All you have to do is find a job that pays good wages at the national level that lets you live in inexpensive places. It is possible - being a professor at a top school is an example - but not easy.
Most people don’t want to move to a cheaper place if it involves taking a big salary cut, even if you are in relatively better shape. It makes it hard to move back.
Here’s an anecdote:
In 1990, I was working in San Diego for a large aerospace company. My research was no longer considered aligned with the corporate directions so I was advised to find a new field of research (and move to the research labs up in LA). So, I started calling companies still doing research in my area.
I interviewed at the Westinghouse Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA. They made me an offer, much lower than my current salary.
I called them up and told them I couldn’t be certain that in a few years I might decide it wasn’t the job for me and need to leave, but I really liked the group and the research they were doing and I’d consider joining their staff if they at least kept my salary at the current value. I told them my salary and they said they’d get back to me.
A week later they called me back and told me that if I was paid the salary I quoted, it would be equal to the Director of the lab.
I ended up joining another company’s lab in Los Angeles at a 20% increase in salary (plus a signing bonus). 
only for prime workers
Yeah…unfortunately it’s hard to work a “Wall Street” or “Silicon Valley tech” job if you don’t live in commuting distance of Wall Street or Silicon Valley. There are certainly financial services and tech jobs all over the country. But it’s often good for one’s career to be in the center of those ecosystems.
OTOH, if you are working a job that doesn’t need to be near those cities, it’s not critical to be there. I worked in the corporate headquarters of a retail company when I was in business school. But other than the fact that my business school is outside of Boston, I could have done the same job for a company in Missouri where it’s probably a lot cheaper.
Of course, the only reason I was working that retail corporate HQ job in the first place was because it became too difficult trying to go to business school while working 10+ hour days at a “Fast Five” consulting firm (or whatever they called companies like Cambridge Technology Partners, Sapient, Scient, Viant, MarchFirst and Razorfish in the 90s).
Until this past September, I worked at an ad agency which had Publicis Sapient and Razorfish as sister agencies (and, if I’d stayed, my job would have been moved under Razorfish at the start of this year).
Publicis Sapient styles itself these days as a “digital transformation” consultancy, while Razorfish is a digital marketing/advertising agency.
Aren’t all those companies more or less digital agencies under Publicis Groupe these days?
In the mid 90s they branded themselves as a sort of new style of technology / management consultancies focused on this hot new dot com stuff. Like a more modern web-centric version of the advisory/consulting arms of the Big-5 (now 4). They all sort of blend together in terms of their offerings IMHO. Andersen Consulting rebranded as the more “digital” sounding Accenture. All the other firms have digital practices. All the digital practices have strategy arms. It’s hard to keep track of them all.
And they all hire from each other with people changing jobs every few years.
One of my biggest gripes about where I live is that it’s a blue collar town. The vast majority of jobs don’t require a degree, so we’re crawling with kids that have degrees griping about the lack of good jobs - who absolutely will not leave KY.
Meanwhile, me with a high school diploma working a pizza shack? I was told off the record that a black kid was never going to get promoted past where I was, and I moved to Chicago the next week. (Where, ironically, I turned down the promotion I couldn’t get in KY - but I at least had the option).
lol
Hope the cardboard box was big enough
There is a big semiconductor company in Idaho. I don’t know how they pay, but if they pay Silicon Valley wages someone working there would have it pretty good.
The big benefit of working in Silicon Valley is easy job hopping. I started to work in NJ, and moving to California for a new job was traumatic to my wife and kids. When I switched jobs again the only impact was that my commute was a bit shorter.
Not all of us though. I’m still hacking away at 63 years old. I trained and think I make more than my boss. I don’t care, she doesn’t care. I’m right where I want to be. No way I want management.
I do understand that this is unusual.
It’s an interesting structure. I would suck at her job, and she would suck at mine.
Yeah, I was still writing code at 56. There was one guy in our office my age still coding, and everyone else was significantly younger. I think the average age of software developers there was probably 30-35. Maybe a little younger.
