How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

Post by xxpor » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 5:47 AM UTC

bcbrown wrote: post #401

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be troubled by the thought of spending 80 minutes each day trapped in a steel cage. That's 400 minutes per week, or about 300 hours per year just sitting in traffic. Even if SV were the best place to be an engineer, it's hard to imagine it being worth sacrificing 300 hours per year. A 10 minute commute is 25% of that, which is 75 hours per year, which is still a lot. But for me, there is a huge psychological…

I've done a not-quite-so-bad commute, Seattle to Redmond, only 20-40 minutes on the way to work, 50-70 minutes on the way home. I found it soul-crushing. Most of the wait on the way home was in the line to get on the freeway. I became a worse person, unwilling to let other cars merge in, always assuming the worst of other drivers. Currently I have a 20 minute pleasant bus commute to work, and I wouldn't go back to th…

Post by yetanotherphd » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 6:00 AM UTC

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #69

firstOrder wrote: post #50

The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/database administrators is that if someone is really talented, they can negotiate a good salary, and that labor organizing together would just protect the lazy and the slackers. You hear this same thing when someone is lowballed a salary number, or has to put up wit…

Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. It's a clear personality trait in the profession. Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Can you imagine a top lawyer looking like that? The importance of projecting a serious professional image to the broader society doesn't seem to eve…

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 7:22 AM UTC

marme wrote: post #275

dredmorbius wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1B throws all that much more friction into an already unequal relationship, tossing power further to employers. My preferred reform would be for H1B to be fully unrestricted. If you're going to allow labor into the country, let it compete on fully equal footing with domestic labor. For the reasons Smith articulates and you've either failed to read or are intentionally choosing to ignore, employers already have the u…

real changes that need to be made to h1b are the fact that they need to prioritize the h1bs to foreigners who graduate from US universities. Every year thousands of foreign PhD students graduate and go back to their home country not because they want to but because they could not get an H1B visa mostly because they wont work at the cut rate a person fresh from their home country would work for. These PhDs are trained…

Post by wavefunction » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 10:23 AM UTC

eric_h wrote: post #397

wavefunction wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he's the Woz, he's immutable and immovable like the Bhudda Funny how Jobs was the 'Bhuddist.'

buddha, buddhist

Post by wavefunction » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 11:32 AM UTC

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #313

pg wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment thread is like a micro version of the origins of the hard sciences.

Unfortunately, salary information is generally kept confidential. Nature is much more forthright with its facts. There is some information on, say, glassdoor.com, but it's anecdotal. Is there a reliable and high-res salary datasource?