period.
| The problem was that we lived on credit just like Americans
| and when it came time to pay it, things started falling
| off. Ceausescu didn't invest wisely the money from the IMF,
| so he started exploiting everything and everyone to the max
| until the debt was paid off. Just a few months afterwards
| the Revolution happened and he was trialed and sentenced to
| death.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| The fish stinks from the top
| another2another wrote:
| "A fish rots from the head down" is the saying. And since
| neither Jeff nor Joel are the heads at SO anymore I'm not sure
| of the relevance here.
|
| But we can all agree that they made a wonderful fish that has
| helped millions of developers (including myself) over the
| years.
| wmiel wrote:
| Interesting, it seems that extremely rich americans are
| discovering what scandinavian countries solve through taxation
| and effective government.
|
| They used to have it in some form with 'new deal' and 'great
| society' until ~1970, but now they can't because of the very same
| reasons that are making them extremely rich.
|
| Plus there's some fetisishation of efficiency of the private
| sector vs public one and distrust in public institutions, while
| in some areas I don't think it's warranted, it's just that public
| insititutions are more transparent than the private sector imo.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Yes, these sorts of posts strike me as rich people learning
| that being rich doesn't solve everyone else's problems. Better
| late than never.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| America has a lot of taxation. Fortunately for the Scandinavian
| countries it spends it on "protecting Scandinavian shipping
| lanes" and "medical research grants that benefit Scandinavia",
| rather than solely on local welfare spending. The America First
| lot are learning a lot from Scandinavia there, though. I'm not
| sure we're all going to like where that could lead.
| wslh wrote:
| It is very difficult to compare or extrapolate US with
| Scandinavian countries. US is socially super-heterogeneus,
| huge, and big population while Scandinavian countries are
| socially homogeneus, small size and population. And this is
| just the beginning.
| adamc wrote:
| This is just wrong, on many levels. If you look where tax
| revenues go, it's mostly defense (military industrial
| complex) and middle-class entitlements.
| mminer237 wrote:
| That's just wrong. Defense spending is 13% of the budget:
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
|
| Federal taxes are mostly spent on welfare like Social
| Security, Medicare, Medicaid, & SSI.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| You just said that "the budget is mostly Y" in response
| to, "the budget is mostly X + Y"
| dgfitz wrote:
| Huh?
|
| adamc said "budget is mostly A + B" and the response was
| "no, its mostly W + X + Y + Z"
| adamc wrote:
| The things he cites _are_ mostly middle-class
| entitlements. That 's where a lot of social security and
| medicare spending goes.
| adamc wrote:
| That isn't welfare. Most of those are middle-class
| entitlements. And defense is the second highest category:
| https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-
| guide/feder...
|
| Calling Social Security "welfare" is some weird political
| stance.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I though America spends its taxation on destabilizing Middle
| East and flooding Europe and Scandinavia with migrants.
|
| If Europe tried to do what America does for Europe it should
| dump military equipment onto various central and South
| American countries so they can fight among themselves and
| create droves of refugees traveling North.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| The US has been destabilizing South and Central American
| Nations quite well on its own.
| ellen364 wrote:
| I can't immediately think of a major US naval deployment in
| the North Sea outside the big NATO exercises every 1-2 years.
| Were you thinking of a specific shipping lane?
| PKop wrote:
| I prefer my higher wages and lower taxes, thanks. We need to
| get a handle (moratorium) on mass immigration into US before we
| care about handing out more of our money for welfare. Why would
| I want my hard earned wages to be given to an endless influx of
| poor foreigners? The problem with higher taxes is the money is
| not spent well. Solve that and people are more willing to
| contribute.
|
| Look at how badly run are the high tax cities and states in the
| US. Talk of taxing more without discussion of bad governance is
| a non starter.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I was raised in a low tax American state, and now live in a
| high tax one. The quality of life is so vastly better here
| that I could never go back.
|
| Turns out those taxes actually build nice places to live.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Is it better for the people who live in the rural areas of
| whatever state you live in? Are the better areas
| affordable?
|
| I'm far from a "disaffected rural White American Trump
| supporter" (yes I'm purposefully using a cliche). None of
| those adjectives describe me besides "American". But a lot
| of people on the left (which I am when it comes to social
| issues) are very self unaware.
| jamespo wrote:
| Being on the left, but specifying on social issues
| suggests you want someone else to pay to solve those
| social issues.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| No, I have no problem paying taxes or government
| requiring business to pay taxes.
|
| I don't agree with the over and mostly dumb regulation of
| tech from the left and I think they over index on the
| wrong issues and the reason we are where we are now is
| because old folks on the left wouldn't exit the stage
| when they should have - Supreme Court justices and Biden
| specifically.
|
| I'm pro Vax and have been shot up with every vaccine
| imaginable including multiple Covid boosters. But the
| anti-vax movement was exasperated by Democrats trying to
| force the Covid vaccine on people
| ciupicri wrote:
| What are those states?
| beastman82 wrote:
| As a counterpoint I moved to Massachusetts where the roads
| are among the worst in the country. My taxes apparently do
| not buy infrastructure maintenance.
| hb-robo wrote:
| I don't really get Mass in general. On paper it seems
| like it should be quite a bit nicer than it is in
| reality. I live in the Hudson Valley and feel like it
| would be a downgrade in a few ways. And for being a deep
| blue state they are pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on
| things like food safety and health guidelines.
| hollerith wrote:
| >pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food
| safety and health guidelines.
|
| I know that state and local governments are responsible
| for inspecting restaurants. Also I know that NYC banned
| transfats in restaurant food. Is that what you mean by
| "food safety and health guidelines"?
| andrewl wrote:
| Although there is probably support for immigrants besides
| welfare, I believe that welfare itself is reserved for
| citizens.
|
| And this is not a statement for or against immigration, but
| in response to what some people have said (not PKop, to whom
| I am replying): non-citizen immigrants do pay at least _some_
| taxes, in the form of sales tax. And, depending on how they
| are paid (cash or paycheck) they will also be paying taxes on
| their own pay. If they are getting cash it is easier to avoid
| taxes. It is harder if they 're receiving a salary.
| PKop wrote:
| Immigrants from certain locations, which the vast majority
| of the waves of immigration we are getting in recent years,
| are net negatives in terms of budget impact, takers vs
| contributors to tax revenue. And yes, I agree with you on
| the perfectly logical and common sense position that
| welfare should be reserved for citizens.
|
| Housing migrants in Hotels in US cities, paid for by
| citizen tax revenue, or guaranteed emergency health care,
| paid for by citizen tax revenue, among other examples are
| bad policy and unfair to Americans.
| kstrauser wrote:
| With at least one major exception: I want to non-citizens,
| whether here legally or not, to get healthcare. In the
| spirit of enlightened self interest, if someone has
| smallpox or tuberculosis or COVID or anything else deadly
| and communicable, IDGAF where they're from, I want them to
| get treatment.
| eloisant wrote:
| What are you talking about? Non-citizen immigrants pay the
| exact same taxes as citizens. Not just "some" taxes.
|
| Taxation is based on where you live, not your citizenships.
| (Well except US citizens who have to pay federal taxes even
| if they live abroad but that's an exception).
| andrewl wrote:
| I was mostly thinking that poorly paid agricultural
| workers or other people doing periodic manual labor may
| be getting paid in cash, and perhaps they are not paying
| taxes on the money, even if they are legally _required_
| to. The wait staff and bartenders I used to know did not
| pay tax on their cash tips.
|
| So what I am talking about is not what the legal
| requirement is, but to what degree it is followed. But to
| the degree these people pay taxes while here they are not
| getting a completely free ride when they take advantage
| of our tax-supported services.
|
| On a related note, I would be happy for illegal
| immigrants to get at least _some_ medical support, such
| as vaccinations and treatment for communicable diseases,
| as that benefits everybody.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| It's a non-starter to talk about having government do
| something that uses taxes like stopping people from moving
| past the line in the dirt.
| PKop wrote:
| It's a non starter to raise my taxes, fix your reading
| comprehension. Certainly, you wouldn't be surprised to know
| I think there's enough money to do this, and that I oppose
| the government doing other things but support the
| government doing this yes? It's just common sense.
| 9question1 wrote:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/elon-mu...
|
| "Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR
| manager, and they're like, Yeah, that means that this person's
| the most qualified, because it's the exact same language. And
| she's like, This person is clearly unqualified because they
| didn't even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like,
| this happens a lot.
|
| So first they're looking for these exact matches. And then they
| take everybody who was really close in language--and also, by
| the way, who has something called a government resume, which is
| different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know
| that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool,
| they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and
| everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean
| master--I think that's the top rating in a lot of these--they
| make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."
|
| This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or
| fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think
| folks who don't live in America don't understand how
| dramatically different and worse the implementation of
| government is in America from many other countries who
| sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if
| the goals are similar.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This happens in private corporations, too. Most of us have
| gotten clearly bullshit resumes forwarded by HR.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| I don't think you understand how bad it is in literally any
| large organization ever.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| I don't know your background, so I won't say I don't think
| you understand - but in my experience, government is
| multiple times worse than any private organization. Yes,
| the same problems exist - but without any of the pressures
| that force private business to adapt or fail, so the
| problems are worse by far.
| Draiken wrote:
| Same exact thing (or worse) happens in private orgs. But we
| don't even have access to it.
|
| I mean, we don't have to go far to see this. Nepotism is
| illegal in many countries for public institutions, and
| rampant on private ones.
|
| This narrative that private corporations are better "just
| because" is so silly. We simply see the inefficiencies of the
| government and can't see the same ones on private entities.
| Especially the big ones.
