First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.
Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.
I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.
If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.
Vincent - nice work on this, there's clearly a good kernel of insight here, and I can tell you've been at this a couple years.
I completed a (rather large) contract to reverse-engineer, and eventually rebuild, a hotel chain's property management system from scratch from 2015-2018. We did it all: keycard integration, booking channel sync, credit cards, group bookings, yield management, front-desk GUI, supply management, taking rooms into/out of service, reservation migration from old system to new...you name it, we probably touched it. Dozens of small lessons about the lodging (and broader hospitality i.e. restaurants, country clubs, bars) business domain.
One thing is that hotel = brand (flag) + real estate + operations. You can remix those things in a lot of different ways, e.g. a single ownership group might have two properties on opposite sides of a street, one Hyatt the other Hilton, and they might look different but share staff, or procurement.
The industry's term for brand -- "flag" -- says a lot about how they view Hilton/Hyatt. They come and go, even if the staff running the property stays the same. The main reason hotels choose to flag vs. stay independent, is access to the chain's booking flow.
One of the more interesting consequences of this setup, is that small, independent hotels, are kind of a shit show in terms of technology. Chains generally require a lot of standardization of their member properties, including what software they run to manage the property. Many properties that don't affiliate with a chain don't have any property management system at all. It's basically 10-20 rooms run directly off the moral equivalent of an Excel sheet at the front desk. And why wouldn't it be--small boutique hotels often gross $1-2 million/year; there isn't budget for expensive enterprise software, or maybe more critically, the people who know how to deploy and operate it.
A significant value-add of Expedia and booking.com, especially with independent properties, is getting the supply (hotel) side of the market organized. Many of these hotels outsource their entire reservation tracking system to a single channel (e.g. booking.com) because trying to keep track of bookings across phone, direct web, Expedia, booking.com, and others, is just too hard without specialist software that requires more IT muscle to deploy than a single non-chain hotel can muster.
I mention this because I go to church every Sunday and was thinking about how much real estate churches have (event halls) that sit unused, and what a schlep it would be -- although good for everyone -- to expose the collective supply of the world's churches, HOAs, park districts, and other nonprofits, to the kind of events you're trying to do. It would indeed be a tremendous pain in the ass to get all the physical access (keys), contract terms, payment systems, availability, etc ironed out, but it's a massively underused class of real estate and many of these organizations could really use the cash.
Hard agree with both points--this feels way closer to reality than most of what I've read.
On recession: cost of living is becoming crisis-level. I read recently that 67% of Americans are paycheck-to-paycheck. 150k/yr is 12k/month. If groceries go from 500 to 1000/month, a 150k wage-earner save less for retirement. For someone making 30-40k (basically minimum wage), it's a huge hit. Then consider it's the same story for cars, housing, medical care...it goes on and on. It doesn't look "recessionary" because GDP keeps going up. But we're getting so much less for it with every passing year.
I also agree that we need to consider what brownfield dev looks like. It's where the vast majority of my time has gone over 15+ years in software and I'm not convinced all the coordination / sequencing / thinking will be assisted with LLMs. Particularly because they aren't trained on large proprietary codebases.
What we might both be missing, is that for most people, writing the actual code is hard. LLMs help with that a lot. That's what a lot of junior/entry-level work, actually is (not as much planning/thinking as seniors do).
I tried to automate a big chunk of property management (mostly commercial) over the past few years. The main thing I realized is that it's mostly a people business, and AI (or computers generally) are never going to stand over a vendor's shoulder and keep them honest (e.g. make sure they sweep up or don't scuff the walls), or have a difficult conversation about late rent with a tenant, or show up after hours when a pipe breaks, if only to show face with a tenant.
There are definitely workflow and process elements that can be automated. But if wealth management is any indication, there are a lot of people willing to pay a premium for having a person involved. Not sure why real estate would be different.
The wildcard in all this is the NAR court decision. If buyers have to pay for their own representation, that might make them shop around a little more.
I think these aren't more popular because actually, there are things that genuinely suck about small business ownership. Offhand: stress, uncertainty/having to make payroll, having a significant % of your net worth tied up in a single, undiversified investment that's near-impossible to sell.
Given the choice, I think a normal cash-paying salary job (maybe with bonus) is vastly preferable to most people.
A perspective I've found helpful is to think about a fund as a business, which it is.
Let's assume a hypothetical case of running a $100 million tech investment fund. The first 10-11% of return should go straight to investors (not the manager), for the simple reason that 7-8% is available in the stock market, and unlike the public markets, tech funds are illiquid--unlike investing in SPY, you can't wake up one day and trade out of your interest in a fund like this. You're locked in. That shifts the return expectation upward.
So assuming the manager's cost of equity (what investors demand) is around 10-11%, maybe a great manager can get the return number to 15-16%. That's a pretty good return on the fund but it's only $5 million in absolute gross returns (10->15% on $100 million). Considering the manager might get only 10-20% of this (the rest goes to investors), it's just a lot of work to earn $1 million in performance-based comp, over 2-3 years of active work and perhaps a decade of full fund life. These things are also typically run by teams (several partners) so the returns are split.
