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Hi-tech Work Places no Better than Factories?
Anonymous Coward writes "A
tasty bit of truth.
Again, a Sociology Professor has found out what we all know. He wistfully comments on the state of geekdom in the modern corporation:
"They face the lonely insecurity of the individual entrepreneur in a marketplace and culture that stresses, with macho imagery from war and sports, that they are ultimately alone"
and adds that...
"For many this may be the shape of work in the 21st century."
You want to start a union? I mean how much is your boss making at your expense even if he did start the company long before you joined up?"
HELL NO.
Sent from your iPad.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
We're safer, we breath cleaner air. We don't suffer from hearing loss. We're not on our feet all day and we make good money.
Yeah, life sure is tough.
If you think a factory is better, go work in a factory! I'll stay in my cubicle and deal with being "lonely and insecure". I'm very thankful for my job and anyone who thinks a career in an office is difficult needs a big reality check. We have it very good, people.
spacefem.com
When I talk to the other employees in other departments, I see that the developers have much more security, and much better working conditions, than anyone but the executives.
Brevity is the soul of wit
-- Polonius
Isee this saem arguement again and again in many forms..
From oh India programmers will take away all high paying jobs..
oh this that and other..
With more than 10 billion in the world economy ideas are not unique and special..but that unique programing implementation is..
Thats why its called sofware engineering..
Want to beat India programmers and own your next million dollar company desing the code around a unique implementation..that no one has done..
Remember no one makes money making an ebay or mazone clone..
I would say that in High tech you are allowed to think and reason..in factories this is not the case..they expect you to be dumb sheep and look for that particular hiring trait..
The next Woz is out there are you ready for his or her new products to wow your mind?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Is this Marxism-101? An Anonymous Coward posts something about how we're all exploited by the Bosses, and it makes the Front Page?
/dev/clue > AC
cat
Nobody is "exploiting" you. If you work for what they pay, then its a business deal, and done. If you don't like your pay, renegotiate, quit, or SHUT UP. Because your company founder put his brains, personal capital, and personal life on the line to start a company, WHICH PUTS THE FOOD ON YOUR TABLE, and now makes more $$ than you, doesn't mean he's "exploiting" you. People have been hearing the worn-out battle cry of the second-raters so long that they're starting to believe it. Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, man trades with man, to the profit and benefit of both. Nobody is forcing you to work (at least in Civilized places). Your boss gets the fruit of your labors, you get a check. His company grows, he lines his pockets, and you sleep under a roof. If that bothers you, start your own company.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I have never understood why all CS majors want to end up with programming jobs. CS is much more than software engineering, but I know exactly 2 other CS undergrads at my school that want to go into academia. Being a professor is a great job, and doing research in an area that you enjoy (for me, graph theory and combinatorial design theory) is fun and rewarding. And if you love to program, you can always do research into language design, software engineering, etc. Why go to Silicon Valley looking for a job which will drive you insane and burn you out by the time you're thirty when you can have fun doing original research and can't be fired thanks to tenure?
Why pay someone 90% of the proceeds of your labor for the priviledge of working for them? I am self-employed now (as much as I can be, with disabilities) and even if back to 100% health would never go to work for someone else again. A friend is a mechanic, works for a big chain, doing mufflers and brakes. When the company has billed the customers $4000, his cut is about $300. His customers are so loyal to his work that when he left one place and went to another, they followed. So I ask him "Why not just work for yourself, start out on your own?" After all, he manages the day to day operations, knows all the ins and outs of ordering, etc. Answer? NO GUTS. For generations we have all been fed this lie - the American work ethic, that says to go to work for someone ELSE and work HARD, 40, 50, 60 hours a week to get by. Corporations count on us buying into that so they will have a ready source of peons.
This space available.
You don't get your fingers crushed in a high-tech workplace by dodgy machinery, you earn a much better salary, you're not breathing dangerous toxins and you are able to afford a life. I'd rather work in cubicle land than in a 19th century (or even 20th!) factory.
If it does, then I can understand.
This is the main reason why I want to involved with Research and Development and become a professor. I would rather create new things than (as one of my old bosses put it) "Tell a computer what to do" for the rest of my life.
In a factory, just like behind a computer programming, you somehow become subordinate to the machine. That is what leads to employee unsatisfaction in my opinion.
~ kjrose
It all boils down to mathematics. Every employee costs money. Consider the following:
S = Salary/Hourly Wage
B = Benefits
A = Administrative overhead (payroll, etc)
I = Business insurance cost per person
R = Revenue from your work
P = Profit from your work
P = R - (S + B + A + I)
Viewing this model you can draw several quick conclusions. First, if you are doing billable work, then the quickest way to get a pay increase is to increase your billable rate.
Second, no matter how long you work for the company, at any given moment there exists a maximum amount you can be paid before your company loses money.
It is pretty standard to get paid between 25 and 33 percent of your billable rate. Any less than that probably indicates a boss that is ripping you off royally.
The article makes it sound like having to learn new things to keep up is a bad thing. It's what makes the job better than most.
Sig is taking a break!
I did both white-collar and manual labor. When you had been carrying brick 12 hours a day for 6$/hour, you don't complain about being lonely and insecure from your climatized office. I'll take my high-paying, challenging and virtually risk-free tech job anyday, thank you very much. Comparing 21st century techies to 19th factory worker is ridiculous self-pity; the author
:wq
Spacefem wrote that "we have it easy..." and I strongly agree, based on experience. I have worked in factories for most of my adult life (I'm 35 now)
and I'm here to tell you that it can be quite debilitating. Medically and physically, it becomes quite expensive when your living depends on your good health and you have to take off a week or two for medical problems. In other words, a week or two of no income.
It's not the Golden Era of manufacturing anymore in my part of the US; $25k gross is considered a decent middle-class income here. If you are fortunate to have any financial reserves, they are probably very slim.
It's mentally debilitating; there are no fellow geeks, so it tends to get lonely beyond a certain point. (my answer is to do Linux at home). Certainly, there's little of the intellectually stimulating debate that I love. (I majored in English, with a few years each of Philosophy and Art. Now I'm into networking)
Now for the perspective: I have to wonder how much of this sociologist's observations are specific to the IT industry, or is it all just becoming part of the US corporate ethos? IMHO, business is a very human activity, but the way we go about it certainly isn't sometimes.
C|N>K
In my experience, the same things are wrong with "Big Labor" as "Big Business" and "Big Government". These common difficulties are rooted in the foibles of human behavior and are spawned by the types that are attracted to the controlling positions.
There is a chance that a "Geek Guild" would be a good thing. If anyone has a chance, this bunch might... However, anyone remember the old FidoNet power struggles?
Anyway, it might be wise to check out the experiences of today's Engineers unions (mostly aerospace as far as I know) as well as study the Guilds of Renasaissance times.
Keep the "Good", avoid the "Bad".
Cheers!
Reports of my deaf have been greatly exaggerated.
... in that the concept of employment for life seems to be disappearing (along with corporate loyalty). If medium-term contracts are the norm for non-core technical work, then professional societies are the logical repository of skills/knowledge/ethics rather than code which is effectively leased (despite all claims of IP). The problem is that for guys, their identity is tied up much more with their role ... of which job function plays a major part. How to handle uncertainty, especially with job insecurity in a rapid transition as many white collar jobs disappear under computer automation? This is a big issue in that highly skilled people have probably been underpricing their talents in not factoring in the loss of any pension (especially given the risky behaviour by many corporations) nor any trade practices restrictions (non-compete clauses).
LL
I've said that lower trained IT staff, Helpdesk, Support, even SysAdmins need a union for years. Of course if the industry were unionized that would be the end of the 25 year old engineering manager. Then again is that such a bad thing?
I think that thing that everyone is scared of is a Union coming in and telling them that they're relegated to Jr. SysAdmin while the mainframe guys are trained and promoted. People are afraid that they won't be allowed to rise to the level of their competance as quickly as they saw people do during the boom years.
Ultimately any union that is created for IT will be started by IT workers, remember that. It's not like the UAW is going to come in and force their methods of union dirty tricks on the IT industry. Would any of you have a problem with an IT Union that was built by Sage/USENIX, or a like organization? If there actually were an IT union and it had some clout who do you think could be lobbying in Washington against DMCA and the like?
The problem is we all still have some of that cowboy glint in our eyes. "Yeah I can be a CIO by 30, I know more than the doofus sitting in the executive suite does anyway" Grow up a little bit and see that while not perfect, in the face of a declining IT industry a Union is one thing that can give you some power back, on a large economic sized scale.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
In Soviet Slashdot, everyone deserves to be paid whatever they think they deserve, regardless of what they are actually worth.
All I can say is that the individual coder is partially responsible for putting themself in such a position. Research the company, talk to the employees. Don't just jump into a job not knowing what the culture is like.
Perhaps the problem is that there aren't enough good companies out there along with the dilution of the number of tech workers and the dot bomb is forcing people to take jobs they otherwise would not.
Long gone are the days of drive up dentists to Yahoo's main offices
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
IT people think they have some right to work 4 hours a day and get paid 200k a year. The .com boom is dead, get over it.
Welcome to the real world; job insecurity and other "stresses" are what all other workers have always faced. IT people are no better. In fact, programming has become more of a commodity than most other fields. If you aren't adding any real value, than you shouldn't have a job. Simple as that.
I've also spent most of my career working as a janitor, a factory worker (Chain mail gloves, anyone?), carpenter, or a food service worker. I don't care whether an office programming job is isolated or anything like that. I just want one because I love to program. It's a job that I can do. I'm not a mechanic, and I'm a pretty lousy carpenter, but I'm a half-way decent programmer.
Sign me up for the white collar nightmare.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
Sometimes it boils down to the following: in many workplaces you will have employers pushing employees to perform tasks well above and beyond their originally intended workload. The employees do not fuss about it, as they know they can easily be replaced by the saturated glut of equally-trained (or equally-trainable) unemployed or opportunity-seeking individuals.
... because they ARE replaceable.
It's the classic corporate-machine strategy: increase profit, reduce expenditures. Squeeze whatever productivity from employees that you can; if they balk, replace them
Three cheers for capitalism...
I thought that being a geek meant that you were smart. If you're smart, why would you want a union?
"Geek Union" seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me.
"Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, man trades with man, to the profit and benefit of both."
Yup, sure sounds like some-one studied Marxism-101 to me. But I'm not sure whether you passed that particular course.
Thank you You need to be modded up. Not a troll by far. Even if I disagreed I would mod you up.
Unions are best suited for workplaces where employees are simply parts in a machine. They don't have very much knowledge that needs to be communicated to a replacement and new people can be brought up to speed in a very short period of time. A factory worker is a good example.
For people working under these conditions they need some form of group representation, because they have nothing else to bargain with. They can be easily be replaced. Your value as an employee dose not increase the longer you hold the job.
I.T. (and most other jobs) your value to your employer does increase over time. Also your able to become a specialist in an area. (We can't let Johnny go, he's the only one who knows the AS/400). Having a union in this area is a bad idea for both the Company and the Employee.
While you would have easier working conditions and possibly more pay you would lose your ability to specialize. Unions don't want people to become more useful (I.E. learn how to do multiple jobs), they want to hire more people. (Which adds to the union's income) But your job would be secure as long as the company exists. Just keep in mind unions have been known to destroy companies. And forget about having a job you enjoy. Dose anyone really want a government job?
The company loses as well because they are no longer as flexible, and profitable.
As for your boss making too much money form you. Just keep in mind that you wouldn't have your job without him.
Start a union, so I can pay union dues?! Is the guy nuts or what? Not that is my only objection, but the government takes enough out of weekly paycheck, besides I don't mind working the extra few hours - as long as it's not 16 hours a dayin/dayout, does he want all the work to move to India/china with what he's asking.
Yeah, it might be mentally frustrating at times, but come on, no better than factory work? Go to some sweat shops in china if you want to get a full appreciation what it is like to work in crappy conditions, no air conditioning, lunch breaks, long hours PLUS NOT HAVING AN OPTION TO QUIT BECAUSE YOUR A FAMILY NEEDS THE MONEY OR IT'LL STARVE. Some people are just spoiled.
And, how much money the boss makes off my labor. What do I care, if I get a better offer elsewhere, I work there AND hope they make money off me.
That's a facinating thought. Sure, replacing engineers with an offshore worker saves money...I wonder how hard it is to H1B executives as well? Wouldn't that save...more money per visa, which is a constant cost to the company?
Seems like H1Bs should be aimed at execs, since each visa can save the company more money. Aiming them at engineers is a misuse of company funds.
May we never see th
I wasn't a coder (fortunately), but I was a design engineer. The long hours and social isolation made my life very hard, and I was getting dissociated. Being a social person, I had to change something, and that was to get a business degree (MBA in my case). I got it not so I can wave the degree around, but to add a business dimension to my engineering brain, and boy did it help. I'm extremely versatile, I'm working in a business environment where I not only chase down business with the business portion of my skills, I help define new products for customers with my engineering portion of my skills and my heart. And I always remember the engineers and don't sell them short like so many of the idiot sales guys and managers had when I was the design engineer.
In short, do your best to infiltrate the top ranks now. We may hold a lot of resentment towards PHBs, but with a little tact we can defeat the PHBs like the Mandarin Chinese defeated the Mongols - not by force, but by integrating them into our culture.
I leave you with this quote:
"If you hire someone smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are." - R.H. Grant
Is this Marxism-101? An Anonymous Coward posts something about how we're all exploited by the Bosses, and it makes the Front Page?
Labeling something "Marxism" gets you nowhere and effectively stops the reasonable discussion.
I can too label the current state of the affairs "Wild Capitalism".
Nobody is "exploiting" you. If you work for what they pay, then its a business deal, and done.
That's right.
If you don't like your pay, renegotiate, quit, or SHUT UP.
And that's not, except "renegotiate". However, the problem is that you're not ABLE to negotiate, because there are some 10 people outside, waiting for the same job and they have all to insist in same benefits.
Because your company founder put his brains, personal capital, and personal life on the line to start a company, WHICH PUTS THE FOOD ON YOUR TABLE, and now makes more $$ than you, doesn't mean he's "exploiting" you.
Yes, it means. Because I put my brains too, I put my personal capital too (be it time or knowledge or abilities) and I put my personal life too for the company, WHICH PUTS THE FOOD ON HIS TABLE, and in addition puts the mannor, the spa, the limousine, the jet, etc.
It is OK, if he makes more than me, but making 500 times more is RIDICULOUS.
If that bothers you, start your own company.
This is just outrageous. You effectively claim the workers have no rights, and if they want rights they must become employers first !
~velco
I used to think an awful lot like the author of this article. I was fed up with how stupid my bosses were, how poorly I was treated and paid, and how wasteful I thought the company was.
- here, but how many of those very same people could effectively run a business, turn a profit, and employ someone else? This is not meant to be condescending, but instead a wakeup call to geeks. If you don't like how someone is doing something, go try doing it yourself. You may find that it's much harder than you first supposed.
So I started my own business. What an education that was!
I've found that, as a business owner, I have to work far harder than I ever anticipated in order to keep the company viable. There's a tremendous amount of work going on that employees of a company never see and are rarely aware of, work that has to be done by someone with good management skills. If that work is being done properly then the employees never know about it and they're able to do their jobs.
I have a great deal of respect now for entrepeneurs who risk a great deal to start a new business. It takes guts, patience, perserverance, and more to do that.
Any fool can sit around and bitch and moan about how much they hate their company/boss/workplace/insert-bitch-and-moan-noun
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I highly doubt that any of you hever spent 10 seconds inside a factory liek a foundry. try running a snag grinder for 8 hours a day lifting and holding against a high speed grinding wheel a 10-50 pound casting... watching that weekly some of workers you eat lunch with go to the hospital and lose fingers, hands feet or a leg due to accidents.. or watch a newly installed snag grinder grinding wheel explode and kill a foreman. Or how about watch a pouring ladel run out (the term used when the molten metal inside finally ate through the ladel and is gushing 3000 degree metal all over the workers and floor) and severly burn 5 people.
Sorry, but none of you have a clue what it's like in the real world. fortunately I was one of those that did the grunt work whil I attended college full time. so I got to live the live that I never ever would wish on the worst of my enemies. Yes some places in the tech industry suck, with bosses that are basically robbing everyone blind to keep his ferarri detailed... but... you can always work elsewhere (relocate! what the hell are you still doing in your location? if you wont relocate then you're just throwing excuses... or you really dont want a different job.
There are employers out there that care for the employees and recognize that the employee is what makes his business work and profitable.. anyone that doesn't is of course.... an idiot.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You only become subordinate to the machine when you don't understand it or what it's doing. If you know what you're doing, you'll never be subordinated by it or it's seeming whims. Coding can be very enjoyable if you have flexibility in how you do it, and the know-how to achieve your goals, otherwise it'll just be one long headache after another.
In theory, doing business is about providing value to your customers and fostering sound relationships with your suppliers, including your employees who provide the labor you need. In theory, businesses don't have a need to extort their employees because they see them as an important part of the business' capital. In theory, there is also a meaningful relationship between the wage rate of the lowest paid employee and the salary of the CEO.
But, in reality, the latter isn't true anymore. What we have done in the 90's is vastly overpay managers at the highest levels at the expense of the rest of the employees. What we have done is apply the basic ideas of capitalism (demand/supply and competition) to a social structure within the company that has led to a hierarchy where everyone is just out to get to the better end of everything, where cheating, lying and corruption is rewarded, where honesty and cooperation is punished.
It hasn't always been like that. I work as the bookkeeper/accountant in a small business. It is frightening to see that in a venture like this where the personal assets of the owners are at risk, where the owners work their hardest and accept pay cuts to keep the company running in hope for future revenue, the employees are actually treated as valuable assets. It is frightening because in large businesses that have all the resources available to treat their employees with dignity and respect, those resources are rather used to give the CEO another raise on top of his multi-million dollar salary.
Adam Smith & Co never thought of capitalism as the foundation of social order. It was supposed to be the basis for how we conduct trade with other people (and later corporations).
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
I'm sorry, but CEO's are making out like bandits.
CEOs are making out like bandits, but the people being screwed over by this are the investors, not the employees. If the CEO was paid a reasonable salary, the money wouldn't magically appear in the worker's paychecks--workers are paid what they're willing to work for, and not a penny more.
I don't know why investors put up all their money being spent on these "rock star" executives, maybe they even have a good reason, but my guess is some sort of backscratching between the employees of institutional investors and the execs that profit while their companies fail.
--
Benjamin Coates
If you don't like your pay, renegotiate, quit, or SHUT UP.
No problem. I'll just quit, lose my health insurance, my paycheck that feeds my family, and risk a poor reference because my boss doesn't want me to quit. Oh, and in this great economy I'm sure I'll find a better job right away. Of course the founder is allowed to make more money, like you said, that doesn't mean he's "exploting". However, don't act like employees have the power to renegotiate resonable wages, because most of the time they don't. Sure, his personal capital may have started the company, but the ongoing contributions of employees is what grows it and what really generates the profit.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
What he said was REALITY. But, even in THEORY individual employees don't matter, as the people running the company who give you jobs have all the clout.
Two solutions exist.
If any individual employees want some control/respect/influence, speak up. Sitting there won't do anything.
OR
Start your company.
If you want to stay the way you are, that's a third option. But it seems you don't like the way you are but don't want change. You want the business to change around you.
Never mind that of the small percentage of business that end up being successful, these are the ones that didn't throw their money around but instead invested their money into employees wisely, knowing the best deal with finding tech people. If you don't like that they can do that, do something about it!!!!! Make a union, do something.
After all, doing something is what your company's founders did in the first place. They are the ones who made a successful business, successful to know to pay $$$$$$$$$$$ to executives and $ to developers. Why? WELL WHY NOT if it helps them be successful????
Now obviously a company can't do much without developers if that's their business. To fight the oppression, you need unions. As long as a portion of group keeps accepting this, we will all have to accept this.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Why is there such animosity toward unions? Yes, they can be corrupt, but as with your government that is the fault of largely apathetic constituency. The one crucial benefit to a union is that it offers the majority of those working in and who presumably have interests in a corporation some voice at the decision-making levels.
In a small hi-tech company, say 100 people or less, the situation of the lowest employee is not so greatly removed from that of the CEO. In much larger corporations, say Oracle, there is a much greater divide between the coders in India and Larry Ellison in his japanese mansion. No, the union should not be about giving every indian worker their own equally lavish mansion, but it should be about putting a voice with enough weight (presumably representing a majority of the company's workforce) into the decision making process which often neglects employees in favor of board member bonuses, etc.
In short, I think it is the extreme separation between masses of employees and their employers that makes unions important as a means of bridging that gap. Alternatively, or in conjunction with stock options one could ideally transform an employee into someone with a greater commitment and conception of the company. (=better employee)
Unionization has some serious upsides and downsides. A lot of us have probably worked at places where the conditions, hours, etc. were ridiculous.
Obviously, a group has much more bargaining power than an individual. At least in the short term, the situation for the entire group will improve. As time goes on, though, productivity and profitability become second to the needs of the union management.
Those highly competent individuals (we know who we are!) who do most of the work and, sometimes, are rewarded based upon this, will most certainly lose out when their voice is swallowed by that of the masses.
A practical solution, I don't know. A secret brotherhood?
I've worked in the whole Bell Labs chain of companies (AT&T, Lucent, AT&T again, Lucent again, Avaya) for 10 years already and as of last August I've been laid off. There are some obvious pros and cons:
Good points:
Bad points:
Let's face it, it's a toss up when you talk about the pros and cons, but ya get a CS/CompEng/IT/IS degree because you're interested in computers, so that really tips the scales. The cons may be significant now, but the fact that I can say the pros and cons balance out even when the economy is so horrible tells us really how good the jobs are when the economy is good.. you can't tell me you had it that bad before the recession, when companies left a dozen job offers on your answering machine every day. I won't believe it. You see blue collar workers working multiple jobs all the time anyway, these days, so while you might say "Money isn't everything," I would disagree when you're talking about the nasty hours.
>I would rather create new things than (as one of my old bosses put it) "Tell a computer what to do" for the rest of my life.
Yeah... but no one else listens to me. Atleast the computer does.
(I firmly believe this is why a lot of people learn to program.)
I once worked in a factory that made refrigeration units. Have you ever ran a footpedal drillpress that the minimum requirement is 4000 parts A DAY? No? Let me break it down. That equals 500 parts an hour, and 8.3 parts per minute. Do you know how fast that is? Especially when you're soaked with coolant from the waist down, and you're hands have turned to prunes from it? Work THAT job, and then tell me that we geeks don't have it any better. BAH!
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
Guys, some of you are under the mistaken impression that your skills will enable you to continue to earn the $80 - $100k salaries you've gotten used to. You won't. I'm a Staffing Manager for a national consulting firm. Three years ago we partnered with a firm in India to move some of our development work off shore. For us it was a way to boost profits in a sagging economy and it's worked out well. The majority of our Indian colleagues speak english well enough that there is no language barrier to speak of and their development skills are generally first rate, as good as any American. The bonus is that they work for one quarter the American wage. And in India they still have a phenomenal income. Most of the guys I know have maids and are chauffered to work. Due to decreased labor costs we've been able to lower our rates enough to beat the competition and increase profits since we don't pass on all of the decreased costs to our customers. The slump in the US economy has enabled us to hire thousands more Indian workers all the while laying off thousands of their American counterparts without anyone batting an eye. For us we are extremely well positioned for economic upturn, profits will skyrocket. American corporations like mine are no longer at the mercy of fickle, overpaid tech geeks. My advice is to get used to working for a lot less and having more competition for your jobs. Either that or move to India and enjoy the good life.
So what's so great about Europe?
The IT worker has the same knowledge demands as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and architects. Why do we not have state licensure to shake out the undesirables, the people who are manager-cum-IT guy?
How many of us have had to deal with idiot managers with unrealistic projects, CIO's that didn't know a port from his sphincter, and salesmen that screw over service departments for higher commision? And don't forget all of these people make a HELL of a lot more than we do.
I say by having formal licensure (instead of a hodgepod of certs and degrees), we can elevate our standing in the corporate pecking order and create a tangible seperation between those who KNOW and those DO NOT. I would guess about half of the "IT" workers out there (read: most of the managers and salesmen) would not be able to pass a real boarded exam. The ones who do get licensed would have a much more leverage on demanding higher salaries.
I may be a little bitter in that I stupidly live in the worst state for IT, Indiana. I went from $24 hour in a factory (and almost lost a hand) to $14 hour doing tier II support (our salesmen made $40000 + commision and never got out of their chairs, we never got to sit down).
Oh did I mention I got laid off (support department got centralized to Kansas City...nice...no warning, no severance). Chrysler here I come...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Why not
- Get an idea
- try to find those 10 people
- talk to them
- organize partnership?
Looking from here in Europe, US workers appear to be trussed and blinded by the american dream as upheld by US corporatism.
That and the whole population almost genetically raised to consume, makes you guys look pretty lame.
When are you going to get a clue ?
They'll never gonna get it.
"Slaves don't want to be free, they want their own slaves"
*sheesh*
~velco
I find my Ham Skinner (3rd one down) to be much better than my old programmer job. Much less stress.
they think they deserve
The problem is that for centuries, US workers have been *massively* more wealthy than third world workers. You bitch about CEOs having 500 times your salary? How about the workers that *you* are making 500 times more than?
You know how big companies can squash little ones? It isn't necessarily because they're that much more efficient (ever seen overhead at a large company? Stupid decisions, overpriced purchases...) It's because large companies can exploit workers in other nations.
And it isn't just multinationals. We yank oil out of other countries at ridiculously low prices so that we can fuel our good transport system, massively cutting the costs of our centralized production. We make products overseas at brutally low wages and then bring them here. A medium-sized company can pay an import company and get their piece of the overseas profit.
So people on here are bitching about how "the American worker *deserves* more". Don't make me laugh. You're living large off the fruits of other countries, friends. Your complaint is that you don't have the latest model car, or a fucking high-definition TV? The people that your comforts are coming from have issues like *starving*.
Now, if you want to take a much more mercenary approach, like "screw workers in other countries and execs, I'm looking out for #1", that's reasonable. But the moral arguments that are coming up here are laughable. "The CEO makes more money than I do, which is unfair". Christ.
May we never see th
"Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, man trades with man, to the profit and benefit of both."
Nah, you've got this all wrong. The statement should read:
Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, it's the other way around.
Open letter to Slashdot editors:
Topic: Editorializing on the front page
Please consider editing opinion out of story submissions. Journalism, in the name of integrity, separates fact from opinion, which is why newspapers have a separate editorial page. Allowing the sort of politically charged language that the poster of this story uses in what is ostensibly a news item is unprofessional, a disservice to objectivity and ultimately to slashdot's credibility. Let the posters espouse their opinions in their comments, but please, not in the story submissions themselves.
Respectfully,
A longtime loyal reader (posting anonymously because I'm obviously - necessarily - "off-topic")
The problem, however, is that there is little doubt about the control and influence these large institutional organizations have over our life. Unfortunately, labor unions are as weak as they've been in 75 years. Corporations have never been stronger. A couple more kicks to the head (at least in the US, at least) and the labor movement will be down and out for good.
This is not good for white collar workers or blue collar workers. Unions used to add powerful checks and balances to the economy by helping to fight and curb corporate greed. But now, across the board, we are seeing wage stagnation, cuts in benefits, cuts in health coverage, loss of decent pension plans, etc. All the gains that labor unions brought to the American worker are now quickly eroding.
I'm not saying geeks need to run out and join a union (good luck because you'll probably get fired anyway). But I think we should all be at least a little more understanding about how unions have positively influenced our work lives whether we are members or not.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Yeah being a code crunching monkey or a help desk luser is not REALLY like working in a plating factory but it has many of the same attributes. Fixed job responsibilities, closely managed performance metrics, lack of independent thought, limited job security....
We think having 91 different card keys is a badge of respect and honor, but it's not. It's just an excuse to overwork people.
Unless you consider producing paper(s) development that is not what the academia is about ...
Under Marxism man exploits man, under capitalism, however, it is reversed.
How many companies have you seen cut IT staff for financial reasons, realize that the company actually NEEDED the terminated job functions, and then hire contract workers or consultants? I've worked in the IT department for 4 small to large sized corporations, and have seen the above scenario happen 2 times. I've actually had a company recruit me from an existing job, only to downsize me (along with several co-workers) a year later. A good friend of mine was recruited by a company with no IT staff, cleaned up their network and userland, then was promptly "downsized". There are a million horror stories. Some companies seem to now realize that if you continually cycle IT consultants and contract workers through a complex infrastructure, the quality and efficiency of support will drop dramatically, and in most cases the salaries will actually increase.
Of course the ugly side of forming a union would be that eventually the standard industry qualification for joining would be "MS Union Certification.NET".
Do we really need a union? How many of our lazy IT buddies are willing to go on strike, and walk a picket line? Is Dilbert really up to "scrub busting"?
Does anyone have any personal experience working with unions in Europe?
The company I work for is based in Europe, and I work in their US based headquarters. In the last year we have had five rounds of layoffs resulting in a massive (measured in thousands) number of US employees losing their jobs. With each round of layoffs the company had to spend tons of time negotiating with the unions in Europe before they could do anything. From the people I know overseas they tell me that (because of unions) it takes an act of god for someone to lose their job. Most of them are shocked to find out that 1) we get no vacation time compared to them, 2) we have to pay for our own education, and 3) we can get fired without any notice in most US states.
If unions can improve the quality of life and make it easier for us (in the US) to get training (for example) then what is wrong with that? I think we can learn from the mistakes of the auto industry unions and do better. After all we are talking about a totally different class of people here. How many people that worked on a car assembly line have graduate degrees? How many people that worked on a car assembly line started intellectual revolutions like open source and Linux? A majority of us are people who enjoy challenges, want to constantly improve ourselves, and want to work hard to see our employers succeed in the marketplace!
Of course all of this becomes a moot point when you consider that there are countries like India where people are willing to take our jobs and do them for something like $4 an hour.
Yea like the Europeans and every one else in the world doesn't want to live here or have that same dream in there little part of the world.
You are the one who needs to get the clue.
I don't care if my boss is making a lot more money then I am and in fact I wish I could help make him even more money. I just don't like working long hours and then having everything thrown away to change direction ad infinitum. What I propose is a union that demands decent process, requirements and making sure documentation, QA, and customer support are part of the process from day one. Forget the money, I think what most people want is just to get rid of the disfunctional elements that prevent us from doing our jobs.
Certainly unions became something else after the years of struggle ended. They shifted their concerns. Like any other institution, they evolved, and not necessarily in consistently productive directions. Consequently, we tend to emphasize the negative effects of present-day unionism and forget how it came about. This is a common phenomenon -- another quick example: the FDA, designed to make sure you didn't fall over dead when you ate your hamburger, is now derided for being slow and bureaucratic. So, a basic historical principle: you can't understand a mature institution by looking at it's mature behavior.
That said, let's look at the present discussion.
Unless and until current employment conditions are perceived as inhumane, unjust and evil by a substantial number of employees, employers will basically have carte blanche within those parameters. Unless conditions become (or are perceived to be) so intolerable, there will be no real attempt to find solutions that better those conditions. It is in the interests of employers to better conditions only if it improves productivity.
Besides, the solution to the problems of the capitalist triumph -- anarcho-syndicalism -- has already been found. We simply have to wait until the capitalists, unrestricted by a government they own and laws and law enforcement they control, decide to tighten the reins a little too far. Of course, well-educated employers probably won't regard their employees as mere resources, but continue to regard their employees as people.
Damn. No grounds for revolution.
Trained as an historian, living as a coder.
"When I grow up, I'll be stable."
No, he's not claiming anything of the sort. What he's claiming is that, in a captialist society, with competition both for the companies and the employees, you've got a few choices:
-Accept your current working conditions
-Work out new ones with your employer
-Leave and find new sources of work
Our industry is in a slump, and a bad one. We just came off one of the biggest booms of the modern economy, and we're hurtin'. It'll turn around, it always does. But while it's bad, it's going to suck. And people are very eager to find new work. You don't like your current job? Go find a new one. Oh, wait, none out there? Tough shit. This is what the market will bear, if you think you can do better, go do it. With the employment market so tight, you probably can't, unless you're Just That Good. It's reality, nothing more.
But get this: we did the SAME THING to our employers not two years ago. Don't want to pay me $100K/yr., pay my cell phone, and let me wear ripped jeans to work? Tough shit: go find another techie. Oh, they're really hard to find? That's too bad. The shoe's on the other foot, and we don't like it. It'll all even out, but until then, you put up/shut up, or bide your time. Stop whining about corporate greed/getting it from your boss. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Personally, I've been laid off twice this calender year, by two separate companies. Do I begrudge the executives? In the end, no: they're making business decisions, and while some of them are really stupid, in the end, their responsibilites are to their shareholders, and the greater good. I notice folks here screaming away about the burgious executives of the world trampling the masses. News flash, people: IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY. Now, we simply have more visibility and awareness of the robber-barons, that we actually have a chance to get pissed off about it.
Take it from this perspective: do some research about starting a small business, or work for a small business (50 people). I have, on both accounts. Some of my best knowledge and insight into a business was from watching my bosses (the president and another officer) sweat payroll. And when you look at the sheer amount of effort in management and planning, administritivia, guiding the vision, hiring/firing, sweating the money, the details, the long hours, *plus* actually producing for the company...
