Inside the World of Silicon Valley's 'Coasters' -- the Millionaire Engineers Who Get Paid Gobs of Money and Barely Work (businessinsider.com) 226
Business Insider has explored what it calls the "least-secret secret" in the Valley -- "resters and vesters," or "coasters" referring to engineers who get paid big bucks without doing too much work, waiting for their stock to vest. From the report: Engineers can wind up in "rest and vest" jobs in a variety of ways. Manny Medina, the CEO of fast-growing Seattle startup Outreach, has been on all sides of it. He briefly was a coaster himself, and says he saw how Microsoft used it to great effect when he worked for the software giant. He has also tried to lure some "rest and vest" engineers to come work for him at his startup. Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.
They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls. "My days began at that point at 11 and I took long lunches," he laughs. "They didn't want you to build anything else, because anything you built would be maintained by someone else. But you have to stand by while they bring people up to speed." Years later, he landed at Microsoft and says he saw how Microsoft used high-paying jobs strategically, both within its engineering ranks and with its R&D unit, Microsoft Research. [...] "You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model." At other companies it's less about defense and more about becoming indispensable. For instance, Facebook has a fairly hush bonus program called "discretionary equity" or "DE," said a former Facebook engineer who received it. "DE" is when the company hands an engineer a massive, extra chunk of restricted stock units, worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's a thank you for a job well done. It also helps keep the person from jumping ship because DE vests over time. These are bonus grants that are signed by top execs, sometimes even CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. "At Facebook the 'OGs' [Original Gangsters] we know got DE," this former Facebook engineer said. OGs refer to engineers who worked at the company before the IPO. "Their Facebook stock quadruples and they don't leave. They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days," this person said.
FIRST!!! (Score:2)
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Ditto. I need a well paying full-time IT job. :P
Institutional Knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like a good idea. So many companies are foolish and instead of paying for people to stay, they let years, sometimes decades of knowledge walk out of the door to replace them with someone who is cheaper but far less productive. I've watched it happen multiple times at my company over the last year, its mindboggling. Company is now spending way more as other people have to learn and fill in the missing knowledge and domain expertise. Would have been far cheaper just to give those people large raises.
Also the concept of using vesting stock options to hold on to people isn't new, it's called golden handcuffs, but I guess the new part is it being applied to top software engineers instead of executives.
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Watch out, sometimes they keep idiots around because they think the idiot knows something. Upper management doesn't really have a good idea of who's a valuable worker or not. They know who's rated highly but that is often political. Sometimes the person who designed the product is also an idiot, and do you really want to keep that person and their unmaintainable crap code or get someone who can fix it without being roadblocked. I see times when a person eventually leaves a company that others breathe a
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
"And then they start to pull 9-5 days"
Heaven forbid someone having a reasonable work-life balance in this day and age.
Still, for many I think this would be incredibly boring after a while. Still, there are golden sign-on bonuses if you are that strong and you need to be bought out of your current position.
9-5 (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked at a lot of companies in my career and some are fine with you doing a 9-5 so long as you get your work done well and on time. Others such as a certain investment bank I worked at were more interested in appearance than output - if you left at 5 they thought you were slacking even if you did twice as much work as the guy who spent most of the day surfing the web but left at 7pm. Sadly this shallow management mentality ended up with me in front of HR despite me closing more bug tickets than almost everyone else in the team. With that kind of small minded mentality its no wonder they couldn't keep the best for very long and IT was populated by people with little coding talend and no life to speak of who didn't mind spending 12 hours a day at their desk.
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as the guy who spent most of the day surfing the web but left at 7pm
Or if you showed up at 7 AM to begin with.
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It's easier to watch porn at 7 AM since you're the only one there. After 9 AM, it becomes a bit uncomfortable for the other workers.
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Why would I care? If you don't wanna see my dong, what are you doing in my cubicle?
Hey, if you put me in a pen like an animal, don't expect me to stay civilized!
Re:9-5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I one of the few that prefers to work like I did in college? Coast along doing small boring tasks ("homework") for a week or two then 'cramming' during a development sprint?
I've worked remotely for 7 years and I can't stand a consistent schedule, especially now that I'm primarily a stay at home working parent. Some days it's 7-9 until the kid wakes up. Then 1-3 during nap. Then 10pm-1a. Or any random combination therein.
