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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.
t, and i've been unemployed for a year. Not fun.
I don't know what these guys are complaining about anyways.
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When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Could it be more depressing to be about to graduate with a computer science degree?
If experienced people are having to work for nothing, what hope is there for a recent grad? Any advice?
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.
was sub-par for a first job. I hope neither myself nor any of you are forced to do such a thing again.
As for working for free, I've been doing it as the lead programmer for this company that I started with my friends four years ago. I do it because its fun, not because I think that the stock will ever be worth anything. We are too kind hearted to charge for our software.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Same story different source, most of the people in these situations are either a) product/project managers or b) marketers/sales people. Talented engineers and programmers can always find work, if they are willing to relocate.
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.
My opinion? I know a lot of techs with good work ethics...and I think that some of the managers now had a name and a face and they only had good things to say about him.
when a slot came open....instead of interviewing hundreds of hungry techs...they hired him.
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...
Whilst I couldn't see myself managing for long without regular compensation, if I was out of work I would definitely consider voluntary/low-paid work simply to keep up to date. There is no easier way of keeping up to date with standards and new technologies than working in your area of expertise (xml/xsl + related in my case). I realize this is only applicable to those who work with technologies that change (I guess most of us here ?) but is still valid for others as its a great way of keeping the brain ticking and looks pretty good on the CV/resume too. Gareth.
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.
In all honestly, these people - where they can, I recognise some have families with other major commitments etc - need to move to where there is work. Yes, salaries are five digits every where other than a few hot spots - but those hot spots (a) are effing expensive to live in and (b) don't have the jobs any more.
IT remains a growing field. The adjustments in the last couple of years were specific and related to a crash in one, relatively small but high profile, area of the industry. If you're prepared to work for options, consider instead casting your job searching net over a wider area.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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...
More likely enjoy the fruits of their labour and give them nothing in return. And ask their in-house programmers why they should still have jobs, when guys will do it for nothing.
figure your average weekly hours worked.
(5dx9-10h) Be sure to include all office hours
(.5 - 1.5h) plus commuting time
(5dx1-3h off hours research time at home
(~4-8h) weekend time on pet projects to keep skills sharp
~57.5-77.5 Total hours per week.
expect about 48 work weeks (2wk vaca,1 wk sick, 1wk holidays)
hours worked = 2760-3720 hours/yr
Figure over your career you will go from 32K-120K
A nice average of 76K/yr
Leaves you in the hourly rate of $27.50 - $20.43
Yup you are screwed.
comment directly in my journal
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.
I got laid a bit before Thanksgiving, the market is soft, etc, etc. While I get serious about the job hunt (and have rested enough to recover from just plain burnout on my part), I've done a bunch of "free" work for interesting places.
It's not benefiting corporations, but helping wire up a community center, getting a box read as a firewall and one ready as a mailserver/file server/web server so that they can teach kids computers and how to build web pages is kinda rewarding.
Do I expect another volunteer to mention me to their company when they have a need? I wouldn't turn it down, but it's not WHY I started.
Am I learning new skills? Not from this, but I'm doing some stuff in that playground that I've wanted to learn (playing with AFS and LDAP and such).
Fill your time as you want, gain new skills.
I'm not too hyped about doing real work for no real compensation (I have plenty of single ply stock options and they chafe - I much prefer the two ply stock options).
With McDonalds facing up to a loss for the first time in its history, many servers are finding themselves out of work as the burger giant closes stores across the World.
All is not lost though, as many of those who previously spent their day deep fryin' hash browns and pulling milk-shakes are having to instead make do finding work as computer programmers or systems administrator, earning as little as USD 100,000 per year.
The BigMac(TM) bubble has burst, and Fast Food industry analysts predict a year of consolidation before a potential BigMac(TM) revival in 2004. Until then, workers highly trained in deep fat fryers and express lane tills will just have to live as best they can on the salaries of dot com techies.
When I'm between jobs I sometimes will volunteer for a charity... It's a great way to network and do something good.
They call a company that makes money off investors a scam. A company that makes money for investors by selling something to customers a business.
I don't like the idea of working for a company that will pay me if they get funded... I'd rather work (especially if I'm not being paid) for a company that will pay if we get orders from customers. Businesses should seek to generate INCOME not INVESTMENT. Investors should put their money into companies that can MAKE MONEY. So what about R/D or new concepts? Sometimes they pay off... but most have a 10% chance of surviving the first year.
-- $G
Well, 86.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot by an idiot.
Education is the silver bullet.
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.
"Working for peanuts." You don't hear that phrase very often. My first mental image was of a bunch of A.I. hobbyists resurrecting Charles M. Schultz as a computer program or something...
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
Working for Peanuts is ok.
Isn't Peanuts where they make that "Linux" kernel?
Oh, that was a different Linus.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
No way, I'd rather work for Kinko's. For one, have too much pride in my own value (which I have lowered a bit), but I would *never* work just for stock options with no actual pay. Its like living for a dream
If I was on benefits would I risk it? No...Not in my opinion. Most people will end up losing more than they gain and some companies will even be closed due to being sued out of existance...
How do I keep up skills? Like everyone has always done, be a typical techie and play and learn technology.
On another note, since when has a marketing type been considered a techie geek?
StarTux
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
All you need to do is take a real Financial Planning Course. Something real is taught by a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) not a CFP (Certified Financial Planner) since I could pass the CFP without studying (I have a degree in Finance). A CFA is like a CPA, you've really got to know your shit.
...) to a percentage that gives you the return you desire at a risk level you're willing to take.
..., there would be a lot less problems in dealing with money. Remember you're smart enough to earn it, you are smart enough to invest it.
Anyone that is investing solely in the Stock Market gets what they deserve. There are simple rules to becoming financially secure.
1: Insurance is the most important purchase you make. (If you get lucky enough to make a few million and then a tragedy strikes all your work is for nothing.)
2: Chose a good career. You can be a success in anything but some fields are easier than others.
3: Save a % of your income always. Living below your means allows you to keep your head above water when the chips are down.
4: Invest in a home (mortgage) before the market. It gives people without their own business one of the few tax write offs, and you're accruing equity instead of throwing money away on rent. (My house was purchased via FHA loan with $2000 down and I got lucky and bought from a buyer that was willing to accept paying closing costs to sell the house at their asking price, which saved $4000+)
5: Don't trust others to invest your money, do your own research and diversify (not stock diversification but REAL diversification, stocks, bonds, T-Bills, CD's, Real-Estate, Tangable Assets (Gold),
If people took 1/2 the care in researching their investments as they do in buying a car, house, dvd player,
6: Don't follow what the street says, if you did you were buying RHAT at 230 and Global Crossing at 180. When things seem crazy they probably are.
7: Continue to learn through out your career. You never know where you might end up. You don't want to be the 50 year old that everyone at work is suggesting the book "Who moved my cheese" for light reading.
8: Don't try to hit a home run with your investments. Sometimes several base hits gets you more runs. (Take the sure thing, instead of the high risk/high reward).
Juste mon deux francs.
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.
I don't know about where you work, or the people that you know, but I've never come in on a Monday morning, asked about a person's weekend, and received a happy "I worked all weekend!" as a response. I see people all around me working late, coming in early, working weekends and they're miserable. They don't work OT because they love doing it. They enjoy the work as professionals, but the only reason they work the OT, as opposed to going home to be with their families or friends, is because they're afraid of losing their jobs if they don't.
I'd love to meet some of these people who are "happy" working for nothing. Something tells me their work consists mainly of networked Unreal Tournament or the like on the company computers, and not so much actual work.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I stuck with an AWFUL job for too many years because of a promise of 1/4 mil. in stock options. Salary was good, but the scent of options let me put up with entirely more bullsh*t than I would have otherwise. Hey, I was 22, whaddaya want. (no scathing retorts please)
I'm a 2000 man.
Welcome to the real world, twerp.
People don't "think" they need to work unpaid overtime just to hold a job. They DO need to, at least these days.
There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people willing to do your job for half of what you make, because they're not making ANYTHING now. It just shows how brainless you are, telling people who can't feed their families or keep their homes heated should not take any less money than you believe they should for the good of the profession.
