I'm fortunate enough to be in one of the top percentiles of household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.
Like Atwood, I did not come from a well-off family; parents divorced in my early teens and father passed away in my late teens from cancer (smoking and alcoholism) and in many ways lucked into a very good career after attending a state university. My spouse's father -- a janitor in a public school -- and mother -- a crossing guard -- passed when she was in her 20's as well. There weren't any large fortunes passed down.
Some friends recently purchased a house in my township and I visited to drop off my kid for a play date. I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house" ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for a fraction of the price. It boggles the mind to consider when/how my kids will be able to have their slice of the American Dream.
There are clearly some fundamental things that have to be fixed in the US at a policy level, but there's seemingly no political will to fix them; everyone seems out for themselves and to enrich their own coffers. This is handicapping social mobility through the hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??). This is the sentiment that I feel Atwood is also feeling.
As a high earning software engineer (IC), I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to hire me either because of AI or because of age (early 40's now so I figure maybe 10 years of high earning as an IC?).
> but there's seemingly no political will to fix them;
I don't know if that's the solution. In fact, "political will" is what we don't want nor need in a liberal democracy. Authoritarians appeal to their supporter by promising a strong will and projecting an image of a strong man who has the will to cow everyone and get things done. That's just not how it works in a democracy.
What I believe we need is compromise and a willingness for individuals or the various factions to sacrifice, take risks, and/or get less than what we had hope for. In return we can all be collectively better off in the long run. It feels like we've all been so thoroughly segmented and divided that we've stopped caring for other people who might be different or have opposing opinions.
Look to the stagnancy of the UK to see where the US could be in a few more decades. They have the same high prices for housing, but far far lower wages. When the powerful political class (homeowners) has all their wealth tied up in their homes, they see little wrong with such broken basic arrangements, because it doesn't hurt them and they see their number going up for wealth. Canada and Australia have similarly destructive housing policies and outcomes.
And since the self-immolation of Brexit, they have far worsened their financial future. Similar politics of self-destruction masked as the appearance of strength are gaining a loooot of ground in the US as well.
Are you accounting for things like free healthcare when comparing wages? (I wish I did't have to say this, but it's a genuine question, not snark). I always wonder when people compare other countries to the US.
Edit: I agree that Brexit was the most incredible piece of self-harm that I've seen a country do to itself. I certainly don't have rose-tinted spectacles about the state of the UK.
I think most Americans over-index on the cost of healthcare and the availability of insurance because it’s constant in our news and our system absolutely sucks. Most people don’t need regular medical care because most people are healthy (until they start getting older). It’s expensive, sure, but most people in the middle-class have employer sponsored healthcare, and retirees have government sponsored healthcare, and many low-income people have government sponsored healthcare. The difference in out-of-pocket costs is easily accounted for within significantly higher salaries.
Of course, the issue is not the actual availability of insurance, it is that there is a patchwork of laws and protections and it’s not universal to be covered at any point in your life. But many states have well above a 90% insurance rate. California, the most populous state, has 93%. Massachusetts is sitting at 98%. Even Texas, the worst state for health insurance, is at 85% of the population covered.
There are a bunch of numbers that are trivially accessible via Google, including government sources, but I couldn’t find any that match perfectly with the time range of the wage data.
Here is one quote, from a few years earlier…
> Median annual out-of-pocket spending on medical care ranged from $360 (Hawaii) to $1,500 (Nebraska). In four states, households in the top 10 percent of out-of-pocket expenses spent $7,000 or more on these items.
Roughly speaking, when I've looked into this comparison, for near-median earners, they're better off in the UK, because of things like healthcare. But when you look at the higher-earning roles, especially engineering or software, then the different in pay more than makes up for the increased cost of living (i.e. a higher percentage of your pay may go towards cost of living, but the smaller percentage of money left over is still larger in absolute terms). There's other tradeoffs in terms of work culture and so on, though (e.g. you get much more holiday in the UK).
In the US, the average out-of-pocket healthcare spending was $1,424.6 per capita in 2022
Most people have insurance. They might have some high out of pocket maximum like $10k. So worse case scenario you're out an additional $10k.
But you pay a lot less in taxes
In US, a single filer, the 12% bracket covers income from $11,926 to $48,475. In UK it's 20%
So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes, not to mention VAT and others (although I am ignoring other US taxes like state, local and payroll). More than covers your out of pocket healthcare costs.
And pretty much any job in the US is significantly higher paying, for instance a typical accountant in US makes 80k while in the uk that 37k pounds. Pretty much every office job is like this. And note the US 80k figures includes benefits like ... you guessed it, healthcare!
Even if make the generous assumptions that taxes are the same, UK has same healthcare quality and everyone is hitting out of pocket max every year, it's still not close. The whole "but we don't have to pay for healthcare" strikes me as just a cope.
I think if the health insurance situation was as rosy in the U.S as you make out there would not have been as much support for the killer of the United Healthcare CEO. The figure for the average out of pocket expenses hides a lot of pain.
75% of Americans with employer-provided health coverage are satisfied with their current plans
For Americans overall, 71% rate the quality of healthcare they personally receive as excellent or good. Similarly, 72% give excellent or good marks to the quality of care they receive personally.
Regarding health insurance coverage, 65% of Americans rate their own coverage as excellent or good. Another poll found 63% rated their own health care coverage as excellent or good.
Perhaps. But if I weren’t online I wouldn’t know how widespread the support of Luigi is.
Only 75% of people on employer healthcare plans are satisfied? A great many people aren’t on employer plans.
From the third link you provided:
For the first time in Gallup’s two-decade trend, less than half of Americans are complimentary about the quality of U.S. healthcare, with 48% rating it “excellent” or “good.” The slight majority now rate healthcare quality as subpar, including 31% saying it is “only fair” and 21% -- a new high -- calling it “poor.”
People have lots of anger about healthcare for many many reasons. I can't tell you how many people I've met who are angry about "Obamacare" but don't realize how it helped them compared to the prior situation. There's also lots of anger at the prices for healthcare that we sometimes see, and that anger gets directed at insurance too, even if it's a hospital or other provider setting the prices. And then there's the anxiety of "will this be covered."
Even without out of pocket costs there's lots of reasons to be angry at insurers.
A health plan like that costs your company 25K/yr on the backend. They pay that as part of your compensation, you just don’t see it.
Even the most basic HDHP Bronze Kaiser plan currently costs over 1K/mo, and that increases about 10% per year.
If you’ve ever had a coworker (or yourself) decline COBRA coverage because it was “so expensive”, you need to understand that the price under COBRA was the price the whole time, you just didn’t see it.
This is a pitch-perfect example of the Brexit-like self-destructive politics that come with the "win" of appearing strong.
Here is a person who has the typical experience, who could easily be convinced by their positive experience to say "everybody should have this." But instead of going that route you impute negative motivations and put very ugly distasteful words into their mouth. Which, even if they are highly supportive of your position, will likely turn them against you. Instead of using this opportunity to advocate for a really good thing, you use it as an opportunity to hit somebody you view as the enemy with a rhetorical hammer. End result: no more people in favor of better means of distributing health care, and perhaps a net negative.
Especially in the context of how to account for free-at-point-of-care healthcare, which started this. If the employer is paying the prices that are revealed to employees only via COBRA, should that be accounted for in part of the wages or not? The US chooses to put about twice the fraction of GDP into healthcare that the UK does, and that per-capita GDP is also higher, how do we account for that in terms of wages and individuals? The $1T that employers pay for healthcare should be accounted for how, exactly? It's a tough question, and most likely in any comparison of nations there's a couple different ways to see how it impacts the average person. And when the "average" person in the US has such varying experiences, that has to enter into any comparison too.
In California there is great healthcare coverage for those with extremely low to no income, due to subsidy. Those with healthy salaries and savings can weather the times of unemployment and pay the COBRA prices. Those who struggle the most are the ones in between, and improving that involves getting those on the high and low end to advocate for the in-between incomes. It does not involve making enemies of them.
It's Kaiser in northern California. This is an extremely common healthcare option. Yeah, we're rich. That's the whole point: even out of pocket prices for that plan are dwarfed by the gap in salary to the UK professionals.
According to article linked to below there are 48 million uninsured Americans. Fifteen percent of the UK population isn’t without coverage. The subsidies don’t work well.
That's not how it works for millions upon millions of Americans that are not fortunate enough to work at a job that provides tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare insurance as a benefit.
This line of thinking is exactly why the "American Dream" is falling apart; we increasingly place a handicap on some Americans and then wonder why some slice of America is not advancing generationally.
Americans who have jobs with health benefits that include Kaiser in CA is a whole lot of them in CA! It's a massive hospital system that covers 9 million people, a full quarter of the state.
Yeah both the UK and US are notorious for NIMBYism. People filing lawsuits as like a hobby, because they want to stop all development. In these countries it's far to easy for a small group of complainers to grind the entire system to a halt and burn endless amounts of time and money. It seems particularly bad in the anglosphere.
It's particularly bad in the anglosphere because we have common law legal systems that are built around resolving personal disputes in court.
This has upsides -- it was a good solution to the problem in the 1200s of people solving disputes by fighting it out -- but in a modern context the downsides are pretty high thanks to rent-seeking lawyers.
I think the root of many problems is housing costs
I'm somewhere around your age, and I also wonder what the future of software development work looks like. I don't know that I'd direct my kids towards the field; maybe this is just a temporary bumpy patch and it'll improve, but it is hard to say.
One thing I think is that being 40-50 or so means that there is plenty of runway for a second career. Could retrain for something, nursing, cpa, lawyer, trades? Just have to have the savings for making that transition
My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening and closing constantly.
But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?
There are several root causes we can potentially drill further down to, but making headway will likely require hard work and involvement in our communities. You could always try running for something and becoming a politician.
Yes, I think we need to reform zoning and build like crazy. With everything costing a million dollars on the west coast, I don't see why there isn't a crane every block putting up a new building
Housing is a massive bomb because for so many people is is the singular investment that their net worth and retirement is held in. This idea has been so deeply entrenched for so long that a reversal will wipe out millions of people's net worth.
At some point the bomb will go off, but there's no incentive to look at the long term of 10+ years out when the explosion will destroy people's political careers in the short term.
Technically multiple bombs explode here and there. Here's how:
* Family bought 1 house (assets), big mortgage (cause it's expensive), live until retirement
* Parents sell the house (lost the assets) to either a wealthier family or investors to downgrade
* Parents potentially share the proceeding to the kids to support their Housing endeavor but Kids will be forced to buy something smaller (usually Condos) because detached is expensive and kids wage just starting from the bottom of the paygrade.
You just touched on another one of my big concerns – Condos.
I love condos, but the older generations have no idea what modern condo living is really like and what maintenance is required for these kinds of places. They get talked about like 'starter' homes for young people that can't afford a single family house and so often they nudge younger people to buy them and 'get on the ladder'.
Often they are TERRIBLE investments though. Property tax is relatively high in most cities, ongoing fees are huge, governance is normally terrible, and every now and then something major goes wrong and the current owners are left with huge extra bills.
'Getting on the ladder' in this way, along with student debt really cripples so many people into a life of debt payments while building very little wealth.
I know so many people 20 years ago who "I'll sell my CA house and retire elsewhere" was a majority of their plan.
As of now, I can only count a very few who actually did it, turns out it's hard to leave where you've lived your entire working life to move somewhere you've never been, and the price differential isn't as amazing as it once was (since Covid flattened that out somewhat).
The ones who did end up doing it ended up following their children (who were priced out of where they grew up).
Normally you'd expect measured, predictable, steady inflation to be the method to "defuse the bomb" but so far that hasn't been really tried (if houses keep going up 1-2% a year, but inflation is 5%, you have a 3% drop in value each year even though on paper, you have an increase).
20 years ago is when the bomb probably could have been diffused, but I think the recovery out of the GFC put it on the back burner and then it was too late.
Housing should have been getting built like crazy in places like CA so that those people thinking of selling had a reason to sell. By not building houses property values keep booming, and even if you plan to sell and move somewhere it's easy to endlessly delay that decision when you're getting rich as hell.
The current global realpolitiks shows that unless you have a very heavy industry that you can invest in, to replace the cratering housing prices, no country is willing to blow it up on purpose. China is trying to strategically do it, but they still have so many more people that they can lift up, move around and put to work into different industries. It's just not really the case for developed countries. I'm assuming India will take the same course in the near future, but their challenges are a bit different.
Also, when supermajority+ have the same problem, it's in the interest of the government to do anything possible to delay the problem for the future generations. That's why I have reservations about US, Canada, UK, Australia and others doing the same thing. It also doesn't help when your entire population growth is depended on immigration, as you can, theoretically, keep the demand higher without many complaints, while limiting the supply.
There's also the Japan problem, but it's weird. In Tokyo we're seeing rental prices actually going up, as it's the only region where the population is growing for all the wrong reasons.
> top percentiles of household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going to make it
It might not be too late to change this. I also lucked into being in the right place at the right time (interested in computers and programming when graduating in the 2000s). But from the start my goal has been to take advantage of this extraordinary luck and become independently wealthy. My wife (who's not in tech but has a solid $80k - $100k job) and I have lived very cheaply saving more than half of our takehome pay for more than a decade now, investing it in simple index funds.
I, too, don't know what the future will hold for my kids or my career, but I'm relatively confident I've got 10 more high-earning years in me. And my spreadsheet tells me that will be enough to generate generational wealth such that my kids won't have to work if they don't want to.
This obviously isn't a solution for everyone, and I realize much of your post is about US policy. But I just wanted to point out the potential blindspot that you may have from your upbringing where "independently wealthy" people are those people over there, and not me. But with a high income and the magic of compound growth, it's not so unattainable.
Regarding housing the problems are the same everywhere where the same "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea. We can all get wealthy by buying houses from each other with ever increasing prices. In reality the only winners in this game are a) banks b) early buyers who can cash out, liquidate and move somewhere cheaper.
In my country of origin housing is now so expensive that it takes 2 median income lifetimes to pay for it. Of course you can find cheaper housing in rural countryside or in some deadbeat towns but then there's basically no work either, so at minimum you need a car to commute. For someone making a below median income operating a vehicle is easily -300€ / mo cost.
And the funny thing the country is 93% forest. Unzoned land is plentiful and costs nothing but after zoning the price goes up to 20k € per each m². The townships and counties have a monopoly on zoning and use that to milk the constituents for money. Of course that money is all away from other spending so local communities and small time businesses (such as restaurants, hair dressers etc) are all taking a hit since (with the recent greedflation) people simply have no more purchasing power left over.
In my current country Germany, here in Bayern the situation is exactly the same. In Munich a small unit in is at minimum 1-1.5m € and it'll be bare bones. The cost is insane. At the same time there's a shortage of all kinds of laborers. How does a "bus driver" afford to live here. Well, they don't.
The whole economic system is biased against younger generations and while the older generations live longer they accumulate all the wealth. They are a large representative of the population (due to the upside down age pyramid) and active voters so they of course vote for politicians who will not topple this order.
In the past all empires have fallen when the middle class has fallen. When there's a critical mass of people with nothing to lose and who feel like the system has failed them the heads will roll and revolutions will begin.
