mobility

There is an awful lot of internal mobility that's possible.

The end result is your engineers have restricted mobility, and you don't have to pay them what they're worth. It's very similar to price fixing, but with humans and their ability to earn a living.

What we actually have in the US is some degree of social mobility within the middle class. The parasitic upper class is still a problem, and resistant to improvement.

The sad thing is that I don't doubt that Google is better than 95 percent of large corporations its size in terms of internal mobility, individual autonomy, and engineer-centric culture. It might be better than 98%.

People with limited knowledge and understanding of something and/or restricted mobility in tech aren't in a place to see things the way you see them. Help them get to that place, instead of just telling them how to see things with metaphors that only work once you're at that place.

The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.

So did I experience social mobility from cheap education fees? Absolutely.

Compounding this problem is the fact that mobility slows to a crawl, because the queue is full. This breeds dissatisfaction with the young, ambitious types, while simultaneously breeding resentment among the older, entrenched types who adopt the grumbly "kids these days&;&."

It's the tying of the risk pool to employers that's most problematic to me, and which imo severely weakens other parts of the free market, by reducing labor mobility. That might actually improve some free-market elements of healthcare, since the actual customers would choose providers, rather than their employers doing it for them.

Indeed, things that are ostensibly good, say more people getting higher education or more job mobility, can push out the time when people settle down, buy a house, and start saving, thus increasing the number of people who don't have substantial assets. The median family net worth of a household headed by someone under 35 is $10k, while it's over $230k for a household headed by someone aged 55-65.

But in doing so they're encouraging labor mobility, and seem strangely shocked to find out that employees would take with them the expertise, history, and network of contacts that they had accumulated and move that value somewhere else. It's really interesting how they have resorted to strong arming their engineers with these shot in the back non-competes, and couple it with salary collusion and hiring agreements.

Successive waves of these businesses created a climate of tremendous economic mobility, with workers constantly jockeying to jump to each emerging income tier. In just over a decade, I've seen several hundred million people come out of absolutely grinding poverty into a lifestyle which is still poor but not truly deprived; I've seen several hundred million more acquire a standard of living that -- considering the difference in purchasing parity power -- is perfectly in line with first-world norms.