Yikes. Good points. And a good time to admit that the person described is an amalgam of what I heard from (at least) two artist friends, in somewhat different industries, about things that happened in the early days of the pandemic. No actual creatives were harmed in the making of this post :)
In the future, I'll try to avoid exaggerating, and additionally, think more adversarially.
All the same: it's very, very hard to be a creative right now, if your creativity is anything other than coding. My fellow coders need to realize that the circumstances that have led to our overpay are indeed temporary, because of the way job titles function as positional goods, and become themselves fought over.
The other field I've seen this occur in are postgrad humanities, where the adjunctification of academe has been accomplished by inflating the status of the work. (And I speak as someone who dropped out of a PhD in the humanities.)
If you're expected to be honored just to be in the room, you can expect to earn only an honorarium.
And that's the future I see for our industry as well, eventually.
There must be some sort of general principle of growth and decay involved.
I have the following argument, applying market principles to discourse.
There are four categories of claims:
1. Easy to hear and false
2. Easy to hear and true
2. Hard to hear and false
3. Hard to hear and true
The first category is the domain of spin doctors and marketers. Let's ignore it for now.
The second category encompasses a lot of facts, but generally these won't show up in discourse. Because they're easy to hear, they are already known to both parties and agreed-upon. Let's call these "common knowledge" or even (more tendentiously) common-sense.
The third category show up in discourse as "things you want to make your opponent believe about themselves or their worldview." These are your psyops, basically.
Finally, the fourth category is pretty much every true thing that you need to actually point out. They need pointing-out because of a natural (and relatable!) human tendency to avoid discomfort. If they weren't hard to hear, you would have let yourself hear them already. Thus, most of discourse takes place here.
If the foregoing breakdown is correct, it also suggests that the *hardest-to-hear truths* are going to be the ones which are most significant, because of all the truth claims, they are the ones which have not yet been universally admitted.
HN's current posture toward discourse seems to encourage making hard-to-hear truths even harder, by literally fading them. And moreover, the guidelines prohibiting the discussion of our collective moderation decisions in-thread is itself a way of figuratively moving *even the awareness of the problem itself* from `color: #000` to `color: rgb(130,130,130)`.
This is why I now try to read the greytext first. For every one comment faded because it was offtopic or whatever, there are three which were faded for telling us emperors about our new clothes.
She has made some of the most exquisite thought products I've ever experienced (a strange way to talk about music, but I'm trying to cleave to the OP.) She works 90 hours a week, has been well-regarded in her industry for 10+ years.
I've seen her drop everything, on any night of the week, to hit the deadline for wrap, dozens of times in the last year alone.
She has $400CAD to her name, has no car, and rents. If she weren't in a housing co-op, she'd need to move out of the city -- and as it already stands, she lives in the roughest neighbourhood in town.
The moral of this story is that enjoyable, well-regarded work where you feel a deep connection to the end-product almost inevitably becomes part of its own compensation package.
There will be people who will code for free, for 'exposure', and there will be a lot of them, not too long from now at all, because coding is a delight, and is becoming more delightful every day (cf CoPilot).
I think a lot about how the romanticization of coding as a profession parallels the romanticization of the music industry in the 80s and 90s. People work cheap for hallowed dreams. Pride goeth before the fall.
I take great pride in achieving a -2 point rating on a post because it means that I've spoken truth to the powers that read HN.
I take even greater pride in talking about commenting of comments, _contra_ the guidelines, because a rule that you cannot discuss collective moderation decisions is like forbidding your subordinates from telling you that you have spinach in your teeth.
No one needs to -- the Free Speech Debate is not really about the government, is it? Elon didn't buy Twitter to protect it from the fed. He bought it to protect it from what he calls a "woke mind-virus" -- aka, progressive politics.
This article is trending because -- and I'm generalizing here -- HN skews center-right (what I like to call 'business-right'.) As a result, it has fallen prey to the false narrative of corrupt left-wing mainstream media unfairly maligning good honest billionaires.
It's wild that HN, forum that seems disproportionately in favor of unregulated speech should feel uncomfortable when a newspaper chooses a critical editorial stance.
You agree that, by your own lights, editorial stances of newspapers are none of your business, yes? Free speech, yes?
Everyone says 'both sides' but that's not actually the case, is it? Shoe, meet other foot.
You do understand that critical thinking is literally the point of journalism, right?
In 2022, I'd certainly give the same directive. Our industry can and should be held to account, just like any other seat of power. (Because that's what we are now, whether we like it or not.)
This sounds like pretty much every network admin gig I've ever had, but I'm old.
My first job in 2001 involved running around trying to back up everyone's Outlook files and yeah, you see a lot of email.
The tone of this comment suggests a young'un who has never been face to face with a /var/spool/mail that is mounted over NFS because your supervisor worked at BAE in 1992 and it was SOP there for reasons that were never, ever, ever relevant in your shop of 14, but NFS didn't come up this morning so you're trying to figure out where the hell everyone's email went
And yes this is vaguebooking about my supervisor from 2001 (you know who you are)
I bailed on a MAAMA job in the states to move back to Canada.
Salary expectations (and currency!) are generally lower here, but the job market itself is hotter than I've ever seen it here.
My theory is that USA tech companies are friendshoring like mad.
In other words, Canada is picking up the recoil from the trade war with China. Biz that used to go to China (or even India) is now going to Toronto.
And every time a US company looks at their bottom line, they will recall that, if they hire three hours north of Seattle, they'll get something like a 40%-50% discount on total comp, PhDs out the wazoo, and a convenient, well-funded federal immigration system.
It's a no-brainer. What kind of fool would start a business in a politically unstable disaster-country where some populist executive order could cut you off from your supply of H1Bs next year?
Your job is moving to Canada (or possibly Europe,) and if you're smart, you'll move with it.
The article is as-yet unwritten -- the premiss will be that in general, the privilege of being permitted to worry about any given thing is, in an organization, the most critical plank of status. The opposite of a window seat.
Pay, equity, everything else -- not as important.
It has little to do with my former employer specifically. It's anthropology.
The market and I agree that you are misreading things, but we can agree to disagree.
By my lights, winners don't have to take all in order to have won -- approximately half the market is sufficient. Enough to dictate terms for most users most of the time. That's Apple in 2022, and the market is reflecting that fact. In fact, I daresay that if Apple hasn't won, it is, at the very least, mate-in-three, or thereabouts.
A more interesting question is, what psychological comfort is there in minimizing one's perception of their hegemony?
I'm thinking in terms of avoidance of discomfort. Ideologically, I've been a FOSSian my whole life -- I'm in my forties, and I was a teenager when I first installed Red Hat.
But I'm increasingly aware that, despite having won the battle with the NT kernel, we somehow lost the war. Specifically, we were co-opted by Apple, Amazon, and, yes, now Microsoft too.
It puts food on my table but it leaves me feeling a little empty. I don't know about you. <3 Maybe it's the same?
It's hard to admit you're a bird in a cage. It's even harder to admit that the next generation will be.
In the future, I'll try to avoid exaggerating, and additionally, think more adversarially.
All the same: it's very, very hard to be a creative right now, if your creativity is anything other than coding. My fellow coders need to realize that the circumstances that have led to our overpay are indeed temporary, because of the way job titles function as positional goods, and become themselves fought over.
The other field I've seen this occur in are postgrad humanities, where the adjunctification of academe has been accomplished by inflating the status of the work. (And I speak as someone who dropped out of a PhD in the humanities.)
If you're expected to be honored just to be in the room, you can expect to earn only an honorarium.
And that's the future I see for our industry as well, eventually.
There must be some sort of general principle of growth and decay involved.