> "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea.
Lending money for housing is not insane. Houses are durable goods where most of the cost needs to be paid up front. The builder of the house is paying for a structure that will house people for 50+ years. This duration mismatch is exactly what lending is supposed to help with.
Lending is not the problem. People were complaining it was when interest rates were at 0%. Now they are at 7%, but housing prices are still high.
It's the lack of supply that is the reason why having a mortgage market is a bad idea.
You HAVE to live somewhere. This means any cash you can get your hands on, such as a mortgage, it's going to be used to compete with all the other people who need to live somewhere.
The problem can be solved in two ways. Either you make it really hard to get a mortgage, or you make enough houses that people are not competing over musical chairs.
Houses are not durable goods. Their value should go down as they get older (this is in fact how housing is valued in Japan for example).
And yes lending per se is not the problem, the problem is using lending to prop up this ponzi scheme that has artificially inflated prices due to constricted supply and then selling it to the citizens as a tool to "create wealth".
The average person needs a commodified asset that's useful to them from the onset - and builds value over time - in order to strengthen their possibility of upwards mobility now, and generational wealth in the future. A 401K does nothing for you in the 40 years you're accumulating it, a car depreciates substantially - as soon as after purchase, the stock market is oftentimes a playsake for the already well-off, there's simply nothing like housing for individuals in most sectors of the status quo "bell curve".
Upwards mobility? But that's exactly what younger generations can't do since housing is completely out of reach for them.
My example from Munich, a condo going for a 1m €. Median software engineer salary is around 66k € per year. Income tax ~40% so your take home is around 40k year.
That means that if you put all your net income towards your home you'd need 25 years just for the principle not counting interest or spending money on essentials such as food or energy.
So how do you do it? You don't. It's simply not possible unless you have exceptional circumstances (top %1 job, rich mom & dad etc).
This also means you now have no chance but to rent and and all your rent money just goes forward to the generations of individuals who invested in this ponzi scheme earlier or to the investment firms and businesses who operate in this domain. Regardless again all the wealth moves up the pyramid to the top.
Also even those older generations, all this "wealth" is imaginary. You can only realize your gains when you actually sell (so you realize the market price you sell on) and in addition you still gotta live somewhere, so to win in this game is to buy early and cash out by selling and then moving to somewhere low cost. (Perhaps retirement).
In summary, expensive housing is only benefiting those who already have amassed wealth and it's obstructing those who haven't from amassing any wealth.
> I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.
Brother, I feel the same way. The education system is broken, public discourse has degraded to illiterate thuggery and madness, and today's children and young adults are facing crushing economic rent-taking.
There are millions of people in the US that are making a lot less than you do who manage to buy houses, go on vacations, save for retirement and put their kids through college.
I’m 50 now, we purposefully “de-contented” our lives two years ago after our youngest graduated in 2020 and after Covid so we wouldn’t have to be in the rat race. I never made a lot as your standard enterprise dev and didn’t hit $200K+ until I was 46 and started working at BigTech remotely and we used the three years I was there to pay off debt, put some money in savings, etc.
I’ve turned down opportunities that would pay me close to $100k more in cash because I didn’t want the headache and definitely wasn’t going to ever be in an office. If you need me to be physically somewhere for a week, put me on a plane.
Even in 2020, I said no to interviewing as an SDE at Amazon because I didn’t want to relocate to Seattle after Covid lifted and I was only making $150K then. The remote position at AWS ProServe was then suggested.
We had the big house in the burbs of Atlanta in the “good school system” in 2016 built when I was only making $140K. True, when we sold it last year it was double the price. But we would have had to move further out if we were buying house in 2023. It would have been doable
Either way, we moved to a condo in Florida that is state tax free, we downsized to one car and now if I had to, I could pay all of our bills including our spending money with just my income and all I would need to make is $140K.
Making around $200k, I max out my retirement + catch up contributions + HSA and we have been on a plane to do something (mostly vacations, occasionally visiting friends) over a dozen times a year since mid 2022 and that trend is continuing for the foreseeable future
For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college and should be making way more than me in three years. I’m not bragging.
I have no other income besides my job.
I have no worries about “AI”, I moved into consulting working full time for consulting companies in 2020 (well then the consulting department at AWS). I just have to be able to sell and/or guide implementations of whatever the shovel du jour is. Right now I’m leading a Kubernetes + AI implementation.
> For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college and should be making way more than me in three years.
And more to the point, when I mentioned what I was making, I didn’t want to get the response that “you know you could make $400K+ by grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG”.
> For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college
Maybe, if new grad is defined as:
- A remarkable programmer on their own time. i.e. Impressive Github profile, side projects, leetcode expert, etc. Just going through Comp Sci isn't going to get you hired at BigTech today.
- Someone with a fantastic network. Better hope you've got friends in high places or family with connections.
Go to salary.com and select any major city in the US and see what a senior software engineer makes.
Anecdotally, I spent my entire career between 1996- 2020 working local jobs in Atlanta. Which is not exactly a tech hub. Look at the compensation of your standard non tech well known companies that are either based in Atlanta or have a large presence like Delta, Home Depot, Coke, GE (GE Transportation), State Farm.
I’ve never studied a line of leetcode nor have I had a GitHub portfolio my entire career until 2021.
I guess I'm confused by your take then, and the evidence you use to support it. You stated "But you move up in your career just like everyone else does" from a 65-75K starting salary as a college grad, when your own figures show that the average household income is oftentimes comprised of two people making even less than that, but have reached the stage of upwards mobility to buy a house, albeit oftentimes "house-broke" and in strife to pay mortgages.
These people didn't move up, as per your assessment. Most people need to combine salaries with someone else to even have a fair chance in this system, to get any upwards mobility.
When I was single until I was 28, I didn’t even want a house. I wanted the flexibility of being able to move. In fact, I hated the maintenances of owning a single family home and as I mentioned in my first reply We downsized to a condo as soon as we could.
If you are single with no responsibilities but yourself in many major cities, you can make it off of $65K. Homeownership is not the only metric of success
People making less than that aren’t homeless and starving.
I did a back of the napkin estimate before from all of the sources I could find and the best numbers I could find was that the top paying tech companies employ around 10% of all developers in the US.
On the other hand, the average CRUD developer in any major city in the US can make $140K-$170K within seven years of graduating with strategic job hopping
They specifically select against folks like me (on multiple dimensions) so 0 * any-percentage still equals nada. I might be able to swing the second one when the market improves.
Get involved with local politics. Join community planning boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for relaxing rules around zoning.
One of the small cities close to Seattle (Shoreline) just announced radical changes to their zoning laws! Change can happen. Right now Seattle is going through loud public debates over this, with NIMBYs going to meetings and shouting crazy accusations about what building more houses will do (recently: building dense housing will cause vitamin D deficiency...). Go spend an hour a month shouting back at them, it makes a real difference!
> Get involved with local politics. Join community planning boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for relaxing rules around zoning.
I think the takeaway from the last few election cycles is that this really isn't effective anymore now that the channels of information and communication are controlled by a small handful of corporations who's objective is to simply make more money.
But even besides that, I feel that defeats the spirit of the American Dream. What good is making just my community better when the kids one town over are falling behind because they don't have the property tax base to fund better programs and wealthy parents that can pay for better early childcare, private tutoring, and more resources? I already live in a fairly well-off enclave; my concern is for the rest of my fellow Americans who are not so fortunate -- the same concern as Atwood; we've "made it", but we want a society that leaves behind stepping stones for others to make their way up.
So I am compliant when it comes to paying taxes and do not shun paying my fair share because in my view, taxes and government -- you know, of the people, by the people, for the people -- are supposed to be used to make all of America better and not just better for some Americans. But we've seen decades of policy bifurcating on this point. You may point out that spending on social programs have increased. Yes, but so has rent-taking on that spend and siphoning and accumulation of those funds in a few coffers.
It's not no will, it's no incentive, and usually incentivized to not fix them. The same people keep getting voted in. What other message should they hear than their constituents are happy with the job they're doing? Over half of the American people just voted for someone who lied to our faces and promised they'd make things better when they posses a track record that proved otherwise the last time (and also now a felony record, but I digress). If I decided my career was going to be politics, and I kept getting elected, why on Earth would I ever change what was working?
Get them a Roth IRA. Put $7k in it each year as long as you can. Invest the Roth in an index fund, dividend fund, or straight up picks. Have them put into the fund as soon as they are able (summer jobs, etc)
If you have enough, buy another property. Your kids can live in it or manage it later.
Put stuff in trusts or be sure they can manage it effectively. The thing you most want (probably) is for them to be secure into their old age, long after you are gone. But they will start feeling secure by middle age, and you will all be happier.
The idea that most people just have an extra $7k a year sitting around to put into a retirement account they won't be able to access for decades seems pretty out of touch. A lot of people are just getting by. Additionally, if you live in a high CoL area, you might be prevented from contributing to a Roth even though most of your income goes to living expenses.
Some of the advice thrown around in this thread is so out of touch.
"Just get a high paying job".
"I never worry about healthcare because of my employer".
"Just put $7,000 away into a retirement account and $10,000 into a 529 every year. What's the problem?"
And even if I'm in a position to do that, the problem is that there are millions of fellow Americans (the majority) that don't have these "luxuries".
As a non American, I've always struggled to understand the "American Dream".
It is about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and going from poor to wealthy by using the opportunities that the US provides. Is that a correct assessment?
The problem I have with that is that it doesn't in any way include bringing your community up with you or letting your wealth be reinvested back into the environment in which you were poor. It solves the issue only for that single person without addressing why the issue existed in the first place. It seems to be inherently "selfish", no?
As an immigrant, I define the "American Dream" as "opportunity regardless of social class". I think Atwood also hints at this in his blog post (as this is the reason he called out his upbringing and family).
This is in contrast to the system of nobility and "old money" in Europe and why many immigrants sought to find their way to the New World.
The idea of public education started in the US and for a long time has been one of the key public services that enabled this social mobility. In the US, historically, there were opportunities even for immigrants to become self-made men and women and their children would be better off than they were. Immigrants might arrive in the US illiterate, but their children would at least have the opportunity to be educated and find better paths.
It's still possible, but it feels as if the cards are stacked higher and higher towards those that are already coming from some wealth. I increasingly feel like the chances that my kids are going to be better off than me are decreasing every year because the stepping stones to success are becoming eroded.
That's still possible (and in some cases, plumber/carpenter/contractor is perhaps the best option still available).
What we're seeing is at least partially the result of everyone going to college for something like a few decades.
Deciding to be apprentice to a plumber at 17 is much different than having to do the same at 21/23 because the degree you went into debt for isn't panning out the way you wanted.
You're 4+ years behind, you're some amount of debt in the hole, and you're having to work hard.
(Average student loan debt is something like $37k, which isn't the cost of a house, but is certainly close to a down payment.)
you are me; down parents issues with smoking/etc and current career/age.
> I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to hire me
My plan is simple: Retire. Avoid that 1m house when possible.
> I have no idea how my kids are going to make it
Same boat here, but I'm less concerned insofaras I'm doing everything I can to keep as many options/opportunities open to my kids as possible. This honestly significantly dampens the 'retire' plan; but what can you do? My parents would have no idea what I do if I tried to explain it; I expect the world to shift similarly by the time my kids are working. The goal is simply to give every advantage I can and keep as many doors open as possible.
If you think software engineering salaries are low in the USA, try working in Europe. A 'good' salary can be 30K or even lower after tax per year, and electricity costs twice as much as in the USA. In some places, even bottle scavengers earn more than software engineers in Europe.
Yes, but my sense is that in Europe, you can "survive" easier than in the US.
There are several key differences.
In the US, everything is spread out so you absolutely need to own a car in many low cost of living (COL) places; there's no option for transportation. In the US, healthcare can absolutely destroy you and you cannot get quality healthcare at a decent rate without a job that provides it as a benefit. Access to transportation networks is also poor compared to Europe and Asia where trains are abundant, fast, cheap, and accessible by wide networks of public transport. The way the US has been built out is not amenable to that in low COL areas.
So I acknowledge that there are lots of problems world wide in different countries and wages are lower and taxes are higher in general in the EU, but there are more social safety nets compared to the US. The baseline "cost of existing" in the US is simply higher.
Considering your upbringing, you're making some confusing statements. Somebody who was brought up low income but is now wealthy ("one of the top percentiles of household income") should know better. It's called living frugally.
It sounds like you're fearful of losing your luxurious lifestyle if your income changes. Most Americans are fearful of affording clothing, food and shelter if their income changes.
Like Atwood, I understand my good fortune in life and I am ever grateful and humbled that I have achieved what I have starting from a 1 bedroom apartment where my entire family slept in one room.
Like Atwood, I want an America where the path of upward mobility and opportunity is available to all and not so blatantly biased towards the privileged and those that are already well-off.
I'm not concerned so much for myself, but for the two lives I've brought into this world and for the lives of the millions of Americans and immigrants that did not have my good fortune (and I'd say much of my own current status is a result of luck and opportune moments in life).
Like Atwood, I worry that we no longer have the will to create and pass legislation that benefits the masses at the expense of the few because those few now control so much of the channels over which our discourse flows (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, et al).
Atwood's solution and approach is to use his accumulated fortune to donate to organizations that seek to help other fellow Americans. Ostensibly, that's what good policy and taxation should solve instead.
The more I sit with it's long-term policy implications, the more I think it would solve the lack of productivity, progress, and prosperity with modern society. It also has supporters from across the political spectrum because it represents a tax shift rather than a tax increase(even Nobel prize winning economists Milton Friedman(libertarian) and Paul Krugman(modern keynesian) are both fans - and they're pretty far apart when it comes to most policies!)
Wages have been flat against productivity gains since the early 1970s in the US. The only way to make it here is to invest heavily over a long time horizon.
> I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house" ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for a fraction of the price.
Thankfull, Trump's new EO regarding housing has it covered. The cavalry has arrived.
Hey Jeff! If you are reading this comments, I just want to say thank you! Thanks just for being a nice person. In this over individualistic world, you just shared what you know and helped other people.
I'm your fan since the beginning of Coding Horror. Shared dozens of your blog posts. Stack Overflow changed how everybody programmed. I started coding in a pre-Internet time, when you got stuck, you just got stuck. I'm from Brazil and never went to USA, but I hope someday I can buy you a beer or a coffee.
Interesting, it seems that extremely rich americans are discovering what scandinavian countries solve through taxation and effective government.
They used to have it in some form with 'new deal' and 'great society' until ~1970, but now they can't because of the very same reasons that are making them extremely rich.
Plus there's some fetisishation of efficiency of the private sector vs public one and distrust in public institutions, while in some areas I don't think it's warranted, it's just that public insititutions are more transparent than the private sector imo.
"Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.
So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."
This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think folks who don't live in America don't understand how dramatically different and worse the implementation of government is in America from many other countries who sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if the goals are similar.
I don't know your background, so I won't say I don't think you understand - but in my experience, government is multiple times worse than any private organization. Yes, the same problems exist - but without any of the pressures that force private business to adapt or fail, so the problems are worse by far.
