Great story; great writing. I feel like the Container Store would reject anyone who seemed overqualified. If only because they know they'd bolt if something better came up. Of course, that's not a given, but you can understand where they're coming from.
That's pretty close to the truth - people bolting after the seasonal rush is over is the best case scenario - they still want the people do they end up hiring for the period to stay on through the entire period.
While I think you're probably right about their motivation, I think a lot of companies seem to apply the "overqualified" classification in stupid scenarios.
For example, this is a job for a seasonal door greeter at retail, by definition it is temporary. Even if it wasn't meant to be temporary, is someone who is "overqualified" really more of a statistically significant "flight risk" than some high school kid, an elderly retiree, or someone who somehow has made a career of being a seasonal door greeter?
I suspect all classes of potential hires would be very nearly equally incredibly unreliable in the long-term for a job of this ilk, if you actually hired from all groups and did a study on job longevity.
Google for "retail turnover rate". A quarter century ago when I was working retail it was about 100%, and according to google it remains around 100%. What you're worried about has been BAU for more than a quarter century. Training varies from an hour or so, up to maybe 10 hours for the most demanding cashiering jobs, although those are often hired from within.
Its a little different from skilled trades or silicon valley programming.
So the average employment length is a year, but more realistically the "old" first shift people work there about four years and the kids and seasonal work there about ten or so weeks at most, its not a smooth bell curve.
For one thing, all our writers are paid. (We believe that great writing should be valued.)
We're also trying to do a better job of driving targeted traffic to articles on our site. Since Medium accepts virtually all content, they can't make the smart investments in promotion and marketing that we're making. (We're also building some sophisticated technology for modeling these audiences across the web.)
Also, we offer editing services to all our writers. Hopefully this manifests in higher quality writing.
Images instead? Although peppering of stories with boring stock photos isn't great either. Original art is of course expensive, but that would be best.
This has long been a pet peeve of mine when it comes to online articles. I see the appeal for printed magazines because, if people are flipping pages, a large pull quote might catch their attention and get them to start reading. But for an online article, the fact that I'm scrolling down means that I am reading. And if I'm reading, there's nothing more annoying than re-reading the exact sentence that I just read.
If you want to do more intelligent pull quotes, paraphrase the quotes and use them as headings. For example:
... And then, Reader, I clicked on it.
<div class="pullquote">The Container Store is my kind of porn</div>
I'd been looking for a new job for months, the search wasn't going
as well as I'd planned, and The Container Store, let's be honest,
is my kind of porn. ...
This has the advantage of piquing someone's curiosity ("Why is the Container Store a kind of porn for this person?") and they can carry on to read the following paragraph to find out why. For the next pull quote:
<div class="pullquote">A job with benefits is a unicorn</div>
Of course, it too appears above the paragraph that mentions it. The point is to set the stage for what you're about to read, not just regurgitate in a large, bold font the text you just read... which wastes peoples' time.
There has to be a better way, its really distracting and breaks up all the flow. The article font is already large enough make the page scroll forever, to add large chunks of quotes or images in the made me give up halfway though.
I'm already reading the page. I don't need a pull quote to repeat what I just read. Pull quotes are for magazine layouts when you're flipping through pages. Pull quotes on a web article is a clear sign that the editor is stuck in print media. I'm not 'flipping' through web pages like a magazine, so their usage is a bit passé. Perhaps let's not listen to what the writers like and listen to what readers like. I'm pretty sure the designers aren't making grammar suggestions to the writers, so let's let the designers focus on what they know best: readability and usability.
Putting them inline with the story is bad. Doing so in a way that just repeats the preceding paragraph is terrible. Seriously, read it for yourself all the way through and ask yourself if that's a comfortable flow.
Most of that page is just white, blank, empty nothingness on the sides. Not all of us are reading this page on tiny, or mobile screens where the small paragraph width fills the screen. One can only dream, I suppose.
I work at a very large software company, and we also have beer in the fridge pretty often. Usually ends up coming out Friday afternoons when people are starting to wind down.
Articles like this seem to be among the best ammo to support single-payer healthcare and a basic income for all adult citizens. In addition to shielding workers from harm due to business changes, this would also enable more entrepreneurship since the risk of failure would be much lower for people starting new businesses. Small businesses would also be more enticing to work for, since they wouldn't need to directly provide health insurance and the specter of the business folding wouldn't be as much of a concern.
I've always wondered if basic income would remove the need for VCs; everyone in your startup is essentially fully funded then (as long as you didn't need to live in an expensive locale) and your only cost is AWS (or whatever infrastructure provider you're running on).
This effect would be attenuated by the fact that you could pay the equity to employees directly. You are of course correct that for those employees who would rather get a high stable income instead of equity, you would likely need a third-party that was interested in equity alone. But remember that the calculus for stability vs equity would be changed for the employee pool too, so it may simply become the norm to work for equity in a startup.
It would definitely change the risk/reward equation, but I think you overestimate how much people value equity vs. living above the poverty line (which is about where basic income would need to be). Or maybe I underestimate it because I don't live in silicon valley. I think basic income would be more exciting for small businesses that aren't attractive to investors, but have similar financial constraints as early-stage startups.
I may be extrapolating the current situation out too far, but I figure that it'll just sharpen the distinction that already exists between startups and big companies. Right now you can go to a big company and make triple, or you can work for a startup because some combination of the risk/responsibility/potential equity payoff makes up for the loss in salary. I was just extending that idea out further; I already know multiple people who have saved a few 100k a couple years out of college and are much, much less motivated by money now (vs the non-monetary payoffs that startups offer). Sure, the pool of engineers who would do so may be small, but that doesn't mean EVERY startup needs to take this route. Either way, it's an interesting thought.
Who pays for that basic income? The guy that's working 60 hours at a job he hates because he's trying to be personally responsible. If we had 'basic income' what would be the incentive to work at all? High unemployment is correlated to higher basic income availability. The EU unemployment rate is almost double that if the US. Even progressive Sweeden has an 8% rate. China, incidentally has a 4% rate.
Incentives are powerful things and the law of unintended consequences ought to ignored at our own peril.
The point of basic income is to pay for it with automation and software, not the sweat and blood of someone else.
The majority of farming can be automated. Should it not be possible to give food away for nothing then? If trucking/mobility (self driving cars) can provide such a huge benefit to society, why would we not provide it at almost no cost to people?
Robotics. Software. Renewable Energy. These three ingredients remove the need to take anything from anyone while providing for everyone.
You're still going to need to work to get your latest film or Taylor Swift album if you have moral qualms about IP rights, but we are slowly approaching the age where we have enough energy and the required framework to meet everyone's basic needs without taking from that 60 hour/week fellow.
To your point, the unemployment rate SHOULD be high. People do not live to work, they work to live. The sooner we can let everyone have more leisure time and not die from starvation or lack of medical care, the sooner we advance as a people.
In closing, think like an engineer. The incentive to work should be, "How can I fix or automate this problem so a human being never needs to work on it again?"
The majority of farming already is automated. We've got giant robots that feed us now, they are called tractors. The newest ones have GPS guidance, and literally drive themselves (though they are still required to have a human pilot in the cab). This is a drastically different situation than 100 years ago, with primarily human and animal-powered farming.
The main cost is fuel and other chemical inputs, and the mortgage on the land itself.
"The main cost is fuel and other chemical inputs, and the mortgage on the land itself."
Don't forget the capital investment for the actual machines, and the R&D spending required to even make them available. The big reason we do have a lot of our farming automated is because it was profitable to spend upfront capital on automation instead of manual labor which became inefficient/obsolete in that regard.
Unfortunately, our society isn't structured that way at the moment. Any benefit gained from automation is not directly "transferred" to some arbitrary bucket designated "Money we can now spend on enhancing peoples lives / making it so they don't work for basic needs."
>"Robotics. Software. Renewable Energy. These three ingredients remove the need to take anything from anyone while providing for everyone."
As much as I admire your noble sentiment, I feel it is a bit unrealistic. Someone has to pay for those robots to be designed, maintained. For that software to be designed and administered, monitored. And renewable energy doesn't manifest out of nowhere, it needs capital investment (most of the time) to be harnessed.
I'm struggling to conceptually understand how you think those items will manufacture productivity (general concept, as opposed to money) without it being taken from someone, whether willingly or forcefully?
The guy that's working 60 hours at a job he hates...
I've been that guy, but... fuck that guy. Obviously you're not talking about someone who is just barely paying the rent, because overtime. I also presume we're not referring to someone working three part-times; much sympathy in that case, but with EITC how much tax is he really paying? Finally, we must not be talking about the startups, because love.
More likely, this is a salaried employee at an established firm who is doing the job of one-and-a-half or two salaried employees, for the pay and benefits of one. If he started working rationally, the firm would have to hire, and unemployment would decrease.
"a basic income for all adult citizens. [..]shielding workers from harm due to business changes"
As I read that, I agree with you... Until I realize you meant that to be provided for by others via taxes. Now, I understand the compulsion to protect everyone in the name of some social good, at the very least the "not as fortune as me-group".
But why are we removing the need/worry for individuals to do this for themselves? I say this because I know for a fact that this is achievable for individuals (even poor ones). For a quite-honestly, tiny-fraction of my salary, I get all sorts of income-protection. Due to illness, terminal disease, disability, everything. Add on top of that life-insurance for my family to pay off the loan-amount on the mortgage and have them covered till my child is reasonably on his way to college, if I should leave them early.
These aren't some pipe-dream schemes or ideas, they exist. And people can get them, without the need to beg some "noble" politician to give it to them for free in return for votes/power.
Thanks for the links! I'm in the US and, as far as I know, we don't have anything like the policy discussed in your wikipedia link. Unemployment insurance is a good thing (and I'm curious why it didn't show up at all in the original article) but it doesn't help much with the health insurance issue.
Specifically, you are on a high enough income that you aren't worrying about food, much less mortgage repayments, job stability, whether you can afford fuel for the car this week, or whether you need to just rinse clothes in water to save the money you would have spent on detergent for more important things like food, rent, or bus tickets.
There are also pele out there who won't miss another $100k in taxes. Their worries are along the lines of "how can I make all my money work for me without swamping any single market?"
Taxation and social welfare is just the modern version of "feed your slaves." You should be happy to provide universal health care and subsistence income in order to ensure your future workforce is healthy, educated and stress-free. We treat our racing horses better than this.
Complaining about "privilege" is limp-wristed ad hominem intended to silence viewpoints you don't like, as evidenced by your refusal to take seriously zo1's points ("You should be happy ...").
zo1's arguments are valid or invalid independent of her/his "privilege" (whatever that even means).
Saying privilege doesn't factor in when someone trots out the old "poor people would be just fine if they weren't lazy/ignorant/poor/etc" is just as much an attempt to silence a viewpoint you clearly don't agree with.
Nonsense. The view that (to paraphrase) "poverty is attributable to laziness" is ridiculous on its own merits; Your claim that an ad hominem is necessary to show how wrong it is is even more ridiculous.
Luckily, no one trotted out that argument. Even if they had trotted it out, making wimpy appeals to the claimant's "privilege" has no bearing on whether the statement "poor people would be just fine if they weren't lazy/ignorant/poor/etc" is true or not. Such claims can be exploded in the same way as any other false claim. By addressing the argument and exposing it as untrue.
What do you mean by "factor in"? Are you saying I have my viewpoint because I'm privileged? Are you saying my viewpoint on the matter would be different if I didn't have the privilege? Or are you saying that my viewpoint is invalid because I have privilege?
Or something else, entirely? Really, I'm curious... As someone whose parents had no privilege and were poor.
I wouldn't have a mortgage if I was worrying about food, car fuel or job stability. But, honestly, I'm not entirely sure where you're going with the comment. I'm not some filthy-rich person that could afford to "not miss 100k in taxes". We bought a small, modest home so we wouldn't have to worry too much about these sorts of issues. Where is the privilege in that?
>"Taxation and social welfare is just the modern version of 'feed your slaves.' You should be happy to provide universal health care and subsistence income in order to ensure your future workforce is healthy, educated and stress-free. We treat our racing horses better than this."
I don't view the majority of our fellow man as "our slaves", that require some sort of food/handout from us. Nor do I seek to optimize their healthy and education with the hopes of some sort of workforce productivity boost / optimization, as you seem to imply.
"The GP appears to believe no one ever has bad luck and everyone is as fortunate as he."
Do you honestly believe that that was the point I was trying to convey? My point was that there are ways for individuals to mitigate the risk and impact of those "bad luck" situations, without the need for government spending.
Mortgages are just loans, that's not the relevant part. The relevant part is what the mortgage is being used for. If it's being used as means of owning property and if you always have positive net equity in that property then you're not saddled with a mortgage for 30 years. If you're smart you keep around a bit of savings and if you find yourself in a situation where you can't pay your mortgage any more you simply sell the house (or rent it) and move somewhere cheaper.
Everyone should pay the exact same tax rate. The confiscatory, class-envy based taxation is unfair and unjust. If I make more, I pay more. I shouldn't have to pay a higher percentage. How is that fair? What right do you have to determine if someone 'needs' their money or not? This is America.
Besides, if that woman were truly destitute, she could have gotten Medicaid. We already fund programs for the truly poor.
Let's say you make $100k per year. Why don't you pay $80k to the government. I don't think you need that extra money right? After all, your take home pay would still be above minimum wage. Better yet, you really only need a studio apartment, you don't actually need a bedroom.
Just as I have no idea about your life, how can you presume to know anything about everyone else's?
If we taxed the 'rich' at 100%, it wouldn't even pay the federal budget for one year.
We don't need fewer people paying more taxes. We need more people paying tax.
<i>Everyone should pay the exact same tax rate. The confiscatory, class-envy based taxation is unfair and unjust.</i>
Not that current taxation policy is anything but ridiculous, but flat tax isn't particularly "fair", for many values of fair. For example, the burden of paying, say, 20% of gross income is wildly different for someone making 20k/yr vs someone making 100k/yr.
But at the same time, it is "fair", for other values of fair. (like "impartial", "unbiased", "unprejudiced" and "neutral") Also, "fair" is kind of location based... a lot depends on which side of the equation you sit.
"If we taxed the 'rich' at 100%, it wouldn't even pay the federal budget for one year."
Not that I support the policy, but depending on how you define "rich" it might. Per Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+budget+%2F+us+total+...), the US budget is approximately 30% of total US income. That's going to need more than the incomes of the clichéd 1%, but not terribly much more. If you let us borrow the same amount we're currently borrowing (extracting current revenue by taxing the top at 100%: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+tax+revenues+%2F+us+...) that shrinks down to about 10%. Ignoring, of course, the very important point that those people aren't going to keep earning the same way when they don't see any of it.
Wondering if a flat percent make sense is sorta reasonable. But the rest of your screed is pretty idiotic.
And most civilizations have come to the conclusion that progressive taxation makes sense. The wealthy benefit much more than in a straight line proportion.
Your absurd idea of an 80% tax rate would never fly. People who won't miss another $200k a year in taxes are the ones already minimising their taxes to the point they are only paying a half million or so.
The wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few. Higher tax rates for higher incomes makes perfect sense when basing "far" on "ability to cope with the loss".
20% of a low- to middle-income salary is a far greater burden than a 40% tax on someone with an income exceeding $400k.
There is an old saying in my social circles: follow the money. If you want to make money, you arrange to take it from the people with the money. Luxury cars, luxury apartments, gastronomic restaurants, and so forth.
Why not tax these people more? They aren't actually going to miss the money, and ensuring that there are more healthy middle class folks with disposable incomes will actually help the rich get richer still.
Social welfare and a universal single-payer health care system is actually a grand firm of corporate welfare. Throw a living wage into the mix and you can reduce minimum wages to zero. How much better will the outlook be for entrepreneurs and startups in that environment? No longer will volunteer internships be exploitation, no longer will labour costs factor into viability of a business, and you will have many more consumers with spare change to serve.
Well... not everybody bases "fair" on "ability to cope with the loss" so higher tax rates for higher incomes does not make perfect sense. Wouldn't it be better to tax everyone at 20% and then let people volunteer to pay 30% if they want to help cover those that can't afford the 20%. This way everybody wins. Right now we generally have a large group of people that gets together and says, "We really need to help those poor people. And that guy over there is going to pay for it." It is super easy to vote for higher taxes for someone else. I'm curious just how many people would just volunteer to pay more than the 20%. How do those people feel now that the only person they can point to is themself.
> But why are we removing the need/worry for individuals to do this for themselves?
As a german, who lives in a system of universal health coverage and unemployment payments i can tell you that that is a very naive way of looking at it. There are two very strong factors that mitigate this:
1. Most humans wish to be useful. Most humans wish to do some kind of work in their lives. This is not theoretical, this is real. We found in germany that unemployment can strongly contribute to depression. Additionally people who are not employed will often find ways to contribute otherwise. We have a strong culture of volunteer workers here in germany.
2. In order to provide a useful, yet humane, push to people, there is one single requirement for unemployment payments: People have to regularly provide copies of job applications they sent out.
There are many more details to the system than i have the leisure to describe here, but please, do yourself a favour and read up on our system before you dismiss the possibility of an implementation.
> These aren't some pipe-dream schemes or ideas, they exist.
Universal health coverage and unemployment payments are also not pipe-dream schemes or ideas, they exist.
The German culture tends to value hard work for the sake of hard work higher than other cultures. Even Americans don't glorify hard work for it's own sake. It's all part of the "American dream" to end up well-off, to climb the ladder.
Not all Germans wish to be useful, there are plenty of freeloaders. Assuming you've had a job, you get a good percentage of your salary for a while, and then once that's run out, you get a house deemed adequate for your family, health insurance, and about $500 a month. This is not enough for a great life, and no one with any ambition is going to accept that standard of living. That said, some do, and mostly, Germans are willing to live with paying for that. The flip side is that this is the worst your life can ever get. Having Hartz IV as a very deep backstop gives people a real confidence and peace about their lives that doesn't exist in the U.S.
>Even Americans don't glorify hard work for it's own sake.
This is a hard thing to argue about, but I think you could not be more wrong about this. Americans identify themselves very strongly with being productive at their jobs. They take few vacations. Any suggestion that people should be paid more or get more time off is denigrated as laziness. Unlike many other countries, having a gap in your work history is seen as a huge warning sign. You saved up money and took 2 years off? Good luck getting another job. America still has a tremendous amount of the Protestant Work Ethic in it. Why do you think America has stood by while companies got rid of pensions, and go decade after decade after decade not giving raises?
I wonder, who are all these people that would prefer to live close to the existence minimum, subsidizing off welfare, and not do anything productive? Is it you? Many of your friends? Do you actually know anyone that would prefer to not be useful?
