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Working Hard?
Two related stories about working hard in the U.S.: U.S. workers are granted less (and take less) vacation time than workers in other industrialized nations. And if that wasn't enough, changes to the overtime laws will eliminate overtime pay for many workers.
While I believe everyone should be granted overtime pay.. Which would the average slashdot poster do? Build furniture 50-60 hours a week, or code.. Seriously.. If you've never had a physical job, you have no idea how much it takes out of you.. If I had to choose which type of person should get OT pay, it'd be the physical laborer that (we assume) doesn't know as much as your average code geek or accountant... I think working in a factory setting vs office setting is already incentive enough to get the training they need.
"The reason Americans have to work more than the rest of the world is because they are less productive."
Actually, just the opposite. Not only do Americans work more hours than all other industrialized nations (IIRC, only two other countries overall beat us), but we also tend to be more productive. For example, one of the big problems Ottawa has with NAFTA is that American workers are overall more productive hour-per-hour than Canadian workers, giving American businesses a competitive advantage over Canadian businesses.
"I doubt you could sit at a desk for 8 hours and really only be coding for 5"
What you're talking about happened during the so-called internet bubble. Welcome to 2003. And even if that were still true, how many US workers are coders?
Please don't insult genuine liberals by confusing us with the socialists and communists who lie by calling themselves liberals.
Socialists and communists are liberals the same way that script kiddies and crackers are hackers. In other words they're not. In both cases the terms have been misused to such a great extent that the original meaning has been largely forgotten.
If you want to understand genuine liberalism, read John Locke, Adam Smith, or basically anything written by the founding fathers of the US. If you want to understand the bullshit that people call liberalism today, read the Communist Manifesto.
Be sure to keep a bucket nearby when you do to catch your vomit. Also lock up any guns you might have so that you can resist the urge to go out and start shooting the bastards.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I live in a 1400 square foot apartment for 900/mo.
I am married, and food for me AND my wife costs about 250 a month. Are you a big eater or something?
Entertainment? I read Slashdot and code, and of course download my entertainment don't you?
Vacations are overrated when you can earn money!
Yeah, the economy sucks. I DO work hard for the company that I work for, as the job sector in my area is VERY fleeting.
Yes, anyone can do it. For about $500 in the U.S. you can get an "S Corporation". Then you are self employed and your own boss. Whatever your "deliverable" is, consulting, whatever, learn about SELLING. Learn to cold call, warm call, market, etc. Read three books on each at least, because chances are two are shit and one will be good. USE that book store. Don't just peruse Guns and Ammo and PC Mag. Now read up on accounting. Then basic tax law. Then get yourself an accountant and an attornet to handle the little bits. Initially, you need only $2000 or $3000 the first year (of course this is to keep the S Corp running, I'm not talking about savings to pay for rent).
Now sell your deliverable. DOn't spend money on adverts. CALL. USE THE PHONE. Sell. Then deliver. Sell more. After a year you might end up where I am after doing this, and where many small business people are... making a nice upper-middle class income that is comfy, and you are self employed and your own boss. Work harder... for yourself. Enjoy the great amazing tax breaks US Gov gives you for trying to start a biz. Work harder for less vacation time? Not if you are self employed.
It almost is that easy. After 5 years of GUI Java development, the last of the dot com bubble popped me out of the wall st area. Now I'm self employed and loving it. HARD WORK. You could make 0 but there is NO salary cap. Anyway, use that bookstore. Amazing what's in there. When I sit there reading a good selling book and a tax book, and I look around at all the slobs dripping coffee ofer their shitty little magazines before they have to go to sleep and be ready at their cubicle at 9:00am the next morning, I laugh. End of rant. Go sell. Good luck.
The greedy bastards just don't get it... I have been ineligible for overtime for my entire career and I'm ok with that. When I get off work after a full day typing and my wrists ache and I can't seem to focus on anything outside the beamwidth of 19" at 2.5 feet, I just have to sit down for some Belgian Waffles at the local restaurant and watch someone really hussle for < 1/3rd of my wage and I just can't bring myself to snivel.
So it's not with any personal sense of unfair treatment, that I state the following:
A minimum wage, while coincidently fair to an employee, serves it's greatest purpose in motivating employers to make good business decisions.
As an average employee works more than 40 hours a week his/her work quality steadily declines and his/her chance of having some kind of accident goes up hyperbolicly.
