Metadata
- Author: matt.sh
- Full Title:: Panic! At the Job Market
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market
- Finished date:: 2024-07-18
Highlights
What counts as risk assets avoided during high interest rate periods? Well, funding companies with uncertain futures is a pretty risky asset. So, at times of high interest rates, the weaker companies collapse, strong companies use high interest rates as an excuse to “clean house” every 10 years, then a couple hundred thousand previously high compensation workers discover there are no jobs for anybody anymore over the next 2-4 years. (View Highlight)
Initial growth companies are the worst combination of high-risk, low-reward effort-vs-compensation tradeoffs. Sadly, getting trapped in underperforming initial growth companies is something I never realized was a lifetime risk until way too late to save myself. Now I’ve got nothing to show of my life of work, while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career, all working as just some rando middle manager at multi-trillion-dollar companies. (View Highlight)
At least in Spain this is not usually true: stable companies pay way less
While you’re working at an underfunded, under-compensated, low-growth company just to get by, other people you know will be working at multi-trillion dollar companies making 5x to 50x your compensation for doing the same work or less. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2024-07-19
The key to midwit meme humor is always the “most advanced” people often use simple solutions indistinguishable from people who don’t know what they are doing. Average people are often in the “knows enough to be dangerous” category by over-thinking and over-working and over-processing everything out of lack of more complete experience to discover simpler and cleaner solutions. (View Highlight)
According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. (View Highlight)