Everyone's circumstances are different. There are plenty of early retirees with similar backgrounds to my own that have kids (Mr. Money Mustache himself has a kid, for example, and retired at 30!) We currently have no kids. But I find the "kids are expensive!" thing is usually pretty overblown / not very creative about solving any problems. Kid spending is similar to the emotional and socialized high-spending expectations that plague the wedding industry. If one applies the same creative simple living strategies outlined in this article, there's no reason kids should increase one's expenses _that_ much. Saving up an extra $100k per kid is probably more than enough, and wouldn't delay an early retirement by more than ~6 months to a year in most cases.
How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by being replaceable.
If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage
Let's say I have a company with an R&D budget of $1 billion. $100 million goes into robotics and AI, $900 million goes into core business interests. You form a union and demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own.
What will happen when budgeting for the next fiscal year? Replacing you is a core business interest now, and so is avoiding the need to hire your replacement. The R&D budget will be adjusted accordingly.
If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.
> If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.
This is really irrespective of union membership. Sometimes people have this odd view of unions as "Now you're basically consigning yourself to 'lowest common denominator' employee", but that need not be the case. There are many unions that have vastly different pay scales and include "stars" (think actors' unions, sports players' unions, etc.) Even Tom Cruise joined the negotiations as a SAG member, and my guess is he's got plenty of leverage all by himself: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/07/tom-cruise-repo...
One thing the Hollywood people have in common with each other, but not with us, is that they move from one employer to the next frequently as a matter of course. Those employers explicitly do NOT want to carry them on their books when they don't have specific jobs for them to perform.
Unionization makes a lot more sense in those cases. If I need a ship unloaded, I call up some dockworkers. If I need some heavy boxes moved, I call up some Teamsters. If I need someone to look good on a screen, I call up Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence. If I need someone to feed the actors, I call the craft union. Etc. Like the old joke about hookers, I don't pay these people to come to work, I pay them to go away.
None of that is comparable to what I do, or (probably) to what you do. Your employer can only become less competitive if you join a separate outside organization that acts as a middleman for your labor. That's not the case in other industries.
That's certainly not the case with all unions like that, e.g. sport players' unions, where a player works for a team for a couple of years, then may go to another team, or (an area where I'm familiar) AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, where many union members are employed by the same dance or opera company for years, sometimes their entire career.
> demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own
The union oughtn't seek "ridiculous" accommodations then. It should seek at least reasonable ones, and possible aspirational ones, and negotiate it out from there. The problem we're seeing now is that even demands that most would find reasonable are cast as ridiculous by management. And if a union has trouble getting employers to listen, there's no hope that someone on their own can.
I've personally lost faith that a typical employer is capable of recognizing the value of an individual employee. So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for individual performance or criticality to the business (Twitter's being a good example). So my own value isn't as strong of a bargaining chip.
It doesn't matter, if my employer would treat me as interchangeable anyway.
And even interchangeable employees deserve reasonable accommodations. I do think a union can highlight those needs more effectively than individuals (especially for interchangeable ones, to your point).
Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the point where the cost to the employer is lower than the cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they get without the union.
Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor, then the employer might as well just replace them now. So it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the arrangement is still worthwhile.
> it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.
That's a bad take. I can understand reasons for not wanting to join a union, but that's a pretty ridiculous assessment of what goes on.
The thing is, all of us like to believe we're special snowflakes and uniquely valuable. What many are realizing is that some of the only real power most of have is if we act collectively. It's not just "a middle man doing the negotiation for you", it's union members acting together, and organizing that way, that gives unions any power at all.
Just look at the recent Hollywood strikes - the only reason they got anywhere is the strong power of their unions (e.g. union members aren't allowed to work for any struck employer, worldwide, while a strike is ongoing). And actors and writers really do have special snowflakes, the big stars that make millions per film, and they're all union members, too.
Don’t forget all the “oh yeah I’m not allowed to fix that, that’s a CSS bug and I’m a JS Developer. You’ll need to bring in a CSS development team to look at that one”.
You understand that that only happens in unions when the union assents to those divisions, right? You understand that you get to vote about whether your union operates that way?
