I definitely agree that there are a lot of entitled people here. I will not argue against that. But I also believe we have different estimates of the proportion and who are making these comments. Maybe you think I am one of them, maybe not? I can say I am a grad student and as far as wages go it is better than the memes but even if I do get a summer internship (this summer not as lucky) my income is substantially closer to that of the driver than the SWE. But we've also seen HN grow exponentially over the last few years. It has really caused the tone to change around here, for good and bad. One of my particular frustrations is that in this growth that noise expresses itself as shorter and more pointed comments. At least in my experience, it feels like it has significant decreased the number larger and detailed conversations, like these, that drew me in in the first place. So I do appreciate what you wrote, even though we disagree. But then again, disagreement is in part how we learn. Maybe you feel differently or the same. A larger audience also means far more priors and viewpoints, which often makes communication difficult in the first place and frankly gives bad actors a larger edge to increase noise. I think if my experience is representative it does also suggest we may be speaking to a wide audience at large, which would result in an increase of entitled SWEs but also in laymen and people simply interested in tech at large. Maybe someone has scraped the list of front page articles and through categorization there could be hints to if this feeling is true or not. Maybe the experience is just the environment changing? It is hard to know. So I can't reject your estimation outright either and with respect to the framing you have specified, I think your comment is fairly agreeable.

But the next two paragraphs I find a bit confusing. I had originally started with a discussion of possible miscommunication, which in the current response I believe you agree with. But your response to that comment was about how you do not believe an employee should be _forced_ to compatible. I took this to mean with respect to wages and with that respect a minimum wage is that forced mechanism. But it seems you agree. Maybe I'm too primed in the thinking that it makes interpretation difficult. At least in this regard to this, I do not think the federal standard meets the demands of the current environments. Nor do I think many states. I think this issue is rather complicated though because the minimum requirements are highly non-homogeneous across even a singular state. I'm not quite sure what the solution to this is, but maybe you have some ideas. There is some balance in there that prevents low wage workers from being priced out, required to bus/train in with long commutes, and maintain high wages for SWEs and C-suite. The oversimplification of the problem I think makes the solution difficult as first order approximations or narrow framings aren't "good enough."

But thinking carefully, I can see that that interpretation may be wrong, or wrong enough. Because I think we're close in position (ironically not an uncommon case in people that disagree). Maybe you meant that there should not be tight restrictions in maintaining that employee, such as we see in more European structures? I think we'd at least both agree that the government's role in this is mainly to ensure that there is healthy and strong competition within the market. I think it matters where on that scale of employer/employee market we are, where people think we are, and where they think we're headed. We should want that employee market, as I think everyone benefits the most here (even that top 0.01%, but not visible through their bank accounts). I do think 5+ years back SWEs was clearly an employee market, which likely even built a lot of entitlement. But I think we quickly shifted to an employer market, making people's stress go up, and even causing overestimation of that scale.

I do think these changes cause resentment regardless of the income level. I can understand someone being frustrated even making $200k/yr WFH when they see friends let go, the company say they have to tighten the reigns on perks/income/employees, all while seeing stock and C-suite compensation go up or even be the same. These are conflicting signals. Static friction is quite a force too. In this respect I don't agree that an employer should be forced to do anything either. In fact, we are on an incubator website and I would encourage those people to take their frustrations out by competition rather than regulation. After all, this was the game being played between the capitalists and the soviets: a market economy vs a planned economy. But I think too that people underestimate the heavy hand that was being used. Not so much the invisible hand of Smith, but rather invisible because it tilted scales and purposefully hid. Maybe the market is too captured. Maybe not. I will at least say it is easy to get caught up in one of the two dominant narratives that has permeated our culture with respect to wealth inequality. But I don't think either of those narratives are particularly helpful as they do not capture the complexity of the issues we are facing and themselves end up only being noise and even make conversations like these difficult as we are now primed so well it is easy to misinterpret and jump to each other's throat. Especially when we see these conflicting signals, they do give each narrative evidence to their claims. Possibly even saying the same thing in different ways and building frustration as we feel unheard. Most of language is implicit after all, and it is hard to know intent or reception through a screen. I do appreciate your comment though, as I think you have brought up things I wasn't thinking about and made me think deeper. I also think conversations like these do start to heal our community. I appreciate the lack of brevity. The world is complicated and language is imprecise, I'd rather slow down and truly communicate, even if it is harder.