Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"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
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?
HELL NO.
Damn right! For a geek a strike would mean not touching the computer for an extended period of time. Can you imagine abstaining from games and pr0n for that long? A few days and we'd be ready for a pay cut...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
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.
Damn right! For a geek a strike would mean not touching the computer for an extended period of time.
What a geek would one be without an own computer ?
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
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
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.
If you work for a software company on a piece of software and go home and start writing an open source equivalent during your strike time?
:-)
Nah, I'd say that this would be significantly more influential than drinking beer at home or picketing or anything that the steelworkers did...
May we never see th
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.
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.
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
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.
So what's so great about Europe?
Actually, the textiles industry STILL employs millions of Americans. More precisely, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 425,000 Americans working in textile mills and 537,000 producing other "apparel products". These figures don't include any jobs linked to retail, transportation, marketing, etc.
The sad thing is that most of these jobs WOULD have gone the way of the Dodo without union pressure for international textile quotas like the Multifiber Agreement. I'm personally pissed off because I *know* there is no way a pair of jeans should cost more than $10, and I feel gouged every time I buy clothing.
Any bets on how long it takes for someone to argue that massive software exporting is a security risk, or - as in airlines - pass legislation requiring all government software to be procured domestically? Bah!
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
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.
On the one hand, you talk about unions driving work offshore, while acknowledging that work is *already* being driven offshore without them, and that working people here have to beg, er, "upgrade" themselves every couple of years just to tread water. Not exactly logically consistent, but then again, what *is* about corporate merchantilism (state capitalism)?
How can YOU compete with a Chinese "migrant" working 16 hours a day for 30 cents an hour to put together circuit boards? Or Linux-MS-certified professionals in Penang that work for $14000 a year at what are $50k+ jobs here? The answer is simple: you can't, union or not. Unless, of course, you're willing to live in a cardboard box without your Playstation. Somehow, I rather doubt that you are.
All the talk about value of labor is meaningless if the same work is not compensated the same everywhere. As long as someone in Bangalore can (and is willing to) sweat out code for a third of what it costs here, jobs will go offshore. Dogging on unions is one thing, but don't hand out the platitudes about "upgrading skills" as a counterpoint to unionism because the two overlap only in the minds of the true-believer neo-liberal free-marketers.
If you're *really* concerned about the American worker--and honestly, who is? We're all out for ourselves, anyway; that's the American way, right?--then take a good long look at the systematic exploitation of the working class (and yes, that includes all the Reaganite computer jockeys who prattle their free market mantra even as their credit cards are maxed to the limit) by those who are all too happy to exploit the next starving programmer in line.
The money train is leaving for the "emerging economies". For job-securing skill-set upgrading, the languages you need are Hindi and Mandarin, not C# or Java.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
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.
To claim all unions are bad is just as ignorant as to claim all corporations are bad. There are always exceptions, and giving a voice to workers is better than allowing them to be pitted against each other. From that axiom, we can say taht a union of some sort will heolp workers. The next step is to figure out from past experience what works and what doesn't. It would be silly to say that since some unions haven't worked out in the past that it would be pointless to try and start one. By that logic, no one should invest in any companies because of past examples like Enron and Worldcom.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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.
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.
Funny, I don't recall this talk when the market favored IT workers. Nearly everyone here was, "sticking it the man" and finding different employement every 6-12 months. Now times have changed and everyone wants protection. Companies don't owe you protection any more than you owed your employer when the market was good.
Simple fact. Unions promote complacency.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
So you are telling me that if the workers in your company walked out of the "factory" floor tomorrow, they could replace you? Baloney. The company needs to pump out its product NOW. If you held them hostage by withholding your coding labor, you could get just about anything you wanted.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Hello AC,
You make a lot of good points. We do live in a free market economy, and IT workers (like me - I am a consultant) do need to think about value given to customers, especially compared with off shore workers.
For a while after the dot com bust, I was not particularly happy to not have enough work to do.
I decided to bail on some ego stuff, and reduce my consulting rate to $20/hour. I could do this because my wife and I have no debt, the kids are grown, etc. Now, I am busy, not making as much money, but quite happy!