|
| I've never worked at a company that didn't have many absurd
| processes, incompetent people, useless bureaucracy and so on.
| keybored wrote:
| Policymaking is never discovered. It's forced. Like class
| struggle forced the hand of actors like FDR during his
| presidency.
|
| Then that was forced away by the reaction (class struggle) of
| the most right-wing capitalists and ideologues which ultimately
| lead to neoliberalism.
|
| So sure, there are some set of relatively enlightened
| capitalists that want more of a social democratic status quo
| for the stability it brings. But the material conditions are
| not there.[1] So people like Jeff Atwood will write opinion
| pieces and give what is the grand of scheme of things token
| material support. But it can't realistically happen right now
| in the US.
|
| Of course the same principles apply to Scandinavian countries.
| They're (our) false ideology is called the Nordic Model.
|
| [1] Look at Bernie Sanders. The Independent senator who ran for
| the ostensibly left-wing Democratic Party as a mere social
| democrat and was shot down by the Establishment. Now that he is
| too old to run again and the presidential election is done for
| you see people in the Establishment say things like, huh I
| think that guy had a point!
| spencerflem wrote:
| This is downvoted, but its true.
|
| Actual change will not come easily and it is opposed mightily
| by the ruling class
| tuananh wrote:
| Selling StackOverflow for $1.8B in 2021 seems like a great deal
| now, doesn't it?
| ActionHank wrote:
| Makes me wonder which founders should be selling now...
| Etheryte wrote:
| Unless you're already minted beyond measure, selling anything
| at any time for $1.8B is a great deal, you and everyone you
| ever cared about are set for life.
| CWIZO wrote:
| OP was refering to SO being on a massive decline since then.
| munchler wrote:
| Has there been any large business more decimated by the rise of
| LLM's than SO? Traffic in the tags I follow there dropped off a
| cliff pretty much the same day that ChatGPT was first released.
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| Yeah, good timing. Just about a year before the release of
| ChatGPT.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people
| that he has spent billions in "philanthropy" to destroy the
| public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools.
|
| The point is that even something noble-sounding like giving away
| your fortune still tends to enforce the current system and simply
| create more wealth inequality. In this case, charter schools are
| simply a massive wealth transfer from government to the private
| sector.
|
| Atwood left StackOverflow years ago but he's been there for
| years. We can only speculate as to what he made from the sale.
| I'd guess 10-15%.
|
| I just hope his altruism goes to something of public benefit.
| billy99k wrote:
| "Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people
| that he has spent billions in "philanthropy" to destroy the
| public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools."
|
| Many public schools are shit and I applaud his effort to come
| with alternatives instead of forcing everyone to get a poor
| education, until these problems are actually fixed.
| jmyeet wrote:
| That's by design. It's a strategy pioneered by Ronald Reagan
| called "starve the beast" [1]. Basically, you starve a public
| institution of funds and then use the inevitable failure for
| gutting it entirely and likely privatizing it.
|
| We're seeing this in real-time in Texas [2] in particular
| with Abbott's takeover of the Houston ISD and the blatant
| corruption and racism going on with the Keller ISD.
|
| Also, charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry pick
| students. Public schools don't have that luxury.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
|
| [2]: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/campaign-to-
| sabot...
| abigail95 wrote:
| The public school funding models in the USA are variable,
| even by county, they can't be controlled or set by the top
| down, and the fact that the USA spends more than the OECD
| average disputes everything you are saying.
| jmyeet wrote:
| That's false [1]. USA is like #6 in per-student spending.
| It's even lower in terms of GDP [2].
|
| [1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/policy-
| issues/education-finan...
|
| [2]: https://webfs.oecd.org/els-
| com/Family_Database/PF1_2_Public_...
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| > That's by design. It's a strategy pioneered by Ronald
| Reagan called "starve the beast" [1]. Basically, you starve
| a public institution of funds and then use the inevitable
| failure for gutting it entirely and likely privatizing it.
|
| I'd argue that if public schools across the board were
| doing their job and educating students then there wouldn't
| be anything to starve.
|
| > Also, charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry
| pick students. Public schools don't have that luxury.
|
| My kids have gone to one of the bigger charter school
| chains in my city for around a decade and this is not true.
| They employ lots of specialists to assist struggling
| students like my youngest. I'm not sure if they would
| tolerate the worst troublemakers at public schools but I
| also don't think those children's parents would be looking
| at better options for education.
| acheron wrote:
| Sounds good and noble to me. Most public schools are terrible
| and should be destroyed.
| francisofascii wrote:
| It is too bad with any type of philanthropy, somebody can find
| a reason why it is a negative for someone else.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I'm fortunate enough to be in one of the top percentiles of
| household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no
| idea how my kids are going to make it.
|
| Like Atwood, I did not come from a well-off family; parents
| divorced in my early teens and father passed away in my late
| teens from cancer (smoking and alcoholism) and in many ways
| lucked into a very good career after attending a state
| university. My spouse's father -- a janitor in a public school --
| and mother -- a crossing guard -- passed when she was in her 20's
| as well. There weren't any large fortunes passed down.
|
| Some friends recently purchased a house in my township and I
| visited to drop off my kid for a play date. I walked in and
| thought to myself _" wow, this is a $1m house"_ ... except it
| looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for
| a fraction of the price. It boggles the mind to consider when/how
| my kids will be able to have their slice of the American Dream.
|
| There are clearly some fundamental things that have to be fixed
| in the US at a policy level, but there's seemingly no political
| will to fix them; everyone seems out for themselves and to enrich
| their own coffers. This is handicapping social mobility through
| the hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and
| foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??).
| This is the sentiment that I feel Atwood is also feeling.
|
| As a high earning software engineer (IC), I'm not sure how I can
| survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to
| hire me either because of AI or because of age (early 40's now so
| I figure maybe 10 years of high earning as an IC?).
| epistasis wrote:
| Look to the stagnancy of the UK to see where the US could be in
| a few more decades. They have the same high prices for housing,
| but far far lower wages. When the powerful political class
| (homeowners) has all their wealth tied up in their homes, they
| see little wrong with such broken basic arrangements, because
| it doesn't hurt them and they see their number going up for
| wealth. Canada and Australia have similarly destructive housing
| policies and outcomes.
|
| And since the self-immolation of Brexit, they have far worsened
| their financial future. Similar politics of self-destruction
| masked as the appearance of strength are gaining a loooot of
| ground in the US as well.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Yes. Trump is looking like Brexit on steroids to me.
| frereubu wrote:
| Are you accounting for things like free healthcare when
| comparing wages? (I wish I did't have to say this, but it's a
| genuine question, not snark). I always wonder when people
| compare other countries to the US.
|
| Edit: I agree that Brexit was the most incredible piece of
| self-harm that I've seen a country do to itself. I certainly
| don't have rose-tinted spectacles about the state of the UK.
| wbl wrote:
| My US job comes with NHS level never seeing a bill. This is
| really easy to do in CA.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| Saying "fuck you, I'm rich" is not a good look.
|
| A health plan like that costs your company 25K/yr on the
| backend. They pay that as part of your compensation, you
| just don't see it.
|
| Even the most basic HDHP Bronze Kaiser plan currently
| costs over 1K/mo, and that increases about 10% per year.
|
| If you've ever had a coworker (or yourself) decline COBRA
| coverage because it was "so expensive", you need to
| understand that the price under COBRA was the price the
| whole time, you just didn't see it.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| $25k doesn't sound like a lot. Doesn't sound like it
| accounts for the difference in salary.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is?
|
| 25K/yr IS a LOT.
|
| Per the US Census, the median income in the US is a bit
| over 37,500, so it's literally an entire paycheck.
|
| Remember - the NHS is available to everyone, not just the
| rich.
|
| Source: https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_med
| ium=explore...
| wbl wrote:
| You're misunderstanding how the ACA subsidies work.
| sympil wrote:
| According to article linked to below there are 48 million
| uninsured Americans. Fifteen percent of the UK population
| isn't without coverage. The subsidies don't work well.
| hello_moto wrote:
| $25K is a lot.
|
| Respectfully, You're out of touch until you lost your 6
| digits job.
| epistasis wrote:
| > Saying "fuck you, I'm rich" is not a good look.
|
| This is a pitch-perfect example of the Brexit-like self-
| destructive politics that come with the "win" of
| appearing strong.
|
| Here is a person who has the typical experience, who
| could easily be convinced by their positive experience to
| say "everybody should have this." But instead of going
| that route you impute negative motivations and put very
| ugly distasteful words into their mouth. Which, even if
| they are _highly_ supportive of your position, will
| likely turn them against you. Instead of using this
| opportunity to advocate for a really good thing, you use
| it as an opportunity to hit somebody you view as the
| enemy with a rhetorical hammer. End result: no more
| people in favor of better means of distributing health
| care, and perhaps a net negative.
|
| _Especially_ in the context of how to account for free-
| at-point-of-care healthcare, which started this. If the
| employer is paying the prices that are revealed to
| employees only via COBRA, should that be accounted for in
| part of the wages or not? The US chooses to put about
| twice the fraction of GDP into healthcare that the UK
| does, and that per-capita GDP is also higher, how do we
| account for that in terms of wages and individuals? The
| $1T that employers pay for healthcare should be accounted
| for how, exactly? It 's a tough question, and most likely
| in any comparison of nations there's a couple different
| ways to see how it impacts the average person. And when
| the "average" person in the US has such varying
| experiences, that has to enter into any comparison too.
|
| In California there is great healthcare coverage for
| those with extremely low to no income, due to subsidy.