Then when it's development sprint time I work on site in an office. I'll work 8a-12a. Put on a pot of coffee and do it again the next day, sometimes pulling an all nighter if I'm in a development groove. I've found I can get a normal '9-5x5' worth of work done in a single day if I eliminate interrupting my train of thought and having a nice quiet office.
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I don't know how normal it is, but that's certainly how I like to work. I'll work vaguely normal hours for a while, get stuck into something, and put in a 70 hour week or three. Then when it's over I might do little enough for a few days. Fortunately, in my position I can be useful even when not churning out code or bug fixes; I can grease the skids for support issues, help out other folks, dig around for weaknesses, etc.
Re:9-5 (Score:4, Interesting)
[Citation Needed]?
If you look at history it's not like Native American hunting trips were a 9-5. They went on irregular expeditions that lasted days to a week. They worked until the job was done. The same with persistence hunters that would follow an animal until it was exhausted.
And I do have a regular, consistent cycle. It's just not based on a 24 hour clock it's on a 4 week basis. Personally I'd rather 'sprint' for a week and take 3 weeks off than try and maintain a regular daily schedule. I also do that with other tasks like grocery shopping. We make a month plan, spend half a day shopping, put everything away and eat for a month+.
At the end of the month I find that I have more time because it's not being 'killed by a thousand cuts'. Just being able to shop at 9AM on a Monday saves a considerable amount of time over shopping when everyone else is.
Re:9-5 (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked at a lot of companies in my career and some are fine with you doing a 9-5 so long as you get your work done well and on time.
This.
In my own companies, I never cared about how many hours my employees worked, or when they worked those hours (with the exception of positions that require coordination with others outside the company).
What I cared about was that deadlines were met and the work quality was acceptable. As long as that happens, nothing else matters.
When choosing where I want to work, I tend to look at this as well. If a company seems overly focused on "correct" working hour and durations, I tend to pass. I'm being paid for work product, not for how many hours I warm a chair. If a company doesn't see that, it's a strong indication that I'm a poor fit there.
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George Constanza's rules for 'working hard' [conorneill.com]
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Not only that, but a manager's salary is based off of the cumulative cost of all underlings so a manager of a large team of mostly incompetent people will be making much more than someone over a small team of highly competent people,
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As if the whole point of being alive is to work for some shit company like FB for a very average wage.
Imagine the nerve of those people who work reasonable hours, and get great pay too. They're such capaitalists.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Market value includes perceptions (Score:3)
The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product. They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference.
That's largely a distinction without a difference. Your market value is by definition what you can convince someone else to pay you. Perception is a part of that. In most cases there is no objective way to value a particular set of skills.
Re:Market value includes perceptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Of note however is that many of the hardest working people are actually paid the least. You can certainly argue that anyone who has put in the effort to rise above minimum wage can do so, and I would probably agree that for certain individuals it's possible. For the average person it's not realistic however. Furthermore the fact is that there is a finite job pool, so while putting in the effort to advance yourself can pay off for the individual, there will still be a need for the people filling minimum wage jobs; so if everyone becomes more educated and skilled; it will still be the people who are the least educated and skilled who take those jobs.
Minimum wage as it is now is modern slave labor; it doesn't pay enough to reasonably support a single person never mind a family. As a society we should find it ethically unconscionable to force the kind of living conditions many minimum wage workers have to deal with. People need to eat though, so if the choice is working a really crappy job or starving, people will put up with a lot.
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I make 10-100x as much as an engineer, but it is much more physically and emotionally draining, I stay up nights worrying about problems, have to be there when the customer tells me and I am surrounded by people complaining about the same and
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Have you started shooting back yet?
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The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product.
Actually it does, just not for people who have access to the money faucet that is the financial industry. If you are near the fountain of wealth that is perpetual arbitrary loan creation by private investment banks, backstopped by the fed, then I totally agree with your statement. However, for those still stuck in the real economy hyper competitive market forces are working quite well to pummel their value towards zero.
The difference now is that engineers were not traditionally so close to the money supply,
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That analysis is actually quite inaccurate, because it misses much bigger effects. Yes, valuation of employees is subjective. But that's true for cars, iPads, loaves of bread, massages, flights, etc. as well. Far more important is that valuation of employees is relative to t
Unintentional insight (Score:5, Insightful)
"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days."
