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Techies Working for Peanuts
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about laid-off techies getting desperate and going to work for, well, nothing. No offense to these people, if you're up against the wall you do whatever you can, but I hope they're aware that most of them are not going to get even the slightest compensation for their time.
I'd rather ask for $100 a week and blow it all at the race track. Your odds are better and at least you know whether or not you've flown the coop within the span of minutes as opposed to excruciating months or years.
The value of stocks seem to have no logical basis anymore. Remember the big IPOs when most rational people were thinking "How can a company that gives away its product make money?" while watching stock values rise to $280 a share? Add to that so many daytraders that the fluctuating prices mean absolutely nothing.
On top of that you have well-paid economists that can only explain the past and not the future and you have a self-feeding network of greed.
There's an episode of The Nature of Things about statistics. Someone from the Toronto Star did an experiment a few years back where she threw darts at a stock listing in order to choose investments. She outperformed a pool of 10 investors 2 years in a row. Obviously you'd have to do it over a longer time, but I think it's amusing how little a difference there is between chance and skill in the world of investing.
I am now facing the choice of working for minimum wage in a warehouse or McD's because *nobody* wants programmers. I even tried to pass myself off as an East Indian programmer, but even India companies didn't want my services. It is sad state of things for us programmers.
I would much rather program for min wage than flip burgers for min wages. Any offers?
Miles Locker, attorney for the California labor commissioner, said it's against the state labor code for employers to offer stock options as compensation if they're not paying workers at least the minimum wage. All workers in California must be paid at least $6.75 an hour, plus any applicable overtime. He said it doesn't matter if the worker has agreed to work for less.
This is why I hate government interference in the economy. I once worked for a company and developed their product for free, in exchange for future consideration. This was probably illegal in California, but OH MY GOD I did it anyway. It eventually turned into a full-time employment and a really sweet royalty agreement.
If I had followed my oh-so-compassionate government and not allowed myself to be "exploited", I wouldn't have earned a pretty good pile of money.
Obviously that's not the norm and not what the minimum wage is intended for, but "unintended consequences" are what happen when the government screws with things. Of course, let's not even get into how many poor people are locked out of any job at all because of minimum wage...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you are unemployed but you can still pay your bills, this beats sitting at home in front of the telly.
5 Years ago I helped start a small IT consultancy company. I learned tons of stuff, not just IT skills, but things about how companies work, what is actually involved in setting one up, legal issues, finance matters, marketing, etc. etc. Looking back, I would say that experience has been invaluable to me, so much that I'd say it may be worth quitting a paying job for, in some cases.
Then again, do take a good hard look at those stock options and make sure you'll hit big if the company does take off. You are working for free to build a company, with part of the risk of things not working out falling on your shoulders. But... if it does work out, you should then reap part of the (substantial) rewards as well.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I find it really, really pathetic that these "people" (yes, I meant the quotes) have no life outside of work. What most people call work ends for them (ie: performing a task for compensation), and they're lost. They have to do "something". And that "something" is work for free. There sure are a lot of empty, sad people out there. If my life was so empty that I'd rather work for free then do something on my own time, I'd probably shoot myself.
Another friend of mine worked on the project writing the technical side of the business plan. She didn't seriously expect it to turn into money, and she'd have dropped it in a minute if a paying job came along, but it gave her a 3-month job entry on her resume as well. I don't know if she called it a contract or a limited partnership or what.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Working on someone else's idea for nothing seems a particularly unproductive thing to do. Yes, you *might* get *some* future value (but probably not your fair share). You will almost certainly make yourself inelegible for unemployment benefits and you run the risk of getting caught up in the project without ever settling the question of proper remuneration.
Employers will be reluctant to spend money on good staff when they can already get it for free.
Why not simply develop your own idea? Maybe it'll work and maybe you'll get rich in the process. If not, what have you lost?
You still have all the benefits of practising and improving your art, maybe learning new, more marketable skills in the process.
The sob story in the linked article is about someone who's supposed to be a "product marketing director." That doesn't sound like a techie to me.
Certainly things are a bit tough out there, no doubt about that. Still, I think that if anyone's in a tight spot right now their time is better spent in hitting the classifieds and the help-wanted ads, instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves.
I've been doing contract programming for, oh, about ten years now. A little less than a year ago I went back "on the beach." Rather than wringing my hands out, and sharing my sad life's story to anyone who'd care to listen, I diligently looked for work, while at the same time I was studying up and brushing up my skills. I literally went to work each day: got up, went through all the job websites to see what came up overnight, then hitting the man pages, and studying until breaking for lunch. After lunch, another go at the job boards, to see what the pimps uploaded in the morning, then going back to the books until the significant-other finished work and came home.