| Those with healthy salaries and savings can weather the
| times of unemployment and pay the COBRA prices. Those who
| struggle the most are the ones in between, and improving
| that involves getting those on the high and low end to
| advocate for the in-between incomes. It does not involve
| making enemies of them.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| > Here is a person who has the typical experience
|
| This is bullshit: it is atypical _not_ to see a bill.
| Parent is also bullshitting by saying it 's easy to get a
| job with no-bills health insurance in CA, unless they are
| ignoring 98% of Californians.
| wbl wrote:
| It's Kaiser in northern California. This is an extremely
| common healthcare option. Yeah, we're rich. That's the
| whole point: even out of pocket prices for that plan are
| dwarfed by the gap in salary to the UK professionals.
| vkou wrote:
| Most people aren't professionals, though. Nobody's
| arguing that the US _isn 't_ set up for the comfort of
| people making $500,000+/year.
| wbl wrote:
| Kaiser was an option when I was making 130k a year.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| You said it was "easy" to get a job with Kaiser upthread
| - what percentage if CA residents are on it?
| fragmede wrote:
| roughly a quarter of California (9.4 in CA vs 38 for CA
| total)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| $130K a year still puts you at the 87th percentile of
| income in the US.
|
| https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
| karaterobot wrote:
| > A health plan like that costs your company 25K/yr on
| the backend. They pay that as part of your compensation,
| you just don't see it.
|
| That's very true, but of course the NHS costs some amount
| of money on the backend, it's just abstracted away in
| taxes. The real difference is how much care you get for
| your money _,_ not* which way of not directly paying for
| health care is better.
|
| * You get more in the UK.
| acdha wrote:
| It's also about predictability: medical bankruptcy is an
| American phenomenon. The average cost isn't what worries
| people, it's the possibility of having coverage denied,
| being hit with "out of network" charges like an ambulance
| taking you to the closest hospital or a specialist
| showing up at an in-network one, or having your health
| decline rapidly while you need to get a lawyer to
| convince your health insurer to pay for treatment your
| doctor considers necessary. It's especially about what
| happens if your health declines to where you cannot work
| and lose all of the treatment that you've setup so far.
| eloisant wrote:
| Not really, the US health system is so broken is just
| costs more. The system of who pays what is very
| different, but at the end of the day the cost of
| healthcare is much higher in US than any other country.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| Yup, I feel that until someone has seen and understood
| the first graphic in this article, they really don't grok
| the situation:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| That's not how it works for millions upon millions of
| Americans that are not fortunate enough to work at a job
| that provides tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare
| insurance as a benefit.
|
| This line of thinking is exactly why the "American Dream"
| is falling apart; we increasingly place a handicap on
| some Americans and then wonder why some slice of America
| is not advancing generationally.
| wbl wrote:
| Americans who have jobs with health benefits that include
| Kaiser in CA is a whole lot of them in CA! It's a massive
| hospital system that covers 9 million people, a full
| quarter of the state.
| hello_moto wrote:
| You're tied to your job though. Not so in say, UK,
| Canada.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Roughly speaking, when I've looked into this comparison,
| for near-median earners, they're better off in the UK,
| because of things like healthcare. But when you look at the
| higher-earning roles, especially engineering or software,
| then the different in pay more than makes up for the
| increased cost of living (i.e. a higher percentage of your
| pay may go towards cost of living, but the smaller
| percentage of money left over is still larger in absolute
| terms). There's other tradeoffs in terms of work culture
| and so on, though (e.g. you get much more holiday in the
| UK).
| bko wrote:
| Can you share your research?
|
| In the US, the average out-of-pocket healthcare spending
| was $1,424.6 per capita in 2022
|
| Most people have insurance. They might have some high out
| of pocket maximum like $10k. So worse case scenario
| you're out an additional $10k.
|
| But you pay a lot less in taxes
|
| In US, a single filer, the 12% bracket covers income from
| $11,926 to $48,475. In UK it's 20%
|
| So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes, not to
| mention VAT and others (although I am ignoring other US
| taxes like state, local and payroll). More than covers
| your out of pocket healthcare costs.
|
| And pretty much any job in the US is significantly higher
| paying, for instance a typical accountant in US makes 80k
| while in the uk that 37k pounds. Pretty much every office
| job is like this. And note the US 80k figures includes
| benefits like ... you guessed it, healthcare!
|
| Even if make the generous assumptions that taxes are the
| same, UK has same healthcare quality and everyone is
| hitting out of pocket max every year, it's still not
| close. The whole "but we don't have to pay for
| healthcare" strikes me as just a cope.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/484578/us-per-capita-
| out...
|
| https://www.allbusinessschools.com/accounting/salary/
|
| https://uk.indeed.com/career/accountant/salaries
| g8oz wrote:
| I think if the health insurance situation was as rosy in
| the U.S as you make out there would not have been as much
| support for the killer of the United Healthcare CEO. The
| figure for the average out of pocket expenses hides a lot
| of pain.
| epistasis wrote:
| People have lots of anger about healthcare for many many
| reasons. I can't tell you how many people I've met who
| are angry about "Obamacare" but don't realize how it
| helped them compared to the prior situation. There's also
| lots of anger at the prices for healthcare that we
| sometimes see, and that anger gets directed at insurance
| too, even if it's a hospital or other provider setting
| the prices. And then there's the anxiety of "will this be
| covered."
|
| Even without out of pocket costs there's lots of reasons
| to be angry at insurers.
| MrBrobot wrote:
| Whether you agree with the Affordable Healthcare Act or
| not, I feel like nobody remembers "lifetime maximums." I
| have some relatively minor (but massively impactful) pre-
| existing conditions, and I would have exceeded my
| lifetime maximum by age 30 due to testing, procedures,
| hospital stays, etc. I have family members that would
| have exceeded theirs before age 1.
| bko wrote:
| 75% of Americans with employer-provided health coverage
| are satisfied with their current plans
|
| For Americans overall, 71% rate the quality of healthcare
| they personally receive as excellent or good. Similarly,
| 72% give excellent or good marks to the quality of care
| they receive personally.
|
| Regarding health insurance coverage, 65% of Americans
| rate their own coverage as excellent or good. Another
| poll found 63% rated their own health care coverage as
| excellent or good.
|
| You have to get offline
|
| https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-poll-strong-
| majority-...
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-
| quality-...
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/468176/americans-sour-
| healthcar...
| sympil wrote:
| _You have to get offline_
|
| Perhaps. But if I weren't online I wouldn't know how
| widespread the support of Luigi is.
|
| Only 75% of people on employer healthcare plans are
| satisfied? A great many people aren't on employer plans.
|
| From the third link you provided:
|
| _For the first time in Gallup's two-decade trend, less
| than half of Americans are complimentary about the
| quality of U.S. healthcare, with 48% rating it
| "excellent" or "good." The slight majority now rate
| healthcare quality as subpar, including 31% saying it is
| "only fair" and 21% -- a new high -- calling it "poor."_
| epistasis wrote:
| Is the support that widespread, or is it a bubble created
| by social media?
|
| I think there's great dissatisfaction with healthcare in
| general, but social media is not a good way of judging
| social attitudes across the US. It's great for finding a
| small niche, however.
| sympil wrote:
| He's got a lot more support than any other murderer I
| know about.
| vkou wrote:
| Not to mention, they are satisfied compared to what? The
| situation they'd be in if they were unemployed and had to
| pay for the entire overpriced thing themselves?
| bko wrote:
| > The poll by CloudResearch found that 27% of U.S. adults
| expressed "moderate" or "a lot" of sympathy for Mangione.
|
| > A smaller but significant share of adults, 12%, said
| they were supportive of the decision to murder Brian
| Thompson, 50, who was shot in New York on Dec. 4.
|
| 12% is basically zero in this country. To give you a
| frame of reference, 14% of people think Obama is
| antichrist
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/1-in-4-americans-
| sympathiz...
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/news/12-million-americans-believe-
| liza...
| sympil wrote:
| The former DHS head seems to think it's a lot of people.
| Don't know any other murderers who have 27% of the
| population having sympathy for them.
|
| 12% is not basically zero.
|
| https://www.thewrap.com/luigi-mangione-discourse-alarms-
| home...
| Tade0 wrote:
| > So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes
|
| Your calculations don't take into account personal
| allowance, which is PS12750($15680) in the UK.
|
| At $40k the difference is much closer to $1.5k.
|
| Also there's the question of costs of living. That same
| 40k buys you 30% more in the UK if you're including rent.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I think most Americans over-index on the cost of healthcare
| and the availability of insurance because it's constant in
| our news and our system absolutely sucks. Most people don't
| need regular medical care because most people are healthy
| (until they start getting older). It's expensive, sure, but
| most people in the middle-class have employer sponsored
| healthcare, and retirees have government sponsored
| healthcare, and many low-income people have government
| sponsored healthcare. The difference in out-of-pocket costs
| is easily accounted for within significantly higher
| salaries.
|
| Of course, the issue is not the actual availability of
| insurance, it is that there is a patchwork of laws and
| protections and it's not universal to be covered at any
| point in your life. But many states have well above a 90%
| insurance rate. California, the most populous state, has
| 93%. Massachusetts is sitting at 98%. Even Texas, the worst
| state for health insurance, is at 85% of the population
| covered.
| fastasucan wrote:
| >The difference in out-of-pocket costs is easily
| accounted for within significantly higher salaries.
|
| Any sources for this?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Salary Info (25k USD salary difference, before tax)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_averag
| e_w...
|
| Cost of healthcare:
|
| There are a bunch of numbers that are trivially
| accessible via Google, including government sources, but
| I couldn't find any that match perfectly with the time
| range of the wage data.
|
| Here is one quote, from a few years earlier...
