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

The Burnout Machine

unionize.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 695 posts

Re: The Burnout Machine

#351

Post by rglover »

Apocryphon wrote: post #239
rglover wrote: post #9

The ideal is to encourage developers to start their own small businesses and support each other by being customers. That, and when you find success/profitability, don't sell to a big tech nightmare or PE—just run the business. The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.

Reminds me of this comment I saw recently > Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what? End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43379353

Create your own SaaS or consult/freelance. Or if it's too stressful or not lucrative enough, start another type of small business. The "big business with lots of employees" thing is a relatively new phenomenon. Most people used to be solo operators or part of a family business.

And if you prefer, employers who need engineers aren't going away. They're being temporarily deluded into thinking that they can get rid of their teams due to the AI hype, but I expect that to change as "vibe coded" software starts to fall apart.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#352

Post by achenet »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #58
film42 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it paid off.

Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.

Not sure why this is downvoted.

A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day

International workers day started as a protest to get 8 hour days.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#353

Post by YZF »

achenet wrote: post #345
YZF wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're under-estimating how easy it is to do good enough. During the dot com boom many people with academic degrees in various fields tried to move over to software development with very limited success. That's like the top few % of the population to start with. Only some tiny fraction of those were in the good enough to successful range and many were ejected from the market when it crashed to never come back.

Being good at acquiring fancy academic degrees != Being good at programming. If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too. Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still. The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or…

I was working as a software developer before I got a degree. You're missing my point though.

Academic degrees and programming are a lot more similar than programming and ballet. People who got engineering and science degrees, as a population, are going to be more likely to become software engineers vs. the general population. This seems like a pretty obviously true claim. It's not a claim that people without degrees can't be software engineers. That's a pretty large population and I am a counter-example. My point is even within a population of people who in theory are more likely to become good, and who have had some motivation and invested time, it often does not work.

If anyone could program then we wouldn't be getting paid what we are. The reason why random people aren't all competing for our programming jobs isn't that our jobs are the worst. There are much worse jobs that people are competing over.

EDIT: and by the way, athletes in general do much better than the non-athlete population even in areas very dissimilar to the current sport.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#354

Post by onemoresoop »

busterarm wrote: post #196
shagie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd point to Kickstarter United - https://kickstarterunited.org How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry ( 190 points | Oct 7, 2020 | 369 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24711814 Kickstarter Union voted 97.6% to ratify one of the first tech union contracts ( 179 points | June 17, 2022 | 305 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780972

Kickstarter only voted 97.6% after absolutely bitter internal conflicts and a semi-forced exodus of people who weren't on board with the plan. The in-fighting was extremely bitter, extremely personal, included death-threats and I know several former Kickstarter employees on both sides of that mess who are in therapy over how that all went down.

Were death threats on one side more than the other? If so, which side?

Re: The Burnout Machine

#355

Post by mulmen »

jajko wrote: post #125
film42 wrote: post #11

I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems." What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me th…

Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen. I had…

I live in the US and my employer provides excellent healthcare. I broke my collarbone last spring and had surgery to repair it followed by months of physical therapy. Zero dollars out of pocket.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#357

Post by hirvi74 »

YZF wrote: post #320
bawolff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" Is it though? People in software seem to be constantly talking about burnout/mental health issues. Like we need some explanation as to why software has such high pay, flexibility, limited education requirements, and yet not everyone in the world is doing it. High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.

Pay like other things is something you mentally calibrate to. Once you have then it has only marginal impact on your happiness and mental well-being. Let's say your TC is $120k or $80k or even $250k you're going to adjust your lifestyle to this. So sure, you can drive a nicer car and live in a nicer place for $250k but now you also maybe have to make payments on your nicer car and your nicer house and those things ma…

I live in the US, and according to what I read online, I am severely underpaid. The thing is, I don't really care. I have almost 9 years of experience, and I haven't even broke $100k yet. I work in government (state level), so it's not known for being high paying in the first place. There are other benefits, of course.

Nonetheless, I would obviously take more money, if offered, but I don't feel the need to frantically run around in the rat-race for it. I seriously cannot imagine what more money would do for me. I already feel like I make plenty just to push buttons on a keyboard.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#358

Post by whoknowsidont »

stared wrote: post #100

Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation. > We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion…

Some of you are outing yourselves as not having any real world, let's just call them... issues.

>as victims of the global system.

You know if I were to be REALLY generous and take your statements in good-faith, that still wouldn't change the fact that injustice is injustice. Being murdered is not the same thing as having your wallet stolen, but that doesn't mean you should throw up your hands with a thought-terminating cliche and go "well it could have been worse! Guess I should just let them have it and not do any follow up!"

Really, really confused take to be quite honest.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#359

Post by medhir »

stared wrote: post #100

Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation. > We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion…

two things can be true:

- tech work is relatively privileged

- we, as tech workers, are losing out immensely due to a lack of collective bargaining

I look at the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as a reference: these are jobs with similarly privileged work conditions. However, there being a union meant they could inflict significant pain on industry players until their demands around AI training were met.

Meanwhile, we’re all just keeping our heads down hoping the market improves at the same time the biggest players are using our inputs to train even better models.

Just because our work conditions are better than other professions doesn’t negate the notion that we are being actively exploited to our own detriment.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#360

Post by whoknowsidont »

goostavos wrote: post #45
protonbob wrote: post #20

The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.

I work at a FANG. Senior SDE. I don't have slack on my phone. I don't read emails (unless someone tells me out of band that one needs a response). Once I close this laptop work is dead to me until the following day. You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they gi…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN