I've always wondered why we don't make student loans similar to other loans; IE, dischargeable in bankruptcy, and thus force lenders to evaluate credit risk when making them. That would mean less loans are issued and schools must cut costs and borrowers must pick more economically advantageous programs.
"We will pay for it, but it's a loan so not really" is a fallacy. If we decide that education is an all around good thing so we want to subsidize it, great, but let's just do that directly.
Which might seem like a bad thing but remember why we got into this mess - private loans are often predatory! Private lenders understand the nature of young adults and absolutely used that to their advantage.
Then people would complain that disadvantaged students are being denied high education, because such students inevitably are going to have worse academic prospects than well off students, and therefore can't get student loans.
So you expect private lenders to be on the hook for delinquencies and put them in charge of assessing credit risk, but then at the same time kneecap them by not allowing them to see any information about the lenders aside from what degree they're studying? Seems like a shitty regime where the smart middle class students (not rich students, because they don't need student loans) bears the burden of subsidizing all the bad students.
Money-market accounts are not covered by government deposit insurance. But money-market funds make a return for themselves by investing their customers’ cash in risky assets, similarly to a bank. If there’s a run on your money-market fund akin to the bank runs we’ve recently seen, the FDIC isn’t going to save you.
(Kinda. The other big distinction between a bank and a money-market fund is that the latter don’t indulge the farce of “demand deposits”. Money-market accounts are fixed-term securities, so you’ve agreed to lock up your money until some agreed upon future date, just like with a bond. That might be inconvenient for you, in comparison to a bank account, but it vastly reduces the complexity the fund faces in matching maturities of liabilities and assets to minimize run risk. As a result, together with stricter regulatory controls on their risk-taking, money-market funds fail much less often than banks do. The last time a US money-market fund broke the buck, in 2008, during the last financial crisis, the Treasury stepped in to make investors whole.)
Yes, really. The Treasury guaranteed dollar-for-dollar redemptions for all investors’ holdings at the time the RPF broke the buck, following Lehman’s failure several days before [0, 1]. Only those who speculated on the value of the fund after that time lost money, and very little.
Your second reference makes it quite clear that nobody was “made whole” by the program:
“Participating MMFs were required to have an NAV at or above $0.995 on September 19, 2008 (Department of the Treasury 2008f). Architects of the program chose this cutoff to prevent damaging runs while at the same time not curing “losses that had already been sustained (because of credit mistakes) at the few funds that were already in trouble” (Shafran 2020).”
“There were no losses, and the Department of the Treasury did not make any payments through the Guarantee Program, generating a surplus of $1.2 billion in fees.”
You’re right, sorry. Reserve Primary was the only fund whose NAV was below the Treasury’s qualifying threshold, so it did not participate in the guarantee program. I had the mistaken recollection that Reserve Primary’s NAV had returned above the $0.995 level by the 19th, but that was not the case.
(In fact, the SEC ended up suing Reserve Primary’s managers for making misleading statements after breaking the buck that they would restore a $1 NAV, which they did not do. Reserve Primary’s investors had an eventual recovery as of 2011 of 99.06% of par value.)
Of the funds that participated in the Treasury’s guarantee program, none were liquidated likely because the program succeeded in stemming the run on the money-market sector. As I’m sure you know, the whole point of the Treasury’s guarantee was to give money-market investors confidence that their money was safe so that they would not redeem their shares and the funds would not need to liquidate assets for payouts.
It worked, and I think it’s clear that the Treasury’s backstop, by ending the run, prevented fire-sales that likely would have led to the liquidation of further funds in the absence of government intervention. That was the point I was making in my original comment: despite the lack of a formal equivalent of deposit insurance for money-market funds, the government did step in to backstop investor’s money in the sector during the only episode in which there was a need for it.
Edit: Whoops, also noticed that in my original comment above, I twice mis-wrote money-market account. Everything we’ve been discussing relates to money-market funds (more formally, money-market mutual funds), not money-market accounts. The latter term is another name for savings accounts at a bank, which of course are FDIC-insured. (The two are related in that the cash put into both gets invested in short-term, low-risk government and commercial bonds, the markets for which are collectively called “money markets”.)