You understand you’ve removed all personal agency from the worker? They must now do what the thousands of others have decided is best for their job security, not what that individual actually wants to do. My gf used to be a split artist/technical person at her job, she loved it. It got unionized, and now: “Sorry bub, union says you aren’t allowed to make art any more. Keep your head down and script your scripts, we’re getting a real artist for the other parts. Oh yeah and it will be way more work to integrate with them than if you were doing the full stack, but we still want it done in the same amount of time so work late or whatever. Thanks!”
If that's an accurate representation of what happened, that sounds like a shitty union that's insufficiently understanding of the reality that efficiencies improve the bottom line in ways that workers can benefit from, too. Maybe, then, one should engage in that dreaded politics and make it better--because on the flip side, "personal agency" for a worker is just as likely to be "RTO and work late and no raises this year".
Only outliers ever win by atomization--and as somebody with a track record of being an outlier and operating successfully in atomized environments, I'd certainly rather not have my entire technical career be a high-wire act because companies can get away with it!
I do not know what RTO is, but her union is certainly shitty - and still doesn't give raises. And your advice of "in addition to taking on the job of training these artists, and doing extra work to integrate with their sub-par assets, you should take on the job of a politician too, then you'd see how great unions are!" doesn't really gel. Some people want to just have a conversation with their boss about what work they want, not take up three new jobs they don't want because "The Guild" gave them a shitty contract.
I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something.
The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.
I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side.
I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful:
1. Take classes part time (doing this)
2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work
3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field
Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better.
For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.
Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.
My current position is like that. We have this app, "donut" which is sort of like blind dating for work, it will pair people up at random and look at their calendars and schedule them with 30 minutes for chitchat.
Sounds cheesy, and it kind of is, but you get to know your coworkers. Last week's donut was with someone from Kenya, currently in Malta for the month. She works during the week and travels during the weekends.
Myself, I haven't really taken advantage of the location flexibility. But I'm just saying the positions are out there. If you're competing on the global scale you probably want to specialize a bit more than you otherwise would. X years of experience might not be enough.
I worked for a startup whose product was a workflow orchestrator. They failed, so I emailed their biggest competitor (who clearly wasn't making the same mistakes), and said: "If you can't beat 'em, join em?" And now I'm working on a different workflow orchestrator. I picked workflow orchestrators because I like working with graph structures, and I think that familiarity with them might be relevant to future topics I want to work on.
I'm not trying to pitch workflow orchestrators to you, I'm just saying it's handy to have a thing that you're into which makes you stand out when applying for positions that are adjacent to that thing.
It's worth thinking about early on because you might be able to slant your work towards more exposure to that thing.
As someone who has become increasingly bitter about and alienated from the American lifestyle because of this issue, this comment made my day. Brutal, biting, hilarious. Thanks for writing it.
If there's data supporting RTO then why do they justify it with vague appeals to "company culture" and "watercooler moments" rather than just explaining the data?
Probably because saying "some employees in WFH are playing videogames all day instead of doing any work" is not a politically correct answer so then corpo-speak about culture and values it is.
They don't even need to say that though, just present some evidence to make me believe this is something other than an arbitrary management cultural preference and I'll feel much less imposed upon and bitter about it.
Anecdotally, when Cyberpunk dropped during covid winter of 2020, all the big gamers on the team had nothing to show for over a couple of weeks in terms of output.
I'm pro WFH, but it was obvious the productivity of some people had dropped significantly after the switch to WFH and were actively avoiding dodging work due to no more in-office oversight and being too close to many fun distractions at home, like their gaming rigs.
You want proof, well obviously the management or company has no proof that those employees were playing cyberpunk all day on their gaming rigs at home, since they don't have CCTV in your living room, but the guys were admitting it themselves during some calls with other colleagues, which correlated with the major drop in their productivity.
Again, I'm pro WFH, but let's not pretend that there are no slackers in this racket who would abuse every bit of trust and privilege to do very little work. I'm sure everyone met some.
The data is in the attrition reports they run - more often than not, it's a soft layoff, while still justifying the rent cost and investments they've put into their office space.
Why would they want that? That seems delusional to me. What they want is all the normal things corporations are criticized for: short term returns, growth, employee productivity, etc.
Why would my organization VP want to "fucking own you and every aspect of your life"? That is extremely strong language, and I'm having a hard time taking it seriously.
In a corporation 80℅ of the work is done by 20% of the people and by design there is a lot of redundancy aroud. The worst thing that can happen is for the drones to figure out just how badly they are getting screwed.
Productivity? If you can figure out how to measure it let me know.