I'll tell you what: if I'm ever lucky/good enough to put that business together, you're goddamned right I'm gonna be one of the highest, if not *the* highest, paid SOB in the group. And I'll do my best to treat my employees like gold. But this is not a charity-fucking-ball. Corporation exist to make money, and for no other reason. The balance will swing the other way. In the meantime, sharpen your skills, build that resume, and wait.
I wish I had some fucking mod points to slap an Insightful on your ass.
Derek
Call this post a troll if you like but it is the truth.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
I work in a union job as a TA, which is hardly factory work (well...), and the union has been a great benefit. The pay is so-so, but the TAA has ensured us a full tuition waver, medical benefits, and increased pay for experienced TAs even if that work was done at another university. Furthermore, the union helps ensure that course instructors don't regularly require more hours than specified in our contracts. Without a union, we'd have no voice to the university explaining what was more important to grad students. We'd have no place to take complaints about work burdens other than the people who give us grades and decide teaching assignments.
/., they won't be able to blame unions this time. Maybe they can use "the war on terrorism" or "government red tape" instead.
I also worked at a non-union job in an industry that has a well-established union -- newspapers. It was a small, family-owned paper, and reporters were sometimes asked to write puff pieces about advertisers or friends of the family. Not uncommon, granted, but without the guild a reporter who refused, even once, "on principle" could be subject to immediate termination. There was no grievence process and no fair method to handle hiring from within. And yes, the pay was pretty bad.
Now, I'm not a programmer and I don't claim to know if organization would help those who are. But I'm a regular slashdot reader, and I'm always seeing complaints about managers who don't take employee considerations into account when making hiring and promotion decisions. I get the distinct sense that many people put in _unpaid_ overtime because "that's what you do," regardless of company gratitude or benefits. A union doesn't necessarily solve these issues, but it also doesn't necessarily equate with being factory workers either. Unions are the collective agents of the people who work at a job, and as such are empowered to represent your interests. To the extent those differ from the interests of management _and_ of auto plant workers, the union will reflect that fact. Let's not forget that some of the most powerful unions in this country represent skilled positions in which simply firing the staff and hiring a non-union crew isn't viable -- unions like SAG. Plus, as someone pointed out, unions can present an organized lobbying front for a community much in need of one.
Will a union drive jobs to India, or China, or wherever the next batch of cheap programmers is being trained? I'm not an economist, but let's think about the alternative. Without a union, presumably, the reason jobs won't leave is because employers will be free to keep their costs low. How? Presumably, by lowering wages, cutting benefits and demanding more unpaid work from employees. Is it better to have every programmer make $6.50 an hour for the first 40 and $0 an hour for the next 20 after that, with no retirement and no health care, than to have a few employers decide they'd rather go to India. As long as you contentedly blame labor for jobs going overseas and live in fear of management, some companies will use that as leverage to force workers to do more and more for less, always threatening to move the jobs somewhere else until, eventually, there's no more blood in the turnip and they finally move the jobs somewhere else. But, of course, thanks to a bunch of blowhards on
Yes, I have worked in factories during holidays while studying for my degree, and they were a great inspiration to study so that I would never have to do such work again. However I have discovered working in IT is not exactly the bed of roses promised.
In 8 years I've worked 5 different jobs in 4 different countries, and of those only one had any job stability. The first, IBM, lost it's contract for providing outsourcing, the second 2 were medium term projects, the last 2 discarded all "expensive" staff and switched to labour from the 3rd world.
Every one of those jobs has forced me to learn most aspects of every job in the respective companies, including the managers and overpaid sales staff. Then there is the added pressure of a zero tolerance for mistakes - when any bugs have the potential to cost the company millions. When mistakes are detected it is typically the IT department that is assumed guilty till proven innocent when most of the time it is the fault of incompetent managers or undertrained staff, and when you have fixed the problem you rarely get an apology or even a thankyou.
And training? What's that? A broken promise that's what.
Sure, I get paid more than the factory workers, but there are easier jobs out there, with higher pay, less pressure, more job security, where your work is appreciated and valued, and where you aren't blamed for the mistakes of others.
Personally I wouldn't recommend a job in IT to young people. Try engineering or something instead.
Is there an IT "person"? What are they like? Am I one?
If just by being in IT, I automatically get the trust that whatever union I form wouldn't BREAK YOUR KNEES (and that's going to be the kindest sort of 'negotiation') to get things accomplished... I'm running for public office.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
As a union member these past fifteen years (two different unions at two different workplaces), I have to ask: How many of you have even belonged to a union? How many of you have firsthand experience being on a union negotiating committee, walked a picket line or have seen a horrible injustice averted by a grievance? I have, and that has helped me see how I get value from my union. (And, no, I don't hate my employers or have a bad relationship with them -- we're all professionals.)
Yes, unions can have their bad sides, but so do some employers who take advantage of employees unwilling to rock the boat when their employment rights are violated.
So don't dismiss unions out of hand. At least learn a bit more about them first.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Somebody call the waaaaaambulance!
In a tight market, though, you are forced to take what you can get, and employers know this. They can make you work longer hours, in smaller cubicles, with less ergonomic support, for less pay and fewer benefits than you could if you had some kind of leverage against them (i.e. a union). Same employer, same employee, but the deal is better for the working stiff with a union. Is that magic, or are employers actually trying to get the best deal for themselves they can get, more so if they are unopposed?
After reading the forum, I'm sick to death over two points:
1) "boss puts food on my table". Crap. I put a hell of a lot more than food on boss's table through all the work I do. And it doesn't matter if you work in a "cush" tech job (how's your eyesight? lower back feeling good?) or on a line, you are there because you make boss rich, not the other way around. Otherwise, you'd be canned immediately. And once that happens, how grateful should you still be?
2) "it beats factory work" No doubt. It's nice to have a job that avoids the worst kind of boredom on the factory line. But don't think for a second that that somehow disqualifies all of us from being workers deserving of fair pay, decent hours, job security, safe workplaces, and all the other "frills" that a modern capitalist society must provide. Did the sociologist's point about tech work being like the 19th century fall on completely deaf ears? Wake up! You're being treated like trash, but you're still asked to be grateful? Like they say across the Pond, bollocks!
A friend of mine who works as a carpenter came to my office once. He saw the fridge and pop inside. He asked how much one would cost, he really wanted a coke. When I told him it was free to employees, his jaw dropped.
He buys his own tools (although his boss will pay for reasonable maintenance). He has to be at work at 7 on a construction site. Weather doesn't stop the work. Maybe the clowns in road crews don't do any work, but I know my friend does. He makes, at most, about 1/2 of what I do.
I, on the other hand, sit in my office all day. I go for a run at lunch time to keep the blood flowing in my body. I have full medical coverage. I work in a safe part of town. I drive a nice car and live in a nice house. How exactly am I being exploited? Sure, my boss makes more than me, but he built the damned company after all.
Some of the entitlement mentality I'm seeing on this board makes me fear for the future of society. You wankers are gonna get a real hard dose of reality one day.
I have long listened to the argument that a business man deserves the greatest share because he is the one taking the risks.
OK. Exactly what risks is he taking? Well, if things go wrong he will lose everything he has got and wind up having to work for someone else. It is true that is not a risk his employees take; but only because they are already on the down side of that situation.
It has been my observation that it is a very difficult task to make money honestly in a business. Because it is very difficult only the very best in a given field are ever able to do so. Most people who are successful at running a business do so by stealing from someone. If they steal from the government they risk prison, if they steal from their customers they risk losing them (1), if they steal from their suppliers they risk being cut off from the material they need to stay in business. About the only remaining avenue is to steal from employees; this seems to be a universally accepted way of doing business. The fact that the vast majority of businesses do steal from employees is the main way that most business stay solvent.
If stealing from employees were eliminated from business only the very best companies in a given field would remain. The huge numbers of incompetent people who would find themselves unemployed would probably trigger a massive depression.
Because of this we maintain the fiction that people are paid what they are worth in a free market economy. The truth is that people are paid as little as the businesses figure they can get away with.
If you were to eliminate the greed angle - so that business owners didn't make substantially more than employees for the same amount of work - very few people would ever start a business; the greatly increased responsibility and pressure of running a business compared to being an employee would ensure that was so.
(1) Yes I know that Microsoft has been eminently successful in stealing from their customers: $299 for a product that costs them under a dollar to produce qualifies as theft in my book. However people are slowly starting to catch on to them. Oh, by the way please don't give me the corporate line about how much it costs to write Microsoft XXX product in the first place; Microsoft net profits (after every accounting trick in the book to lower them) are in the 40% of gross sales range - it typically costs MS more to advertise a product than it ever cost them to write it. The actual costs of writing software are so low that it is possible to write a major operating system using the programmers' donated spare time. Come to think of it Microsoft steals from the government also; last year they paid not one thin dime if federal corporate income taxes. They also steal from their shareholders, since contrary to federal law they don't distribute any of their massive profits in the form of dividends.
I don't know anyone in Silicon Valley who didn't get better terms, bonuses and wages higher than factory workers so it's a flawed comparions.
If say there was an IT union, you'd no longer be able to sit in a prospective boss's office and negotiate a salary, and your wages would involuntarily be tapped to pay union dues, and when they say strike and risk layoffs, you have to do it. And of course your union will likely fall under mafia control.
But hey, it's worth that catered meal when working weekends, right?
To put it bluntly: if you do not like the wage or working conditions at your job, do not work there. This is the choice faced by everyone who works, factory and hi-tech workers included. Of course we are "ultimately alone," such is the nature of existence as human beings. Join a union if you want, but don't expect special legal protections for doing so (such as those enjoyed by teacher's unions).
The statement "I mean how much is your boss making at your expense even if he did start the company long before you joined up?" is patently absurd. This reeks of Marx's labor theory of value, and is not a valid economic analysis. Entrepeneur's start companies in order to attempt to gain profits. For these purposes they hire workers to fulfill duties for reimbursements (wages/salary). Again, if you don't like it, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. What exactly is stopping anyone else from starting their own company if it is so easy?
Europe has 1/3 higher population than the US, but a lower GDP ... suppose it could be worse, you could live in my corner of the world (neither us/europe)
You have a good point - in moderation. It is not reasonable for people to expect all their employment goals to be handed to them by a legal framework. It does take some pushing and stretching yourself outside your envelope. And certainly the law ought include ample provision for the work and effort put in by the founder(s) of a company to be rewarded. But this goes too far:
That really depends on who you are. For the programmer/engineer types that haunt
On the other hand, most people in this world start with so few resources that they are subject to a lot of exploitation. Factory workers (god forbid you toil in a high-production, low-cost place like China or Singapore), retail, data-entry, office support drones, and an endlessly long list of other jobs involve skills that are perceived as basically interchangeable, and most everyone knows this.
And the fact that someone with brains, brawn and balls started a company ought not to give her the right to exploit people, nor does it grant her the right to a mighty river of money just cause she did some good work at the outset, nor should it excuse her from the duty we have to other human beings to give them a little help in this life. Upper management's sense of entitlement is just as honed as the worker bees, and just as bogus.
An IT workers coop - not quite a union, but with some of the same goals - that helped take some of the rough edges off of life as an IT worker could be a great thing, to keep things in balance in the workplace.
Pluses of Factory Work
There is no casual overtime (time working without pay). Overtime is paid.
More generous dress code (or more like, lack there of)
Very little corporate politics other than getting the job done.
Pluses of IT work
Little back breaking work (except for moving 90 lbs monitors)
Flex time (though being taken away with downturn)
More money (again, going down due to downturn)
In my own experience, IT has been good especially from 1996 until recently for me. The company I work for has cracked down on petty things like dress code and are demanding casual overtime. Also, surfing the Internet is really frowned upon much more than a year or two ago even during lunch. I know the corporate executives are pushing for the 45 hour work week while they themselves would come in at 9:30am and leave at 2:30pm. Where I am at, you don't get pay raises other than COLA's if you don't work casual overtime. There are poeple who go in every Saturday for a half day even though they do nothing but yet, they get the pay raises and praise from Mgt. My weekend time is valuable and I like to get out and play since Colorado is a great playground.
As much as the media and society puts down the dot com boom, it was good for us IT worers such as relaxing the rules like dress codes and bringing in flex time. Right now, it is payback time from the executives because of the boom several years ago. They make sure we know that they are in the driver's seat. Payback & Retribution sucks. When the IT market comes back, maybe within reason, we can regain the lost no-cost benefits such as flex time, relaxed dress codes.
Evidently unlike yourself, I did exactly this a year ago, and I'm doing okay. I was working for a US company in the UK office, which had no power in the company. Stupid decisions involving myself were repeatedly taken by stupid people. After fourteen months I wasn't sleeping many nights and deeply unhappy, so I upped and quit.
What you're really saying is that due to your own fears, you must stay regardless of the situation or its longer-term consequences, because they hand out money. You have the benefit of rumination and foresight in order that you can take decisions based on what your head is telling you. This is the counsel of fear.
If your head is telling you that things are irretrieveably fucked up, and that you are stagnating at a post paying good money, then despite this 'local optimum', sometimes the right thing to do is to turn your back on it.
Many people in the higher ranks are directly exploiting the work of people below them in order to make money, I won't bore you with my stories, but suffice it to say that the people above you get that fat wad for keeping you beaten down and available to be pimped.
And that's not, except "renegotiate". However, the problem is that you're not ABLE to negotiate, because there are some 10 people outside, waiting for the same job and they have all to insist in same benefits
If you're really so replaceable that 10 people can easily be found to do your job, then it's likely that you aren't really contributing to the company and are in fact a drain on the payroll of the workers who are more difficult to replace.
Yes, it means. Because I put my brains too, I put my personal capital too (be it time or knowledge or abilities)
If you're an employee, the only risk you take is losing your job and not getting a paycheck. Even if your employer is losing money, your salary will still be paid. The entrpreneur risks bankruptcy - 90% of new businesses fail. The risks don't really compare.
It is OK, if he makes more than me, but making 500 times more is RIDICULOUS.
The average salary in the US is $36,000. You seriously believe that the average manager makes a salary of $1.8M? I'm afraid it is you who are ridiculous.
This is just outrageous. You effectively claim the workers have no rights, and if they want rights they must become employers first !
And you effectively claim that an employer owes you a living whether or not you actually add value to the business.
I got into the PC business when Windows was at Version 2.11 and DTP and WYSIWYG were the buzzwords and Macs were running rings around PC's both in terms of the OS and software (Win2.11 was such a POS that I am amazed anyone ever used it) I moved into Pre-Press when the business was still new just before the recession in the early 90's. The DTP market blew up and mostly died in everyone's faces very much the same way the dotcom boom did. Years later I got into the internet by way of multimedia.
What had changed? I was now older than most of my superiors and got treated like crap by most of them. I had one boss in my last internet agency that I caught twice sniffing coke in the toilets.
I have since moved into sys admin/jack of all trades for small companies where there is a demand for people like me who experience in lots of different IT fields.
The article is very descriptive of my life, in that with the incredible mental stresses of the past two years I have gained almost 40Kilogrammes, am lonely as hell, often very tired and often end up working 15 hour days. Recently I decided that this BS has to stop and I want my fitness and my life back again (used to swim 8 kilometers a week and had a girlfriend as well). I was fuck scared of being laid off yet once again, but I pulled whatever courage I still had together(yes, I think most geeks are the frightened sort) and told my boss that I simply cannot go on like this anymore. It turns out that he was more frightened of losing me than I was of losing my job. As of this week I only work four days in the week and on saturdays so that I can do project related work where I need to think.
I think a union would be a good idea as IT moves out of the highlight and into the realworld working mainstream. 70 hour weeks make one anti-social, fat and lonely.
Fuck that.
Most programmers think of themselves more as artists than engineers. Most of the management models and software development models kicked around misunderstand this. Even more confusing, many people writing code aren't motivated by money -- and the fact that more people say that than actually beleive it makes it even more twisted.
Since it is hard to measure output, especially on software that isn't done, we usually just measure input. This is profoundly bogus, life isn't graded on effort. How many times have you heard someone brag, "we have four hundred engineers working on that problem!"?
That is like deciding a movie is better because of the cast is very large, or that a rock band is better because they have four hundred drummers.
Writing software is a pretty interesting activity. One of the rather wild things about it is that individual productivity varies by huge factors, probably as much as four orders of magnitude. My own experience (and I doubt many people have seen very few exceptions) is that on any given software project, a tiny minority, usually no more than four or five people, do nearly all of the work. Generally there is pretty strong agreement on who those four or five people are. The rest of the people either make minor contributions or make problems that the people actually doing the work have to clean up.
I've never worked at an organization that didn't emphasize that they hire, "only really good people." The question comes up, where do the 50% of people who are honestly below average end up working? I've never found this place.