Also the risk for money markets is breaking the buck, not going to zero like an AT1 bond or something. There is a very small risk of losing a very small amount of money and there is a slightly larger risk that liquidity takes longer than expected.
There are many situations, especially as a middle manager, where you are incentivized to play organizational games more than actually deliver.
We (I'm a middle manager myself) Aren't stupid, so we will.
More headcount and influence means more (at least potential) business impact, and often promotions. If the organization encourages us to fight with other managers to get more of that, that's what we'll do instead of running our organizations better.
This is a really good article on the subject. I like the 6 factor model.
It's really easy to see hours as the only real problem. But they really aren't. Another article I read talked about how people who are constantly ruminating about work but work about 40 hours are at a higher risk for health impacts than those working many more.
I know this personally; I'm currently on a leave of absence because I burned out. And no amount of 'boundaries' around work kept it out of my thoughts all the time.
It really was about the other factors in the six factor model. Values drifting. Loss of control. Worsening relationship with my lead and no real peers to work with.
It would have been very different, even with more work, if I felt like I was part of a team trying to solve problems, rather than trying to put out the latest needless fire my boss created.
Agree, hours have very little to do with burnout, unless your talking about the colloquial burnout which seems to be used as a synonym for fatigued or exhausted.
I've been a workaholic all my life, often working 80 - 100 hours a week for years on end, often in stressful situations. That didn't cause burnout or anything like it.
What ultimately got me was developing a quick but complex POC that became business critical seemingly overnight. Nothing worse than knowing that a hidden bug in something you coded over beers one night could cost 5000 people their jobs in a matter of hours, and having execs want you to move on to the next big idea instead of providing appropriate resources to carefully rewrite and thoroughly test. The depersonalisation such prolonged stress can cause is really hard to convey.
Yeah, in 1918 the sort of car centric sprawl that is ubiquitous now would be unheard of. It's doubtful that removing school would have removed social interaction the same way it does now.
That isn't to say that the OP was protected regardless. But the mindset that lets you do this is a mindset that comes from a background of abundance. Where you can always get another job if you want one, where you always have friends or parents who will bail you out or give you what you need.
A background where things just always seem to work out.
Another way to look at it (especially for those allergic to the idea that privilege may apply to their own outcome) is that ambition, risk taking, and entrepreneurship are evenly distributed across all socioeconomic classes, or close to it.
It's just that some distinct socioeconomic classes have the capability of failing and retrying very quickly, due to moneyed resources.
Contrast that to the person without assets or access to capital, they save up, take a chance, fail, and now have to wait maybe 10 years or more to get to the same place with jobs. And with time, there is error introduced, divergent paths, life changing events, or simply competing priorities as the years keep going by. Alternatively, everyone else in their similar situation rationally decides not to bother, a good network for them is one that exposes them to basic personal finance gurus on odd forums and youtube, who give them generic advice that works for a broad population.
On the concept of privilege, there is no parade and red carpet that gets rolled out, you just wake up one day and realize that you don't have to apply for jobs to maintain food and shelter, and that your bank account also has enough to make that seed investment or hire developers. So, if you're willing to play your cards, you play them. Enough people are willing to and their successes wind up outnumbering the poorer people that want to play tech entreprenuer.
> So, if you're willing to play your cards, you play them. Enough people are willing to and their successes wind up outnumbering the poorer people that want to play tech entreprenuer.
Writing, literature. The word play is used in reference to the use of play in a previous sentence. I think it's a common colorful writing technique.
there is a distinction between "play your cards" and "so, you want to play tech entreprenuer?" but i guess you are so far up capitals arse, you got tone deaf
The author goes on to talk about how there should be a leisure class (basically an aristocracy) and that should be “people of means”. So it’s not even hidden really, it’s just a cementing of the increasing wealth divide more throughly into the political sphere. Neo-Victorianism or something. The working class, literally called “wage-slaves” seemingly unironically in the article and their betters.
