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Tech Professionals' Aggravations Rise, But So Do Salaries (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite some concerns over the stock market and whether the so-called "unicorns" will survive the year, it's apparently still a good time to get into tech: New data from Robert Half Technology suggests that salaries for various tech positions will increase as much as 7 percent this year. Which is good, because tech professionals have confessed to a host of aggravations with their lives, including too-expensive housing, lengthy commutes and gridlock, inability to achieve work-life balance, and a disconnect from their jobs. It's neither the best nor worst of times, but the money could be pretty good.
There comes a point, and its exact location may differ from individual to individual, where more money is just not worth the aggravation. Selling your health and/or your relationships for money???
Nice spin Dice.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
1) This is Dice stuff, posted on a Dice website. Intrinsical value seems questionable, if not for that of a place-filler. Slow news night / day ?
2) Regarding housing and commutes: this concerns only Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a tiny part of the world. A large, large majority of us techies work somewhere else: Australia, Europe, Asia, other parts of the world. Scope of post seems limited. Also TLDR.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think the best part is no worries about money drying up after retirement. Work hard, party hard, die of heart attack at 45!
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"Can I interest you in the feature driven model methodology?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Thirty four characters live here.
I love comments like "can increase as much as" which don't mean anything.
The attached article from the staffing company reads very well as marketing/recruiting material but strikes me as optimistic.
What are your impressions of the labor market where you are ? Do you see such demand that rates/salaries will go up the significantly this year (assuming we don't get slammed too hard by outsourcing / H1B) ?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
WTF is with this thread? Is Dice paying people to generate fake comments now?
And lack of vacation just makes that worse. I haven't had a full week off since 1992.
No offence, but you're a fucking idiot then.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Getting crushed by agile meetings! Also, the methodology doesn't allow a day off.
Then get a new methodology.
You people are like turkeys who think Christmas and Thanksgiving are great for business.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
$132000 a year, 38 hour week, six weeks leave a year, plus public holidays. Oh, and I work one day a week from home. My commute is half an hour from one house, or an hour from my weekender.
So this whole tech worker thing sounds like wool mill workers in the 1880s. Are you the new proletariat?
WTF is with this thread? Is Dice paying people to generate fake comments now?
Agreed, there can't be that many identical morons in the world.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Someone is having a conversation with themselves.
Me, I get a month or so off every year.
Of course, I live in a civilised country.
Back in the 1990's during the "Tech Bubble", "Economy 2.0". Tech workers were treated like gods, High pay, large benefits, and easy jobs. Anyone who was around during that time was lucky. A lot of people skipped college and went straight into tech, as "Web Developers", with an increase of people going to college in degrees that they really didn't care for but because it made a lot of money and was an easy job.
So what happened it created a glut of bad employees, lazy tech workers, who were over paid. Well new immigration laws, and the rise of Free Software allowed these business who realized that "Economy 2.0" was "Economy 1.0" in a market bubble needed to switch to more profitable entities. So they outsourced to cheaper countries for many of these easy jobs at a much lower rate, and kept raising the bar until, they found a happy medium.
So Tech workers who are employed in the US today have to be the following to be competitive
1. They need to be at a particular skill level, if not they will need to work harder to compensate. I am sorry but in my 20 years of professional experience, I have found the person who is working past 50 hours a week is either new at the job, and is working up experience, or just not technically savvy enough to get the job done right and on deadline.
2. They need to know how to be professional. This means a degree of people skills, not being insulting. Also knowing a bit how to deal with politics, how not to take blame for every problem yet willing to work on a solution to fix it. Also if you are to point blame you need to be professional about it, and make sure it isn't too sharp of a point.
3. They should understand the business they are in. There isn't a "Tech Industry" No one works in Tech, Apple make Consumer Product that happens to be computers. Google/Facebook/Twitter... are advertising companies with interesting software to keep its viewers engaged. Your technology skills should be used to benefit the business they are supporting. Medical IT work is different than Industrial IT Work, which is different than Government IT work... Know the business is important.
4. Know your place. In tech we tend to work across the organization, so we get high level glance at every job, and try to improve it with technology. This sometimes makes us think that we know how to do all these peoples jobs... You do not. You can make the best hammer in the world, but it doesn't make you a good carpenter, but your hammer may make a good carpenter better.
Yes today we tech workers have to be like the rest of the middle class staff. We are no longer treated as gods having the skills unknowable by mere mortals. We are not expected to produce, and be part of the team.
Now my experience, I don't work in metro areas, I have worked for startups, large and small orgs, Governments and industries. I found for the most part I found my aggravation is from my own pride being stomped on by reality, not from The Man who is trying to keep me down. Much of IT work is very creative, however working as part of the team means your creativity is limited to the needs of the group. So you will not get your own way.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My aggravation definitely rose when I tried to read the f***ing ten page, one paragraph per page, article!