One thing that you and I disagree with: I think that many IT people in India are really hurting right now. I am sometimes hired to work with developers in India, Russia, Brazil, etc. I have heard, in a round-about way, that things are tough in India.
-Mark
Warning: I am blogging now: http://radio.weblogs.com/0115954/
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
Robots and unions did not damn the big three carmakers. Planned obsolescence, a money grab idea strait out of the boardrooms, damned the big three. If it weren't for corporate welfare, Chrysler would have died at the end of the seventies. That crook, Lee Iacocca had nothing to do with saving them.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
so now that the union may serve your interests, you are for them? how convenient.
It's not convenience. It's being rational. Of course I am in favor of things that serve my interests. Duh!
Plus, I never said I was anti-union. I said that I initially (and incorrectly) viewed them as blue-collar organizations.
But ask yourself, at the end of the day, how much did the unions really help the steel industry or the coal miners?
Okay, let's look at the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and how they helped the coal miners. They got them the eight-hour day in 1898, collective bargaining rights in 1933, health and retirement benefits in 1946, and health and safety protections in 1969. They have fought for compensation for coal miners with black lung disease and for changes to the work environment (ventilation, scrbbers, water infusion, respirators, etc.) to protect today's miners. They have been at the forefront in pushing for mine safety reforms and rescue equipment.
Then take a look at how the union leaders and their families live.
Of course they live better than the average member. You don't get effective, well-spoken lobbyists, attorneys, and leaders by paying them what the average coal miner earns.
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.
Forming a union would be the best thing hight tech workers could do for ourselves. The fight needs to be us(the workers) VS.them(the bosses)not us VS. us The union bashers here think they are part of the same elite that their bosses are part of. They will learn when they are earning the same as the teenagers saying, "fries with that." Wake up! Boom and Muffy don't want you at their country club! Tech workers are working longer and harder for less, and the bosses are rolling around in the wealth that we create for them. We cannot change that divided. We must be united. That is called a union.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
If you're in a union, you get paid less, your benefits will often suck large, and when the union tells you to strike, you have no choice. If they decide to strike for 6 months, that's 6 months that you (and your family, if applicable) go without food. Thanks, but no thanks."Believe?" No. "Know?" Yes.I prefer both, and can get them just fine without a union. I can't get them with one.
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.
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.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
Probably because you want job security.
And I'm sure that all of the unionized US steel workers would agree... oh wait, there aren't any any more. Well then, all of the unionized US textile workers would agree with you... oh wait. How about the unionized US automotive industry workers... damn. Hang on, am I noticing a trend here?
Unions = very short term job security. But even that job security just lasts long enough for the company owners to find cheaper labor elsewhere once the unions jack up the wages.
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!
But since we (most of the Slashdot readership) do not drive trucks for a living this argument is a moot point.
No, it is not a moot point. It is an analogy. It shows what happens when a union is there to protect employees from unfair hiring practices.
Part of falling being a professional is negotiating your contract with your employer.
You don't get to. Employers aren't going to have staffs of tech people, each of whom bargained for different compensation related to overtime, office accomodations, hours, signing bonuses, severence packages, etc.
If you want overtime, ask for it.
I want a Mercedes Benz company car. I'll ask for that, too. That's the point of collective bargaining. The compensation is not set by the most desperate worker.
If they won't give you the hourly wage requested for overtime, you can always work your required 40 hours and be done with it.
And they can fire you and replace you with someone willing to work 80 hours per week.
You can try and find another position that doesn't require as much overtime (although in this economy it might be damn near impossible)
That's another argument in favor of union contracts. They prevent companies from taking advantage of workers during a bad job market.
If you can't tak ethe heat get out of the kitchen.
And here's the bravado I predicted. So, if I can't deal with excessive overtime, I should just drop out of the tech industry and work at McDonalds? Just give up 20+ years of experience and apply to be laborer on a construction site?
I'll fight you to the bitter end before I let you destroy my profession by unioniziing it.
