231–240 of 823 posts
I've worked 3x12, 4x10, and 5x8, without AI. I think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. On the days I worked, I was able to lock in and get a lot done, and had a significant amount of time outside of the normal working hours, which were free from meetings and distractions. During those 3 days all I really did was work and sleep. On the 4 days off I was able to rest and recover and actually have a life. It al…
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my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.
> i think things are better than they were 40 years ago. In relative terms, they seem much worse, Americans standing isn’t what it was. In absolute terms, I don’t know. What’s the measure?
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If only there were some kind of third party we could all collectively agree to delegate enforcement of cooperation to...
Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to. Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
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The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?
You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.
The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.
Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.
There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.
There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
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The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.
They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.
This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
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When your labor force makes gains in productivity you can choose to do one of two things: 1. Reduce working hours 2. Grow the economy Guess which option was last picked in 1868 and never again despite massive gains in productivity?
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption? One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
Where is that additional money going to come from? I think you’re missing some important factors in your analysis.
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Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly: You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.