For various reasons, size of a software development organization does matter. None of those reasons have anything to do with productivity or the quality of the end product (an important exception is how good Open Source projects parallelize debugging and testing). In a big company, a bigger development organization affords its managers nicer chairs and offices. In a start-up company, a bigger development organization impresses naive investors. In neither of these cases does a bigger development organization produce better software more quickly.
This is analogous to creative businesses like making movies, music, or writing books. I suspect in the end that salary distributions will be very similar -- a few people will make big bucks and have quite a bit of visibility, the vast majority will make pretty poor wages, and there will be a whole lot of wannabees waiting tables hoping for their big break. Companies will pitch having a few star programmers on their team to help lure more investment and interest in the product (think about how Julia Roberts or Nicholas Cage generate buzz for a movie just by being on the cast).
The current model for employing coders is a lot like the old "studio system" that Hollywood had before WWII. The current economic mess might be a force that will move the industry closer to the "star" system that Hollywood has today.
Some might argue that companies have a huge stake in controlling their programmers, since they are the only people who have the expertise to improve the products they have developed. But nobody would take a Terminator sequence seriously without Arnold, and Nirvana without Kurt Cobain is similarly unimaginable.
This might seem grossly unfair to the vast majority of programmers. It is. But there are people running loose portraying themselves as programmers who have:
- Edited CVS repositories directly to "save time"
- Deleted comments from source files to make the files compile more quickly
- Bulk-converted all project source files to uppercase so they were easier to read
I haven't made any of these things up. One of the few benefits of a newer system is that people who do stuff like that would be sleeping on grates.Sure good people tend to be in good depts. and at good schools, but it is the advisor who matters.
and other information at CRA. Check out some of the old ones about 10 years or so ago, you'll see they aren't so encouraging.
People would never think that they should be brain surgeons without skill, preparation or background, yet somehow they think they are entitled to money.
If you are in an obscure area or are doing interdisciplinary work, it is much harder to get funded. Interdisciplinary projects are best headed by pairs of specialists in each area rather than having people who try to specialize in both areas.
The government steals enough of my money. I don't need a union to extort additional funds from my paycheck. I also say no thanks to the potential of being forced into joining if I want a job, glares, hatred, or worse...physical violence, from union workers when I go to work while they're all on some stupid strike. I think I'll pass. Unions were a good thing in their day, now they're nothing but legalized crime syndicates.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
In a tight market, though, you are forced to take what you can get, and employers know this.
That's because, in a tight market, you're worth less. Supply and demand: when supply exceeds demand, as in a tight market, price will decline, because there are more options available. It's called "competition," and it's amazing how certain Slashdotters call it a good thing when there's competition in the consumer goods market (lowering prices), but a bad thing in the employment market (lowering wages). The world is not structured to benefit you (the collective you) all the time; sometimes, you have to take your lumps, suck it up, and survive until you get another chance to thrive. Matter of fact, that's been a pattern in life since, oh, about the time life began. Famine and feast. You want to improve your value? Reduce supply. No, that doesn't mean getting rid of other techs, it means making yourself more valuable. If you add to your skillset, you move yourself to a new market, essentially the Skill +1 market. That's smaller than the Skill 0 market. Do it again, moving to Skill +2, and there are even fewer people against whom you'll need to compete. As you do so, you make yourself more valuable; you're worth more, and you'll get paid more. Just don't sit and whine because you're not living in a permanent "feast" time, and able to pull down the same salary you were five years ago because the supply was tight relative to demand.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
while probing the the d@*k side....
...
... Hmmm Hmmm ... Yes!
... ... Ha Ha Ha
There goes the social standard
Next phase... They have to pay to work in IT and carry their own machine for 10 miles!
Prepare to be milked people
I don't know about you pal, but even as we speak, my shoulders are aching and my knuckles hurt when I write/ lift heavy objects. The doctor has told me that it still quite isn't Repetitive Stress Injury, but that I should consider taking breaks once in a while.
Don't let passive cubicles blind you from the real physical dangers that a geek lifestyle offers.
More than mere navel gazing.
I guess it's all about experience and perception. I've done a lot of both kinds of work and have found that - for me - it's just trading one set of variables for another.
I've worked in a garment factory, a restaurant kitchen, a construction site, and a meat packing plant while growing up. After school I've worked in design lofts, media production houses, and a lot of that time was spent in server rooms.
Yes, I don't have the threat of having my arm chopped off in a stamper anymore but I have deteriorating eye-motor skills (CRTs). Gone is the threat of burning my hand off with hot oil, but now I suffer from weakened hand strength (typing all day). No, I don't get pneumonia from standing on a steel skeleton in winter winds but I now have a cough from breathing stale HVAC air. I'm not lifting carcasses but I have back problems from sitting all day. Yadda yadda yadda.
But ultimately, it's not the quality of work but the quality of life that seems to suffer for me. My social skills have gone to pot since taking on computer work and my life outside of work has definitely suffered. I wonder if it's the 'macho culture' that makes it easy for us to dismiss the things that seem really important to having a good life like human interaction and actually seeing the sun during the day.
ditto
In a couple of other positions, the buildings were older and full of asbestos. It may or may not have been coincidence that everyone in the office had a constant cough, though it may have also been lower humidity due to the AC system. At least those guys had an air quality inspector you could call in (We did on at least one occasion and they didn't turn up anything.)
Just because you're working for an IT Company doesn't mean they're not putting you into a potentially hazardous shithole. I'd suggest checking out the office when you interview. Ask the employees about the environment maybe. A couple of people we've interviewed in our current position have taken a look at our cube farm, and the manager thinks they've not taken the offers because of it. Sensible, if other work is to be had.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
> They face the lonely insecurity of the individual entrepreneur in a marketplace and culture that stresses, with macho imagery from war and sports, that they are ultimately alone.
What's next, "There are no atheists in cubicles," kind of thing?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But indeed, one day we will have robots to do most of our labor for us, and we'll have genetic engineering, clean energy, and all the biotech advances we could ever want, and then I'll be ready to start making the trade for fewer hours. Because at that point our production will have become extremely efficient, and we'll have attained the things I want to see society achieve.
This is naive at best. Even if this future happenes, it won't occur overnight. This will be a gradual transition. Most people with power and money will find a way to keep their places. The rest of us will still have to work to make a living. It'll be a different kind of work, but I highly doubt that marketplace will allow more slack in this country.
Imagine starting a company with two of your best geek friends. Now imagine being forced to not work more than 35 hours a week. Or having to take a break every two hours even if you are in the middle of debugging that threaded program. Or not being able to get rid of that deadwood non-performer you hired last year. Or having to give everybody a pay rise according to the contract even when the company is going into the red.
Try making that work.
The nature of our work is based on continuous learning, individual responsibility, and isolation (name 5 friends who are not geeks).
There is a problem of supply and demand. There are more of us than the economy can support at this point. It will fix itself, even if somewhat painfully. Big factory solutions from the last century won't help.
The entrpreneur risks bankruptcy. . .
Not really. This is what incorporation is all about. The entrepreneur incorporates, then risks seeing the corporation go bankrupt. His or her personal finances are unaffected by the corporation's bankruptcy status.
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
A friend of mine had a job in a pastry factory. As a pastry aligner.
That's right; sometimes the pastries on the conveyor belt were not properly aligned to slot neatly into the box. Someone had to be on call to prevent a sticky box overflow exception.
"Not on my watch," he'd tell me.
He would then weep bitter tears.
People from India and Pakistan DO speak better English than us Ah-mur-i-cuns. Have you ever watched CNN's World Report? The Indian and Pakistani journalists all speak the Queen's English very melodiously and beautifully. Even though most of the time the news was pretty horrifying (Nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, much sabre rattling...a Cold War in microcosm) they sure made it sound pleasant.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
eurostar?
homo
--what you said is true, but it's not an either/or situation. A long time ago I was in the UAW, and for sure the rank and file completely dismissed the threat of japanese inroads, it was laughable to them (not to me I saw it coming) and managment back then was completely out to lunch coke addled morons. BUT, another thing happened, japan not only sold cheaper cars initially, they "dumped" them, ie, sold them BELOW COST to themselves in order to garner longer term brand loyalty and market share. Exactly what they are currently doing with the hybrid cars as well. They also put a HUGE number of restrictions on US imports into japan, and we-our "leaders" just ate it.
To me it should be a quid pro quo, you tariff us, we tariff you right back. You won't allow US people to own property there (japan, mexico, china) they shouldn't be allowed to purchase and own anything here.
Our leaders are sell-outs, and they play the left versus right, repub versus dem,white collar versus blue collar angles against us, keep everyone faked out as they are creating a global two class technofuedal society. The US middle class is the biggest hindrance to those efforts, that's why you see them gleefully destroying first the blue collar manufacturing and agricultural jobs (white collars never cared for those people while this was happening), now they will be destroying the white collar jobs (and of a suddent the white collars are going HEY! what's going on?). They won't "run out" of technology, nor will these uber international pirate bosses "go broke" or lack for anything, they just prefer the master/serf style society, and are willing to trade off the loss of customers to a great degree. The bonus money to them is they get to keep constantly keep transferring ownership of all the land and buildings upstream into fewer hands. A headline last night, mortgage defaults at 30 year high. This isn't an accident, it's part of "the plan". Get people to establish credit well beyond any rational level, WELL beyond that, get them shilled into the phony manipuylated stock market, then destroy their jobs and income, poof, the uber bosses get to legally own everything. In the meantime they set people -the white collar and blue collar victims-squabbling with each other using propoganda and media manipulation with the "political" system with *one* political party with two names. It's a great scam for them and is working right on schedule. One of the easier ways to see the scam is to look at "official" unemployment figures, which are approximately 1/2 of what the real numbers are. How they do that? simple, they stop counting people who have exhausted unemployment insurance, they don't count people extremely under-employed in very low paying part time jobs, and they also really messed with consumer cost of living indices by taking out food and energy costs, which they used to include.
The economy is much worse than they admit to, despite wallmarts impressive figures. I'd like to see a breakdown of how much walmart's sales are cash versus credit card the other day.
Two other economic indicators, look at large banks derivatives exposure, then look at fortune 500 pension funding, and government pension funding and projected cost of social security and medicare/medicaid.
It's pretty dismal right now.
It's more complex than that obviously, but that is a good gist-cliff notes version over-view.
Yep, the man don't want you unionizing, they want you to keep voting for either crips or bloods gang at the polls, they don't want you to notice the daily factory closings and the daily importing of second world labor, white or blue collar. They want you to keep with the safe little finger pointing "it's all the dems fault, no it's all the repubs fault". They love it when people stop looking at that bare minimum level. They love it when 99% of the population is more interested in professional sports, movies, music, games, mindless TV shows and etc. They want you concentrating on ANYTHING but looking real hard at what's going on now and using common sense and logic to make a rational projection of events with some sort of realistic timeline. they want you to focus on "homeland security" and "terrorists" as they remove border patrol people and abandon the southern borders to humongous invasion. they want you to think "cheap prices on gadgets" now as these so called "american" companies all move off shore in search of the last dregs of short term profits. They want you to constantly take any "spare" cash you got and pump it into the magic beans stock market, or even buy government paper, which is just another form of indebtedness that falls right back on you in the form of future higher taxes to pay this paper off. You won't see any of those TV shills recommending people pay off their mortgage early, or perhaps get a smaller and more modest place so they can do that, nope, they still want you to buy-buy-buy, get those 30 year notes on fancy foyers and gimgrack houses and shiny things in the rooms. Just keep doing it on credit, that's all they ask, and don't look any farther than that. On and on. They baited the trap years ago, most people took the bait. The bad part is, people will still argue there is no trap.
Oh well.
Let's see here, your job is difficult, you don't think you are adequately compensated, and you don't get to chat with other people all day. And if you quit, someone else will snap up your position in a heartbeat. There's a club for these people- it's called The Rest of the World... we meet in the bar on Friday. See you there.
"Never pet a burning dog."
I think unions would KILL open source. Would any union allow its members to work on code for FREE?
Factory workers aren't the only groups that are unionized. To my mind, we should evaluated the state of telecom and electrical workers' unions when considering whether the IT industry would benefit; especially considering the overlap with these industries that surely exists in some of our job descriptions.
Further, there's a wide berth of job functions within the IT industry. Assuming that unionization is a good idea for high tech workers in general, would the union umbrella cover everyone from data entry "specialists" to systems analysts? What I've read thus far suggests that most people are equating "high tech" with "software development"--is this really what we're discussing?
As for the argument that unionization would encourage international outsourcing, I think that this is a shortsighted prediction. While a cheaper IT workforce may be found in India (et al), it seems to me that there's already a great deal of malcontent among India's IT workers as it is, often due to low wages. Americans want to outsource high-tech development to India to cut costs, and high-tech professionals in India want to move to the West to make more money... hmmm. Sounds like a pretty transitory situation to me.
In the past, when blue collar workers en masse have lost their jobs due to American companies utilizing Mexican and East Asian labor, Americans rejoined with a zeal for products manufactured locally. Is it so strange to consider that such a scnario might replay in the case of American-made software?
Somehow I can't see geeks throwing bricks at scabs. Or even having the strength to.
Well there's the problem right there. Why is there job insecurity? Probably because unions and such got so many things linked as part of compensation, that losing a job is like losing a lifestyle. The truth is that there needs to be a revolution in the way that people find jobs. Corporations should be replaced by project teams that ebb and flow together... Getting together, producing results, getting paid, and then starting over. Right now, management is obsolete, but unions won't help us get rid of them.
And frankly, we're almost at the point when Robots will be able to replace most of the human labor. So what will these high moral CEOs of today do? The first person to get the robots, most likely will kill off the rest of us. Oh dystopia!
I ran out of moderator points yesterday, or you'd be +1 insightful...
Regards,
Ross
...well, right off the bat in your list, the truck drivers? If you had been reading the non-tech news you *might* have noticed that now mexican 5$ a DAY truck drivers are now legal to drive all over the united states. This has just happened.
Don't worry, your white collar tech job is going as well, get used to the idea. Only the timeline might be different for different people and jobs, but basically, if you are any sort of middle class in the US, you are now surplus population to the globalists. You are not only replaceable, you WILL be replaced.
It is NOT going to be nice, in fact, it's going to be pretty hellish once it really starts hitting hard. Give it some time.
Want an example of what these globalists can do once they set their minds to it, to the middle class of a nation? Look at argentina two years ago, one year ago, and now.
If only the latter were true. Corporations treat employees as they would capital while demanding complete and total loyalty. It's the rare corporate boardroom that isn't in need of emergency cranio-rectal extraction.
MARKETOROID ALERT, be careful
If you're an employee, the only risk you take is losing your job and not getting a paycheck. Even if your employer is losing money, your salary will still be paid. The entrpreneur risks bankruptcy - 90% of new businesses fail. The risks don't really compare.
Thats dead wrong. Ever been an employee at a company where the owner goes bankrupt?? YOU DONT GET YOUR MONEY! Laws are made to protect the owner of the company not the employee. The risks don't really compare? Damn right, an employee takes a MUCH MUCH MUCH higher risk. Example: lets say you are a single mother working in a factory. The factory owner goes bankrupt. Oh wait, all his money is under his wifes name.. So he only has 2 million dollars left, what will he do? Meanwhile the single mother who has worked at the factory for 10 years of her life is broke, has no education and is destitute. Maybe she hasnt been paid in a month, has thousands of dollars in debt.. Gambling debt? NO! Food debt! Roof debt!
That single mother probably didnt contribute anything magical to the factory, but what did the owner contribute? His AMAZING skills landed his company bankrupt. I could do that, 10 million people could do that. Shouldnt he be fired?
The one, sole power a union has over management is the union's ability to stop working -- and the IT industry does not have that option.
Remember what happened during the Reagan years when the air traffic controllers went on strike?
Well, it's even worse in IT. For many years, the suits have hoodwinked/bribed the US Congress into believe that there was a shortage of skilled American IT workers. In truth, there *was* a shortage... of easily-hireable, easily-fireable foreigners who were willing to work for pennies. Thus, the rise of the H1-B and offshoring initiatives.
Management might not have gotten away with this had there already been a geek union. But it's too late; the firewall is irretrievably open. If geeks were to form a union *today* and then stop work *today* (okay, tomorrow because today is Sunday) management would just accept a week-long halt in productivity while they find H1-B contractors to fill in. And then forget about coming back to work.
The sad truth is, that by the time that we dumb shmucks realized that we needed a union, management had already preempted the power that a union would bring.
Honest inquiry btw; I'm seriously considering throwing a law degree in the mix, but I have no idea how to finance it without going insane, I already had my stomach ulcer thank you very much.
Any advice is appreciated !
At least as far as I can tell. High tech jobs are not much like working in a factory.