|
| > Median annual out-of-pocket spending on medical care
| ranged from $360 (Hawaii) to $1,500 (Nebraska). In four
| states, households in the top 10 percent of out-of-pocket
| expenses spent $7,000 or more on these items.
|
| https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-
| briefs/2...
|
| See also: https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/publications/s
| t441/stat441....
| krferriter wrote:
| Yeah both the UK and US are notorious for NIMBYism. People
| filing lawsuits as like a hobby, because they want to stop
| all development. In these countries it's far to easy for a
| small group of complainers to grind the entire system to a
| halt and burn endless amounts of time and money. It seems
| particularly bad in the anglosphere.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| It's particularly bad in the anglosphere because we have
| common law legal systems that are built around resolving
| personal disputes in court.
|
| This has upsides -- it was a good solution to the problem
| in the 1200s of people solving disputes by fighting it out
| -- but in a modern context the downsides are pretty high
| thanks to rent-seeking lawyers.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| There are millions of people in the US that are making a lot
| less than you do who manage to buy houses, go on vacations,
| save for retirement and put their kids through college.
|
| I'm 50 now, we purposefully "de-contented" our lives two years
| ago after our youngest graduated in 2020 and after Covid so we
| wouldn't have to be in the rat race. I never made a lot as your
| standard enterprise dev and didn't hit $200K+ until I was 46
| and started working at BigTech remotely and we used the three
| years I was there to pay off debt, put some money in savings,
| etc.
|
| I've turned down opportunities that would pay me close to $100k
| more in cash because I didn't want the headache and definitely
| wasn't going to ever be in an office. If you need me to be
| physically somewhere for a week, put me on a plane.
|
| Even in 2020, I said no to interviewing as an SDE at Amazon
| because I didn't want to relocate to Seattle after Covid lifted
| and I was only making $150K then. The remote position at AWS
| ProServe was then suggested.
|
| We had the big house in the burbs of Atlanta in the "good
| school system" in 2016 built when I was only making $140K.
| True, when we sold it last year it was double the price. But we
| would have had to move further out if we were buying house in
| 2023. It would have been doable
|
| Either way, we moved to a condo in Florida that is state tax
| free, we downsized to one car and now if I had to, I could pay
| all of our bills including our spending money with just my
| income and all I would need to make is $140K.
|
| Making around $200k, I max out my retirement + catch up
| contributions + HSA and we have been on a plane to do
| _something_ (mostly vacations, occasionally visiting friends)
| over a dozen times a year since mid 2022 and that trend is
| continuing for the foreseeable future
|
| For those who don't know, a new grad going into any of the
| BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college
| and should be making way more than me in three years. I'm not
| bragging.
|
| I have no other income besides my job.
|
| I have no worries about "AI", I moved into consulting working
| full time for consulting companies in 2020 (well then the
| consulting department at AWS). I just have to be able to sell
| and/or guide implementations of whatever the shovel du jour is.
| Right now I'm leading a Kubernetes + AI implementation.
| ebiester wrote:
| Yes, but how is that 15 year old going to do the same? What
| about the ones who don't end up winning the career lottery?
|
| We need this to be possible for two people making 40k a year,
| not 140.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| A new college grad across all fields has a median earning
| of $65K - $75K (https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-
| loans/average-college...). No you can't buy a house
| straight out of school. But you move up in your career just
| like everyone else does.
|
| From that same citation, look at the median starting salary
| in engineering disciplines - over $100K.
|
| The median household income of homebuyers is around $110K.
| (https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-finds-typical-home-
| buye...).
|
| Most homebuyers are not single
| (https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/in-the-news/single-women-
| ar...)
| HaZeust wrote:
| "Household income" is often a joint statistic. $110K
| comes out to roughly 55K each. You're not making the
| assertions you think.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes I am
|
| - the typical college grad makes $65K
|
| - the typical homebuyer is not single.
|
| - the typical household has two earners.
| HaZeust wrote:
| I guess I'm confused by your take then, and the evidence
| you use to support it. You stated "But you move up in
| your career just like everyone else does" from a 65-75K
| starting salary as a college grad, when your own figures
| show that the average household income is oftentimes
| comprised of two people making even less than that, but
| have reached the stage of upwards mobility to buy a
| house, albeit oftentimes "house-broke" and in strife to
| pay mortgages.
|
| These people didn't move up, as per your assessment. Most
| people need to combine salaries with someone else to even
| have a fair chance in this system, to get _any_ upwards
| mobility.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| When I was single until I was 28, I didn't even want a
| house. I wanted the flexibility of being able to move. In
| fact, I hated the maintenances of owning a single family
| home and as I mentioned in my first reply We downsized to
| a condo as soon as we could.
|
| If you are single with no responsibilities but yourself
| in many major cities, you can make it off of $65K.
| Homeownership is not the only metric of success
|
| People making less than that aren't homeless and
| starving.
| zxor wrote:
| > in many major cities, you can make it off of $65K
|
| This is certainly not true in any of the cities near me.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I bet wherever you live, people making $65K a year aren't
| homeless
| dleink wrote:
| Not sure what it proves to say, "People who own expensive
| homes have high incomes". higher prices filter out
| potential buyers with lower incomes.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I am not doing any such thing.
|
| $110K is not a "high income" for two college educated
| people. It's actually the combined new grad income.
|
| And because of assertive mating, most college graduates
| marry other college graduates.
|
| This is the home ownership rate by age
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-
| house...
| belter wrote:
| > For those who don't know, a new grad going into any of the
| BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of
| college and should be making way more than me in three years.
|
| What bubble do you live in?
|
| "US Tech Layoffs Continue In 2025 With Big Tech Scaling
| Worker Counts And Fintech, E-Commerce Sectors Reporting Total
| Shutdowns" - https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-
| layoffs/
|
| "Computer science grads say the job market is rough. Some are
| opting for a 'panic' master's degree instead." -
| https://www.businessinsider.nl/computer-science-grads-say-
| th...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1fylku5/are_most_.
| ..
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/15/why-is-
| it-...
| anthomtb wrote:
| Well, he (probably not she) is describing expected earnings
| once hired, not chances of actually getting hired.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And more to the point, when I mentioned what I was
| making, I didn't want to get the response that "you know
| you could make $400K+ by grinding leetCode and working
| for a FAANG".
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You do know that these companies still hire people don't
| you?
| belter wrote:
| In other Continents :-)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, why don't you "just" get a job at BigTech?
|
| The chances of that are approximately 0%, despite being a
| much better than average developer/IT person.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I did a back of the napkin estimate before from all of the
| sources I could find and the best numbers I could find was
| that the top paying tech companies employ around 10% of all
| developers in the US.
|
| On the other hand, the average CRUD developer in any major
| city in the US can make $140K-$170K within seven years of
| graduating with strategic job hopping
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| They specifically select against folks like me (on
| multiple dimensions) so 0 * any-percentage still equals
| nada. I might be able to swing the second one when the
| market improves.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I myself didn't get in through the front door. I got in
| via the consulting division at AWS (Professional
| Services). Yes it was a full time direct hire under
| Amazons usual 4 year offer with base + large signing
| bonus + RSUs. I am no longer there.
|
| There are all sorts of non tech white collar jobs at all
| of the BigTech companies that pay top of market. My best
| friend was hired in the finance department at Amazon
| Retail. He is now a director at a smaller place and is
| just now matching the comp of an L6 at Amazon five years
| later.
|
| There is a better than 50% chance I could get into Google
| (GCP) doing similar work if I put in the work and learned
| and could speak about the GCP equivalent of the AWS tech
| that I know well and where I lead large implementations.
|
| But they only do hybrid and I have no desire to work in
| an office.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Warning, just kind of rat-holing on terminology a little.
| You've used the phrase "can make" twice now. I've always
| found that way of expressing it kind of weasel-y. Yes, a
| software developer "can make" $140-170K, by the
| definition of "can" meaning a non-zero possibility. A new
| grad "can make" $100K+. A senior software engineer "can
| make" $1M/yr. All these things are true. I "can win" the
| lottery, too, and my kid "can be" president of the USA
| one day. Also technically true. It's more interesting to
| talk about typical cases, rather than best-case
| aspirational ones, which I see you _are_ doing in other
| parts of the thread (great!). I think HN very often
| mistakes the best case for the typical case, especially
| when we talk about salaries.
|
| Even using typical case, salary means and medians don't
| tell the whole story, as the distributions can be wild.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I posted sources at salary.com where you can filter by
| city and is more applicable to most developers than
| levels.fyi. I also mentioned what non tech companies are
| paying like Coke, Delta, Home Depot , etc in non tech
| hubs.
|
| Median is not "best case". I'm also well aware of the bi
| modal distribution of comp in the industry where a
| "senior" enterprise dev tops out at around what an entry
| level developer makes at BigTech.
|
| Before the current shit show of the last couple of years
| in the industry, as a senior enterprise CRUD developer, I
| could throw my resume in the air and get a "full stack
| developer" job in Atlanta making $150k within a couple of
| weeks. This was the norm in Atlanta.
|
| I've moved on since then. But the last time I was looking
| last year, my old recruiters were still saying if I lived
| in Atlanta I could make around that as just a C#
| developer. None of those jobs required any more than 5-7
| years of experience.
|
| "Enterprise CRUD developer" was my plan B.
|
| I'm probably one of the few people commenting here who
| has been in both worlds recently and now purposefully on
| the tip top end of "enterprise" dev and still on the low
| end of BigTech.
|
| Making $140K to $170k as a senior CRUD/franework
| enterprise "full stack developer" is the norm. I've moved
| to strategic cloud consulting now making more.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| "People who get to work in the highly coveted, rather small,
| highest revenue-per-employee sector in human history should
| be just fine!"
