You dont ask for a raise. You get exactly what you deserve.
Hear me out:
No one ever gets a raise before they start doing the extra work.
It is always a case of "wow, we better give Alice a raise since she's doing so much and it would suck to try and replace her with someone else at her current pay".
I disagree with this, if you start going above and beyond on your work consistently people/co-workers/the company will get used to this and it becomes your baseline. Why pay more for someone already doing the work?
Achieving above your pay grade for a long period can also place you in the tricky situation of management agreeing to a raise if you up X/Y/Z, if you're already performing to a high level without monetary recognition then you're in a tough spot.
All this leads into why lots of engineers struggle to get raises within the same company and then with a few career hops will instead double/triple their salary.
The cost of the lost productivity from domain knowledge within companies leaving with engineers who can't get raises must be far higher, especially as going out into the current hiring market means you'll probably have to pay equal or more for a similarly skilled but without domain knowledge engineer.
Oh, please. Have you even read anything that OP wrote?
The OP specifically said that he feels like leading the projects and adding a lot of value. 32k in euros before taxes is awful. No one will give you anything unless you ask for it. Exploiting VISA workers is a common thing - he is afraid he is being exploited.
It is always a case of "wow, Alice is working like a superwoman for that shitty salary, thank God we have her on the team, because other people would have been a lot more expensive".
They are not the ones that took us to war with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya.
The mainstream news is the one that is complicit in the spread of dangerous Conspiracy theories such as: "Saddam was behind 9/11 and has Weapons of Mass Destruction!"
Boom. 10,000's of US soldiers dead and many more crippled.
1 Million Iraqi people dead.
Infowars has more often than not been right on important matters.
Is Alex Jones over the top? Of course!
Are their Chem Trails and other conspiracy theories "out there"? You bet!
But look up MK Ultra on Wikipedia and other programs that the US/CIA ran and you will realize that truth is stranger and much more dangerous than the "conspiracy theories and the penis pills" that Alex Jones is talking about.
At least those Penis pills aren't like the Opiates and depression medication that kills 10's of thousands a year that MSNBC, Fox, CNN et al peddle.
Use your ability to think: this is an information war and the MSM is the most dangerous kind of "fake news" and they are fighting tooth and nail to be the ones allowed to define their competing broadcasters as "fake" (since Infowars is now becoming huge)
Yes, that's the unfortunate problem. They often bring up issues and questions that won't be discussed anywhere else. Then ruin it by throwing in some heavy conspiracy without any supporting evidence.
> Infowars has more often than not been right on important matters
I agree with the spirit of your comment, except this bit steps over the line and ruins the whole thing.
The thing about Infowars is they are close a random noise generator. They can't help but be right on some things, as anything random is bound to do.
By contrast, the MSM is a structured but biased source. Their narratives will tend to align with reality quite well, only getting a few facts wrong here and there, due to internal processes that filter out the inconvenient facts.
So, it's true that already having to apply critical thinking, it's actually easier to sift through Infowars's crap, as most of it is blatant garbage that can be easily discarded - whereas the MSM you'll hear the same exact message from multiple sources, and have a much harder time picking out the little bit of actively harmful garbage. But this doesn't mean that you can point to randomness and say it has any sort of predictive power.
(Of course, my comment here is certainly not condoning the growing centralized censorship touched on in the original article. We've been destined for this slow motion trainwreck ever since the term AJAX was coined, and it's looking like we need to abandon centralized communication platforms ASAFP!)
Also do not understand why I must drive to an ATM where usually homeless people sleep.
Is this some kind of anonymous performance art? I have trouble believing that people like this really exist in a form that knows how to turn their computer on.
Having spent some time in about that bracket in an average cost-of-living area (earned slightly more, but I'd spent the previous few years being a broke grad student), I can attest that it felt amazingly rich - there were few things I would have done with more money. My life satisfaction came from my job, my relationships, and my hobbies.
There's a lot of evidence supporting the general conclusion that happiness is either logarithmic in income, or asymptotic after a point. Just blowing it off as "a joke" doesn't hold water. There's also considerable evidence that things like friendships, family, good relationships with neighbors, etc., are much more important contributors to happiness than income.
We're talking about human happiness, the capacity for love, freedom, and self actualization. Happiness.
We're not talking about buying overpriced liabilities such as fancy cars, furniture and clothes.
I make over 150k and it's awful working 160 hours a month.
Think about why this study is messed up:
Wage earners spend the Best part of day typically indoors, taking orders from another person.
Wage earners send their children to be taken care of by strangers.