Policymaking is never discovered. It’s forced. Like class struggle forced the hand of actors like FDR during his presidency.
Then that was forced away by the reaction (class struggle) of the most right-wing capitalists and ideologues which ultimately lead to neoliberalism.
So sure, there are some set of relatively enlightened capitalists that want more of a social democratic status quo for the stability it brings. But the material conditions are not there.[1] So people like Jeff Atwood will write opinion pieces and give what is the grand of scheme of things token material support. But it can’t realistically happen right now in the US.
Of course the same principles apply to Scandinavian countries. They’re (our) false ideology is called the Nordic Model.
[1] Look at Bernie Sanders. The Independent senator who ran for the ostensibly left-wing Democratic Party as a mere social democrat and was shot down by the Establishment. Now that he is too old to run again and the presidential election is done for you see people in the Establishment say things like, huh I think that guy had a point!
I prefer my higher wages and lower taxes, thanks. We need to get a handle (moratorium) on mass immigration into US before we care about handing out more of our money for welfare. Why would I want my hard earned wages to be given to an endless influx of poor foreigners? The problem with higher taxes is the money is not spent well. Solve that and people are more willing to contribute.
Look at how badly run are the high tax cities and states in the US. Talk of taxing more without discussion of bad governance is a non starter.
As a counterpoint I moved to Massachusetts where the roads are among the worst in the country. My taxes apparently do not buy infrastructure maintenance.
I don't really get Mass in general. On paper it seems like it should be quite a bit nicer than it is in reality. I live in the Hudson Valley and feel like it would be a downgrade in a few ways. And for being a deep blue state they are pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.
>pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.
I know that state and local governments are responsible for inspecting restaurants. Also I know that NYC banned transfats in restaurant food. Is that what you mean by "food safety and health guidelines"?
Is it better for the people who live in the rural areas of whatever state you live in? Are the better areas affordable?
I’m far from a “disaffected rural White American Trump supporter” (yes I’m purposefully using a cliche). None of those adjectives describe me besides “American”. But a lot of people on the left (which I am when it comes to social issues) are very self unaware.
No, I have no problem paying taxes or government requiring business to pay taxes.
I don’t agree with the over and mostly dumb regulation of tech from the left and I think they over index on the wrong issues and the reason we are where we are now is because old folks on the left wouldn’t exit the stage when they should have - Supreme Court justices and Biden specifically.
I’m pro Vax and have been shot up with every vaccine imaginable including multiple Covid boosters. But the anti-vax movement was exasperated by Democrats trying to force the Covid vaccine on people
Although there is probably support for immigrants besides welfare, I believe that welfare itself is reserved for citizens.
And this is not a statement for or against immigration, but in response to what some people have said (not PKop, to whom I am replying): non-citizen immigrants do pay at least some taxes, in the form of sales tax. And, depending on how they are paid (cash or paycheck) they will also be paying taxes on their own pay. If they are getting cash it is easier to avoid taxes. It is harder if they're receiving a salary.
Immigrants from certain locations, which the vast majority of the waves of immigration we are getting in recent years, are net negatives in terms of budget impact, takers vs contributors to tax revenue. And yes, I agree with you on the perfectly logical and common sense position that welfare should be reserved for citizens.
Housing migrants in Hotels in US cities, paid for by citizen tax revenue, or guaranteed emergency health care, paid for by citizen tax revenue, among other examples are bad policy and unfair to Americans.
It's a non starter to raise my taxes, fix your reading comprehension. Certainly, you wouldn't be surprised to know I think there's enough money to do this, and that I oppose the government doing other things but support the government doing this yes? It's just common sense.
America has a lot of taxation. Fortunately for the Scandinavian countries it spends it on "protecting Scandinavian shipping lanes" and "medical research grants that benefit Scandinavia", rather than solely on local welfare spending. The America First lot are learning a lot from Scandinavia there, though. I'm not sure we're all going to like where that could lead.
I can't immediately think of a major US naval deployment in the North Sea outside the big NATO exercises every 1-2 years. Were you thinking of a specific shipping lane?
It is very difficult to compare or extrapolate US with Scandinavian countries. US is socially super-heterogeneus, huge, and big population while Scandinavian countries are socially homogeneus, small size and population. And this is just the beginning.
This is just wrong, on many levels. If you look where tax revenues go, it's mostly defense (military industrial complex) and middle-class entitlements.
I though America spends its taxation on destabilizing Middle East and flooding Europe and Scandinavia with migrants.
If Europe tried to do what America does for Europe it should dump military equipment onto various central and South American countries so they can fight among themselves and create droves of refugees traveling North.
Unless you're already minted beyond measure, selling anything at any time for $1.8B is a great deal, you and everyone you ever cared about are set for life.
Has there been any large business more decimated by the rise of LLM's than SO? Traffic in the tags I follow there dropped off a cliff pretty much the same day that ChatGPT was first released.
> 34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote. Why?
In the referenced news:
> ... “Currently my biggest issue with U.S. politics is the response to the Palestinian genocide," Rojas said. ...
Back to the article:
> I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question.
> We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight.
Is there any serious polls show how many Americans choose not to vote for the same reason? is it a number so small that it can be ignored?
When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024 were asked “Which one of the following issues was MOST important in deciding your vote?” they selected:
29% - Ending Israel’s violence in Gaza
24% - The economy
12% - Medicare and Social Security
11% - Immigration and border security
10% - Healthcare
9% - Abortion policy
5% - Don’t know
Yeah, not directly related. Interesting though that most people who abstained from voting did have a issue they could name, and only 5% put down "Don't know" so this particular demographic may fall in this category (probably more complicated though).
The article is wrong/misleading. It starts by talking about Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and who did not cast a ballot in 2024. Then it cites this poll, which is of a completely different demographic: Those who voted Biden in 2020 and did vote in 2024 (but not for Trump/Harris).
As I pointed out elsewhere, those numbers are so tiny they would not have impacted the election results at all if every single one of them voted Harris.
So anecdotal, but I think you have to consider the depressed turnout. From my circles, it's clear that plenty of Gen Z people (not just Muslims) either stayed home because of Gaza or (as in Dearborn, MI) voted Trump to protest Gaza. Gaza was a IMO a huge enthusiasm dampener for Harris.
>These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and housing are not compatible with the American Dream.
Yep, it's dead. Someone please make it official already. Don't worry about the autopsy or time/date of death - just get the death certificate already and let's move on.
Whether they want to replace it with something equivalent is frankly up to the rich people, college institutions, and home owners/sellers. Just guessing based on the trend, but that will also be a No.
Right now, it's really called "The American Survival Games". This isn't just fear mongering, you have to change your mindset. The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work. Now that is not the case and you constantly have to reassess what your work trajectory is going to get you and if it will be enough to survive the next day, but also survive the volatility of a very polarized nation changing its policies on a whim. You also need a backup plan for your job in case you just get laid off due to no fault of your own. And a backup plan for the backup plan because the hiring landscape might change.
Come on, haven't you heard that Trump has declared the start of a new American Golden Age? You gotta have some faith!
No seriously, this reminds me of another "Golden Age" which according to the propaganda happened under Ceausescu in Romania when I was growing up (https://princetonbuffer.princeton.edu/2014/01/30/tales-from-...), while in reality everything was falling to pieces. I just hope Trump's age won't last as long as Ceausescu's (24 years).
Actually life was pretty good for Romanians during the "Golden Age" compared to the rest of the communist period. The problem was that we lived on credit just like Americans and when it came time to pay it, things started falling off. Ceaușescu didn't invest wisely the money from the IMF, so he started exploiting everything and everyone to the max until the debt was paid off. Just a few months afterwards the Revolution happened and he was trialed and sentenced to death.
I like Jeff. Way back when, I was a front page posteron SO, and #1 on the C++ tag. I got really fed up with the whole SO thing and I asked Jeff to delete my account and all associated posts. This really screwed up their SQLServer system (not at all my intention, I had a lot of posts) but he plodded ahead with it anyway, despite me saying not to bother. A good guy, IMHO.
Back in the early days of SO, I listened to many of the podcasts by Joel and Jeff. Jeff always came across as an overall good dude. He seemed to want SO to be a helpful tool for developers, and wanted to do the right thing, regardless of the monetary implications.
The American dream is not at risk, nor is it fading out.
In fact is has been entirely dead for sometime.
Society is solidly rigged by long time rich and established
players.
It would take a revolution to revive it.
The amazing part is that the constitution does cover
how to go about this, with little actual combat.
The only thing that is needed is for a good majority of
voter to tell the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans
that their services are no longer wanted then clean house
by voting in a new set of players from a new set of political parties.
It is totally legal, and it is even not that hard,
IF you could pierce the indoctrinated dogma that Rs or Ds are the only
choices or you are throwing your vote away.
Just getting the citizens who do not vote (141 million??) to become active
would bring it closer.
You dont need a BILLION dollars to run for election.
It is needed when you have to make someone utterly corrupt
and removed from reality palatable to voters.
But even after a revolution brought about by an election the fight
would be tremendous against the entrenched / swamp / deep-state /
oligarchs / 1% / enterprises / lobby organisations etc etc .
Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...
There was a time when StackOverflow already had considerable size and it still felt as if Jeff knew and moderated every single post.
This is what made StackOverflow in my opinion. The excellent moderation in the beginning resulted in excellent quality.
Now, not taking away from the other early moderators, Jeff was definitely a huge part of it and one thing is for sure: He busted his ass off for this site and he deserves the reward.
I don't think anyone deserves 1.8bln reward. Norman Borlaug perhaps. But good for Jeff. I think SO was immensly societally and economically valuable and most people who actually got 1.8bln are less deserving than Jeff is.
Stack overflow was an invaluable resource for me as a developer. I got a wealth of knowledge about a bunch of thorny problems I was encountering with out paying anything. The people who answered the questions I had were able to help far more people than they ever could have individually without SO. I’m having a hard time being upset about his financial windfall. It’s really only a bait and switch for people who answered questions with some other unstated expectation than helping others or receiving help.
In aggregate, Stack Overflow probably saved developers far more time than anyone ever put in, and saved companies all over the world far more money than the founders made in their exit.
The founders monetized a platform where unpaid contributors built 99% of the value by answering questions for intangible "Reputation". The fact that contributions were voluntary doesn’t negate the issue. It highlights it.
A system designed to extract free labor for massive financial gain, while offering only gamified rewards, reflects exploitative design, not fairness.
This is such an incomprehensible take. Every developer has benefited from SO. I’ve contributed to the site exactly because it’s been so good to me. I don’t need money on top of that. The website is the reward. Nobody cares about reputation.
Websites cost money to run, and I’m glad SO was so well monetized that it didn’t run out of money and get deactivated like so many of the old school forums we used to go to for help before.
See my analogy below in this thread about the public park...
What is incomprehensible is developers confusing the value created by the site, with the means of production of said value.
While contributing to the site might provide you with some personal feelings of value, maybe even a rush of altruistic euphoria... :-) An illusory sense of digital sainthood...Your unpaid work directly enhances the value of a platform that profits from selling the collective output, including yours.
This means you’re effectively donating your expertise to a for-profit entity, with no equity or share in its success
No one is forcing anyone to do anything, and everyone always knew what they were getting themselves in to. It was always a deal where everyone wins. That you don't like that choice for yourself is fine. No need to be so negative, dismissive, and cynical about how other people choose to spend their free time.
You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy.
Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.
It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.
I sometimes feel this way even about Google maps. On some level when I make a small contribution I'm aware that everyone doing so profits Google quite nicely.
But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from having Google maps as a resource, far more than the contribution I've made.
It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place that people help share information useful to each other, which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a way to monetize the sharing of this information.
Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or horrid really is a matter of perspective.
I remember reading Atwood's blog around the time he launched it, and from his writing, he seemed genuine in his desire to build a tool that would help developers write code. This was also right in the middle of the original gamification craze, so of course internet points lol
I remember reading his rants about just how bad the current situation was (which was a terrible website called "developers exchange" or public phpBB internet forums). Never underestimate the passion derived from sheer hatred of the status quo.
Also his backup strategies around 2008 were quite interesting.
Ah yes, perpetually flagged by every corporate firewall that did substring keyword matching on DNS queries.
Incidentally, the amount of sheer content-masking garbage on their pages was what originally prompted me to install and learn (IIRC) Greasemonkey and a bunch of DOM/CSS stuff.
i feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its initial impetus, literally "let's get together and collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"
for a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was still good.
Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
Many people landed good jobs that way. It was a good way for self-promo back in the day.
Jobs stackexchange section was also way better than most other jobs boards at the time.
It only went majorly downhill after the key people behind the site went away to work on other things and it got sold...
Except Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10 website.
Nobody contributes to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow because of license. Most contribute because humans like sharing information with other people. If Wikipedia's eyeballs are low, people wouldn't contribute.
A group of volunteers builds a public park, putting in hours of work, landscaping, planting trees, and creating a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy.
Years later, the park’s manager fences it off, sells it for $1.8 billion, and pockets the money.
When questioned, the manager says, “So what? The volunteers enjoyed building it, and people got value from the park while it was open.”
Your story about a park going from "public" to "private", with the manager tricking the volunteers into making something that is no longer public and pocketing the money, is a false analogy for multiple reasons.
1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name, network, software and system.
2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the content licenses, then the park is still open and public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion dollars. It's just in the commons.
Basically, while both the website and the content are valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that for free. It was used to buy the website, which has always been private and proprietary.
Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's content into proprietary. But neither happened. And that's why it's a false analogy.
Not the least. Rational homo economicus pretty much doesn't exist in real life. The vast majority of us are driven by the essential motives and desires while the intelligence rationalizes already made decisions.
> Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
Is this how you'd characterise open source software contributions as well (minus the points, of course)?
I enjoyed the site and found it useful to begin with however it became a playground for people who felt they were know it alls to get recognition. A little ego boost if you will and that ruined the point for me, which was to get a varied response on technical questions.
It also doesn’t answer your question as if you asked a different one. So many stackoverflow conversations:
Q: I am looking for a way to do X in language Y.
A: You shouldn’t need to do that. What do you really want to do?
Argh. What I really want to do is exactly what I asked. If you don’t know, fine, but don’t try to steer me towards a question you do know the answer to. Just let someone else answer. Not everything is an XY problem[1].
It's a case-by-case thing. Sometimes in this big world you see people asking things like "how do I write a firewall wildcard rule that blocks all IPv6 addresses starting with the number '2'?" and you just want to reach through the screen and shake them by the shoulders and ask them if everything is okay.
I'd rather a Q&A site have a specific and correct A for every specific Q, no matter how ridiculous some user thinks the Q is. If I was open to re-thinking my design I would have asked something like "Please help me re-think my firewall rules..."
I do find those suggestions valuable 80-90% of the time. But in the fringes, on less popular questions, it’s really frustrating because I can’t just substitute it in this way because the situation is just different.
One one annoying thing about using LLMs to answer technical questions is when you provide context like “I have tried X, Y already, and Z won’t work because…” it does what LLMs do— uses all the words in the prompt to string together more words into an answer. It would make LLMs so much more intuitive to use for technical questions if this problem could be solved… sounds so obvious that maybe it does exist?