The "product" is already devalued. Wake up and smell the coffee. If you don't want to work for nothing, well, go into carpentry or some other profession that society actually values.
The good thing about working for peanuts is that at the very least you can eat.
I challenge any of those posting that people should go get a job, or that if they have good skills they can find a job, etc., to please post their phone number at work, so people can call and ask them who at their company to contact.
Companies posting job offers in Silicon Valley are getting THOUSANDS of resumes. So give people a break about finding a job, please. It ain't gonna happen. Even Starbucks isn't hiring.
In fact, if you live in a town where a Starbucks is hiring, please post that.
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.
On a related globe and mail article, we can read and see what we've all been fearing. Techies, specially graduates without much experience are taking jobs that pay as much as a burger flipper at your local mcds.
Hard times, Hard times.
[alk]
So those who have a family to raise will stay jobless because of some morons who are willing to work for free.
Employers will look at the situation and say. Hey, what the heck? Many IT workers are willing to work for free, maybe we should decrease the salaries for IT people. Minimum wage would be good.
My first "job" out of college was designing an electric car for a couple of "Whole Earth" types from Iowa. This was the mid-seventies. The idea was still considered viable then.I did this for the promise of "future compensation."
.
.
I was responsible for *everything* in the design and turned in some very good and innovative work that still stands up today. A few of the ideas I came up with that weren't viable at the time ( and that I didn't patent) were later hailed as genius when duplicated by others ( such as building the motors directly into the wheel hubs, controlled by a computer, and thus eliminting anything that could be considered a "drivetrain").
Why is my story different? I never saw a dime. Not one. And I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. I was doing something I loved, for reasons I loved and turned out work I'm still proud to have done.
I have been crudely used by employers who complied with every letter of the law with regards to compensation. These people didn't use me at all. At times I wonder if I didn't use *them.*
There are always multiple sides to any story. The laws can only typically accept one of them, even though some of the others may be perfectly valid.
In this case the laws are specifically oriented to the "factory worker" position where the worker performs tasks strictly for the paycheck and fails completely to recognize that in some fields what the workers are doing at work is what they would be doing for their own personal satisfaction if they were free to chose anything to do.
As H.D. wrote in "Life Without Principle":
"To have done anything by which you earned money *merely* is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself..
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work;. .
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it."
This is a bit of wisdom most have yet to learn, and the modern evolution of American capitalism seems to actively deny.
KFG
Absolutely not:
I have personal experience with doing this... working 80+ hours a week to make sure my company stayed on target (getting paid for a salary figured on a nominal 40 hours). 6 months into it I renegotiated my salary and more then tripled it. If you work for a company which is small enough or organised enough to notice what you are doing, then putting your heart and soul into your work pays off. The real question is: "Are adding value to the company?" Are you? If you aren't, then your position is already worthless.
If you are trying to make money; government intervention, the lack of jobs, unpleasant work, etc., etc. are all great excuses to make you think that you are doing everything that you can to get by... Instead, realize that things have radically changed; use your ubertech skills to find a new solution to the "making a living" problem.
(Or were you really a fake "techie" who wasn't really that intelligent? Go ahead, I _dare_ you to think outside of that box you are in.)
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
My advice would be to come up with a good idea and use your skills to implement it. Sure, maxims like "they'll always have a need for more programmers" might come and go like so many packets but one thing that really never will die is the need to buy goods and services. Provide one or the other and do it smartly and you'll probably be a lot better off than you could have dreamed working for someone else.
My
Limekiller
SCABS.
There doesn't need to be a strike on for you to sell out other workers.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
... which is of course why everybody moved to Silicon Valley. It was a lot of fun, even though it made housing prices silly, the weather is great, and if you didn't have the contacts to get jobs easily, it was easier to make them when you were there in person as well as on the net, and of course there's the fun of walking by a sidewalk cafe and hearing a conversation about some latest trend in your field as opposed to some random topic you don't care about. But while it'll be a long time before there's another boom like this one, there's no guarantee that it'll be around here.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The IT market is so glutted with workers that all the employers want industry-specific experience in whatever industry they are in.
Portland has the highest unemployment in the country. I know engineers in Portland who have been looking for a year. Who are you kidding? All the tech companies in Portland dumped employees, and none are hiring!
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?
Perhaps they should have SAVED MONEY just in case something happened. I know, that's really not that easy for some people, but come on, if you're making over $100,000/year and can still say that you cannot afford to put aside *something* into savings, then you need some serious financial counceling.
An entire freekin winery in Sonoma County is by no means affordable to the average techie.
My heart just *weeps* for these poor Marketing Directors... *sniffle* working for free..
I've hoped this has knocked some of the pomposity out of a lot of you; if so, this cloud has a silver lining.
2 years ago 95% of the people on slashdot were CONVINCED that they would never worry about work, since they were just so amazingly skilled that they could always get a job. Unemployment was for those other people, those liberal arts majors and all the people that made fun of them in high school and aren't we showing them since we're all rich and will stay that way. Oh, guess we won't.
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
Two years ago I worked for free for two months as a web developer for a then-struggling firm - but I was rank amateur,
Sounds to me like you were essentially an intern. To me that is a reasonable way to get a start in any profession. However once you get that start, and make some financial commitments working for free is a pretty dire circumstance.
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
I'm serious. I have a Chinese friend who reports that the pay over there for Westerners is extremely high, while living costs are almost nothing. The country is throwing billions of dollars trying to ramp up for the new century. --And to host the next Olympics, don't forget. If you're white and you know technology, then you have a job and you'll make a mint. The governments of the West prefer not to advertise this to their citizens for obvious reasons, but the word is real. You want to live well and make a stellar living? Then pack your bags. China is the new America.
-Fantastic Lad
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.***
Heheh. Absolutely. Don't know about you, but I love burritos... don't know where I'd be without "the Bell."
How ironic that those minimum wage tech-support types (it's a dirty job, but let's face it... someone's gotta do it) are making more money than the people mentioned in the article. Nobody ever said life was fair, but cmon...
It's one thing to work for some kind of equity: training, health care benefits, a vested retirement plan, future job consideration, or even your own parking space. I just hope these guys have something in writing that says they'll get preference when a full-time (or heck, even part-time is better than free) position when one comes open. Work for free to get noticed by the boss? At the rate managers come and go, these freebie employees might be building up sweat equity in exactly nothing.
Might be time to move on to another market, or get a temporary job to pay the bills. For families with kids, mortgage, etc this has to be no fun.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I'm a sysadmin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We're in the process of hiring a person for our desktop support team in my department. Now, university training in Comp Sci is a minor plus, but it comes NO WHERE NEAR experience for me. I'm interested in real world experience and an ability to communicate well with others. Personally, the best sysadmins I've known have tended to have come to IT after first being in some other (usually technical) discipline.
I have a stack of 50 resumes for the support position right now. Not having any degree will tend to count against you in my book, but lacking an IT-related degree won't. In my book 8 years IT work can count for more than a degree + 3 years.
Many of the resumes I see overrate the importance of degrees and underrate experience. I don't find that academic performance is necessarily a reliable indicator of job performance. Experience (with good recommendations from previous employers) does serve as a good indicator for making wise hiring choices.
Life is short: void the warranty.
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).
There are a lot of very qualified folk unable to find a decent job these days, including myself. One of the worst things that can happen is the wearing down of confidence as each day goes by with little prospect of finding a job earning enough to keep the bills paid.
Volunteering your efforts may not pay the bills, but it can provide a much needed sense of accomplishment; and when the bills aren't getting paid anyways that alone can be priceless.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Most of the laid -off people I have seen are in this category
- novice graphic designers (2 yrs exp). Most of them working some totally unrelated field then saw the dot-com boom, went for a quick diploma, and joined the 'hi-tech' companies
- marketting types..
- 'irritable' programmers, who think all programming is pressing that button in Visual Studio IDE. These are again the 'quick-buck' types, who doesn't know what a 'stack' is..
All my friends who are real techies (programmers / engineers / sys admins) are still employed. Sure they don't get 20% raises these days. But they still have a job.
This just my observation, I am NOT saying who ever doesn't have a job is not a real techie. What do other slashdotters think?
please no flames.