It seems to me that there is a growing perception that:
a) good things DON’T happen to people who step up
b) there is, in fact, little opportunity to “step up”
c) most employees ARE effectively treated as drones no one cares about; and
d) there probably WON’T be any “big opportunity” for most people
Yes, “work hard and constantly better yourself” is generally good advice. But what a lot of people see is if they don’t have the wherewithal to be in the say top 10% of performers who can land jobs in the top 10% of non-crap jobs where there are actually paths for advancement and/or significant financial opportunities, they have little chance of being able to afford to own a home, raise a family, and generally enjoy a decent lifestyle.
Also, many people have a hard time reconciling with constantly having to work hard and present a “positive attitude” to “get ahead” in a system that continuously demonstrates itself to be classist, racist, sexist, agist, capricious, unethical, and/or incompetent.
Sam should watch Amadeus. Not historical, of course, but the message was that Salieri was never going to be Mozart no matter that he worked ten times harder at composing than Mozart did.
You only hear success stories from successful people.
True, but that doesn’t mean that less successful people aren’t still entitled to decent quality of life. As you and msmith point out, that’s the trouble with the “work hard and constantly better yourself” mantra touted as a universal panacea for workplace shittiness in general.
If elite jobs are always going to be only a small percentage of rank-and-file jobs, then exhorting dissatisfied rank-and-file workers to just “better themselves” by landing an elite job is always going to be bullshit. We can’t address the problems of the workforce as a whole by simply preaching the gospel of individual advancement.
If a worker needs to get a substantial promotion in order to have a non-shitty job, and if promotions are never available to more than a small fraction of the workforce, then the shitty-jobs problem isn’t the fault of individual workers, it’s a problem with the system itself. Non-promoted workers deserve non-shitty jobs too.
^ every word of that true.
In my experience, most people can perform at a high level in the right job, even if they perform poorly in another one. The key is matching the person to the job, which is incredibly difficult.
But if you are in a job where you can’t move up but you see others moving up, then your job is to either figure out why and fix it, or leave that job and find one more suited to your personal talents and desires.
Even within a single job category people can go from being star performers to needing performance management just because of a change in managers or co-workers. Maintaining high performing personnel is a tricky thing.
In any given job, only a percentage of people will be promoted. But in general, as people gain experience they get better jobs. Very few people end their working lives doing exactly the same things they did when they started.
But if you want to find better work, either for more pay, more responsibility, or better conditions, the majority of the burden for achieving that is on you. And yes, it can be really hard to do things like switch jobs, but that’s what people have had to do since time immemorial.
At an individual-goals level, sure. But at an entire-workforce level, if the system is fundamentally set up so that most jobs are shitty, then it’s statistically impossible for more than a small minority of workers to get a substantially better job.
In that situation, telling workers in general that “the burden for achieving” a non-shitty job is “on them” will be bullshit. You can’t fix systemic workforce problems by recommending individual solutions that are statistically guaranteed to be unavailable to more than a minority of the workforce.
And indeed, this “personal responsibility” gospel of modern capitalism is not designed to fix systemic workforce problems. It’s designed to keep workers in shitty jobs docile and disinclined for collective action.
Modern capitlaism is not ‘designed’ to keep workers in shitty jobs for the simple reason that modern capitalism isn’t designed. It’s what you get when people don’t try to design an economy. It’s emergent, and complex, and there are a million reasons for everything that happens in a capitalist economy. Trying to break it down into good vs evil, oppressor vs oppressed, capitalists vs workers, is attempting to apply an incredibly simple framework to extremely complex systems.
What part of a “shitty” job/lifestyle depends on expectations?
I am not at all an apologist for big business - or even capitalism. But some people seem contend with relatively modest lifestyles which can be supported on their modest incomes. Whereas others seem very stressed that despite being an average person with no amazing talents, they think they ought to be able to emulate lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Sure, expectations are molded by advertising…