Inside the World of Silicon Valley's 'Coasters' -- the Millionaire Engineers Who Get Paid Gobs of Money and Barely Work (businessinsider.com)

Business Insider has explored what it calls the "least-secret secret" in the Valley -- "resters and vesters," or "coasters" referring to engineers who get paid big bucks without doing too much work, waiting for their stock to vest. From the report: Engineers can wind up in "rest and vest" jobs in a variety of ways. Manny Medina, the CEO of fast-growing Seattle startup Outreach, has been on all sides of it. He briefly was a coaster himself, and says he saw how Microsoft used it to great effect when he worked for the software giant. He has also tried to lure some "rest and vest" engineers to come work for him at his startup. Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation. They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls. "My days began at that point at 11 and I took long lunches," he laughs. "They didn't want you to build anything else, because anything you built would be maintained by someone else. But you have to stand by while they bring people up to speed." Years later, he landed at Microsoft and says he saw how Microsoft used high-paying jobs strategically, both within its engineering ranks and with its R&D unit, Microsoft Research. [...] "You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model." At other companies it's less about defense and more about becoming indispensable. For instance, Facebook has a fairly hush bonus program called "discretionary equity" or "DE," said a former Facebook engineer who received it. "DE" is when the company hands an engineer a massive, extra chunk of restricted stock units, worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's a thank you for a job well done. It also helps keep the person from jumping ship because DE vests over time. These are bonus grants that are signed by top execs, sometimes even CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. "At Facebook the 'OGs' [Original Gangsters] we know got DE," this former Facebook engineer said. OGs refer to engineers who worked at the company before the IPO. "Their Facebook stock quadruples and they don't leave. They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days," this person said.

Comments

Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

I just can't do it. It's unfathomable. I don't blame the engineers, why wouldn't you do it if you could? But the corporate culture in America must be brought down. It's evil and must be stopped at all costs.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cayenne8]

I just can't do it. It's unfathomable. I don't blame the engineers, why wouldn't you do it if you could? But the corporate culture in America must be brought down. It's evil and must be stopped at all costs.

If you didn't value school growing up, and you are an adult and not able to give more than $7/hr value to an employer, well.......you reap what you sow.

Sorry, the world does not owe you anything.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

How is being born on the wrong side of the tracks, or the wrong color, or to parents without proper connections, 'reaping what you sow'? What exactly was sown? This is exactly the kind of arrogant, snobbish attitude that needs to be addressed.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[es330td]

It is very unfortunate this post was made by an Anonymous Coward. I would really like to know what alternate form of business operation they would propose to the existing corporate culture.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Please constrain your comments to the specifics of the post to which you are replying. The parent said, "If you didn't value school growing up". Now a person born a poor black child can do well in school. They can ignore the negative influences of the ghetto. It won't be easy. I wouldn't want to try, but it is possible (having work with individuals that did just that). Given that, what is your issue with the parent comment?

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cayenne8]

How is being born on the wrong side of the tracks, or the wrong color, or to parents without proper connections, 'reaping what you sow'?

There is no doubt that each of us gets a different starting block in life.

But that is life, it always has been.

If you start further back, it just means you have to try harder, and it is possible, you CAN see examples of this in life.

I've personally known people that started off with WAY less than I had, but they worked past poverty and neighborhood culture and became VERY successful.

Much more successful than myself.

I've also seen kids who have had natural smarts, and come from wealthy families, that ended up nowhere, poor and basically.....your $7/hr worker.

Yes, everyone gets a different starting block in life, be it wealth, family, physical and mental levels.....but it is up to the person to struggle and strive to make it through life.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anon-Admin]

WTF, I was born on the wrong side of the tracks and raised by a single mother who did not have "proper connections" and worked retail jobs her whole life.

Im well into the 6 figures because I learned, used my knowledge, and bring value to the companies I work for.

Personally, I think it is the racist democrats who constantly push the made up narrative about how the poor black kids can not get ahead in life because they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, are the wrong color, and have parents without proper connections.

Don't think it is a made up narrative? What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids, or arabic kids? Well they appear to be doing just fine.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cheesybagel]

It's still no way to have proper social cohesion. I see this a lot in California where a lot of people are rich but then you have crumbling infrastructure and a huge vagrant population. At least the weather is nice.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[JonnyCalcutta]

So really your philosophy is to punish people for choices made when they were children? Or in many cases, for the conditions that they lived under when they were children?

