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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Boo hoo.
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?
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
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 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.