I had mixed feelings about those that demonstrated their knowledge by answering the question extremely thoroughly with a lengthy treatise. On the one hand, their answer was a great resource for deeper understanding, on the other I just wanted a one-liner to solve my problem and go on with my day!
True, but that also sums up one of the junior dev problems often talked about on HN - those who use SO to get a direct answer that they can copy-and-paste, instead of an actual explanation to help them learn (and save them having to look it up next time).
I realized seeing the picture on top that I have actually never seen his face before, only his well known avatar. Despite having read his stuff and following him for a decade.
meh. you're probably right. I edited and distilled it down to the main point. I just wish it were a nonprofit at the end of the day, I guess. It would've been the right thing to do. That he chose not to makes me sad. That he was rewarded richly for it, sadder.
I’ve seen the goalposts on “the American Dream” move a lot. It used to be, everyone can work hard and have a good life. Buy a house, car, raise kids on a single income with free high school education. It might be a historical fluke but that’s what it was.
Then it somehow became “anyone can become rich” and we celebrated the middle class origins of our billionaires.
Now it seems to be “we have the richest billionaires”.
People are being gaslit with metrics like GDP and stock index prices that measure the performance of corporations and the wealthiest Americans. But the reality is that American life expectancy has plateaued or going down, while the EU has blasted past us.
I asked and answered some easy questions as a student to learn more, then when I became a professional and got certified in Kubernetes and a lot of on the job experience I started answering kubernetes questions, getting quite a bunch of points and feeling good I was giving back something. They then decided kubernetes was not part of the main website and all questions should be asked somewhere else where you started from scratch. I never used any of their websites again.
Today I had a small amount of Google Sheets work to do, to extend somebody else's work, and I had both Claude and ChatGPT hallucinating mythical function names, and not understanding array functions with utter confidence and certainty. StackOverflow results from a web search gave me the answer faster, in the end.
I hate the use of this word to describe when a sentence completer gives a wrong result. To hallucinate you have to have a concept of reality. Which those models don't have. They're just mathematical tools which some times manage to give a result humans think as human-like.
I don't work in LLMs, but I use a ton of similar tools to model biology, and I really like the term "hallucinate." I would argue that the LLM does have a concept of reality, in the form of a probabilistic distribution over sentence structure. And that probability distribution does not match the reality that I live in, even if it matches the LLM training data and training procedure fairly well. I would argue that even a simple random forest model has a concept of reality, or maybe is a concept of reality, though a faulty one.
Ironically enough, the LLM was better at explaining trade offs and new syntax, and I learned more about the topic from the LLMs, largely from observing the unintended effects of their incorrect instructions. It was just dead wrong on several key details and when it didn't know how to do something it answered with BS with just as much confidence as the insightful parts, which would be infuriating from a human, but merely time wasting from the LLM.
Yes, for non-work things I find it vaguely useful. My workflow is to first google search, often see Stack Overflow answers, and then move on to an LLM or actual documentation if I don't get anything through search.
I do it this way around because I can search far faster than I can write out reasonable english sentences that head-off bad LLM responses.
Sometimes when I'm confident enough that the LLM will be able to give me the "right answer" faster than search I'll do it first, but that's mostly when I have something I can copy/paste in.
My experience with LLMs has been different. I give it trash prompts and it gives me reasonable responses. I think it's figured out the space between what I type and what I want. That's great. Until we get an input which allows it to figure out the space between what I type and what I think. That doesn't even sound too bad, because now I can just think and it'll happen. I look forward to this future, sounds wonderfully efficient, which would finally give me the time to do that thing I really want to do but don't have the time right now because we're not efficient enough.
But no, my experience is different with regards to the ratio of quality of input versus output. I think we all do a subconscious ROI of whether typing that little extra will yield an output that's going to be that much better that it was worth the time and effort.
If I know what I want, just not exactly where, I'll go straight for a search. But if it's more fuzzy then LLMs has totally changed how I acquire knowledge.
Now I find it more productive to ask an LLM to get some keywords or similar which I might search for afterwards.
The great thing about LLMs is that, unlike a search engine, you can tell it "no, not quite like that, more like this" to guide it.
I do, I don't use co-pilot to code or LLMs much other than for work until I find a personal use for it. I like other fields of AI more eg. ML/computer vision.
I still use to find answers to problems, but less often than I did a few years ago (thank you chatgpt et al) and I search via my browser (thank you Kagi search adjustments) not via the site's search.
I haven't posted questions or answers for years. Too many petty, officious people and general toxicity.
At least for me, I've found chatgpt to be a good Google replacement. It might be helpful beyond that occasionally, but it really excels in spitting out existing data.
Google -> stackoverflow is typically much faster than chatgpt.
If you are a fast typer and can formulate a short question then you can often get from thought to answer in well under 10 seconds.
With chatgpt there is a small thinking delay then often a long token sequence of filler before you get the few lines you're looking for.
ChatGPT shines compared to stackoverflow for something you know that requires a dialog of prompts or you're asking it to write some specific code instead of just finding out how to accomplish a small task with very clear syntax.
It sounds weird but google seems like it used to be scary accurate back in the day, but results for me seem a lot muddier than they used to be in the past few years.
I search it for things that are outside regular documentation.
However any contributions (answers, questions) are directly related to something I'm working on. There's no community (or certainty that your work will not be marked-as-duplicate) which would justify a more-general kind of helping-out.
Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people that he has spent billions in “philanthropy” to destroy the public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools.
The point is that even something noble-sounding like giving away your fortune still tends to enforce the current system and simply create more wealth inequality. In this case, charter schools are simply a massive wealth transfer from government to the private sector.
Atwood left StackOverflow years ago but he’s been there for years. We can only speculate as to what he made from the sale. I’d guess 10-15%.
I just hope his altruism goes to something of public benefit.
"Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people that he has spent billions in “philanthropy” to destroy the public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools."
Many public schools are shit and I applaud his effort to come with alternatives instead of forcing everyone to get a poor education, until these problems are actually fixed.
That's by design. It's a strategy pioneered by Ronald Reagan called "starve the beast" [1]. Basically, you starve a public institution of funds and then use the inevitable failure for gutting it entirely and likely privatizing it.
We're seeing this in real-time in Texas [2] in particular with Abbott's takeover of the Houston ISD and the blatant corruption and racism going on with the Keller ISD.
Also, charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry pick students. Public schools don't have that luxury.
The public school funding models in the USA are variable, even by county, they can't be controlled or set by the top down, and the fact that the USA spends more than the OECD average disputes everything you are saying.
StackOverflow has a very successful gamification model. People just give them free labor voluntarily because they like to ask questions and even moderate. Perhaps also fueled by the naive libertarianism of the Californian Ideology.
Imagine a world if more of the centi-billionaires were more like Gates trying to cure diseases and make the world a better place.
I’m not advocating for the compelling of folks to be forced to give up their riches (Ill gotten or not) just imagine if people were better versions of themselves.
Instead of worrying about how hard it is to give away their money effectively these billionaires should be working to fix a political system created specifically to funnel money to billionaires. Without fixing the actual problem giving away money is just virtue signalling.
Unless you are among the uber wealthy -- wealthy enough to control communication channels -- it's very hard to change the political system.
Today, many Americans consume their information from social media and an shrinking number of "traditional" media sources that are largely controlled by a few entities.
It is very difficult to affect discourse in a meaningful way that can then move policy by getting people to vote.
A fairly tame start (i.e. not overtly against their own money-making interests) would be to support voting-reform to one of the many many options that are superior to plurality/first-past-the-post voting.
Insofar as regular-businesses like predictability, this would actually be good for them. Fewer dramatic changes from slim margins every election cycle.
If you click through to the original blog post[1], you will see him advocating for exactly this.
>Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.
Why would we expect someone to not only have the insight on how to fix society, but actually be able to reshape it, just because they are a billionaire? Giving resources to those who need it might be the best way to help for some.
Accumulating that much wealth means you were in a frenzy. It’s good he snapped out of it. Take someone like Elon or Bezos, 10 billion is not enough, 100 isn’t, 200 isn’t. We have people that are still in a manic greed phase.
It’s karma that the ghost of Hitler possessed Elon’s body. Simple greed can destroy a soul too. You have no idea the supernatural forces that will dock in your soul if you make it a comfortable nesting place.
I'm fortunate enough to be in one of the top percentiles of household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.
Like Atwood, I did not come from a well-off family; parents divorced in my early teens and father passed away in my late teens from cancer (smoking and alcoholism) and in many ways lucked into a very good career after attending a state university. My spouse's father -- a janitor in a public school -- and mother -- a crossing guard -- passed when she was in her 20's as well. There weren't any large fortunes passed down.
Some friends recently purchased a house in my township and I visited to drop off my kid for a play date. I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house" ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for a fraction of the price. It boggles the mind to consider when/how my kids will be able to have their slice of the American Dream.
There are clearly some fundamental things that have to be fixed in the US at a policy level, but there's seemingly no political will to fix them; everyone seems out for themselves and to enrich their own coffers. This is handicapping social mobility through the hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??). This is the sentiment that I feel Atwood is also feeling.
As a high earning software engineer (IC), I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to hire me either because of AI or because of age (early 40's now so I figure maybe 10 years of high earning as an IC?).
> but there's seemingly no political will to fix them;
I don't know if that's the solution. In fact, "political will" is what we don't want nor need in a liberal democracy. Authoritarians appeal to their supporter by promising a strong will and projecting an image of a strong man who has the will to cow everyone and get things done. That's just not how it works in a democracy.
What I believe we need is compromise and a willingness for individuals or the various factions to sacrifice, take risks, and/or get less than what we had hope for. In return we can all be collectively better off in the long run. It feels like we've all been so thoroughly segmented and divided that we've stopped caring for other people who might be different or have opposing opinions.
Look to the stagnancy of the UK to see where the US could be in a few more decades. They have the same high prices for housing, but far far lower wages. When the powerful political class (homeowners) has all their wealth tied up in their homes, they see little wrong with such broken basic arrangements, because it doesn't hurt them and they see their number going up for wealth. Canada and Australia have similarly destructive housing policies and outcomes.
And since the self-immolation of Brexit, they have far worsened their financial future. Similar politics of self-destruction masked as the appearance of strength are gaining a loooot of ground in the US as well.
Are you accounting for things like free healthcare when comparing wages? (I wish I did't have to say this, but it's a genuine question, not snark). I always wonder when people compare other countries to the US.
Edit: I agree that Brexit was the most incredible piece of self-harm that I've seen a country do to itself. I certainly don't have rose-tinted spectacles about the state of the UK.
I think most Americans over-index on the cost of healthcare and the availability of insurance because it’s constant in our news and our system absolutely sucks. Most people don’t need regular medical care because most people are healthy (until they start getting older). It’s expensive, sure, but most people in the middle-class have employer sponsored healthcare, and retirees have government sponsored healthcare, and many low-income people have government sponsored healthcare. The difference in out-of-pocket costs is easily accounted for within significantly higher salaries.
Of course, the issue is not the actual availability of insurance, it is that there is a patchwork of laws and protections and it’s not universal to be covered at any point in your life. But many states have well above a 90% insurance rate. California, the most populous state, has 93%. Massachusetts is sitting at 98%. Even Texas, the worst state for health insurance, is at 85% of the population covered.
>The difference in out-of-pocket costs is easily accounted for within significantly higher salaries.
Any sources for this?
Salary Info (25k USD salary difference, before tax)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
Cost of healthcare:
There are a bunch of numbers that are trivially accessible via Google, including government sources, but I couldn’t find any that match perfectly with the time range of the wage data.
Here is one quote, from a few years earlier…
> Median annual out-of-pocket spending on medical care ranged from $360 (Hawaii) to $1,500 (Nebraska). In four states, households in the top 10 percent of out-of-pocket expenses spent $7,000 or more on these items.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
See also: https://meps.ahrq.gov/data_files/publications/st441/stat441....
Roughly speaking, when I've looked into this comparison, for near-median earners, they're better off in the UK, because of things like healthcare. But when you look at the higher-earning roles, especially engineering or software, then the different in pay more than makes up for the increased cost of living (i.e. a higher percentage of your pay may go towards cost of living, but the smaller percentage of money left over is still larger in absolute terms). There's other tradeoffs in terms of work culture and so on, though (e.g. you get much more holiday in the UK).
Can you share your research?
In the US, the average out-of-pocket healthcare spending was $1,424.6 per capita in 2022
Most people have insurance. They might have some high out of pocket maximum like $10k. So worse case scenario you're out an additional $10k.
But you pay a lot less in taxes
In US, a single filer, the 12% bracket covers income from $11,926 to $48,475. In UK it's 20%
So at 40k you're paying an additional 3k in taxes, not to mention VAT and others (although I am ignoring other US taxes like state, local and payroll). More than covers your out of pocket healthcare costs.
And pretty much any job in the US is significantly higher paying, for instance a typical accountant in US makes 80k while in the uk that 37k pounds. Pretty much every office job is like this. And note the US 80k figures includes benefits like ... you guessed it, healthcare!
Even if make the generous assumptions that taxes are the same, UK has same healthcare quality and everyone is hitting out of pocket max every year, it's still not close. The whole "but we don't have to pay for healthcare" strikes me as just a cope.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/484578/us-per-capita-out...
https://www.allbusinessschools.com/accounting/salary/
https://uk.indeed.com/career/accountant/salaries
I think if the health insurance situation was as rosy in the U.S as you make out there would not have been as much support for the killer of the United Healthcare CEO. The figure for the average out of pocket expenses hides a lot of pain.
75% of Americans with employer-provided health coverage are satisfied with their current plans
For Americans overall, 71% rate the quality of healthcare they personally receive as excellent or good. Similarly, 72% give excellent or good marks to the quality of care they receive personally.
Regarding health insurance coverage, 65% of Americans rate their own coverage as excellent or good. Another poll found 63% rated their own health care coverage as excellent or good.
You have to get offline
https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-poll-strong-majority-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-quality-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/468176/americans-sour-healthcar...
You have to get offline
Perhaps. But if I weren’t online I wouldn’t know how widespread the support of Luigi is.
Only 75% of people on employer healthcare plans are satisfied? A great many people aren’t on employer plans.
From the third link you provided:
For the first time in Gallup’s two-decade trend, less than half of Americans are complimentary about the quality of U.S. healthcare, with 48% rating it “excellent” or “good.” The slight majority now rate healthcare quality as subpar, including 31% saying it is “only fair” and 21% -- a new high -- calling it “poor.”
People have lots of anger about healthcare for many many reasons. I can't tell you how many people I've met who are angry about "Obamacare" but don't realize how it helped them compared to the prior situation. There's also lots of anger at the prices for healthcare that we sometimes see, and that anger gets directed at insurance too, even if it's a hospital or other provider setting the prices. And then there's the anxiety of "will this be covered."
Even without out of pocket costs there's lots of reasons to be angry at insurers.
My US job comes with NHS level never seeing a bill. This is really easy to do in CA.
Saying “fuck you, I’m rich” is not a good look.