Look, I'm an industrial engineer who specialized in manufacturing systems. I've worked in factories and I spent the last few years doing computer simulations of factories. This meant I have spent a LOT of time in factories as well as a lot of time as a high tech worker doing programming. I have lived in both worlds and let me clue you, high tech jobs are cushy by comparison.
Yes high tech workers have their problems. Project managment tends to be poor, hours are long, bosses can be clueless. Lots of folks here on slashdot are well aware of the problems and I don't mean to trivialize them. But I do mean to give a dose of reality.
Working in a factory is in many ways harder. You are on your feet all day, every day, often 6-7 days a week. The work is usually physically tiring, repetitive, and mind numbing not to mention dangerous. (sorry carpal tunnel just doesn't compare to getting run over by a forklift) If someone doesn't show up one day you get to cover for them which means your day just got significantly longer and harder. Even the best plants are not exactly comfortable to be in and are loud, smelly and often dirty. You'll be wearing ear plugs and safety glasses all day long. Any office is plush by comparison.
If you are skilled labor you might pull down a decent wage, though you will never be rich. If you are unskilled labor, you will make minimum wage or close to it, and you will be stuck with the crappiest, most mind numbing jobs you can imagine. And you can be replaced in a heartbeat with pretty much any monkey off the street unless union rules prevent it.
Your co-workers will be a mixed bag of intelligence, but generally uneducated past high school. We're talking the same crowds you find at your typical NASCAR or WWF event. Piss someone off at work and you might find your tires slashed. (especially if your are a manager) Never drive a nice car to work if you work in a factory.
Want to join a union? Let me clue you in about unions. (I'm speaking in generalities here, there are exceptions to everything I'm about to say) They *can* serve a useful purpose but you don't really want to be in one if you can avoid it. Unions are all about rules and they will define job descriptions to the Nth degree. Only certain people are allowed to do certain jobs. Unions will remove much of the flexibility from your job. Want merit based pay increases? Dream on. Unions are about preserving jobs with a relatively high average pay, not promoting individual achievement. You'll get the same pay increase as everyone else no matter how hard you work. And since people know this, they tend to not work very hard. Want a close relationship with managment? Not very likely with a union. You'll often have a shop steward present for every conversation you have with management.
Anyway, the point is that unions are sometimes necessary to avoid a truly abusive work environment, but frankly very few white collar jobs even come close. If you are a skilled worker with talents that are in demand, I cannot see any logical reason you would want to join a union. It would only hurt you in the long run.
To get back to my original point, factory jobs and hi-tech jobs just aren't the same. Sure any job can be hard and you can get a pointy-haired boss who will make your life miserable. But I don't think anyone who has actually spent time in a factory could agree with this author.
I have a couple of points to counteract the vast slew of nonsense that has been posted here.
First: "It's not fair that the boss makes more money than I do. I work all day long, and he sits around and gets a ferrari."
The boss does not sit around and do nothing and get a free ferrari. 99% of small businesses fail within 8 years; this implies that the successful small businessman is providing a service that 99% of people who tried were incapable of providing. If running a company were so easy, and a ferrari were guaranteed, then everyone would do it.
The fact is, small business owners subsidize both employees and consumers. This is a well-known economic fact. They do not intend to do this; they wrongly think that running a business is easier than it is, and they end up bankrupting themselves while paying employees and consumers. It is simply not true that the small business owner is "exploiting" you.
Another point I should take issue with: "It's not fair that I'm only paid $80k per year. My company is exploiting me and driving down the price of my labor, so that my bosses can greedily increase their profit margins."
Fact: the average profit margin in large U.S. businesses is 4%. That profit margin is not blown on ferraris; it goes to expanding the business. In short, there is no extra money. Your livelihood is not being stolen and sucked up in greedy profits. In order to increase your salaries, business would have to raise prices, which would make everyone else in this economy poorer. And don't say: "we can just take money away from executives!" Executives do something that you could not do. If being an executive were so easy, companies would fire them and replace them with someone less expensive. Comapnies don't want to blow money on execs any more than on anything else; the only reason execs are paid alot is because they render a service that few others can provide.
And a final point: "Look at the fruits of evil capitalism. I am only paid $80k per year, and I am forced to work, and my job leads to loneliness, etc. Capitalism has done this!"
A typical salary before capitalism was ~$800/year. That is what the salary still is in communist China. You are paid 100 times that amount. Capitalism has led to a phenomenal increase in the standard of living; NOTHING ELSE could have done this.
All of this demonstrates a few basic points:
1. Slashdotters, and people in general, are radically ignorant of both business and economics.
2. Their suggested "improvements" would wreck the phenomenal machinery that provides them with a fantastic living. The masses go in search of more food, and the methods they employ are generally to wreck the bakeries.
I haven't made any of these things up.
I know you haven't! I think I spent 20% or more of my time over my career cleaning up after these people.
Unfortunately, if these people are good at kissing ass, they stay, and the good people go.
That was the situation at the last job, anyway. And the incompetent fool that was left behind only made slightly less than me...even if I was paid TWICE as much as that person, it still is going to cost them much more...maybe even if I was paid 5x as much as that "developer". I'm serious. We're talking about someone who didn't even know what Usenet or Google Groups search was. We're talking about someone who didn't know what "patterns" were - never even heard of them. We're talking about someone who doesn't comment code at all, and was constantly breaking others' code to try to "fix" something in their own. Someone who would constantly make UNDOCUMENTED changes to PRODUCTION database systems without using the database modeling tool, which archives changes. Someone who thought they were a "DBA" because they could point and click in SQL Server Admin. And that's the most recent example...I could delve into various people I've worked with in the past nine years, and not many people here would be surprised because they have been subjected to the same, I'm sure.
The next job I land, I will be spending MUCH more effort relaying the screwups of my "peers", and making HIGHLY visible my accomplishments. It's unfortunate, because it actually makes me less productive, but that's the way it has to go I guess, if *I* am to stay employed. It infuriates me no end when I can name a dozen or so in-DUH-viduals who are still employed and produce nothing of value, while I sit at home unemployed month after month. It's partly my fault for not making sure the bosses at those jobs KNEW who was doing the screwing up.
I'm through with being a "team player" if it means more of this. When there were plenty of jobs to go around, playing along was fine. The situation has changed, so out come the knives, I'm afraid. Lord knows I had to pull a few out of my back after the last layoff.
That must be a pretty comforting thought. Too bad you're wrong.
CEOs are making out like bandits, but the people being screwed over by this are the investors, not the employees.
/. title to this story, the author of that title obviously has never been near a real factory, much less worked in one.
Quite correct. Just adding that the CEOs that *are* making out like bandits should fall by the wayside in time and the CEOs that are making out like value-added-assets will replace the former in time.
Now for some general rambling not related to your post at all but relevant to the general topic.
The lemming investors chasing after bad deals because of some star-struck vision, they will fall by the wayside in time too and people that more deserve those assets will replace them. Many ways for this to happen and it happens all the time, through a cessation of operations, bankruptcy, hostile takeover, etc.
As for the deceptive
As for the topic, if you are a true professional you do not have a need for a union. If you are just a layman, then you will have a very rough time creating a successful union, these are just historical facts. Of course there are some exceptions, but extreme outliers are not a good way to make policy or to hang the livelyhoods of your fellow laymen on. If you are a craftsman you have a good historical standing for a successful union effort as well as a good historical standing to strike out on your own and take all of the risks associated with that venture.
Believe it or not, the normal business building process is:
1. Invest your own money.
2. Seek others to join you, or not.
3. Get things going working long hours while you try to make ends meet, working sometimes months or years before the doors open.
4. Pray that you start making a profit before your house is forclosed on.
Unfortunately, discussions like this general topic get a lot of comments suggesting that somehow the operation just sprang up making tons of money while the workers were screwed at every turn. That is just not typical.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Everything in moderation. Having to learn the new tech fad of the week, month or half year on a regular basis is very repetitive and is NOT the mental joyride you may think it is.
Some folks would like to simply DO their jobs without having to take personal time to conastantly keep up to date with whatever frivolous new product or "paradigm" some big software company wants to push on us. IT in many ways is like being a hamster running on a wheel. No matter how fast you run you stay in the same place.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I've been part of 3 startups, as a partner and a programmer. You people seem to have so little concept of what it is to grow and manage a company until it is stable and successful. Decent managers don't sleep at night because they're worried about payroll, about how to get you benefits.
Sunday nights were the worst for me in the early days. Never slept a wink trying to think everything through. Trying to to get enough money to operate until security. This shit ain't easy, and you know what? I paid ALL of my developers more than I paid myself. But in the end, I had equity (and so did they to a large extent). But if you want the control and the equity, get in on the ground floor, help it start.
Otherwise, you're hired to do a job, so do it. I can tell you, noone that works for me or the managers I work with feel that their time is less valuable than mine. In fact, that's the rule, everyone's time is equally valuable. But, as a manager and a founder, I get to make decisions that sometimes the developers don't agree with. That's the nature of all good teams, not just business, or development.
We are the most overpaid, pampered demographic segment, cut your word-hole whining.
--Stupidity is Self Curing!
Now think about how hard your slave driving PHB makes you work to fix that last bug. 80 hours a week sitting on your ass in front of a computer, never lifting anything heavier than some liquid caffeine. Sorry, no sympathy from me.
Every day I think how lucky I am to have gone to college and got a job sitting on my ass in front of a computer. You should too.
"Oh my God! Davis just lost his arm in the laser printer!"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
That's an over-simplification. I work in R&D for a large software company; roughly half my time is playing with new technologies and ideas and the rest of the time is spent actually coding product. You don't HAVE to go to acadaemia to enjoy that kind of environment, though I admit my situation may not be overly common.
That statement shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how businesses are run. I see so many people assuming that major decisions are made by the investors. That is so ridiculously laughable. Think about it, what rights does the investor really have in making a corporation's decisions? Can they actually run the business as you seem to imply? Get real, tell that one to anyone who knows businesses and they'll get a real laugh.
And by the way, why is it that you feel that the individual employee is paid only what he is worth, while CEOs are (and implicitly in your statement) free of this constraint? Did the investors really decide to pay CEOs outrageous amounts?
So here I go. In July I started working for a very small internet company. When I started working, the other two employees didn't know how to read or write HTML code. One of them was a coked-out chick who designed all her web pages with big pink letters. So I redesigned their entire network of sites, implemented advertising and traffic-flow techniques my boss had never even dreamed of. Overall traffic soared, and sales more than doubled. My boss enjoyed a nice, rented house in prime real estate area, paid his child support, had all the drugs he wanted, and had a ton of money just to throw around. I was making $10/hr, which was later bumped to a $2k/mo salary, but since I worked so much, I was actually making less. I was employed as an "independent contractor", but had to work in the office every day (except Saturdays), did my work under constant supervision, and every day I was told what to do and when to do it. He broke every rule in the book, just so he wouldn't have to pay me overtime or withhold taxes -- I didn't even have a contract. But, apparantely, his "accountant" told him he'd only face a "small fine of $50" for misclassifying me as an independent contractor. Nevermind that his accountant hasn't paid her own taxes in decades and the government doesn't know where (or who) she is. It's unfair to suggest that employers shouldn't make money (even a lot of it) off of their employees. Whether it's fair or not can be determined by the level of honesty and integrity -- are you getting the recognition (financial or otherwise) you deserve? If your efforts aren't worthy of being realized and rewarded, then don't expect to be paid more. If they are worthy of it, demand it, or find a different employer and let the company deal with someone who doesn't understand the job like you do, while you work for their competition. I did -- I'm earning twice as much as I did before AND I'm in negotiations to be made a partner in the company.
"Mother, should I run for President? Mother, should I trust the government?"
Corporation exist to make money, and for no other reason.
Corporations exist at the whim of the communities who charter them.
in a captialist society, with competition both for the companies and the employees, you've got a few choices:
-Accept your current working conditions
-Work out new ones with your employer
-Leave and find new sources of work
Good thing we don't live in a capitalist society, eh? Corporate welfare keeps bad companies from dying and keeps labor cheap by taking steps to depress wages every time workers get too uppity.
Eh comrade?
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Only slightly related to the topic at hand.
I've recieved an offer to telecommute for a small company doing payroll (Customer service aspect). Thing is. One I have to punk down $20 to start and a small amount from each check up to the third one to pay for the referbished gateway they'll send me (with XP). They'll also establish a 800 number her as well. Does this sound like a wise thing to get myself into? I will research the company the best that I can, but I'm hoping it's not a "too good to be true" offer. The pay while not spetacular isn't bad ($12/hr).
God I hope you are wrong. Because I have worked in Hollywood, and it is 5-10 times worse than anything else in the universe. The people on top aren't the most skilled. They are the best politicians. They kissed ass and back-stabbed their way to the top. The peons work twice as much as IT people do and they make minimum wage. Or perhaps nothing. Stars...we don't want that, good god. (for acurate portrayal of hollywood see "swimming with sharks")
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
This is just outrageous. You effectively claim the workers have no rights, and if they want rights they must become employers first!
How soon we forget history. How soon we forget the events of even two and three years ago. The tech industry's motto used to be "caveat employer". Let the employer beware. We demanded ping pong tables, refrigerators stocked with ale, and the elimination of the dress code. If we didn't get it we walked out. I personally saw a 60% increase in pay over two years, the creation of a corporate cafeteria with a real chef, the creation of a corporate gym, and flex time that made rubber bands look rigid. I got one raise just because management *thought* a recruiter had talked to me.
Now the shoes on the other foot, and we decry our lack of rights. Hah!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Looking from here in Europe, US workers appear to be trussed and blinded by the american dream
I used to work for a French company operating in the US. Since I had some skillz, I got to travel to France now and again. It was quite interesting to see the 'greves' that had people taking batteau mouche rides to get to work in Paris when the Metro was having a 'social action'. The French government was also running a campaign to try to cut down on people working overtime because unemployment was over 14%. There were union posters in the workplaces extolling the idea that people had a right to a job, and the goverment should legislate a shorter workweek to get this to happen.
During my time with this country we moved a lot of manufacturing out of Europe to either the US or China because the costs in France were so high (due to unions) and the problems with trying to get something done in August when the entire country of France was in the Alps en vacance, or on two hour lunch breaks, or there was a greve that meant customers couldn't get their product. NO new projects went into Europe because of the cost and employment law issues.
This doesn't seem to me to be the way to a productive society to me. People will get jobs when the cost of their employment is less than what they can produce for a company, not because 'they have a right to a job'. Structural rigdidity is the primary reason that growth in Japan has been zero for a decade now, and growth in Europe is about 1/2 that in the US.
OTOH, I do think that the French system of education has a lot of things to teach America. Not that I advocate adopting it totally though as I'm not much enamored of the idea that the baccelaureatte result determines the rest of your life.
Name one industry that has benefited from the introduction of unions. Steel, Education, auto; of these industries would have been better off without unions. Sure the very vocal bottom 20% loves the fact that a union virtually guarantees their pay and job security, but what does that do to the final product?
Unions only increase costs, decrease productivity, and guarantee that the industry will need a government bail-out or protection in 20-30 years.
These down times are just what the tech industry needs. The excess capacity of HTML jockeys and MCSEs will go find other jobs flipping burgers where they should have been in the first place if not for the dot com boom.
-ted
There is no room for negotiation. Well, of course you could starve to death or die during the winter or something. Does this mean you have a CHOICE?
But get this: we did the SAME THING to our employers not two years ago.
That was, in fact happening a few years ago. However, the average techies were working 60-80 hour weeks. I also notice that H1-B was more than doubled to increase the supply of captive tech workers.
I further note that when the dot-coms crashed, nobody did anything to reduce the supply of tech workers to match.
I do agree that tech work sucks a whole lot less than factory work. I've done that and never will again.
Other professions have their own brand of problems. In sales, you don't know how big your check will be from week to week, clerical work is generally boring, lawyers have to be workaholics and have a lot of stress related disease. Entrepaneurs suffer from long hours and financial uncertainty (often going from minor disaster to minor disaster).
Perhaps the real problem is that our economic system is fundamentally incapable of meeting our goals (most people want security and work that doesn't suck).
I actually work in a factory - I have for over nine years - and it's in the auto sector so it's not bad paying. The work is repetitious and boring, but I use that time to turn my brain off and go into freeflowing mode for awhile. You know, ruminate over financial stuff [inspect part for porosity], think about my beautiful daughters [ensure flash is removed from core], ponder over theological/philosophical issues... pretty soon my shift is done and I feel renewed and ready to attack my Linux box or go for a workout!
To get to the meat of my point: those who bitch about their grunt factory jobs are whiners and wimps.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I worked for Digital/Compaq/HP. I was put on a State govt site to work as a resident. In order to get access to the email there (or out to the internet) they requested my SSN. I requested from them the required information under the privacy act of 1974. My job secutiry was threatened by the customer. In the intrest in having work I let the issue drop but periododically I broughtitup, Neither the customer nor my manager seemed to be the slightest bit intrested in following *FEDERAL* regs. I finally was so disgusted i quit. here is a hint folks.. you are an employee, you are an expense to a company. You are money going out. You are not important.
