update: I resent my employee for being richer and more qualified than me

Remember the letter-writer who resented her employee for being richer and more qualified than her? The first update was here, and here’s the final installment:

I thought I’d give you an update almost three years later.

First, the good: my husband and I both graduated high school. My husband also got an entry-level remote software dev job near the end of 2024 due to Jane’s husband’s connections and we were on track to do maybe be able to get a down payment on a townhouse (houses now completely out of our budget but a townhouse was possible).

I ended up buying the bakery and it’s doing very well. The location is a prime one, right by the ferry terminal so we get a lot of tourists.

The bad: my husband was let go from his job as tech is going through a downsizing and AI fanatics. Because my husband only had a year and a bit of experience, no formal training, and we live on an island with a very small and competitive market, it has been a tough four months. And because of my husband’s job loss and the tariffs that the American president keeps on taking on and off my country, we aren’t able to afford a mortgage again, because we’re too risky.

The interesting: the comment section got into a very lively debate about gentrification and if it’s rude to talk about money. On the money aspect, I still think it’s incredibly rude to discuss finances, but from my husband’s experience at work and at networking events and the few parties we went to at Jane’s house, it seems to be a common topic of discussion. There appears to be no shame in those circles for discussing how much they spent, financing on cars or mortgages or investing in retirements or savings or stocks. It feels like it’s one of those invisible white collar class things where they all grew up with it and don’t realize it’s rude. I did try to say that I don’t discuss money, to which they said okay and then the subject changed, but when I returned to them after getting a drink, Jane and some others were talking about how they had saved money buying a Switch 2 from Costco.

On the gentrification bit, it is hard to swallow that my small city has so many mainlanders who can work remote and take advantage of the lower prices here. This is/was a mill town/industrial town but the city is apparently trying to court more of them over here — there was an entire newspaper article about of how our city’s adult population, 70% had only a high school degree or less, and if we want to grow and get jobs, we need to attract people with more education and become more desirable for things like data centers.

I will say on the Jane front, she somehow managed to get the city to get sidewalks and crosswalks on the roads around her house after making a public campaign about how she lived less than a kilometer from the elementary school and her kid couldn’t walk to school safely, even though the city plans showed that there was supposed to be a sidewalk/crosswalk there 10 years prior — so she’s still around. She comes into my bakery every week and she seems happy, if not very busy.