What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?
&gt;These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills<p>I&#x27;ve turned down like 40 candidates lately for a job that pays at least 80k.<p>It&#x27;s hard as hell to find someone who is both knowledgeable and personable.<p>The word &quot;shortage&quot; pops up often in these types of conversations, but the word I&#x27;d prefer is &quot;mismatch&quot;. Me and the people I know are hiring aggressively, all the time, for people who know about engineering, product design, data analysis, etc.<p>There are lots of jobs. Most of the people you walk past on the street just don&#x27;t know how to do them.<p>&gt;  unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.<p>I think this kind of thing is defeatist and intellectually dishonest. In a roundabout way, it says &quot;I have trouble finding work, and I&#x27;m a good person, so all the people with work must be bad people&quot;<p>We&#x27;ve gotta stop otherizing successful IC-type employees and start training people to switch into those fields late stage (the current tech talent pool is overwhelmingly people who started early and stayed on board)<p>The article goes on to talk about things unrelated to this comment, but it really started off on the wrong foot, IMO, by needlessly polarizing a complex situation and dismissing the abundant existence of genuinely good, chronically underfilled positions.<p>edit: the article also bases some numbers on &quot;official unemployment&quot;. I&#x27;m not an expert on this topic but I&#x27;ve heard that number to be somewhat deceiving, in part because it fails to count 1) people who have some work (like a few shifts at a retail store) but would like to be employed more of the time and 2) people who have given up actively searching for work.<p>edit 2:<p>&gt; profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.<p>whoa. can&#x27;t just... brush past that one. That paragraph is not followed up on robustly. I&#x27;m interested in entertaining the thought, but you can&#x27;t just drop that pill and expect me to swallow it.