This is classic market bottom stuff. At the bottom, it always sucks to be a worker. I have very vivid memories of working a night-shift temp job in 1993-1994, when I had just graduated before the economy had really picked up. I remember thinking at the time that if I was being exploited, surely somebody was making out well--the corporations. So I was determined to get into stocks but didn't have the money. At one point, I had finally managed to scrape enough dough together to buy into the Netscape IPO. I was priced out on what I thought was a ridiculously high limit order. If I had managed to catch those shares on opening day, IIRC, the buyout came at twice that price. In retrospect, that particular pick wasn't the best. A friend had recommended AOL, but I couldn't see the value in it because I knew people who were just "cycling" their free disks, and AOL itself was also screwing people. I couldn't see the short-term value in companies and customers screwing eachother, but we all know now that it worked great--for a while.
Anyhow, this tech bubble is more severe than most ordinary recessions, but the rules don't change: At the bottom of the market, it always sucks to be an employee. So become an employer. If you have any money saved up from the last expansion, now is the time to buy in.
So forget all this crap about interning because you might get your foot in the door. Work at Taco Bell if you have too, and plow whatever you can save back into the market. Live with the folks if necessary. Don't buy imported beer. Don't buy beer. How do you think the immigrants do it? Read "The Millionaire Next Door". By holding back your services until you get paid, and buying stock in industries that are reaping the benefit of free or low-cost labor, you are turning the tables on what might appear to be a bad situation! By buying into the market, you become an employer without assuming the risk of forming your own start-up. It's really a great little invention, this market thing, as long as you know how and when to use it. Finally, read my .sig. It sums it up pretty well. Don't give any significant effort to the corporate community unless you have nothing better to do. Otherwise, you are better off earning a few bucks at Taco Bell and programming when you feel like it; not trying to impress some suits who might just give you a handshake and escort you out the door whenever *they* feel like it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Buy gold while you can. The yeller stuff is quietly creeping up. Gained $30 since this time last month, thanks to war worries and people waking up to the fact that whole star-destroyer of the economy is going bye-bye in a few short months. --You can gauge how close the world is to disaster by watching how reliably gold gains, how shakey the dollar gets, and how many Britney clones are flashing their skin at us. The water's boiling, kids!
--And when the bubble bursts and all the poor to middle income people are bankrupt when the banks foreclose on all the debt they addicted the populace to, you'll sure be glad to own something a little harder than the soon-to-be tanked American dollar!
Some of the most powerful American banks got that way by foreclosing on mountains of mortgaged property during and after the Great Depression. Depressions allow the rich to consolidate wealth and the poor to become slave labor.
You think this stuff isn't planned? Don't be stupid. Bush isn't stupid; He's a raving psychopath, but he isn't stupid. (Easy mistake to make, mind you. Stupidity and psychosis sort of look the same at a distance.) --In any case, that loon is deliberately crashing the economy for several nasty reasons. Just watch. But don't waste any time getting to your seats; Estimates put the big kablooie sometime within the next six months, with the smart money on mid to late February.
Don't say you weren't warned; a few of the more aware ones out here in cyber space have been screaming and yelling about this stuff for a couple of years now. It's late in the game, kids and kittens! Make yer hay while you can.
Invest somehow in Food, Gold or unmortgaged Land ownership. --And military/biomedical interests for those of you with no morals. That shit always does well during Hell years. (Daddy Warbucks.) Canned goods might not be a bad idea either. I can't remember; did they issue food stamps during the Great Depression?
-Fantastic Lad --Fear is stupid and useless. Preparedness is everything.
According to the world bank the average per capita GDP world wide is about $7000/year. The US is near the top, true; but it's more like 32%, not 47%.
The problem that people are feeling here is that if you are unemployed and your benefits have run out (typically 6 months) your income is zero. That is not good on a very personal level, regardless of what the country is doing.
Working for options is really nothing 'new', and was born in the mid 90's dot.com stampede. There were many 'paper' millionaires. Some worked for free, others for near minimum wage. It was a huge risk, because most companies failed, even in the very beginning. And of course, most others failed a few years later. But the trend of working for chance seemed to start back then, and even though it's marketing and other non-tech types jobs, it shows this start-up method may have migrated across business lines.
Yea, a friend and I were talking and he lamented on the fact that he could be spending $30k/yr for a high quality CS education only to be offered $35k/yr after graduation.
In the Boston area, $35k/yr isn't even a living wage. Housing prices in Mass. are $380k/avg.!!
For those out of school, companies want every $7k cert only to be offered $29k/yr! It's time to look for a different line of work.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
The article points this out. There are minimum wage laws. You CANNOT legally pay an employee strictly with stock options, or even stock. You have to give him at least the state minimum wage in spendable money.
You cannot agree to be an independant contractor and then behave like an employee. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck in this case. If you behave like an employee (go to work at the hours they appoint, use their equipment and not yours, etc.) they cannot file a 1099 form and say that makes you a contractor... it just means they've filled out the wrong form.
I'm out of work and looking, but only person I'll work for free for is myself. If I'm going to work for someone I'm going to get paid. I rather change careers and make my love for computers a hobby.
If you work for nothing that is what people think you are worth.
I'm a laid off Network Engineer with a CCNA. I couldn't get shit so I mooched unemployment for all it was worth and got a job as an automobile mechanic. Thankfully I had formal education in both fields. I was so sick of the IT world, I'm just glad I had a backup plan.
You won't see this graph on CNBC very often.
s pc ,^ixic,^dji&a=v&p=s&t=my&l=on&z=l& q=l
For good reason! Never plot long term stock market results on a linear scale! Always plot on a log scale to get a more realistic view of the growth rate vs. time.
This plot clearly shows the other recessions that have occurrred over the course of the century, the malaise of the 70's, the NASDAQ bubble, the crash, etc. in persepective.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^DJI&d=c&k=c1&c=^g
Sorry, interns must be getting academic credit from a respectiblely accredited institution in order to qualify qualify to get out of the minimum wage laws.
Which means the original poster is owed some money from his employer. If he leaves the job for any reason before the statue of limitations law is up, he should collect.
They don't want 15+ years experience in 5 different platforms, 8 languages, database design, applications, systems analysis, or training and documentation backgrounds.
They aren't looking for programmers who understand business requirements, or who have full life-cycle experience with real-world applications.
They want youth, to be ground-up and spit out in 10 years.
Yes, I am bitter. I am a damn good programmer. But I'm 37, with no degree, and a mortgage and family to look out for.
Even short-term contracts are impossible to find these days.
I am starting to take some vo-tech courses. I'm thinking welding might be a good career move. Programming and UNIX administration is a field for the young.
'Cause I hear Uncle Enzo is looking for a new Deliverator...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
The person initially described by the article isn't a techie. She's a product manager, a part of marketing. She's a great example of the kind of person with "soft" skills who made obscene money in the "heyday" and were laid off in droves.
Remember the person who called you 3 times a day to wholly change the design of the product you and your team were developing?
Remember the person who came to work at 10 and whose job seemed to consist largely of kibbutzing?
Remember the person who promised the client the world and told you it needed to be done in 2 weeks, without being able to understand the architecture overhaul that would be necessary to implement the changes?
Remember the person who asked you, the Sr. Developer, why their email wasn't working (assuming you could and would fix it as a top priority)?
I'm sure there are lots of real techies struggling to get by these days. In fact, I know some of them. Let's hear more about these people. That would be more relevant.
But I'm tired of hearing the sob stories of non-technical "soft-skilled" people who fanned the flames of the nascent Internet boom by helping to hype products and ideas that weren't tangible, pulling down 6-figure salaries for spouting off ideas with no grounding in technical realities, and then blaming the technical folks when things didn't materialize (because they couldn't).
In a job interview thejob interviewer will have exactly two things to judge you on. Hw will have your C.V and you.
:
Your C.V will probably have something along the lines of previous employment, qualifications etc. If you are in the interview the interviewer already knows everything from your C.V anyway, which leaves.... you.
When it comes down to it the person who gets hired isn't the person who is technically the best on paper, but the one who relates best to the interviewer.