The accidents cost everyone. That cost is spread around in insurance premiums and workman's comp., but we all pay for it. The cost of mediocre work in a global economy is that it makes slave labor from struggling countries more appealing to use because the quality differential has decreased.
Very few business owners are so farsighted as to spend extra cash to help with these problems. The primary benefit of the overtime pay that it forces them to.
When you have four employees working 50 hour weeks, it is cheaper for the business to hire the extra employee the need than it is to pay 40 hours a week in overtime. This system makes the bean-counters make better decisions for their own workplace and for the country as well.
If I find a place for public comment I will propose a counter amendment.
In order to ignore the welfare of the worker to the same extent as the currently proposed bill, continue to withhold overtime pay from people who have earned it, but force the employer to pay it directly to a non-profit hospital, food bank, or homeless shelter, so that the business is still motivated to keep employee hours sane, and the charitable systems that will bear the brunt of the cost for this extreme lack of foresight will be better funded.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
in California (where most of these technical people and jobs are)
This is ajust a reminder that you need to learn what goes on outside of the People's Republic of California. "Most" of the technical people and jobs most definitely are NOT in California. While I could agree that there is a high density of both there, you really need to get outside of that state a bit if you think the technical world revolves around your geography.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Say your a grocery clerk earning $12.00 an hour stocking shelves. You work 4 days a week and you work on a sunday. You opt to NOT work that 5th weekday because you know that you can make double time, or time and half on sundays. So you work your way up the ladder and get that sunday as a "cherry" day where you could have simply worked that "normal day". There is SO MUCH of this, it's crazy.
If you think that typifies the experience of the average American, you're nuts. I'm unemployed, and my neighbors on either side both work two full time shit-jobs to stay ahead of their bills. And I live in a middle class neighborhood. Don't be so hard on the minimum wage earners, since you might be one yourself pretty soon. yeah, you think you're untouchable but scores mighter than you have fallen.
Give me a break! You speak if the "low wage earners" lounge around working 4 day weeks at 15 and 32 dollars an hour? You're fucking nuts. Around here, people are waiting in line for a chance to work at Wal-Mart. Earth to NIMROD, we're having trouble translating your message.
These are bad times, fella. And if that hasn't sunken into your head by now, there is something wrong with you.
When you work just for the money, of course you dont want to be there, you dont want to be doing what you are doing, but you do it because you get paid to.
Clerk Jobs, and many of these other meaningless jobs, of course no ones going to be motivated to work long and hard doing that, how the hell can you motivate yourself to go to your mc donalds job everyday? Whats your motivation? To be the best burger flipper who ever lived? No thats not it, to help people by making them fat? Maybe thats not it either, you see there are no motivations to these jobs.
This is why I hate the corperate world and the corperate attitude, I myself would prefer to work for a non profit because I dont see myself ever being motivated by money.
Say your a grocery clerk earning $12.00 an hour stocking shelves. You work 4 days a week and you work on a sunday. You opt to NOT work that 5th weekday because you know that you can make double time, or time and half on sundays. So you work your way up the ladder and get that sunday as a "cherry" day where you could have simply worked that "normal day". There is SO MUCH of this, it's crazy.
You see? Thats the exact problem, it doesnt matter how much you pay a grocery clerk, they will NEVER care about their job, but you know what? It also doesnt matter how much you pay a manager because they will never care about their job either.
Most jobs people have simply dont matter, they dont improve the world in any way, they dont improve you as a person, and no one cares if you are good at it. Why not be a teacher? Even a construction worker matters more than some guy in an office working in a cubical.
Remember, these laws cost us. The employer eats this salary and doesn't get to claim that employee's hours on the books -- it's considered "overtime" and not part of the 40 hours work week. It effects unemployement taxes and is a huge burden on the accounting side.
Who cares about the empoyer? Most of the time Employers dont matter any more than Employees, does Bill Gates matter to society? No, maybe he did back when he made Windows95, but that was the 90s, right now he doesnt matter.
So it depends on who your Employer is, and how important they are to both the industry and to society as a whole. Some Employers are better off being hurt.
It eventually hurts the employer by costing them lot's of money which they eventually push back to us by keeping the prices up and/or hiring less employees.
Bad logic, if they raise prices and we dont buy, they go out of business. If they hire less employees they cannot expand their business.
