Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 353 posts

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#131

Post by tines »

ergonaught wrote: post #116
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…

> Process improvement: Is this your job? Then no. This remark from TFA at least implies when it "is" part of your job, go for it. Perhaps you have rejected, or simply not engaged with, the "call" to recognize class warfare, however, or if I can be silly I'll call you a "capital sympathizer". From the frame of recognizing workers vs capitalists, you can't just say write off being exploited as "well you were paid to be…

I think his point was that it's the job that you signed up for, so either do the job, or don't work there.

> You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.

Working for minimum wage wasn't part of the contract you signed ("your job"), so your example isn't valid.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#132

Post by l33t233372 »

WalterBright wrote: post #57
giraffe_lady wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It is absolutely adversarial. One side wants one thing, the other side wants the opposite. That’s what an adversarial situation is.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#133

Post by carlosjobim »

pdonis wrote: post #31
etothepii wrote: post #21

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.

> The problem with this article is that one does not need capital to start a tech company Yes, one does. One needs tech skills. Those are capital. (You agree with this since you say tech workers get more valuable with age and experience.) They're just not capital in the form of a large pot of cash that can be used to throw money at problems.

Skills are not capital in the communist vocabulary. Skills have an unlimited supply that can not be limited.

If you want to mind-bend people into believing skills are capital, then all the workers in the world are bona-fide capitalists, since they are using their skills to get paid.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#134

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

> No, I think most of these are usually part of the job of a software engineer, and it's part of developing solutions that work, rather than just gaming individual metrics.

If you speak to people who work in trading or finance, they do none of those things. They view each other as conpetitors and don't help each other. They aim to outgame and outdo each-other.

The culture in software is very different to most other industries. But if you look at other fields of engineering, you don't see people stepping outside their roles as much.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#135

Post by littlestymaar »

grumpy_coder wrote: post #97
WalterBright wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate If you did, why would a company hire you? The idea is the employee must create more value than he costs. And the employee gets more pay than his labor is worth to himself. That's why it's a win-win relationship.

Except the company cut has been getting bigger and bigger for the last 40 years. Productivity has increased and wages have not.

That's indeed true for the average worker, but are you sure it is the case for software engineer? How high were the salaries in the 80s?

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#136

Post by UIUC_06 »

Ah, Marxism: that 19th century idea that refuses to die no matter how often it fails.

You would think, wouldn't you, that the several dozen countries over the last 100 years that became avowedly Marxist, and turned into prison farms that citizens couldn't wait to leave, would have convinced everyone that it doesn't work?

But no. The college freshman mentality keeps vomiting it up again.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#138

Post by Natsu »

MarkMarine wrote: post #95
WalterBright wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are al…

> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor?

Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite.

> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.

People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits.

> Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.

And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#139

Post by xg15 »

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…

Found that part odd as well. I think this would be the first labor movement I ever heard about that argues for less solidarity with your fellow workers.

Protip: Organising collective action will become impossible if everyone hates each other and keeps information from each other for fear of their own job security. That will help capital in the end.

Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer

#140

Post by Natsu »

brightstep wrote: post #54
teucris wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Man, you must have worked for some terrible companies. I have friends at everywhere I ever worked and we always tried to cooperate.
Post reply on HN