Stop working. If you accept the shit that is poured onto you, you deserve no better.
Yes, it seems to be working quite well for the fast food workers, etc.
You fucking moron.
And THAT is why all of our jobs are going to mexico and india. Who needs good ol' american labor that you have to care for, insure, and treat like a human when you can hire someone in the developing (third) world?
I'm sorry, 90% of bosses (I've had one or two good ones, but only on the local level, not corporate level) care only for the bottom line, and if they could get away with paying unix admin as much as a janitor they would, gladly. BUT.. if they could hire a crapload of malaysian women to do the same task for half the price, they would.
Money comes above people. Always. Personal success comes above group success, always. American buisness (and most americans) are just greedy. Sad. Eh?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Where this in-joke about Russia of Soviet I'm really intrigued where came from it did.
Other than sounding like the ever-annoying Yoda.. where this came from did it?
mogorific carpentry experiments
Not to mention only small business are allowed to go bankrupt in America. If you're a big business, the gov't will gladly hand you corporate welfare (while complaining about the Reagan "welfare queen" at the same time).
Let's blame H1-B because they are all underpaid. Well, I am one of them. And believe me I am not underpaid. I lost my job earlier last year (after 9/11) during some of the worst times. It took me a week to find a new job, and I even got a signing bonus. Hmmmmm, why would they do this, since they can so nicely underpay me? Could it be because I am more qualified than the other computer science wannabes that make up a huge portion of the so-called IT unemployed? Could it be that a degree and experience matters again all of a sudden? That people actually look for skills and not "I am a car-sales man and I can program some Visual Basic and I also did the webpage for my used car sales lot". And did it occur to you that real skills are still hard to find?
-
Important Note to Recruiters and Contract Agencies
Headhunters and contract brokers are a large part of the problems we have, expecially with older workers not being valued for their experience - they only want the latest buzzword.I'm a software consultant, I deal exclusively with the end client, because I feel that brokers don't serve my needs, or (in my honest opinion) the needs of my clients.
Headhunters are a pestilence on the face of high-tech. Join me in boycotting them.
What can you do if you're looking for a perm job? Apply directly to the company. Most open positions are never advertised. Just send your cover letter and resume to companies you think you might want to work for, regardless of whether a position is advertised.
This page has some tips on job hunting, it's most useful to people from Santa Cruz but the methods are helpful to anyone.
The "dot.com downturn" has been challenging for me as well as everyone else - but I have continued to work and be able to support myself and my wife throughout it. An I have done so without the help of headhunters.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Once an industry becomes unionized that industy will be destroyed in a short period of time. Lets see how many I can name:
Auto workers
This is why we drive Japanese cars and not American.
Communication workers (CWA) - This is why our phone systems are still rooted in 1940's technology and is still the biggiest expense for any real business.
Airlines (pilots, mechanics, and stewardices) - This is why United is about to go belly up.
Textiles
This is why all of our clothes say "Made in China" or "Made in Taiwan"
Teachers - This is a big reason of why Johnny can't read
Construction industry - This is why it costs 10 times more to build in the US than it does overseas.
Teamsters - enough said
Shall I go on. Unions are a big scam. They don't stand for making the employee a better employee. They stand for putting up as many roadblocks as possible to prevent improvements that would cause their members to lose their jobs. In the painting industry, members are not allowed to paint a wall using sprayers because they would finish the job in 1/10th of the time it would take to do it by using a roller. In the teachers union, it takes 5 years to fire a teacher who has been found sexually abusing children. This is what unions give us.
Ask yourself, would you trust your future to such an organization? Sorry, but I'll take my chances. I can improve myself and if I don't like the work environment, I can leave. My opportunities are much better than being part of a unionized (communist) group.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
I must have missed something here. Are you a slave? Is your boss forcing you to work for him? No? It's your choice? He's paying you a sum on which you agreed?
It doesn't sound like he's making money at your expense, it sounds like he's making money and you're both gaining.
But hey, isn't it cool how the code I'm writing looks like an ascii picture of Brittney Spears nekkid?
O by the way, how is that raise you promised me a month ago coming along??
And if he can't, why is he making 500x as much as you are? Is: really a good reason?
because the workers put up with murderous (literally) working conditions, the factories dump raw sewage, employ children, etc.
So in many ways, trade protections are the flip side of human rights: should folks be able to sell stuff here cheap they make while abusing their workers and destroying the environment?
IOW, how about if we said: you can sell us whatever you want, so long as you pay your workers at least the US minimum wage and obey the same environmental regs. companies on US soil do?
Scientists learn why things work.
Engineers learn how things work.
Liberal arts students learn to say "Do you want fries with that?"
Unions were formed for a reason. They have changed over the years, and many aren't doing as good of a job as they once did at representing the real needs of the workers. Part of the problem is that they did thier original job very well, giving us worker safety laws, the 8 hour workday, child safety laws, etc. They removed the much of the need for their existence.
Unions could have grown in new and exciting directions, instead most have become just another power structure.
Considering that it is the stated goal of most national economies to keep about 5% of the workforce unemployed at all times to forestall inflation, it behooves the workers to bargain collectively. As long as employers have far more information about potential employees than those employees could reasonably be expected to have about potential employers, it behooves the workers to bargain collectively. And as long as the lack of a job threatens one's very survival while the lack of employees doesn't, it behooves workers to bargain collectively.
An IT guild could do much more than help worker bargain collectively. It could standardize skill testing and promotion policies to help ensure a true meritocracy. It could act as a temporary agency, owned by the members themselves. It could put out journals, perform research and generally advance the state of the art. It could have a political action arm that could focus members efforts to get good laws passed and bad ones shot down.
To those who charge that such an organization would become just one more bureaucratic nightmare I say: only if you let it.
Such a guild would have to be built around the ideals of true democratic control by the members. With modern technology we have the means to more accurately measure the will of a group than ever before.
As long as power remains unbalanced, the weak will have to band together to protect their interests from the powerful. When the weak band together, they give their power to a leader. When leaders are given power, they have more in common with other powerful people than with the weak. The common interest of the powerful is to maintain the imbalance of power that creates the need for them.
A free market tends to concentrate power in the hands of those who already have it. A free market posesses no natural means of redistributing power in an already unbalanced situation.
The only path I see out of this situation is a true democracy of one person, one vote on every issue that effects them.
While many people in the world have democratic control of their social and political lives, democracy ends at the workplace. Unions and guilds represent one way of returning some democratic control of our production to we, the people.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Outrageous? Actually it's not at all. You probably don't realise this because you don't understand, you're probably have Credit Cards, a House (or rent), and other loans. You don't realise it your in indentured servitude. Long live capitalism and democracy! etc.
Here's a newsflash... improve cube farm conditions along with factory conditions.
That poor sap punching out industrial sprinkler fitting heaters has every bit as much of a right to expect decent working conditions.
WAKE UP tech-geek gunslinger. There are millions of us now, and we are interchangeable to a frightening degree. "Us vs. them" went out with the furby.
the most mysterious thing you'll see today
"What rights does the investor really have in making a corporation's decisions?"
The answer is "ALL" rights, except those which are counter to applicable laws.
If you're thinking of the individual with a few shares of common stock as "the investor", well, that person might get a couple of minutes to speak at the annual meeting.
It's the investors who really have a large stake in the enterprise that make the decisions.
as a nation in our words about human rights and environmental protection.
Sure you can get goods cheaper if you buy from countries where its ok to make workers work for subsistence (or below) level wages, and allow factories to dump raw sewage.
A simple solution would be to only let nations sell here if they pay workers the US minimum wage, enforce the US minimum workplace laws, and obey US environmental regs.
For the tech industry, offshore programmers could undersell US programmers only if the same workplace regs. regarding humane workplace conditions, overtime, etc. were followed. This would level the playing field to one of raw skill rather than how much more abuse one country's programmers are willing to take.
You would probably get more geeks on board if you called it a SIG.
A Janitor's job is to provide me with a clean working environment.
A Unix Sysadmin's job is...to provide me with a clean working environment.
So...what's your point? ;)
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
Well...the other option is, er, what? Socialism or any other sort of collectivism (i.e., Marxism, fascism, naziism, Communism) that has been *directly* responsible for 100 million deaths in the past century?
And read The Road to Serfdom if you think the Nazi's rise to power had nothing to do with socialism - it had everything to do with socialism....freedom means ECONOMIC freedom, as well as social freedoms, and anything else is on the slippery slope to another Hitler or Stalin.
I know it's hard for you Euro-weenies to get this through your thick skulls, since you are so steeped in sour grapes, and you view Americans as "cowboys", but we have a better system than you, despite how intellectually superior you think you are.
If it was up to Europe, the whole world would be under the sway of murderous collectivism of one sort or another - whether that collectivism calls itself Marxism or Naziism or fascism doesn't make any difference.
Don't thank us or anything, and keep on truckin' on your road to serfdom.
Not all unions pull dirty shit. My father was in a union and for close to 10 years they went without a pay raise. The compnay financially wasn't doing the greatest but it was getting by. Then, when the company starting making decent money and paid it all out to the shareholders the union members asked for a raise. When they were refused they had a strike, and finally got the raise after 10 years.
Guess I'm not up on the latest revisionist version of the Civil War, all those poor, innocent southerners who lost their god given right to own another human being, how tragic...
I think a better place to put the blame is on activist judges who (in the late 1800s through the 1930s) took the 14thA and the Commerce clause far beyond the letter and the intent. A practice which is still common today, even among (especially among?) conservative "strict constructionist" justices...
Justice Thomas
Funny, insightful, informative!
(but if you work for me, please see me first if you are unhappy;-).
Many have already sounded off on the non-Dickensian nature of most technology work. The work is generally physically safe, conducted in generally well lighted and air conditioned/heated offices.
;-) have to count for something. Put another way, I
am much better at this stuff than anything else I could choose to do. And
with age comes the wisdom to see through the pretense of those on the other
side of the negotiation fence for what it is.
What I want to know is - how old are those posting the anti-union, pro-intelligentsia drivel that is in this thread?
So many here are missing one basic issue that the BBC article alludes to: IT work itself is ABSOLUTELY NOT RESPECTED by most companies nor managements, and neither are the practitioners. I think that is the underlying problem that is reflected in poorly designed, one dimensional, excessively macho work culture in this field.
To reflect this assertion, the proportion of top executives in most large companies whose background is engineering or applied sciences is truly insignificant, and the career track in IT and engineering is absolutely non-existent and must be manufactured ad hoc by the individual. This is as truly a young person's game as major league "anything".
My post is not about wanting anyone to guarantee me a job, nor a plea for anyone to kiss my ass in gratitude for knowing how to code a constructor or a GUI. I simply would like to see some genuine appreciation from the people whose businesses I help. Alas, I find that I am expected to: shut up; code my nuts off; not express any opinion; and conveniently disappear when my piece is done.
You may feel that you're doing great at 25 or 30. I challenge those beating their chests in shared exultation at the primacy of the uber-geek to say the same things at 40 or 50! At some point real soon now, unless you enter into some sweetheart partnership or start your own company, you're going to see your options shrivel unless you *aggressively* re-make yourself. In my area, I simply see almost nobody over 45 in high tech.
My background and perspective: I am a self employed IT contractor and have done this for 9+ years. Prior to that I was employed in several jobs for a total of 20+ years of experience in mixed HW and SW applications. I have mainly developed shrink wrap resalable applications for my clients and I have represented myself, so I have not had to contend with any static from a body shop agency.
My experience, overall, has been that I have pretty much been treated more as a temp or grunt worker along the lines outlined above. Here are some of the wonderful roses and tokens of appreciation thrown to my feet for developing mission critical applications for my client base.
- Threatened with death/disappearance/lawsuit/other by a startup's paranoid CEO if I were to quit a 1099 contract or reduce my work hours.
- Bullied continually by another company when working on a fixed cost contract, and treated like I was their janitor and their property - it was a conversion of their flagship vertical product to Windows. I pulled it off in a reasonable time and cost and I was told later that they felt I was 'sleaze'.
- The president of a long term client took something like four months and much wheedling and begging from me to write a simple stinking letter of reference. This from a guy that claims that he was grossly underpaid and abused when
he was "just" a programmer... IE: my brother, a corporate controller, says that he dashes off letters like this on demand within 2-3 business days so that he doesn't forget.... and feels that it's his duty when someone does their job well.
- Another client's owner insists on using me pretty much like a robotic pair of coding arms, reserving all design decisions for himself and treating all developers in his company like code technicians. "Here, put this 'Begin' starting at column 4, and space down two lines, and put a 'writeln()'.." etc.
- Got shingles (at age 37!) working in a boiler room office coding VB apps while the office's tech writer is constantly over my desk grunting inane questions at the other developer in the office.
Mostly, I find that flagrant hypocrisy, psychological abuse, ingratitude, and snotty holier-than-thou "I was a coder once but now I'm not a loser like that" attitudes are bestowed on software and engineering types by business owners and managers.
So why am I still doing this crap, you may ask? The major reason is degree of investment in the industry - at some point, age, cunning and (my) nastiness
My uncle is a self employed farmer.
My grandfather, uncle, and cousin are all self employed construction contractor (each works alone).
I am a self employed software consultant.
My father runs a menswear store alone.
None of us can even sing.
Joe Batt Solid Design
worth a look
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/vaccine_awa
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
-Abraham Lincoln
no
maybe you should start thinking about how and why is it
telling people they are free
the greatest scam of recorded history
Welcome to the NewWorldOrder
denial
that is in fact true is untrue, or that something that is in fact
untrue is true)
Do you know how pirates handled payroll? First, keep your ship in shape and keep your pantry full. Everything that's left after that is profit. Two shares of it go to the captain, one and a half to the quartermaster, and one to each member of the crew.
Pirates=CEO makes twice the money an average employee does.
Modern Large Company=on average CEO makes 500 times the money an average employee does.
Comparing upper management to cutthroats is, therefore, often a dreadful insult. To cutthroats.
Funny how 2 year ago no one (except the bosses) was complaining about how the workers "exploited" the companies by demanding (and getting) absurd salaries, benefits, etc. Sure, in theory the bosses could go elsewhere for their needs, but in practice you had to "pay the going rate" even if it was clearly too high.
Fast forward to today, tip the scales a little, and watch 'em howl!
I now realize the reason why price fixing and
cheap labour occurs. It is simply because I
decided that the because the "established"
value of these pair of shoes was $800, that I
had the choice to decide wether I wanted blue
or black.
It is bargaining man on man in the above example
in the finest, because although I tried to
explain to the retailer, that these pair of shoes
are made by some people in a foreign country,
paid peanuts, and the markup on these shoes
were phenomenal, he would not change his price.
He insisted, "That was the price".
I guess the retailer of these shoes didn't
live in a "civilized" place.
--
Silvio
"All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the Pursuit of Happiness" --from the Declaration of Independence,
1776
All persons are created equal, the words have been told for more than
two hundred years. Yet it took the struggles of many to obtain equalty
for people disadvantaged because of their race, skin color, gender,
and age. Laws have been passed to ban these discriminations and
affirmative actions implemented to correct the past wrongs. Yet
another serious form of discrimination, that of intelligence, has not
received significant attention and millions of people are denied
opportunities or successes because of their intelligence, or, their
perceived intelligence.
Intelligence is, like skin color, a trait from birth. Some people are
born poor speakers. Some are born poor at math, or at art or at
sports. Some people are slow thinkers or react slowly. But they are
human beings, and they should have rights for the same opportunities
and potential for advancement as smart people. People may be stupid,
but that's not their fault!
Intelligence discrimination, or "perceived intelligence"
discrimination (because many people do not have the skills to judge
intelligence accurately), is everywhere, and you probably have
experienced it in your life. When you were in grade school, did you
wonder why your math teacher always favored that kid who did well in
math tests more than you? In your job, did you wonder why should that
guy who completes tasks faster or appears to be a quick thinker get
promoted instead of you? Or even worse, you may have the same ability
as that other guy at the particular tasks, but because he expresses
himself better or is a smooth talker, he, not you, gets that big job?
Such unfairness occurs daily everywhere in the world. People appearing
foolish are denied successes and advancements. Such denials often are
due to perception, instead of accurate measurements of one's ability
to do a particular task. People do not know that fools can take
important and leading roles and often can do a better job than the
so-called "smart" people.
Fools often have to hide their nature, for these who can learn such
lessons and capable of hiding it. They cannot express their true
selves and have to try to "fit in" with the "smart" people. They have
to live painful lives and watch out everyday not to reveal their
foolishness. Often after they made to the top, people find out that
they are actually fools, like Dan Quayle! But people do not think
that, fools can be leaders too! People do not assume that, fools, like
Dan Quayle, can serve as the Vice President of the United States! But
he did! His political career was over once his foolishness was known,
but that should not have been that way.