Not to mention, that I think pretty much everywhere, the amount of resources society as a whole end up wasting on the idle rich in one form or another, probably makes that wasted on "freeloaders" and "those abusing the system" a rounding error.
Until your weasel executive terminates your job along with a thousand others, so the company looks more profitable prior to an IPO (which to my middle-class simpleton mind is indistinguishable from fraud, because the buyers of stock are not expecting to buy an empty shell of a company with compromised operative capabilities)...
Then when the severance begins to run short and you miss a payment of your insurance - just this once - if you get hit by a bus your kids will be left to fend for themselves.
I'm not saying it's unlikely... These things do happen, and we need to be aware of them. We need to be afraid of them, and prepare accordingly. But pretending like they don't exist and "can never happen to me" is like sticking your head in the sand.
>But why are we removing the need/worry for individuals to do this for themselves?
Computers and automation technology have made individual workers so productive that employers no longer need nearly as many workers as there are workers who need jobs. And we know very well what happens, right or wrong on an individual level, when there are large numbers of people who can not work but who still need to eat. And it's not pretty. Protection from that should be something every corporation willingly pays an increased tax rate for. The alternative is a destroyed economy that will take their organization down with it.
I have read a number of these stories. Mostly people gripping with the realities of life. A lot of struggle, and a lot of pain. One thing that helps me is my faith. Not that I think some deity is going to rescue me from hard times, but to let go the frustration and anger at things I cannot change to a higher power where I don't have to worry about them.
I also thought about faith, but from a different direction. I think there are a lot of people, making decisions, who could do with a little fear of eternal damnation.
I was going to respond to your magic-market fairy reference, but I see you removed it now just as I clicked reply. Oh well... I thought it was the norm around here to put little "Edit notes" at the bottom of your post if you edit it?
My own personal rule would be to only mark that I edited a post if somebody actually replied to it and my change was relevant to that response. (It is unfair to make the response no longer make sense.)
I've actually edited this response six or so times so far, but would expect few people to notice and marking it as "edited" would just introduce noise.
While a belief that everything will be okay can be an important tool to help an individual lead a happy life, we have to be careful not to let acceptance become complacency. The precariousness of health insurance in the United States is unjust, and we should be frustrated and angry about it, and channel that frustration into action.
Note that I didn't say "everything would be ok" I said "let go of the frustration at things I cannot change." One of my personal challenges is that if I am not careful I can get hung up replaying a sequence of events in my head trying to find a path where the outcome would be different. That is useful a couple of times, but it becomes destructive if it goes on too long. It takes thinking resources away from getting things done.
Imagine that you have a really competent friend that you trust completely, you relate to them all of the events leading up to the "problem" (or issue or what ever) and tell them to figure out if there was anything else you could have done and get back to you. They say, "I'm on it boss, will let you know." And now you can stop worrying about it and do the next thing on your list.
Now you can argue there is no God and I cannot disprove your argument, but I can relate that this tool or scheme lets me get on with my life, and on more than one occasion I have later received insight (perhaps from my subconscious, I make no claim of origin) on the problem. I find it helpful in my life, and in dealing with things I cannot change but may avoid in the future.
I don't understand how the Container Store fits in to this story, other than the fact that she was denied a job. Also, I disagree with this:
Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land
a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.
Being an author does not qualify you to work in Loss Prevention. It may, as gdilla pointed out in another comment, even make you overqualified for the position.
I sympathize with the author, and I think there is a compelling story here about healthcare, but the title undermines it severely by making it about how she failed one attempt to get an entry-level job; and it almost feels like a form of blackmail: The Container Store now has to deal with this widely-shared article about how they didn't give a poor, cancer-having mother a small little job.
I agree that the Container Store (meaning the company, the physical store, the people who work there) doesn't fit into the story very well. I think that for the author, the Container Store is a symbol of order and control in the author's otherwise chaotic and out of control life. Containers allow people to organize their things, so, to the author, the Container Store symbolizes taking control of and organizing one's life; placing each piece of it into the right "bin". The author feels like their life is out of control and the rejection from the Container Store thus reflects that symbolically. The author should have expanded further on what the Container Store means to her, but I think I have a reasonable interpretation.
I agree. Given the fact that she mentioned multiple times trying to sell a novel and a tv pilot, I doubt that this was an earnest attempt to get a job, but rather an earnest attempt to get fodder for an overly-complicated article about being rejected from a menial job at the expense of somebody else (The Container Store).
For all we know, they rejected her to give somebody who didn't have a Harvard degree a chance to earn some income.
I don't think it was about the article. It was an attempt to get a job with health insurance because she messed up her health insurance situation after she lost her previous job.
It may be technically true that "she messed up her health insurance", but note how easy it was to do that while believing she was doing the right thing. Using some programming parlance, the system did a terrible job of "making invalid states unrepresentable".
The Container Store didn't come off badly in this article. She spent paragraphs talking about how much she liked their products. This article was about how easy it is to fall completely through the cracks, and realize you are actually looking at death and starvation, and there's no safety net, through no fault of your own. The author figured her last lifeboat was she could always get a McJob (which is most people's belief) if things ever went really wrong, and then she learned that she couldn't even get that, and the ones she could, wouldn't give her benefits / enough money to pay her medical bills. Most people don't really realize what its like to be in that situation, and realize that you are now fighting for your life in a system that doesn't care.
Agreed. Harvard grad isn't going to cut it. If she had worked a little harder and gotten into Stanford, then she might have gotten the job and be considered worthy of receiving health care. The credentials and education required for loss prevention are staggering and I'm sure they only hire the top 1% of grads, and she's probably only in the top 2%. The rest of the countries population can eat cake.
> most of us are just a single job loss, a single medical diagnosis, a single broken marriage removed from a swirling, chaotic, wholly uncontained abyss.
I completely understand that. I was transitioning from my old industry into tech and was hit with some surprise medical issues. If I didnt have the luxury of a large savings I would have been de-railed completely. I was also lucky that Lyft was an option in SF because I got rejected by several companies along the way. Now that I have a start in a new career I'm pretty keen on rebuilding to ward off the next random disaster.
It is super annoying and adds no additional content by design. There's like four or five of these throughout the article.
As to the article most of the issues seem to revolve around a broken healthcare system (i.e. no public option, insurance through employers, unemployed pay more than employed, etc). Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren't meant to be in positions like this...
I liked the first 2/3 of the article, just the end is kind of irksome. Harvard, CEO pay, gender gap, etc none of this came across like the author likely intended. I bet she didn't customise her resume for "The Container Store" job and just forwarded her normal/writer one.
I suspect that apart from the uncontrollable desire to add something that is perceived to add some aesthetic value to the article, that there is some precedence to these enlarged excerpts actually resulting in increased readership. I don't have data to back this up, but I know that David Ogilvy regularly discussed his almost formulaic use of serifed bold headers, slightly smaller, bold subheaders, and images because they were shown to increase the readership of his advertisements.
My guess is that these are used for a similar reason.
That technique is called a pull-quote[0] and is largely a relic from print publishing. It can still work well on occasion, but the example you cite is particularly bad because it's too long and interrupts the content rather than being floated to the side, allowing the content to flow around it.
I actually definitely agree with you: that pull quote in particular added no value and I've removed it.
We've had this debate internally (I'm personally not a fan of pull quotes), but a lot of writers like them for the ability to highlight key points and to break up the stories.
Would it maybe be helpful if we didn't make the pull quotes full width? Or required that they be shorter?
Likely wouldn't bug me because it is impossible (given the context) to assume you're meant to read it. Whereas when you stick it inline but make it bigger it could be either read or not read depending on the author's intent.
They made it like that for the mobile readers obviously. Ideally you'd want responsive design so it doesn't need to stay full width even on wide computer/tablet screens, but if you can't do that then you have to give priority to the iPhones. For some reason.
At least none of your pull quotes came before they are actual quoted in the article. I too hate pull quotes (I already ready it once! :) ) but there is a special place in hell for writers that write like reality TV shows ("Coming up on....", "Previously on..." on either side of commercial breaks). Great article by the way!
If I remember the old newspaper days correctly, pull quotes and boxes were used to enhance context via additional quotes, facts or summaries instead of repeating the content that's already in the article. The other reason for having them was to make a longer piece more scannable, which doesn't work as well when you have to scroll.
So, it's a carry over from glossy print magazines, which is probably an effective tool, when your periodical is adrift in a sea of other periodicals, and you need to catch the reader's eye, as they skim through 400 pages, like a flipbook animation, scanning for content.
It's supposed to be a climactic snippet of a punchline without the set up, presented significantly earlier in the article than it's actual inline appearance, so that the reader has a hard time finding it in the normal scale wall-of-text, and can't skim to it. Then the time they spend sifting through the article, they read more of it, and (if it's a good article) they become more enticed into buying the magazine, as the newstand clerk scowls at them, because what is this? A library? No reading!
But damn it! I need to know the whole joke!
I guess I'll just buy it an read the rest on the train...
That's how those things are supposed to work. But they're a little anachronistic for the internet. Some people are just attached to the look and feel of the design, probably. But on a web page that you scroll through, it's much less effective at courting the reader, and in this particular instance, the examples are intrusive, and counter-productively placed right next to the passages from which they originate.
> Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren't meant to be in positions like this...