Such a shame. Its as if a business shouldn't be run in startup mode or run-up-to-deadline mode at every possible moment, and people might desire lives outside of work and sleep.
We can't have that.
This quote is an example of how the concept of "fuck you money" arose.
Where's the minimum wage figure... (Score:5, Informative)
If they're smart, they make the best use of it (Score:3)
"Coasters" because they work normal hours? (Score:5, Informative)
"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"
Working massive numbers of hours weeks is not normal. For a startup, yes...but once a company is out of the "get big fast" phase and actually making money, there's no excuse to burn people out and run the place like a startup. I know younger tech employees want to continue the college dorm lifestyle and live at work, but I dislike the trend of calling anyone who wants to work a sane number of hours a week "coasters."
Lots of big, successful companies have "Distinguished Engineer" positions and use them for different reasons, such as:
- To have a raft of smart people on staff, not necessarily to do nuts-and-bolts work but to provide top-level guidance to those who do
- To have a position that, because of the pay structure of the organization, is the only technical position that pays high enough to reward a technical person for things like inventing the company's cash cow products, etc.
- For vanity or bragging rights...such as having Linus Torvalds or Vint Cerf on your payroll
- And of course, to pay these people enough to keep them from jumping to your competitors
Distinguished Engineers are mostly accomplished enough that they don't really have to worry about finding a job. They're getting paid handsomely, and/or able to live off the crazy amounts of money they've made already. It's basically the prize for winning the meritocracy lottery. It's also the closest any of us techies will get to the level of a corporate CxO -- paid handsomely in cash, stock and free stuff by their primary company, plus getting the salary, perks and influence associated with "sitting" on a ton of other companies' boards. I wouldn't call them "coasters." I'd call them savvy!
Well BOB I just space out at my desk (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working and I have eight different bosses So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. So I just do the minimal amount of work not to get fired.
Doesn't matter how much I get paid (Score:5, Informative)
Whether I'm making a little or a lot (and I've done both), I can't stand having to be at a workplace with nothing to do. The time goes so slowly, and it's pure torture, particularly when I could be doing what I love: engineering.
I have seen people who slack on the job, so I understand they exist -- but I will never understand how anyone can handle doing that. You literally could not pay me enough to put up with doing nothing.
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Usually people stay because of the appearance that the slow period will end soon. "We'll start work on $thing_you_really_want_to_do right after we release _____". The contents of that blank change a few times. Each time it looks reasonable, and appears to be a short-lived condition.
Then 6 months have passed, you're ripping your hair out from boredom and they just changed the contents of the blank again. And by then you're deep in the sunk cost fallacy - you won't be able to get a job doing $thing elsewh
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Really stressful (Score:3)
I've occasionally been in positions where I didn't have enough work to keep me busy, and I hate it. It's more stressful than being overworked in some ways.
For example, I once started a new job, and almost immediately my supervisor went on vacation for a month. Before he left we went over the project I was going to be working on, and he figured I had everything I needed to get a good start on it while he was away. Well, I finished the whole project in two weeks. So I spent the next two weeks wandering the office and asking everyone, "Can I do anything to help you out? Can you give me something useful to do? Please?" Mostly they didn't, so I sat at the computer and played games. You probably think that sounds fun, but believe me, it wasn't.
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In a world where California is full of actor-waiters, you specialize yourself as the IT-janitor.
I specialized in finding solutions to problems that IT people don't want to deal with. Most often because they think it's someone else's problem rather their own. There are IT closets that the janitors won't even touch.
When you work in IT but willfully demote yourself to janitor, no wonder you get paid the wages of a janitor.
Why do you care how much I get paid for cleaning up other people's messes? For the line of work I'm doing, I get paid quite well.
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Because maybe if you got paid more for your day job then you wouldn't annoy everyone by spamming affiliate links all day to supplement your income.
You seriously think I need extra coffee money to supplement my income?
If only someone would do the community a favor and pay you shut-the-fuck-up money.
The proper term is "fuck you" money.
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As usual, you completely misunderstand a simple idiom and misapply it.
Uh, no. That's one definition. The most common definition that I've read regarding Silicon Valley is providing enough money to get someone to leave the company and avoid a lawsuit. Hence, "fuck you" money is substantially more than severance money.
STEM shortage? (Score:2)
FTA:"You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model."
Tell me again how we have a STEM shortage in the US?