Because of that, I picked up a number of good skills before I found a new gig, in early fall; and the stuff that I learned by then is precisely why my current contract just got renewed this week.
This may not be what people might want to hear, but if you have a good head on your shoulders, buck up, hang on, and don't settle for some cheap job that pays a half of what it should be paying. There's no doubt that companies these days are taking advantage of the soft economy, and using that to get geeks for pennies. I've witnessed this first hand, for almost a year now.
See here: folks need to understand that companies won't stop abusing geeks as long as the geeks permit themselves to be abused. Fsck them. There were plenty of low paying gigs that I could've taken earlier this summer. But I waited until I found a reasonable gig, at a reasonable pay. And if I didn't? If I took the low-paying jobs that all the headhunters/pimps were calling me about, then now, at the end of the year, I'd end up with the same pile of cash, but instead of picking up new skills over the summer, I would've wasted it in another windowlesss office, for toiling away for chump chnage.
Of course, a lot of advanced planning is required before you can afford to be on the beach for a prolonged period of time, without much of a lifestyle change. You have to be thinking ahead all the time; if when life was good you should still live a modest lifestyle, and hoard as much cash as you can, instead of blowing it away, living high on the hog. But that's another rant...
That has to be hard to swallow; going from a fully-paid, full-benefits employee to a minimally-paid stock-options-only person.
Stock options only? Considering the life expectancy of some of the Dot-coms out there, you'd be better off working at Taco Bell. Yes, fast food is a job, but it's painful to do with a degree under your belt (I'd expect more liberal arts majors to be doing that). "Hello, tech support desk" becomes "you want any hot sauce with those burritos?" How awful.
I'm not a tech for a living; strictly a hobbyist. My day job required me to work an slave-labor internship... 100+ hours per week... but even THAT was paid. You can't pay the rent with stock options.
I don't see how the companies that are employing these folks are getting away with this kind of thing. Whether you agree with it or not, there is a minimum-wage.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
whats even more depressing is losing jobs to people with a BS but with little or no experience. I don't have a BS but I have 8 years of experience.
Just like any industry when qualified workers work below their value it brings everyone down. If i freelance at a set price, someone (just as qualified) will under-cut me. Then it devalues EVERYONE's value making it harder for successful freelancers and employees to hold their value. Usually this works itself out because of professionalism and quality. I do alot of HTML and webapplications and when i give my price they are taken back and go look for a high school kid that will do it for peanuts. The difference between me and him is quality and professionalism, but there is no difference between me and a layed-off version of me.
Yeah. How about remembering that you aren't going to college to be trained for a job. You are going there to learn something and perhaps broaden your knowledge in many subject areas, hopefully making you a bit of a better person.
I never could figure out people who go to college expecting to be trained for a certain job. If you want that, go to a trade school.
I graduated with a degree in Aerospace just as the Clinton administration took over. Military cuts == bye bye aerospace (although, in hindsight, if I'd focused on rockets and satellites instead of aircraft, the communications industry today really kept aerospace jobs around). But IT jobs are easy to come by, less stressful, and pay much better than anything an entry level engineer could hope for, so it's all good.
Programming is something you should do to support your real job. Get over it.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
There are a few advantages in keeping working without pay:
1. add more working experience to the resume
2. in the loop of things
3. making new contacts
4. options in getting out if new opportunities are found - i.e. no obligation to stay
5. chance of getting hired
6. keep daily routine and busy but have the option not to work
Personally, I would rather keep working than sitting around
Now, I can't speak for everyone, but I've only met one product marketing manager who truly qualified for the term 'highly skilled'. The rest were a bunch of marketroid frauds. The one who WAS highly skilled quit the last company I worked at, started his own, and just sold it (in the midst of the horrible recession, no less) to a huge company for well over a hundred million dollars.
If you're a programmer or other skilled person who can truly create something, do this if you find something you love, but don't do grunt work. Expand yourself. My first hobby -- network security -- turned into my full time job. My hobbies during that job have again become my work. I've cultivated a new set of hobbies, specifically with an eye on turning them into my full time work intentionally. Having had it happen many times, I'm determined to direct it a bit more the next time.
Good luck to those workers. I hope it works out. But the companies have a bunch of free labor, and you often get what you pay for.
It happens all of the time. When a company looks at a pile of 50-100 resumes for one position they weed out people based on certain things. Usually one of those is a degree.
