41–50 of 353 posts
This has all the practicality of college freshman Marxism combined with the slapdash rhetoric of a Medium post.
The problem with this article is that one does not need capital to start a tech company. This very website, sneered at in the article, is littered with examples of people who have built something at the side. I'm not sure knowledge workers can make the same complaints about class struggle that mechanical labourers can. We tend to get more valuable with age and experience.
I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it'…
> railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century. Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US. The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920), radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers (peaked around 19…
There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.
> Especially if the company you’re working for is not actually struggling economically right now. If you work for Google, say, you must be thinking, “What is it about the coming recession that makes a company that’s doing just fine institute broad layoffs for the first time in its 23-year history?” People commenting about the layoffs keep citing the financial health of the companies that are doing the layoffs as evid…
Thats it. Thats where the Marxism enters. Most of these companies (or the bigger ones) aren't losing money with these new products, they were just losing profit margin because its profitable but not as profitable. They chose to have fatter profits over your employment and wellbeing.
WRT your employment, you’re not their top priority, so they shouldn’t be yours.
Also, FWIW big companies lobby to keep healthcare employment tied, not because they love paying for healthcare, but because they love the forced loyalty - it makes quitting/being fired way more risky. Companies expect 2 weeks notice on quitting, but will lay you off overnight via email. Companies will ask you your salary expectation to underpay you, but won't tell you their salary range up front (except in California where it is now law to do so). The imbalance is crazy.
I don't live in NY or Seattle. The tech sector is much smaller where I am. I've never seen it be advantageous to treat other people as someone I'm in competition with. I've been laid off. Yeah it sucks, but no job is forever, and being nice to people means I get to sleep at night. I've also never seen anyone who can't be replaced. Time and time again something wasn't documented, and other devs/dbas/admins stepped in…
It's adversarial whether you integrate that understanding into your actions or not. And acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners doesn't mean you have to be nasty to anyone on an interpersonal level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century. Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US. The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920), radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers (peaked around 19…
> Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler? There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.
I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it'…
In the 80s and 90s programming salaries were not very high, it was a decent middle-class job. Sure, there were outliers if you hit a big IPO as always (e.g. Sun in the 80s, Netscape in the 90s, among others). But salaries? No, they were generally in line with other white-collar middle-class jobs like accounting or such.
It's only in the later 00s and particularly the 2010s that mean programmer salaries exploded to the point that now entry level jobs in SV can be 180K+. It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.
I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it'…
Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45 year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able to provide today.
[1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional
I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it'…
Offshoring and H1-Bs have definitely kept programmer wages lower than they would have been otherwise.