My parents (well, my mom at least, my dad was an entrepreneur) would never quit their jobs. This was something that was unheard of. Xer's would be happy with whatever job came their way. Now, the millenials are fully understanding that their jobs are about as secure as their car parked in the bad part of town.

Honestly, corporations have changed how they treat their employees, and so the employees are adapting.

You might have what it takes to walk the walk, but don't jump to conclusions before you've trod the path of a truly awful economy.

My point was that once upon a time, companies and their employees were likelier to stick together through good times and bad. These days the equation has changed: companies are liable to dump you when quarterly profits aren't good, and you're likely to dump a company at the first whiff of something better. That's better in some ways, but I think we've also given up something that may be harder to quantify. For instance, if you're a happy worker and not worried about the next quarter, you can also invest in the company long term, rather than strictly looking out for your own interests, and vice versa, even if there's a bad quarter. Said companies also had time to invest in things like creating Unix, and lots of other R&D that wasn't immediately registered as profitable.

I don't know that I'd be happy like that, and I think that the cream of the crop in today's world oughtn't look to other people's companies as a place to make their mark; still, I think it's something that bears thinking about. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back at some point in the future.

You're 100% correct though, I have no problem limiting my tolerance for bad situations these days.

That I think is the key. Everyone figures that it'll be great when we're all sitting around in our pj's "working", but will it? We're talking about a change to the fundamental nature of our society. There will be winners and losers, but that's a very different world from the one we know.

One of the major themes is that the focus went from people as citizens and unto people as consumers. Thus the reason for corporations changing their behavior. It's as much the consumer's fault as the corporations'.

I have a pet theory that this is why some people have this visceral hatred of corporations: they're a mirror to the people, and people don't like what they see.

People who hate corporations for being corporations generally aren't really thinking about what they don't like about said corps, and also rarely take the time to consider how the corporations actions would be justifiable (in a human sense, not necessarily just in the profit-motive sense) to the people running them.

I think that what people tend to rail against is corporations like Monsanto. Sure, they can only sell what 'people' want to buy - but they also have no problem with showing utter disregard for human life or the environment, furthermore what they sell is not marketed at individuals - they end up being only able to sell what other corporations want to buy (who in turn don't know or don't care about said disregard for human life or the environment), and have enough money to buy their way out of most legal trouble.

And we know that you value your worth relatively to what your neighbors have. So with your neighbors suddenly being much better off due to them being celebrities, you end up feeling poorer and must play the consumerism game.

I'll try to rewrite this to make more sense later - pretty tired now.

Ours is the first generation with the technology to enable it.

Granted, our didn't have computers or the internet; technology has marched onward. But regardless of whether we're discussing the modem or the mimeograph, the story of the young usurping the old with 'modern' technology is a classic.

Yes, it's the beginning of a fairly tale, a standard mythological motif - by which I don't mean it is fictional or trivial, but that it is universal. BTW: Matt does acknowledge that the next generation will do the same to his (at the end).

He's right about greater productivity - but if everyone is more productive, then the competitive bar simply resets at a higher level. It's an endless trudge, if the finish line recedes as you approach...

There's a sophisticated argument that with a smaller firm-size, you have more CEO's. The problem with competitive success remains that not everyone can be a winner - it's a zero-sum game by definition. But everyone can have a family. Everyone can have the satisfaction of improvement and mastery. Everyone can enjoy the thrill of risking a lesser thing for a greater thing. Everyone can take pride in effort and sacrifice for a worthy goal.

And ultimately, these things are immensely more satisfying than vacationing for months in Europe.

Talkin bout my generation

The economy is not a zero-sum game. The economy is not a zero-sum game. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

There does not need to be a loser for every winner.

We can all be happy and affluent.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/29109.php

(Actually, the research in question had caveats: absolute income correlated with happiness until one's basic physical & health needs were satisfied. After that point, it didn't matter: instead, what mattered was how well you were doing relative to your peer group. So for there to be winners, there had to be losers as well.)

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker from the Midwest and for the first time I understood how the defition of winning and happiness differs. I don't think there has ever been a time in my life where I needed something and couldn't have it whereas my co-worker had to work hard for everything he has. His definition of "winning" is having a nice place to sleep, being able to eat a nice meal, and go out every once in a while. And once he has that, maybe a little bit nicer place to sleep, a little bit nicer meals, and going out more often. What other people have is not important to him, therefore, in his world everyone can win.