I know a ton more about IT and business than MOST CS grads with less experience (and some that have more experience). However, no degree and 8 yrs experience won't get a fair shake against a degree and 3 years of exp.
Boo hoo.
The problem is when you don't live with your parents anymore and have your own bills to pay. You can't ONLY work for free then. Alot of us programmers have always had one or more hobby projects where we work for free. At least i've been doing it since back in the early eighties. Then i could afford it, now i couldn't.
We've established that it sucks. Now - what can we do about it?
Stand your ground. Make it clear to your boss that you won't do it, and why you won't do it. Don't be a jerk about it, but be firm.
Yes, it sounds like a recipe for getting shit-canned, but if you're a good employee you'll stick around.
I've had my current job for almost three years now, and have never worked a single hour of unpaid OT, and anytime anyone asks I make very sure to tell them why.
Most of my co-workers do, but I don't feel bad for "not doing it" while they're "stuck" doing it, I feel bad for them not standing up for themselves as professionals.
Just because almost no-one stands their ground doesn't mean that it can't be done.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
More misleading journalism....
Okay, this woman is 50 and lives in Healdsburg....a very wealthy area. Her husband and her either own the home, or have a very low mortgage. They have at least $1M in equity in the home.
Bottom line: they are not hurting to pay the rent.
She lost a 100K a year job as a product marketeer at Critical Path....and so she should (by the law of economics). I know CP very well...good products, horrible marketing and management. Obviously, if she was worth the 100K, she would still be around. I'm not trying to be harsh (I know many CP people), but come on...overpaid marketing jobs went the way of the dinosaurs a couple years back.
Let's see some stories about the young families who are scaping by on food stamps after losing the job....people who will work at any job in order to feed their families....people who know true hard times.
most folks aren't really at the brink of destruction
'Scuse me? I hate to tell you this, but after over a year of unemployment, I, and hundreds of thousands like me, exist REALLY uncomfortably close to the "brink of destruction".
I've maxed my CC's, run out of savings (including 401k), and would presently starve to death if my SO decided to throw me out.
And I've always managed my money rather well, not buying too many frivolous things, avoiding spending more than I have like the plague (my one exception, buying a new car when my last one died. But a "commuting" car, by no means a luxury toy). But a total of around $10k to last 14 months now, good luck. I suspect many geeks (who have a stereotype/reputation for buying *lots* of expensive toys and holding pretty decent sized debts) have it a lot worse than I do.
And it has nothing to do with "wanting" to work, or only the "bad" geeks not having jobs... I have qualifications and experience that hiring managers used to *dream* of. And yeah, for the first three months, I only applied for "sweet" jobs. Then "anything involving computers". Six months ago I started getting sick of hearing the word "overqualified". Lately I've taken to simply "forgetting" the fact that I went to college for applications, and get a much better callback rate, but the number of unemployed (in general, not just tech) means anything I apply for, even flipping burgers, I have to compete with literally hundreds of others to get noticed.
Not a pretty situation, for a lot of people. I don't "whine" about it much, but *DON'T* try to trivialize the problem.
And, think the US has economic problems now? Wait another year. If the tech market doesn't start picking up, a lot (more) of us will end up declaring bankruptcy. What effect do you suppose that would have, half a million geeks, each owing as much as a quarter million dollars (typical house, or a really nice car and lots of toys), all defaulting on their debts?
"Programming is something you should do to support your real job. Get over it."
Right, and we all know how much world class software has been written by accountants, HR and marketing people. And how many VB jockeys even know who Donald Knuth is. Spare me.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
No need to do that at MIT or Stanford; your local community college can teach you that just as well. Real-world experience is always valuable too, of course, but the only way to get it is to teach people in the real world :-)
Remember the worst teachers you had in college? Besides the grad student who didn't speak English, there was that old guy who droned on and on and rambled without getting to the point, and the guy who discovered halfway through the semester that the class had only gotten through a third of the programming projects he'd planned for the semester, so he'd have to double your workload for the second half? All of them were nice people I'd studied under, one was a co-worker teaching a night course, and the last one really was a good teached but I had to drop a humanities elective to be able to finish his course instead. You could be one of them, or you could be a much better teacher than that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The fact is that ninety-nine plus percent of those companies who are employing people for options are not going to end up with stock that's worth anything.
So if you have to work for free, do it for yourself and start a project. At least you won't be deluding yourself into thinking your getting money when you're not.