Some pointers
1. Be happy. Being a Grump is a one way ticket out the door.
2. Don't complain about previous employer. Same effect as #1.
3. Answer questions with reasonable length. Nothing worse than trying to force information out of people,
4. Don't argue with the Interviewer.
Finally - tests are usually fairly simple because employers use them to weed out the incompetents. If a test seems amazingly easy doesn't mean there is anything 'hidden'.
I think the expectations meany grads had of good salaries straight into their first job was unrealistic. There is nothing wrong with a bit of humility to temper those expectations :)
It sure does sound like the worst of it is in California. While things are bad in my area (Utah), it sure does seem really bad in California. According to this article it sounds like the mismanagement of the state government will likely make it a lot worse in California before it gets any better. I wouldn't be surprised to see a monster tax increase in California. I hope I'm wrong, but this would be a huge hit to California's chance of creating new jobs.
My Weblog
Most of the time I don't need brilliance, I need hard workers. I want employees who are motivated and what better proof of motivation could you offer than that you worked for free. How could you say "I like what I do" better than this?
Credentials don't mean much to me unless I can send the credentials out to fix a network. I would choose an amateur radio operator over someone whose former company paid for their MCSE just because the ham did it on their own.
I want people who can think critically, solve problems, and get things done and get on to the next job. It seems to me that these people are demonstrating that they have ambition and like to work.
Besides, I was disabled for a few years and I worked for free for some ISPs which needed the help. It paid off for me when they became my clients later.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
What a bunch of idiots. No wonder they don't have jobs - they're morons. "Oh I can't find an IT job, so I'll work for worthless options and continue to whine about not having money." Here's a clue for our San Fran wunderkind - take whatever job you can get, in whatever field or trade you can, if it means you can pay your rent and eat. There is no such thing as a bad job, if it puts food in your mouth and pays your bills. Hate to say it but wake up and join the real world.
Derek
The story: I left a job at a dot bomb that was imploding to go to work for a company that made a physical product that I could see a market for. The day I started I got fired... along with everyone else. Our next round of funding hadn't happenned. Everyone got the same offer: come back to work writing perl for minimum wage ($4.75/hour so I guess Java still pays better then perl) and the hope that things would get better. About four months later we managed to land a round of VC funding.
I stuck it out because this all started in December (bad time to look for work) and my wife was making decent money plus the folks I would be working with seemed really decent (turned out to be true). Everyone who stuck it out got a "loyalty bonus" that just happenned to make up the difference between the $4.75/hr and what we originally signed on for. We just completed our third round of venture funding with an "up" round and clean terms. No guarantees, but things look good.
Moral of the story: Some chance at real money still beats stock options. Look at the product and whether there is a market for it. If there isn't a market, there won't be funding and the stock options won't be worth squat. Due to wages and hours laws, no one can promise you in writing that they will make it up but, if you can't trust the management's word, maybe working there isn't a good idea anyway.
BTW, I've got over 20 years professional programming experience and a M.Sc. in math.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
"Jobs like thes" can damage legitimate, real businesses simply by being another lowballing competitor.
(1) operate company while not paying workers
(2) kill off competitor who DOES pay workers by lowballing 'em
(3) go out of freakin' business because you have to be an idiot to make a business plan where you don't pay your own people, you just gamble on being bought up lock stock and barrel
(4) LOSE! Everybody loses!
It's amazing how dot-com, corporate, stock-option-capitalist gibberish and insanity can STILL be doing damage years after the dotcom era collapsed! My god, what's it gonna take? Anyone care to start arguing that we should seek out bosses with big leather whips to physically beat us with, on the grounds that being tortured makes us work harder which produces more profit for the company?
I just know that I'm going to stick with those who aren't totally crazy- and I _run_ a business, thank you. It's not computer tech, thank God. I'm just going to build it incrementally like I've been doing all along, with solid value and no debt and the ability to pay my suppliers and fulfil my orders, and I'm going to do that regardless of who else is in the arena with me- you can't hurt me via undercutting and suicidal moneylosing stupidity if I can KEEP OPERATING regardless, scaling back my needs in tough times. You can only put me out of business if I overextend to the point that I can't keep operating without X amount of income.
These guys are worse than the damn lottery. There's no reality in what they're doing. Even a Harvard MBA would smack them upside the head for this- but what they really need isn't a Harvard MBA. They need to be given a good talking to by a hot dog stand owner...
In the Boston area, $35k/yr isn't even a living wage. Housing prices in Mass. are $380k/avg.!!
I lived in Cambridge Mass. until 5 years ago, on $32K/yr (I worked for a nonprofit org, which paid fairly low wages -- but they paid what they considered `enough to live reasonably'). I was quite comfortable, and certainly didn't pinch pennies (e.g., always shopped at upscale stores, bought various tech toys when the urge hit, etc); I probably could have survived on quite a bit less. Have prices risen dramatically in the past few years, or are you exaggerating just a wee bit?
[of course, I was single, but if you're not single, well, then you've got two incomes!]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Even if I didn't have a job, and no money, and needed it desperately.
Working for FREE gets you nowhere. now if it's like 28K a year or something, that's money, but the way it reads, some are working for peanuts vs. free. If a check bounces, i'm not coming to work until I get the cash.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Prices are insane for housing in the greater Boston area. Really, the average price of a house in Mass. is over $350k and I do believe it's $380k. We live in Acton, MA, about 25miles west of Boston, and you can't touch a house for under $400k. These are houses that 10 years ago went for $170k. McMansions are still going up like crazy. I don't know who's buying them. Alot of my friends are out of work too.
I have a wife and kid and she makes more that $35k/yr and we're struggling. We've gone thru our house savings and have dipped into 401k money to make the rent. It's not a cakewalk out there. Childcare is $16k/year (yea, $16k!) so I'm the stay at home Dad till things pick up. Mind you, I love spending time with my son, but we'll never make it if things continue like this.
Yes, we're looking to relocate.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
Yes, free everything. What's wrong with
that? As long as there's free food and shelter...
No, seriously... Some of the OS movement are
not zealots who DEMAND things of you. You can
call it, eh, enlightened communism. That
is, nobody demands free things; people just offer
things for free (like Open Source, which is,
admittedly, easy to offer for free since giving
info out does not deprive you of a physical
resource, only of the possibility to use it
exclusively for your gain which, in turn, is
only useful in a capitalist marketplace, but
y'all knew that....) in exchange for... well,
nothing, except an [idealist] hope that others
will offer their fruits of labor for free. The
idea being that A) people like what they're doing
for it's own rewards (that is, the task itself)
and, as long as their needs are met, are ok with
everything being free, and B) people realize that
there are some things that not many people would
voluntarily undertake (e.g., cleaning toilets.).
In which case, one pitches in for her (and more than that, several times more, actually, ideally,
in order to take care of those who do not, for
whatever reason) share of the work.
Remember, again: capitalism and free markets
are a great system pragmatically.
But this pragmatism hinges upon the notion
that "nobody else does it[offer stuff for free]
so why should I". If the shift in thought/action
is swift and pervasive enough, why not have
communism? That's idealistic communism, mind you,
not the one where people with guns come to
take your cow, as many people have been brought
up to believe.
Considered harmful.
You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually. Might take a while to get reputations and standards in place, but eventually, it comes down to the fact that there *are* competent coders in that country who *are* willing to work for a lot less. OSS might have accelerated the move, but the existing $90k salaries for "web programmers" was simply not a stable state of affairs. What's more, the shift is just going to increase. If they aren't already doing it, the government or a private organization is going to start a certification program with rankings of various companies to help with B2B contract work.
And you know what? That's okay. Sure, for a brief while software developers were overpaid, and now there's a glut of them. Now things are changing.
What's the effect of all this, on everyone involved? Well, let's see. People in other countries pretty much benefit. US programmers drop down from their bubble-inflated pay. Some of them may be hurt during the adjustment, since they have to compete with a glut of competitors. The average US citizen likely benefits, since his new patterned carpet was fabricated by a machine that was cheap to produce because an Indian coder did all the software work.
So everyone gets trickle-down benefit. Globalization is, in the long run, good for just about everyone.
