421–430 of 450 posts
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> I mean right now you hear about high demand for tech people, but wages don't reflect that. By what metric? Software developers can make $250k+ in SV. I have a hard time imagining pay doubling broadly. Only a small cohort of employers could sustain paying engineers $500k+, though I suppose it is possible.
That's in SV. And the vast, vast majority aren't making that.
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Sorry small businesses have apparently been so cruel to you, I've had great luck with them.
I've been lucky as well and all of my small business experience personally has been great (tech small businesses are pretty good on average, I think) but my point is that luck, by definition, doesn't happen to everybody and we shouldn't have to rely on it. "I got lucky therefore there is no problem" is not a reasonable position to take.
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What if I don't want to follow those rules? What if instead, I want to negotiate my own work contract? If a union comes in, I have no option. I do not want other people voting on my contract. This is why I will always fight the establishment of a union in the tech industry. I do not want to be governed by the union rules, so I am not going to allow this stuff to be established in the first place.
"What if I don't want to follow those rules?" Same as if you don't want to follow any other rules laid down by your job. "What if instead, I want to negotiate my own work contract?" Nobody's saying you can't do that. "If a union comes in, I have no option. I do not want other people voting on my contract." You don't have any evidence of that. "This is why I will always fight the establishment of a union in the tech i…
Instead of doing that, I will just prevent the rules form being implemented in the first place.
The real world situation that we live in is that if I do not want to follow these rules, there is a perfectly easy way for them to be stopped. And the way for them to be stopped is to prevent the union from forming before they get any power over ms.
As most people in tech oppose unions, I do not just have to "deal with it". I can stop unions from having any power over my life at all by preventing their existence in the first place.
"So because you think you're a snowflake, you don't want things to improve for other people"
No, I'd be perfectly happy with people engaging in voluntary association if they didn't always inevitably end up trying to force me to join their special club.
As long as these people won't drop the whole "force everyone to join us" clause, I will continue to oppose them.
Fortunately, the pro union people are in the vast minority in tech, though, so there is not much to worry about yet.
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> The myth that just won't die. If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing, companies wouldn't have the luxury of being as picky as they are, and open reqs wouldn't attract hundreds of applicants. I don't know whether to think it is real, or that it is a myth. It's true that tech companies are picky, it's true that salaries are not skyrocketing. Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, t…
>I don't know whether to think it is real, or that it is a myth. It's true that tech companies are picky, it's true that salaries are not skyrocketing. Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, that was my impression. Then you should probably hurry up and skyrocket your salaries.
The world would be a better place if people just paid people what they were worth. If we could start having more honest conversations about salary (e.g., talking about salary, and comparing salaries should not be taboo…), I think it'd go a long ways.
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> Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, that was my impression. Matches my experience on the hiring side. Even after we filter heavily long before they get to me, within the last month, had a candidate for a senior software position who literally asked "What is AWS?" I can only presume that guy files loads of applications and goes on every interview he's offered.
Are you paying market rates? If so, how are you calculating market rates? Also, if you are paying market rates, why would you expect anyone really talented to select your company over all the other ones that pay market rates? (I'm not trying to be snide).
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> The myth that just won't die. If this were true, salaries would be skyrocketing, companies wouldn't have the luxury of being as picky as they are, and open reqs wouldn't attract hundreds of applicants. I don't know whether to think it is real, or that it is a myth. It's true that tech companies are picky, it's true that salaries are not skyrocketing. Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, t…
>Open reqs attract hundreds of unqualified applicants, at least, that was my impression. In that case, what you can do is train your underqualified candidates. Create a system which allows you to train candidates for training and get them up to speed. Kind of like manufacturing used to do.
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I've been lucky as well and all of my small business experience personally has been great (tech small businesses are pretty good on average, I think) but my point is that luck, by definition, doesn't happen to everybody and we shouldn't have to rely on it. "I got lucky therefore there is no problem" is not a reasonable position to take.
When you say we shouldn't have to rely on luck, do you mean in terms of not being harassed, or more generally? Because if you mean more generally, I don't know how you do that without severely curtailing people's freedoms.
And even if that isn't okay for you, there are plenty of ways to do this without even curtailing anyone's "freedoms" to be abusive: we can provide government jobs to all workers if they want them and require managers at government run institutions behave decently, for example, as we did in the New Deal.
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I agree. Transformative technology has this effect on people. The other day I was arguing with someone that said we need true Artificial General Intellegence before full autonomy is available. I'm fine with skepticism, but these types of unfounded claims drive me crazy. If you want to argue the companies aren't really moving the tech as fast as they claim, post actual evidence, not some nonsense about speech recognit…
Technologists have a bad habit of not taking consideration the political and social sides of innovation. The success of autonomous cars depends less on the tech as much as it would depends more on politics. As tech don't mix well with politics and the interests of the majority, autonomous cars will only happen when the tech is good enough to overcome politics. Some people think that this will take decades if not cent…
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The transaction of you working for me is still voluntary. No person forced you to work for me. I did not cause you to starve. If I disappeared off the face of the planet you would still starve. That I offer you a job improves your options relative to what you would otherwise have had. I can only "force" you to work 20 hours a day if all your other options are even worse, and I am the one who improves your options the…
"The transaction of you working for me is still voluntary." Only in the most extreme interpretation of the word. "No person forced you to work for me. " Maybe not, but the idea that I will be fired if I don't do what you say means that it's not entirely voluntary. "I can only "force" you to work 20 hours a day if all your other options are even worse, and I am the one who improves your options the most." Again, that'…
Exploitation is an incoherent doctrine. A moral crime, where the victim is strictly better off for having been victimized! A crime where each successful enforcement action makes all parties strictly worse off, but where the person who suffers most from enforcement is the "victim."
In a just world, someone who supports this doctrine would be made to suffer in proportion to the suffering they willfully and violently inflict on the most vulnerable by removing their access to "exploitative" situations.
Wanting people to enjoy a high standard of living is noble. Wanting to get there by banning all labor transactions that don't confer an uppper-class lifestyle is lunacy. Redistribute the income. Make direct provision for services. Whatever. Don't pat yourself on the back for removing the best option of someone with no options. That's about the vilest and most evil thing a human being can do. Give them better ones.
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So that's a nice optimistic vision, and if I had any faith we could keep it to that, I'd be for it. My vision includes scope creep and lots of greedy ambitious good-at-politics less-good-at-actually-doing-work types grabbing the show once it's successful. Most organisations meaningfully described as unions has a non-trivial element of excluding people from the trade in one way or another. I will never be a part of an…
Guess what: you (almost certainly) already are. You think your business (on orders from the management, not based on a vote of the workers) doesn't arbitrarily exclude people? You don't have HR officers who filter out great programmers because they don't have credentials? Your company doesn't post job listings that require 5 years of experience and a college degree to write basic CRUD apps? You just have no control o…
It's farcical to expect a majority of union members to put ideology above self-interest and vote to depress their own wages by permitting new entrants to follow in their footsteps (except in proportion to existing members leaving the field, maybe).
People who are inside an advantageous position (employed in a desirable field, living in a desirable city) very reliably kick the ladder down once they've climbed.
Society at large is nearly always better off when these people are disenfranchised and disempowered. You don't even need a tyrant to do this either; simply expand the voter pool to include would-be entrants as well as current members.