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

What about academia?

[Jaalin]

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?

Re:What about academia?

[reynolds_john]

I believe you are a bit behind the times. My father recently retired from a major university here in Arizona. One of the things on the plate right now is to remove tenure for teachers.
Increasingly, universities are run as corporations, complete with greed, terrible politics, and lack of interest in their teachers. ASU is a wonderful example of this - there have been articles in the Arizona Republic newspaper about the 'brain drain' hemmoraging from ASU because they just won't pay their teachers even close to what they deserve.
As for any business, you must eventually understand that the future is already written; we are all to be temp workers. I'm not sure how painful this transition will be, but already there are very few bastions of stable, long-term work. Heck, just look at what our president passed (or should I say "snuck" through) on Friday - ability to hire/fire workers, displace federal workers in place of the private sector, etc. etc.
A good friend of mine has tried over and over to get a stable IT job - he's been through it now about ten times in the last year. Each time there was a different excuse, and the last few times they've fired and re-hired the next day for someone who was willing to work cheaper! In his words, "Welcome to Corporate America: do what you can, just don't get caught."

Mathematics

[div_2n]

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.

Re:You wanna start a Union?

[Allthefuckinggoodnam]

One of the big problems that my company (a consulting firm specializing in custom software development) faces is rate pressure due to off shore options. Much like the other industries in our country in the past, economic tough times have forced companies to look for cheaper work elsewhere.

I personally am tired of hearing people complain about this phenomenon and come up with bad answers to a very real problem. Creating a union is one "solution" i've heard. The people who make these claims will read an article like this and feel even more strongly that we need to be unionized. I believe this is the worst thing we could do. It will accelerate the trend to go offshore.

The real answer to the job security problem is to find new ways to add value, above and beyond custom development skills (which in many C level executives eyes has become a commodity). Had the steel, audio/video, and textile industries taken a different tact than hiding behind a union to avoid the "constant upgrading of skills" that the author of the articles derides, perhaps they would still be industries that employ millions of Americans.

Just like when I was in school, the sociology professor offers a very bad answer, one that will compound the problem. It amazes me how little things have changed.

Been There, Done That

[DrDeaf]

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!

Dockworkers Union was right!

[Genady]

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.

Re:You wanna start a Union?

[perljon]

I agree with you that Unions can be the death or cancer of an industry. For example, in the late 70 and early 80's the car unions fought the implmentation of robots to replace workers. At first, the union kept jobs. But the plants in Japan implemented robots and were able to produce a car quicker, with higher quality, for cheaper. The end result is that the sales of Japanese cars sky-rocketed in the US at the sake of American cars. And all those jobs that were saved from not implementing robots were lost plus tens times that because the industry just couldn't compete. In this case, Unions inhibited inovation and in effect, killed themselves.

On the other hand, in America and all modern productive countries, the masses have given up their freedom to further the goals of the employer. As an employee, I spend most of my life serving my employer. So much of my quality of life is controlled by my employer. (And all full time employees). I think it is reasonable to expect and ask for job security, freedom from wrongful financial persecution (someone firing you 'cause they don't like you), and a reasonably comfortable work environment. After all, I am giving my employer my life. The least I could expect is to be treated fairly.

In conclusion, Unions can be horrible for an industry when they don't consider the business needs of the company. On the other hand, Companies need employees to make money. Employees sacrafice a great deal of control in the employee-employer realtionship. The least a company could do is provide employment fairness and comfort, and restraint on cracking the whip.

Want out of the "factory"? Become management!

[StandardCell]

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

factories are NOT like tech jobs.

[Lumpy]

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.

A Little Perspective

[mwdib]

Let's try to remember that unions were formed - despite significant governmental repression - to solve a very real set of problems being experienced by the vast majority of industrial workers. Unionizers were not campaigning for longer coffee breaks or free dental. Early labor organizers were fighting for basic human rights and what we would consider the most fundamental of humane treatment. This was done when government and private agencies (remember Pinkerton?) employed violence, torture and executions to enforce the employer's "rights."

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.

Fifteen Years in a Union. . .

[ancarett]

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.