Juniors make 20-40% less than mids and seniors. And yet Seniors are at least twice as productive. In my experience in tech, in design to be specific, it’s more like 10x difference. That’s not a myth. If you don’t think this is the case, I’m sorry, you’re just not there yet or you’re one of those people who let their emotions blind them about obvious facts (like me 😂)

Nobody talks about this. So I will. We all chose to pretend like this is not the case. God forbid we pay people based on their output… What a blasphemous idea…

Instead, we come up with moronic ways of justifying how we pay people. Let’s pay people based on their age, where they live, how many years they spent partying (also known as university), and how many children they have. That last one is not a joke. It’s not about Ceaușescu either. It’s much more common than you’d think. I built C&B software once upon a time… It’s ungodly. Jesus wouldn’t approve of it…

The dumbass rules come from our inability to talk openly about things in our culture. No matter how politely and gently I would say it, I would never be allowed to say “How come you’re paying this guy almost as much as me even though I produce 7x as much output.”

I want to be able to challenge people to productivity duels… I want to be challenged to productivity duels… not everyone should value productivity as I do, but for those who chose to, there must be an upside. Currently, that's only reserved for salespeople. The rest of us have to contend with moronic bonuses that were really part of one’s salary but are given as bonuses for tax considerations…

The fear is that if we allowed these things to happen, if people were indeed to be paid based on productivity, someone's colleague will come to work in the back of a Maybach while they take the bus. But that’s not true. Allowing the market to do its thing will bring people closer in compensation, except it will give everyone motive to produce more, if they chose to.

If we were allowed to debate this without fearing for the fragile compositions of our most unproductive (the people who are currently getting an underserved free ride) we would be able to point out the obvious solutions. Here are a few non-stupid ones:

• Abolish 5-year tech programs. And 3 years as well. They produce morons that buy courses on “auto-layout” and "How to use Notion". Clearly, university broke their ability to figure things out. I say tech programs because that’s what I know, but I bet there’s no such thing as 5-years worth of accounting education. There just isn’t.

• Abolish all business, entrepreneurship, and management programs (don’t get me started on management). These people learn exactly nothing. They just age. Business programs ought to be for people who have work experience. I don’t know why this isn’t a total no-brainer. Some of these people are competent, but that’s because of who they are, not the education they wasted their time on. They should get a 3-month boot camp and be shipped to companies who need help. That'll teach them.

• Spend government resources on companies, not universities. You know, the people who actually produce shit. Give them all that money you freed from the bogus 5-year courses and let them train their own people.

• Create tools that allow companies to recoup their investment in employees who flee before a company breaks even on them. Financial instruments could be a good idea. But more social tools are probably more appropriate. Something like slut-shaming but for disloyalty instead of promiscuity. Disloyalty shaming ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️.

I’m not joking when I say that this university thing is the root of most evil. I sincerely think it’s poorly disguised communism. “Oh, let’s plan the workforce needs of our society centrally. Let’s also protect these kids from market forces and create an artificial womb so they get 5 more years of uselessness” Maybe this is why universities are full of incompetent commies who don’t produce anything except more incompetent commies.

Governments don’t know what and how people should study. Nobody knows. Thankfully, we have markets. Markets are big machines for finding out this sort of thing. This disruption of the relationship between effort and reward is totally coming from this idiotic interventionism.

Education should be short and intermittent. You take a program for 6 months, you kinda learn a thing, you go work for a few years, and come back if you need to learn more things. We teach you again and off you go. If you need to do 3 years you do 3. If you need to become a doctor, you can do 5. But most jobs don’t require that. People don’t want to admit it because they want you to think what they do is complicated. Well, it might be, but you learned most of it on the job, not in a classroom.

This is already happening organically. We’re just too blind to notice. We’re busy obstructing the workings of the free market with more “modern” university programs, overpriced juniors who can’t do a thing, and entire sectors with underpaid people because of overcrowding caused by interventionist morons.

In a free market, HR managers, accountants, assistants, and sales folk are all paid based on their contributions. Guess what? They probably would make more money, certainly closers to engineers and lawyers. Do you know why? Because there wouldn’t be that many of them to drive their compensation down. A lighter and more accessible education promotes movement in the marketplace and makes sure that wage gaps don't get out of hand. An engineer is only worth half a million dollars if you paired him with the rest of the company. That makes the company worth a lot, not the nerd writing the code. How you split the value in between is a matter of supply and demand. This is your basic economics, but as I already told you, universities fail to teach even the most basic things.

In a free market, Juniors would be free, until they start to produce things. They would be what interns are today, except younger and more willing to listen because they haven't exhausted their patience on obsolete university professors with questionable fashion choices.

In a free market, students pay for internships, not degrees. Internships would not be complementary to education. They would be the education. Companies will create their own curricula because they know what they need better than a central planner. Taxpayers would fund said internships instead of the government orgies known as universities. That would free up said universities to get to the important business of figuring things out, not educating teenagers who don't really want to be educated.