To be clear, are there any professions out there that don't suck in some fashion? Is there some magical career that is reasonably compensated, where the management isn't evil, and it is possible to have some semblance of a life outside of work?
The smart money sez that if IT is so awful, maybe it is time to jump ship and look into careers of being plumbers or country doctors.
Or maybe the notion of work culture needs to change, and that is certainly not going to come from above.
Yeah, 7% is bullshit. we need a 35% to make up for the decade of not getting ANY increases.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
WTF is with this thread? Is Dice paying people to generate fake comments now?
Agreed, there can't be that many identical morons in the world.
I was wondering the same thing. It's like an AC Gish gallop.
Careful. Not everyone is as lucky as you are. There are plenty of us with engineering degrees from top 10 engineering schools that haven't managed to swing high salaries or continuous employment. Count your blessings.
Let me guess: you are working for the government so the taxpayers are paying you. Well guess what: the rest of us need to work in order to generate enough tax revenue so you can get your 38 hour week.
.. industry, PLEASE DON'T.
There are far too many people working in IT who simply shouldn't be, and they just make stuff harder.
It does if you account for it. It helps if everyone on your team knows ahead before the sprint when they will be off. It's just a matter of guessing how much the missing people will cost the team in how much it can get done. In reality agile accounts for missing people really well. If the sprint goals aren't met then too bad. Unfortunately no one respects that aspect of agile.
It probably largely depends on how it is implemented at your company. A lot of scrum seems to have been created because "Agile doesn't allow managers enough micro-managing power". Add to that if you hire someone whose sole job is scrum meetings they're probably going to have a lot of them just to look busy. Where I work we use "scrum team captains" instead and the teams are largely autonomous. I am just a developer that handles a lot of the extra scrum stuff. And since I hate meetings and I'm in charge of scheduling them the team gets to avoid most of them.
Bingo. Agile. The bane of my existence.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Test driven development is good, but its no cure-all. But it makes more sense to me than agile, which was supposed to fix everything, and is not "agile".
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
LOL!
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
What's really important for us to realize is that we're a favored group of the working people, but we are not immune to how the current system treats workers, and we need to look at our impact on others.
We haven't taken this recession quite so much on the chin as blue-collar workers; jobs may be on the rise again, but not well-paying jobs for most. In the meantime, those landlords who are charging high rents in tech-heavy cities? They're making life hard for us, but nigh well impossible to other people. That gentrification is displacing people of less means, often people with roots and community. Watching the Mission in San Francisco become a place that the Latino culture that gave it its character could scarcely hang on made me really think about this. I had occasion to have a bunch of housemates who worked in the restaurants, and they were barely hanging on financially, a non-stop cliffhanger. Seems to me we're enabling a racket.
I for my part have chosen to build a tiny house, get a mobile hotspot, telecommute, and work on scaling my lifestyle to my actual needs. Landlords don't usually offer that; they're trying to oversell as much as anyone, and to as generic an audience as possible. We could work on changing that. I see people turning to community land trusts to try to keep housing possible for low-income people. It's hard for artists that make San Francisco to remain there without such measures, at this point. If we in IT gave this our energy too, we'd be keeping more of what we toil so many hours for, but it'd give momentum to something that's a lifeline to others. I'd rather not just work long hours to give the landlords incentive to evict the artists that made me want to live somewhere to begin with!
In short, we're in the business of being problem solvers at work; if we do this for ourselves and the communities we're in or neighbors too, it could change a lot of this.
That's because the rest of us don't get mandatory, statue-guaranteed vacation time. But try to bring that up and you get shouted down by the corporate lobbyists who would not only like to continue to be free to abuse "exempt" employees who don't get overtime (or sick days, or parental leave, or a lot of things common in other First World countries), they find it offensive that they can't chain the cogs to their desks.
Mandating vacation time would put everyone on the same playing field, instead of one company being tempted to cut PTO to a smaller amount than the competition, so that they can "increase shareholder value". Eventually a race to the bottom hits the bottom.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Because they don't have to. Most companies will actually let you take the vacation time you've earned, but many have turned PTO into a meaningless number on a screen. You might have 160 hours of vacation in the bank, but if you can't ever get a vacation approved, you might as well not have any at all. And that's perfectly legal; with only a few exceptions (FMLA, which is unpaid; jury duty, National Guard exercises) that they'll still try to fire you (or at least try to screw you out of getting paid when they're required to) for using.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the only thing that will curb this abuse is mandating vacation/sick time by law. But that benefits the employees, which obviously makes the government fascist.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
In theory scrum does give the developer some insulation from managerial bullshit. The product owner (idiot MBA usually) decides they need a new feature or an enhancement, the tickets are written and groomed, and they're presented in the backlog at a sprint planning meeting.