Putting fools at the positions of leadership actually has great
benefits. Fools obey the rules and cannot figure out evil plans. For
example, if Enron's leaders were fools, would they have figure out how
to commit accounting fraud? On ther other hand, it requires no
reminder that great evils were done by smart people. Do you think bin
Laden or Hilter were fools? Of course not!
Therefore the common belief to advance smart or hard working people
should be changed. Fools need to be given equal opportunities and
considerations. But merely conceptual changes and public education are
not enough. The social injustice runs so deep that only legal measures
can guarantee equal rights for fools.
Hard working is often said as the way to make it to the top no matter
what the preconditions are. But smart people can work hard too, and
this places fools at a disadvantage. Fools have to work much harder
than smarties to achieve the same. Therefore hard working is not the
save-all solution for the social injustice and cannot be relied upon
as the only measure. External help is necessary for fools.
Therefore, we demand laws to ban discrimination based on IQ, perceived
IQ or similar measures. We call on governments to implement policies
prohibiting preferential treatments for people with high achievements
or IQs. (Perceived) Intelligence should not be a factor in job
application, scholarship application or school admission. Fools should
not be afraid that showing their foolishness may have negative
consequences.
We also calls for affirmative actions for fools. Foolish children
should receive more lecture time from teachers. Test scores should be
normalized against students' IQ. Fools should receive more relaxed
standards for job performance, for example, more time to complete a
task than that given to a "smart" person. Fools should receive more
training from employers. Fools should not receive lower salaries than
smart people. We call for government agencies to enforce these
regulations and to accept complains from fools for intelligence
discrimination.
We are in the last barrier toward addressing inequalities in our
society, that of intelligence-based discrimination. Race, gender and
other forms of discrimination have been outlawed, and it is time to
take action to eliminate injustices due to intelligence. We have
presented the rational for fool equality and concrete measures to be
implemented. It is time to implement these actions and to have all
people, dumb and smart, as equals and sharing the same potential for
successful, happy and satisfying lives.
And here on slashdot, we have macho male techies saying that the article is full of shit, because techies who aren't happy with their jobs can just go elsewhere.
Explain to me again how the author has missed the boat, because I really don't see it happening here.
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The entrpreneur risks bankruptcy. . .
Not really. This is what incorporation is all about. The entrepreneur incorporates, then risks seeing the corporation go bankrupt. His or her personal finances are unaffected by the corporation's bankruptcy status.
Except that usually it was the entrepreneur's personal finances that went into founding the company in the first place. If the company goes bankrupt, none of that is magically returned. Duh.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You actually think a bunch of people care where the products are made? Have you not been on Earth for the past 15 years? You do know how much marketshare foreign automakers have been gaining don't you? And ALL computer manufacturers employ foreign labor. Know of any companies that produce PC's domestically?
People want the products they want for the lowest price they can get. I'm not going to spend more to support someone I don't even know.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Unions have long outlived their usefulness. Unions have demanded such a high amount of security in all aspects of life from the employers of their members that they have wrecked salary structures across the board and caused them to stagnate (excepting executives, whose salaries climb ever higher). Corporate leadership isn't stupid or kind. They aren't going to guarantee every employee's on-site security, medical health, education, pension, family security, etc. without recompense. If they have to pay $30,000-salaried workers an extra $15,000 in benefits, guess what? They'll fire enough $30k workers to make up the difference.
If geeks don't like their working conditions - if they are "lonely" or "insecure" or have other mental maladies - they should just leave. If anyone could actually assemble enough geeks to start a viable union, why would they? Why not just start a company with all that disenfranchised talent? Truckers might not be able to ply their trade without a large overseeing organization to provide resources and direction, but programmers? Isn't that kinda what we're supposed to be doing no matter what?
Isn't it interesting that a comparison to 19th century factories, while obviously exaggerated, isn't completely and utterly ridiculous? After a century of progress, there should be _no_ comparison, yet there is.
Isn't it interesting that some execs make hundreds or more times their workers? If pay were equal, that'd be (by my envelope) about 10% fewer layoffs. So-called "deadwood" is an asset: pay them to take classes and run drills -- preparedness is value. Pay them to hang around with light hours and make the office more comfortable while they attend to a life outside the office -- aren't these things implied by "conservative values"?
The party line among execs is that their pay is justified by a "global competitive market" for their skills -- but really, how many of these folks are being actively recruited in any serious way? No -- they are an old boys club. Obscene stock grants and bonuses don't "align their motivations" -- they "isolate them from the rest of us".
All that said, one of the bigger problems in IT is the substitution of bodies for brains. Too many IT workers don't really know what they're doing -- but have positions of high consequence. I'm not sad to see them go -- I'm sad to see them hired in the first place.
One common pattern I've noticed is eager, young, generally nice-folks execs and upper managers who fret primarily about the role of the appropriate use of their "authority" -- and that tends to result in arbitrary and counterproductive exercises thereof. Another pattern is HR execs who write COE's (conditions of employment documents) that fill many pages, the gist of which is "we have arbitrary rights over you, you have no claims against us". In other words, from one way of looking at it, our jobs suck because everyone at every level is paranoid, untrusting, and isolated.
The best high-tech employers I've ever heard of were various coops -- most often, celebrity coops (coops of already famous hackers). We need more of those, and we need efforts to bring everyone up to speed with those, attitude-wise.
The most satisfied class of employees I've ever seen are non-tenure-track university employees, especially the unionized ones. Their pay sucks. They have no end of gripes. But their benefits are generally good, job security good, hours good, job satisfaction often good, work product often good, and they all live in and _help_to_create_ the best urban environments in the nation and drink plenty of good coffee and enjoy good affordable food.
You'd fail history if you wrote that the only reason the South went to war was because of slavery.
The South felt that they were poorly represented, The North had a stronger economy, and many of the tariffs imposed at the Federal level, hurt the South.
I'm sympathizing with the South, just making it clear that slavery wasn't the ONLY reason the South seceded from the Union. After all, the North had their own slaves, they were "Wage Slaves."
For a professional group like IT Professionals, a better model might be the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA has worked to control entry into the profession, develop professional standards and ethics, exert clout politically, and increase professionalism generally. a heavily "radicalized" ACM or IEEE-CS could take on this role.
For decades marxism has been analyzing the relationship between capital and its main resource: the people it employs. While it has not been successful in producing alternatives to capitalism, I still believe there are valuable insights to be gained from *some* of the marxist theorists.
r d/index.htm.
If, like me, you would like to gain a better understanding of the relationship between capital, waged labor, and high-technology, then there is no better read than this book:
Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism, by Nick Dyer-Whiteford.
It's got excellent reviews on Amazon, and it is also available online here http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dyerwithefo
You do not need to be a marxist to read it, but it's not light reading either. I'm still in the process of reading it, and I never studied marxism nor sociology before, so it takes me a bit more time than other books. Still, after having been through the first 4 chapters (out of 9), I cannot wait for the rest. If, like me, you work in the software industry, you will not be disappointed: it can really give you a much wider prospective, notably on the Free Software and Open Source movement.
A technical guild that represents the body of technicians. There would be a need to fund this guild but the dues could be so ridiculously low that they don't cloud the issue, possibly a $5 lifetime membership w/donations accepted from there on.
The guild would set various universal guildlines for technical workers and be international, what is believed to be acceptable wage in the US should be the same elsewhere.
The guild would address broad issues, after putting up polls to the membership, move and lobby for certain rights and issues that important to the IT industry. Anything could be proposed, everything from wages to free speech and would be put to polls, if a course of action was decided on then suggestions for how to pursue and polls for that would then be raised. (All this could be done within a matter of a few days).
I'd be happy to do the initial work to get this going, but I can't do it alone. If you'd like to help in some way, have webspace to contribute for a donations, legal assistance, manpower, etc please mail me at wendoy@mcleodusa.net
Depending on resources available I'd to see this also be a place for exchange of ideas and information to help people enter the IT industry, or existing professionals to learn. Howto's and tutorials, platform bias is not really what we need here, I'd like to see windows and linux side by side.
Regarding the "You want to start a union?" statement, my answer is yes. In fact, I'm somewhat surprised that this hasn't happened yet
(to my knowledge anyway.)
I think that Slashdot should have a vote on whether or not we should have a union. I think that it will happen eventually.
Seriously.
In all this discussion, no one has noted that there ARE a few unions representing High-Tech workers. In particular:
1. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers,
http://www.washtech.org is the union for "PermaTemps" at Microsoft and other companies. They are mostly oriented towards workers in the Seattle, WA area. They were involved in a bitter fight to organize Amazon.
2. The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, http://www.speea.org represents 24000 Aerospace Engineers at Boeing.
BTW, they are currently organizing Boeing workers in St. Louis.
This is a common misconception, actually. Well, today they exist to make money. But that wasn't always the case. In the 1700s, corporations existed because the government wanted them to, because they served a public good. Think about whether having everyone working for an organization that's single and only goal is greed is really a good thing.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
It might ruin their chance to work 80 hours a week for 42 hours of pay, get divorced and hospitalised from stress therefore losing their jobs because they cant work, then work out they have nothing to show for their naive attitudes and make burgers for the rest of their lives while their children insult them for being naive dreamers.
Newsflash: A Australian recent study revealed that school bullies have much more successful (yes, even the money part) and satisfying lives than their victims. Why, because they know how to fight in the first place.
Geeks though, are brought up to be afraid, meek and quiet. Their parents never want an individual who stands up for themselves. How scared would you be in the face of baton wielding cops amd lawyers yelling threats while you try to defend your wages. You'd run like a baby. The sissy, childish culture of geeks is exactly what makes them so easily exploitable. They believe anything and live on the smell of hoping they, one day, will be as rich as Bill Gates.
The perfect employee.
The job of the CEO isn't to know how to do your job and the job of every subordinate under him. Its to lead the company. That means knowing how to delegate tasks to those trained to do them best and making sure the company heads and stays in a direction that is beneficial to all employees. With a bit of maturity you might have realized that a while ago instead of playing the childish game of asking if the CEO could do your specific job.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I do and I'll drop it on your head.
This was about right on target. Derivatives? Maybe you'll be wiping your butt with those notes someday
Sometimes, these Reaganite crack-smokers need the gun butt of reality to show them how crack their ideas are. China == great deflator.
Yeah, and look at what's happening at Boeing today. They used to be the leaders in the aerospace industry, but now they are consistently being beaten by Airbus. Airbus has made significant inroads into its basic market. Even american airline companies have been buying Airbus airplanes instead of Boeing. Face it, unions add additional bureacracy that suck they life out of the industry. It removes the flexibility of management to adjust the company's structure, direction and expenses as the situation and competition requires. In addition, an excellent company should be on a regular basis firing the bottom 10% of its work force. This is to remove the underperforming from the company payroles, and make it more leaner, meaner company. Unions remove this ability, and in no time, the top performer employees have left the company to other better pastures, and the company is left with all of the rejects, with no ability to do anything about it.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
You trade a set amount of work for a set amount of money regardless of the profit. I like the fact that my company can lose money and I'll still get paid. I like the fact that they may not make money on my work for months, but I'll still get paid next week. If you don't like it start your own company.
if you did, you might see that my post was in response to CEOs who make absurdly more than their employees, not CEOs who make a reasonable amount more than their employees.
Hey, some managers do add alot of value, but generally it is the ones who could jump in and code (or whatever the main business of the corp. is) if needed, and the best ones do jump in when needed. Of course, such folks tend to not be comfortable making 500x times more than their top producing employees.
With a bit of maturity you might have realized that a while ago instead of playing the childish game of asking if the CEO could do your specific job.
Yeah right, and with a bit of maturity you might realise that folks who don't understand the guts of the business they are leading can't make intelligent decisions about that business. IOW, this country is overun with MBAs who think it's "mature" to believe they can lead without knowledge of the nuts and bolts (or 1s and 0s)...
...you have nothing to lose but your jobs, your liberty, and your self esteem. Hasn't anyone noticed yet that socialism is a dud?
Seriously, any industry that isn't a sweat-shop is complacent. A company or an individual who's inspired and actively working to turn ideas into saleable product hasn't got time to waste on the cushy stuff.
"my paycheck that feeds my family"
You see having a family as a right, something that you take for granted. That having a family is something for which you should be praised by, even *supported* by society.
I on the other hand, see your "family" as an expression of your selfishness. You have not established a means to support this "family" that you chose to create.
The idea that your family makes more more deserving of a paycheck than another person would be -- an even larger paycheck than you yourself would need if you had not chosen consumerism and contribution to overpopulation -- makes me ill.
If you are still dependant on a paycheck, you have not earned the *privilege* of creating a "family". It *certainly* should not entitle you to anything.
Before you go off and form PU - The Programmers Union -- realize that it already exists. It's called "IEEE" and "ACM".
It does things to "protect" it's members, the same as any union. Things like lobbying against green cards and H1-B visas, to artificially control the size of the available talent pool, and thereby inflate the cost of their labor.
In general, it's not a bad idea to work to strike some balance between what top management is paid, and what the people "in the trenches" (to strain your metaphor) are paid; in fact, we have punative tax codes to do exactly this, including preventing matching contributions by the company above a certain amount/percentage for 401K and other benefits, to make sure that the people "on top" do not benefit more from the matching than people on the bottom of the pay scale.
On the other hand, it's unlikely that union tactics will be effective in the "at will" and "right to work" states, like California, where most high technology industry is concentrated -- no accident, that.
The communications workers union have been trying, unsuccessfully, to unionize IBM technology workers for 20+ years, now, and they have universally failed, due to their inability to prove that there will be any benefit to the workers, whatsoever, other than the union getting to take over administration of one of the larger private pension funds on the planet.
-- Terry
Not all unions.
The economy is picking up right now.
That's pretty clear.
Back in the late 80's and early 90's things were a lot worse. Real-estate actually fell significantly in value.
But the economy came out of it stronger precisely because Bush Sr. didn't jerk his knee. All the old, inefficient industries and practices died.
IT workers had a field day for 6 years. So now we've got to put up with 3 crappy years. But if you stuck with an old-time steady industry, you're in good shape now, and when the job market takes off (starting to in several parts of the country), you'll be in good shape because you won't be seen as an opportunist.
Hell, you might even *like* the job you have and stay there.
I just finished reading a book that verses on this topic. I found this book on a second hand bookshop a couple of weeks ago and the photo on the cover really made me buy it.
/AC
The book was published back in 1975 but to my astonishment is incredibly up to date! The book is called "A Seventh Man" by John Berger and Jean Mohr. It tells the story of a migrant worker in Europe and in the process you find out a lot of things. Among them why high-tech work places are not better than "good" old steam driven factories.
"A Seventh Man"
A book of images and words about the experience of Migrant Workers in Europe
by John Berger and Jean Mohr
Penguin Books
Enjoy the photos!
"Could it be because I am more qualified than the other computer science wannabes that make up a huge portion of the so-called IT unemployed?"
I doubt it.
If you are from India, I find a PhD in math to have equivalent to US BS skills.
If you got your degree from Mainland china, its virtually meaningless.
Packistan? Please.
South American? Uh no.
The really top-notch IT workers from from US, Canada and Western Europe. But, they all get good wages, and so they don't particularly threaten me.
Oh wait. You mean you're a guy who's an MSCE? That isn't part of the IT industry. Ii consider that nothing more than a glorified secretary position.
As a programmer, you are a vendor of engineering services. Your much reviled boss is your customer. You should be happy your customer wants to pay you to do things. You should be willing to do a little "extra" to keep your customer happy. You are very fortunate that your customer is willing to provide you with a desk and computer and nice air-conditioned office to work in. Would you, as a customer of a retail store, be willing to supply the store with similar amenities so that they can manufacture and sell you things?
But one of course had to define how far back one is going to measure these 'rural standards of living', which often were better for average peasents before industrial farming methods (see Scott's "Weapons of the Weak" for a good description of how the coming of modern farming practices often reduces the living standards of average peasants.
Of course, after labor has been replaced by tractors and small land owners have been kicked off their family plots, their living standards are often quite bad, and working for barely under subsistance wages in a factory may be a marginal improvement, in an 'out of the frying pan into the fire' sort of way (Scott goes into that as well, pointing out the similarites to the Highland Clearences in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution
If mine is a "quasi-pastoral view of underdevelopment" fine, no matter how many syllables you throw at me, I still say that if it would be exploitation to treat an American that way, it is exploitation to treat a Malay that way. Call me simple minded if you like.
I find it hard to believe that there are large externalities associated with spinning cotton into fiber.