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Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Funny)
Just outta curiosity, do the Marxists have to succeed to see him swing?
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Right. No Marxist revolutions ever happened right? It was just the will of the people as a reaction to the Fascists.
Fucking idiot. Pick up a goddamn history book that wasn't written by some left wing lunatic.
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history book that wasn't written by some left wing lunatic.
Good luck finding one of those...
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I just can't do it. It's unfathomable. I don't blame the engineers, why wouldn't you do it if you could? But the corporate culture in America must be brought down. It's evil and must be stopped at all costs.
Obviously b'cos every job is indistinguishable from every other job
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So really your philosophy is to punish people for choices made when they were children? Or in many cases, for the conditions that they lived under when they were children?
I always find it a strange position, because if the world doesn't owe people anything, then you are not owed what you have. You are happy to accept societies help in making sure you hang onto your un-owed wealth though.
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely yes people should have to LIVE WITH THE LIFE THEY HAVE LIVED.
I spent my youth and college years bettering myself. Working the summers for experience and studying when not working. Then I immediately transitioned to a full time job and worked my ass off. You then expect me to feel sorry for someone who spent that time partying, having a grand time, taking copious mini-vacations and partying on weeknights because their job doesn't require much of them. Then they want to complain about the pitfalls of living that lifestyle and expect the government to put them on par with me once they figured out they don't want to live with the consequences. Fuck that.
I didn't/don't get to "call in sick" (as in fake sick), I don't get to take random thursday/fridays off with little notice to make short vacations or just hang with friends. I spent summers and lots of free time to be where I am today and to take that away from me because It was in a time past is bullshit. Everyone wants to be forgiven for past mistakes and look forward to a bright future but the fact is the past matters. I am NOT OWED what I have but I have earned peoples FUTURE trust and respect because of my PAST performance and the skills I possess. If you don't have a positive past with tons of knowledge and smarts then why should people treat you as if you have things you don't have. I am not "owed" anything. If no one wants what I have worked to build - I get screwed. Tons of
These asshole minimum wage workers that complain have no fucking clue what it is like to have real responsibility. In another life I would trade a blue collar "livin' the life" to what I have now even though I am making 5x as much. Having free time can save you a shit ton of money too... home cooked tenderloin steak $5-10, restaurant tenderloin steak $50 - $100+. I only make 5x as much and after taxes, probably 4x as much so having free time can actually allow me to eat better for less money.
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent my youth and college years bettering myself. Working the summers for experience and studying when not working. Then I immediately transitioned to a full time job and worked my ass off. You then expect me to feel sorry for someone who spent that time partying, having a grand time, taking copious mini-vacations and partying on weeknights because their job doesn't require much of them
No, we expect you to "feel sorry for" the people who also spent their youth and college years bettering themselves, but did not have your luck.
Because those people vastly outnumber the ones like you who did get lucky.
Want an example? My career as a software engineer exists because I graduated college near the beginning of the dot-com boom with a degree that isn't directly related to computers or software (still a science discipline though). Companies were desperate enough that they gave me a shot. By the time the dot-com bust happened, I had amassed enough experience for my degree to not matter much.
If I had been born 5 or so years later, I would have graduated into the bust. And that would have crippled my ability to start my career, most likely to the point where it could not have happened - it's not like I could afford to go get a second degree in CS and still eat.
That difference has nothing to do with working hard. It is luck. And I'm absolutely sure delving into your history you could find examples where your current situation is dependent on a roll of the dice. That friend/acquaintance who gave you an internship or other start. The cop who let you off with a warning instead of planting evidence [nytimes.com]. That time a close relative did not get sick and need you. And so on.
The Calvinism behind the philosophy of the US, where working hard means you will succeed, has a giant flaw: It ignores luck. Largely because acknowledging the affect of luck requires admitting that it's not all about hard work. Sometimes the hard workers get screwed. And sometimes the successful are handed their success with minimal effort.
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A strong work ethic ain't just something you're born with, either. It's taught. It can possibly be taught at any age, but people who have been taught that their hard work will not be rewarded can't be blamed for not wanting to work hard. For every person who worked hard and became financially successful, there's ten people who worked just as hard if not harder, and didn't.
college for all + loans is killing us (Score:2)
college for all + loans and the black eye that trades get is killing us.
How much better off would we be with alt history in where X happens?
