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What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

31–40 of 68 posts

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in proportion to how much value they create. They're paid in proportion to how much unique value they gatekeep. Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. They dream of making us more of a commodity, so that as the chief gatekeepers of the tech economic engine, they get to keep a larger slice of the pie we create.

>Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?

It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs.

You can argue with that or not but don't pretend you do not understand the capitalist ideal of an excess supply of labour so that salaries and benefits can be driven to legal minimums with desperate people still waiting to be hired no matter the indignity. Creating Labour surpluses to reduce Labour power and enable exploitation is not a "net benefit to humanity", it only benefits capital.

In our shitty world, you are only valued if you are in a position of more demand than the supply. You might get that by being lucky but most only get it by gatekeeping whether it's doctors or delivery drivers or companies buying up their competitors. If you stand idly by, the world will punish you.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#32
post #8

Of the three places I’ve been a full time employed dev I only enjoyed working at the first. This was a UK retailer, the other two were “tech” companies. The retailer operated in the way the article describes, direct contact with the business, ability to unearth a problem and run with it, understanding that dev work isn’t just fingers on keyboard and sharing of full business context. The other two had strict comms lin…

I think, though I'm not sure, that some people prefer the latter environment. Having worked with teams which have preferred to work in as pure a technology environment as could be constructed while still providing value, I think this might be the "product focussed" (or not) distinction that people make about themselves on their CVs.

To me “product focussed” is the situation the article describes, everyone thinks about the product (and therefore the business by extension)

Those who don’t like that work environment (so would prefer the latter two of my three dev jobs) would be tech focussed in my book.

It’s all semantics though

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?

It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs. You can argue with that or not but don't pretend you do not understand the capitalist ideal of an excess supply of labour so that salaries and benefits can be driven to legal minimums with desperate people still waiting to be hired no matter the…

>It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs.

Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'. With this logic, aren't we all here who got into SW development responsible for increasing the labor supply and decreasing wages?

What's disingenuous, is people in traffic complaining there's traffic. It's sounds like you got "yours" and then you wanna kick down the ladder behind you.

Where does the buck stop? Who gets to decide who's deserving of getting into SW development without also being responsible for diluting wages, and who not?

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#34
Imo all of this talk about being “well treated” in SE is an utter load of shit

Regular office jobs don’t have oncall. They don’t get randomly pinged outside of business hours. They aren’t as rat racey. There’s less ageism. They don’t force you to live in areas where a shitbox sfh costs more than 2mil

Seriously, I wish I could go back to undergrad and tell myself to go into a regular engineering field. And my experience isn’t even the worst I’ve heard, just ask anyone from AWS and they’ll tell you

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#35
post #11

This is the reason why I am trying to move away from being a software engineer. I don't like to complain but it is honestly degrading how SE are treated in some places. I've been on teams with 4 project managers/analysts and 3 developers. They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams. There is just no way in winning this.

Yes PM roles seem to be exploding at certain companies and it's a bad thing for developers. There's not enough engineers to meet demand so just hire more PMs seems to be the strategy.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#36
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is degrading about that? Would you rather sit in meetings than develop?

I would like to work in a place where communication is a two way thing.

It's a culture issue. Some PMs get the impression that they're higher up in the hierarchy; they start delegating instead of negotiating with the devs. Really they're just around because upper management prefers talking to them instead of the pseudo autistic engineers.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#37
post #34

Imo all of this talk about being “well treated” in SE is an utter load of shit Regular office jobs don’t have oncall. They don’t get randomly pinged outside of business hours. They aren’t as rat racey. There’s less ageism. They don’t force you to live in areas where a shitbox sfh costs more than 2mil Seriously, I wish I could go back to undergrad and tell myself to go into a regular engineering field. And my experien…

A lot of tech jobs don’t have on call/out of hours expectations (in the UK at least). They’re probably not the top paying jobs at the prestigious companies, but that’s the trade off. I’m sure there are similar trade offs with the “best” jobs in other fields.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#38
post #28

It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. IMO there’s probably a good reason for it, namely some institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough. But it also makes me a little sad that other white collar jobs don’t have the same benefits. There are probably a ton of jobs wh…

> It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. Other office jobs are treated better. They don’t get pinged at random times outside of business hours. They don’t have to attend late night meetings because of foreign time zone I know a bunch of AWS people and have heard worse things from them Frankly, I love programming but would rather have a regular office j…

I replied to your other similar post too, but why not look into working for smaller companies or contract/freelance work? Not all tech jobs are big tech type work. You’ll make less money perhaps but it sounds like you might be happier based on what’s important to you.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#39

It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. IMO there’s probably a good reason for it, namely some institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough. But it also makes me a little sad that other white collar jobs don’t have the same benefits. There are probably a ton of jobs wh…

It's not a miracle.

You're treated well because you have the potential to deliver multiples of what you're making in revenue.

Other office jobs rarely can do so.

That means that sensible places will happily pay you a lot and make money on you, and that will prop the entire market up, which means even crap places will have to pay more just to get some developers.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#40
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in proportion to how much value they create. They're paid in proportion to how much unique value they gatekeep. Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. They dream of making us more of a commodity, so that as the chief gatekeepers of the tech economic engine, they get to keep a larger slice of the pie we create.

>Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?

I was just explaining why the tech oligarchy is so obsessed with it. It's a long term pragmatic and selfish effort to drive down our wages that is couched in progressive terms about inclusion, equality, education, etc. They also want to appear to be the hero while they try to push down dev wages.

It was a positive statement. You're free to make whatever normative judgements about that that you please. I'm not here to stop you praising it.

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