In her defense, I guarantee she was told that they shouldn't at some point in her life. Every time an employer goes with social proof over qualifications, they implicitly tell the world exactly this.
> Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.
If she actually put "Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad", of course it was rejected. Such an application is overqualified, and it looks strange that someone who actually has those credentials would want to do something like that.
If she didn't put that on the application, then it is not intellectually honest to say that an "Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad" was rejected. The person that was rejected was the character that is described in the job application, not the author who is hiding behind that character!
The people doing the hiring for this type of greet-the-public job are usually looking for "fresh faces" who project a certain image, which means, of course, that the jobs tend to go to attractive young people. Nobody cares about your bestselling writing, Harvard degree or Emmy award: unless perhaps the latter is in an "Oustanding Lead/Supporting Actor in ..." category because then, doh, you're actually famous, in the sense that random people in the public recognize your face!
I call bullshit. Especially because this is a temporary position, either way in a few months she would be gone. And if there's an attitude problem she could be fired.
I've had plenty of jobs that were beneath me and I hated (I even worked at Taco Bell for a season as a graduate student), I did them and did them well then left when I felt it was time to move on, no harm no foul.
And this includes computer science and programming jobs. Yes I enjoy programming and engineering and generally like my job, but all this fake enthusiasm is annoying. Most people are there for one reason to make money, either now or in the future.
Oh my...called bullshit. Knock yourself out. Objective reality doesn't match your preconceived notions. You'll find that happens a lot as you move through life.
I don't doubt many of people feel that way and a lot of them are hiring managers, but I don't feel the need to question someone's motivations for applying to a job below their level.
Life's complicated enough without trying to overlay my preconceived notions about why they're appling for a particular job onto someone else, as you say.
The statistical improbability of getting hired for such a position aside, if someone overqualified wanted to work for you in a (very) temporary position, why would you not hire them? Or at least get them to interview?
Because someone overqualified (worse, an overly educated and successful writer) is assumed to look down upon the McJob. Nobody wants an employee who resents what they are doing, as something that they have sunk to. Also, nobody wants an employee that will bail as soon as their publishing activity picks up. Or one whose mind is somewhere else at all times.
Honestly I disagree with that and because I've been on the other side of that I will mostly give people the benefit of the doubt. They're applying because they really need the job. Period. Unless I see something else that indicates issues I won't hold that against them.
There are very few positions I've ever had, even great jobs I loved, that I wouldn't readily leave for greener pastures. Why would I stay when another company is offering me more money and/or more responsibility for similar or more interesting work? Sure, I'm not going to drop my job at the drop of a hat, but I'll do what's best for me and that rarely involves staying for long periods of time at one company.
I've had a boss that had no choice (it was an Austrian firm that refused to pay US market rates), but to hire people grossly overqualified for the position they were in and paid way below market rate for it and he put together a great team by finding "naive and/or desperate people" (I was both at the time, having just come back from Japan when Nova, the English school, when bankrupt suddenly). And I'm still grateful to him for everything I learned there about business, but he did his best to keep everyone advancing in their career and encouraged people to move along when it was time.
Just as companies keep trying to make employees interchangeable that makes jobs just as interchangeable.
It's not about whether you'll leave for a better opportunity, it's whether you're actively looking for them. John Smith the high school dropout is glad to just have the job, they'll stick with it as long as they can. The emmy-win
It's not about whether you'll leave for a better opportunity, it's whether you're actively looking for them.
John Smith the high school dropout is glad to just have the job, he'll stick with it as long as he can. The emmy-winning harvard graduate is going to be looking for alternatives every day she's working there, because she knows she can get hired at one. The likelihood of them leaving is much higher because they're coming to those opportunities instead of the other way around.
Sure he's glad to have a job, but unless he's a major fuck-up he's also overqualified for that job. And I'm sure if he actually needs to support himself or anyone else he's looking for his next job too. Not graduating high-school makes it hard to land even a low skill job, but not because he's any less qualified for it. It's just a lazy minimum filter to avoid people that would have absentee issues.
Working retail is simple (not easy, depending on your personality) and anyone can do it once they've been shown how to run the register.
"The likelihood of them leaving is much higher..."
Do you know what the turnover is in low skill jobs?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102021496#.
"After reaching 100 percent in 2005—then subsequently dropping to 51 percent following the recession in 2011—median turnover rates for part-time retail workers jumped back up to 74.9 percent in 2013, according to Hay Group, a management consulting firm."
That it is a last resort is just writer's hyperbole. Why, the true last resorts are activities like driving taxicabs, or putting up drywall (or painting it).
Hmmm ... the true last resort is living on the street and dying of hunger and exposure. But it occurs to me that this is the modern version of Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath". Truly desperate people will try a lot more than just applying to the container store.
For what it's worth, this is not true at large tech companies. There isn't a fixed number of job openings, and candidates aren't compared with each other. Instead, there is a bar that interviews must meet, and any candidate that passes that bar gets an offer.
While theoretically it's true, it's not true in practice. I worked in two big tech corporations and in both all interviewers who did more than 15-20 interviews converged to 50%/50% hire/reject ratio. Candidates are not compared directly to each other, their performance at interview is still compared to average performance.
If they're really investing a lot in their workers, then they want a perfect fit or ideal type of background. If they believed the writer was a risk to pack up and leave a year down the road, it makes sense that they wouldn't take that risk...
Honestly, it sounds like during the best of times she spent each and every paycheck in full, and then when hard times fell upon her, she had nothing to fall back on. This is a common symptom in our consumerist society. An author of her magnitude would have been making enough $ at one point to stow away at least a few years' expenses if she'd just sacrificed a little more during the fat period.
Eh, four kids, a breakup, work that was already seasonal in nature, cancer and laid off in a recession tho.
Also, authors generally don't rake it in and certainly not at the magnitude of "a few years' expenses".
Maybe she could've would've should've but fixed costs are sticky and you don't have to look around very hard to find people who can't absorb that many shocks in such a short period of time.
Then, why not income-protection insurance? That would have solved all her unfortunate-circumstance problems, including the health insurance one.
Especially so for someone with some sort of seasonal income. They're the type of individuals who should know better than to not have a reasonable buffer (in case work doesn't come in that season).
I hadn't heard of income-protection insurance and after some googling it's no wonder: as far as I can it's a kind of disability insurance - it doesn't kick in if you're merely unemployed.
At that point, you're at the mercy of your state's unemployment insurance - which you might not be eligible for if you've been working as a contractor or self employed. Not to mention that seasonal work makes it harder to plan, since you don't have reliable income to plan around.
There just aren't that many "no-brainer" options for absorbing this many shocks, at a scale most individuals can cope with.
She had 6 grand lying around to pay for a mere 3 months of health insurance, so it doesn't seem like she was overly short on money. Her problem was that she couldn't keep her health insurance even at that exorbitant price.
This article brings up a very important point that I don't think the author intended to make: do not sign up for COBRA. If the author had signed up for an individual plan under Obamacare within the 60 day period from when she lost her job, she would have at least had health insurance, and if she remained unemployed, she would qualify for increasingly large subsidies.
In the olden days (before 2013) you had to sign up for COBRA to stay insured unless you were healthy enough to qualify for individual insurance. But now you can't be turned down, but you can only sign up during specific enrollment periods. Problem is, COBRA is still around, and companies are still required to offer it to you, even though for most people it's going to be way more expensive than individual insurance (because it's unsubsidized), and if something goes wrong or you become unable to afford the premiums, you can end up like the author, unable to sign up for an individual plan because you're out of the enrollment period.
This is one of a few holes and pitfalls that were created by the Affordable Care Act.
I know a lot about this stuff because my startup helps companies save money and design health benefits programs that take advantage of recent changes in the health care law (benefitter.com). If you have any Obamacare questions, let me know.
You can also retroactively sign up for COBRA. That's what I did when I left my job; went "uninsured" for 60 days then got my own insurance. In that 60 day window if something had happened, I would have retroactively signed up for COBRA (having to pay both months) and used the coverage. It's certainly a roll-of-the-dice, but for a younger healthy person like myself, I was really only worried about freak accidents and needed the money.
I did the same thing. I had the paperwork filled out and the check ready to go. Then I told a family member where it physically was in my apartment. In the off chance I did actually get hit by a bus and hospitalized -- at least someone could get the paperwork turned it for me.
I felt sort of silly doing it, but realized that if I really was mostly worried about some kind of freak accident, then i should actually ensure that the insurance could kick in following said freak accident.
That's really interesting. I feel like more people need to know this. I always just assumed you were "meant" to sign up for COBRA and didn't even consider that Obamacare-plans might be a superior choice given unemployment.
Seems to me like the author is seriously overqualified to be working at the Container Store. That's probably why she was rejected.
Also, the whole article is a great example of why single-payer socialised health care is a good thing. Living in Canada, I don't have to worry that a job loss means no health coverage.
>Living in Canada, I don't have to worry that a job loss means no health coverage.
I wouldn't be that smug; you're still one accident or one cancer away from destitution. The surgery may be fully covered, but you're shit out of luck if you're unemployed and need physio/cancer drugs.
I'm still baffled by the complexity Americans have to put up with, but we still got pretty large cracks in our system.
There's also employment insurance from the government, disability insurance, etc... I grew up knowing someone who's been legitimately disabled for 20 years. She owns a house and gets on fine, not rich by any means, but lives a decent quality of life, without any family to speak of. Our social net isn't ideal, but its much better than most Canadians think (I know its a Canadian quality to be critical of ourselves)...