The same college for all for push but with Bankruptcy for student loans?
College for some and trades / tech / schools for (not part of the degree system) for others with out Bankruptcy for student loans?
College for all* (with trades / tech / schools at more less the same college accreditation level?)
community college becomes part of the k-12 system (say K-14 with trade c
Yeah, those dumb whiny bluecollars! (Score:2)
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
You really want to claim that this is their own doing and not mostly pure luck? For real?
Most of those that "make it big" owe more to random chance and being lucky than any of the "hard work" they put in. Of course it requires you to take an opportunity when it comes, no doubt about this, but saying that people who ain't rich just are lazy bums is one of the worst insults possible when their biggest fault is that they simply never had the lucky opportunity cross their way.
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Our economic system requires that a certain percentage of people earn subsistence-level wages. Even if the entire population were highly educated and highly motivated, there would still be a not insignificant number of people making the least amount of money that the law will allow.
To say that a person's income is entirely up to them is such an extreme oversimplification as to border on a lie.
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What if the "least amount of money that the law will allow" were raised to well above subsistence level, causing top-end incomes to be pulled down to afford minimum wage workers? I wonder whether it would fix this hellworld or cause this awful economic system to collapse.
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:4, Insightful)
The complaint is really that the economy has artificially low valuations for manual labor of the type humans do, and does not need to devolve into a self-righteous weenie-measuring contest.
I don't know anyone who argues that putting in the time to train up should not be rewarded, but in so doing we seem to have spawned a class of individuals who think everything everyone else does in the GED sector of the labor force is completely worthless and without merit. They fail to see that it is the humility of these people who clean their toilets and make their sandwiches which enables them to excel in their fields. These people don't go to work with the motivation that they can "do great things"... they don't get any of that ego-nourishing fluff. But they put their backs into it anyway, often breaking their bodies over the long term in ways much worse than carpel tunnel syndrome or the back problems from sitting all day.
In many cases these people are looking to better themselves and escape from these thankless occupations, but are kept in their place by the perpetual catch-22 which is capitalism's calling card: you don't have enough resources to get enough resources to improve your life.
Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know that the valuation is artificially low. I think, in this particular case, the market is pretty efficient at pricing out the relative value of cleaning toilets vs technical work.
The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not. If one person does work that sells to the whole world and the second person does something that's valuable to maybe 10 people in the building, the valuations for the former vs the latter is obviously going to be really off.
Of course, the self-righteous can always come up with some conclusion of "you don't really deserve that!". People on all sides think that, rich or poor. But that ignores the need for practical, not-subjective ways to improve people's lives.
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The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not.
Yes, it does, as it is kinda hard for the techies to do their great globally-effective job while holding it in for fear of having to use the filthy can.
My point is all of us who have the privilege to work in fields where lots of people rely on us are in turn relying on other more humble people. We should be grateful for that and afford them the respect and dignity they deserve.
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Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."
Replace the cherry with some plastic figures and the ice cream sundae with a wedding cake fit for royalty, and you have an excellent analogy for why CEOs are paid such ridiculous amounts.
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these people who clean their toilets and make their sandwiches
Hope it's not the same dude, or that at least he knows to wash his hands between the two tasks.
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That kind of bullshit is exactly what's wrong with America.
"If you didn't make good decisions when you were at an age where your brain is not developed, and everyone makes shit decisions all the time, then you're fucked" is just not an acceptable statement. Especially this applies when most of the people making those bad decisions are living in a home where their parents just don't give a shit, and never point out to them that school actually matters (or anything else for that matter). They're often livin
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While I am pretty proud that Slashdot marked this Troll, I'd like to add a thought:
The world doesn't owe me anything is not wrong.
However, stating it like that kinda implies that you think that I owe the world something.
And that is just false. I owe none of you people anything. There is a, usually, unspoken contract between me and the rest of you goombas that we'll all flourish more if we specialize and use our skillsets as efficiently as possible and then trade these skills to let others provide us efficie
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no doubt that each of us gets a different starting block in life.
But that is life, it always has been.
If you start further back, it just means you have to try harder, and it is possible, you CAN see examples of this in life.
I've personally known people that started off with WAY less than I had, but they worked past poverty and neighborhood culture and became VERY successful.
Much more successful than myself.
I've also seen kids who have had natural smarts, and come from wealthy families, that ended up nowhere, poor and basically.....your $7/hr worker.