I always find it a strange position, because if the world doesn't owe people anything, then you are not owed what you have. You are happy to accept societies help in making sure you hang onto your un-owed wealth though.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[__aaclcg7560]

I see this a lot in the United States where a lot of people are rich but then you have crumbling infrastructure and a huge vagrant population.

FTFY - It's just not a California problem.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

>If you start further back, it just means you have to try harder, and it is possible, you CAN see examples of this in life.
Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, there you go again with the poor oppressed coloreds bullshit. Being born in a third world country is a major setback; being born black in the USA isn't - you just want to feed your victim complex so you can feel better about being an underachiever (or about your white guilt, depending on your case).

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was black with the same high school GPA and ACT score, I would have gotten a free ride to any school I wanted. If I was a black female, probably a parade as well.

Now it would have been harder for me to do so if I lived in a crack house, but minorities who try to succeed will get every benefit in the world. ...unless you're Asian, because too many Asians have succeeded, so they actullay get less benefits than white people.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see any relationship between both.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[computational super]

People like OP honestly believe that a revolution is coming (and truth be told, they might be right, I'm willing give it a 50/50 chance these days). They also believe (painfully mistakenly) that if the revolution does come, that they will be spared because they gave a thought to the "poor, downtrodden, working classes" back before the shooting began. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), if Antifa gets some actual political traction and starts going door to door carrying out executions, they're not going to pay nearly as much attention to political affiliation as they will to what sort of car you drive. Zuck thinks he's safe because he supported Hillary. He'll be the first one swinging from a lamppost if the Marxists succeed.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I think it is the racist democrats who constantly push the made up narrative about how the poor black kids can not get ahead in life because they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, are the wrong color, and have parents without proper connections.

Don't think it is a made up narrative? What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids, or arabic kids? Well they appear to be doing just fine.

I've seen poor inner city and poor rural Appalachia (my family comes from the East Tennessee mountains). The irony is the poor inner city actually have more opportunity for growth and "escape" because that's where most of the programs are targeted. So at least they actually have a chance at help thanks to the "racist democrats". At this point, the only choice rural Appalachia poor have is to cook meth. You'd think the conservatives would throw their own people a bone.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the unlucky sod

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[0100010001010011]

Your statement ignores the statistics of reality. My wife and I were raised in similar situations to you and now made it to the 1%, but we realize we are a statistical anomaly.

Your upper middle class family that has a kid caught with drugs or any of the other dozen stupid things kids do can afford a good lawyer and a clean record. They can afford the private tutor to make sure their kids gets extra special attention. They can afford foods that promote brain development, and compared to some people, food all together.

You, like my wife, probably had the Single Mother who actually cared. Some kids aren't as fortunate.

What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids,

You mean the one in a million (almost literally) that have the opportunity to test well enough to go somewhere? How many 'average' Chinese and Indian kids will never travel to the US to get an advanced degree because they didn't place in the top 0.1%? The statistical likely hood of some average Joe from an upper middle class family landing in these positions is considerably higher than a random person near the poverty line of any background.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Opportunist]

You really want to claim that this is their own doing and not mostly pure luck? For real?

Most of those that "make it big" owe more to random chance and being lucky than any of the "hard work" they put in. Of course it requires you to take an opportunity when it comes, no doubt about this, but saying that people who ain't rich just are lazy bums is one of the worst insults possible when their biggest fault is that they simply never had the lucky opportunity cross their way.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Opportunist]

Just outta curiosity, do the Marxists have to succeed to see him swing?

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[joh]

It won't be the Marxists. It will be the National Socialists, and if you happen to be non-white your political affiliation won't matter anyway.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[gfxguy]

I disagree, but there's something in between what you guys are arguing about. A lot of people who were born "on the wrong side of the tracks" end up doing really well both because they overcame the bad influences of their peers AND because they were raised by someone who valued hard work and education and encouraged the child to do well in school. It's almost entirely parenting.

When you get up into the middle and upper classes, the children can generally see hard work paying off, both in their guardians and elsewhere in their neighborhoods. People growing up in the ghetto don't get that. It could be a long discussion when you get to a lot of the finer points, but people are a product of both their nature and their nurture (how much influence the latter has depends on the former - some people are more easily influenced).