You'll be able to work on exactly what you want to work on, and all the fruits of your labor will be yours in the end, even if it has no dollar value. You can sell your project if anyone will buy it, or you can give it away under the GPL and get karma++.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
this Russian guy I went to school with is currently holding down an unpaid job with zero benefits. He does it because he's got no work experience in tech over here, and they pay his bus pass.. "live on unemployment insurance, get free transportation, donate 8 hours daily, and look for job in the spare time" says the guy.
Work without pay is better than sitting at home losing your skills on the couch. Or playing Everquest.
..not just the employees but the state governments.
From the article:
Some are holding down these jobs while receiving unemployment benefits.
In my state (and I believe most others including California) this 'work' makes you inellegible for unemployment as you are being compensated (the stock options, although worthless, are still 'pay', but not in California where they don't count and therefore the people are not being paid for the work performed). Call me a jerk (or worse) but if I found out that someone I knew was doing this I'd be calling the local unemployment office to report them. Yes I'm hard-hearted about it but look at it this way - this is a way for the 'employer' to skirt around the unemployment funding laws, and for the 'employee' to get money THEY ARE NOT ENTITLED TO. I should not have to pay more taxes because people are defrauding the government. Again from the article:
State officials say those working for equity can lose their unemployment benefits. Moreover, the startups that sign up these workers could be violating state labor laws.
These people in question are not really employees but I bet they have to sign a non-compete agreements anyway in a large number of cases.
A previous employer, for whom I worked as a tech, put me on pure commision pay (i.e. no work, no pay) and then didn't provide any work to do. They weren't happy when I said I would do work for any one who called me directly at home for help without including them (sorry - you don't provide the work I, and usually the courts, consider your non-compete voided) nor were they happy when I finally filed for unemployment (lack of work provissions in the law). The entire commision pay but no work deal was a way for them to avoid taking the hit on the unemployment taxes they had to pay.
Julian Millenbach said at the end of the article employers who do not pay don'tvalue the worker's time or labor. I would add that at least some of them do value it - as something that can be stolen.
***Blackholes are where the gods divided by zero.***
a jobless friend of mine volunteered to work for free at a company that he desired employement with.
about 3 months later they hired him.
his work ethic got noticed, and a several people figured out he was too valuable to let go.
And how, exactly, did he pay for food and housing for those three months? Trust fund? Welfare? Lived at home?
I swear, the only thing modern North America is preparing everyone for is indentured servitude.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I just read the article and it states that this lady worked as a Product Marketing directory. She markets a product. She got paid 100K for this. The article calls this a highly skilled job!?!?!?
Are they nuts?
Writing good code is a high skill. Repairing engines is good diagnostic and repair skills. being a doctor 'saving' lives is a high skill.
Marketing a product is not a high skill. It is a knack with no theoretical underpinnings that would require a high level of symbolic manipulation in order do a job.
But some people paid her 100K and now she wonders why she cant find someone else to pay her 100K for ajob that any college grad with an english degree could do. This is not highly skilled. English degress are not a sign of any high skill. It is a fundamental on which other things are built on it.
anyway, would like to hear replies
Sigs are dangerous coy things
I've only seen one person say this, and it was in passing. Probably one of the major benefits of this is not having a huge gaping hole in your resume. "Let's see, you've been unemployed for 8 months now? Well, sounds like we want to pick you right up!" The benefits are most important in the immediate term.
Although the parallels aren't exact, I think of it as selling a home. A just-on-the-market home is going to look far more appealing than one that has become a stale property. Everyone wonders, "what is wrong with this that it hasn't sold?"
There are some interesting parallels to this and what happened when the domestic oil market bottomed out... was that early 80s? Lots of unemployed oil workers (yes, even technical types). They eventually shifted into sales or other things. Here, I think they're trying to ride it out. I don't think it is going to make for a good recovery (pent-up worker demand for jobs).
I know everyone doesn't count it as the end all be all...but many do.
:) I applied for a position at the company my brother works for and he was told I wouldn't get an interview because I didn't have a degree.
Too many in this area anyhow
I DO have 8 years of network/support experience, a CCNA, 4-5 UNIX and Linux experience but won't be granted an interview for this job which is for a Solaris/Linux sysadmin position.
I know that is just one example, but I know it happens more often than not.
I think likewise in the healthfield you are getting more doctors how are designing the medical software because they know what is needed to get things done and not have it mediated by a programming team that has not a clue on the real intent of the product code.