Yes, everyone gets a different starting block in life, be it wealth, family, physical and mental levels.....but it is up to the person to struggle and strive to make it through life.
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.
Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:2)
Says the unlucky sod
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Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.
Says the unlucky sod
Also says this very lucky sod. I have made numerous mistakes in my life, including flunking out of college for not attending classes and was still working as an assistant manager at KFC at the age of 24. I pulled my life back together in my late 20's and made a $150k salary by the age of 35 as a software engineer living in a Midwest suburb. Ultimately my own internal motivation pulled me out of my poor circumstances, but it would be ignorant of me to think the advantages of my birth weren't a significant en
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I disagree, but there's something in between what you guys are arguing about. A lot of people who were born "on the wrong side of the tracks" end up doing really well both because they overcame the bad influences of their peers AND because they were raised by someone who valued hard work and education and encouraged the child to do well in school. It's almost entirely parenting.
When you get up into the middle and upper classes, the children can generally see hard work paying off, both in their guardians a
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That doesn't mean governments (or private organizations) can't lend a hand. Daycare, for instance, can be invaluable to parents struggling with multiple jobs. I am all against hard-handed legislative hammers and think the "war on poverty" has mostly been a waste of time and money. But people tend to take it too far where any government action, even mostly positive ones like subsidizing daycare or giving health insurance to poor children, are cried out as "government intervention bad!!!!".
Look how they defun
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:4, Interesting)
if you live in an impoverished area and are not willing to move to where jobs are, you're relegating yourself to a pretty poor life, in general.
Our families are still unhappy that my wife and I moved far from them, but we make tons more than them, even taking into account cost of living. During the last recession jobs in our respective fields bumped all the way up to 4% unemployment in our area. We're back down to critical shortages of people in our fields now, where both of us could have another job within a month or so, should we find we need to change.
Jobs that don't exist where we grew up are paying us piles of money and we have an embarrassing number to choose from. I have no idea what we'd be doing back where we grew up, but it would probably suck, not pay a lot, and not come with meaningful benefits. A lot of people are amazed that we just left our families behind and moved, but I can't seeing not doing that, if there is so much opportunity elsewhere. We love our families, but if they want to live in the middle of nowhere in dying small towns, they're going to have to live there without us. Life is too short to spend it making bad choices because you're sentimental about your childhood.
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What's the deal with this??
Is this something new where kids are afraid to move away from their parents/relatives when the become adults?
I live in a different state than ANY of my relatives....I moved away when I went to college, boomeranged back a couple of short times, and then finally out totally away from everyone.
I go back to visit from time to time, but really....is there something that has happened the last generation where
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Is this something new where kids are afraid to move away from their parents/relatives when the become adults?
No, it's something old about when unemployment is high and there's no jobs available, kids can't afford to move out. It's still not socially acceptable for a young man to let a young woman pay his rent, so most of the youngsters staying at home are boys.
I moved out of the house when I was fifteen, but I had computer skills and the dot-com bubble was forming. That was a position of privilege. Without it, I would have been stuck at home with my emotionally abusive mother, or living on the streets and just try
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Hilarious, AC. Spoken like someone who has never left suburbia or the city and spent time in one of the many small dying towns in the US. Love my family, and I love going back to visit, but it's a choice between managing a small business at $25k/year with no benefits vs actually having a solid retirement fund, money to travel, the ability to own a home, and knowledge that if my employer dries up, I'll have plenty of jobs to choose from. Out in the sticks, when you lose your job it's devastating, and you mig
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This is very much true. The "American Dream" has been little more than idealistic propaganda for quite some time. The hard work == success mantra is almost complete bullshit. Without luck to get your ass into a place where it is even possible to succeed, you can be holding down three jobs and you still won't go anywhere.
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WTF, I was born on the wrong side of the tracks and raised by a single mother who did not have "proper connections" and worked retail jobs her whole life.
Im well into the 6 figures because I learned, used my knowledge, and bring value to the companies I work for.
Personally, I think it is the racist democrats who constantly push the made up narrative about how the poor black kids can not get ahead in life because they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, are the wrong color, and have parents without pr
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It's still no way to have proper social cohesion. I see this a lot in California where a lot of people are rich but then you have crumbling infrastructure and a huge vagrant population. At least the weather is nice.