I don't know where I'd be if I wasn't raised in a middle class neighborhood, but if I was surrounded by bad influences and parents who didn't care, I'm certain I'd be a lot less well off. But you are a lot more likely to succeed if you are a hard worker (even more than if you are just "naturally" smart), but it is definitely luck to be born into an environment that actually encourages hard work and education.

Some people still luck into great jobs, and some exceptional people can't seem to catch a break. But here's the thing - graduating high school is the single biggest indicator of success in the future (in the U.S.), but if you live in an impoverished area and are not willing to move to where jobs are, you're relegating yourself to a pretty poor life, in general.

And let's be realistic in this discussion - we're not talking about Zuckerberg or Gates success, we're talking about being able to support yourself and your family with a decent lifestyle. That's the American dream was - only lately has it become being ostentatiously wealthy.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Constrain to the specifics because the parent relied on a typical conservative cliche that doesn't even really give specifics? How about the specifics of all the institutional racism? How is that for taking issue with the parent comment?

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[JohnFen]

Our economic system requires that a certain percentage of people earn subsistence-level wages. Even if the entire population were highly educated and highly motivated, there would still be a not insignificant number of people making the least amount of money that the law will allow.

To say that a person's income is entirely up to them is such an extreme oversimplification as to border on a lie.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[gfxguy]

I agree, but you're living proof that it's not how wealthy you were growing up, it's how your guardians raised you. You saw your mother working very hard to support you, and she probably spent a lot of effort encouraging you to work hard and do well in school (often, in these cases, the guardian(s) will point to themselves and warn that you don't want to turn out like them - working very hard for very little - so you need to succeed in school). Often a single parent will also constantly warn of the mistake they made that caused them to be a single parent, because it's more often than not a stupid mistake and not an "act of god" that made it that way.

The biggest influence is parents/guardians - if that guardian is sitting back collecting welfare and not giving a crap about the children they are raising, well, guess what? That mentality gets passed down to the kids. You can grow up in a really crappy area, where schools suck, and your peers and the prevailing attitude is that school and hard work is for suckers, but if you have great people raising you then you can overcome that environment.

What I can say from your story is that your mom is a phenomenal person, and you should be very grateful to have had her as the one raising you.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[dunkelfalke]

From my experience, the people who smirk and say that life is inherently unfair are usualy the assholes who make the life unfair in first place.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[skids]

The complaint is really that the economy has artificially low valuations for manual labor of the type humans do, and does not need to devolve into a self-righteous weenie-measuring contest.

I don't know anyone who argues that putting in the time to train up should not be rewarded, but in so doing we seem to have spawned a class of individuals who think everything everyone else does in the GED sector of the labor force is completely worthless and without merit. They fail to see that it is the humility of these people who clean their toilets and make their sandwiches which enables them to excel in their fields. These people don't go to work with the motivation that they can "do great things"... they don't get any of that ego-nourishing fluff. But they put their backs into it anyway, often breaking their bodies over the long term in ways much worse than carpel tunnel syndrome or the back problems from sitting all day.

In many cases these people are looking to better themselves and escape from these thankless occupations, but are kept in their place by the perpetual catch-22 which is capitalism's calling card: you don't have enough resources to get enough resources to improve your life.

Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to just move the goal posts of the discussion for some reason ?

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron to confuse unicorn billionaires and average wealth / income.

Those that are intelligent, work hard, and responsible have a much higher income across the board. No luck required

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

You could be the smartest person in the world and work really hard and you won't have the wealth of Gates, Buffett, Zuck, etc. There is always some luck involved, having the right idea or making the right moves at the right time.

Now, for general wealth, making 6 figures a year, that's obtainable for pretty much anyone.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But the bottom 50% of people have set the bar pretty low. It's quite reasonable for us to be critical of those who are unwilling to raise themselves above that.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Opportunist]

Please don't tell me you think that Gates or Zuckerberg made their money with hard work and intelligence with zero luck required.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[unixisc]

I just can't do it. It's unfathomable. I don't blame the engineers, why wouldn't you do it if you could? But the corporate culture in America must be brought down. It's evil and must be stopped at all costs.

