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An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

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Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#51

Post by qsort »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #46
kemiller2002 wrote: post #7

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…

"In competition" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the interests at play. 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.

Some aspects are adversarial, some aspects aren't.

How much compensation I get is adversarial.

How much documentation I write or how many internal tools I develop isn't adversarial, not even if you put la liberté guidant le peuple above the fold.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#52

Post by 908B64B197 »

neilv wrote: post #39

> Engineering culture encourages workers to collectively improve the company’s effectiveness. It encourages them to share knowledge with one another. To train each other. To build tools for one another. To bring new workers up to speed, and review each other’s work. To speed the company up. To seek out weaknesses in the company and fix them. / Engineers do this while they’re doing their actual job, the one the compan…

>> Engineering culture encourages workers to collectively improve the company’s effectiveness. It encourages them to share knowledge with one another. To train each other. To build tools for one another. To bring new workers up to speed, and review each other’s work. To speed the company up. To seek out weaknesses in the company and fix them. / Engineers do this while they’re doing their actual job, the one the company thinks it’s paying them for: tending the machine that makes money.

Isn't it why any serious engineering job will have stocks as part of the comp package? That's pretty much the whole point: if the company does better, your stock does better...

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#53

Post by dvt »

jjav wrote: post #48
dvt wrote: post #17

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'…

> Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to sabotage 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-cl…

> It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.

The last 10 years of ballooning salaries are a mirage perpetuated by the FED's irresponsible quantitative easing. Who cares if you're making $180k when an entry-level house in your area costs $2 million. Not to mention that the people making that much in the first job is a fraction of a fraction of the workforce.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#54

Post by brightstep »

teucris wrote: post #28
lampshades wrote: post #16

Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you. Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can. Don’t care if the company fails, don’t pay any mind to burning bridges, don’t bother giving two weeks, and certainly don’t do anything more than the bare minimum. All…

> Do not help those who seek to devalue you Excellent statement. The rest only applies if you can confirm that your company is seeking to devalue you. That is becoming more common but I don’t think it’s universally true.

All companies seek to devalue their workers. It is the nature of the profit motive. The less a company can pay for labor, the more it reaps as profit.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#55

Post by 908B64B197 »

lampshades wrote: post #16

Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you. Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can. Don’t care if the company fails, don’t pay any mind to burning bridges, don’t bother giving two weeks, and certainly don’t do anything more than the bare minimum. All…

> Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can.

And the opposite is true: if you are running a company, make it your employees priority that the company grows and incentivize them to achieve more!

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#56

Post by trieste92 »

lampshades wrote: post #16

Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you. Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can. Don’t care if the company fails, don’t pay any mind to burning bridges, don’t bother giving two weeks, and certainly don’t do anything more than the bare minimum. All…

> Extract as much value for as little work as possible.

This only makes sense if you assume that work has negative value

Imo it's the other way around: more work has more value (up to a certain point) because you acquire new skills and grow, and have the satisfaction of solving interesting problems

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#57

Post by WalterBright »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #46
kemiller2002 wrote: post #7

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…

"In competition" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the interests at play. 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.

> acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners

It is not adversarial. It is a mutually beneficial, win-win relationship.

It's the unions who (mistakenly) frame it as a win-lose relationship, which is why businesses don't like dealing with them.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#58

Post by lampshades »

trieste92 wrote: post #56
lampshades wrote: post #16

Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you. Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can. Don’t care if the company fails, don’t pay any mind to burning bridges, don’t bother giving two weeks, and certainly don’t do anything more than the bare minimum. All…

> Extract as much value for as little work as possible. This only makes sense if you assume that work has negative value Imo it's the other way around: more work has more value (up to a certain point) because you acquire new skills and grow, and have the satisfaction of solving interesting problems

[flagged]

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#59

Post by tonfreed »

I mean, yes offense, but this guy is a literally who trying to call people to radical action. And let's face it, large companies often hire dead weight to beef up their stock prices, it was inevitable they were going to shave headcount when the purse strings needed to tighten.

While I'm not wholly unsympathetic to those laid off, I've personally found that people that post this kind of thing are the first to try and guilt you into free labor themselves.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#60

Post by primeblue »

RajT88 wrote: post #35
lampshades wrote: post #16

Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you. Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can. Don’t care if the company fails, don’t pay any mind to burning bridges, don’t bother giving two weeks, and certainly don’t do anything more than the bare minimum. All…

Burning those bridges carries a cost to your career. If you think about your retirement prospects as amassing wealth by optimizing the "Area under the graph", it's really important to build a professional network so if one job opportunity ends, you can quickly work your network to find another similarly paying job. Failing that, you take a big pay cut, and impact your salary history. I can't imagine an employer makin…

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