I’ve been watching a channel on YouTube that talks a lot about socialism, and although I don’t think anyone will ever convince me that socialism is a good thing, the guy who runs the channel has some pretty fascinating criticisms of ‘capitalism’, or at least, how this appears to function today. Several of his points actually resonate with my own criticisms of the modern world, I’ve simply never thought about these in the way he presents them.
One of these major criticisms is how the burden of employment is always placed on the worker. If you don’t qualify for the job, it’s your fault. But if billion dollar companies want to lay off thousands of people for no clear reason, that’s fine, they’re just cutting costs. It’s your job to compete for the few positions. We’ve so internalized this that some days, even when I’m highly productive, I feel like a bum because I don’t currently have a job. Why aren’t you making money for somebody else?
And see, it makes sense that we have to compete for these jobs to some extent. If you’ve never written a line of code in your life, you really can’t expect to get a job as a software developer. If some hiring manager who maybe barely scrapes the 6-figure salary needs to hire somebody who can simply get a job done, they are going to hire the best candidate they can while the position is open. That’s just how the world works.
However, it’s amazing to me how people will pour their heart and soul into gaining knowledge and skills just to compete for fussy office jobs. In the name of competition, people will learn things and gain skills that have absolutely no value outside of the boundaries of their job duties and no particular value to themselves, either, but they really need the job, so they do it anyway.
I’ve talked about this before. Because of how specialization works, most of your employable skills will not be useful in your daily life. Some jobs are naturally better at this than others. Being a mechanic, for example, gives you a great many skills for being able to work on your own car(s), although naturally you will be gaining the skills to work on certain makes and models you will never own. On the opposite side of the spectrum, if you are a surgeon, you will never be able to operate on your own body, so the skill is almost purely valuable to other people, and it’s only valuable to yourself insofar as you can exchange the practice of that skill for money.
But many office jobs fall into the latter category, too. How does being a corporate recruiter help you in your personal life? Almost not at all. It might give you good people skills, and it would almost certainly be beneficial for you if you started your own company and wanted to hire people, but beyond that, it is exclusively a skill that is traded for money. This makes you extremely dependent on a job, which isn’t so great for you, but is great for big companies that want to pay pennies for a position they know people will fight viciously over.
But yeah, we consider this a “good thing” because it “promotes efficiency” and supposedly “drives prices down”, while a great many of us are miserable just trying to get by. (Have you ever thought about that? We have all these cheap goods, but so many people are miserable. If that was the tradeoff, was it really worth it? Most of those cheap goods just end up rotting in closets.)
This is a reminder to me why pursuing financial independence is so important: I don’t want to be somebody else’s tool.
And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to make a difference, or be good at what I do, but I hate the idea of desperately competing in the market for “grand tool” status. I think plenty of other people have already carved out that niche.
And this is not the same as rejecting employment in favor of studying your passion of 18th century Scottish bagpipes, then complaining about how evil capitalism is for not giving you a 6-figure job. No. What it means is that there has to be a better way forward than destroying yourself in order to ultimately line somebody else’s pockets, just for them to lay you off at the drop of a hat, or when “profits” aren’t high enough. Again, I’m never going to fly the hammer and sickle, or vote socialist, but I think it’s extremely important to realize how the power imbalance between employer and employee can make life suck.
We even see this with the Protestant Work Stupid Ethic. The relationship of the employee to the employer is always a moral relationship, where people are commanded not to “rob their employer of their time”, but there is no such social construct to command the employer to pay their employees a good wage and treat them well. In fact, this just gets brushed off by quoting the Bible: “The worker is worth his pay”. In fact, whenever employers are encouraged to treat their employees well, it is usually in reference to passages about slavery, which is kind of hilarious when you think about it. And if you don’t have a job but want a job, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough. “There’s work all around!” [There are, truly, many who simply refuse to work, but I think they are a minority] But do you know how hard it is to live and pay the average rent or mortgage on minimum wage? It isn’t possible. I don’t mean this conspiratorially, but this works wonderfully for companies, who have a host of candidates to choose from who are desperate just to pay their bills and will learn anything, do anything, work in any conditions, just to make that happen. This is extremely widespread, but again, the burden is always placed on the individual for “not trying hard enough”. I’m ashamed to say I kind of used to see it this way back when I was a point-blank conservative. I believe that people are generally willing to work if they can do so and realistically afford to live. (Granted, many people are really bad with money, but does this really justify companies paying terrible wages for terrible conditions? I don’t think so)
Now, it’s still true that you have to make yourself useful if you want people to give you money. But how much money you need is largely a structural consideration in your life, and needing less money makes you less dependent on ‘the system’, which is why I’m a big fan of minimalism and simplicity and not owning, for example, a giant-ass house. There’s no shortage of good reasons for “upgrading” a house, but I have no doubt somebody who stood to profit from it manufactured the idea that everybody has a “starter” house they must eventually “upgrade”. And as a rule of thumb, I don’t trust realtors.
With my own career shift, right now, it’s clear to me that I really need to knuckle down and learn more before I can truly be useful to employers in the capacity of a security analyst. Which isn’t to say I might not still be able to find the right entry-level job where I’m at now, but the more I learn, I think the easier that is going to be. To some extent, it’s all interesting to me, and if I’m going to work, I may as well do interesting work that I enjoy, but it does raise the question: am I going to be capable, or am I going to be a tool?
There are many people out there who will ask the world of you but only want to pay you $60k. It’s pathetic when you know that the skillsets they are asking for easily garner twice that much. Toxic companies exist, and you should avoid them. But still, I will need to invest in some skills over others, and that can be a delicate balance if you want to get employed in the relative short-term.
I guess for me, I keep asking myself what interests me the most. Most blue-team IT jobs are looking for one or two specific subsets of security skills. Some are gaming for you to have vulnerability management skills, others to have firewall and intrusion prevention skills, some want you to be good at log analysis and incident response, etc. Most job listings look for all of these, but if you pay close enough attention, you can tell which are most important to them. This is encouraging because it means I can pick those things that interest me most, and if I invest in those skills I might actually get a job doing those things. This is how I can get something more out of the job than just a paycheck.
I also keep wondering how I can leverage security skills in my own life. I sometimes wonder if I could run a small online shop from home and run the infrastructure myself without having to pay various services. The ROI of specialization can slap pretty hard against things like this, but it still opens doors. And of course there is the option of earning money from Bug Bounties, too, which is always on my mind. It doesn’t pay great relative to employment in the industry, but it does allow you to earn pretty dang good money without employment. But you gotta be good.
I don’t want my skills to exist only for an employer. There are any number of political policies that should exist but don’t, and I wouldn’t say it is wrong to fight for more rights, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own situation, so you still may have to play the game. But as always, a little strategy can go a long way.