Obviously b'cos every job is indistinguishable from every other job

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cayenne8]

A lot of people who were born "on the wrong side of the tracks" end up doing really well both because they overcame the bad influences of their peers AND because they were raised by someone who valued hard work and education and encouraged the child to do well in school. It's almost entirely parenting.

People growing up in the ghetto don't get that. It could be a long discussion when you get to a lot of the finer points, but people are a product of both their nature and their nurture (how much influence the latter has depends on the former - some people are more easily influenced).

The thing is...this is something you just cannot legislate your way out off....

This will take major change within the communities themselves.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[LynnwoodRooster]

It's because, at least in CA, we like to spend tens of billions on high speed rail to nowhere, and billions of dollars on illegal immigrants, and then ignore the infrastructure that would actually benefit ALL citizens of CA...

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cayenne8]

You mean the one in a million (almost literally) that have the opportunity to test well enough to go somewhere? How many 'average' Chinese and Indian kids will never travel to the US to get an advanced degree because they didn't place in the top 0.1%?

I believe the OP was referring to poor Chinese and Indian kids that are already IN the US...

His point being, you don't seen other minorities, that may be poor having the same problems the black kids are having.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you didn't value school growing up, and you are an adult and not able to give more than $7/hr value to an employer, well.......you reap what you sow."

Now, see, where this is wrong is that plenty of jobs and people easily deliver that value and then some. What they don't deliver is 200% more value for the owner to leech off of because owner. If you want to run your mouth off about who the world does not owe, try starting there.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

"The biggest influence is parents/guardians"
Yea... it is.. HOW MUCH FUCKING MONEY THEY HAVE!!!!!
http://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-success-income-inequality-2014-1
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/3088-american-dream-wealthy-parents.html

" You can grow up in a really crappy area, where schools suck, and your peers and the prevailing attitude is that school and hard work is for suckers, but if you have great people raising you then you can overcome that environment."

Yea' and you can also be an astronaut or win the lottery... But YOU won't. 99.999% of people wont.

That's the point.
It does not matter how many bootstraps you pull.. You can pull all the bootstraps in the world.
If you were not born rich you probably won't die rich..
If you were born poor you have a 90% chance of dying poor.
https://wilsonquarterly.com/stories/why-rich-kids-become-rich-adults-and-poor-kids-become-poor-adults/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-kids-stay-rich-poor-kids-stay-poor/

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely yes people should have to LIVE WITH THE LIFE THEY HAVE LIVED.

I spent my youth and college years bettering myself. Working the summers for experience and studying when not working. Then I immediately transitioned to a full time job and worked my ass off. You then expect me to feel sorry for someone who spent that time partying, having a grand time, taking copious mini-vacations and partying on weeknights because their job doesn't require much of them. Then they want to complain about the pitfalls of living that lifestyle and expect the government to put them on par with me once they figured out they don't want to live with the consequences. Fuck that.

I didn't/don't get to "call in sick" (as in fake sick), I don't get to take random thursday/fridays off with little notice to make short vacations or just hang with friends. I spent summers and lots of free time to be where I am today and to take that away from me because It was in a time past is bullshit. Everyone wants to be forgiven for past mistakes and look forward to a bright future but the fact is the past matters. I am NOT OWED what I have but I have earned peoples FUTURE trust and respect because of my PAST performance and the skills I possess. If you don't have a positive past with tons of knowledge and smarts then why should people treat you as if you have things you don't have. I am not "owed" anything. If no one wants what I have worked to build - I get screwed. Tons of

These asshole minimum wage workers that complain have no fucking clue what it is like to have real responsibility. In another life I would trade a blue collar "livin' the life" to what I have now even though I am making 5x as much. Having free time can save you a shit ton of money too... home cooked tenderloin steak $5-10, restaurant tenderloin steak $50 - $100+. I only make 5x as much and after taxes, probably 4x as much so having free time can actually allow me to eat better for less money.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Said

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[beelsebob]

That kind of bullshit is exactly what's wrong with America.

"If you didn't make good decisions when you were at an age where your brain is not developed, and everyone makes shit decisions all the time, then you're fucked" is just not an acceptable statement. Especially this applies when most of the people making those bad decisions are living in a home where their parents just don't give a shit, and never point out to them that school actually matters (or anything else for that matter). They're often living in a home where they don't even actually have a real bed, and hence doing this on shitty amounts of sleep. They're often doing it in a home where there's a very real chance that they'll get the shit beaten out of them, or have to witness the shit getting beaten out of someone they care about. They're often doing it in a home where there's a good chance that they won't eat.