A health plan like that costs your company 25K/yr on the backend. They pay that as part of your compensation, you just don’t see it.
Even the most basic HDHP Bronze Kaiser plan currently costs over 1K/mo, and that increases about 10% per year.
If you’ve ever had a coworker (or yourself) decline COBRA coverage because it was “so expensive”, you need to understand that the price under COBRA was the price the whole time, you just didn’t see it.
> Saying “fuck you, I’m rich” is not a good look.
This is a pitch-perfect example of the Brexit-like self-destructive politics that come with the "win" of appearing strong.
Here is a person who has the typical experience, who could easily be convinced by their positive experience to say "everybody should have this." But instead of going that route you impute negative motivations and put very ugly distasteful words into their mouth. Which, even if they are highly supportive of your position, will likely turn them against you. Instead of using this opportunity to advocate for a really good thing, you use it as an opportunity to hit somebody you view as the enemy with a rhetorical hammer. End result: no more people in favor of better means of distributing health care, and perhaps a net negative.
Especially in the context of how to account for free-at-point-of-care healthcare, which started this. If the employer is paying the prices that are revealed to employees only via COBRA, should that be accounted for in part of the wages or not? The US chooses to put about twice the fraction of GDP into healthcare that the UK does, and that per-capita GDP is also higher, how do we account for that in terms of wages and individuals? The $1T that employers pay for healthcare should be accounted for how, exactly? It's a tough question, and most likely in any comparison of nations there's a couple different ways to see how it impacts the average person. And when the "average" person in the US has such varying experiences, that has to enter into any comparison too.
In California there is great healthcare coverage for those with extremely low to no income, due to subsidy. Those with healthy salaries and savings can weather the times of unemployment and pay the COBRA prices. Those who struggle the most are the ones in between, and improving that involves getting those on the high and low end to advocate for the in-between incomes. It does not involve making enemies of them.
It's Kaiser in northern California. This is an extremely common healthcare option. Yeah, we're rich. That's the whole point: even out of pocket prices for that plan are dwarfed by the gap in salary to the UK professionals.
$25k doesn't sound like a lot. Doesn't sound like it accounts for the difference in salary.
$25K is a lot.
Respectfully, You're out of touch until you lost your 6 digits job.
I’m not sure what your point is?
25K/yr IS a LOT.
Per the US Census, the median income in the US is a bit over 37,500, so it’s literally an entire paycheck.
Remember - the NHS is available to everyone, not just the rich.
Source: https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore...
You're misunderstanding how the ACA subsidies work.
According to article linked to below there are 48 million uninsured Americans. Fifteen percent of the UK population isn’t without coverage. The subsidies don’t work well.
That's not how it works for millions upon millions of Americans that are not fortunate enough to work at a job that provides tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare insurance as a benefit.
This line of thinking is exactly why the "American Dream" is falling apart; we increasingly place a handicap on some Americans and then wonder why some slice of America is not advancing generationally.
Americans who have jobs with health benefits that include Kaiser in CA is a whole lot of them in CA! It's a massive hospital system that covers 9 million people, a full quarter of the state.
Yes. Trump is looking like Brexit on steroids to me.
Yeah both the UK and US are notorious for NIMBYism. People filing lawsuits as like a hobby, because they want to stop all development. In these countries it's far to easy for a small group of complainers to grind the entire system to a halt and burn endless amounts of time and money. It seems particularly bad in the anglosphere.
It's particularly bad in the anglosphere because we have common law legal systems that are built around resolving personal disputes in court.
This has upsides -- it was a good solution to the problem in the 1200s of people solving disputes by fighting it out -- but in a modern context the downsides are pretty high thanks to rent-seeking lawyers.
I think the root of many problems is housing costs
I'm somewhere around your age, and I also wonder what the future of software development work looks like. I don't know that I'd direct my kids towards the field; maybe this is just a temporary bumpy patch and it'll improve, but it is hard to say.
One thing I think is that being 40-50 or so means that there is plenty of runway for a second career. Could retrain for something, nursing, cpa, lawyer, trades? Just have to have the savings for making that transition
My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening and closing constantly.
But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?
There are several root causes we can potentially drill further down to, but making headway will likely require hard work and involvement in our communities. You could always try running for something and becoming a politician.
Yes, I think we need to reform zoning and build like crazy. With everything costing a million dollars on the west coast, I don't see why there isn't a crane every block putting up a new building
Other than NIMBYs, zoning and code
I really think we could have a boom
Housing costs are both created by NIMBY and The Rich gobbling assets both Residential _AND_ Commercials.
Here's the thing: if housing cost goes up but wage goes up as well (wage is controlled by the Rich), then things will be fine.
But things aren't fine because Wage gets depressed, everywhere.
Totally agree about housing costs. After 10 years of paying high rent in the UK I've returned to Dublin.
Currently paying €1,300 per month for a tiny studio. (I'm told I'm lucky) So hard to build up savings.
The average price for a home in Dublin is now €600,000 according to our central statistics office. Unbelievable.
(The average annual salary in Ireland is €50,000)
Housing is a massive bomb because for so many people is is the singular investment that their net worth and retirement is held in. This idea has been so deeply entrenched for so long that a reversal will wipe out millions of people's net worth.
At some point the bomb will go off, but there's no incentive to look at the long term of 10+ years out when the explosion will destroy people's political careers in the short term.
Technically multiple bombs explode here and there. Here's how:
* Family bought 1 house (assets), big mortgage (cause it's expensive), live until retirement
* Parents sell the house (lost the assets) to either a wealthier family or investors to downgrade
* Parents potentially share the proceeding to the kids to support their Housing endeavor but Kids will be forced to buy something smaller (usually Condos) because detached is expensive and kids wage just starting from the bottom of the paygrade.
Long-term, middle class will erode.
You just touched on another one of my big concerns – Condos.
I love condos, but the older generations have no idea what modern condo living is really like and what maintenance is required for these kinds of places. They get talked about like 'starter' homes for young people that can't afford a single family house and so often they nudge younger people to buy them and 'get on the ladder'.
Often they are TERRIBLE investments though. Property tax is relatively high in most cities, ongoing fees are huge, governance is normally terrible, and every now and then something major goes wrong and the current owners are left with huge extra bills.
'Getting on the ladder' in this way, along with student debt really cripples so many people into a life of debt payments while building very little wealth.
I know so many people 20 years ago who "I'll sell my CA house and retire elsewhere" was a majority of their plan.
As of now, I can only count a very few who actually did it, turns out it's hard to leave where you've lived your entire working life to move somewhere you've never been, and the price differential isn't as amazing as it once was (since Covid flattened that out somewhat).
The ones who did end up doing it ended up following their children (who were priced out of where they grew up).
Normally you'd expect measured, predictable, steady inflation to be the method to "defuse the bomb" but so far that hasn't been really tried (if houses keep going up 1-2% a year, but inflation is 5%, you have a 3% drop in value each year even though on paper, you have an increase).
20 years ago is when the bomb probably could have been diffused, but I think the recovery out of the GFC put it on the back burner and then it was too late.
Housing should have been getting built like crazy in places like CA so that those people thinking of selling had a reason to sell. By not building houses property values keep booming, and even if you plan to sell and move somewhere it's easy to endlessly delay that decision when you're getting rich as hell.
The current global realpolitiks shows that unless you have a very heavy industry that you can invest in, to replace the cratering housing prices, no country is willing to blow it up on purpose. China is trying to strategically do it, but they still have so many more people that they can lift up, move around and put to work into different industries. It's just not really the case for developed countries. I'm assuming India will take the same course in the near future, but their challenges are a bit different.
Also, when supermajority+ have the same problem, it's in the interest of the government to do anything possible to delay the problem for the future generations. That's why I have reservations about US, Canada, UK, Australia and others doing the same thing. It also doesn't help when your entire population growth is depended on immigration, as you can, theoretically, keep the demand higher without many complaints, while limiting the supply.
There's also the Japan problem, but it's weird. In Tokyo we're seeing rental prices actually going up, as it's the only region where the population is growing for all the wrong reasons.
Oh well, good luck to us.
> top percentiles of household income but I'm not independently wealthy and I have no idea how my kids are going to make it
It might not be too late to change this. I also lucked into being in the right place at the right time (interested in computers and programming when graduating in the 2000s). But from the start my goal has been to take advantage of this extraordinary luck and become independently wealthy. My wife (who's not in tech but has a solid $80k - $100k job) and I have lived very cheaply saving more than half of our takehome pay for more than a decade now, investing it in simple index funds.
I, too, don't know what the future will hold for my kids or my career, but I'm relatively confident I've got 10 more high-earning years in me. And my spreadsheet tells me that will be enough to generate generational wealth such that my kids won't have to work if they don't want to.
This obviously isn't a solution for everyone, and I realize much of your post is about US policy. But I just wanted to point out the potential blindspot that you may have from your upbringing where "independently wealthy" people are those people over there, and not me. But with a high income and the magic of compound growth, it's not so unattainable.
Regarding housing the problems are the same everywhere where the same "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea. We can all get wealthy by buying houses from each other with ever increasing prices. In reality the only winners in this game are a) banks b) early buyers who can cash out, liquidate and move somewhere cheaper.
In my country of origin housing is now so expensive that it takes 2 median income lifetimes to pay for it. Of course you can find cheaper housing in rural countryside or in some deadbeat towns but then there's basically no work either, so at minimum you need a car to commute. For someone making a below median income operating a vehicle is easily -300€ / mo cost.
And the funny thing the country is 93% forest. Unzoned land is plentiful and costs nothing but after zoning the price goes up to 20k € per each m². The townships and counties have a monopoly on zoning and use that to milk the constituents for money. Of course that money is all away from other spending so local communities and small time businesses (such as restaurants, hair dressers etc) are all taking a hit since (with the recent greedflation) people simply have no more purchasing power left over.
In my current country Germany, here in Bayern the situation is exactly the same. In Munich a small unit in is at minimum 1-1.5m € and it'll be bare bones. The cost is insane. At the same time there's a shortage of all kinds of laborers. How does a "bus driver" afford to live here. Well, they don't.
The whole economic system is biased against younger generations and while the older generations live longer they accumulate all the wealth. They are a large representative of the population (due to the upside down age pyramid) and active voters so they of course vote for politicians who will not topple this order.
In the past all empires have fallen when the middle class has fallen. When there's a critical mass of people with nothing to lose and who feel like the system has failed them the heads will roll and revolutions will begin.
> "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea.
Lending money for housing is not insane. Houses are durable goods where most of the cost needs to be paid up front. The builder of the house is paying for a structure that will house people for 50+ years. This duration mismatch is exactly what lending is supposed to help with.
Lending is not the problem. People were complaining it was when interest rates were at 0%. Now they are at 7%, but housing prices are still high.
Lack of supply is the problem.
It's the lack of supply that is the reason why having a mortgage market is a bad idea.
You HAVE to live somewhere. This means any cash you can get your hands on, such as a mortgage, it's going to be used to compete with all the other people who need to live somewhere.
The problem can be solved in two ways. Either you make it really hard to get a mortgage, or you make enough houses that people are not competing over musical chairs.
Houses are not durable goods. Their value should go down as they get older (this is in fact how housing is valued in Japan for example).
And yes lending per se is not the problem, the problem is using lending to prop up this ponzi scheme that has artificially inflated prices due to constricted supply and then selling it to the citizens as a tool to "create wealth".
>"Their value should go down as they get older"
The average person needs a commodified asset that's useful to them from the onset - and builds value over time - in order to strengthen their possibility of upwards mobility now, and generational wealth in the future. A 401K does nothing for you in the 40 years you're accumulating it, a car depreciates substantially - as soon as after purchase, the stock market is oftentimes a playsake for the already well-off, there's simply nothing like housing for individuals in most sectors of the status quo "bell curve".
Upwards mobility? But that's exactly what younger generations can't do since housing is completely out of reach for them.
My example from Munich, a condo going for a 1m €. Median software engineer salary is around 66k € per year. Income tax ~40% so your take home is around 40k year.
That means that if you put all your net income towards your home you'd need 25 years just for the principle not counting interest or spending money on essentials such as food or energy.
So how do you do it? You don't. It's simply not possible unless you have exceptional circumstances (top %1 job, rich mom & dad etc).
This also means you now have no chance but to rent and and all your rent money just goes forward to the generations of individuals who invested in this ponzi scheme earlier or to the investment firms and businesses who operate in this domain. Regardless again all the wealth moves up the pyramid to the top.
Also even those older generations, all this "wealth" is imaginary. You can only realize your gains when you actually sell (so you realize the market price you sell on) and in addition you still gotta live somewhere, so to win in this game is to buy early and cash out by selling and then moving to somewhere low cost. (Perhaps retirement).
In summary, expensive housing is only benefiting those who already have amassed wealth and it's obstructing those who haven't from amassing any wealth.
We are completely in agreement. I'm in that younger generation, as well; I know.
> I have no idea how my kids are going to make it.
Brother, I feel the same way. The education system is broken, public discourse has degraded to illiterate thuggery and madness, and today's children and young adults are facing crushing economic rent-taking.
There are millions of people in the US that are making a lot less than you do who manage to buy houses, go on vacations, save for retirement and put their kids through college.
I’m 50 now, we purposefully “de-contented” our lives two years ago after our youngest graduated in 2020 and after Covid so we wouldn’t have to be in the rat race. I never made a lot as your standard enterprise dev and didn’t hit $200K+ until I was 46 and started working at BigTech remotely and we used the three years I was there to pay off debt, put some money in savings, etc.
I’ve turned down opportunities that would pay me close to $100k more in cash because I didn’t want the headache and definitely wasn’t going to ever be in an office. If you need me to be physically somewhere for a week, put me on a plane.
Even in 2020, I said no to interviewing as an SDE at Amazon because I didn’t want to relocate to Seattle after Covid lifted and I was only making $150K then. The remote position at AWS ProServe was then suggested.
We had the big house in the burbs of Atlanta in the “good school system” in 2016 built when I was only making $140K. True, when we sold it last year it was double the price. But we would have had to move further out if we were buying house in 2023. It would have been doable
Either way, we moved to a condo in Florida that is state tax free, we downsized to one car and now if I had to, I could pay all of our bills including our spending money with just my income and all I would need to make is $140K.
Making around $200k, I max out my retirement + catch up contributions + HSA and we have been on a plane to do something (mostly vacations, occasionally visiting friends) over a dozen times a year since mid 2022 and that trend is continuing for the foreseeable future
For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college and should be making way more than me in three years. I’m not bragging.
I have no other income besides my job.
I have no worries about “AI”, I moved into consulting working full time for consulting companies in 2020 (well then the consulting department at AWS). I just have to be able to sell and/or guide implementations of whatever the shovel du jour is. Right now I’m leading a Kubernetes + AI implementation.
> For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college and should be making way more than me in three years.
What bubble do you live in?
"US Tech Layoffs Continue In 2025 With Big Tech Scaling Worker Counts And Fintech, E-Commerce Sectors Reporting Total Shutdowns" - https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs/
"Computer science grads say the job market is rough. Some are opting for a ‘panic’ master’s degree instead." - https://www.businessinsider.nl/computer-science-grads-say-th...
https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1fylku5/are_most_...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/15/why-is-it-...