The poor have plenty of government support. You can live the liesure lifestyle if you choose to. I used to work 30 hours a week @$9 per hr and pay for an apartment, vehicle, and all of my expenses. The work (cook) was fun and I had a lot of free time to explore tech.
Right after that I got a job as a mechanic and then was laid off. I spent two years on unemployment. I have actual real memories from living a good life during that time. Developing software, hanging out with friends and family, fishing tributaries (walking for hours through a creek or river), tinkering with cars, and reading everything I could get my hands on about world events.
I barely have any memories from when I was trudging through 50 hours a week in a job. Except for those times where I was at a startup trying to change the world (80 hrs a week). But that was an event where I could see the beginning and the end.
Not sure if this was the intention to say it like that.
For me, the interpretation is that when you have time to pursue your own interests, you discover something that is worth fighting for.
I had 2 months off a job and it was the happiest I have ever been because I spend it on researching and discovering problems that I care about. But it was due to the accessibility to "leisure"
I mean maybe, but hn has a primary tech audience. I bet 70% of us here could quit our job, take some risks,go bankrupt, get a new job, all with only mild consequences.
Yes that's privilege and it doesn't apply to everyone but its not an obscure level of privilege. You don't need to be a multimillionaire to have it.
> If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so.
The essay is calling out people of means directly and telling them to stop wasting their time.
If you have the means, it is your real job to do so.
The entire article is a call to build a leisure class. Not whisky and xbox leisure. Newton and Seneca leisure.
This doesn't smell like privilege, it is privilege. But it is highlighting not only the opportunity of that life, but the duty.
The idea that only the rich are able to take risks - or even think about it - is a bias, and an ugly one at that.
It doesn't match history - the only reason we have many good things is because poor people took major risks - and it's part of the tyranny of low expectations that is seeping deeper every day into the fabric of our culture.
It's a remarkably effective way of keeping the pours in their place in the name of "empathy" and "awareness". It's akin to a humblebrag where that the rich can talk bad about themselves while shoring up their position.
And it's a kind of talk that I as one of those pours have zero patience with.
> It doesn't match history - the only reason we have many good things is because poor people took major risks
Check your history again - most of the people who made scientific discoveries or breakthroughs were people of means, or otherwise didn't have to do "real" (paying) work[1] and could afford to dick-around with experiments all day long for months on end and not starve.
1. In history - i.e. from dawn of time to about 1950-ish, when research universities and corporate/government R&D matured.
Where did I say science? Many modern scientific disciplines are by their nature exclusionary because they require access to specialized equipment and space, so of course that's somewhat of an exception to my generality.
And I say somewhat because historically a surprising number of breakthroughs did not happen in a lab, nor were discovered by professional scientists. I took a course in the history of science and tech and the primary lesson pounded into us was how often breakthroughs were accidents made by amateurs.
And among the names of poor scientists are folks like Tesla and the early Einstein I mentioned earlier. So my point stands, even extending a little bit at least here.
You didn't - I said science since it's a specific subset of "many good things" in history that has a clear written record I'm familiar with. Do you think science should be excluded? If so, which fields did you have in mind? Philosophy? Political theory? Economics?
I would hope it is obvious I am not talking about the period prior to the modern age in which the only people who could read were rich.
Because that says nothing about mindset, which is the claim I was replying to.
To test his mindset theory, we have to go to a period in which raw non-monetary resources - the most basic of which is the ability to read - is distributed among both rich and poor. And then you see - do the pours do anything?
And they do, across the vast majority of fields - including even science, which I edited my reply above to include. I'm shocked indeed that this is even being questioned. I'm coming from a humanities and social science background and so that's my primary frame of reference, but my understanding is that while it is not the rule of course they are widely a not insignificant minority among those who have made significant contributions. And obviously an even larger group if we include not only the poor but also the "non-privileged" which is who the OP to this particular thread was throwing into relief.
Of course everyone can take risks, but the consequences of these risks backfiring, are vastly different based on available monetary resources.
