Unless you’re truly special, The days of multi hundred thousand total comp packages are over - you’d better learn to live as though you’re on a ~175k salary, and if that’s too low, start taking steps on cutting NOW
See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering
Absolutely. Total comp, not to mention hiring in general at publicly traded tech firms has dropped significantly since the “software recession” and mass layoffs.
The current good times for employees are mainly in the economy outside of tech
The change happened gradually throughout the 90's. People born in the late 80's typically had free-roam experience, while those born in the miid-late 90's did not,
What makes it hard is the stigmatization of letting children roam free unsupervised, and the isolating nature of suburbs coupled with both parents being working parents.
Kids can’t go anywhere and are stuck at home. None of their friends are within walking distance. What do you expect them to do?
No, I would say this is a totally different issue actually.
It doesn't matter where kids go these days because every single one of them has an internet connected cell phone at their side.
When they are with their friends, they are still with the internet. Their actions are moulded by it, as well they should be. If anything you do could be captured in video and posted online forever, you're going to change your behavior to reflect that reality.
This mode of thinking is very prevalent on the left but it’s actually the opposite on the right, which is instead anti government. So it really isn’t a universal shift.
All this talk about “community” - what “community”? It simply doesn’t exist anymore even if you wanted it - short of arranging to stay near your extended family and in laws, what else is there in the modern western world?
Churches, I guess is the only other true community left…
Small communities exist everywhere, at least in Europe. Scouts, sports clubs, volunteer fire departments, political activism groups. In all of these groups we build a community around a non-competitive purpose (with the exception of some sports clubs) and in all of them we also help each other with stuff that is not related to the primary purpose of the club.
I think it happens if you have kids. Parents make friends with their kids' friends' parents. "Soccer moms" and other parents whose kids are enrolled in sports make friends with other parents of their kid's teammates. Parents also make friends with their kid's teachers.
And kids still make friends at school, and after school during extracurricular activities like sports and jazz band.
Besides that, I think you're right, unless you make friends with your coworkers. There are also still parts of the US where you make friends with your neighbors. My parents recently moved to different suburbs a few years ago, and they're friends with their neighbors.
Which is fine. I always found it easier to find online communities than IRL ones. Heck, I met my partner online. But these aren't something most folks include.
Music groups such as amateur orchestras, brass bands etc are still a bit of community. Admittedly quite niche, you need to know about them, find a way and have the ability to learn an instrument. There are informal ad-hoc communities e:g at my local leisure centre the regular swimmers chat to each other quite a lot. Kept a lot of people going mentally through lockdown I think. (swimming was allowed subject to restricted numbers and booking ahead)
Churches, dont make me laugh. In fact, church people, or believers in general were those people that convinced me that rural community is something I only want a big distance to. That, and excessive alcohol consumption during the day and evening. It improved when I moved to the next bigish city. But churches are really the antithesis for comfortable communities, to me.
There are affinity groups dedicated to more than just particular novel-gazing interpretations of the divine. We should be striving to make a space for affinity groups to meet & form.
I agree, young people don’t invest in others anymore. It has emotionally become a consumer world. E.g., try getting some volunteers at your local sports club.
Separate of what did or didn’t happen here, I hope more companies crack the secondary market puzzle. The current environment really sucks for startup employee liquidity and might be going on for a lot longer.
> I hope more companies crack the secondary market puzzle.
This feels like the wrong solution. I mean, the reason we need a secondary market is because companies are going public much later than the used to. Why? Because the government made it a lot more onerous to go public. Why? Because companies were abusing the process to enrich insiders.
If we make the secondary market easier, we'll just be right back where we were, and then the government would probably just step in and make it onerous again.
I think the actual solution here is to make going public easier again while addressing the loopholes for abuse so that companies can go public sooner and everyone can get liquidity sooner.
From reading your first paragraph I thought you were heading to an opposite conclusion, but yes, completely agree that we should make it easier to go public
I know there’s equityzen and probably other marketplaces, but I think the main issue is most even late stage startups ban secondary trading
This knowledge might be outdated, I quit that game and opted to join public companies since a couple years ago.
Yes it’s an upfront risk that employees take when joining but man does it not also feel incredibly one sided and smelly, esp the later stage the startup gets
I don't think it is inherent to publicly traded companies, but it certainly seems to be inherent to our publicly traded companies. Most of the shareholders are: gamblers chasing fashion looking for quick profits, management insiders that want to pump the stock and their bonuses before they change jobs in ~5 years, or index funds that buy stock no matter what.
There's very few investors bothering to understand how to value a company and nobody cares about a businesses cost of capital or its return on invested capital.
Investors value lack of volatility. This is a kind of impedance mismatch between investor decisions, how management is evaluated, and the health of enterprises over longer (but not much longer) time periods. Especially in publicly traded companies.
This happens because of how US rules apply to profit, dividends, reporting periods, etc. The rules and incentives could be changed.