The point is that $100 million funds just aren't making their managers rich. The two outcomes of this, which you see over and over, are (1) for managers to try to manage much bigger funds ($500+ million) or (2) big management fees of 2%/year or more, which significantly erode returns.
The net result being, VC is a very hard business that almost always delivers substandard returns to its investors, after long lock-ins with very little liquidity. It's very tough and I'm not surprised to see these guys shutting down.
Maybe there was a time when this wasn't true. I spent a lot of the 2010s working in San Francisco tech jobs. It was quite enjoyable and I just got back from a guy's wedding who I worked with closely 2012-2015. Three different startups, one mine, other two as an employee. All three crashed and burned.
I think there are three possibilities.
One is that tech is somehow different/exceptional and bound to stay that way forever. I doubt it.
The second is that we were always lying to ourselves, it was always just "a job", but we were all young, stupid, and naive. This feels too cynical.
The third, which I feel is most accurate these days, is that tech was different, but now is a more mature industry, and is, as you put it "just some shit corporate world". Maybe there was a time when it was genuinely true that people got "unlimited vacation", that "titles don't matter" and that the CEO ate with the hoi polloi. But I think those days have passed. Everything's different now. The people coming into this industry today are 4.0 GPA high school kids, not misfits tinkering with computers in their basement. Competitive parents no longer feel they have to justify why their kid is going into tech rather than law, finance, or medicine. Salaries have increased 3-5x (!!). Tech influences elections, mints billionaires, and controls many facets of American life.
The problem is that the attitudes haven't kept up. These days, Google, facebook, etc are just standard American megacorps. They are some of the most valuable companies in the world with huge lobbying budgets, and tremendous pressure to deliver shareholder value.
The simple fact is that margins always get compressed as industries mature. Google has been under greater and greater margin pressure over the last decade as Apple demands higher payments to be their default search engine, OpenAI starts to steal share, and more people head directly to Amazon for search results. Google of course is going to blame the pandemic for this, but the actual issue is long-term erosion of margin. It's hard to see how any of this is going to reverse course over time.
I think this portends a larger culture shift in Silicon Valley tech that, in my opinion, cannot come quickly enough.
Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you".
Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.
It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.
Bit of unsolicited advice. It's very possible you've had a great career as a programmer. But for better or worse, high schools are academic environments where you can't write "elligable" and expect to be taken seriously.
If you aren't willing to correct this, this may not be the path for you.
Keep in mind this has to include downside protection to cover the very real risk of someone initiating a suit in case they screw up (which I'm sure happens from time to time).
I think overall, what a lot of this entire discussion misses is that 90, maybe 99% of transactions are pretty straightforward, but the 1% where things go haywire, might cost 10, even 100x as much in wasted time, money, etc. Real estate brokerage is a regulated professional service which means by law, there's a minimum standard of care owed to anyone who uses these peoples' services. This costs money to provide which ultimately means a lot of the costs of the problem cases end up socialized/spread out, over everyone.
This feels quite unfair if you've got your act together and everything goes smoothly, but it seems hard to know upfront which ones will be the hard cases, or not.
Not really. 20-30% effective on income including CA's 9.4% at ~40k, plus 10-20k in property taxes, 10%+ in sales taxes, excise taxes on everything from gasoline to alcohol, and various "fees" that are really taxes including auto registration, building permit fees, DMV charges, ride share fees, motor oil and battery disposal charges. Also, some cities (e.g. NYC) have a personal income tax.
Obviously you're right that marginal != effective, but Americans really do pay a LOT in taxes, when you add it up, for a relatively middling level of services (e.g. no public healthcare, no subsidized daycares, marginal-quality public schools)
The problem with licensure is that there are many markets where the number of licensed professionals is zero. My wife reminds me of this--she grew up in rural Idaho, where many things I take for granted (e.g. electricians, medical care) growing up in the Chicago suburbs, weren't available.
Let's consider the choices of a homeowner in this market, who needs electrical work done: (a) pay a licensed professional to travel into their market (expensive), (b) have someone unlicensed do the work (or DIY it), or (c) just don't do it.
This is why I think certification (not mandatory licensing) is the way to go. It's not clear that criminalizing economic activity when it's someone's only real choice--and there may be major health/safety hazards if the work isn't done--is beneficial.
This is it. There's real skill in creating simple solutions to complex problems. Knowing the general landscape of what's out there, and easily available off the shelf, really does help.
Developers grow. It starts with simple code that doesn't work. The next step is, complicated code that solves the problem, in messy unmaintainable ways. The next step is writing super clean, almost boring code, that's highly readable and "dumb" and does exactly what it's supposed to do.
The other thing to realize, a lot of great code doesn't just spring from the developer's hands in its final form -- it's extensively edited and rewritten into its final, good, form.
First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.
Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.
I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.
If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.