A wealthy person may well sink years and piles of money into a dream. If it doesn't work out, meh, that's life. Back to some well paid job and preparing the next try.
Person in strained financial position doing the same and it backfires: May well take years to get back on ones feet, and may even end up in a homeless shelter.
The person who I responded to said "the mindset that lets you do this is a mindset that comes from a background of abundance" - implying that pours have a mindset which doesn't "let them" take risks.
And it goes without saying that the rich have it easier. That doesn't make it their exclusive province, nor indeed should it. It's not exactly as if the risk-free pour life is exactly paradise anyways. When I fell from working class to vagabond in fact it was a significant step up.
It's not that the ability to take risks is fundamentally different, it's just that if you're rich, the consequences of failure will be easier to deal with, allowing more risk-taking and thus more chances at success.
> the tyranny of low expectations that is seeping deeper every day
Thank you. I agree and in fact I didn't post my initial response because it was too snarky. HN seems to have this idea that people will only take risks if the downside is minimal or a minor career setback. It completely ignores an entire class of people "who have so little that they have nothing to lose."
i agree, though it's not just a bias. it's a lie, meant to keep those who don't have the capital to sit the fuck down and work for their employers like the rest of them.
especcially since time and time again those poor people who do contribute major inventions, without having much capital, have been, one could say, robbed of their invention by people who do have lots of capital.
yeah of course money was exchanged, but not in relation. yeah of course nobody can say how well an invention will lift of, but should be considered in the exchange of goods. that makes it to expensive for the buyer as they cant be sure the risk is worth it when really considering it? then you are an non-Lisper: you know the cost of everything, but the actual value of anything? nah....
money has to go. there is no other way. we need to stop valuating things with money. or rather: at all. Value is a synthetic property, imagined by have's to keep stuff away from have-not's, enforced by the state, who has a lot but is really nobody, since we made it so easy to distribute blame across periods of governance. (not saying we should embrace a kazakh model, just we should be all equal workers)
I don't think this person is considering the single mom who has to work multiple minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet; the people who have never had any opportunity to have any sort of "network" to magically get another job.
When you're in that position, you're constantly exhausted because of how much you're working. You have no savings. You absolutely cannot afford to just "quit" and have things work out.
There is never a suggestion that the single mom working multiple minimum wage jobs to make ends meet is the target.
> If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so.
I "retired" for about ten years. I chose to be poor and just focus on raising my kids and being home with them. I discovered what it is this guy is talking about. I was able to focus on personal projects and learning about the world.
I applied all of that and reentered the corporate world like a beast. It is now ten years later and cannot wait to "retire" again. I miss being able to think about things and live life without the narrowing constraints imposed by wage slavery.
You can't understand how liberating it is until you try it but it takes a lot of faith in yourself.
and friends with money, nobody financially depended on him, probably savings to live not just from unemployment benefits (that would even make networking challenging financially I guess)
Yeah it can come from a background of abundance but does not mean it is not a good attitude to have. I have spent most of my life with an attitude of scarcity and I was jealous of others. It held me back in so many ways and made me unhappy. Now I try to live with positive outlook on the future and try to make things happen with a belief that things will work out some how in the end. Impoverised people could benefit from some of this thinking (balanced with realism) since it could help improve their circumstance.
Figure out what motivates you and what drains you. Do you feel drowsy every day regardless of what's going on, whether it's a work day or the weekend?
Do specific things or tasks take energy from you? It might be that meetings sap your energy. Or, if you're extroverted, meetings might give you energy.
Sometimes it's bigger things - like a job that's just not interesting any more. Can you shake it up with different tasks and challenges?
Or maybe it's burnout, which can manifest as constant fatigue. Maybe you need a break. Maybe that break is a small one during a hectic day, or maybe you need a break from your current life situation to recharge.
Physical health absolutely matters, but don't forget the mental aspects. If you just aren't finding your current situation stimulating, that might be a signal about the situation, not just your body.
I can't speak to being a CEO - I'm just a middle manager - but a lot of this, especially the loneliness, resonated with me.