I say "shit or get off the pot". If you want sunday to be a "holy day" or you don't want to have overtime pay for over 40 hours for certain types of "non-exempt" employee's then you can't have "wishy washy" blue law's that just don't make sense anymore in 2003.
I think workers should be able to decide their contracts, I dont think the government should have any control over this. If I sign a contract to work 7 days a week 12 hours a day, THATS THE AGREEMENT. If I sign on to do it at a certain price, THAT IS THE AGREEMENT.
If I sign on to work 5 days a week 40 hours a week, THAT is the agreement. If my employer wants me to work overtime, they must sign a new overtime agreement with me!
I know one thing. My brother-in-law who's in a union and works for a grocery chain here in MA was complaining recently that he has to now pay for health insurance. I thought (that sucks), then he told me it was $50.00 a month. I almost puked. We (I own a software company here in Boston) pay $925 per family to BCBS -- I'd kill for $50.00 a month... But, yet, he complains.
If your brother had a job that MATTERED, your brother wouldnt be complaining. He must not really like his job if he complains, perhaps he should quit.
Yes, he's very angry that he can't earn $34.00 an hour on sunday's anymore instead of making $22.00 on a n
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Just want to throw this out there, see if anyone else has had similar experiences...
I work for a company in a Boston suburb, hit three years there this June. At the beginning of this year I was finally given an explanation of my paid time off (10 days vacation, 0 days sick). In early January, my grandmother had a stroke, and asked for a few days off to go back to Maine to visit family. The CEO said I could and I wouldn't have to worry about losing vacation days. I came back the following Monday to find a message from the CEO asking to talk to me. The long and the short of it was, in the 4 days I was away, I had forfeited all my vacation days. Fine, I can deal I suppose. In April, my grandmother passed away. Again, I asked for time off to go to Maine to visit family again. It was granted, including by the person I was working under on a project at the time. I went to Maine again for 4 days, returned the following Monday. This time the CEO was furious that I didn't have the current project I'd been working on done, and suffered a 20% pay cut that week, 'to compensate for lost time.'
Fun fun. If I recall (I don't have the paper at the moment) I will gain an additional 5 vacation days per year when I hit 5 years at the company, if I last that long...
So the US doesn't guarantee any vacation time and its workers take less vacation time per year compared to other countries ... but what about legal holidays? There are quite a few legal holidays in the US, and a lot of people (not all) get most of those days off. Do other countries have more or less legal holidays? I mean if Japaneese workers take 7 more vacation days, but they get 10 less legal holidays ... well you do the math. I'm not saying this is the case, just that these statistics are necesarry for proper analysis.
Grok, but I'd hardly call the Dems' tactics passive acquiescence.
The Dem base is equally drunk on a religion (albeit one of social engineering - witness phrases like "diversity" and "fairness" being waved around in much the same way as 'pubs use "God" or "family"), war (class war), flag-burning (well, only to piss off Republicans ;), xenophobia (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan do a great job of keeping 15% of the population drunk on race war, who then vote Dem, even though there is no, and never will be, a Dem equivalent to Condi Rice or Colin Powell - Condi for VP in '04 and Prez in '08. Hilary vs. Condi grudge match! :), and the petty advantages that some other working stiff is getting.
Anyways, back on track, I'm just saying get used to serfdom. It's not that bad. The Lords demand tribute, we pay tribute, and for the most part, if we keep our fucking mouths shut and fill out the forms when they tell us to, they leave us alone.
If the business plan is fundamentally flawed, no amount of above-and-beyond effort will save the company. Take what you can, punch out, try again.
Eventually, you'll land at a company whose business model isn't fundamentally flawed, and where you still get most, if not all, of the perks of the fuckedcompany.com bait.
> Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
Extend and escape. You'll still work part-time for the rest of your life.
I've discovered the same thing, except that as long as times are good (and after a few jumps, I've been lucky enough to land in a pretty fucking nice niche in this here economy of ours :), stick around and make hay while the sun shines.
In 10 years, my skills will be obsolete. 15 if I really push at keeping up with my industry. Then I become unemployable.
But after about 10 years of work and living "beneath my means" (like you - limited system upgrades, drive the car until it falls apart, etc), I've accumulated about 5-10 years of savings. Good investments (yes, even during the bear market, one can make money) have added about two or three more years to that.
In short, if a girder fell on my head, nuking the part of my brain that I use for work, I could pull the plug on my job today and last a good 10 years, with no change in lifestyle, on what I've accumulated.
