Why do people owe me a nice retirement? I never really got the idea of state-funded retirement. Perhaps I should feel I'm owed something if I'm too fragile/disabled to work, but I don't know why age alone should grant me anything?
Appreciate this is a controversial view so interested in hearing why I'm wrong so I can stop holding it. I think retirement should just be replaced by disability welfare to be honest.
Open a history book. Read upon why state pensions were introduced - by people who thought like you actually. (Spoiler: because alternative doesn't end well even for the wealthy.)
Isn't 19th century covered by history classes anymore? :/
Just to throw out one reason - it's valuable to working people because they don't have to take care of their parents in old age. Can't speak to Europe, but Social Security in the US is definitely not enough for a "nice retirement". It may help a frugal person in a low cost of living area cover their basic expenses.
> Social Security in the US is definitely not enough for a "nice retirement".
A two-retiree couple who contributed at the tax limit for long enough would get $122,592 in Social Security benefits in 2025. Not beachfront living in the Hamptons, perhaps, but not cat food eating money either.
At least in Europe, you pay a percentage of your wage into the state’s pension fund. Details vary by country, but it’s not uncommon that you contribute automatically 10% of your gross salary. For your entire working life.
The state then being kind enough to give you something back after 35-40 years of contributions is expected.
The state pension in most countries is simply a collective pension fund that you pay for during your working life (or your employer does on your behalf). The state owes you retirement because you paid for it. It's not a handout that others are paying for you; you actually paid for it your entire working life.
So, Denmark raising the retirement age is kind of a big deal. I imagine the Danish might be less than thrilled about that.
The state isn't paying for it, you're paying for it, through your taxes. (Technically you're paying for the next generation's retirement, but it's the same principle.)
I'm not agreeing with the parent comment, but I've long held the opinion that one of the the reasons the US is so much more economically successful than Europe is because businesses have so much more influence over government.
This is viewed negatively in general (perhaps rightly), but I think it does provide some balance between the incentives of wealth creation and workers. For example, here in the UK we'll happily regulate entire sectors of the economy out of business every year, but in the US attempts to do this would be met with huge multi-million dollar lobbying campaigns.
ChatGPT is good for asking questions about languages, SDKs, and APIs, or generating boilerplate, but it's useless if you want to give an AI a ticket and for it to raise PRs for you.
This is where you need agentic solutions like Codex which will be far more useful because they will actually have access to your codebase and a dev environment where they can test and debug changes.
They still do really dumb things, but a lot of this can be avoided if you prompt well and give it the right types of problems to solve.
In my experience at the moment there's a sweet spot with these agentic coding platforms which makes them useful for semi-complicated tasks – assuming you prompt well they can generate 90% of the code you need, then you just need to spend the extra 10% fixing it up before it's ready for prod.
Tasks too simple (a few lines) it's a waste of time. You spend longer prompting and going back and forth with the agent than it would take to just make the change yourself.
Then obviously very complicated tasks, especially tasks that require some thought around architecture and performance, coding agents really struggle with. Less because they can't do it, but because for certain problems simply meeting ACs is far less important than how the ACs are being met. Ideally here you want to get the architecture right first, then once that's in place you can break down the remaining work for the AI to pick up.
> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?
They'll probably just need to learn for longer and if companies ever get so desperate for senior engineers then just take the most able/experienced junior/mid level dev.
But I'd argue before they do that if companies can't find skilled labour domestically they should consider bringing skilled workers from abroad. There are literally hundreds of millions of Indians who got connected to the internet over the last decade. There's no reason a company should struggle to find senior engineers.
So basically all education facilities should go abroad too if no one needs Western fresh grads. Will provide a lot of shareholder value, but there are some externalities too.
I am just a biological neural net, not so different from the "machines" anymore, really. They can even create works of art, where I would struggle. They can even emulate human emotions to make people feel more comfortable, which is something I do often as someone with autism.
The only meaningful difference between me and the machines is that I have a subjective superiority complex. What an awful place the universe would be without me!
I don't want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.
It was genuinely such an exciting time back then. People were still optimistic about the web and new platform like mobile. There was so much to build, yet relativity few people working in tech. And those of us who were weird enough to work in tech loved it. It felt like almost every week there was some new startup asking around for tech talent and they'd take almost anyone they could get. And when you joined you built cool things that had never been built before.
Today tech feel so stale. People who work in tech are not techies, but just see it as a career. There's so few novel things to build that SWE has basically become a profession of plumbing already built libraries and SaaS tools together. Even startups feel so much more mature from the get go. Back then startups were often bootstrapped projects by a dude in his bedroom. Today before a single line of code is written startups already have CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and several million dollars of investment.
Perhaps this guy should have kept up with trends, but 20 years ago the dude would have had a job at a company where he was respected greatly for being the dude who could throw together an e-commerce store in a few days or something. He probably would have been building genuinely new stuff with a team of other people who loved tech.
Appreciate this is a controversial view so interested in hearing why I'm wrong so I can stop holding it. I think retirement should just be replaced by disability welfare to be honest.
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