All of the excuses and rationalizations I see posted here make me ill. It's like very few "peons" understand the mentality of those who are "in charge" - e.g. the Clueless, Loser, Sociopath hierarchy of how businesses are structured. There has been a recent spate of stories across the web about how wealth affects people's mentality and behavior - I am reminded now of a story about India and how the stark class differences there motivate those at the upper end to treat those not in their own class as even human.... it is more subtle, but just as bad here in the UK. Why would it be any different in the West? How in the world is Silicon Valley, or IT in general, any much different than any other business sector? It is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism that capital will try to exploit labor as much as possible and by any means available. Engineers getting $250K a year is irrelevant - those people are still just "house niggers"...
As a middle class American, admittedly clueless, the education I've gotten over the past decade has been eye opening. And a bit late; I wish I'd learned this stuff years ago. But that is the dark side of being an engineer - the work and the creative aspects can swamp everything else. Other creative professions have this same basic problem, with the business major types exploiting them as much as possible. And basic Marxist theory is even more forbidden than rational thought about drugs in America...
i am not a raving Marxist, but after the last 4 years of my life getting shafted by one of the new crop of robber barons (an out and out sociopath) (yes, I have finally graduated from the Loser class (or been expelled)) it's... christ. Humanity is so tiresome. I've had some great bosses, mind you, and worked for some good companies. But the capital-labor relationship is fundamentally deteriorating and with the coming rise of automation and increased population and refusal to raise taxes and all these other social forces I see, the future looks very dystopian over the next 20 years. Things are getting such that the only logical position to take is that you incorporate yourself and thus you can act as sociopathic as you need to, given everyone else is acting the same. Does anyone with any sense want to live in such a world? I'd like to just do a good day's work, get paid fairly for it and not have to spend more time figuring out how to protect myself from getting screwed over - or figuring out how to screw over the next guy. I can't do my best possible work otherwise. I've got better things to do than play social games. This is something Ayn Rand touched upon in Altas Shrugged, as reviled as that book might be. Lots of capitalists these days are nothing but the social leeches that she railed against, despite their hypocritical protests to the contrary.
I guess I am a Marxist, or at least see the slice of truth about life and society that it reveals. There is a value in honest work, in creating something useful for society - that is something fundamental to being a real engineer. IT likes to claim that is a fundamental value of the profession, but I don't see that anymore (in general). There is too much money sloshing around. Things are getting out of balance. I can only hope the social strife prevalent in the 30s (go read some American history) comes about again - OWS and the protests in the Bay Area now are only the beginning. Then again, the resurgence of the fundamental social forces motivating the 60s that happened in the very early days of the rave scene got explicitly squashed by the authoritarian parts of the power structures in society.... Yes, I do have some stories.
Fortunately, climate change will smack humanity upside the head and force us to start thinking differently.