By the time my skills are well and truly obsolete, that figure will be "the rest of my probable lifespan".
And since I'm not in the game to rack up the highest score (Bill, for all his evil, has already done that. Larry was the only guy who could have come close, but the dot-com fiasco took Oracle down to the point that the best use of his capital is buying his competitors out of the market ;), it'll be time to sit back, crack open a cold one, and figure out what to do with half a lifetime of freedom.
> Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
As you say - work is where you trade your time for money. Opting out is much easier when you trade that money back for time.
(We're doing the same thing - the only fundamental difference is that you're doing it a few hours a day, and I'm gambling that I won't get hit by a bus before I cash in a two-decade time card. To the reader - whichever option is "better" is up to you to figure out. IMO there's no right answer to this one; I'm just tossing out an alternative version of the same strategy.)
What is it with this assumption that people who make good money don't work. I have relatives that make $15 - $20 an hour, and, for some reason, assume people who make 6 figures are lazy.
Most executives I know, especially these days, work insane amounts of hours, with no overtime pay, at all. If you do the math on their hours and pay, you see they aren't making that much more than the normal working person (I'm not talking officers like CEOs, etc, just normal Director and VP level executives).
People that work hard and do the right things (the right things over the course of their life, not just in the past couple years or when it suits them), by and large, get promoted and make good money.
All of this overtime, FLSA, etc, just interfere with the natural flow of markets (the labour market, in this case).
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
First Quote: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Second Quote: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. " {{End of Quotes}} I believe it is no hyperbole if I were to declare now the vastest majority of American children now wake up, "homeless", their "fatheres conqured".
Ya know, I swore I wasn't gonna get involved in this, but reading all these posts, I just didn't have a choice.
...He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt his smooth consumation. ...unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort and hope. ...as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people's money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness that flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.
I am 50 years old. I have an engineering degree. About 20 years ago, an engineering student, whose assignment was to interview a working engineer, interviewed me about my career. Well, having just come off a series of 80 hour weeks, trying to meet unrealistic schedules assigned by unknowing bosses, I blasted him. The poor kid probably switched majors. The one question I remember clearly (probably assigned verbatim by the teacher who dreamed up the assignment in the first place) was "exactly what has your engineering degree meant to you in your career?".
My answer was: "My engineering degree is nothing but a license to work free overtime. Sure, I make some money but, if you divide the number of hours I work by the pay I get, I probably make less than factory workers!"
Engineers, at least in my work experience, have always been exempt from overtime pay. And that has led to nothing but abuse by the companies I have worked for. I burned out, left engineering as a career, and then returned to engineering.
I returned because there is nothing else I would rather do. I don't have he words, but let me leave with a quote from someone who does:
Engineering: it is a great profession. There is the satisfaction of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privilege. The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. [It] haunts his nights and dogs his days.
Herbert Hoover
The Profession of Engineering (from his memoirs)
As much as you'd like to believe it, you're not some square-jawed Ayn Rand hero supporting ungrateful parasites.
While I agree with your entire post, I do feel quite often I am supporting "ungrateful parasites." The parasites, are NOT the common man though, but the CEOs and Congressmen and the "privileged class." It really makes me sick when the **AA's whine about the "billions" they are losing, while eating one single dinner that cost them more than most people I know make in a month. When our Congressmen try to vote themselves a raise, using reasons like " I can no longer afford three house payments" (I don't remember which one of them said this, but one of them did,) I feel the rise of violent thoughts. It turns out, they had three houses, one in their district, one in Washington, D.C., and one, a vacation home in Aspen, CO!! That one they didn't even live in or rent out for most of the year!
Sidenote about Aspen: A few years ago, all the millionaire doctors, lawyers, and other business people who had made Aspen their playground of choice tried to get some sort of legal action going in the state, because they were slowly but surely getting pushed out of town by the billionaires, and could no longer afford houses there.
I get extremely angry when company CEOs claim their business is bad, and they have to lay off thousands of employees, and cut back the hours of those who get to stay, and then, then they have the gall to force the company to pay them millions of dollars in bonuses, whether they get fired, quit or stay on, and drive the company to the point where it goes bankrupt, which leads to the government bailing them out monetarily. That, in my mind is criminal, and makes me angry. Why should the taxes I pay go to these type people? I have no problem helping out some one who needs a hand, but that isn't where the money goes.