This is where it goes off the rails: According to the scrum rules, the developers get to decide if an issue is ready for development or needs further grooming, and if the issue is too large to get done in one sprint and needs to be broken up further. The developers are supposed to be able to decide, ultimately, what goes into a sprint. However, what ends up happening is that the developers get ignored, as usual, and end up with the same unreasonable workloads and weasely ambiguous requirements. Scrum is supposed to limit the product owner's ability to ask for the unreasonable; however, most idiot MBAs have never met a ridiculous deadline they didn't like, and since they're usually above the people who do actual work on the org chart, they don't have to listen to the developers.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Yeah, I hear that. As I write, somebody is trying to schedule a "follow up meeting" for an issue. Since I'm pretty much booked up with actual work all day, her answer "oh, can we just schedule it at 12:30" then.
Yeah, the answer to me being too busy for more meetings is to schedule one in my lunchtime, because apparently my calendar is open there...
Agreed. No matter what rules are put in place the people that don't do the work will end up wanting more than possible out of the people that do.
This is where you need "leadership" from the development team. Go ahead and fuck up my sprint. I'll tell you form the get-go that it's probably not going to work. And when it doesn't I will hold you responsible.
This requires a "corporate culture" that allows for this. But I would say successful software development requires some form of listening to the devs. That said our product owners do mostly listen to us so this isn't a problem in the first place.
And lack of vacation just makes that worse. I haven't had a full week off since 1992.
No offence, but you're a fucking idiot then.
They're not an idiot, They're a fictional creation. It's and entire thread of ACs spouting crap to each other. It's probably just one AC who is doing so at his job where they get paid to do no work, be they still feel oppressed.
She made $1200 per week and couldn't afford food? I'm guessing at least one of your numbers is totally made up...
That is Agile done wrong. The Agile Manifesto says "people over processes", so if you get shoehorned into a process that doesn't work, it ain't Agile, even if that's what it's called.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Calculating a day as six hours of work is more realistic. In the long run, you're not getting more work than that anyway.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There seem to be two definitions of Agile going around. One has something to do with the Agile Manifesto, and one is a buzzword management uses to screw employees over. I'm reasonably happy with Scrum myself, but we actually do it more or less right around here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's why you change jobs every 6-18 months. Every time you change jobs, take a month off.
No, I work for a car company that didn't get bailed out by the US government recently. I work 38 hours because that's what my contract says. They pay me to do stuff for them, I do it. That's what contracts are for.
No True Scotsman fallacy. If it's called "Agile" and that's how most companies practice it, then it IS "Agile".
Yeah, a fucking idiot that wants to keep his job. At many companies, actually taking the time off that you have earned is a one-way ticket to not being a "team player" and poor performance reviews. Vacation is optional here. You can get fired for taking vacation (because of poor performance reviews because you took vacation).
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
"Agile" is a term that is more or less defined, and using it improperly hurts our ability to communicate. There are two concepts here, Agile more or less based on the Agile manifesto, and Agile the buzzword. How do you propose to distinguish them? I'm a bit tired of Free-as-in-speech and Free-as-in-beer myself, although I don't have a better idea.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The No True Scotsman fallacy doesn't mean that technical terms (jargon) cannot have precise definitions at odds with their common use. It just means that you have to define your terms before you can meaningfully claim that something does or does not qualify. Claiming that someone is not a True Scotsman raises the question, "What attributes must one have to be considered a True Scotsman?". Until that question is properly answered, the claim that one is not a True Scotsman remains an unsupported assertion.
There is a widely-accepted document known as the Agile Manifesto which partially answers that question in the case of agile development. If a development methodology includes elements which are contrary to that Manifesto then it is unreasonable to consider it agile development, even if it is commonly referred to as such.
It's fine to disagree with someone else's choice of terms, but that does not automatically imply that they are committing the No True Scotsman fallacy so long as their terms are consistent and well-defined.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The problem is, if absolutely no one actually practices it the way the manifesto says, then the manifesto is irrelevant. No one's talking about some mythical thing that no one really does in the real world, they're complaining about how it's actually used in real life. It's like communism as described in Marx's writings versus how real communist countries actually act.
I worked like an absolute swordfighter in 2014: Up at 6AM, working in the morning over breakfast, working on the train, (first one in the office,) skipping lunch and pressing right through to quitting time, (last one in the office,) working on the train ride home, dinner, reading documentation in bed, and often waking up in the middle of the night to get some work done. After all, I needed to prove myself, and sharpen my skills. All the while, my boss was a total prick who openly hated me for not being able to instantly fulfill whatever fantasy he dreamed up. The developer at the desk next to me, whom he liked much more, had more experience than me, yet was given much easier tasks. He would stick up for me, telling our boss that the problems he was giving me were being handled by large teams of PHDs at other, larger companies. He became as fed up as I was, and we both quit. Now, I just turn around a few small gigs here and there, just covering my half of the rent and bills. I spend a lot less, and I sleep a lot more. I'm not stressed. I ride my bike most every morning. I work on personal projects. I paint. I'm much happier, if a bit more frugal by necessity.