I would not try to unionize something to destroy it. I would unionize it to improve conditions for the members.
If you want a bigger office go ask for it. Asking for a Union to step in and negotiate office space for you is pretty needless. If you can't have a talk with your boss in a constructive way about your needs then I feel sorry for you. It seems like alot of nerdy types lack the people skills required to carry on normal human conversation.
I am probably both more eloquent and convincing a speaker than are you, so don't talk down to me. You just don't get it. Companies are not going to give you a bigger/nicer office just because you want it. They are not going to piss off 40 of your coworkers by leaving them in cubicles while giving you a corner office from which you will do the same type of work. Have you ever managed professionals before? I have and I can tell you from experience that people will get jealous when a coworker's monitor is 1" larger. If something that petty upsets them, how do you think they would react to one of their own being moved out of a cubicle and into a windowed office?
But then again, it is easy for an Ivy Leaguer to come off as a pompous jackass.
Apparently so.
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.
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?
Where? What kind of jobs? Can I do it without bending over and keeping my clothes on?
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Frankly, you are a troll, and no it's not the truth. Not entirely.
Welcome to the world of extreme interdependence. Society is a complex system where *every* function is absolutely vital to the functioning of the whole. The programmers walk out? You can't ship any more product, and the company dies. Nobody maintains the corporate network? Your communications are cut off, and the company dies. The salesmen stop drumming business? Money stops coming in, and the company dies. Management, the legal department, the secretaries, the janitors? Every one of these groups could hamstring the company if they decided to make a fuss until they got paid "what they're worth."
Imagine if your internal organs started pulling the same shenanigans: Your heart wants more resources because the body would collapse without it. The kidneys demand two weeks vacation a year because you'd be poisoned without them. The brain thinks it wants more oxygen. And why not? After all, without the brain there's not a whole lot of point to the rest of the system.
Or ask yourself which functions in society could be used as leverage if the people fulfilling them decided to get greedy. Doctors? Lawyers? Auto mechanics? Construction workers? Garbage disposal? Coal miners?
I'm not saying that the current pay structure is perfect, or even sane. But your rationale for getting yourself higher wages is guaranteed to be turned back on you. Find another one.
You can start this war, but I guarantee you it's the janitors who will finish it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
--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?
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!
Recruiting, sales, real estate, finance, law.......etc
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
...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.
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.
In most industries, unions have had a very bad effect in the medium to long term. For one thing, they tend to resist any change in working practices because change usually hurts somebody. On the other had, without change you can't have progress and you can't be flexible in responding to challenges.
However, the following made me think:
If we had a union, do you think that Congress would have been able to pass legislation [dol.gov] that specifically exempted hourly computer professionals from receiving 1.5x overtime pay?
That's not the only example of Congress screwing technical people. I've been in the industry longer than you and can remember when technical people could be independent contractors in the USA. Congress mostly killed that in the 1986 revision of the tax law, which specifically discriminates against technical people. (Section 1706). The UK apparently passed something similar (IR35) last year. Technical people clearly need to have some kind of organization to fight their corner with Congress - whether you call it a "union" or not is not important.
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
As a practical matter - It's is quite easy to compete with offsore work if your work is tailored exactly to the customer: For example, it would be easy for Microsoft to farm off the next version of Windows to India, but it would be next to impossible for my client, "Bob's Widgits Inc", to farm off "Widgit-Manager V3" to India.
The language, turnaround, and design issues balance the equasion to the programmer working for a small company and for small projects. God help you if your working for Microsoft though.
Amreica is the easiest place to start a small business: File some $200 paperwork, have a good idea and start working. It's the best job security one can, have. In my littls business, because I own the little bugger, I'm the last employee to get fired.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.
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/
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...
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
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).
Doctors and lawyers don't have to deal with new technologies coming down the pipe every 3-6 months. If we go ahead with licensing we'll be slowing down the development of the tech industry. I'm not sure the rest of the country or society wants to suffer thru slowed innovation for the benefit of a relatively small population of IT professionals.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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
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
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.