Well, that's why we work reeeal close with the doctors -- keep one down the hall who can tell us when he wants something done different, and several more elsewhere on staff. The programming team doesn't do all that much "mediating" when our customer is right there providing instant feedback on how we propose to implement the features (and UI) he requests.
Having a team of competant programmers who act at a doctor's direction is much more effective than trying to expect reliable, scalable, secure software to be created by someone whose years of training and experience have been in a completely different field. I'd no sooner take over my CEO's place as an emergency room physician or our CMO's former job as a GP than see either of them try to write code. Large-scale software design, like medicine, requires specialisation and experience; trying to write or design software without the programmers is every bit as bad an idea as trying to perform surgery without the surgeons.
Hehe, after reading your links, I realize he's right. China IS the new America...
(Or is the US the new China..?)
* You can only work someone so many hours before they become unproductively burned out.
* You can only pay such a low wage before people realize they are better off in some other field.
* You can only pull off so many projects with so few resources.
IF the wages keep dropping, it will end up fastfood-izing the industry. Where a few management brain does all the thinking and everyone's just a tech monkey. Of course since the cost of engineering degrees and the skills required to be an engineer is so demanding... Fastfood-izing will bring the beginning of the end for american technological progress.
Time to move or get a new career.
Guys like you were saying "you don't really need a degree...waste of time...I know more than these guys".
I am now in upper management (yes, with a BS degree), and I told you (plural) that you were wrong, degrees always matter.
Times are tough and guess what....degrees matter.
I'm not saying you're stupid, or lazy, or inexperienced, but degrees always matter. Never forget that.
Immigrants do well because they insist on getting educated. What do they know that you don't?
Uh, no.
They want techies fresh out of college, willing to go anywhere, work for any wage, any hours, and who have at least 10 years of experience with the specific hardware and software that they're using. They want people who have 10 years of C# experience and 15 years of Java experience (that those languages haven't even been around that long is irrelevant).
They want it all, and in this very down tech economy they can get away with demanding it.
This is why techies fresh out of college are having just as much of a problem finding work as experienced people. Companies want the impossible, and are just as happy to ask for it, since doing so only works in their favor -- people are eventually willing to work for free for them, so why not?
And that's only the beginning. You think things are bad now? You haven't seen anything yet.
We're headed for a real depression on the scale of the Great Depression, people, and I don't think anything's going to pull us out of it in the near future. It's going to happen because the only major things on the horizon to invest in (biotech and medical) are either highly regulated (and thus have the same future that personal aviation has had) or are morally ambiguous at best, and thus something companies won't touch here in the U.S. due to the political repercussions. Much safer for them to conduct such research and development outside the U.S.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Yeah, that's right, you just coded yourself out of a JOB!
And this is a temporary situation, brought on by a recession, too many programmers from the dot-com era.
You think there won't be software development work left, because it's all consumed? Get real. Walk into a business, *any* business, and look at the amount of *crap* they waste time doing that could be automated. Same for government agencies. I still don't have good speech recognition or synthesis on my computer. My car doesn't drive itself. I can't check to see how much a Jolly Pirate (kickass franchise, BTW...easily beats Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Doughnuts) doughnut is and where the closest location is by making ten taps or so on my PDA. I can't set up random speakers with a couple mics throughout the house and have the computer tune itself and dynamically generate a house-wide surround sound system, able to make a sound appear to come from anywhere in the house.
Golly gee, there seems to be a *whole freaking lot of programming that hasn't been done yet*! And for the forseeable future, at least twenty years or so, I don't see those getting finished!
You're complaining about not enough jobs. That's because the industry is busy dealing with a change in the market. Sudden changes screw everyone. But as long as there's coding out there that people want and find useful, there's going to be jobs out there as soon a business decides to provide it.
Blame the baby boomers, who threw *way* too much retirement money into various mutual funds and stocks, and then got burned and yanked *everything* out. Don't blame the industry. The industry is fine, and seven years from now, it'll have plenty of work again.
May we never see th
Plenty of people on *Slashdot* are. The problem is getting Joe Sixpack away from CNN and "terrorist scare" stories that are doing a good job of keeping Bush's approval ratings high.
I mean, wartime presidents (as long as they avoid getting their ass kicked) get great ratings, and Bush just found the perfect solution -- a never-ending war that has no well-defined goals, is vaguely military in nature, and lets him accuse just about anyone.
May we never see th
So, In anticipation of W getting elected our "economy" began heading south well *before* the election. Furthermore, (as a result of W's win) foreign tech workers decided to work for less pay and in fact, become slave laborers!!
Thanks for clearing that up.