|
| Uhh yeah...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Well, first, the reply was to someone who doesn't know how
| they will survive probably making five or six times what
| the median income is.
|
| Second, I posted statistics where even the average college
| grad can still make it.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42794546
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| "survive" typically means "maintain this quality of
| life".
|
| If I were to be displaced by AI, I'm not sure how I'd the
| mortgage and two kids (that an average college grad
| doesn't have).
|
| I could sell the house and net several hundred thousand
| dollars, but if I want to keep the kids in the same
| district, it's a wash because the township has been
| fervently fighting fair-value housing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So your complaint is that because of AI, you might not be
| able to maintain the lifestyle that puts you in I assume
| at least the top 5% of earners and make around $350K
| (https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-
| calculator/)?
|
| The average household is making less than $100k a year
| (same source) and are somehow surviving, you might have
| to make different life choices.
| digital_sawzall wrote:
| I hate to say but that's a 'boomer take' but you sound
| like a parody of a tiktok skit.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Are my statistics off? I quoted both the comp at BigTech
| and enterprise dev where most developers work.
|
| And how many "boomers" have any clue about BigTech comp?
|
| Are people who graduate from college who are "only"
| making 75K on average going homeless and hungry?
| ArlenBales wrote:
| > For those who don't know, a new grad going into any of the
| BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of
| college
|
| Maybe, if new grad is defined as:
|
| - A remarkable programmer on their own time. i.e. Impressive
| Github profile, side projects, leetcode expert, etc. Just
| going through Comp Sci isn't going to get you hired at
| BigTech today.
|
| - Someone with a fantastic network. Better hope you've got
| friends in high places or family with connections.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Go to salary.com and select any major city in the US and
| see what a senior software engineer makes.
|
| Anecdotally, I spent my entire career between 1996- 2020
| working local jobs in Atlanta. Which is not exactly a tech
| hub. Look at the compensation of your standard non tech
| well known companies that are either based in Atlanta or
| have a large presence like Delta, Home Depot, Coke, GE (GE
| Transportation), State Farm.
|
| I've never studied a line of leetcode nor have I had a
| GitHub portfolio my entire career until 2021.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Amazon/Microsoft/Meta all hire new college grads, and all
| will have a total comp above 165k.
|
| You do not need an impressive Github profile, these
| companies are almost entirely leetcode interview based.
| unhappyineurope wrote:
| If you think software engineering salaries are low in the USA,
| try working in Europe. A 'good' salary can be 30K or even lower
| after tax per year, and electricity costs twice as much as in
| the USA. In some places, even bottle scavengers earn more than
| software engineers in Europe.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Yes, but my sense is that in Europe, you can "survive" easier
| than in the US.
|
| There are several key differences.
|
| In the US, everything is spread out so you absolutely _need_
| to own a car in many low cost of living (COL) places; there
| 's no option for transportation. In the US, healthcare can
| absolutely destroy you and you cannot get quality healthcare
| at a decent rate without a job that provides it as a benefit.
| Access to transportation networks is also poor compared to
| Europe and Asia where trains are abundant, fast, cheap, and
| accessible by wide networks of public transport. The way the
| US has been built out is not amenable to that in low COL
| areas.
|
| So I acknowledge that there are lots of problems world wide
| in different countries and wages are lower and taxes are
| higher in general in the EU, but there are more social safety
| nets compared to the US. The baseline "cost of existing" in
| the US is simply higher.
| eloisant wrote:
| Europe is a big continent with very different countries.
|
| Whether you're talking about UK, Norway, France, Poland,
| Switzerland, Italy, etc. that's a completely different story
| for each.
| w0m wrote:
| you are me; down parents issues with smoking/etc and current
| career/age.
|
| > I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer
| find companies willing to hire me
|
| My plan is simple: Retire. Avoid that 1m house when possible.
|
| > I have no idea how my kids are going to make it
|
| Same boat here, but I'm less concerned insofaras I'm doing
| everything I can to keep as many options/opportunities open to
| my kids as possible. This honestly significantly dampens the
| 'retire' plan; but what can you do? My parents would have no
| idea what I do if I tried to explain it; I expect the world to
| shift similarly by the time my kids are working. The goal is
| simply to give every advantage I can and keep as many doors
| open as possible.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.
|
| Brother, I feel the same way. The education system is broken,
| public discourse has degraded to illiterate thuggery and
| madness, and today's children and young adults are facing
| crushing economic rent-taking.
| samiv wrote:
| Regarding housing the problems are the same everywhere where
| the same "housing is an investment" policies have been propped
| up by lending. What an insane idea. We can all get wealthy by
| buying houses from each other with ever increasing prices. In
| reality the only winners in this game are a) banks b) early
| buyers who can cash out, liquidate and move somewhere cheaper.
|
| In my country of origin housing is now so expensive that it
| takes 2 median income lifetimes to pay for it. Of course you
| can find cheaper housing in rural countryside or in some
| deadbeat towns but then there's basically no work either, so at
| minimum you need a car to commute. For someone making a below
| median income operating a vehicle is easily -300EUR / mo cost.
|
| And the funny thing the country is 93% forest. Unzoned land is
| plentiful and costs nothing but after zoning the price goes up
| to 20k EUR per each m2. The townships and counties have a
| monopoly on zoning and use that to milk the constituents for
| money. Of course that money is all away from other spending so
| local communities and small time businesses (such as
| restaurants, hair dressers etc) are all taking a hit since
| (with the recent greedflation) people simply have no more
| purchasing power left over.
|
| In my current country Germany, here in Bayern the situation is
| exactly the same. In Munich a small unit in is at minimum
| 1-1.5m EUR and it'll be bare bones. The cost is insane. At the
| same time there's a shortage of all kinds of laborers. How does
| a "bus driver" afford to live here. Well, they don't.
|
| The whole economic system is biased against younger generations
| and while the older generations live longer they accumulate all
| the wealth. They are a large representative of the population
| (due to the upside down age pyramid) and active voters so they
| of course vote for politicians who will not topple this order.
|
| In the past all empires have fallen when the middle class has
| fallen. When there's a critical mass of people with nothing to
| lose and who feel like the system has failed them the heads
| will roll and revolutions will begin.
| shuckles wrote:
| > "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by
| lending. What an insane idea.
|
| Lending money for housing is not insane. Houses are durable
| goods where most of the cost needs to be paid up front. The
| builder of the house is paying for a structure that will
| house people for 50+ years. This duration mismatch is exactly
| what lending is supposed to help with.
|
| Lending is not the problem. People were complaining it was
| when interest rates were at 0%. Now they are at 7%, but
| housing prices are still high.
|
| Lack of supply is the problem.
| samiv wrote:
| Houses are not durable goods. Their value should go down as
| they get older (this is in fact how housing is valued in
| Japan for example).
|
| And yes lending per se is not the problem, the problem is
| using lending to prop up this ponzi scheme that has
| artificially inflated prices due to constricted supply and
| then selling it to the citizens as a tool to "create
| wealth".
| HaZeust wrote:
| >"Their value should go down as they get older"
|
| The average person needs a commodified asset that's
| useful to them from the onset - and builds value over
| time - in order to strengthen their possibility of
| upwards mobility now, and generational wealth in the
| future. A 401K does nothing for you in the 40 years
| you're accumulating it, a car depreciates substantially -
| as soon as after purchase, the stock market is oftentimes
| a playsake for the already well-off, there's simply
| nothing like housing for individuals in most sectors of
| the status quo "bell curve".
| samiv wrote:
| Upwards mobility? But that's exactly what younger
| generations can't do since housing is completely out of
| reach for them.
|
| My example from Munich, a condo going for a 1m EUR.
| Median software engineer salary is around 66k EUR per
| year. Income tax ~40% so your take home is around 40k
| year.
|
| That means that if you put all your net income towards
| your home you'd need 25 years just for the principle not
| counting interest or spending money on essentials such as
| food or energy.
|
| So how do you do it? You don't. It's simply not possible
| unless you have exceptional circumstances (top %1 job,
| rich mom & dad etc).
|
| This also means you now have no chance but to rent and
| and all your rent money just goes forward to the
| generations of individuals who invested in this ponzi
| scheme earlier or to the investment firms and businesses
| who operate in this domain. Regardless again all the
| wealth moves up the pyramid to the top.
|
| Also even those older generations, all this "wealth" is
| imaginary. You can only realize your gains when you
| actually sell (so you realize the market price you sell
| on) and in addition you still gotta live somewhere, so to
| win in this game is to buy early and cash out by selling
| and then moving to somewhere low cost. (Perhaps
| retirement).
|
| In summary, expensive housing is only benefiting those
| who already have amassed wealth and it's obstructing
| those who haven't from amassing any wealth.
| HaZeust wrote:
| We are completely in agreement. I'm in that younger
| generation, as well; I know.
| robocat wrote:
| > Income tax ~40%
|
| Actual or marginal?
|
| Makes a big difference to your calcs. I worry when I see
| people quote their marginal rate because it shows a
| fundamental ignorance of finance. I know nothing about
| Germany, but in NZ top marginal rate is 39% and actual
| tax rate is below that.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's the lack of supply that is the reason why having a
| mortgage market is a bad idea.
|
| You HAVE to live somewhere. This means any cash you can get
| your hands on, such as a mortgage, it's going to be used to
| compete with all the other people who need to live
| somewhere.
|
| The problem can be solved in two ways. Either you make it
| really hard to get a mortgage, or you make enough houses
| that people are not competing over musical chairs.
| mjevans wrote:
| The only solution is build build build. Preferably with
| good building (more modern, flame resistant with that in
| mind) and zoning codes (more like Japan's quality of life
| impact based ones).
| sureglymop wrote:
| As a non American, I've always struggled to understand the
| "American Dream".
|
| It is about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and
| going from poor to wealthy by using the opportunities that the
| US provides. Is that a correct assessment?
|
| The problem I have with that is that it doesn't in any way
| include bringing your community up with you or letting your
| wealth be reinvested back into the environment in which you
| were poor. It solves the issue only for that single person
| without addressing why the issue existed in the first place. It
| seems to be inherently "selfish", no?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Pretty much yes!
| Aqua_Geek wrote:
| America has a long history of promoting "rugged
| individualism." Community is hardly ever part of the
| conversation, unfortunately.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's getting worse as time goes on, too. Things like
| Cooperation, "Common Good" and Community are not merely
| ignored. More and more they're being actively opposed.
| Individualism is no longer: "I don't need community and
| society." It's become: "I don't need community and society,
| and you shouldn't have it either!" Rugged Individualism has
| become Toxic Individualism.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Just fifty years ago you could buy a home by swinging a
| hammer for a few years. No degree needed. So it was a thing.
|
| When you made it you would pay taxes, giving back to others.
| Not selfish.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's still possible (and in some cases,
| plumber/carpenter/contractor is perhaps the best option
| still available).
|
| What we're seeing is at least _partially_ the result of
| everyone going to college for something like a few decades.
|
| Deciding to be apprentice to a plumber at 17 is much
| different than having to do the same at 21/23 because the
| degree you went into debt for isn't panning out the way you
| wanted.
|
| You're 4+ years behind, you're some amount of debt in the
| hole, and you're having to work hard.
|
| (Average student loan debt is something like $37k, which
| isn't the cost of a house, but is certainly close to a down
| payment.)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| You're right, my nephew bought a shack to fix up in
| Montana a few years back. But, I don't think that's what
| most people think of when they say the dream is alive.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You can still get an FHA loan and put 3.5% down.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| As an immigrant, I define the "American Dream" as
| "opportunity regardless of social class". I think Atwood also
| hints at this in his blog post (as this is the reason he
| called out his upbringing and family).
|
| This is in contrast to the system of nobility and "old money"
| in Europe and why many immigrants sought to find their way to
| the New World.
|
| The idea of public education started in the US and for a long
| time has been one of the key public services that enabled
| this social mobility. In the US, historically, there were
| opportunities even for immigrants to become self-made men and
| women and their children would be better off than they were.
| Immigrants might arrive in the US illiterate, but their
| children would at least have the opportunity to be educated
| and find better paths.
|
| It's still possible, but it feels as if the cards are stacked
| higher and higher towards those that are already coming from
| some wealth. I increasingly feel like the chances that my
| kids are going to be better off than me are decreasing every
| year because the stepping stones to success are becoming
| eroded.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Housing is a massive bomb because for so many people is is the
| singular investment that their net worth and retirement is held
| in. This idea has been so deeply entrenched for so long that a
| reversal will wipe out millions of people's net worth.
|
| At some point the bomb will go off, but there's no incentive to
| look at the long term of 10+ years out when the explosion will
| destroy people's political careers in the short term.
| bombcar wrote:
| I know so many people 20 years ago who "I'll sell my CA house
| and retire elsewhere" was a majority of their plan.
|
| As of now, I can only count a very few who actually _did_ it,
| turns out it 's hard to leave where you've lived your entire
| working life to move somewhere you've never been, and the
| price differential isn't as amazing as it once was (since
| Covid flattened that out somewhat).
|
| The ones who did end up doing it ended up following their
| children (who were priced out of where they grew up).
|
| Normally you'd expect measured, predictable, steady inflation
| to be the method to "defuse the bomb" but so far that hasn't
| been really tried (if houses keep going up 1-2% a year, but
| inflation is 5%, you have a 3% drop in value each year even
| though on paper, you have an increase).
| crowcroft wrote:
| 20 years ago is when the bomb probably could have been
| diffused, but I think the recovery out of the GFC put it on
| the back burner and then it was too late.
|
| Housing should have been getting built like crazy in places
| like CA so that those people thinking of selling had a
| reason to sell. By not building houses property values keep
| booming, and even if you plan to sell and move somewhere
| it's easy to endlessly delay that decision when you're
| getting rich as hell.
| koolba wrote:
| CA housing cannot be fixed without across the board
| reassessment. Otherwise the winner with an old property
| paying 2% of their 1980s purchase price will never sell.
| The immediate tax hit for moving to a similar house would
| be financial insanity.
|
| And reassessing across the board is not going to happen
| either because it would price out grandma living on a fixed
| income.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I bought my house (in CA) in 2019, and my property tax
| bill is ~$30k/yr. My literal nextdoor neighbor's property
| tax bill is less than $1k/yr (it last sold in the 1960s
| and has been passed down within the same family).
| bombcar wrote:
| And to fix the problem, they added Prop 90 and 19, which
| now let you transfer the base value around! What an
| amusing shell game.
|
| https://www.boe.ca.gov/prop19/#FAQs
|
| But more efficiently shuffling existing supply doesn't
| create new supply.
| hello_moto wrote:
| Technically multiple bombs explode here and there. Here's
| how:
|
| * Family bought 1 house (assets), big mortgage (cause it's
| expensive), live until retirement
|
| * Parents sell the house (lost the assets) to either a
| wealthier family or investors to downgrade
|
| * Parents potentially share the proceeding to the kids to
| support their Housing endeavor but Kids will be forced to buy
| something smaller (usually Condos) because detached is
| expensive and kids wage just starting from the bottom of the
| paygrade.
|
| Long-term, middle class will erode.
| crowcroft wrote:
| You just touched on another one of my big concerns -
| Condos.
|
| I love condos, but the older generations have no idea what
| modern condo living is really like and what maintenance is
| required for these kinds of places. They get talked about
| like 'starter' homes for young people that can't afford a
| single family house and so often they nudge younger people
| to buy them and 'get on the ladder'.
|
| Often they are TERRIBLE investments though. Property tax is
| relatively high in most cities, ongoing fees are huge,
| governance is normally terrible, and every now and then
| something major goes wrong and the current owners are left
| with huge extra bills.
|
| 'Getting on the ladder' in this way, along with student
| debt really cripples so many people into a life of debt
| payments while building very little wealth.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I love my condo that we downsized to from our big house
| in the burbs. But you are right, they are horrible
| "investments". I knew that going in.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| The current global realpolitiks shows that unless you have a
| very heavy industry that you can invest in, to replace the
| cratering housing prices, no country is willing to blow it up
| on purpose. China is trying to strategically do it, but they
| still have so many more people that they can lift up, move
| around and put to work into different industries. It's just
| not really the case for developed countries. I'm assuming
| India will take the same course in the near future, but their
| challenges are a bit different.
|
| Also, when supermajority+ have the same problem, it's in the
| interest of the government to do anything possible to delay
| the problem for the future generations. That's why I have
| reservations about US, Canada, UK, Australia and others doing
| the same thing. It also doesn't help when your entire
| population growth is depended on immigration, as you can,
| theoretically, keep the demand higher without many
| complaints, while limiting the supply.
|
| There's also the Japan problem, but it's weird. In Tokyo
| we're seeing rental prices actually going up, as it's the
| only region where the population is growing for all the wrong
| reasons.
|
| Oh well, good luck to us.
| monknomo wrote:
| I think the root of many problems is housing costs
|
| I'm somewhere around your age, and I also wonder what the
| future of software development work looks like. I don't know
| that I'd direct my kids towards the field; maybe this is just a
| temporary bumpy patch and it'll improve, but it is hard to say.
|
| One thing I think is that being 40-50 or so means that there is
| plenty of runway for a second career. Could retrain for
| something, nursing, cpa, lawyer, trades? Just have to have the
| savings for making that transition
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial
| space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it
| as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at
| least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening
| and closing constantly.
|
| But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking
| why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem
| unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor
| unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family
| homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?
|
| There are several root causes we can potentially drill
| further down to, but making headway will likely require hard
| work and involvement in our communities. You could always try
| running for something and becoming a politician.
| monknomo wrote:
| Yes, I think we need to reform zoning and build like crazy.
| With everything costing a million dollars on the west
| coast, I don't see why there isn't a crane every block
| putting up a new building
|
| Other than NIMBYs, zoning and code
| monknomo wrote:
| I really think we could have a boom
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Okay, why is city council /the mayor unwilling to rezone
| (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters?
| Corruption? Something else?_
|
| The council and the mayor of Exampletown are elected by the
| residents of Exampletown.
|
| The people who've been forced out of Exampletown by the
| high rents? And those who'd like to live there, but can't
| afford to? They don't get a vote.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| My point is: when looking for the "root cause" of these
| problems, people shouldn't stop asking when they get to
| the rent being high, that's a symptom.
|
| Additionally, if people care about helping younger
| generations, it's within reach to jump in and help shape
| the communities they'll be living in. E.g. If an issue is
| zoning, go to zoning meetings.
| farrelle25 wrote:
| Totally agree about housing costs. After 10 years of paying
| high rent in the UK I've returned to Dublin.
|
| Currently paying EUR1,300 per month for a tiny studio. (I'm
| told I'm lucky) So hard to build up savings.
|
| The average price for a home in Dublin is now EUR600,000
| according to our central statistics office. Unbelievable.
|
| (The average annual salary in Ireland is EUR50,000)
| hello_moto wrote:
| Housing costs are both created by NIMBY and The Rich gobbling
| assets both Residential _AND_ Commercials.