You do know that these companies still hire people don’t you?
In other Continents :-)
Well, he (probably not she) is describing expected earnings once hired, not chances of actually getting hired.
And more to the point, when I mentioned what I was making, I didn’t want to get the response that “you know you could make $400K+ by grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG”.
> For those who don’t know, a new grad going into any of the BigTech companies can make around $165K straight out of college
Maybe, if new grad is defined as:
- A remarkable programmer on their own time. i.e. Impressive Github profile, side projects, leetcode expert, etc. Just going through Comp Sci isn't going to get you hired at BigTech today.
- Someone with a fantastic network. Better hope you've got friends in high places or family with connections.
Go to salary.com and select any major city in the US and see what a senior software engineer makes.
Anecdotally, I spent my entire career between 1996- 2020 working local jobs in Atlanta. Which is not exactly a tech hub. Look at the compensation of your standard non tech well known companies that are either based in Atlanta or have a large presence like Delta, Home Depot, Coke, GE (GE Transportation), State Farm.
I’ve never studied a line of leetcode nor have I had a GitHub portfolio my entire career until 2021.
Yes, but how is that 15 year old going to do the same? What about the ones who don't end up winning the career lottery?
We need this to be possible for two people making 40k a year, not 140.
A new college grad across all fields has a median earning of $65K - $75K (https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/average-college...). No you can’t buy a house straight out of school. But you move up in your career just like everyone else does.
From that same citation, look at the median starting salary in engineering disciplines - over $100K.
The median household income of homebuyers is around $110K. (https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-finds-typical-home-buye...).
Most homebuyers are not single (https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/in-the-news/single-women-ar...)
Not sure what it proves to say, "People who own expensive homes have high incomes". higher prices filter out potential buyers with lower incomes.
I am not doing any such thing.
$110K is not a “high income” for two college educated people. It’s actually the combined new grad income.
And because of assertive mating, most college graduates marry other college graduates.
This is the home ownership rate by age
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...
"Household income" is often a joint statistic. $110K comes out to roughly 55K each. You're not making the assertions you think.
Yes I am
- the typical college grad makes $65K
- the typical homebuyer is not single.
- the typical household has two earners.
I guess I'm confused by your take then, and the evidence you use to support it. You stated "But you move up in your career just like everyone else does" from a 65-75K starting salary as a college grad, when your own figures show that the average household income is oftentimes comprised of two people making even less than that, but have reached the stage of upwards mobility to buy a house, albeit oftentimes "house-broke" and in strife to pay mortgages.
These people didn't move up, as per your assessment. Most people need to combine salaries with someone else to even have a fair chance in this system, to get any upwards mobility.
When I was single until I was 28, I didn’t even want a house. I wanted the flexibility of being able to move. In fact, I hated the maintenances of owning a single family home and as I mentioned in my first reply We downsized to a condo as soon as we could.
If you are single with no responsibilities but yourself in many major cities, you can make it off of $65K. Homeownership is not the only metric of success
People making less than that aren’t homeless and starving.
“People who get to work in the highly coveted, rather small, highest revenue-per-employee sector in human history should be just fine!”
Uhh yeah…
Well, first, the reply was to someone who doesn’t know how they will survive probably making five or six times what the median income is.
Second, I posted statistics where even the average college grad can still make it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42794546
Yes, why don’t you “just” get a job at BigTech?
The chances of that are approximately 0%, despite being a much better than average developer/IT person.
I did a back of the napkin estimate before from all of the sources I could find and the best numbers I could find was that the top paying tech companies employ around 10% of all developers in the US.
On the other hand, the average CRUD developer in any major city in the US can make $140K-$170K within seven years of graduating with strategic job hopping
They specifically select against folks like me (on multiple dimensions) so 0 * any-percentage still equals nada. I might be able to swing the second one when the market improves.
Get involved with local politics. Join community planning boards, go to city council meetings, and voice support for relaxing rules around zoning.
One of the small cities close to Seattle (Shoreline) just announced radical changes to their zoning laws! Change can happen. Right now Seattle is going through loud public debates over this, with NIMBYs going to meetings and shouting crazy accusations about what building more houses will do (recently: building dense housing will cause vitamin D deficiency...). Go spend an hour a month shouting back at them, it makes a real difference!
But even besides that, I feel that defeats the spirit of the American Dream. What good is making just my community better when the kids one town over are falling behind because they don't have the property tax base to fund better programs and wealthy parents that can pay for better early childcare, private tutoring, and more resources? I already live in a fairly well-off enclave; my concern is for the rest of my fellow Americans who are not so fortunate -- the same concern as Atwood; we've "made it", but we want a society that leaves behind stepping stones for others to make their way up.
So I am compliant when it comes to paying taxes and do not shun paying my fair share because in my view, taxes and government -- you know, of the people, by the people, for the people -- are supposed to be used to make all of America better and not just better for some Americans. But we've seen decades of policy bifurcating on this point. You may point out that spending on social programs have increased. Yes, but so has rent-taking on that spend and siphoning and accumulation of those funds in a few coffers.
> there's seemingly no political will to fix them
It's not no will, it's no incentive, and usually incentivized to not fix them. The same people keep getting voted in. What other message should they hear than their constituents are happy with the job they're doing? Over half of the American people just voted for someone who lied to our faces and promised they'd make things better when they posses a track record that proved otherwise the last time (and also now a felony record, but I digress). If I decided my career was going to be politics, and I kept getting elected, why on Earth would I ever change what was working?
Get them a Roth IRA. Put $7k in it each year as long as you can. Invest the Roth in an index fund, dividend fund, or straight up picks. Have them put into the fund as soon as they are able (summer jobs, etc)
If you have enough, buy another property. Your kids can live in it or manage it later.
Put stuff in trusts or be sure they can manage it effectively. The thing you most want (probably) is for them to be secure into their old age, long after you are gone. But they will start feeling secure by middle age, and you will all be happier.
The idea that most people just have an extra $7k a year sitting around to put into a retirement account they won't be able to access for decades seems pretty out of touch. A lot of people are just getting by. Additionally, if you live in a high CoL area, you might be prevented from contributing to a Roth even though most of your income goes to living expenses.
Some of the advice thrown around in this thread is so out of touch.
And even if I'm in a position to do that, the problem is that there are millions of fellow Americans (the majority) that don't have these "luxuries".Also the "buy another property".
Like, this is part of the damn problem.
As a non American, I've always struggled to understand the "American Dream".
It is about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and going from poor to wealthy by using the opportunities that the US provides. Is that a correct assessment?
The problem I have with that is that it doesn't in any way include bringing your community up with you or letting your wealth be reinvested back into the environment in which you were poor. It solves the issue only for that single person without addressing why the issue existed in the first place. It seems to be inherently "selfish", no?
As an immigrant, I define the "American Dream" as "opportunity regardless of social class". I think Atwood also hints at this in his blog post (as this is the reason he called out his upbringing and family).
This is in contrast to the system of nobility and "old money" in Europe and why many immigrants sought to find their way to the New World.
The idea of public education started in the US and for a long time has been one of the key public services that enabled this social mobility. In the US, historically, there were opportunities even for immigrants to become self-made men and women and their children would be better off than they were. Immigrants might arrive in the US illiterate, but their children would at least have the opportunity to be educated and find better paths.
It's still possible, but it feels as if the cards are stacked higher and higher towards those that are already coming from some wealth. I increasingly feel like the chances that my kids are going to be better off than me are decreasing every year because the stepping stones to success are becoming eroded.
Just fifty years ago you could buy a home by swinging a hammer for a few years. No degree needed. So it was a thing.
When you made it you would pay taxes, giving back to others. Not selfish.
That's still possible (and in some cases, plumber/carpenter/contractor is perhaps the best option still available).
What we're seeing is at least partially the result of everyone going to college for something like a few decades.
Deciding to be apprentice to a plumber at 17 is much different than having to do the same at 21/23 because the degree you went into debt for isn't panning out the way you wanted.
You're 4+ years behind, you're some amount of debt in the hole, and you're having to work hard.
(Average student loan debt is something like $37k, which isn't the cost of a house, but is certainly close to a down payment.)
You're right, my nephew bought a shack to fix up in Montana. But, I don't think that's what most people think of when they say the dream is alive.
America has a long history of promoting “rugged individualism.” Community is hardly ever part of the conversation, unfortunately.
Pretty much yes!
This is the problem, we don't agree on the solution. You said
> e hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??).
Except the USA spends more on education than most other countries.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
That would argue the issue is not about spending, at least for education, it's something else (not sure what)
I agree though on the general idea that something has to change. Housing in unaffordable.
you are me; down parents issues with smoking/etc and current career/age.
> I'm not sure how I can survive in the US once I can no longer find companies willing to hire me
My plan is simple: Retire. Avoid that 1m house when possible.
> I have no idea how my kids are going to make it
Same boat here, but I'm less concerned insofaras I'm doing everything I can to keep as many options/opportunities open to my kids as possible. This honestly significantly dampens the 'retire' plan; but what can you do? My parents would have no idea what I do if I tried to explain it; I expect the world to shift similarly by the time my kids are working. The goal is simply to give every advantage I can and keep as many doors open as possible.
If you think software engineering salaries are low in the USA, try working in Europe. A 'good' salary can be 30K or even lower after tax per year, and electricity costs twice as much as in the USA. In some places, even bottle scavengers earn more than software engineers in Europe.
Yes, but my sense is that in Europe, you can "survive" easier than in the US.
There are several key differences.
In the US, everything is spread out so you absolutely need to own a car in many low cost of living (COL) places; there's no option for transportation. In the US, healthcare can absolutely destroy you and you cannot get quality healthcare at a decent rate without a job that provides it as a benefit. Access to transportation networks is also poor compared to Europe and Asia where trains are abundant, fast, cheap, and accessible by wide networks of public transport. The way the US has been built out is not amenable to that in low COL areas.
So I acknowledge that there are lots of problems world wide in different countries and wages are lower and taxes are higher in general in the EU, but there are more social safety nets compared to the US. The baseline "cost of existing" in the US is simply higher.
Considering your upbringing, you're making some confusing statements. Somebody who was brought up low income but is now wealthy ("one of the top percentiles of household income") should know better. It's called living frugally.
It sounds like you're fearful of losing your luxurious lifestyle if your income changes. Most Americans are fearful of affording clothing, food and shelter if their income changes.
You're reading it all wrong.
Like Atwood, I understand my good fortune in life and I am ever grateful and humbled that I have achieved what I have starting from a 1 bedroom apartment where my entire family slept in one room.
Like Atwood, I want an America where the path of upward mobility and opportunity is available to all and not so blatantly biased towards the privileged and those that are already well-off.
I'm not concerned so much for myself, but for the two lives I've brought into this world and for the lives of the millions of Americans and immigrants that did not have my good fortune (and I'd say much of my own current status is a result of luck and opportune moments in life).
Like Atwood, I worry that we no longer have the will to create and pass legislation that benefits the masses at the expense of the few because those few now control so much of the channels over which our discourse flows (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, et al).
Atwood's solution and approach is to use his accumulated fortune to donate to organizations that seek to help other fellow Americans. Ostensibly, that's what good policy and taxation should solve instead.
Land value tax!
The more I sit with it's long-term policy implications, the more I think it would solve the lack of productivity, progress, and prosperity with modern society. It also has supporters from across the political spectrum because it represents a tax shift rather than a tax increase(even Nobel prize winning economists Milton Friedman(libertarian) and Paul Krugman(modern keynesian) are both fans - and they're pretty far apart when it comes to most policies!)
Short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg
Long version: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...
Wages have been flat against productivity gains since the early 1970s in the US. The only way to make it here is to invest heavily over a long time horizon.
> I walked in and thought to myself "wow, this is a $1m house" ... except it looked just like mine...that I had purchased 9 years earlier for a fraction of the price.
Thankfull, Trump's new EO regarding housing has it covered. The cavalry has arrived.
Hey Jeff! If you are reading this comments, I just want to say thank you! Thanks just for being a nice person. In this over individualistic world, you just shared what you know and helped other people.
I'm your fan since the beginning of Coding Horror. Shared dozens of your blog posts. Stack Overflow changed how everybody programmed. I started coding in a pre-Internet time, when you got stuck, you just got stuck. I'm from Brazil and never went to USA, but I hope someday I can buy you a beer or a coffee.
I know that this post will be piled under thousands of others arguing about housing and health care in the USA.
Interesting, it seems that extremely rich americans are discovering what scandinavian countries solve through taxation and effective government.
They used to have it in some form with 'new deal' and 'great society' until ~1970, but now they can't because of the very same reasons that are making them extremely rich.
Plus there's some fetisishation of efficiency of the private sector vs public one and distrust in public institutions, while in some areas I don't think it's warranted, it's just that public insititutions are more transparent than the private sector imo.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/elon-mu...
"Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.
So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."
This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think folks who don't live in America don't understand how dramatically different and worse the implementation of government is in America from many other countries who sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if the goals are similar.
This happens in private corporations, too. Most of us have gotten clearly bullshit resumes forwarded by HR.
I don't think you understand how bad it is in literally any large organization ever.
I don't know your background, so I won't say I don't think you understand - but in my experience, government is multiple times worse than any private organization. Yes, the same problems exist - but without any of the pressures that force private business to adapt or fail, so the problems are worse by far.
Yes, these sorts of posts strike me as rich people learning that being rich doesn't solve everyone else's problems. Better late than never.
Policymaking is never discovered. It’s forced. Like class struggle forced the hand of actors like FDR during his presidency.
Then that was forced away by the reaction (class struggle) of the most right-wing capitalists and ideologues which ultimately lead to neoliberalism.
So sure, there are some set of relatively enlightened capitalists that want more of a social democratic status quo for the stability it brings. But the material conditions are not there.[1] So people like Jeff Atwood will write opinion pieces and give what is the grand of scheme of things token material support. But it can’t realistically happen right now in the US.
Of course the same principles apply to Scandinavian countries. They’re (our) false ideology is called the Nordic Model.
[1] Look at Bernie Sanders. The Independent senator who ran for the ostensibly left-wing Democratic Party as a mere social democrat and was shot down by the Establishment. Now that he is too old to run again and the presidential election is done for you see people in the Establishment say things like, huh I think that guy had a point!
This is downvoted, but its true.
Actual change will not come easily and it is opposed mightily by the ruling class
I prefer my higher wages and lower taxes, thanks. We need to get a handle (moratorium) on mass immigration into US before we care about handing out more of our money for welfare. Why would I want my hard earned wages to be given to an endless influx of poor foreigners? The problem with higher taxes is the money is not spent well. Solve that and people are more willing to contribute.
Look at how badly run are the high tax cities and states in the US. Talk of taxing more without discussion of bad governance is a non starter.
I was raised in a low tax American state, and now live in a high tax one. The quality of life is so vastly better here that I could never go back.
Turns out those taxes actually build nice places to live.
As a counterpoint I moved to Massachusetts where the roads are among the worst in the country. My taxes apparently do not buy infrastructure maintenance.