Speaking of Canada, in her situation, I'd think about trying to get refugee status in Canada. If her cancer comes back from lack of treatment she's just doomed her kids to becoming orphans. Its not like she'd be leaving a vibrant economy behind, if there's basically nowhere to work. There must be jobs somewhere, and if not in the USA anymore, gotta be somewhere...
Where I live, everyone is underemployed, so I know without looking that she's a coastie. If coasties want to see their future, look around "the greater Chicago area". Everyone is like a former tool and die mechanic working as an oil changer, or a math degree holder working in a call center, or a biz grad working food service, or a former K12 teacher working as a waitress. If overqualified people were not hired, pretty much no one would be hired. Its pretty nuts.
That wouldn't really address this issue all that much. A lot of people don't have the savings to continue payments, so yea, they would be at risk of losing their car insurance (and health insurance) when unemployed. (Yes I know that unemployment insurance exists but that's also the case in the health insurance case with COBRA et al).
I really don't understand how this got to the front of HN, but okay, i'll bite:
Articles like this make me ashamed to live in a country where we have so much, and yet feel the need to complain when things don't go exactly our way. As if the world owes you a lack of breast cancer, or a stable marriage, or a steady, decent job.
Ask the migrant worker who's here illegally, far from his family, who works a soul-crushing routine, saving pennies to send home, with no visible end in sight, with absolutely no form of health care, with virtually no rights as a non-citizen, about finding a job. Maybe he's lucky that he doesn't look for white-collar jobs. That he only has to stand outside a home depot in the rain and hope to get randomly selected, jump into the pick-up, and head off to whatever manual labor might make him a few bucks that day, so he can put a small portion away for his family and use the rest to buy something from the dollar menu.
Poor us, we starving, huddled, highly educated, successful, safe, free, white middle-classes.
Jobless? Cancer? Kids to support? Even with all of that, there's still so many options and opportunities afforded to this person. Sometimes things won't be perfect. Bumps in the road happen to everyone at some point or another. But that doesn't mean you have to wallow in your misfortune. You can also take stock of how much good there still is, and how much worse off you could be. Be thankful for the bumps and keep on rolling.
Perhaps other people have standards higher than rock-bottom? You could just as easily point to people 500 years ago and say how much better off we are than them, so why every try to identify shortfalls and improve them?
If you think that having an Emmy, degree from Harvard, and a slot on the NYT best-seller list makes you any more qualified for a job at the Container Store than a 19 year old high school dropout with 2 years of McJob experience, you might be a classist.
Agreed. College educated people tend to never think much about the overwhelming amount of tacit knowledge needed for less prestigious and apparently simple jobs.
Still, I can feel the pain of the author, having gone through several months of unemployment at the beginning of my marriage. You did everything the elders told you to do, and still you end up getting the short stick and thrown to the sidewalk. I was able to pivot my career and bounce back, in part due to being still youngish... in part thanks to the support of my family. But I can clearly see what a shipwreck that would have been 20 years later, minus a spouse and plus a couple of teenager kids.
"For years we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field, work hard at your marriage, save money, organize your flour, salt, and sugar into labeled bins, and you will be in control of your life and your destiny."
I'm officially starting to get sick of hearing this. Yes, it's an interesting story, and yes, US Healthcare is in need of some serious fixing, whatever that may mean to you.
But nobody ever guaranteed that you'll be in control of your life and your destiny. Freak things happen; life isn't fair. All of these things (work hard, save, study, etc.) are good to teach kids, because it increases the odds of being in control of your own destiny. But that's it--it tilts the odds slightly in your favor.
What else would you rather teach your kids? The author mentions her own child is paying his/her way through college. Is that a bad thing? If higher education is a part of this "convenient lie", perhaps you should tell your child: it doesn't matter if you study hard or work hard--just sit back and wait for things to happen.
Perhaps sitting down and talking with her children about career paths. No one ever guaranteed that she'd be financially independent regardless of what she chose for work (that I know of, anyways). If she chose to go into a field that she LOVES, but that doesn't pay much, she needs to be aware of that. Writing is a difficult field, I am sure. And yes, doing what you love is important, but so is being able to do the things outside of work that you love.
The article talks about "massive nooses of debt" that affect the economy. Nobody forced her child to go to a college where he/she had to take out massive loans. State schools are excellent choices! Outside of the top 10-ish in the country, I'd be surprised if the higher-cost schools are "worth" their cost. Talk to your children about their college choices!
Yes, there are things that need to be addressed about our economy. Yes, our healthcare system is in a bad state. But I am sick & tired of hearing people blaming the lie that "some anonymous person/society told me to work hard and study hard, but now I'm not where I want to be--it must be society's fault". She had to downsize your apartment, she can't pay for her child's college. So what? Is that society's fault?
Of course it is. Even worse, it's the CEOs' fault. Because we all know they didn't actually work hard to get their position, they were anointed by the king. All rich people cheated their way to the top and they should be paid more closely to the assembly line worker because after all, assembly lines are hard work. It isn't fair! It isn't fair! I blame Canada first and CO2 emissions a close second. Now someone reading this please send me $1000, I deserve it and besides, why should you keep any of it? You didn't really earn it and you don't need it. You only have it because you are a white male.
I think that summarizes a large number of people's thinking on the subject.
You miss the point: most people think America is a place where hard work and education allows somebody to achieve a middle class lifestyle (aka the American Dream).
Following from this, here's the key point: most Americans want to live in such a society where the American dream is achievable.
And, for the most part, that is true is it not? The author had to downsize her apartment and couldn't afford to pay for her child's school, but overall it sounds like she is comfortably middle class.
But I am sick & tired of hearing people blaming the lie that "some anonymous person/society told me to work hard and study hard, but now I'm not where I want to be--it must be society's fault".
What if--and I'm just spitballing here--what if they're right? What if it is society's fault, because of the numerous extra requirements we place on people: car insurance, health insurance, taxes, etc.? What if we aren't actually giving back their money's worth?
Wait, those are the examples you're choosing? Car insurance, health insurance and taxes? I don't really understand what you're arguing, I guess. Would people be better off without car insurance, health insurance or taxes? Or are you saying that those services be provided for by the government (although how they're paid for without taxes, I couldn't tell you).
Health insurance, for example, is a layer of indirection and wage garnishing imposed by society due to its unwillingness to allow government provisioning of healthcare.
Car insurance is required because cars are required, because society has forced sprawling urban and suburban design on the masses and neglected mass transit.
"For years we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field ... and you will be in control of your life and your destiny."
Surely a nice idea, and maybe I'm a cynic, but what rational adult actually believes this? Some fields are inherently more stable and well-paying than others.
"Now, in this new gilded age, where profit takes precedence over people, and commerce takes precedence over art"
When in the history of the United States has this not been the case?
>And I pretty much believed it until I actually started working in the private sector.
Indeed. There is usually a pretty large difference between what people are told about the world growing up and reality.
In my experience, people who never figure this out externalize blame when things go wrong: Greedy corporation fired me, CEOs make X when I only make Y, someone should have made sure I had healthcare, landlord raised my rent, etc.
Where in this article does she take ownership of her life and decisions?
The "in your chosen field" part was new to me. If your chosen field is buggy whip manufacturing, well...you're going to have to work hard at something else.
Exactly. She was in print media and television, two industries that are quite obviously dying. Yet, she shows little interest in adapting or retraining, she simply externalizes blame and resists change. Not really a recipe for success.
Exactly. It's actually hilarious to me how Harvard grads with Sociology or Women's Studies degrees wonder why they're unemployed and in debt.
It's not my fault you majored in Medieval Poetry. Why should I subsidize someone's ill conceived choices? Regarding poetry, it's interesting how the world's greatest poets did not get an expensive MFA in poetry. Hemingway didn't even go to college. Studying liberal arts is important, but getting $100k student loans to major in something like Sociology? Really? Some folks are just plain old stupid. In what universe do the numbers work for a decision like that? If I was a VC and someone came to me to fund their schooling with that sort of 'plan,' I'd laugh them out of my office.
I've found it's harder to get a job you are massively overqualified for than to get one you are barely qualified for.
If you need a job which you are massively overqualified for, dumb it down and do your best to appear no sort of threat. Bosses in entrenched organizations love people who are just smart enough to push the levers, but not smart enough to appear promotable, or to become bored or feel unfulfilled and cause some sort of trouble or to notice obvious abuses and have the mental capacity and wherewithal to seek remedies....
In these types of situations, appearing dumb and predictable is your best bet. And that's a very hard act for some people.
When the Industrial Revolution came around, the amount of value a worker could produce increased a great deal. But society saw that increase as belonging to the business owner who purchased the machine. Wages fell and fell as worker productivity increased. Entire families, including children, had to work just to survive. After a great deal of fighting, and not a little bloodshed, we got the definition of a 40 hour workweek, and society came to see it as proper that a single person working 40 hours a week should be paid a wage high enough that they could comfortably support an entire family. Society expected employers to share the increased value workers were generating with the workers.
We're facing a similar situation now. Computers and automation technology came into the workplace around 1980 or so. And society sees the increased value workers create thanks to these tools as belonging to the company, not to the worker. The idea that a worker should be paid enough that they can work 40 hours and provide for an entire family comfortably has vanished. Now the concern is only that no one be paid above the market rate for their position, and that the market rate be kept low. Society and the business world was entirely unprepared with the breakneck pace of productivity growth that computers brought about. The idea of having wages keep pace with the productivity gains simply seemed absurd, as it would require large and frequent raises. And now we've gotten so far behind, with wages stagnating for decades while companies have grown accustomed to ludicrous profit margins, that any reasonable correction seems ridiculous. Will we see society come around and consider it proper that a worker once more is entitled to a good portion of the value they create? Or will companies devalue jobs to the point where taking one costs more than they pay? Will we be able to avoid bloodshed this time?
Here's something outrageous that a reader might have missed: An MRI doesn't have to be $6000. The marginal cost of one more MRI is pretty low (they go for under $200 in Japan, and people get them way more frequently), but the price tag quoted to insurance companies is inflated, so that the insurance companies can bargain the hospitals back down. Only the uninsured end up paying a needlessly large sticker price for things like MRIs.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadFor example, this is a job for a seasonal door greeter at retail, by definition it is temporary. Even if it wasn't meant to be temporary, is someone who is "overqualified" really more of a statistically significant "flight risk" than some high school kid, an elderly retiree, or someone who somehow has made a career of being a seasonal door greeter?
I suspect all classes of potential hires would be very nearly equally incredibly unreliable in the long-term for a job of this ilk, if you actually hired from all groups and did a study on job longevity.
Its a little different from skilled trades or silicon valley programming.
So the average employment length is a year, but more realistically the "old" first shift people work there about four years and the kids and seasonal work there about ten or so weeks at most, its not a smooth bell curve.
I'm the lead engineer at Cafe, so if you spot any issues please do let me know.
(Also, if you want to help build top-tier tools for writers like Deb to publish online, we're hiring: http://cafe.com/careers)
We're also trying to do a better job of driving targeted traffic to articles on our site. Since Medium accepts virtually all content, they can't make the smart investments in promotion and marketing that we're making. (We're also building some sophisticated technology for modeling these audiences across the web.)
Also, we offer editing services to all our writers. Hopefully this manifests in higher quality writing.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually personally sympathetic to that viewpoint, but our writers like using them to break up stories.
Would it be helpful if they weren't full width?
If you want to do more intelligent pull quotes, paraphrase the quotes and use them as headings. For example:
This has the advantage of piquing someone's curiosity ("Why is the Container Store a kind of porn for this person?") and they can carry on to read the following paragraph to find out why. For the next pull quote: Of course, it too appears above the paragraph that mentions it. The point is to set the stage for what you're about to read, not just regurgitate in a large, bold font the text you just read... which wastes peoples' time.We are looking at ways of better taking advantage of the margins on desktop though.
OSX 10.10, up-to date Chrome (stable channel).
"We offer a great startup work environment with free beer, snacks, and friendly teammates."
Free beer, really? I have an image of fridge in the office kitchenette where it is stocked up with beer. How common is this for a US company?
It's pretty common for tech startups. We take requests for what everyone wants ordered from FreshDirect each week (including beer & snacks).
Incentives are powerful things and the law of unintended consequences ought to ignored at our own peril.
The majority of farming can be automated. Should it not be possible to give food away for nothing then? If trucking/mobility (self driving cars) can provide such a huge benefit to society, why would we not provide it at almost no cost to people?
Robotics. Software. Renewable Energy. These three ingredients remove the need to take anything from anyone while providing for everyone.
You're still going to need to work to get your latest film or Taylor Swift album if you have moral qualms about IP rights, but we are slowly approaching the age where we have enough energy and the required framework to meet everyone's basic needs without taking from that 60 hour/week fellow.
To your point, the unemployment rate SHOULD be high. People do not live to work, they work to live. The sooner we can let everyone have more leisure time and not die from starvation or lack of medical care, the sooner we advance as a people.
In closing, think like an engineer. The incentive to work should be, "How can I fix or automate this problem so a human being never needs to work on it again?"
The majority of farming already is automated. We've got giant robots that feed us now, they are called tractors. The newest ones have GPS guidance, and literally drive themselves (though they are still required to have a human pilot in the cab). This is a drastically different situation than 100 years ago, with primarily human and animal-powered farming.
The main cost is fuel and other chemical inputs, and the mortgage on the land itself.
Don't forget the capital investment for the actual machines, and the R&D spending required to even make them available. The big reason we do have a lot of our farming automated is because it was profitable to spend upfront capital on automation instead of manual labor which became inefficient/obsolete in that regard.
>"Robotics. Software. Renewable Energy. These three ingredients remove the need to take anything from anyone while providing for everyone."
As much as I admire your noble sentiment, I feel it is a bit unrealistic. Someone has to pay for those robots to be designed, maintained. For that software to be designed and administered, monitored. And renewable energy doesn't manifest out of nowhere, it needs capital investment (most of the time) to be harnessed.
I'm struggling to conceptually understand how you think those items will manufacture productivity (general concept, as opposed to money) without it being taken from someone, whether willingly or forcefully?
I've been that guy, but... fuck that guy. Obviously you're not talking about someone who is just barely paying the rent, because overtime. I also presume we're not referring to someone working three part-times; much sympathy in that case, but with EITC how much tax is he really paying? Finally, we must not be talking about the startups, because love.
More likely, this is a salaried employee at an established firm who is doing the job of one-and-a-half or two salaried employees, for the pay and benefits of one. If he started working rationally, the firm would have to hire, and unemployment would decrease.
As I read that, I agree with you... Until I realize you meant that to be provided for by others via taxes. Now, I understand the compulsion to protect everyone in the name of some social good, at the very least the "not as fortune as me-group".
But why are we removing the need/worry for individuals to do this for themselves? I say this because I know for a fact that this is achievable for individuals (even poor ones). For a quite-honestly, tiny-fraction of my salary, I get all sorts of income-protection. Due to illness, terminal disease, disability, everything. Add on top of that life-insurance for my family to pay off the loan-amount on the mortgage and have them covered till my child is reasonably on his way to college, if I should leave them early.
These aren't some pipe-dream schemes or ideas, they exist. And people can get them, without the need to beg some "noble" politician to give it to them for free in return for votes/power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_protection_insurance https://www.pps.co.za/pages/faq/INCAPACITY.php
A government one, even though you pay for it: http://www.sars.gov.za/TaxTypes/UIF/Pages/default.aspx
Apparently, the US has it as well, though I'm not sure how equivalent to the above it is: http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/unemployment-insurance/
I helped create it.
Specifically, you are on a high enough income that you aren't worrying about food, much less mortgage repayments, job stability, whether you can afford fuel for the car this week, or whether you need to just rinse clothes in water to save the money you would have spent on detergent for more important things like food, rent, or bus tickets.
There are also pele out there who won't miss another $100k in taxes. Their worries are along the lines of "how can I make all my money work for me without swamping any single market?"
Taxation and social welfare is just the modern version of "feed your slaves." You should be happy to provide universal health care and subsistence income in order to ensure your future workforce is healthy, educated and stress-free. We treat our racing horses better than this.
zo1's arguments are valid or invalid independent of her/his "privilege" (whatever that even means).
Or something else, entirely? Really, I'm curious... As someone whose parents had no privilege and were poor.
>"Taxation and social welfare is just the modern version of 'feed your slaves.' You should be happy to provide universal health care and subsistence income in order to ensure your future workforce is healthy, educated and stress-free. We treat our racing horses better than this."
I don't view the majority of our fellow man as "our slaves", that require some sort of food/handout from us. Nor do I seek to optimize their healthy and education with the hopes of some sort of workforce productivity boost / optimization, as you seem to imply.
Edit: made quote clearer.
Really? Mortgages last 30 years, are you sure your current level of income will too?
Do you honestly believe that that was the point I was trying to convey? My point was that there are ways for individuals to mitigate the risk and impact of those "bad luck" situations, without the need for government spending.
Besides, if that woman were truly destitute, she could have gotten Medicaid. We already fund programs for the truly poor.
Let's say you make $100k per year. Why don't you pay $80k to the government. I don't think you need that extra money right? After all, your take home pay would still be above minimum wage. Better yet, you really only need a studio apartment, you don't actually need a bedroom.
Just as I have no idea about your life, how can you presume to know anything about everyone else's?
If we taxed the 'rich' at 100%, it wouldn't even pay the federal budget for one year.
We don't need fewer people paying more taxes. We need more people paying tax.
Not that current taxation policy is anything but ridiculous, but flat tax isn't particularly "fair", for many values of fair. For example, the burden of paying, say, 20% of gross income is wildly different for someone making 20k/yr vs someone making 100k/yr.
Flat in dollars is regressive in utility.
"If we taxed the 'rich' at 100%, it wouldn't even pay the federal budget for one year."
Not that I support the policy, but depending on how you define "rich" it might. Per Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+budget+%2F+us+total+...), the US budget is approximately 30% of total US income. That's going to need more than the incomes of the clichéd 1%, but not terribly much more. If you let us borrow the same amount we're currently borrowing (extracting current revenue by taxing the top at 100%: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+tax+revenues+%2F+us+...) that shrinks down to about 10%. Ignoring, of course, the very important point that those people aren't going to keep earning the same way when they don't see any of it.
And most civilizations have come to the conclusion that progressive taxation makes sense. The wealthy benefit much more than in a straight line proportion.
The wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few. Higher tax rates for higher incomes makes perfect sense when basing "far" on "ability to cope with the loss".
20% of a low- to middle-income salary is a far greater burden than a 40% tax on someone with an income exceeding $400k.