Wage earners send their kids to the zombie factory (public schools)
The fact is that someone with a few million can:
- take care of their own children/babies
- educate their own children
- take care of their aging parents
- take care of sick relatives
- can explore the world
Don't tell me that having 2M in the bank will not make you, your family, and neighborhood FAR "happier" than someone making 300k in wage slavery.
I can tell you for a FACT that making that much money (millions) will objectively lead to higher quality of life for people and their families.
I'm personally working hard now to accumulate several investment properties and live free for life so that I can retire before 40 so that:
- I can raise my kids
- help parents, family, friends
- explore world and learn
- focus all my free time on healthy living
- get best medical treatments
You damn right it will make me happier to be able to do yoga 3 times a day, raising my kids and also building cool shit without Having to answer to a boss.
You know it's true that lots of money makes you immeasurably more fulfilled. Don't listen to socialist lies that you only need some bullshit 105k (<75k after tax)
I agree this study is BS. They have no one in their data who has $5 million+ in the bank and has F* you money... because those people are supposedly outliers.
I would be an order of magnitude happier if I could work on my own projects instead of working for someone else. There's a reason people do side-hustles and punish themselves trying to get something going outside of their normal $100k salary... it's for the hope of having true financial freedom. The study is correct that $100k vs $150k doesn't make much difference at all... but if I had $1 million in a bank it would be a huge difference.
Socialists were the first and the main critics of Wage Slavery. More recently, you have the Situationist movement, which coined the slogan "Ne Travaillez Jamais!" (Never Work!) and has a body of work criticizing this model (both in capitalist and in marxist-leninist countries).
Anyone saying you "only need 105k" is not a socialist.
I did - seriously. Think about it: Single, living in Pittsburgh (reasonable CoL area). I had a cute apartment that I enjoyed coming home to, went running in gorgeous parks or cycling in lovely outlying hills almost every day, worked my butt off at a job that was challenging as hell that I enjoyed, and was putting away enough in savings that it was clear I was on a good trajectory for long-term FI. It was great.
Oh, and the better kicker: I was even happier in grad school when I was earning $24k/year. One of the happiest times of my life. That doesn't apply to everyone's grad school experience, but for me, it was awesome. Lived in a shitty apartment above central square in one of the more expensive regions of the country (hi, Cambridge, still love you but glad I don't have to deal with your housing market). My roommates and officemates at work have become life-long friends.
I will indeed tell you that having 2M in the bank has been a much smaller factor in my happiness than almost anything else, particularly the effect of the people in my life. My day-to-day happiness is much more affected by whether I got a good night's sleep, whether my children are healthy, whether my wife and I are communicating well, whether I'm healthy and able to do the things I like or whether I've once again managed to injure myself pretending I'm 24 instead of 42. :-)
(I'm not unsympathetic to the desire for FI, btw -- quite the opposite. But I've noticed that I want it primarily in a theoretical way, for the comfort in knowing I could quit, not because I actually want to quit. Yes, I'm lucky that I have .. multiple .. jobs that I absolutely love, but I've also chosen to accept a 66% paycut to work in a job I love instead of blasting to FI in industry, and I'm good with that. Sometimes it annoys me and I go do some consulting or bitcoin mining to help make up the difference. :-)
I'm totally with you here. But we need to realize very feel people perceive/realize the world under these terms. Most people feel like they are destined for a job their entire lives and that extreme wealth are for the few lucky/extraordinary other ones. Even in an YC forum.
The perception does not matter in as much as it is actually aligned with reality. Which I suspect it actually is if you're not one of the initially rich.
Few can produce ground-breaking ideas or are lucky enough to actually earn a million dollars quickly (as opposed to stealing it).
depends on how that person got to making 500k or more ... they could be working like crazy, and taken out tons of loans to give their family a fancy life, thus being miserable and stressed out (golden handcuffs) ;)
They're skewed towards wage income, because that's how the majority of people in this country make their living, so it's automatically more relevant.
Just because 1-2% of people make their ends meet with their wealth working for them doesn't mean their presence requires them to be represented with equal weight in research.
Not sure how this isn't self-evident to you.
> The people conducting these studies have their own biases: justifying taking other people's wealth via forceful means such as taxes.
Uh-huh. Taxes are theft, government is bad? Are you sure you're not the one with the biases?
you can choose to denounce your citizenship and stop paying taxes. but your also need to leave the country, and live as a stateless Pirate. and any state enforced rules don't apply so you better arm yourself to the teeth and hide from any roaming military.
Hear me out:
No one ever gets a raise before they start doing the extra work.
It is always a case of "wow, we better give Alice a raise since she's doing so much and it would suck to try and replace her with someone else at her current pay".