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I see this a lot in the United States where a lot of people are rich but then you have crumbling infrastructure and a huge vagrant population.
FTFY - It's just not a California problem.
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Interesting)
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CA is a unique problem in that they didn't get ahead of the housing crunch. This in turn caused cost-of-living to increase significantly. This caused the governments to promise all sorts of perks and pay for employees and contractors. Which causes inflated costs of anything government-run (like infrastructure). That in turn means there's not enough funding for what should be basic, cheap services like roads.
This is the basic inflation cycle. Labor costs track cost of living when there is demand for semi-ski
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"1. Get cost of living down by flooding the market with housing."
Will not happen because CA voters locked down a ton of the housing market with Proposition 13, which in effect punishes you for moving around, and strongly incentivizes not to sell. And ironically, this was brought about by the smallest government policies you can imagine, a combination of ballot propositions (so direct democracy, no government involved in passing it at all) and most city councils voting down construction projects (NIMBY ftw!)
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Will not happen because CA voters locked down a ton of the housing market with Proposition 13, which in effect punishes you for moving around, and strongly incentivizes not to sell.
Prop 13 incentivizes people who have owned their home for a long time not to sell. Otherwise, it's not that significant unless you're in a bubble. Upwardly mobile homeowners tend to trade up every 5 - 7 years.
The lack of available housing in California is more likely due to restrictions on development because ENVIRONMENT, especially in coastal urban areas where the good jobs are. There have been several attempts to overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act to ease restrictions on development, but th
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Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Informative)
Your statement ignores the statistics of reality. My wife and I were raised in similar situations to you and now made it to the 1%, but we realize we are a statistical anomaly.
Your upper middle class family that has a kid caught with drugs or any of the other dozen stupid things kids do can afford a good lawyer and a clean record. They can afford the private tutor to make sure their kids gets extra special attention. They can afford foods that promote brain development, and compared to some people, food all together.
You, like my wife, probably had the Single Mother who actually cared. Some kids aren't as fortunate.
What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids,
You mean the one in a million (almost literally) that have the opportunity to test well enough to go somewhere? How many 'average' Chinese and Indian kids will never travel to the US to get an advanced degree because they didn't place in the top 0.1%? The statistical likely hood of some average Joe from an upper middle class family landing in these positions is considerably higher than a random person near the poverty line of any background.
Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe the OP was referring to poor Chinese and Indian kids that are already IN the US...
His point being, you don't seen other minorities, that may be poor having the same problems the black kids are having.
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Other minority communities don't tend to have a culture of poor education and crime. Which, let's be real, is part of the poor black (and poor white in the south) communities.
Both of those could probably use some injection of cultural intermixing with more successful communities. Especially the southern rural whites. They're basically on a death depression spiral right now.
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I agree, but you're living proof that it's not how wealthy you were growing up, it's how your guardians raised you. You saw your mother working very hard to support you, and she probably spent a lot of effort encouraging you to work hard and do well in school (often, in these cases, the guardian(s) will point to themselves and warn that you don't want to turn out like them - working very hard for very little - so you need to succeed in school). Often a single parent will also constantly warn of the mistak
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Your problem is defining "success" as being "rich" instead of being able to support yourself and your family. The "American" dream was not be ostentatiously wealthy, it used to be to be able to support your family.
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Your problem is defining "success" as being "rich" ...
This idea is pervasive on /. and other sites. I've achieved great comfort and freedom over the last decade with very minimal money. I don't live in NYC, have a car valued over $1000, a cell phone or new clothes,but I'm currently supporting 4 other adults and a child with a nice warm safe house, good food and a lot of toys.
Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:2)
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Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage (Score:2)
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This.
It's one of my pet peeves when people use the word "successful" as a synonym for "wealthy". They are two different things.
You are successful if you've achieved your goals. If those goals are to accumulate wealth, then being wealthy is being successful for you.
However, most people don't have "get rich" as their goal, so they can be successful without it.
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You realize everyone's a little bit racist, right? Saying "racist Democrats", which sort of implying that Republicans are not, is disengenuous. Make one side look good and the other side look bad. Partisanship is the biggest evil in the world now. If you had a good point to make you lost it by being political. You could have just said "I think it is the racists who constantly..."
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Isn't that the whole objective of hard working in the early years?
For some people, obviously, but certainly not for everybody!
Re:I don't quite understand.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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