I don't really get Mass in general. On paper it seems like it should be quite a bit nicer than it is in reality. I live in the Hudson Valley and feel like it would be a downgrade in a few ways. And for being a deep blue state they are pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.
>pretty far behind Cali/NY/Wash/Ill on things like food safety and health guidelines.
I know that state and local governments are responsible for inspecting restaurants. Also I know that NYC banned transfats in restaurant food. Is that what you mean by "food safety and health guidelines"?
Is it better for the people who live in the rural areas of whatever state you live in? Are the better areas affordable?
I’m far from a “disaffected rural White American Trump supporter” (yes I’m purposefully using a cliche). None of those adjectives describe me besides “American”. But a lot of people on the left (which I am when it comes to social issues) are very self unaware.
Being on the left, but specifying on social issues suggests you want someone else to pay to solve those social issues.
No, I have no problem paying taxes or government requiring business to pay taxes.
I don’t agree with the over and mostly dumb regulation of tech from the left and I think they over index on the wrong issues and the reason we are where we are now is because old folks on the left wouldn’t exit the stage when they should have - Supreme Court justices and Biden specifically.
I’m pro Vax and have been shot up with every vaccine imaginable including multiple Covid boosters. But the anti-vax movement was exasperated by Democrats trying to force the Covid vaccine on people
What are those states?
Although there is probably support for immigrants besides welfare, I believe that welfare itself is reserved for citizens.
And this is not a statement for or against immigration, but in response to what some people have said (not PKop, to whom I am replying): non-citizen immigrants do pay at least some taxes, in the form of sales tax. And, depending on how they are paid (cash or paycheck) they will also be paying taxes on their own pay. If they are getting cash it is easier to avoid taxes. It is harder if they're receiving a salary.
Immigrants from certain locations, which the vast majority of the waves of immigration we are getting in recent years, are net negatives in terms of budget impact, takers vs contributors to tax revenue. And yes, I agree with you on the perfectly logical and common sense position that welfare should be reserved for citizens.
Housing migrants in Hotels in US cities, paid for by citizen tax revenue, or guaranteed emergency health care, paid for by citizen tax revenue, among other examples are bad policy and unfair to Americans.
It's a non-starter to talk about having government do something that uses taxes like stopping people from moving past the line in the dirt.
It's a non starter to raise my taxes, fix your reading comprehension. Certainly, you wouldn't be surprised to know I think there's enough money to do this, and that I oppose the government doing other things but support the government doing this yes? It's just common sense.
America has a lot of taxation. Fortunately for the Scandinavian countries it spends it on "protecting Scandinavian shipping lanes" and "medical research grants that benefit Scandinavia", rather than solely on local welfare spending. The America First lot are learning a lot from Scandinavia there, though. I'm not sure we're all going to like where that could lead.
I can't immediately think of a major US naval deployment in the North Sea outside the big NATO exercises every 1-2 years. Were you thinking of a specific shipping lane?
It is very difficult to compare or extrapolate US with Scandinavian countries. US is socially super-heterogeneus, huge, and big population while Scandinavian countries are socially homogeneus, small size and population. And this is just the beginning.
This is just wrong, on many levels. If you look where tax revenues go, it's mostly defense (military industrial complex) and middle-class entitlements.
That's just wrong. Defense spending is 13% of the budget: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
Federal taxes are mostly spent on welfare like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, & SSI.
You just said that "the budget is mostly Y" in response to, "the budget is mostly X + Y"
I though America spends its taxation on destabilizing Middle East and flooding Europe and Scandinavia with migrants.
If Europe tried to do what America does for Europe it should dump military equipment onto various central and South American countries so they can fight among themselves and create droves of refugees traveling North.
The US has been destabilizing South and Central American Nations quite well on its own.
Selling StackOverflow for $1.8B in 2021 seems like a great deal now, doesn’t it?
Unless you're already minted beyond measure, selling anything at any time for $1.8B is a great deal, you and everyone you ever cared about are set for life.
Has there been any large business more decimated by the rise of LLM's than SO? Traffic in the tags I follow there dropped off a cliff pretty much the same day that ChatGPT was first released.
Makes me wonder which founders should be selling now...
I encourage everyone to read his actual blogpost linked in the article, it’s pretty good.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
Interesting
In the article:
> 34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote. Why?
In the referenced news:
> ... “Currently my biggest issue with U.S. politics is the response to the Palestinian genocide," Rojas said. ...
Back to the article:
> I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question.
> We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight.
Is there any serious polls show how many Americans choose not to vote for the same reason? is it a number so small that it can be ignored?
There is a poll about this that was recently released: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
Here's a quote from the poll:
So completely unrelated poll to the question?
Yeah, not directly related. Interesting though that most people who abstained from voting did have a issue they could name, and only 5% put down "Don't know" so this particular demographic may fall in this category (probably more complicated though).
That data is about people who voted in both elections, it's not about people who didn't vote in 2024.
> Interesting though that most people who abstained from voting did have a issue they could name, and only 5% put down
Nope. The poll is about people who did vote - not those who abstained.
> When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024
These people were "irrelevant" to the election outcome. Isn't it the case that if every 3rd party vote went for Harris, Trump would still have won?
"someone besides Harris" means Trump too, not just 3rd party candidates.
Good Drop Site News article about the poll providing context https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kamala-harris-gaza-israel-bid...
The article is wrong/misleading. It starts by talking about Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and who did not cast a ballot in 2024. Then it cites this poll, which is of a completely different demographic: Those who voted Biden in 2020 and did vote in 2024 (but not for Trump/Harris).
As I pointed out elsewhere, those numbers are so tiny they would not have impacted the election results at all if every single one of them voted Harris.
So anecdotal, but I think you have to consider the depressed turnout. From my circles, it's clear that plenty of Gen Z people (not just Muslims) either stayed home because of Gaza or (as in Dearborn, MI) voted Trump to protest Gaza. Gaza was a IMO a huge enthusiasm dampener for Harris.
>These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and housing are not compatible with the American Dream.
Yep, it's dead. Someone please make it official already. Don't worry about the autopsy or time/date of death - just get the death certificate already and let's move on.
Whether they want to replace it with something equivalent is frankly up to the rich people, college institutions, and home owners/sellers. Just guessing based on the trend, but that will also be a No.
Right now, it's really called "The American Survival Games". This isn't just fear mongering, you have to change your mindset. The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work. Now that is not the case and you constantly have to reassess what your work trajectory is going to get you and if it will be enough to survive the next day, but also survive the volatility of a very polarized nation changing its policies on a whim. You also need a backup plan for your job in case you just get laid off due to no fault of your own. And a backup plan for the backup plan because the hiring landscape might change.
> "The American Dream meant you were assured some level of survival in exchange for work."
I've never thought that was a common interpretation of the American Dream.
I've never thought it was anything but that. Work hard and be rewarded, that's the American Dream.
The distinction that ericjmorey is making (I believe) is that the reward is not guaranteed, only the opportunity.
Come on, haven't you heard that Trump has declared the start of a new American Golden Age? You gotta have some faith!
No seriously, this reminds me of another "Golden Age" which according to the propaganda happened under Ceausescu in Romania when I was growing up (https://princetonbuffer.princeton.edu/2014/01/30/tales-from-...), while in reality everything was falling to pieces. I just hope Trump's age won't last as long as Ceausescu's (24 years).
Actually life was pretty good for Romanians during the "Golden Age" compared to the rest of the communist period. The problem was that we lived on credit just like Americans and when it came time to pay it, things started falling off. Ceaușescu didn't invest wisely the money from the IMF, so he started exploiting everything and everyone to the max until the debt was paid off. Just a few months afterwards the Revolution happened and he was trialed and sentenced to death.
It's great. I'd suggest to make it an HN submission on its own.
It has been submitted five times [1] already, so that's covered. :)
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
What do you mean "suggest"? To whom? You should do it yourself if you think it's a good idea.
Obviously my suggestion was targeted at the person "Toutouxc" who has posted a comment I replied to.
I like Jeff. Way back when, I was a front page posteron SO, and #1 on the C++ tag. I got really fed up with the whole SO thing and I asked Jeff to delete my account and all associated posts. This really screwed up their SQLServer system (not at all my intention, I had a lot of posts) but he plodded ahead with it anyway, despite me saying not to bother. A good guy, IMHO.
The median wage for full time workers in the USA is ~60k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
The median house price is 357k.
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
So, on aggregate, for a couple who both work, a house is affordable.
And things aint gonna get any better..... The USA has the best economy in the world, and wealth redistribution is not on the agenda.
Back in the early days of SO, I listened to many of the podcasts by Joel and Jeff. Jeff always came across as an overall good dude. He seemed to want SO to be a helpful tool for developers, and wanted to do the right thing, regardless of the monetary implications.
On a more serious note - huch respect for SO, and props for Jeff for being so inspiring and now - generous.
The American dream is not at risk, nor is it fading out. In fact is has been entirely dead for sometime. Society is solidly rigged by long time rich and established players.
It would take a revolution to revive it.
The amazing part is that the constitution does cover how to go about this, with little actual combat.
The only thing that is needed is for a good majority of voter to tell the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans that their services are no longer wanted then clean house by voting in a new set of players from a new set of political parties.
It is totally legal, and it is even not that hard, IF you could pierce the indoctrinated dogma that Rs or Ds are the only choices or you are throwing your vote away.
Just getting the citizens who do not vote (141 million??) to become active would bring it closer.
You dont need a BILLION dollars to run for election. It is needed when you have to make someone utterly corrupt and removed from reality palatable to voters.
But even after a revolution brought about by an election the fight would be tremendous against the entrenched / swamp / deep-state / oligarchs / 1% / enterprises / lobby organisations etc etc .
But it is there for us to do.
Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...
There was a time when StackOverflow already had considerable size and it still felt as if Jeff knew and moderated every single post.
This is what made StackOverflow in my opinion. The excellent moderation in the beginning resulted in excellent quality.
Now, not taking away from the other early moderators, Jeff was definitely a huge part of it and one thing is for sure: He busted his ass off for this site and he deserves the reward.
I would say Jon Skeet busted his ass off :-)
https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
I don't think anyone deserves 1.8bln reward. Norman Borlaug perhaps. But good for Jeff. I think SO was immensly societally and economically valuable and most people who actually got 1.8bln are less deserving than Jeff is.
I cannot help but think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven... "Deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it".
Stack overflow was an invaluable resource for me as a developer. I got a wealth of knowledge about a bunch of thorny problems I was encountering with out paying anything. The people who answered the questions I had were able to help far more people than they ever could have individually without SO. I’m having a hard time being upset about his financial windfall. It’s really only a bait and switch for people who answered questions with some other unstated expectation than helping others or receiving help.
In aggregate, Stack Overflow probably saved developers far more time than anyone ever put in, and saved companies all over the world far more money than the founders made in their exit.
Creating more value than you capture has ways been the jam.
Also saved AI companies far more effort in gathering correct code for training.
Not just correct code, but also a whole bunch of incorrect answers, as well as votes and comments to help weigh the trustworthiness of each answer.
Your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make.
What was that?
The founders monetized a platform where unpaid contributors built 99% of the value by answering questions for intangible "Reputation". The fact that contributions were voluntary doesn’t negate the issue. It highlights it.
A system designed to extract free labor for massive financial gain, while offering only gamified rewards, reflects exploitative design, not fairness.
This is such an incomprehensible take. Every developer has benefited from SO. I’ve contributed to the site exactly because it’s been so good to me. I don’t need money on top of that. The website is the reward. Nobody cares about reputation.
Websites cost money to run, and I’m glad SO was so well monetized that it didn’t run out of money and get deactivated like so many of the old school forums we used to go to for help before.
See my analogy below in this thread about the public park...
What is incomprehensible is developers confusing the value created by the site, with the means of production of said value.
While contributing to the site might provide you with some personal feelings of value, maybe even a rush of altruistic euphoria... :-) An illusory sense of digital sainthood...Your unpaid work directly enhances the value of a platform that profits from selling the collective output, including yours.
This means you’re effectively donating your expertise to a for-profit entity, with no equity or share in its success
No one is forcing anyone to do anything, and everyone always knew what they were getting themselves in to. It was always a deal where everyone wins. That you don't like that choice for yourself is fine. No need to be so negative, dismissive, and cynical about how other people choose to spend their free time.
It's no different from creating an open source project, profiting from the free work of thousandths and then cash in a la JBoss or Redis.
If he wanted to give back he could have started with John Skeet.
Stack Overflow Inc. was always a commercial company. No one ever pretended anything else.
Now we are talking :-)
You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy.
Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.
It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.
I sometimes feel this way even about Google maps. On some level when I make a small contribution I'm aware that everyone doing so profits Google quite nicely.
But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from having Google maps as a resource, far more than the contribution I've made.
It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place that people help share information useful to each other, which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a way to monetize the sharing of this information.
Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or horrid really is a matter of perspective.
As I said above, your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make. You call it cynical I call it 1.8 Billion.
I remember reading Atwood's blog around the time he launched it, and from his writing, he seemed genuine in his desire to build a tool that would help developers write code. This was also right in the middle of the original gamification craze, so of course internet points lol
I remember reading his rants about just how bad the current situation was (which was a terrible website called "developers exchange" or public phpBB internet forums). Never underestimate the passion derived from sheer hatred of the status quo.
Also his backup strategies around 2008 were quite interesting.
> "developers exchange"
It was "expertsexchange.com" initially. Then they disambiguated it by renaming to "experts-exchange.com", just to be clear.
Awesome! I didn't know that about the domain name.
Ah yes, perpetually flagged by every corporate firewall that did substring keyword matching on DNS queries.
Incidentally, the amount of sheer content-masking garbage on their pages was what originally prompted me to install and learn (IIRC) Greasemonkey and a bunch of DOM/CSS stuff.
Do you think that the expertSexChange site that it was designed to replace had a more appealing business model?
That is how any social media website works including this one.
But my oh my, it was so much better than experts exchange.
i feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its initial impetus, literally "let's get together and collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"
for a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was still good.
The reputation was fun, but I saw it as a proxy for how much I’d helped people. That always felt good.
Is that better or worse than the traditional route, wealth by birthright?
Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
Many people landed good jobs that way. It was a good way for self-promo back in the day. Jobs stackexchange section was also way better than most other jobs boards at the time. It only went majorly downhill after the key people behind the site went away to work on other things and it got sold...
I also learned a great deal from answering questions.
And places like Wikipedia don’t even give you internet points! What dummies these contributors are.
Except Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10 website.
I agree that the Wikipedia model is better, but Stack Exchange posts are also under a Creative Commons license.
Nobody contributes to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow because of license. Most contribute because humans like sharing information with other people. If Wikipedia's eyeballs are low, people wouldn't contribute.
“If Wikipedia’s eyeballs are low, people wouldn’t contribute”
People were contributing well before it was a top 10 website. That’s how it got kickstarted in the first place.
Some people would still contribute. It’s an intrinsic drive. (But I agree with your point in general)
Except nobody is selling Wikipedia for 1.8 Billion. Do you see the difference? Congrats on totally missing the point.
So what? That neither devalues the contributions nor the value given to other people through the content.
