> See, for instance, K. Marx Yeah, I figured it was yet another attempt to sell Marxism.
Well, the title was "introduction to class warfare".
I was hoping it might be a funny discussion about object oriented design, but it wasn't.
An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
81–90 of 353 posts
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem with this article is that one does not need capital to start a tech company Yes, one does. One needs tech skills. Those are capital. (You agree with this since you say tech workers get more valuable with age and experience.) They're just not capital in the form of a large pot of cash that can be used to throw money at problems.
Skills are not capital assets.
Yes, they are. The people who own and run Google and Facebook and Amazon didn't magically get "capital" from nowhere. They used their skills, and turned those skills into huge amounts of money. In other words, they understood what capital they owned, and acted to maximize their return on that capital.
If you insist on refusing to view your own skills as capital, you're just giving up the chance to maximize (or at least improve) your return on that capital.
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#83> Engineering culture encourages workers to collectively improve the company’s effectiveness. It encourages them to share knowledge with one another. To train each other. To build tools for one another. To bring new workers up to speed, and review each other’s work. To speed the company up. To seek out weaknesses in the company and fix them. / Engineers do this while they’re doing their actual job, the one the compan…
Sure it’s part of the description. But it is also free labor when you’re automatically expected to do the work of two people for the price of one. Or when you’re expected to do more for less pay. Like the “job description” is often pretty vague which makes wage theft easy. If you’re working 996 without extra pay or less pay because everything that your “job description” has cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour w…
If you're getting paid to work on something, it's not 'free labor', unless you're unable to leave. By behaving as if you've agreed to this undocumented arrangement, you've formed a 'constructive contract'.
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends. If they lose you to a competitor that pays more, then the company loses. It's that old Supply & Demand thing again.
Well if everyone decides to pay less, like it’s being argued here, then there is no supply demand, that’s just the cost of your labor.
> if everyone decides to pay less
That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with cartels is the members cheat on them under the table. They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using the law to punish members who cheat).
I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth shut. Deal!
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#85The problem with this article is that one does not need capital to start a tech company. This very website, sneered at in the article, is littered with examples of people who have built something at the side. I'm not sure knowledge workers can make the same complaints about class struggle that mechanical labourers can. We tend to get more valuable with age and experience.
Well that is definitely not true.
Even if you have a team of various skill that is ready to work for free (including finance, legal and design), you still need funds for marketing, hosting, etc.
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In competition" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the interests at play. It's adversarial whether you integrate that understanding into your actions or not. And acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners doesn't mean you have to be nasty to anyone on an interpersonal level.
Some aspects are adversarial, some aspects aren't. How much compensation I get is adversarial. How much documentation I write or how many internal tools I develop isn't adversarial, not even if you put la liberté guidant le peuple above the fold.
> How much compensation I get is adversarial.
It's not adversarial, it's set by market conditions. Only collusion can turn it into an adversarial matter, as seen e.g. when Big Tech CEO's were shown to have entered into a secret agreement not to poach each other's employees.
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it is adversarial (in a game theoretical sense). You are not doing any favours to the company and the company is not doing any favours to you; both are trying to extract as much value from the other as possible. Now if we were talking about a worker's co-operative (or any company where a significant portion of ownership laid with the workers), now that's a different story...
Smart businesses know that in order to prosper, you have to make win-win deals. Free market economies grow and prosper because people are making win-win deals. Win-lose deals are the path to poverty and misery.
The point is that capital is currently trying to change the deal to win-lose and it's stupid to carry on as if we're still in the win-win glory days.
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do not help those who seek to devalue you Excellent statement. The rest only applies if you can confirm that your company is seeking to devalue you. That is becoming more common but I don’t think it’s universally true.
All companies seek to devalue their workers. It is the nature of the profit motive. The less a company can pay for labor, the more it reaps as profit.
Some companies are worker-owned cooperatives.
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#89Fire all zero sum thinkers
Re: An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45 year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able to provide today.
There's plenty of evidence[1]; but more importantly, when putting stagnating salaries in the context of housing prices, CPI, and inflation, it becomes even more jarring. Today, as an engineer making 125-175k in LA, for example, you will literally never be able to purchase a home near to where you work. [1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional
There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world where people making a third of that have no trouble buying homes. California is expensive, because people oppose building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in practice.
Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the traffic it generates.