There is an old saying in my social circles: follow the money. If you want to make money, you arrange to take it from the people with the money. Luxury cars, luxury apartments, gastronomic restaurants, and so forth.
Why not tax these people more? They aren't actually going to miss the money, and ensuring that there are more healthy middle class folks with disposable incomes will actually help the rich get richer still.
Social welfare and a universal single-payer health care system is actually a grand firm of corporate welfare. Throw a living wage into the mix and you can reduce minimum wages to zero. How much better will the outlook be for entrepreneurs and startups in that environment? No longer will volunteer internships be exploitation, no longer will labour costs factor into viability of a business, and you will have many more consumers with spare change to serve.
As a german, who lives in a system of universal health coverage and unemployment payments i can tell you that that is a very naive way of looking at it. There are two very strong factors that mitigate this:
1. Most humans wish to be useful. Most humans wish to do some kind of work in their lives. This is not theoretical, this is real. We found in germany that unemployment can strongly contribute to depression. Additionally people who are not employed will often find ways to contribute otherwise. We have a strong culture of volunteer workers here in germany.
2. In order to provide a useful, yet humane, push to people, there is one single requirement for unemployment payments: People have to regularly provide copies of job applications they sent out.
There are many more details to the system than i have the leisure to describe here, but please, do yourself a favour and read up on our system before you dismiss the possibility of an implementation.
> These aren't some pipe-dream schemes or ideas, they exist.
Universal health coverage and unemployment payments are also not pipe-dream schemes or ideas, they exist.
"1. Most Germans wish to be useful...."
The German culture tends to value hard work for the sake of hard work higher than other cultures. Even Americans don't glorify hard work for it's own sake. It's all part of the "American dream" to end up well-off, to climb the ladder.
This is a hard thing to argue about, but I think you could not be more wrong about this. Americans identify themselves very strongly with being productive at their jobs. They take few vacations. Any suggestion that people should be paid more or get more time off is denigrated as laziness. Unlike many other countries, having a gap in your work history is seen as a huge warning sign. You saved up money and took 2 years off? Good luck getting another job. America still has a tremendous amount of the Protestant Work Ethic in it. Why do you think America has stood by while companies got rid of pensions, and go decade after decade after decade not giving raises?
Not to mention, that I think pretty much everywhere, the amount of resources society as a whole end up wasting on the idle rich in one form or another, probably makes that wasted on "freeloaders" and "those abusing the system" a rounding error.
Then when the severance begins to run short and you miss a payment of your insurance - just this once - if you get hit by a bus your kids will be left to fend for themselves.
Computers and automation technology have made individual workers so productive that employers no longer need nearly as many workers as there are workers who need jobs. And we know very well what happens, right or wrong on an individual level, when there are large numbers of people who can not work but who still need to eat. And it's not pretty. Protection from that should be something every corporation willingly pays an increased tax rate for. The alternative is a destroyed economy that will take their organization down with it.
I've actually edited this response six or so times so far, but would expect few people to notice and marking it as "edited" would just introduce noise.
Imagine that you have a really competent friend that you trust completely, you relate to them all of the events leading up to the "problem" (or issue or what ever) and tell them to figure out if there was anything else you could have done and get back to you. They say, "I'm on it boss, will let you know." And now you can stop worrying about it and do the next thing on your list.
Now you can argue there is no God and I cannot disprove your argument, but I can relate that this tool or scheme lets me get on with my life, and on more than one occasion I have later received insight (perhaps from my subconscious, I make no claim of origin) on the problem. I find it helpful in my life, and in dealing with things I cannot change but may avoid in the future.
I sympathize with the author, and I think there is a compelling story here about healthcare, but the title undermines it severely by making it about how she failed one attempt to get an entry-level job; and it almost feels like a form of blackmail: The Container Store now has to deal with this widely-shared article about how they didn't give a poor, cancer-having mother a small little job.
For all we know, they rejected her to give somebody who didn't have a Harvard degree a chance to earn some income.
I completely understand that. I was transitioning from my old industry into tech and was hit with some surprise medical issues. If I didnt have the luxury of a large savings I would have been de-railed completely. I was also lucky that Lyft was an option in SF because I got rejected by several companies along the way. Now that I have a start in a new career I'm pretty keen on rebuilding to ward off the next random disaster.
https://i.imgur.com/aCAmbQ2.png
It is super annoying and adds no additional content by design. There's like four or five of these throughout the article.
As to the article most of the issues seem to revolve around a broken healthcare system (i.e. no public option, insurance through employers, unemployed pay more than employed, etc). Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren't meant to be in positions like this...
I liked the first 2/3 of the article, just the end is kind of irksome. Harvard, CEO pay, gender gap, etc none of this came across like the author likely intended. I bet she didn't customise her resume for "The Container Store" job and just forwarded her normal/writer one.
I suspect that apart from the uncontrollable desire to add something that is perceived to add some aesthetic value to the article, that there is some precedence to these enlarged excerpts actually resulting in increased readership. I don't have data to back this up, but I know that David Ogilvy regularly discussed his almost formulaic use of serifed bold headers, slightly smaller, bold subheaders, and images because they were shown to increase the readership of his advertisements.
My guess is that these are used for a similar reason.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote
I actually definitely agree with you: that pull quote in particular added no value and I've removed it.
We've had this debate internally (I'm personally not a fan of pull quotes), but a lot of writers like them for the ability to highlight key points and to break up the stories.
Would it maybe be helpful if we didn't make the pull quotes full width? Or required that they be shorter?
It doesn't help that because of the size and margin you actually need to scroll past it rather than it being a more subtle part of the text.
Something like this:
https://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/files/2012/07/pullquote_reg...
Likely wouldn't bug me because it is impossible (given the context) to assume you're meant to read it. Whereas when you stick it inline but make it bigger it could be either read or not read depending on the author's intent.
This too looks better:
https://www.drupal.org/files/images/better-pullquote-example...
Not inline also and easy to ignore (which might be "bad" depending on the intent of the pull quotes).
It's supposed to be a climactic snippet of a punchline without the set up, presented significantly earlier in the article than it's actual inline appearance, so that the reader has a hard time finding it in the normal scale wall-of-text, and can't skim to it. Then the time they spend sifting through the article, they read more of it, and (if it's a good article) they become more enticed into buying the magazine, as the newstand clerk scowls at them, because what is this? A library? No reading!
That's how those things are supposed to work. But they're a little anachronistic for the internet. Some people are just attached to the look and feel of the design, probably. But on a web page that you scroll through, it's much less effective at courting the reader, and in this particular instance, the examples are intrusive, and counter-productively placed right next to the passages from which they originate.In her defense, I guarantee she was told that they shouldn't at some point in her life. Every time an employer goes with social proof over qualifications, they implicitly tell the world exactly this.
If she actually put "Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad", of course it was rejected. Such an application is overqualified, and it looks strange that someone who actually has those credentials would want to do something like that.
If she didn't put that on the application, then it is not intellectually honest to say that an "Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad" was rejected. The person that was rejected was the character that is described in the job application, not the author who is hiding behind that character!
The people doing the hiring for this type of greet-the-public job are usually looking for "fresh faces" who project a certain image, which means, of course, that the jobs tend to go to attractive young people. Nobody cares about your bestselling writing, Harvard degree or Emmy award: unless perhaps the latter is in an "Oustanding Lead/Supporting Actor in ..." category because then, doh, you're actually famous, in the sense that random people in the public recognize your face!
I've had plenty of jobs that were beneath me and I hated (I even worked at Taco Bell for a season as a graduate student), I did them and did them well then left when I felt it was time to move on, no harm no foul.
And this includes computer science and programming jobs. Yes I enjoy programming and engineering and generally like my job, but all this fake enthusiasm is annoying. Most people are there for one reason to make money, either now or in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI
Life's complicated enough without trying to overlay my preconceived notions about why they're appling for a particular job onto someone else, as you say.
The statistical improbability of getting hired for such a position aside, if someone overqualified wanted to work for you in a (very) temporary position, why would you not hire them? Or at least get them to interview?
There are very few positions I've ever had, even great jobs I loved, that I wouldn't readily leave for greener pastures. Why would I stay when another company is offering me more money and/or more responsibility for similar or more interesting work? Sure, I'm not going to drop my job at the drop of a hat, but I'll do what's best for me and that rarely involves staying for long periods of time at one company.
I've had a boss that had no choice (it was an Austrian firm that refused to pay US market rates), but to hire people grossly overqualified for the position they were in and paid way below market rate for it and he put together a great team by finding "naive and/or desperate people" (I was both at the time, having just come back from Japan when Nova, the English school, when bankrupt suddenly). And I'm still grateful to him for everything I learned there about business, but he did his best to keep everyone advancing in their career and encouraged people to move along when it was time.
Just as companies keep trying to make employees interchangeable that makes jobs just as interchangeable.
John Smith the high school dropout is glad to just have the job, he'll stick with it as long as he can. The emmy-winning harvard graduate is going to be looking for alternatives every day she's working there, because she knows she can get hired at one. The likelihood of them leaving is much higher because they're coming to those opportunities instead of the other way around.
Working retail is simple (not easy, depending on your personality) and anyone can do it once they've been shown how to run the register.
"The likelihood of them leaving is much higher..." Do you know what the turnover is in low skill jobs?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102021496#. "After reaching 100 percent in 2005—then subsequently dropping to 51 percent following the recession in 2011—median turnover rates for part-time retail workers jumped back up to 74.9 percent in 2013, according to Hay Group, a management consulting firm."