Imagine this scenario:
A group of volunteers builds a public park, putting in hours of work, landscaping, planting trees, and creating a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy.
Years later, the park’s manager fences it off, sells it for $1.8 billion, and pockets the money.
When questioned, the manager says, “So what? The volunteers enjoyed building it, and people got value from the park while it was open.”
Your story about a park going from "public" to "private", with the manager tricking the volunteers into making something that is no longer public and pocketing the money, is a false analogy for multiple reasons.
1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name, network, software and system.
2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the content licenses, then the park is still open and public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion dollars. It's just in the commons.
Basically, while both the website and the content are valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that for free. It was used to buy the website, which has always been private and proprietary.
Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's content into proprietary. But neither happened. And that's why it's a false analogy.
You dismiss the volunteers’ role as if their work was incidental to the platform's success.
The brand, network, and proprietary systems you emphasize are valuable only because of the knowledge and content the community created.
The "bait and switch" lies in fostering a community-driven mission only to commoditize the platform for personal enrichment.
Not the least. Rational homo economicus pretty much doesn't exist in real life. The vast majority of us are driven by the essential motives and desires while the intelligence rationalizes already made decisions.
> Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
Is this how you'd characterise open source software contributions as well (minus the points, of course)?
I enjoyed the site and found it useful to begin with however it became a playground for people who felt they were know it alls to get recognition. A little ego boost if you will and that ruined the point for me, which was to get a varied response on technical questions.
One nice thing about ChatGPT, they won't judge you as a fool for asking an easier question.
It also doesn’t answer your question as if you asked a different one. So many stackoverflow conversations:
Q: I am looking for a way to do X in language Y.
A: You shouldn’t need to do that. What do you really want to do?
Argh. What I really want to do is exactly what I asked. If you don’t know, fine, but don’t try to steer me towards a question you do know the answer to. Just let someone else answer. Not everything is an XY problem[1].
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
It's a case-by-case thing. Sometimes in this big world you see people asking things like "how do I write a firewall wildcard rule that blocks all IPv6 addresses starting with the number '2'?" and you just want to reach through the screen and shake them by the shoulders and ask them if everything is okay.
I'd rather a Q&A site have a specific and correct A for every specific Q, no matter how ridiculous some user thinks the Q is. If I was open to re-thinking my design I would have asked something like "Please help me re-think my firewall rules..."
I do find those suggestions valuable 80-90% of the time. But in the fringes, on less popular questions, it’s really frustrating because I can’t just substitute it in this way because the situation is just different.
OTOH I'd love to have a model trained to address XY problems.
Of course ideally you should be able to ignore that suggestion and force an actual response
> Not everything is an XY problem
Pretty close, though.
Sure, but I find that this phenomenon is just different people thinking at different levels on the abstraction continuum.
One one annoying thing about using LLMs to answer technical questions is when you provide context like “I have tried X, Y already, and Z won’t work because…” it does what LLMs do— uses all the words in the prompt to string together more words into an answer. It would make LLMs so much more intuitive to use for technical questions if this problem could be solved… sounds so obvious that maybe it does exist?
I had mixed feelings about those that demonstrated their knowledge by answering the question extremely thoroughly with a lengthy treatise. On the one hand, their answer was a great resource for deeper understanding, on the other I just wanted a one-liner to solve my problem and go on with my day!
True, but that also sums up one of the junior dev problems often talked about on HN - those who use SO to get a direct answer that they can copy-and-paste, instead of an actual explanation to help them learn (and save them having to look it up next time).
Removed: duplicate comment
I realized seeing the picture on top that I have actually never seen his face before, only his well known avatar. Despite having read his stuff and following him for a decade.
Same here! I thought when I saw it, "ah, so that's what Jeff Atwood looks like".
Would that it had been a public benefit corporation or nonprofit; maybe I would still be contributing today.
Sure was better than ExpertsExchange, though :)
Oh, it wasn't ExpertSexChange?
True enough. I guess it's probably not beyond saving, either. It does have a pretty good core idea.
Making Stackoverflow the Wikipedia of QnA was a missed opportunity in hindsight.
This uber-cynical and uncharitable smearing of the story is unhelpful at best.
May I never be subject to this sort of misreading, and I hope you never are either.
meh. you're probably right. I edited and distilled it down to the main point. I just wish it were a nonprofit at the end of the day, I guess. It would've been the right thing to do. That he chose not to makes me sad. That he was rewarded richly for it, sadder.
> That he chose not to makes me sad
I'm not sure if it was really up to him; I doubt he owned a majority of the company?
I’ve seen the goalposts on “the American Dream” move a lot. It used to be, everyone can work hard and have a good life. Buy a house, car, raise kids on a single income with free high school education. It might be a historical fluke but that’s what it was.
Then it somehow became “anyone can become rich” and we celebrated the middle class origins of our billionaires.
Now it seems to be “we have the richest billionaires”.
People are being gaslit with metrics like GDP and stock index prices that measure the performance of corporations and the wealthiest Americans. But the reality is that American life expectancy has plateaued or going down, while the EU has blasted past us.
I miss the SO podcast that was fun
Side note I watch this guy's livestreams sometimes who was a big developer for Firefox can't remember how I relate these two together
This is very cool of Atwood. Also…my guy sold SO at the absolute peak.
I don't see any interview in the linked article, only some quotes. Am I missing something?
I asked and answered some easy questions as a student to learn more, then when I became a professional and got certified in Kubernetes and a lot of on the job experience I started answering kubernetes questions, getting quite a bunch of points and feeling good I was giving back something. They then decided kubernetes was not part of the main website and all questions should be asked somewhere else where you started from scratch. I never used any of their websites again.
I don't understand why they don't just pick 1000 people and give them $200K. See what happens.
Does anyone still use Stack Overflow post-2022?
Yes, several times a week. The process of just searching for something and reading SO answers is still just as good as ever.
Today I had a small amount of Google Sheets work to do, to extend somebody else's work, and I had both Claude and ChatGPT hallucinating mythical function names, and not understanding array functions with utter confidence and certainty. StackOverflow results from a web search gave me the answer faster, in the end.
> hallucinating
I hate the use of this word to describe when a sentence completer gives a wrong result. To hallucinate you have to have a concept of reality. Which those models don't have. They're just mathematical tools which some times manage to give a result humans think as human-like.
I don't work in LLMs, but I use a ton of similar tools to model biology, and I really like the term "hallucinate." I would argue that the LLM does have a concept of reality, in the form of a probabilistic distribution over sentence structure. And that probability distribution does not match the reality that I live in, even if it matches the LLM training data and training procedure fairly well. I would argue that even a simple random forest model has a concept of reality, or maybe is a concept of reality, though a faulty one.
Do you also hate when prooor use the terms like debugging, serverless, non relational databases (all databases model relationships), etc?
LLM are the reason I get bug reports like…
Them: “why doesn't this thing work I your OSS lib, whereas it works in this other OSS lib?”
Me: “does it? it's not supposed to.”
Then: “oh idk, ChatGPT told me so.”
Not to mention, such sites often have a discussion, with pros and cons of certain tacts, why some methods may be pitfalls, and more.
Such sites help you understand why, far more than a distilled down response of a LLM. Such sites help you learn.
Knowing the why, is often far more important than the how.
Ironically enough, the LLM was better at explaining trade offs and new syntax, and I learned more about the topic from the LLMs, largely from observing the unintended effects of their incorrect instructions. It was just dead wrong on several key details and when it didn't know how to do something it answered with BS with just as much confidence as the insightful parts, which would be infuriating from a human, but merely time wasting from the LLM.
Yes, for non-work things I find it vaguely useful. My workflow is to first google search, often see Stack Overflow answers, and then move on to an LLM or actual documentation if I don't get anything through search.
I do it this way around because I can search far faster than I can write out reasonable english sentences that head-off bad LLM responses.
Sometimes when I'm confident enough that the LLM will be able to give me the "right answer" faster than search I'll do it first, but that's mostly when I have something I can copy/paste in.
My experience with LLMs has been different. I give it trash prompts and it gives me reasonable responses. I think it's figured out the space between what I type and what I want. That's great. Until we get an input which allows it to figure out the space between what I type and what I think. That doesn't even sound too bad, because now I can just think and it'll happen. I look forward to this future, sounds wonderfully efficient, which would finally give me the time to do that thing I really want to do but don't have the time right now because we're not efficient enough.
But no, my experience is different with regards to the ratio of quality of input versus output. I think we all do a subconscious ROI of whether typing that little extra will yield an output that's going to be that much better that it was worth the time and effort.
Or much more likely I'm just lazy.
If I know what I want, just not exactly where, I'll go straight for a search. But if it's more fuzzy then LLMs has totally changed how I acquire knowledge.
Now I find it more productive to ask an LLM to get some keywords or similar which I might search for afterwards.
The great thing about LLMs is that, unlike a search engine, you can tell it "no, not quite like that, more like this" to guide it.
Then why not just tell the LLM to do the search for you?
ChatGPT has had built in web search for over two yeass for paid users
Is there a psychological term for the self-centred thinking where a person thinks "I've stopped using X, therefore everyone's stopped using X"?
That's a thing on YT comments "Does anyone else [insert generic thing everybody does]" boom many thumbs up
Yes and people still watch TV even though you haven’t owned a TV in 20 years (tm Slashdot 2002)
I do, I don't use co-pilot to code or LLMs much other than for work until I find a personal use for it. I like other fields of AI more eg. ML/computer vision.
I still use to find answers to problems, but less often than I did a few years ago (thank you chatgpt et al) and I search via my browser (thank you Kagi search adjustments) not via the site's search.
I haven't posted questions or answers for years. Too many petty, officious people and general toxicity.
Yes, of course I do. Why wouldn't I?
At least for me, I've found chatgpt to be a good Google replacement. It might be helpful beyond that occasionally, but it really excels in spitting out existing data.
For me it depends on what I need.
Google -> stackoverflow is typically much faster than chatgpt.
If you are a fast typer and can formulate a short question then you can often get from thought to answer in well under 10 seconds.
With chatgpt there is a small thinking delay then often a long token sequence of filler before you get the few lines you're looking for.
ChatGPT shines compared to stackoverflow for something you know that requires a dialog of prompts or you're asking it to write some specific code instead of just finding out how to accomplish a small task with very clear syntax.
It sounds weird but google seems like it used to be scary accurate back in the day, but results for me seem a lot muddier than they used to be in the past few years.
For me, Google started to fail when they decided to start dropping parts of the query. And inevitably, the crucial ones.
E.g. I wanted to search for "CUDA on Fedora 41" and Google "helpfully" drops the "41" number from the query!
So I have to notice that and click on "41" to force the search.
I search it for things that are outside regular documentation.
However any contributions (answers, questions) are directly related to something I'm working on. There's no community (or certainty that your work will not be marked-as-duplicate) which would justify a more-general kind of helping-out.
Deleted all of my accounts. It's not worth it anymore.
I don't think I find any useful, recent answers
Many including me
Not that many judging by the two answers. Even 100k is too little relative to the number of English speaking devs in the world
The answers are only 18 minutes old. Give it time.
I had to write a powerscript last week. I lifted 90% of it from 2 or 3 posts in SO
Yes, I still answer some few questions if I know the answer.
Sure, why not?
yea, mate. i still use it to read some questions and answers.
OpenAI
Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people that he has spent billions in “philanthropy” to destroy the public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools.
The point is that even something noble-sounding like giving away your fortune still tends to enforce the current system and simply create more wealth inequality. In this case, charter schools are simply a massive wealth transfer from government to the private sector.
Atwood left StackOverflow years ago but he’s been there for years. We can only speculate as to what he made from the sale. I’d guess 10-15%.
I just hope his altruism goes to something of public benefit.
"Anytime Bill Gates comes up, I feel the need to remind people that he has spent billions in “philanthropy” to destroy the public school system. He is a his backer of charter schools."
Many public schools are shit and I applaud his effort to come with alternatives instead of forcing everyone to get a poor education, until these problems are actually fixed.
That's by design. It's a strategy pioneered by Ronald Reagan called "starve the beast" [1]. Basically, you starve a public institution of funds and then use the inevitable failure for gutting it entirely and likely privatizing it.
We're seeing this in real-time in Texas [2] in particular with Abbott's takeover of the Houston ISD and the blatant corruption and racism going on with the Keller ISD.
Also, charter schools aren't cheaper either. They cherry pick students. Public schools don't have that luxury.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/campaign-to-sabot...
The public school funding models in the USA are variable, even by county, they can't be controlled or set by the top down, and the fact that the USA spends more than the OECD average disputes everything you are saying.
That's false [1]. USA is like #6 in per-student spending. It's even lower in terms of GDP [2].
[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/policy-issues/education-finan...
[2]: https://webfs.oecd.org/els-com/Family_Database/PF1_2_Public_...
It is too bad with any type of philanthropy, somebody can find a reason why it is a negative for someone else.
Sounds good and noble to me. Most public schools are terrible and should be destroyed.
StackOverflow has a very successful gamification model. People just give them free labor voluntarily because they like to ask questions and even moderate. Perhaps also fueled by the naive libertarianism of the Californian Ideology.
Imagine a world if more of the centi-billionaires were more like Gates trying to cure diseases and make the world a better place.
I’m not advocating for the compelling of folks to be forced to give up their riches (Ill gotten or not) just imagine if people were better versions of themselves.
Instead of worrying about how hard it is to give away their money effectively these billionaires should be working to fix a political system created specifically to funnel money to billionaires. Without fixing the actual problem giving away money is just virtue signalling.
Unless you are among the uber wealthy -- wealthy enough to control communication channels -- it's very hard to change the political system.
Today, many Americans consume their information from social media and an shrinking number of "traditional" media sources that are largely controlled by a few entities.
It is very difficult to affect discourse in a meaningful way that can then move policy by getting people to vote.
A fairly tame start (i.e. not overtly against their own money-making interests) would be to support voting-reform to one of the many many options that are superior to plurality/first-past-the-post voting.
Insofar as regular-businesses like predictability, this would actually be good for them. Fewer dramatic changes from slim margins every election cycle.
If you click through to the original blog post[1], you will see him advocating for exactly this.
>Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.
[1] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
Jeff is specifically donating money to causes which improve the political system, enfranchise (not dis-enfranchise) voters.
Why would we expect someone to not only have the insight on how to fix society, but actually be able to reshape it, just because they are a billionaire? Giving resources to those who need it might be the best way to help for some.
Without morally condemning them:
Accumulating that much wealth means you were in a frenzy. It’s good he snapped out of it. Take someone like Elon or Bezos, 10 billion is not enough, 100 isn’t, 200 isn’t. We have people that are still in a manic greed phase.
It’s karma that the ghost of Hitler possessed Elon’s body. Simple greed can destroy a soul too. You have no idea the supernatural forces that will dock in your soul if you make it a comfortable nesting place.
The fish stinks from the top
"A fish rots from the head down" is the saying. And since neither Jeff nor Joel are the heads at SO anymore I'm not sure of the relevance here.
But we can all agree that they made a wonderful fish that has helped millions of developers (including myself) over the years.