|
| Here's the thing: if housing cost goes up but wage goes up as
| well (wage is controlled by the Rich), then things will be
| fine.
|
| But things aren't fine because Wage gets depressed,
| everywhere.
| epistasis wrote:
| The problem isn't as much that wages are depressed as "The
| Rich" is the average person in the older generation that
| bought housing when an appropriate amount was being built,
| then lessened the amount of housing so that there's not
| enough for future generations.
|
| Class analysis must account for the strongest political
| class being real-estate asset holders that don't set wages
| but do benefit from a shortage of that real-estate asset.
| douglee650 wrote:
| Get them a Roth IRA. Put $7k in it each year as long as you
| can. Invest the Roth in an index fund, dividend fund, or
| straight up picks. Have them put into the fund as soon as they
| are able (summer jobs, etc)
|
| If you have enough, buy another property. Your kids can live in
| it or manage it later.
|
| Put stuff in trusts or be sure they can manage it effectively.
| The thing you most want (probably) is for them to be secure
| into their old age, long after you are gone. But they will
| start feeling secure by middle age, and you will all be
| happier.
| LargeWu wrote:
| The idea that most people just have an extra $7k a year
| sitting around to put into a retirement account they won't be
| able to access for decades seems pretty out of touch. A lot
| of people are just getting by. Additionally, if you live in a
| high CoL area, you might be prevented from contributing to a
| Roth even though most of your income goes to living expenses.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Some of the advice thrown around in this thread is so out
| of touch. "Just get a high paying job".
| "I never worry about healthcare because of my employer".
| "Just put $7,000 away into a retirement account and $10,000
| into a 529 every year. What's the problem?"
|
| And even if _I 'm in a position to do that_, the problem is
| that there are millions of fellow Americans (the majority)
| that don't have these "luxuries".
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Your on hackernews, maybe you confused this place with
| Reddit?
|
| This site's guidelines include "On-Topic: Anything that
| good hackers would find interesting. "
|
| Generally speaking, that points to software devs, which
| points to a high paying job.
|
| So when op said they don't know how their kids will save
| money, most commenters are replying with the assumption
| they're talking to a software dev.
|
| Also please by all means toss out your own solutions.
| neonarray wrote:
| Also the "buy another property".
|
| Like, this is part of the damn problem.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not only that, but _even if you could_ put $7K every year
| into an IRA, and _even if_ the investment returned a steady
| 7% per year risk free (HAHA!), in 30 years, it 's grown to
| ~$660K, which, sure, is a nice chunk of change, but at a 3%
| draw down rate, you'll need to live on less than $20K/year.
| You'll need to be really frugal. Move to a super low cost
| of living area and go back to eating ramen. And don't get
| seriously sick or injured. And don't have dependents to
| house, feed, and educate...
| jsight wrote:
| That's probably why he suggested a roth. $7k might be too
| much, but you can withdraw your own contributions from a
| roth without penalty. This makes it a great way to save for
| people early in their career, especially if they are in
| lower tax brackets that wouldn't benefit greatly from
| traditional ira deductions anyway.
|
| TB
| jsight wrote:
| That's probably why he suggested a roth. $7k might be too
| much, but you can withdraw your own contributions from a
| roth without penalty. This makes it a great way to save for
| people early in their career, especially if they are in
| lower tax brackets that wouldn't benefit greatly from
| traditional ira deductions anyway.
| dgfitz wrote:
| You can't put money into an IRA unless the primary holder of
| said IRA has income, and you cannot put more into said IRA
| than was earned by the primary holder of the IRA.
|
| My young children earn $0 annually. I wish I could do this. 3
| IRAs is cheaper than daycare by about half.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes because there are no downsides to managing rental
| property - vacancies, long eviction processes, maintenance,
| etc.
| ArlenBales wrote:
| Considering your upbringing, you're making some confusing
| statements. Somebody who was brought up low income but is now
| wealthy ("one of the top percentiles of household income")
| should know better. It's called living frugally.
|
| It sounds like you're fearful of losing your luxurious
| lifestyle if your income changes. Most Americans are fearful of
| affording clothing, food and shelter if their income changes.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| You're reading it all wrong.
|
| Like Atwood, I understand my good fortune in life and I am
| ever grateful and humbled that I have achieved what I have
| starting from a 1 bedroom apartment where my entire family
| slept in one room.
|
| Like Atwood, I want an America where the path of upward
| mobility and opportunity is available to all and not so
| blatantly biased towards the privileged and those that are
| already well-off.
|
| I'm not concerned so much for myself, but for the two lives
| I've brought into this world and for the lives of the
| millions of Americans and immigrants that did not have my
| good fortune (and I'd say much of my own current status is a
| result of luck and opportune moments in life).
|
| Like Atwood, I worry that we no longer have the will to
| create and pass legislation that benefits the masses at the
| expense of the few because those few now control so much of
| the channels over which our discourse flows (Facebook,
| Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, et al).
|
| Atwood's solution and approach is to use his accumulated
| fortune to donate to organizations that seek to help other
| fellow Americans. Ostensibly, that's what good policy and
| taxation should solve instead.
| com2kid wrote:
| Get involved with local politics. Join community planning
| boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for
| relaxing rules around zoning.
|
| One of the small cities close to Seattle (Shoreline) just
| announced radical changes to their zoning laws! Change can
| happen. Right now Seattle is going through loud public debates
| over this, with NIMBYs going to meetings and shouting crazy
| accusations about what building more houses will do (recently:
| building dense housing will cause vitamin D deficiency...). Go
| spend an hour a month shouting back at them, it makes a real
| difference!
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > Get involved with local politics. Join community planning
| boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for
| relaxing rules around zoning.
|
| I think the takeaway from the last few election cycles is
| that this really isn't effective anymore now that the
| channels of information and communication are controlled by a
| small handful of corporations who's objective is to simply
| make more money.
|
| But even besides that, I feel that defeats the spirit of the
| American Dream. What good is making just my community better
| when the kids one town over are falling behind because they
| don't have the property tax base to fund better programs and
| wealthy parents that can pay for better early childcare,
| private tutoring, and more resources? I already live in a
| fairly well-off enclave; my concern is for the rest of my
| fellow Americans who are not so fortunate -- the same concern
| as Atwood; we've "made it", but we want a society that leaves
| behind stepping stones for others to make their way up.
|
| So I am compliant when it comes to paying taxes and do not
| shun paying my fair share because in my view, taxes and
| government -- you know, _of the people, by the people, for
| the people_ -- are supposed to be used to make all of America
| better and not just better for _some_ Americans. But we 've
| seen decades of policy bifurcating on this point. You may
| point out that spending on social programs have increased.
| _Yes, but so has rent-taking on that spend and siphoning and
| accumulation of those funds in a few coffers_.
| epistasis wrote:
| > information and communication are controlled by a small
| handful of corporations who's objective is to simply make
| more money.
|
| Local elections are where that small handful of
| corporations have zero impact. Even the real estate
| investment trusts and private equity don't bother with
| local elections, because its hopeless. Local elections are
| entirely determined by small networks of highly connected
| individuals, which is almost always homeowners looking to
| protect their biggest asset, their home value.
|
| And that's why local politics has resulted in a housing
| shortage, because the big bad villain isn't a man in a
| tophat with a gold watch in a corporate office, it's the
| next door neighbor that _really hates_ the idea of seeing
| an apartment building when they drive to work each morning,
| and especially hates the idea of mere renters living nearby
| and thinks that they 'll bring crime and reduce his
| property value.
| epistasis wrote:
| I've been doing that for 8 years, and organized into local
| groups with others (the lone voice has little impact, but a
| contingent of people that politicians think will vote a
| certain way and tell their friends to vote a certain way have
| a much bigger impact). However, it's not been very
| successful, because there's an even larger contingent of
| people with more wealth, more time, and more experience. The
| tide is turning, but it's slow.
|
| Minnesota is an example where it worked really well, and I
| wish that the people in my California town were as big-
| hearted and progressive as those in Minneapolis. Maybe we'll
| get there here some day.
|
| In the meantime, state-level efforts are overriding the local
| NIMBYs far more effectively than the local efforts. It turns
| out that nearly every single local politician wants to
| override the NIMBYs, but can't due to the way that local
| elections work (small number of highly motivated folks
| usually determine the outcome). However, when elected to the
| state level, there's a broader electoral base and the
| politicians can finally start to force housing into cities.
|
| I still recommend getting involved locally, whether or not it
| has a big effect. It is rewarding in its own way, and has
| lots of benefits in areas other than housing too.
| aswanson wrote:
| Wages have been flat against productivity gains since the early
| 1970s in the US. The only way to make it here is to invest
| heavily over a long time horizon.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house"
| ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9
| years earlier for a fraction of the price.
|
| Thankfull, Trump's new EO regarding housing has it covered. The
| cavalry has arrived.
| adverbly wrote:
| Land value tax!
|
| The more I sit with it's long-term policy implications, the
| more I think it would solve the lack of productivity, progress,
| and prosperity with modern society. It also has supporters from
| across the political spectrum because it represents a tax shift
| rather than a tax increase(even Nobel prize winning economists
| Milton Friedman(libertarian) and Paul Krugman(modern keynesian)
| are both fans - and they're pretty far apart when it comes to
| most policies!)
|
| Short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg
|
| Long version: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-
| review-progress-a...
| sirlone wrote:
| This is the problem, we don't agree on the solution. You said
|
| > e hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and
| foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare,
| childcare??).
|
| Except the USA spends more on education than most other
| countries.