My definition of winning pretty much requires losers. I don't understand how you can consider yourself a winner unless you are more/better/faster/stronger/etc. than someone else.

Some people have their scale of success calibrated to be absolute (my co-worker), and other have it calibrated to be relative (myself). I hypothesize that the absolutes are happy more often but the relatives have the drive to achieve a greater magnitude of success albeit less of the time, which explains why some people are happy with (relatively) little and others are unhappy even with extreme wealth.

"They want to be CEO tomorrow,"

"I deserve favors from others"

"I know that I have more natural talents than most."

expect ready access to senior executives, even the CEO, to share their brilliant ideas.

I think it's more a testament to the improvements we've made in technology how easy it is for kids to become BIG deals quickly with good ideas.

The last century was full of promises of "the n hour work week", with n much less than 40.

There's definitely a shift going on. I suppose there has always been a shift going on - but it seems like throughout history the "shifts" have been relatively evenly spaced with regards to how they affect the "average persons" lifestyle, and what new things they enable us to do. The "shifting" going on right now, due largely to the advent of the internet, has obvious potential to radically change a lot of things about they way people live and organize.

It's become so much easier for a couple of people to start up a business doing what they like to do, and make a living off of it in the last decade that it's hard to believe - and this is almost all due to massive increases in the ability of people to communicate over large distances.

I'm young, but I really think that we may be living in a time where something closer to "utopia" for humanity (if you can ignore the cliche term) has moved, in about ten years time, from being the stuff of "nice ideals that simply won't happen" to "oh my this could actually happen, and is indeed happening in some areas".

Of course, just because we have the ability to doesn't mean we will. I would guess that as the average person becomes more aware of the sheer scale of the things we could be accomplishing that we will continue to move closer to all the failed promises and visions of the past, at an increasing rate.

To put it another way, the promises of the last century that you speak of were made by people who saw the potential of what could be done, but the advances were not enough to push the small groups ability to successfully implement things to the point where they could do so easily, or without a lot of capitol - large infrastructures, and people working 40 hours a week in said things were, at least partially, still necessary as business expanded to utilize the advances.

Now (for example) we have people paying their rent and bills by selling shirts that they silkscreen themselves in their homes, and they can sell to a global market with relative ease. A passionate individual or small group of people do not have nearly the amount of an uphill battle that they would have had even 5 years ago.

Granted, a lot of these people aren't going to be getting rich - but for a lot of people my age and younger (I'm 23), simply being able to have a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs without having to succumb to the 9 to 5 doing something that we absolutely do not care about at all (and that could probably be automated) is incentive enough.

As recently as the late 1960s, American youth were idealizing personal freedom, quality of life and independence, and "adults" were criticizing them for it (probably in the WSJ). San Francisco is practically a monument to the era...

Matt and many others are doing what he talks about.

I wonder about that. When LiveJournal first had its scaling difficulties in 2002, anyone with any experience in programming kinda rolled their eyes at what Brad was doing and thought "This college kid doesn't have a clue." I mean, writing the whole app in Perl? Relying on MySQL boxes that went down frequently and usually took a whole cluster with them? Walking clusters to build a page? Putting your object traversal logic in the app instead of convenient SQL queries?

Everybody knows that the way to build a scalable webapp is to write in Java or C++, buy an Oracle database and leverage the thousands of man-years they've put into making it perform well on top-end hardware clusters, use stored procedures and constraints to offload processing to that database, and getting a big SAN for storage. Scalable webapps were a solved problem in 2002: after all, EBay and Amazon had done it, as had dozens of Fortune 500 companies.

Fast-forward to 2008. Now, memcached is standard scaling procedure. Federation among dozens of cheap MySQL boxes is standard procedure, with boxes arranged as master/master pairs to deal with the pesky failure problems. Everybody uses commodity hardware, and big server vendors like Sun and IBM are in serious trouble.

I think the real issue is that young workers have much stronger economic incentives to embrace disruptive technologies. They have more work years ahead of them and less investment in existing technologies, so it makes a lot of sense for them to choose technologies that suck now but will (or could) be big in a couple years, because if their bet pays off, they're suddenly on a level playing field with people 20 years their senior.

It's not always blind exuberance, arrogance, and inexperience that makes young people choose new technologies that are "worse" than their old alternatives. They could be taking a very shrewd (and unverbalized, if they're that smart) "fuck off, elders" risk.

Most of the gen-y's I've worked with produced utter crap, and I've left a few jobs now because I got tired of fixing their stuff while they were busy taking credit for it.