I have one word for you: 'community'. You may have heard of it- it's that situation that develops when humans, or really ANY social animals, cooperate, interact with each other, take care of each other when things are tough, and as a result are ultimately TOGETHER.
Try telling a wolf in a pack that it's ultimately alone! You might be able to fight and beat ONE, but the pack will take you down if it needs to.
Maybe you need to be less shocked when people respond to conditions that isolate and neutralize them by trying to join together in forms of community, for mutual well-being and protection.
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.
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??
That would be a union, it would just be a union that demands high quality of work output (even if it took longer) rather than lots of money. If that's really where your priorities are, and there are other people who feel the same, go for it!
And if he can't, why is he making 500x as much as you are? Is: really a good reason?
Unfortunately, having run around this loop a few times in my head, the only solution I see is weathering the storm somehow, anyhow, until the natural forces catch up to the "off-shore" companies, the rising tide raises all boats, the "off-shore" workers demand more money, and "off-shore" isn't competitive anymore.
How long that will take I don't know. It's not like the off-shore people need to make it to perfect parity; there's cost with having your programmers that distant, not in touch with customers, not speaking your native language as well, etc., that will eventually make it more expensive to go offshore then hire locally. But I'm not enough of an economist to know when that will be.
The good news is that this can't last forever. The bad news is that with the shit that passes for "government" in places like China, the wages could be artificially depressed for a while. Hopefully when China's current government dies off some people with more progressive policies will be installed. (I don't forsee full-fledged self-earned democracy, but one can hope.) China's playing with this, but I can't see the current regime allowing it forever; as soon as some capatalists get rich, that means they get powerful and the current power elite will cut them down... anyhow, I'm rambling now but you get some idea about the kind of thinking this can take.
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?
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.
I am almost totally sure that is so exaggerated it doesn't exist in the world anywhere today. Almost.
But even so, your argument does not make the points you think it does. What you're basically saying is that, due to the cost of guaranteeing a standard of living to workers with collective bargaining, companies (according to you, most or ALL companies) simply turn around and have the work done in Far East sweatshops and FIND someplace in the world where they can have people treated like cattle or slaves, and then they give all their business to the place with no human rights, rewarding them and giving them power while punishing the place that does demand basic human rights.
Why do you behave like this is good, like it should be taken for granted?
Not every factory in Asia is a sweatshop. There are hundreds of thousands of factories over there making things for First World nations, and I know for a fact that not all of them are "sweatshops". And even those that are, in relatively free areas like Taiwan and South Korea, people *want* these jobs. The US or European standard of living has no meaning over there. People *want* these jobs because they pay relatively well, and the conditions are better than those of working in a rice paddy all day long for the rest of their lives. So yes, I think that any company that can find willing, productive, and affordable labor in another country should move production there.
The planet's economy is out of whack. It always has been. The European standard of living (I'm talking about hundreds of years here... the US isn't that old) has been so unbelievably good compared to conditions in Africa, Asia, South America etc. for hundreds of years. Now, with real globalization, what we're gonna see is equalization and competition on a global scale. This is a good thing for those people in developing countries, and bad for those of us in modern countries. The standard of living is gonna even out across the planet now. I think that that's a good thing for mankind. Sure, it may suck for US factory workers, but that's life. Life ain't fair. Time for them to find new lines of work, or try to compete with South Koreans who work harder, longer, and for a fraction as much.
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
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
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
Communities form due to necessities of convience. When they are no longer necessary they dissolve. I.E. gentrification...etc.
As for coming together, well you can give an IT union a good try but its futile in the end. IT work is simply to easily exportable with the exception of onsight system administration. When you job can be exported to another country you don't have the leverage most other unions do.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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.
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.