I'm sure that coders right now that just lost their sweet spot find this not a lot of consolation, but it affects everyone. The next step is using machines to replace fast food workers, and machines with better interfaces to replace phone support and salespeople.
Let me put things into perspective. In pioneer times, the US had a much less globalized environment. The lack of a transportation network meant that each area had to produce its own goods. And that means that things that we take for granted now, like granulated sugar and oranges, were *hideously* expensive. Sure, a lot of people lost in the short term (Peddler Smith, who packed a bunch of granulated sugar on his back, may have some tough competition with the upcoming railroads), but in the long term just about everyone won.
Globalization tends to spread out wealth more evenly, so it's true that some US wealth is going to end up in China or India. But it also tends to vastly increase the wealth of the entire system.
Right now, I can buy a keyboard for $10, and a mouse for $5. Just about anyone can afford a pair. That's thanks to overseas manufacturing of a lot of components -- massive globalization. I can buy almost any fruit I'd like, any time of the year. I can afford foods that used to be only for the seriously wealthy (and of poor quality), like pineapples, mangos, and oranges.
Now, sure, a few things become more expensive for your average guy. Anything based on human labor in the US becomes effectively tougher to get. You might have a tougher time getting someone willing to work as a maid or a chauffeur. But we've been dealing with the loss of this sort of job for centuries now, as the middle class swells up, so that's nothing new.
And what about society producing more goods than it can consume, with all these efficiency improvements, driving people out of work? Well, the US might get more socialized, with more government-subsidized benefits (like Europe). Plus, the human demand for luxury goods appears to be endless, so those with a job end up purchasing more unnecessary-to-survival items that end up employing the others.
Anyway, what the point of all this rambling is, is that moving stuff to India and other countries, opening up competition, reducing barriers to trade, and letting technology replace workers is a good thing in the long run, even if a few people are worse off temporarily.
May we never see th
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
I'm sure this particular teacher could have been at fault, but I've seen a ton of people who manage to catch some trivial mistake a teacher made, and suddenly think that they're hot shit, years beyond the teacher. People are human...I'm sure Newton occasionally made mechanical arithmetic errors.
It's a lot easier to sound knowledgable when you sit there and look and think for ten minutes, then find one error and make a fifteen second statement than if you're trying to juggle giving a lecture, not exceeding or going under your desired time, talking for an hour and a half straight with no technical errors at all (covering some material that you may not be actively working with aside from this class), monitoring a room of students and trying to figure out if anyone looks confused, and trying to be audible to everyone in the room.
Again, your teacher certainly could be at fault -- I just want to point out that there *are* those that think they should be Orson Scott Card's protagonist because they catch a few errors.
May we never see th
"what version of windows are you using?"
"its a dell."
Why should they know or care what version of Windows comes up? Most people hit the power switch, grab a drink, and come back to the computer. And "Windows 98" could mean the damn thing was released in '98 or God knows what. Heck, even an experienced computer person from twenty years ago would be looking for a *version number*, not "Windows XP" or "Windows NT" for a "version".
"Ok, you're gonna have to get out your Windows CD."
"Where would I find that?"
[long pause] "...you're asking me where you'd find your Windows CD?"
[No hint of anger or sarcasm] "Yes."
You know, that really isn't very unreasonable at all. The person probably got their system with a preinstalled OS. They got a little plastic packet with papers and installation CDs and whatnot inside of it. They didn't look at it, other than to maybe fill out the warranty card, because the system worked fine out of box. So they've got a bunch of *stuff* that came with the computer. With some laptops these days, you don't even get a CD.
So, what your answer should be is "It was bundled with your computer when you got it."
Seriously. If you took all the things that *I* say outside of my domain when I'm trying to figure something new out and how foolish and naive they must seem to a domain expert, I'm sure I'd look quite stupid. Sure, I can rescue data from a seriously trashed filesystem, but my idea of what qualifies as a capital asset is hazy. What things do I have to be careful of when driving a stick shift? Are there some drugs that shouldn't be taken together? When can I sue someone for harassment? What exactly does Krishna *do*? To an economist, auto mechanic, physician, civil lawyer or Hindi, I come off as a pretty big dolt. After all, to them these things are *obvious*. "Heck," they think, "if you sit down and think them through for a moment, *anyone* could understand this, regardless of their experience." Well, that might be true, but I haven't spent time thinking about some of these, and at the least, I'm much more comfortable *asking* a domain expert (especially if I'm paying one to be present and help me) than just guessing.
May we never see th
30 minutes is long, yes, but trying to figure out what someone is talking about (especially if they're using domain-specific terminology that you're unfamiliar with) isn't necessarily trivial.
:-) ) is one of the greater disasters in the desktop world. I think the first time someone runs into the thing moving, they *always* spend a few minutes trying to figure out what the hell happened and how to manipulate it. It doesn't work like anything else in Windows, and the *obvious* (at least to me) and consistent way for the thing to operate, moving when you drag the *body* instead of the rim of the bar, does not work.
And the UI on the *task* bar (not the "start bar"
As an aside, one of the most annoying things is how current versions of IE, if completing a page render when the user is dragging the window (and assuming solid drag is off), "cancel" out of the drag. It's terribly confusing to users, and leads to a nasty perception of flakiness.
May we never see th
I did a similar thing to change career paths a while back. One of the best employment experiences I have ever had. The people I worked for began to pay me without asking, then when an opening came, I was in, if I wanted. You know I was actually very qualified to perform the job they were asking me to fill, but would have never known otherwise. Also, it was not really the job I was looking for either. Learning both of these things was well worth my time.
One difference though, I was also working at the time. Not sure how this affects your law argument.
In my case, no harm was done either way. If I slowly learned things were not for me, I could easily walk. They got some services for cheap, and I got some new experiences to consider as I move forward in life.
People compete every day for many things. Not willing to undercut free? Tough, others might be. There is potential for abuse on this, which is where your law argument comes in. Truth is, there is potential for abuse in the current labor law too.
The best jobs I have had are those where I could actually work with the people to find out if I really had value. I hate to say it, but this rarely happens in the standard interview process. Person to Person networking is how this sort of thing gets done and doing a little sample work is an excellent way to further that goal.
Maybe if the guy actually was pulling a full workload I could see your point, but what about other levels of involvement that can be useful to both parties? Getting a real-time education about something new combined with the chance to really network is no small payment when you don't have a job. If companies started to encourage this sort of thing, then maybe we have a problem, but for now...
Employee agreement or not, this is good advice and should be taken if the situation is right.
Blogging because I can...
he has locked out all of the competitors for that job who aren't able to undercut free
And what's wrong with that?
What metric do you propose for choosing a worker and who is going to be screwed? I'd say that artificially restricting how much they're willing to do the work for is a little bizarre, actually.
May we never see th
Sorta took the wind out of the sails of his complaint, didn't it? :-)
May we never see th
And I agree, people do ask, "What do you do?". I started truly hearing that when I was unemployed, and it finally started to click with me that for most people, their jobs are their lives, whether or not they like those jobs. That's truly, literally, sad.
I have to disagree. The question is a good, legitimate one.
If you know what someone's job is, you know what they spend eight hours a day -- much of their waking life -- doing. You have some idea where their interests lie, as they're probably working in a field that they don't despise (or they would have switched). You have some idea of their socioeconomic status. You know where their field of knowledge is, and you may have a good idea of what their schedule is (a consultant may have to travel randomly, and a secretary probably has pretty regular hours). All that from just a few words "I'm a neurologist," or "I'm a file critic." Can people draw too much from this? Sure. But I'd argue that it's a pretty good starting point, and a pretty concise way to get information to make a lot of rough predictions about the person. It also gives people an area for small talk, since they can ask about your work.
May we never see th
"...i've been unemployed for a year. Not fun."
That's one of the reasons I decided to stay on the creative side. My company wants me to be a Systems Analyst but I'm fighting it. I think I'd do better with my creative skills than as an engineer.
I'm not sure what to specifically recommend to people in the techie world about that, but creativity is a rare talent. So far I've avoided 2 rounds of layoffs...
I managed a testing project for the main Intranet project for a top Fortune company. The project was managed in the US, coded in India and tested in Australia. There were also a lot of Indians working in the Australian centre. I have worked with Indians in the past too, as well as other Asians. They have an incredible aptitude for detail and complexity.