While the environmental impacts of more chemically intensive industries are often much easier to measure, making cheap jeans has a negative impact as well:
And then there is the synthetic indigo dye that makes 'em blue...
Canada has the best bang-for-the-buck education you can get. There are many good universities of similar caliber to the best institutions in the United States. You have to pay a 100% foreign student differential fee, but if you get naturalized (which can take six months if you're sufficiently skilled and find a job for a short while up here) you're back to the baseline. Housing and food is much cheaper too. The only thing you won't get is the prestige and contacts which, to some, represent the real advantage of taking an MBA. It's all a balance. If you're a real go-getter, I think you can find ways to make your own contacts in industry, albeit slowly.
A 50-60 year old software engineer is like gold.
If they've been around that long, its because they have skills and experience that you can only dream of.
You're one of those losers who feels threatened by the old guy coming in and kicking your ass.
Right now, I *am* the old man, and they've promoted me to management. But I prefer software developers with 15+ years of experience. Why? Because they're worth two 25 year olds with 4-6 years.
Your arrogance serves you well. I'm sure it helps as you say "do you want fries with that". Moron.
My experiences mirrored yours except I got out. I too got tired of the cubicle life, working from dawn to dusk, getting high blood pressure, overweight and stressed. After 8 years in the IT world and seeing my life totally stressed and out-of-control I finally got out after my last layoff.
I am now in a factory job, in a UAW plant, my weight and blood pressure under control with no stress. I make less money, but now I enjoy my free time including my bike riding again. The one thing I do remember about my IT time was that I did have some money, but I couldn't enjoy it since I spent all my time working and my free time stressed out thinking about work.
It's a shame that the technology that is empowering the country is also hurting the knowledge workers that drive it.
My experiences mirrored many who worked in both worlds, except I got out of IT. I too got tired of the cubicle life, working from dawn to dusk, getting high blood pressure, overweight and stressed. After 8 years in the IT world and seeing my life totally stressed and out-of-control I finally got out after my last layoff.
I am now in a factory job, in a UAW plant, my weight and blood pressure under control with no stress. I make less money, but now I enjoy my free time including my bike riding again. The one thing I do remember about my IT time was that I did have some money, but I couldn't enjoy it since I spent all my time working and my free time stressed out thinking about work.
It's a shame that the technology that is empowering the country is also hurting the knowledge workers that drive it.
Anyhow, they are very well organized, the solution is for us to get organized in some fashion. How it happens doesn't really matter, it can be a professional association like doctors and lawyers have like the AMA and ABA (and the IEEE-USA is *not* such an organization, a list of which for reasons I will not go into at length here) or a collectively bargaining union like actors and electricians have (SAG and IBEW). We should get organized the way we want to be organized, but should get organized. They're well-organized and sending millions to Washington to screw us, our salaries and wages have dropped for the first time in a decade. People just sit around and say "it's the economy" as if the economy is some alien force and we're farmers who are in a drought or something. First of all, the H1-Bs, FLSA and 1706 laws passed recently by the ITAA may not have been the main cause behind the slump, but they were certainly contributing factors to things as they are - if things were going to be bad, they have made them worse. Secondly, the economy is not some alien force that no one can control, it doesn't just "go down" and up by itself, it goes up and down because the people at the Federal Reserve makes certain decisions, because management at corporations make decisions over capital, because labor and owners make decisions.
If you really want to do something, first of all, forget trying to talk to people who say "I have no life, my social life is watching Farscape with my handful fo dork friends, I get all of my self-worth from thinking I am the best programmer in the world so I don't have to worry about all of this since I think I'm hot shit". The industry wage has just dropped for the first time in a decade - factoring in inflation that's really bad, yet these self-deluded socially retarted morons thinkt he laws of supply and demand don't affect them. So ignore these people - there will always be socially retarted people who can't deal with people, and lazy people who have other people do all the work for them, who if they do anything just criticize the people actually doing something. That's just the way it is, tune these people out.
Now, what's left is people who want to do something. Maybe they want a guild, maybe a professional association, a union, whatever. They don't like the raised H1-B cap, the FLSA changes, section 1706 and whatnot. One does not have to start from scratch to find these people - there are places like the Programmers Guild, or for unions Washtech/CWA (which is in the CESO confederation) and so forth. You might meet people in the IEEE that are interested, but the IEEE would need such massive reform, including cancelling all corporate donations to it, that it's probably not worth it. Get into contact with these people, get on their mailing lists, go to the meetings, read about it on web sites, talk about it on Usenet (like alt.computer.consultants) and so forth. These organizations already exist, get involved with them, if something's missing, start another one. Then go around to places where techies hang out (like here!) and talk about them, forget about the socially retarted who think they're "programming geniuses" who will argue about this, and just tell those interested that this nascent movement, of IT workers helping IT workers, is growing and invoite them in. This is how things get better. Organizations like CESO, the Programmers Guild and so forth have already done good, we just need more people to come in, and bring more people in so it reaches critical mass.
In some ways it's kind of paradoxical, because I hear many people saying "I want to do something like this but there's nothing out there". That's false, there's a lot out there and some nascent organizations, but they need more people like you to come in. It's kind of like wanting to go into a startup and have your phone and computer there and set up on the first day. That just doesn't happen in a startup, it needs people like you there to grow it so it gets to that point. So people interested but less committed are more likely to join, because someone else set up the meetings, the web sites, the moderated and unmoderated newsgroups and so forth.
I have a web site talking about some of this. Don't sit around waiting for something to hop onto with this, work with us to build it up. Educate yourself, educate others, get involved, join the organizations and organize people. At least there's some been some success on the education front - years ago maybe 20% of IT workers knew what an H1-B visa was, now it's over 50% probably (probably because nowadays over half of IT workers are probably H1-Bs!). But they don't now about the ITAA's involvement in section 1706, the FLSA, and lots of other things. So don't sit around and sulk, help us get this nascent, growing movement going. The movement being IT workers working together to help themselves.
Hmm.... I'm glad to see you replied, challenging the original assertion that "enterpreneurial drive" was the most important factor in getting one's own business started.
I had a problem with that statement too.
As I think about your reply though, I think the "drive/motivation" is inversely proportional to the access to funding one has (at least in most cases).
The two seem to be tied together. For example, a buddy of mine decided to start his own ISP some years ago. He's a real intelligent guy and certainly had enough financial problems to provide a level of motivation to work, and try to be successful at whatever he did.
Nonetheless, he was also not known to be the hardest of workers. He liked to sleep in late, and spend lots of time reading sci-fi books and playing computer games, rather then concentrate on his business or work at hand.
If he was faced, up front, with all of the usual hurdles to jump in order to obtain financing (bank loan or venture capital, for example), I really think that would have proven to be too much work/effort for him, and his ISP would have never got off the ground.
As it was, his father was pretty well off and loaned him the money to get things started.
In other cases, I've known folks who weren't really very knowledgable about the business they wanted to start, but it never seemed to stop them from becoming successful. I have to attribute that to a brute force will to succeed, and the drive to do whatever it took to secure the needed financing, pull all the long hours to build up the company, etc.
It's not that funding is "simply impossible" for some people to get. If their idea and business plan is sound, and they work hard enough to sell it to the right person, they'll get some funding. It's just that it's damn difficult to do this, deal with all the legal taxes and rules, get the business license(s) needed, and all that stuff. Many folks who would otherwise do well with a new business will fold under that pressure and all those requirements.
remove the 10% of people who do not schmooze , flirt and socialize for their job security rather then doing their job. It is often, so in many companies. I see many friends being fired for reasons, completely unrelated to their excellent performance.
Only to be replaced by friends, in-law MCSE cousins, etc etc. Anyway, i think there is far too many programmers in computer industry, and too few work. Industry has already peaked , and soon will fade into even more mediocicity.
It is difficult to decide wether unions are good or bad.
A union would be the worst thing that could happen to America's IT industry right now. What do you think an employer is going to do when he sees rising costs caused by union-demanded higher wages without a corresponding increase in revenues? The same thing the manufacturing industries have done: outsource to other countries where the quality of the work may be less but the costs are so much lower that it's worth both the lower quality and the costs of relocating. Worried about tech jobs moving to India? If unions come to the IT industry you can bet it'll get a lot worse.
Someone hates these cans.
IAWTP
*lameness filter evasion. lameness filter evasion.*
However, the problem is that you're not ABLE to negotiate, because there are some 10 people outside, waiting for the same job and they have all to insist in same benefits.
... :)
Why not
- Get an idea
- try to find those 10 people
- talk to them
- organize partnership?
You forgot:
-
- PROFIT !
~velco
Well, I have a master's in engineering (CS/CE), and I'm a member of the union. And in fact it works quite well, thank you. Our work was not outsourced to the US (or India), even given the telecoms disaster... In fact our US division was closed down, much easier to do after all, since you aren't organised. No pesky re-employment, programs and the like to pay for.
Stefan Axelsson
How soon we forget history. How soon we forget the events of even two and three years ago. The tech industry's motto used to be "caveat employer". Let the employer beware. We demanded ping pong tables, refrigerators stocked with ale, and the elimination of the dress code. If we didn't get it we walked out. I personally saw a 60% increase in pay over two years, the creation of a corporate cafeteria with a real chef, the creation of a corporate gym, and flex time that made rubber bands look rigid. I got one raise just because management *thought* a recruiter had talked to me.
Now the shoes on the other foot, and we decry our lack of rights. Hah!
Err, doesn't that just mean that besides being lousy managers, you guys have been lousy workers ?
Economy does not collapse because of the high wages. Economy collapses when there's no PRODUCTION !
~velco
i havnt eaten more than one meal in five(six?eight?) days. and i consider myself fairly high up in 'the system' as far as tech_based_lives goes. I am learning very quickly that a warm meal, some electricity to power my 486, and soap is a blessing onto it's own. but don't get me wrong - there is something wrong here. so long as there are starving people, when others are wasting food , so long as there are people in the dark, living without even a phone line(they r expensive yo!) while others are tossing fully working 450Mhz pentium III's in the trash (because they are not 'state_of_the_art'...as if they were when they were bought) something is wrong here. unless of course you mean by saying "the basis of all successful economies int he world", 'is the basis of the most ruthless, bloody regiemes in the world', i think you have something very wrong.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Somehow, the main topics on this board center about "Unions" and the rigors of "Factory Piece Work" when the article in question never said anything about "Unions" or such. Obviously, the Jackasses that started many of these off topic threads have done it to all you geeks again: thrown sand in your eyes so that you can't see the truth. Basically, the truth is the main topic of the BBC news article: "Staff in technology jobs work in the white collar equivalent of a 19th century factory.".
Having worked as a Development Engineer for most of career, I can definitely say that the BBC article is right on the mark. Sad, but true, technology jobs have become the white-collar equivalent of 19th century factory work: job insecurity, no retirement, terribly long hours, job isolation, meaningfully upgrading skills almost impossible.
Regardless if you're a PHd Research Engineer or a techie wanna-be armed with a freshly-minted MCSE: you are a work-place commodity. Most often, you are viewed by your employer as high-priced overhead that's to be worked like a pack animal and terminated as soon as the project is near completion - and if you can be replaced by an indentured servant in the form of an H1B, then that's even better.
If disrespect from employers wasn't bad enough, what is transpiring at the technical level is even worse: complete delusion. There's a macho belief amongst lots of "techies" that their skills and personal entrepreneurship make them somehow "special" and not merely commodities. Their constant chest thumping would be amusing if they weren't typically chronically underemployed and, as a result, almost complete strangers to the benefits of health insurance, retirement accounts, and the like: all provided by that old-fashioned concept known as "stable employment".
Worst of all, when techies reach 40 years-of-age, or so, a magic/tragic thing happens: they become almost unemployable. The Chest Thumper (you remember them - the chronically underemployed) will tell you that older techies who are unemployable did it to themselves. According to them, the older techies have "lost their skills", "lost their drive/innovation", "lost their ability to learn new things", "won't work 80-100 hour weeks", and other such nonsense. But, the cold, hard fact is this: most employers don't like the older guys because they feel they must pay them more, and they've become a little too smart. The mentality of most body shops is that an ignorant 25 year-old chest thumper making 40K is much easier to manipulate than an experienced 40 year-old making 70K: regardless of how much more productive the older guy may be. Sad but true, there's a trend in the tech industry where 3 inexperienced guys making 40K are more highly sought than a single experienced guy making 70K - even though productivity/man-hour is sacrificed. That's because techies really are commodities.
Of course, many on these boards will say, "You've got a loser attitude...I'll never be a throw-away commodity because I work and study so hard!". Yeah, right. You just keep believing that, and in the meantime, keep grinding out those 80-hour weeks coupled with the relentless self-initiated technical study necessary to keep up with the latest technical-fad Du Jour. Then when the day comes when you have had enough, you'll be so smart and wise that you'll be able to magically start your own little entrepreneurship and make jillions of bucks and be free of anyone's control. Yeah, right...that's how it works.
For me, I've had enough. I guess all those inspired 80-100 hour weeks and years of self-study just don't cut it for guys like me - ya' know, "old" guys with "loser attitudes". So I'm gone - I'm leaving tech work. Meanwhile, I'm entering a career where I'll earn only half of what I did as an engineer and, for the first time, get to enjoy a few things I've never experienced before as an engineer: going to sleep knowing I'll probably be employed the next day; real vacations - ya' know, the kind that last for two weeks; most weekends off; the assurance that my health benefits will be around tomorrow; ability to live in a single location for more than two years; the assurance that my successful completion of a project won't result in my being terminated because I'm now considered "expensive overhead".
Will I miss the money? Probably not for I never really got the time to enjoy it while I worked as an engineer. Ain't that a bitch - all that money and no time to enjoy it? Anyways, I can be damn happy making 40-45K.
In summary, my parting shot is this: save your damn money while you can for it will save you in the future. It has been said that "Time is Money", but this is wrong. Actually, "Money is Time": time to find a new job you like and/or time to change careers. When you are 40 years or so, make damn sure you've got money - otherwise you'll have run out of time - time to change - time to be something other than someone else's throw-away commodity.
I'd love to be involved in unionizing the nation's coders but very few are positive about the idea. As far as I can tell, a lot of it is a feeling that unions are something blue collar that is beneath the dignity of programmers, along with a heavy dose of libertarian political ideals that trust the free market to take care of them (you'd think everyone would have puzzled that one out over the last few years)
All the same, it really does need to happen. At the rate programming jobs are being farmed out overseas and to H1B's, some collective bargaining with not only management, but the political system itself seems in order. In fact, having that voice in the political process would be much more critical than the contract negotiation.
Thanks !
LOL! Nooooo, according to research by Gore Vidal, He was not a "carpenter" he was a General Contractor, like his father, as well as a school trained Rabbi.
Thus, the big good shiney Dodge Ram!
Also, it would be a 4X4 because He worked in the desert.
There can be no doubt that age discrimination exists in the IT world, perhaps much more so than in other fields. But there is another reason why older programmers are rare: they get tired of programming after a few years and want to do something else. It is endemic to the profession. Even really good programmers can feel this way. Few people are born to sit in a cube debugging and developing code hours on end, day after day. Programming is a fascinating thing, but to maintain long-term enthusiasm for the subject, one's fascination has to overpower a certain degree of tedium and ever-present mess, while isolated under fluorescent lights. Anecdotally, I would say that enthusiasm starts to run thin after about five years.
This factor could be more important than age discrimination in explaining the paucity of older programmers.
Don't assume IT workers have the same leverage as Dock workers. You can't "move" dock work overseas and have it outsourced. Thats their power. They can shut down the ports and thus most of the US economy. IT workers don't have that kind of clout. I'm sure they could arrange to simultaneously hack a bunch of critical computer systems, but thats illegal and they'd wind up in prison instead of on the picket line. So nice try.
And dockworkers aren't doing too well either. There used to be over 100,000 of them. Now there's about 10,000. Those who remain are well paid, but its still a dying industry.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Its.
Its.
Its.
In almost every single case in you're post, you have misapostropized "its".
I find
the over-facile (over)use of "..offensive..."
(to be)
Offensive.
There's a big difference between efficient use of scarce resources (the whole purpose of a for-profit organization) and greed.
One is about entrusting societies productive resources to organizations focused on high performance execution.
The other is about excessive desire for personal gain.
-Stu
They do what they do very well but GM in particular tried to do everything with robots, getting rid of those pesky workers. GM doesn't do that any more.
Those were the cars that tried mens souls. If a human does a crappy job, at least they know it.
That said, I imagine between better bots and experience designing cars with automated production in mind, fewer people are needed to build cars every decade but people are still quite involved on most lines.
The problems with the old factories were largely addressed through the unionization of blue collar works. BBC points out the problem, and the solution is obvious: unionize.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
/* /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [round trip time]
* [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
* possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
* to talk to the University of Mars.
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
* ftp to mars will work nicely.
*/
-- from
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