Did I choose management? Yes. Do I have a choice to stop? Also, yes. Do I make enough money either way to have a nice apartment and no real material concerns? That too.
But I'm definitely stressed and lonely. I'm really not sure if this is what's best for my mental health. From the article him and I aren't the only ones with that feeling. My boss, too, has talked about feeling exhausted; when we have events for leads, it feels like we're even more burned out than the rank-and-file.
Lonely is easy to explain. The more you move up, the fewer peers you have. The fewer people you have to look up to and emulate. The more "on your own" you are, expected to operate independently and direct more folks. There's less of a playbook. More acting by intuition. More people looking up at, depending on, and often resenting you. Your relationships with communities of coworkers changes. When they're upset, rather than joining in on the griping and feeling camaraderie you feel either vaguely responsible or unaware of what's really been going on. Whatever it is not just a thing to bitch and moan about - you're responsible.
The stress comes from the same place - feeling a sense of responsibility for all the people in your org, for the company, all of it. It's a much bigger scope than your IC responsibility. It's hard to let go of, to accept that you might not pick the right 2 or 3 of 100 things to focus on, and when you do, there are real consequences for real people. With that kind of scope you're making a lot more mistakes just because there's so much more surface area. Those mistakes matter, too! Hire the wrong person, ignore a team that needs your attention? These are big painful mistakes. People might quit, their careers might languish, an asshole might make people miserable, customers might have a bad day(/month/quarter/etc), etc.
You have to accept a lot of failure in this very difficult job with a huge scope and no real rules or guidance, but that's hard when you're a competitive, success-oriented person.
"But you can quit!" is a valid argument. One the article addresses - it says it takes years to set up for a CEO. For me, it's shorter, but I still feel like it's something that you can't just hire an eager replacement for - for a bunch of reasons. Pick the wrong person, and again, lots of consequences to people you care about.
Somebody in leadership did quit without notice recently - and I saw all their reports bump up to their lead, who was already way stretched thin. Those people won't have real support for a long time. Their new lead is really stretching himself very thin. I hope the person who quit is able to find peace in it (genuinely, I don't think they wouldn't have done it if they felt there were alternatives). But I know I wouldn't be able to.
Sometimes I wonder if there would be an equivalent to a Dwarf Fortress tantrum spiral. Somebody quits, their team flows up, that person then snaps, etc, until half the company is reporting to a handful of people. (and imagine how responsible the CEO would feel if that happens?)
I think the origin of "Staff, Senior Staff, Principal" came from an attempt to create an IC track. You've been around a while, and you can execute stuff well on your own, where does your career go from there besides manager?
The fact that the assumption was manager is why we have a lot of these problems, tbh. I hate managers who hate managing but that's a separate discussion.
Also funnily enough I was just having a discussion how my company's career ladder explicitly says (in bold!) that promotion is not a reward. If it's not, what is it? What is the reward for hard work and growth, if it isn't that?
Ultimately what I see underlying this article and many like it is an assumption that, at least at an "enlightened" company, politics don't matter. If a company prioritizes low-impact high visibility, that's a stupid company... Yet I've never seen a company free of politics. There will never be a company where your personal assessment of impact of your work matters more than your boss's or their boss's.
We also can't pretend like the amount of work at any given level matches the number of engineers at that level (or who want to be at that level). It just never will. So there will be jockeying for position.
You shouldn't be playing politics all day (a trap I sometimes fall in) but you can't ignore it either. Politics often means justifying your work up the chain, being aware of priorities of those above you etc - it's not just kissing up. Ignore it at your peril.
I worked at a big telco (BT) and they had a super flat structure and a yearly/18 month promotion round that might have 20-25 slots for MPG1 to MPG2 in a division of 40-50k.
MPG1 and MPG2 where the IC grades after that that it was management grades.
You normally had around 18-100 pass the paper shift who then got a board interview.
I played the game and passed the paper shift several times but in the end left the company.
I'm not entirely sure why AI knowledge must be close to a year old, and clearly this is a problem developers are aware of.
Is there are a technical reason they can't be, for instance, a month behind rather than close to a year?