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
|
| That would argue the issue is not about spending, at least for
| education, it's something else (not sure what)
|
| I agree though on the general idea that something has to
| change. Housing in unaffordable.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I said "hostile policies", not "lack of spending"; you jumped
| to your own partisan conclusion.
|
| Policy and spend have to align to make progress. Spend alone
| is useless as is policy without spend.
| eddieroger wrote:
| > there's seemingly no political will to fix them
|
| It's not no will, it's no incentive, and usually incentivized
| to not fix them. The same people keep getting voted in. What
| other message should they hear than their constituents are
| happy with the job they're doing? Over half of the American
| people just voted for someone who lied to our faces and
| promised they'd make things better when they posses a track
| record that proved otherwise the last time (and also now a
| felony record, but I digress). If I decided my career was going
| to be politics, and I kept getting elected, why on Earth would
| I ever change what was working?
| losvedir wrote:
| > _top percentiles of household income but I 'm not
| independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going
| to make it_
|
| It might not be too late to change this. I also lucked into
| being in the right place at the right time (interested in
| computers and programming when graduating in the 2000s). But
| from the start my goal has been to take advantage of this
| extraordinary luck and become independently wealthy. My wife
| (who's not in tech but has a solid $80k - $100k job) and I have
| lived very cheaply saving more than half of our takehome pay
| for more than a decade now, investing it in simple index funds.
|
| I, too, don't know what the future will hold for my kids or my
| career, but I'm relatively confident I've got 10 more high-
| earning years in me. And my spreadsheet tells me that will be
| enough to generate generational wealth such that my kids won't
| have to work if they don't want to.
|
| This obviously isn't a solution for everyone, and I realize
| much of your post is about US policy. But I just wanted to
| point out the potential blindspot that you may have from your
| upbringing where "independently wealthy" people are those
| people over there, and not me. But with a high income and the
| magic of compound growth, it's not so unattainable.
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Buy Bitcoin if you value your children's financial future
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| or not, because it's a massive gamble
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Your kids must found a company etc, day to day job isn't going
| to keep up with basic necessities like
| housing,healthcare,lifestyle etc
|
| luckily we have more diverse job in the future
| keybored wrote:
| StackOverflow has a very successful gamification model. People
| just give them free labor voluntarily because they like to ask
| questions and even moderate. Perhaps also fueled by the naive
| libertarianism of the _Californian Ideology_.
| vasco wrote:
| I asked and answered some easy questions as a student to learn
| more, then when I became a professional and got certified in
| Kubernetes and a lot of on the job experience I started answering
| kubernetes questions, getting quite a bunch of points and feeling
| good I was giving back something. They then decided kubernetes
| was not part of the main website and all questions should be
| asked somewhere else where you started from scratch. I never used
| any of their websites again.
| iambateman wrote:
| This is very cool of Atwood. Also...my guy sold SO at the
| absolute peak.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Back in the early days of SO, I listened to many of the podcasts
| by Joel and Jeff. Jeff always came across as an overall good
| dude. He seemed to want SO to be a helpful tool for developers,
| and wanted to do the right thing, regardless of the monetary
| implications.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Imagine a world if more of the centi-billionaires were more like
| Gates trying to cure diseases and make the world a better place.
|
| I'm not advocating for the compelling of folks to be forced to
| give up their riches (Ill gotten or not) just imagine if people
| were better versions of themselves.
| ggreer wrote:
| Many of them are. Scroll through Wikipedia's list of wealthiest
| charitable foundations.[1]
|
| And instead of starting their own foundations, a lot of wealthy
| people quietly give to existing ones. To pick one example: The
| founders of Netflix, GoPro, WhatsApp, Microsoft, and Facebook
| have all donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Silicon
| Valley Community Foundation.[2]
|
| In terms of both absolute dollars and percentage of GDP, the US
| is the most charitable country on the planet. In 2016,
| Americans donated $258.5 billion to charities, or 1.44% of
| GDP.[3] The next most charitable country was New Zealand, which
| donated 0.79% of GDP. Since then, the US has become even more
| charitable. In 2023, Americans donated $557.16 billion to
| charities[4], or 2% of GDP.
|
| And this doesn't include non-charitable improvements in the
| human condition such as better internet access, new drugs,
| cheaper solar cells, cheaper batteries, and increased adoption
| of electric vehicles. I agree that there's plenty of room for
| improvement, but quality of life today is better than it ever
| has been.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Community_Found...
|
| 3. https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-
| polic...
|
| 4. https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-
| resources/charitable-g...
| codethief wrote:
| I don't see any interview in the linked article, only some
| quotes. Am I missing something?
| janalsncm wrote:
| I've seen the goalposts on "the American Dream" move a lot. It
| used to be, everyone can work hard and have a good life. Buy a
| house, car, raise kids on a single income with free high school
| education. It might be a historical fluke but that's what it was.
|
| Then it somehow became "anyone can become rich" and we celebrated
| the middle class origins of our billionaires.
|
| Now it seems to be "we have the richest billionaires".
|
| People are being gaslit with metrics like GDP and stock index
| prices that measure the performance of corporations and the
| wealthiest Americans. But the reality is that American life
| expectancy has plateaued or going down, while the EU has blasted
| past us.
| eddieroger wrote:
| You can see the through-line if you read it as "if you work
| hard, you can improve your situation." That's the part that's
| changed.
| Clubber wrote:
| I don't understand why they don't just pick 1000 people and give
| them $200K. See what happens.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I like Jeff. Way back when, I was a front page posteron SO, and
| #1 on the C++ tag. I got really fed up with the whole SO thing
| and I asked Jeff to delete my account and all associated posts.
| This really screwed up their SQLServer system (not at all my
| intention, I had a lot of posts) but he plodded ahead with it
| anyway, despite me saying not to bother. A good guy, IMHO.
| ge96 wrote:
| I miss the SO podcast that was fun
|
| Side note I watch this guy's livestreams sometimes who was a big
| developer for Firefox can't remember how I relate these two
| together
| bosky101 wrote:
| A $1.8B startup sale made him wealthy--now he plans to donate
| half his net worth
|
| My first reaction of the title was - that's pretty much every tax
| payer if you think about it :D
|
| On a more serious note - huch respect for SO, and props for Jeff
| for being so inspiring and now - generous.
| matsemann wrote:
| I realized seeing the picture on top that I have actually never
| seen his face before, only his well known avatar. Despite having
| read his stuff and following him for a decade.
| davidcalloway wrote:
| Same here! I thought when I saw it, "ah, so that's what Jeff
| Atwood looks like".
| chairmansteve wrote:
| The median wage for full time workers in the USA is ~60k.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
|
| The median house price is 357k.
|
| https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
|
| So, on aggregate, for a couple who both work, a house is
| affordable.
|
| And things aint gonna get any better..... The USA has the best
| economy in the world, and wealth redistribution is not on the
| agenda.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Median _where_ -- housing and income aren 't evenly distributed
| neves wrote:
| Hey Jeff! If you are reading this comments, I just want to say
| thank you! Thanks just for being a nice person. In this over
| individualistic world, you just shared what you know and helped
| other people.
|
| I'm your fan since the beginning of Coding Horror. Shared dozens
| of your blog posts. Stack Overflow changed how everybody
| programmed. I started coding in a pre-Internet time, when you got
| stuck, you just got stuck. I'm from Brazil and never went to USA,
| but I hope someday I can buy you a beer or a coffee.
| neves wrote:
| I know that this post will be piled under thousands of others
| arguing about housing and health care in the USA.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The American dream is not at risk, nor is it fading out. In fact
| is has been entirely dead for sometime. Society is solidly rigged
| by long time rich and established players.
|
| It would take a revolution to revive it.
|
| The amazing part is that the constitution does cover how to go
| about this, with little actual combat.
|
| The only thing that is needed is for a good majority of voter to
| tell the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans that their services
| are no longer wanted then clean house by voting in a new set of
| players from a new set of political parties.
|
| It is totally legal, and it is even not that hard, IF you could
| pierce the indoctrinated dogma that Rs or Ds are the only choices
| or you are throwing your vote away.
|
| Just getting the citizens who do not vote (141 million??) to
| become active would bring it closer.
|
| You dont need a BILLION dollars to run for election. It is needed
| when you have to make someone utterly corrupt and removed from
| reality palatable to voters.
|
| But even after a revolution brought about by an election the
| fight would be tremendous against the entrenched / swamp / deep-
| state / oligarchs / 1% / enterprises / lobby organisations etc
| etc .
|
| But it is there for us to do.
| blks wrote:
| Is that a case where a rich person sets up a fund to transfer his
| wealth to, but still have control over it? Like the founder of
| Patagonia did.
| mig39 wrote:
| Compared to Stack Overflow, I think the Discourse forum software
| is just as great (if not greater) Jeff Atwood-related tech
| contribution.
|
| Discourse has made it easy to create unique communities and avoid
| the social media algorithm hell. And it's open source and free.
| rossta wrote:
| Advice from a 40-something programmer: Learn how to spend
| responsibly, invest, and plan for your financial future. One way
| to do that is to work with a financial advisor. The sooner you
| start in your career, the better. Look for "advice only"
| fiduciaries who are not otherwise incentivized to promote certain
| investments. Start here https://adviceonlynetwork.com/.
|
| A lot of this stuff isn't taught in traditional schools. Sure,
| you could teach yourself, but I find this is an area where I
| prefer to have an expert in my corner.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > I'm not saying we're socialists here
|
| I understand that this is obligatory to say for an American, but
| at some point you have to stop dancing around the topic so much
| and acknowledge that you kind of are socialists.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Jeff Atwood is a mensch. It shines through in his writing and his
| work. And well done to him for giving away a significant part of
| his wealth to help others, rather than spending it on trinkets
| and baubles.
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