Workers in control of the means of production.

When you get married and have kids, you'll see how much more important that word becomes.

But given that most businesses require more work and eventually fail, taking a job is still much more secure. Perhaps this will change in the coming years, but not yet.

How likely is a 22-year-old to find a job, even at a stable company, where there's a 45% or better chance that it's still worth going to work in 5 years? Not very. Most people get pigeonholed or down-tracked; not everyone can be "protege".

I'm 25 and on my fourth "career". I recognize that no single effort or job is going to deliver better than a 50% chance of liberation and success, but I have a hell of a lot of chances, and I've learned a lot and made great friends in each of my three cycles. I don't fear losing a job-- done that, bounced back-- but stagnation is terrifying.

You asked why we should toil away as an employee for someone else, and that's the answer. Being an entrepreneur is risky business.

Over the years, I'm sure early adapters of Java, .Net, Ajax, Rails, Django, and Objective C did not have a hard time finding jobs. Companies typically try to convert existing developers to use new languages, and an employee hired for this knowledge will be an expert. A startup using the latest technologies will want to hire employees who already possess this knowledge. Finally, a user experimenting with new technologies might decide that he or she is so far ahead of companies who are still using old technology that he or she should start a business.

Bullshit. For every single Paul Graham there are hundreds of entrepreneurs living in abject poverty, wondering how they'll feed their kids or where they get the money to pay the mortgage.

You're taking a very small subset of extremely bright, assertive go getters and insinuating that this is the norm. It is not, and statistics show this.

In my opinion, if they're broke, assuming they are software developers who use the latest technologies to create live projects they can demonstrate (and not some other kind of entrepreneur), then maybe they should "cash in" on their earned skills and work for a while.

Also, having lots of obligations requiring a steady income are needs that should be taken care of first. Everybody is in a different financial situation short term, but the fact is that if you give a startup a go, and use the latest technologies, you won't have a problem finding a job if you need to.

As to at what point a software entrepreneur should put off their ambitions and work at a related company instead for a while, that will depend on the startup and personal circumstances, so it is out of scope for my posts.

Talk to someone who went through the dot bomb. There was a while there where good programmers were having difficulty.

Software entrepreneurs can fail just as hard as any other entrepreneur can. It's hard work running your own business, even in software. This gets even harder and harder as you get older.

Even PG says to start young, when you don't have any massive responsibilities. The older you get, the higher your "minimum income" level goes.

Again, it does not disprove that in the long term, somebody who is a software entrepreneur who learns the latest technologies and has visible projects they've completed, will not have a difficult time finding a job. I am not saying the salary will be huge or that you won't need to relocate, or that there won't be a bad time in the short term.

But in the long term, somebody who is competent will learn way more than they would have during the same time they would at a job, and if they have projects they can show off, they will not have trouble finding a job to pay the bills--that's the entire scope of my post.

Would it be correct to say that how entrepreneurs handle their personal and company funds are out of scope for what I said? In the long term, you will learn more from working on your own projects, and if you can demonstrate your projects, will have no problem finding a job (no more than any other person competing for the same job.)

Therefore, when competing for a job, somebody who has put to use new technologies that companies want to incorporate, and can demonstrate this, will likely do very well in the hiring process.

Also, when companies lay people off in a bad economy, it doesn't always mean that they can't afford to have that many people. They may actually want to hire experts (at a reasonable price), knowing that during a bad economy, there might be some looking for a job.

I'm 25, and my "minimum income" is ridiculous, and probably higher than most 40-year-olds'. The reason is that I live in New York. If I left New York, it would drop by a factor of 2-3, since rent is my biggest expenditure by far.

In practice, many people will be reducing their "minimum income" over the next ten years, because these financial problems are not going away any time soon.

I've also known grad students who've raised families (2-3 kids) on two student stipends. It can be done. Of course, they'll have to "sell out" and work for McKinsey in 15 years, when their kids are entering college, but that's far off in the distance.

I'm not saying that everyone will have kids, but this whole discussion is about generalities, and the consensus is that most people will have kids.

It doesn't get any wilder than the boomers, and more of them had kids than any other generation previously.

Sometimes, the obvious is exactly that.

But I really wanted to thank you for pointing it out. I've recently become more aware of how easily my own thinking can get knotted up in opinions, and get distracted from the facts or the actual problem. I have a limited short-term memory, and the issue itself can get pushed out - temporarily or permanently - without me realizing it (especially when emotions engage).

Scary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism