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Techies Working for Peanuts
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about laid-off techies getting desperate and going to work for, well, nothing. No offense to these people, if you're up against the wall you do whatever you can, but I hope they're aware that most of them are not going to get even the slightest compensation for their time.
I 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?
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.
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.
Working on someone else's idea for nothing seems a particularly unproductive thing to do. Yes, you *might* get *some* future value (but probably not your fair share). You will almost certainly make yourself inelegible for unemployment benefits and you run the risk of getting caught up in the project without ever settling the question of proper remuneration.
Employers will be reluctant to spend money on good staff when they can already get it for free.
Why not simply develop your own idea? Maybe it'll work and maybe you'll get rich in the process. If not, what have you lost?
You still have all the benefits of practising and improving your art, maybe learning new, more marketable skills in the process.
The sob story in the linked article is about someone who's supposed to be a "product marketing director." That doesn't sound like a techie to me.
Certainly things are a bit tough out there, no doubt about that. Still, I think that if anyone's in a tight spot right now their time is better spent in hitting the classifieds and the help-wanted ads, instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves.
I've been doing contract programming for, oh, about ten years now. A little less than a year ago I went back "on the beach." Rather than wringing my hands out, and sharing my sad life's story to anyone who'd care to listen, I diligently looked for work, while at the same time I was studying up and brushing up my skills. I literally went to work each day: got up, went through all the job websites to see what came up overnight, then hitting the man pages, and studying until breaking for lunch. After lunch, another go at the job boards, to see what the pimps uploaded in the morning, then going back to the books until the significant-other finished work and came home.
Because of that, I picked up a number of good skills before I found a new gig, in early fall; and the stuff that I learned by then is precisely why my current contract just got renewed this week.
This may not be what people might want to hear, but if you have a good head on your shoulders, buck up, hang on, and don't settle for some cheap job that pays a half of what it should be paying. There's no doubt that companies these days are taking advantage of the soft economy, and using that to get geeks for pennies. I've witnessed this first hand, for almost a year now.
See here: folks need to understand that companies won't stop abusing geeks as long as the geeks permit themselves to be abused. Fsck them. There were plenty of low paying gigs that I could've taken earlier this summer. But I waited until I found a reasonable gig, at a reasonable pay. And if I didn't? If I took the low-paying jobs that all the headhunters/pimps were calling me about, then now, at the end of the year, I'd end up with the same pile of cash, but instead of picking up new skills over the summer, I would've wasted it in another windowlesss office, for toiling away for chump chnage.
Of course, a lot of advanced planning is required before you can afford to be on the beach for a prolonged period of time, without much of a lifestyle change. You have to be thinking ahead all the time; if when life was good you should still live a modest lifestyle, and hoard as much cash as you can, instead of blowing it away, living high on the hog. But that's another rant...
That has to be hard to swallow; going from a fully-paid, full-benefits employee to a minimally-paid stock-options-only person.
Stock options only? Considering the life expectancy of some of the Dot-coms out there, you'd be better off working at Taco Bell. Yes, fast food is a job, but it's painful to do with a degree under your belt (I'd expect more liberal arts majors to be doing that). "Hello, tech support desk" becomes "you want any hot sauce with those burritos?" How awful.
I'm not a tech for a living; strictly a hobbyist. My day job required me to work an slave-labor internship... 100+ hours per week... but even THAT was paid. You can't pay the rent with stock options.
I don't see how the companies that are employing these folks are getting away with this kind of thing. Whether you agree with it or not, there is a minimum-wage.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
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.
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?
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
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).
Oh c'mon, just leave silicon valley. Move to a modest sized city with around a million people in it. Less crime, lower cost of living, and believe it or not, they do use computers.
I live in Omaha, NE, about 800,000 people in the metro area. Granted, we have a higher than average tech/telecom industry than most cities this size, but it's not too hard to find a job. I had my last day on one job of 4 years on a friday this august and started my new job on a monday. I spent about 5 weeks job hunting. I still get offers for jobs almost 5 months later.
You may only make $50k a year, but $200,000 buys a really nice house and $800 buys a really nice apartment. I live in a 3br 2500sq foot apt that takes up a whole floor, 2 blocks from a medical center so my neighbors are doctors and med students, and we (2 roommates and I) pay $1000 a month. Starter houses and not as nice 2 br apts are about $125k and $500/mo respecivly. You won't need to pack heat to make it from your car to your door either.
It's time to cut your losses and say you're willing to relocate.
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.
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).
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