Personally, I have a real office. My employer insists on paying his techs hourly with 1.5x overtime. We do work hours off the clock but he never asks nor insists on this. If we are behind we do it to catch up, if we didn't he wouldn't fire us, he wouldn't say a word, we do it because we are treated right and we care. If we formed a union and had a strike everytime we wanted a raise he would start fighting tooth and nail to screw us at every turn on principle if nothing else. If you've been in the IT buisness for 20yrs, that means you have 20x the knowledge of the fresh grad (or forget grad, degrees only indicate 4yrs or more getting behind in tech) of an entry level employee in your field? You still learn as quickly and adapt as quickly as you did 20yrs ago? If not, you should be canned. Your employer has interests, and since he is the one writting the paycheck you better be earning a fatter paycheck, not just being paid one. If you have to work more overtime to compete, do so, if you can't handle that, then please do get the hell out of the kitchen. This industry is about competition, someone who has been with the company 20yrs should have no more or less secure a position as someone who was hired yesterday. Experience is good, but if you can't compete with the younger guys. You better be able to write faster more efficient, more brillant code than the younger guy who wants to replace you. You better be able to outwork him in one or more areas, otherwise you don't justify a higher salary it's as simple as that. My employer who distribute the benefits I've mentioned doesn't try to screw us. On the other hand his own father works for him and has been there for 15yrs. Now his father is starting to fall behind on technology and isn't keeping up as well. He's getting old. Being his father is affording him a hell of alot more protection than having been there 15yrs. As soon as he finds a suitable replacement his father will be out. He can't handle the job as cheaply and effectively as a youger replacement can. That's the way this field works, it's called buisness. There are flaws in the system for determining who does a better job, but ultimately a union doesn't care who the better employee is, they care about dues and about making sure nobody gets fired no matter how worthless they are.
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.
Unions might create the following problems
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/
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.
You're not giving your employer your life. You are trading your labor for money. You don't "give" anything. If you don't like the current terms, then quit and find a better place to work. If you don't want to spend the rest of your life in this situation then you need to take matters into your own hands, start your own business and quit bitching from the sidelines.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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.
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
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...
To a certain degree, I agree. I do run my own businesses on the side and as soon as I make more money in my part time business, I will quite my job. However, if everyone ran their own business, who would run the big businesses that are required for the economy to run. There are a lot of one man businesses or 100% partner run only businesses, but lets be honest. In order for our economy to work, there has to be employers and employees. Look at UPS for example. That's a huge operation and not possible to run as a single man operation or even a huge partnership. We need big business. That's capitalism. So, if the economy needs employees and that's part of the system, it becomes partly the responsability of the big business to increase the quality of life of the employees.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
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.
"Unions promote complacency"
I've been in companies were the Unions have completely disabled the company. I don't promote that. I'm not neccesarly saying Unions are the answer, but I do feel that employers do have a responsability to be good to their employees. Face it, not everyone can own their own company. If they did, many types of businesses would not be possible. (For example, how would UPS run if everyone was the boss? Packages wouldn't get any where).
Faced with the fact that employee-employer relationship is neccessary in order for the benefit of society, and businesses do affect the lives of it's employees so severly, I stand to argue that a business has a moral obligation to be good to it's employees. Just like the King's of monarchies have a moral obligation to be good to it's populace and slave owners of old-US had a moral obligation to be good to it's slaves. (Although slavery itself is immoral, most would agree that a kind slave owner was more moral than one who was quick to strike, split up families, or kill it's slaves.)
I think the threat of a Union can be strong motivating factor for a company to treat it's employees in a morally correct way. However, I agree that often Unions take things to the opposite extreme where it is difficult to fire an encompetant employee, etc.
In conclusion, I think it's the moral obligation for a company to be good to it's employees so there is no need for a Union. Once the Union becomes involved, the trust relationship is gone, and the company is as good as dead.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
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.
Im sorry your analogy just doesn't work, if I didn't know any better I'ld swear there was a bit of PHB ab out this post.
The concept that employees should be eternally grateful to the boss should have disappeared with the dodo. Both the boss and employee have responsibilities and rights that reach far beyond the client/customer relationship.
I don't know some days its like the union movement didn't happen.
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
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.
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.
My job already was. That's why I'm not in IT any more. I didn't whine about it, though.
Reading is fundamental.Unlike most people in the world, I tend not to use words unless I understand them.Did I say there was?
Reading is fundamental.