Even call centers (considered a decent job for "unskilled" adults), have better than 25% turnover. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-employee-turnover-ca...
The answer is always that someone else was preferred over you. You usually can't know if your interview performance was a determining factor.
If they're really investing a lot in their workers, then they want a perfect fit or ideal type of background. If they believed the writer was a risk to pack up and leave a year down the road, it makes sense that they wouldn't take that risk...
Also, authors generally don't rake it in and certainly not at the magnitude of "a few years' expenses".
Maybe she could've would've should've but fixed costs are sticky and you don't have to look around very hard to find people who can't absorb that many shocks in such a short period of time.
Especially so for someone with some sort of seasonal income. They're the type of individuals who should know better than to not have a reasonable buffer (in case work doesn't come in that season).
I hadn't heard of income-protection insurance and after some googling it's no wonder: as far as I can it's a kind of disability insurance - it doesn't kick in if you're merely unemployed.
At that point, you're at the mercy of your state's unemployment insurance - which you might not be eligible for if you've been working as a contractor or self employed. Not to mention that seasonal work makes it harder to plan, since you don't have reliable income to plan around.
There just aren't that many "no-brainer" options for absorbing this many shocks, at a scale most individuals can cope with.
Pure private unemployment insurance.
An X of Y magnitude doesn't make people more savvy with savings/planning.
In the olden days (before 2013) you had to sign up for COBRA to stay insured unless you were healthy enough to qualify for individual insurance. But now you can't be turned down, but you can only sign up during specific enrollment periods. Problem is, COBRA is still around, and companies are still required to offer it to you, even though for most people it's going to be way more expensive than individual insurance (because it's unsubsidized), and if something goes wrong or you become unable to afford the premiums, you can end up like the author, unable to sign up for an individual plan because you're out of the enrollment period.
This is one of a few holes and pitfalls that were created by the Affordable Care Act.
I know a lot about this stuff because my startup helps companies save money and design health benefits programs that take advantage of recent changes in the health care law (benefitter.com). If you have any Obamacare questions, let me know.
I felt sort of silly doing it, but realized that if I really was mostly worried about some kind of freak accident, then i should actually ensure that the insurance could kick in following said freak accident.
Also, the whole article is a great example of why single-payer socialised health care is a good thing. Living in Canada, I don't have to worry that a job loss means no health coverage.
I wouldn't be that smug; you're still one accident or one cancer away from destitution. The surgery may be fully covered, but you're shit out of luck if you're unemployed and need physio/cancer drugs.
I'm still baffled by the complexity Americans have to put up with, but we still got pretty large cracks in our system.
Where I live, everyone is underemployed, so I know without looking that she's a coastie. If coasties want to see their future, look around "the greater Chicago area". Everyone is like a former tool and die mechanic working as an oil changer, or a math degree holder working in a call center, or a biz grad working food service, or a former K12 teacher working as a waitress. If overqualified people were not hired, pretty much no one would be hired. Its pretty nuts.
How about medical insurance that isn't tied to employers? I'm not at risk of losing my car insurance just because I lost my job.
US healtcare is so fucked up :/
Articles like this make me ashamed to live in a country where we have so much, and yet feel the need to complain when things don't go exactly our way. As if the world owes you a lack of breast cancer, or a stable marriage, or a steady, decent job.
Ask the migrant worker who's here illegally, far from his family, who works a soul-crushing routine, saving pennies to send home, with no visible end in sight, with absolutely no form of health care, with virtually no rights as a non-citizen, about finding a job. Maybe he's lucky that he doesn't look for white-collar jobs. That he only has to stand outside a home depot in the rain and hope to get randomly selected, jump into the pick-up, and head off to whatever manual labor might make him a few bucks that day, so he can put a small portion away for his family and use the rest to buy something from the dollar menu.
Poor us, we starving, huddled, highly educated, successful, safe, free, white middle-classes.
Jobless? Cancer? Kids to support? Even with all of that, there's still so many options and opportunities afforded to this person. Sometimes things won't be perfect. Bumps in the road happen to everyone at some point or another. But that doesn't mean you have to wallow in your misfortune. You can also take stock of how much good there still is, and how much worse off you could be. Be thankful for the bumps and keep on rolling.
Still, I can feel the pain of the author, having gone through several months of unemployment at the beginning of my marriage. You did everything the elders told you to do, and still you end up getting the short stick and thrown to the sidewalk. I was able to pivot my career and bounce back, in part due to being still youngish... in part thanks to the support of my family. But I can clearly see what a shipwreck that would have been 20 years later, minus a spouse and plus a couple of teenager kids.
I'm officially starting to get sick of hearing this. Yes, it's an interesting story, and yes, US Healthcare is in need of some serious fixing, whatever that may mean to you.
But nobody ever guaranteed that you'll be in control of your life and your destiny. Freak things happen; life isn't fair. All of these things (work hard, save, study, etc.) are good to teach kids, because it increases the odds of being in control of your own destiny. But that's it--it tilts the odds slightly in your favor.
What else would you rather teach your kids? The author mentions her own child is paying his/her way through college. Is that a bad thing? If higher education is a part of this "convenient lie", perhaps you should tell your child: it doesn't matter if you study hard or work hard--just sit back and wait for things to happen.
Perhaps sitting down and talking with her children about career paths. No one ever guaranteed that she'd be financially independent regardless of what she chose for work (that I know of, anyways). If she chose to go into a field that she LOVES, but that doesn't pay much, she needs to be aware of that. Writing is a difficult field, I am sure. And yes, doing what you love is important, but so is being able to do the things outside of work that you love.
The article talks about "massive nooses of debt" that affect the economy. Nobody forced her child to go to a college where he/she had to take out massive loans. State schools are excellent choices! Outside of the top 10-ish in the country, I'd be surprised if the higher-cost schools are "worth" their cost. Talk to your children about their college choices!
Yes, there are things that need to be addressed about our economy. Yes, our healthcare system is in a bad state. But I am sick & tired of hearing people blaming the lie that "some anonymous person/society told me to work hard and study hard, but now I'm not where I want to be--it must be society's fault". She had to downsize your apartment, she can't pay for her child's college. So what? Is that society's fault?
I think that summarizes a large number of people's thinking on the subject.
Following from this, here's the key point: most Americans want to live in such a society where the American dream is achievable.
What if--and I'm just spitballing here--what if they're right? What if it is society's fault, because of the numerous extra requirements we place on people: car insurance, health insurance, taxes, etc.? What if we aren't actually giving back their money's worth?
Car insurance is required because cars are required, because society has forced sprawling urban and suburban design on the masses and neglected mass transit.
So, yeah, I'm going to pick those examples.
Surely a nice idea, and maybe I'm a cynic, but what rational adult actually believes this? Some fields are inherently more stable and well-paying than others.
"Now, in this new gilded age, where profit takes precedence over people, and commerce takes precedence over art"
When in the history of the United States has this not been the case?
'Get a job do that work for 40 years (with only a couple of company changes) and retire'.
'Changing a job more often than every 5 years is job hopping and that's a bad thing.'
'Most people only have a couple of jobs over their working lives.'
Basically all kinds of baby boomer propaganda that was considered 'conventional wisdom'.
And I pretty much believed it until I actually started working in the private sector.
Indeed. There is usually a pretty large difference between what people are told about the world growing up and reality.
In my experience, people who never figure this out externalize blame when things go wrong: Greedy corporation fired me, CEOs make X when I only make Y, someone should have made sure I had healthcare, landlord raised my rent, etc.
Where in this article does she take ownership of her life and decisions?
It's not my fault you majored in Medieval Poetry. Why should I subsidize someone's ill conceived choices? Regarding poetry, it's interesting how the world's greatest poets did not get an expensive MFA in poetry. Hemingway didn't even go to college. Studying liberal arts is important, but getting $100k student loans to major in something like Sociology? Really? Some folks are just plain old stupid. In what universe do the numbers work for a decision like that? If I was a VC and someone came to me to fund their schooling with that sort of 'plan,' I'd laugh them out of my office.
Good luck.
If you need a job which you are massively overqualified for, dumb it down and do your best to appear no sort of threat. Bosses in entrenched organizations love people who are just smart enough to push the levers, but not smart enough to appear promotable, or to become bored or feel unfulfilled and cause some sort of trouble or to notice obvious abuses and have the mental capacity and wherewithal to seek remedies....
In these types of situations, appearing dumb and predictable is your best bet. And that's a very hard act for some people.
We're facing a similar situation now. Computers and automation technology came into the workplace around 1980 or so. And society sees the increased value workers create thanks to these tools as belonging to the company, not to the worker. The idea that a worker should be paid enough that they can work 40 hours and provide for an entire family comfortably has vanished. Now the concern is only that no one be paid above the market rate for their position, and that the market rate be kept low. Society and the business world was entirely unprepared with the breakneck pace of productivity growth that computers brought about. The idea of having wages keep pace with the productivity gains simply seemed absurd, as it would require large and frequent raises. And now we've gotten so far behind, with wages stagnating for decades while companies have grown accustomed to ludicrous profit margins, that any reasonable correction seems ridiculous. Will we see society come around and consider it proper that a worker once more is entitled to a good portion of the value they create? Or will companies devalue jobs to the point where taking one costs more than they pay? Will we be able to avoid bloodshed this time?