Look at the essentials and you'll see we've actually been going backwards, ever since the 1970s:
Housing:
Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.
Cars:
MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.
Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.
Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?
On the other hand, sport cars, helicopters, private jets, yachts and mansions have become more affordable than ever: when your net worth jumps from 100M to 200M this year alone, the 25M jet that seemed a bit pricey, now looks cheap. In the upcoming decade we're going to tackle private islands and recreational space ships.
Compared to 1970, cars get more miles per gallon, cost less, and last longer.
> Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same.
This is not true, MPG has meaningfully improved. From the EPA, "[sedan/wagon, car SUV, truck SUV, pickup truck, and minivan/van] are at or near record high fuel economy and record low CO2 emissions in model year 2019" [1]
New Vehicle estimated real-world fuel economy increased from ~14MPG in 1975 to 24.9MPG in 2019[1]
>It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s
The price of cars has risen below inflation:
The annual inflation average 1970-2021 is 3.86% [2] From 1970 to 2019, cars had an annual inflation average of 2.04%. [3]
Finally, a car today will last longer than they did in 1970. The typical car in 1970 would last until 100K miles. Today the typical car lasts more like 200K miles. [4]
In summary, cars cost less, last longer, and are cheaper than they were in 1970.
I know there's a lot of media saying this headline but This is actually false. checkout Stephan graham, he's got a post on this on Youtube where he investigates it deeply and finds that an extremely tiny percentage of houses are being bought up by private equity.
it's just supply and demand of labor. when there's a vast oversupply of talented labor, you don't need to cater to the desires of that talent pool. there's a long list of potential candidates that would love to work at a FAANG even if they have to go back to the office.
1 year advice: It's very hard to get a software engineering job but stick with it, get work experience any way you can, even if you have to work pro bono. Get as much programming experience as you can. Don't over reach on your resume qualifications, but do go into great detail. Instead of saying: "Skills: Javascript". Go into details, for example: "Skills: Javascript, Front end dev experience: Tabs, pagination, leaderboards, infinite scrolling, post loading, pre-loading, page load optimization, etc" the more details you can give the better. this gives interviewers an idea of what experience you have.
10 Year: It's much easier to get a job, but it's also much harder to keep your job, especially if you just got hired by a new company. an engineer who spends 4 years at one company will be more qualified to work there than a brand new engineer at that company with 10 years of experience. So, at this level, when you join a new company, you'll have to work extremely hard.
If you want the very highest salaries, you'll need to jump ship. it's hard work but the more often you change jobs, the higher the salary.
personally, i think, once you get past the middle of the bell curve, any additional raises are of diminishing returns. you'll work harder and harder for less and less money.
don't let mean companies with bad cultures take advantage of you. there still exist companies with good work cultures where you don't have to be a full time slave.
Your job performance is determined by the following:
1/3 - your own hard work
1/3 - how well you do politically (play nicely with others)
1/3 - factors beyond your control (just one example: working in a rapidly expanding industry will be greatly in your favor)
Can I ask what country you're in? I'm in the US and my experience suggests the exact opposite of nearly every point in your first paragraph
Programming jobs here are plentiful, you should never work for free, your very first job might be a little harder to get than later ones but it won't be hard. And listing things like "tabs" and "pagination" on your resume feels really desperate, like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel to pad out the list as much as possible. The closest thing I would suggest is to maybe list some specific frameworks like React or Redux (or the equivalent for your area); though even then it's not really for the technical recruiters, it's for the imprecise algorithms that sift through the pile
Well, I started my career in the US durring the dot com bubble bust when absolutely no software engineer could get a job no matter what they did. this no doubt informed my views on the subject.
But, even now, I thought it would be harder to get a job as a junior role than senior. As a hiring lead, 5 years back, i remember, we could have our pick of just about any overqualified intern we wanted. we got one guy who already had 1 to 2 years of work experience, just so he could be hired as an intern and he was awesome.
As for being detailed. mentioning implemtations isn't just about padding out. It's about providing an accurate picture of what your experience is. It's not enough to simply say "i am intermediate JS experience". that doesn't tell the interviewer much. furthermore, most people aren't very accurate at rating themselves. overconfident people think they're experts and experts with no confidence under-rate themselves. by mentioning implementations and specific experiences, it allows the interviewer to more accurately guage your level of expertise.
Fwiw, I graduated in 2014 with a CS degree from a mid-tier college with a mid-tier GPA, and I had multiple competing offers lined up months before I graduated. And the market has only gotten hotter since then. It's probably harder for someone transitioning from some other field/coming out of a bootcamp, though I've known people from bootcamps who had similar experiences to mine. Not all of them, but several of them.
My primary use of Win32 APIs now is to scare people away from making anything that byzantine. If the APIs don't do the trick, I start telling back compat stories. [shudder]
i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans.
The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.
There's been a pretty huge drop in living standards over the last 40 to 50 years. One interview with a person who lived through the 60s said, back then a painter could own a home, support a non working wife and six kids. These days, that same painter would have a hard time supporting himself, let alone a wife and six kids and house.
one of the biggest drivers of wealth reduction is all the regulation that prevents more housing from being built, and how it's built. this leads to higher land costs, higher costs of labor, higher regulatory costs. Not to mention, we've kept adding more and more people to this country but haven't added more land or more material inputs. so of course living standards have to come down as everything gets split up per capita. to be sure, there's a ton of empty land out there, but no one's allowed to use it. and companies have moved jobs to areas where people can't live. meanwhile gov regulates the s** out of the housing dev market and yet let's job creators go nuts in an area that can't grow due to local NIMBYism.
