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?"

Comments

negative, much?

[spacefem]

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.

Re:negative, much?

[Dun Malg]

If you think a factory is better, go work in a factory!

Say it again, brother. I once worked in a factory that made plastic buckets. You know how handles get put on buckets? It ain't a machine what does it. It's people. People standing at tables and trying to make a quota for minimum wage. Argh. I have a co-worker who once worked in a factory where they made the coily handset cords for telephones. When the "kids" at our workplace complain about their slacker jobs, we like to trot out our factory stories. Doesn't help though. People who haven't worked in factories usually don't appreciate the mind-numbing repetition that goes on in a factory. I'd rather be exploited for $30K a year in a job that requires thinking than be exploited for $9K in a job that encourages brain death.

Re:negative, much?

[Skjellifetti]

This is similar to the complaints made during the early industrial revolution about how hard and terrible factory work was. But the choice then was factory work or farm work. And I'll bet for most people who didn't own their own farm (and likely many who did) factory work won hands down.

OTOH, factory work is tough and in the early days abusive employers could get away with lots of nasty things we consider illegal and/or immoral today. It took a combination of public outrage, progressive politicians, and organized labor to fix many of the worst ills associated with factory labor conditions.

Just because code serfdom is a better choice than factory work does not mean that all is well or that conditions cannot or should not be improved.

Not for me

[redfiche]

I work in a highly collaborative, challenging environment. I sometimes work long hours, but my time is extremely flexible and I am almost entirely self-directed. The job has it's stresses, but it's the best job I've ever had, and I wouldn't trade it.

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.

Poor geeks ...

[Etyenne]

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

A bit of perspective here

[inode_buddha]

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.

Make an Informed Decision

[Flamesplash]

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

Re:Dont like it?

[FauxPasIII]

> Go start a business, THEN you can comment on how to do or do not like the salary structure.

So... only the rich mangement class are allowed to even voice an opinion on pay structure and labor issues ? That sounds... surprisingly like the current U.S. system, actually.

Re:I'll never work for someone else again

[Surak]

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.

Hmmm..well, the thing is out of the $4000 that was billed, on average, about $2000 is overhead -- rent or mortgage, utilities, marketing and so forth and materials. Then he gets his $300, plus it costs the company an additional $150. That leaves about $1550. Unless your friend reinvests part of that into the company, Uncle Sam gets about 1/3rd of that, or about $520. That leaves $1000. That's *IF* the shop is getting good margins. Most likely, the margins are a lot less than that and the overhead is more like $2500-3000. Meaning that the shop probably makes a whole $200-400 (not much more than your mechanic friend) or so on the whole $4000. Assuming everything's going well of course, and there aren't unforseen costs.

That $4000 sounds like a lot of money. Trust me, it isn't.

Class warfare beats the drums...again

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.

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- 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.

Re:You wanna start a Union?

[fmaxwell]

Em Emalb wrote "HELL NO."

I used to feel the same way. I viewed unions as a blue-collar tool to protect people in low-skill jobs. Then I recognized that skilled professionals like airline pilots were unionized. I have started to realize that it would not be such a bad thing to have a tech workers union.

Can you imagine what the Teamsters would do if companies started bringing in the equivalent of H1-B visa workers to drive trucks at below-normal wages?

If we had a union, do you think that Congress would have been able to pass legislation that specifically exempted hourly computer professionals from receiving 1.5x overtime pay?

Do you think that a union would stand by idly while temp agencies regularly skimmed 30% and more off of the pay earned by immigrants and recent grads in the tech sector?

Do you believe that our industry would consistently lay off older, better-compensated workers only to replace them with recent grads if we had a union?

I know that there is going to a lot of macho posturing on here with people boasting that they are so good that they can set their own terms. But posturing is all that it is. For every 100 people that claim to be in the driver's seat in such contract negotiations, maybe one really is. The majority of companies have standard terms and don't deviate from them except for the most highly compensated corporate officers. Tell them you won't work for them unless they agree to include a buyout clause on your contract and they will tell you to take a hike. Just take a look at the average software engineer's office and compare it to the offices of people in other jobs that require similar quantities of skill and education. Do you think that corporate attorneys regularly sit in cramped cubicles?

The longer I am in this field (now more than 20 years), the more I start to believe a union would be a good thing.

Personal experience with unions in Europe??

[openbear]

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.

Re:Sociology? At your expense? WTF?

[matastas]

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.

Re:Sociology? At your expense? WTF?

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

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.