But I have found they lacked the knowledge and background to come to terms with the importance of managing and unifying the overall software architecture. There was little knowledge of programming to standards, managing common libraries, UI consistency, working to business and functional specifications, documentation, etc, etc. And also the business and legal implications of straying from these guidelines. Everyone suffers from these things, but to my mind it doesn't matter what advantages one has, if one does not have the knowledge and skill to implement good SDLC procedures, it handicaps the whole project.
The other thing I noticed is that these developers are willing to work long hours, and they do not seem to get as stressed as those from western cultures, they seem to just thrive on the work.
Right on! Someone here that has a BRAIN. There is no such thing as a bad job, if you get a paycheck that allows you to EAT.
Derek
We've established that it sucks. Now - what can we do about it?
In the guild yet?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Now you're starting to see, those steelers might know a thing or two you didn't, having been through many a down-turn as a collective.
While it's an interesting statistic, I'm not sure you can derive that from it.
I was talking about absolute pay -- I wasn't including union dues and the like.
In addition, West Virginia tends to not have the highest echelon software engineers around. You aren't going to find many compiler developers or image recognition specialists.
May we never see th
Ah, you're just bitter because you didn't think of just offering stock (tee hee) options (snigger) instead of actual money.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The telecomms slaughter just caught up with my office. 40 engineers hit the local market. Two of us (at last count) have found new jobs. I was lucky to land a job that had been on the market for months. Not because they couldn't find anyone to fill it, but because they could pick and choose applicants and just turn them down until they got the one they wanted. I know this for a fact, because they've (to date) rejected three of my coworkers, two good developers and one really ace guy (I was lucky!).
The salary at my new employer is the same as my old one (which was frozen for 2 years), with minimal benefits and the quite honest disclosure that the company will be gone in two years, either gone titsup, or stripped and the technology sold. The only upside is the promised stock options, but this has turned out to be a scam: nobody there has received any for a year. At this salary, I have had once again had to delay starting any kind of pension provision or investment. After six years in the tech sector, and as a non-smoker, non-drinker with no kids or vices or expensive hobbies and a small mortage (£40k ~= $60K outstanding), this does not bode well for social security in the UK.
Note that this was one of perhaps three tech job going in my city (of a million people) at the moment. You think I'm exaggerating? Think again. I was told (via my agent) that the salary (less than I had asked for) was a final offer, and that if I didn't like it, I was welcome to look elsewhere. The current employees are all top developers, and are being treated like shit, with no raises or the promised stock options, simply because the company plans to not be employing them by the time they can get other jobs.
And yet, for all this, I still feel lucky, because I'm still in employment, and most of my ex-colleagues aren't. However, I'm increasingly inclined to think that software development is a mug's game. The only people that make money at it are the guys in suits, and perhaps one or two tech leads that are lucky enough to be in at the very beginning of one of the 10% of startups that actually survive. For the rest of us, it's going to be a lifetime of two-years working, six months unemployed (if we're lucky), and salaries that - averaged over the hours we actually have to work - really aren't anything special. For example, I'd make more money pro-rata leading a sales-weasel team in PC World, or more money in absolute terms as a train driver.
Anyone else thinking of a career switch? I certainly am.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
An AC wrote:
:)
> OH PLEASE. I'm unemployed and for the first time
> in 40 years I'm one of those dead beats you think
> shouldn't get unemployment. Well I've been
> activity looking for work for over 6 months and
> the only thing I've found is volunteer work at the
> State Funded Workforce center for people looking
> for jobs.
Actually, the story was about people who (IMHO) are getting scammed into working for free on false promises (and thereby possibly devaluing programming work in general), not about good people who volunteer their time to help others during a bad time. You should be commended for your generousity. I'm afraid the people in the story are going to find that those stock options are mostly worthless and their "employers", if they give them a job, will just pay them more worthless paper. But then, maybe I just too cynical because my boss didn't fulfill any of his promises when he hired me. At least I still have a job.
> Believe me I don't want to be taking money away
> from you workers. I hope to be one someday. So
> whay don't you convince your boss to hire me so
> I can stop stealing money from you. But until
> that happens or until my unemployment runs out.
> Thanks for helping me put food in my mouth and a
> roof over my head.
Unemployment benefits were paid for by your previous employer, not by Slashdotters. If they hadn't been, you would have found out when you applied and your previous employer would have been in very hot water with your state. Extensions probably come from the taxpayers, but in times like these they are badly needed (I know, I benefitted from an extension back around 1991). I'd far rather see it go to helping folks like you than go for bombs and big brother programs.
I hope you get a good job soon, and I wish you peace, prosperity, and happiness for the coming new year.
"No one's going to die, mister. Mothra's going to come and save us."
Taiki Goto, "Rebirth of Mothra"
Being British and part of a UK brain drain to the USA, I have always wondered - aloud at times - if Britain ended up with a net increase in Cranial Capacity as a consequence of me leaving???
I don't know about you...
I certainly don't wanna see the bill for the amount of bandwidth consumed by a jobless shelter for geeks...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When America truly was a land of opportunity, there were periods where it was legal to shoot a guy so long as he drew first. --It was perfectly legal to employ people in life threatening job situations; (a life lost for every mile of railroad laid), murder and mayhem ensued just to get unions into being, the Hoover Dam would have been impossible to build without cheap, disposable labor, etc., etc. This was part of what it meant to live in America.
Human rights have nothing to do with lands of opportunity. That stuff comes later.
As for pendulum swings. . . I think you're going to be upset with how things continue to disintegrate in the West. There is no return from where we're heading. Sorry. Face the truth and get yourself well placed, or continue to dream. Only one method will ensure survival.
-Fantastic Lad
I post in more than one place, and horrors, I use the same name wherever I go, unlike the above coward. And yes, I always post loud, and I am of course, liable to make mistakes and assumptions from time to time being human as I am. I'm not always right, and I freely admit this, though in this case, as it turns out, while talking in broad strokes I was not entirely off base either. But discussion boards are self correcting in this manner. I learn as much as others do, and probably more because I like to venture new ideas while remaining open to more informed people. The web is full of informed people; people with direct experience in a million different areas. I mean, look at what happened here; somebody who had actually worked in China offered up his knowledge! How cool is that? Now we all know more. This is the magic of the web! It's not about king of the mountain; about being right or wrong. About snivelling in order to be accepted by the popular kids under threat of being labeled a 'Freak troll'. That's all bullshit.
At the time I scanned the 300 or so posts in this story thread, outside of the general griping and worrying and comiserating, I was the only one with an actual new *IDEA* to offer. Think about that. If this makes me a 'freak troll,' well, I'm terribly sorry to have caused alarm.
As for our coward here, perhaps he shouldn't be on the web at all if unconventional ideas and debate are disturbing to him. I think he will find that his computer can also run nice, safe video games which do not require one to expand one's awareness.
-Fantastic Lad
Ah, sorry. I validated a previous post made by this guy by offering an actual answer.
In reading this latest post of his, I realized my error. --In a single sentence he demonstrated both a total lack of grammatical ability as well as a nodding approval for anti-depressants. I wouldn't have wasted my breath on him had I known earlier that he was just another mud-head. Sorry for any confusion.
-Fantastic Lad
If you agree to work for nothing, you are being exploited. Not only that, you are making it easier for your peers to be exploited. After all, if a company can get someone to work for them for free, why should they give anyone else a decent salary? And that includes yourself if you see a better job. "Hey, you worked for that company for free, why should we pay you £60,000 to work for us?"
Also my experience is that many companies will not count any unpaid work you do as valid - except perhaps for charity work which is only good on your character reference.
Wake up! Working for nothing is a mug's game that in the end benefits no one.
"Information wants to be paid"
Open Source is NOT free software. Look at linux. If you do not have broadband, you will know that the latest and greatst of Linux distros are far from free. Unless you enjoy the idea of tying up a phoneline for days, if not weeks.