Yeah we should be able to have cheap lead paint and asbestos and get rid of fire codes. Kids these days have too many IQ points.
No regulation is not a viable solution unless we want a return to pea soup smog in LA and other areas, rivers that go on fire, and more lead poisoned children.
Getting the balance of regulations is hard but it would be a lot easier if companies didn’t have to be forced to do it. But it’s unrealistic to think it’s viable for them to behave responsibly due to adverse selection.
But in any serious discussion, one has to fully embrace the fact that regulations are good and necessary. If the debating parties don’t admit that then it’s not sincere. Equally it must be admitted that regulations and a burden and should be the minimal necessary to stop unacceptable abuse.
Houston does not have zoning, and the sky has not fallen there. What we have in the rest of the country is an incentive structure that is firmly on the side of rent-seeking and NIMBYism.
It is literally built into our tax code, with the mortgage interest deduction and California’s subsidy of the boomer Generation with the drastic reduction of real estate taxes.
It is ridiculously easy to solve the housing problem in SF, just tear down the single family homes and replace with high rise apartments at HK-level density. But the entrenched interests don’t want to do that.
Your explanation doesn’t check out. First of all, construction hasn’t necessarily slowed down. Second, jobs were always in cities. That hasn’t changed. Third, new construction trends follow economic trends[0] and that has always been the case, since the dawn of the industrial era. It would be one thing if you were arguing that rising wealth inequality is a result of no new homes being built, but you’d still have to account for all the people who live in homes but don’t own them.
This simply doesn't check out. Land prices even in countries with low barriers to construction are skyrocketing.
The simple fact is that private ownership of land leads to the value of the land capturing the value of its inhabitants. It's an inevitable trend, housing prices will increase until people start moving out in a free market. There is no purely free market solution that doesn't simply delay this.
Gov spends 40% of all GDP. That should be plenty to take care of the elderly. Of the entire federal budget almost half goes to the elderly: medicaid/medicaid ~ 20%, social security almost 20%.
the question we should be asking is. Why doesn't all this money go farther than it does? I'd say, we may not be nearly as wealthy as GDP/capita says we are.
if crypto is a ponzi scheme, then isn't cash also a ponzi scheme? cash can become just as worthless, when no one believes in it anymore, just ask zimbabwae.
personally, if i'm going to be in a ponzi scheme, at the very least I want something with a limited supply.
Also, what other option do we have for store of value? Equities are way overvalued beyond reason. Fixed income/cash are becoming worthless very quickly. real estate is hard, very hard (just ask anyone that's bought in the last year). What else is there? put everything in gold?(the supply there is manipulated).
yes, crypto has some environmental cost. but, there's huge need for store of value. if you've been working your entire life and have 200K stored up. Losing 10K per year to inflation, year after year is not acceptable.
>if crypto is a ponzi scheme, then isn't cash also a ponzi scheme? cash can become just as worthless, when no one believes in it anymore, just ask zimbabwae.
That's not how it works. You need to destroy the local economy first. For example, repossessing land of productive farmers and shutting farms down causes famines. If the local economy wasn't destroyed people would rush and start exporting their local products to markets that actually value them. You would end up with a lot of inflation but not Zimbabwe levels.
I recently read up on Venezuelan capital controls and honestly the only thing that came to my mind is that the politicians there want to destroy the currency as much as possible as if a functioning currency were the spawn of Satan that must be prevented at all costs. I'm personally surprised it takes that much to destroy a currency. You pretty much have to be actively evil to get to Venezuela levels.
Given enough care currencies can recover from pretty much anything as long as the local economy stays alive and relationships with foreign countries are being maintained. The only thing that cannot be recovered is the lost potential and time of all the individuals that make up the country.
How're you getting to 5% loss YoY due to inflation? Estimates on inflation for the USD rarely top 3% for years during the last few decades [0]. Certainly there might be an uptick this year but extrapolating that to "You'll lose 10k a year if you just hold 200k" doesn't really make sense. And certainly you'd hold that money in index funds which have pretty decent returns or even bonds which don't pay out so much these days but have some returns I believe.
For the last 20 years:
- case shiller shows housing has gone up 4% every year on average
- Big mac index also 4% per year for the last 20 years
- Gas (tax was not inflation adjusted, so gas prices appear to be only 2.5%) but the underlying cost is going up faster than that.
- cars, one of the lowest inflation categories according to the CPI (real actual inflation is 2.7% for the last 20 years)-> pick your favorite car and see for yourself. those quality adjustments aren't worth nearly what the cpi boys say they are.
So, we've already got 3-4% inflation for the last 20 years. Now with the official CPI almost 2% higher than last year, it means real inflation is probably 2% higher as well.
3% + 2% = 5%
Treasuries are at about 1 - 2% and unless you hold the actual treasury, you're taking a pretty big risk if you're going into the TLT right now with very little upside gain.
European bonds are negative.
The highest yielding bonds, aka junk bonds are returning 3-5% but those will dip nearly as hard as stocks when things get ugly (look at the last two crashes 2020, 2018), so you might as well hold stocks.
Stocks are at record high valuations according to the warren buffet indicator.
Housing: Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.
Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.
Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.
Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?