I have nothing against someone who earns millions of dollars. I hate, with every fiber of my being, any and all people who do what the "leaders" of Enron, MCI, and many more corporations, as well as the "leaders" of nations do on a daily basis. These people have enough money that if they never made another cent, could still live ten times better than any ten families I know could on what they make, yet they whine and cry, that they are going broke, or can't "afford" something.
All you so-called leaders out there, maybe you need to lead by example. You know, like, if you can own more than one house, but your employees or constituents have to work two or more jobs to rent a piece of a building to house their families in, and you don't try to help them in any way, you had better not ever whine about your finances, or claim life is hard. Until you get down in the shit with the common folk, you have NO right to your position in the community.
So, yeah, maybe I do feel like I'm "supporting ungrateful parasites," just not the ones you might think.
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
You can make your statistics say what you want them to say, as long as you read them correctly.
As of 2000 [it takes a while to compile data], the IRS says otherwise.
Let's try looking at things slightly differently.
Let's suppose that each of us was a slave. If each of us was a slave, then our masters would have to pay for our upkeep. So when you talk about real tax rates, you have to first take the poverty-level upkeep, and then see how much disposable income is paid by each group.
Do that, and you'll quickly see that things are just as the wealthy want it to be: the poor pay for everything, there is a significant fraction of people who are worse off than slaves and working very hard, and the wealthy have both the time and assets to buy the laws. [Rush limbough asks "how can the poor pay for everything"? They pay just as the Egyptian slaves did: with their labor. Let's remember that real wealth is things, not money, and most of that is manufactured by the poor, not the wealthy. Go to a grocery store, and it's a poor person stocking the shelves. Go to a farm, and it's poor people producing the food. Nor is the quantity of food significantly improved by the machinery. I'm writing from an area that has very limited machinery, and much greater food production efficiency than America, with correspondingly lower prices for food.]
I would contend that under this viewpoint, America is very corrupt. But I'd also contend that if your viewpoint makes Daschle look bad, my viewpoint makes him look worse.
But it also makes Bush look much worse.
Things are worse than you see, not better.
(Bible quote with one interpretation: "You say that your sins are as scarlet [like a sore or wound]? I shall make them as white as snow! [look again, that's not a sore, that's leprosy!]". Actually, that's not too far off. Zechariah 11, the people get the masters they deserve. But what you deserve is based on your own individual sins. You want to get out of this, start voluntarily living rightly by your family and neighbors. Which includs no porn, no abortion, and so on.)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Airbus doesn't get any subsidies any more. Boeing still gets plenty of juicy military contracts, OTOH.
Geez! I got my BSEE at Cal State University, Long Beach. It was about $500 a semester at the time (mid 1980's). Graduated in 1988. It was the largest EE program west of the Mississippi at the time, and fairly well thought of in the industry as far as I could tell. One interviewer told me that the perception was that CSULB grads had nothing to prove, and just showed up and did the work.
My employer paid for my MSEE from USC, but, honestly, I think I'd be where I am now anyway without it.
I now make $140K a year, just bought a 2003 Mustang GT for cash, and am planning retirement for about age 48... maybe 45 with a bit of luck. That is when I will build the 30" autoguiding, computerized, motorized reflecting telescope in my backyard as my ultimate geek life project (assuming I don't also start work on the directed energy weapons). The mirror alone will set me back $10K or more.
I realzed early on, thanks to some advice from an engineer I knew in high school, that, yeah, the degree isn't worth all *that* much, even from a prestigious school. He told me to learn a lot of hands on stuff, so I joined a ham radio club and built Heathkits all through college (I still use my Heathkit voltmeter at work). Once I was hired post graduation, I learned everything I could, read every application note and data sheet I could get my hands on, and continue my education into the real world stuff.
All that stuff that's so emphasized in college is so unimporant in the real job. I haven't used Kirchoff's law since college. I haven't seen an integral in years.
And, kids, go into hardware engineering. The Indians can't touch me- they're all software weenies. Oh, and take extra courses in electromagnetics. I've lost count of the pure digital guys who don't understand why I am so meticulous about trace impedance and termination stubs when I want to get 10 gigabit data into an FPGA. RF and digital are converging. I regularly deal with digital data streams at 3 GHz or higher, and I don't mean multiplied inside a chip. I mean 3 Gbps data on 20 layer PCBs distributed all over the board, and traces of a couple inches become efficient transmitting and receiving antennas.
--- Ban humanity.