Second, where's the hypocracy in believing that software that IS free can't compete with non-free software? Market forces will dictate what's better, according to capitalism.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Your apathy has allowed your thinking to become most pathetic. You don't bring meaning to your life by committing genocide against another race. If you are so BORED then go find something to do so that your feeble mind does not have the time to think up any more stupid things like what you just said.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
This is the single most important thing as a techie that you must understand, and understand now. Software companies are NOT different from other companise. A company either has a product or service to sell or it doesn't. When it doesn't its called a "failed business" a "sham" or a "scam". Nothing more, nothing less.
Even with an MBA people such as yourself cannot get this. Its amazing. The days of a company being designed solely to be taken over are gone and won't be back for a while. The IP has to be pretty special and worht something of ACTUAL value to the purchasing company.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
What is your idea of a culture then that you so easily find among Germans and find lacking in Americans? Are you certain you simply do not have a grass is greener outlook concerning America?
Do we all have to hold hands and sing songs for us to have a culture? Should we all be anarchist counter-culture annoyances so that we can have "culture"? What defines it?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Does any other nation have television as the center of their life? If not, why can't THAT be our culture? Of course our culture really is popular culture. If its popular, its us!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
How about a reduction in fees? You should see the size of his bonus!
That's because people will buy Nike's for $100. I work for a Fitness Company that Nike is starting to compete with. Not with shoes, but with "fitness gear". Almost everything is made overseas, and is pretty cheap to make.
People will buy what they like, and if they like Nike, they'll pay $100 for it. I paid $140 for non-Nike mototcycle high-tops. My helmet was cheaper. That doesn't mean I'm going to complain about that shoe companie's CEO for my troubles. If you're whining about not getting what you think you deserve, you need to stop buying $100 Nike's.
Your big mistake is your assumption that the CEO's 'big bonus' is 100% of the savings from outsourcing. The rest goes back into the company, in the form of expansion, and bonuses to people who've EARNED their positions (though sometimes that position IS earned via the missionary position :P)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If there is an intelligent moderator out there, please mod the parent up.
You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually.
;) you are doomed to be replaced by someone who also reads that book, and is willing to be paid a whole lot less.
Really? You could have fooled me. Total creative and/or innovative output of Indian sweat-shops: zero.
The simple fact is, once something is well-defined and well-understood, it's not "skilled" labor any longer. If you can do your job after reading "HTML in 21 days", "Flash for Weenies", or "Javascript for Dummies" (now *there's* a redundancy
So, if your job can be summed up as "putting up a web site", you are in trouble (temporarily). This happened 7 or so years ago with back-end COBOL business apps - but no-one minded because this whole "web" thing took off and there was something actually new to work with for everyone to become involved with. So we didn't mind that the brain-dead stuff disappeared to Elbonia.
The answer is to be working on things that sweat-shop workers in third world countries can't do, as true creativity requires a good, solid, broad education and exposure to more of areas of technology, science and life in general than working 20 hours a day in an asbestos lined factory can provide.
Build the next "web", "Java", or whatever interesting new technology in your vertical industry you can come up with, perhaps building on existing things. Okay, that's a pretty hard to reach goal, but you get the idea. Accept that this is the status quo - people won't pay large amounts of money for people to do stuff that has become, frankly, pretty simple. It's part of the maturity cycle of any technology. Live with it.
And yes, there are a lot of non-techies out there, too. They will either sink or swim, depending on whether they are *really* interested in technology, or they just saw a quick buck. So there is far more supply than demand, but most of that supply is an illusion - I may get X candidates for a position, but it's pretty clear that most *aren't* particularly good, or even have anything interesting to contribute to computing. Those people have to drop out of the market first.
Yeah, okay. I can get behind that.
You might want to work on your delivery, though. You were coming off like one of those leftist-guerrillas who bend absolutely every topic of conversation into, not just a soap box, but an excuse to criminalize and blame everybody around them for all the dead trees.
Been there, lived that. When I was 18. I remain one of the most socially and environmentally conscious people I know. I've lived in your shoes, (or at least the pair you were running in just then), and I have become even more aware and careful in my personal actions over time, but I've also learned to better target my attacks because it doesn't pay to look like an un-discerning twit. More people listen when you use a finer brush.
In any case, take care and keep up the good fight!
-Fantastic Lad
Well, I don't know the specifics, and with any luck, I'll be very wrong and things will actully improve. We'll have to wait and see.
Second, assuming that situation does play out, what's to say gold would continue to maintain its value? Who would be willing to buy gold in such a situation?
Well, I'm not sure people will be after a certain point, but we're not at that bridge yet. Right now, I'm using the model of the Great Depression, and gold in that period retained value.
Historically, Gold has always proven reliable so long as there has remained a semblence of organized culture where people aren't entirely starving. (So that having weapons, fortresses and food stocks are more valuable than token metals) And even then, people covet the stuff. So long as things aren't completely screwed up, you can count on the power of greed. --That is, evil will always want to hold power over others, and for this to happen, everybody needs to agree where power resides so that Evil can make a big pile of it for themselves and sit atop it. --Gold is a pretty safe bet, since there is so little of it on the planet, you can't reproduce it, and it never decays, and well, I dunno actually. It's so nice and shiney? Greed baffles me.
Greed is a disease with locomotive-like power, but it is also predictable. When you can predict the behavior of a locomotive-like power, you can hitch your cart to it; use it to drive other engines. --This is what the economy is all about really, and why some misguided individual coined the phrase, "Greed is Good!"
I know it seems a little hypocritical to use greed when it is the source of all the problems in the world, but things are far, far beyond repair at this point. Right now, and for the next ten years or so, the name of the game is going to be one of basic survival.
Maybe I'm wrong; I don't think so, but I sure would be happy to eat that crow!
-Fantastic Lad
With the European Union gaining in strenght and implementing free market reforms this should encourage the growth of business and thus of technology. Very soon the Germany you love so much will be just like the US. On the other side of the globe in China, the government is using greed and materialism to keep the populace distracted from the horrible lack of rights that they suffer. So they too, a nation of 1 billion and a half people will become a TV loving society.
As you can see the world is submitting to US culture like it or not, kicking and screaming. Resistance is futile.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If the people truly want to watch TV, who are we to arrogantly decide that they should not and prevent them from doing so? There's a lot worse a populace could decide to do.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
So everyone gets trickle-down benefit. Globalization is, in the long run, good for just about everyone. Well, it's better for some. If Microsoft (or Corel etc.) gets its software done in India, were will most of the higher profits end up - in India or in Bill Gate's pockets? In the end the poor get a little more money, the middle class gets less, but the rich simply shovel it in.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You brought up good points but your presentation highly is one-sided.
:-)
Yup.
"You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually." is inaccurate.
I meant from an economic standpoint. People have been talking about India probably becoming dominant in the software industry for at *least* five years (at least I've been hearing it for that long).
This is more accurate: Many of us were busy coding away trying to meet deadlines and learning new stuff while CEOs and Politicians were busy taking work from U.S. Citizens and taking it to 3rd world countries.
Only expected behavior -- a lot of this got set in motion after a serious worker shortage at the end of the 90s. Workers demanded obscene rates. They got 'em, sure...but it also meant that it was now less costly to contract out additional work to other countries.
Globalization is not about the working person - American or foreigner.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It *involves* the working person. As for whether it benefits the working person...sure, I'd argue that it does the majority of society, and even probably people in the affected segment (though they may have a painful dip in the short term).
It is about CEOs maximing their profits.
Yup. That's just part of capitalism, though. If you don't work to improve your company's efficiency, you'll get trampled by your competitors.
As the matter of fact, the point of a goernment embracing capitalism at *all* is usually to drive improvements in efficiency, since those that don't improve go under.
Jack Welch, Craig Barret, Shawn Maloney, Bill Gates, and others aren't going global so they could make things cheaper and better for the consumer and provide jobs in the 3rd world. They're doing this to Maximize their profits and minimize expenditures.
Sure, and in the short term they will -- there will be a short time during which profits will rise. But barring monopolies (which the US government and most other governments seek to avoid, for exactly this reason), competition drives down prices and consumes this profit. Most of the benefit of capitalism over a more socialized system is right there -- it's robust. People can be mean, greedy...and instead of screwing over the system, they just improve the system as a whole.