Shaitand said: "My employer who distribute the benefits I've mentioned doesn't try to screw us. On the other hand his own father works for him and has been there for 15yrs. Now his father is starting to fall behind on technology and isn't keeping up as well. He's getting old. Being his father is affording him a hell of alot more protection than having been there 15yrs. As soon as he finds a suitable replacement his father will be out. He can't handle the job as cheaply and effectively as a youger replacement can. That's the way this field works, it's called buisness."
To which I reply:
Am I the only one who's completely horrified by this? This guy's boss is going to can his own father, who's been working for him for upwards of 15 years, because he's getting old and can't keep up with the young'uns???
That's not "business"; that's freakin' horrible. If I was your boss's father, I'd bring a chainsaw to work on my last day and atone for bringing that mutt into the world by performing a "retroactive abortion". Sheesh...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Teachers are probably the single most underpaid group of workers in this country.
My friend's parents are both teachers, and their AGI was six digits last year. Not bad for working only half the days of the year.
Quite a fine example of how unions "help" employees.
It is actually, since teachers are fairly paid and yet everyone thinks they're underpaid, the union must be spreading that propaganda well. But since my point was that unions tend to trade job security for high potential pay, the teacher example actually fits perfectly.
And, come to think of it, it's also a nice example of how unions "help" the customers, too
I wasn't arguing about whether or not unions "help" the customers.
In the rare instances where a union feels like working for its members (instead of just for itself), this may be true
Since unions are made up of their members, I don't see the distinction. Also, to use your argument, since getting a union job is voluntary it obviously must be beneficial, right?
but this is where the union becomes a burden on the employer, and in some instances, the customer, because it suckers the employer into retaining sub-par employees.
So? The shareholders vote for who will represent their interests as a corporation, the workers vote for who will represent their interests as a union. Both are voluntary, though if you don't agree to join you can't work for or own the company. The corporation suckers workers into working for less than they're worth, and the union suckers the corporation into hiring others for more than they're worth. Ultimately this insurance policy against unfair treatment is considered beneficial to some.
As for getting paid less and benefits being worse, I don't see that to be the case.
Is your father really a teacher? Because with that line, I'm beginning to doubt that he is.
My father is a teacher. My mother is a teacher. My sister is going to school to become a teacher. I'd like to work for myself. If that fails I'll probably become a teacher as well, or maybe work for some other non-profit organization.
Just because the union leaders think it's a good reason doesn't mean YOU will, especially when it means the difference between your family eating or starving.
At least you get to vote on it. As opposed to being an at-will employee, where you only get a vote if you happen to also be a shareholder.
"The end result is that the sales of Japanese cars sky-rocketed in the US at the sake of American cars"
that had nothing to do with robotics, and everything to do with US Car manufactures not getting a clue during the first gas 'shortage'.
Auto manufacturer where using robotics.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
My own employer is a large, specialised, business consultancy, and employs around 50 programmers in all (out of a workforce of about 300 people) to maintain data warehousing and analysis systems of the sort you'd once normally have found written in COBOL. Our clients also have teams of programmers and support engineers, though few if any would consider themselves part of the tech industry. And, no, none of our clients are in NYC and only one (a sub office, indeed) is based in California.
Then there's ISPs, baby bells, mobile phone companies, etc, which have offices everywhere. Local and state governments tend to have significant tech resources for one reason or another - any organisation that supports significant databases will need some programmers, even if only on a contract basis.
And from what I can see, technical people are still in short supply. We've had several job openings in the last two years and had immense difficulty filling them, and for nothing particularly taxing - Fortran skills, editing spreadsheets, creating configuration files and using a linker.
So, no, NYC and California are not the centers of the Earth as far as tech jobs go. Anyone stuck without a job in either of those places who can move should move. The demand is there, a bunch of fake jobs, predominantly staffed by clowns who can barely put an HTML file together, disappearing hasn't suddenly meant there's a surplus of programmers. The clowns will need to find real jobs. The programmers should, if they can move out of the .com ruins, be able to code.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wow! and you're going to magically stay 25 forever??
No, but with his people skills, it's quite likely that he'll never see the far side of 30.
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/