Their investors (who consist of the CEOs themselves, their friends, the upper management echelon, and Wall-Street) demand this from them at any cost. If you don't believe me then read up on Enron. They don't care what lives they ruin or people they impoverish.
That's true. I can assure you, though, that the opposite can be quite frusterating. If you have a "warm, family-owned business", it can suck to be passed over for promotion because of nepotism. It can suck to have your taxes going into agricultural subsidies to "ensure that no one's life gets wrecked." Generally, the system moves along and the requirement of adaptation to the changing environment falls upon individuals. Molded glass replaces blown glass? Not much market for glassblowers any more...they're going to have to change professions.
Recently, I heard on a radio program how a worker at a Nike Chinese sneaker factory only makes $800 a year and will not devote $100 or 1/8 of their salary to buy these shoes. They can't.
So? Nikes are a luxury good. That doesn't mean that they can't buy shoes, just that they can't buy the particular luxury good that their employer happens to produce. Do you expect the guy that sweeps the floor at Ferrari to be able to afford one of their cars?
Linux is taking off in India, to Microsoft's concern, because they can't afford the Microsoft OS or Windows applications.
Yup. MS has had artificially inflated prices for a while now, because they've been able to squeeze people out of the market and because they can impose some serious barriers to entry (computers have so many incidental "compatibility" problems...).
companies, (Intel, Microsoft, GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc, etc,) take advantage of social inequalities. Their factories and plants are operational in a country so long as poverty is high. The moment poverty decreases and wages improve for the common person, they're looking to move elsewhere.
Sure. Is that unjust? Why does the person who's now comfortable deserve wages more than the person who's starving in another country?
Recently, car-manufacturing plants in Mexico migrated to Vietnam because in the former, wages went to $2.25/hr Wow - a lot of dough there! In the latter they are 25 cents per day!! For the last decade, thousands of people in Mexico had built their lives around these factories They contributed to the wealth and success of these companies just like the Americans here in the U.S. did.
And they were compensated for it. If they didn't feel that their pay was worth it, they wouldn't have worked there. Very few people I've seen (aside from people founding a company) hold a particularly high degree of loyalty to a company. If another company came along and offered them nine times the amount of pay for their work (and offered and equivalently nice work environment and people and all that), very, very few people would stick around out of "loyalty". No. They'd drop their old company like a hot potato and move to the new one. So there's little loyalty of the worker for the company. Yet you expect companies, when faced with that same prospect, getting nine times the amount of work for the same price (going by your numbers), to suddenly be "loyal" to their employees? When their competitors will force them out of business or they will face a shareholder suit if they do not?
What are they supposed to do now, eat their own young? No CEOs, including Ford's, apologized.
Do workers apologize to their CEOs when they leave for a higher paying job?
The government allows people to come up illegally because they say Americans don't want to pick their own fruits and vegetables.
The government "allows" people to come up illegally because those people have little to lose in trying to make the crossing (and hence are very hard to stop), and turning the Mexico-Texas border into a massive Berlin Wall would cost insane amounts of money yearly. The Border Patrol arrests and turns back Mexican citizens all the time.
(Actually agricultural lobbyists pay American politicians to look the other way on this issue and are the ones promoting this propaganda.)
Sure, there's some under-the-table crap going on that I wish was gone. But would you be willing to pay...oh, I don't know, ten or twenty percent more for your fruit to know that the guy picking it is named Joe Smith instead of Pedro Martinez? No? Well, that's why they do it. The judge and jury of companies is the consumer, who has spoken with his wallet. Farm owners that hire illegal immigrants are at a significant advantage.
I just saw a program today about women in labor on a cable channel. They focused on a South-Western state. Interestingly most of the women were in their teens and were from South-Of-The-Border. (Gosh, maybe they and their parents had to come up here after the car companies shut down over there.) Do I honestly believe these teens are paying health insurance that will pay for the cost of their pregnancy? No. Who then is paying this? It's the American Tax Payer.
You mean legal immigrants here, or else they wouldn't be getting financial aid. Look, if the United States refused to do work outside of the country (Mexico or Vietnam or wherever), demand to get in would be even worse.
Let's take this a step further. These newborns will attend school here. Every homeowner knows this raises taxes. Uncle Sam and the state governments are not turning around and saying, "Gee, we know you've been displaced from your good job and now you have a lesser one. Don't worry everything's cheaper now. We'll even lower your property Taxes." No, No, No, this is like automobile insurance - it only goes up especially when migrant workers are adding more kids to the system.
That can just as easily be caused by Joe Smith in Kansas being a good Catholic and having eight kids. Unless you want to take the China route and have the government regulate and enforce the number of kids you can have, there's not a lot you can do to put a cap on the growth rate.
The point is the cost of producing that apple cheaply comes from somewhere else. Nothing's for free. What good is an inexpensive fruit or vegetable or keyboard if I can't afford to live somewhere, buy gasoline, or own an auto?
Can't do much about living in a beach house in Santa Barbara...land's a limited resource. However, autos have gotten *far* less expensive, as has gasoline. If we wanted to just subsidize American workers, we *could* use only Texan and Alaskan oil (and probably avoid a ton of Middle East issues). Of course, we'd be working with a much smaller supply, and prices would be far higher.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm sorry you're not in work at the moment. However, neither are you going to starve, though you might have to do something drastic like take a severe pay cut or work in a different field.
The guy in Vietnam that you're complaining about working for a quarter a day...*he's* looking at starving.
When all is said and done, in a ten years, whatever happens, your buying power isn't likely to be significantly lower than it was, because stuff keeps getting cheaper.
BTW, I was born in a communist country. Many people in this country have an out-of-touch view with the rest of the world. There's a lot of hatred for this country - some of it justified and some of it not.
Yup. I know well two people in the same boat.
Large companies will do whatever they need to do to keep their investors happy. If this means taking sensitive technologies to China, Russia, Poland, India, Pakistan or some other place hostile to this country, they will do it.
Yup. If it becomes a national-security issue (exporting certain types of tech or eliminating domestic infrastructure required to fight a war), the government frequently steps in, though.
It's all for short-term profit.
Well...no, I can't agree. I'd say that moving from country to country pretty much guarantees a short-term loss. Setting up relationships if you're subcontracting (maybe getting burned on the first few deals you do), paying out to set up a foreign plant...it's good in the long run for the company, though.
Sometimes companies *do* focus on the short term -- a failure to follow a purely capitalistic model -- because a manager's interests may not be aligned with those of the company. For example, he may want profits *this year* to get a promotion. But companies try to discourage disaligning individual interests with company interests as much as possible.
What does this really mean in the long run? For example, if there's a political crisis between the U.S. and say China then what? They shut down Intel's chip producing plants and a huge part of the tech sector collapses. Gee, where did all the short term profits go then? Down a Chinese toilet.
Yup. Some industries are subsidized here to maintain national security issues.
However, in general the building of trade just makes war less and less profitable, and tends to discourage countries from doing it. You notice how we rarely threaten people we have serious economic ties with?
"US: Boeing, Hughes Helped China Illegally WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department said on Wednesday it had charged Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Co.'s Satellite Systems unit with illegally sharing sensitive space technology with China in the 1990s that may have helped Beijing fine-tune its missiles"
Yup. Like I said, national security is one of the few exceptions the US maintains to allowing companies to do what they want (environmental issues are one of the other ones). And if the issue is serious, its likely that some people are going to get into hot water over this.
On a final note, I'm not proposing any solutions other than to say, we need a new system.
Mmmm...personally, I don't think so. I think capitalism can go a long ways before it realy requires fundamental changes. Maybe the introduction of nanotech would do it. A lot of governments have modified, less pure capitalist societies (Europe tends toward more socialized economies than the United States). I expect that even if production starts to outpace consumption, little tweaks like introducing public health care would keep things running.
One where people are more important than profits and one that is in tune with the environment.
Maybe. No one's come up with anything like this, though. Marx thought he had something, but it turns out that his system tends to fall apart when corrupt people are introduced into his system, whereas capitalism is pretty robust.
Maybe the current system has to crash before this is obvious.
Prolly.
BTW, life in these countries is cheap.
May we never see th