The level of stress that the poor are under is huge, expecting a 12 year old, with an undeveloped brain to make a good decision that affects them for the rest of their life is ridiculous. Then telling them "well, you made your bed, lie in it" and giving them no assistance is even more so.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. No Marxist revolutions ever happened right? It was just the will of the people as a reaction to the Fascists.

Fucking idiot. Pick up a goddamn history book that wasn't written by some left wing lunatic.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cordovaCon83]

“Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" -- Seneca

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Stopped reading when you made it political and starting bashing. Rip

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear! A well thought out and logical rebuttal to the Ayn Rand I Got Mine So Fuck You crowd.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Kokuyo]

While I am pretty proud that Slashdot marked this Troll, I'd like to add a thought:

The world doesn't owe me anything is not wrong.

However, stating it like that kinda implies that you think that I owe the world something.

And that is just false. I owe none of you people anything. There is a, usually, unspoken contract between me and the rest of you goombas that we'll all flourish more if we specialize and use our skillsets as efficiently as possible and then trade these skills to let others provide us efficiently with services their good at providing.

The fact that I don't go around murdering and robbing whomever I please has two reasons and it's an either/or relationship: One, I am a decent person. I am this because of a mix of decent upbringing and my character. The upbringing depends on how many goombas basically decided to walk over my parents while complaining about uneven ground.
The second one is the threat of violence and incarceration.

As we know, the latter is a kinda feeble attempt and works mostly on the nice people.

So TL;DR, the fact that I go earning a living instead of clobbering whomever I deem weaker than myself is the fact that my parents had the will, the ability and the energy to teach me empathy. Take that away from people and Trump's America is basically what you get.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Gr8Apes]

Luck is a huge aspect of success, across the board. That doesn't mean hard work didn't go into it, but there's plenty of folks that are both smart and worked hard with very similar products where the lucky one won (Zuckerberg would be exhibit #1 there, Brin and Page #2)

And I would argue that getting into a major college and finishing at least 2 years successfully is more of an indicator of success than finishing high school, which is only an indicator that you will more likely wind up above the poverty level. And that certainly isn't an indication of success by any measure.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

And trillions on bailing out bankers.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[imgod2u]

That doesn't mean governments (or private organizations) can't lend a hand. Daycare, for instance, can be invaluable to parents struggling with multiple jobs. I am all against hard-handed legislative hammers and think the "war on poverty" has mostly been a waste of time and money. But people tend to take it too far where any government action, even mostly positive ones like subsidizing daycare or giving health insurance to poor children, are cried out as "government intervention bad!!!!".

Look how they defunded SNAP recently....

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[computational super]

history book that wasn't written by some left wing lunatic.

Good luck finding one of those...

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[imgod2u]

CA is a unique problem in that they didn't get ahead of the housing crunch. This in turn caused cost-of-living to increase significantly. This caused the governments to promise all sorts of perks and pay for employees and contractors. Which causes inflated costs of anything government-run (like infrastructure). That in turn means there's not enough funding for what should be basic, cheap services like roads.

This is the basic inflation cycle. Labor costs track cost of living when there is demand for semi-skilled labor but not enough supply.

A few ways out would be:
1. Get cost of living down by flooding the market with housing.
2. Get cheap semi-skilled labor (perhaps from sources outside CA, outside the US even? People who are willing to work harder for less).

Neither are popular. NIMBY's hate #1. Liberals and conservatives alike hate #2 (for different reasons).

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[imgod2u]

Other minority communities don't tend to have a culture of poor education and crime. Which, let's be real, is part of the poor black (and poor white in the south) communities.

Both of those could probably use some injection of cultural intermixing with more successful communities. Especially the southern rural whites. They're basically on a death depression spiral right now.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[gfxguy]

Your problem is defining "success" as being "rich" instead of being able to support yourself and your family. The "American" dream was not be ostentatiously wealthy, it used to be to be able to support your family.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok white dude.

This is called privilege: it doesn't affect you directly so you don't give a fuck.

The world is a reflection of our choices. You giving up and checking out contributes to this cycle.

It doesn't have to be this way, but when people like you who have zero empathy check out, then it ends up the status quo.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Youn ever grew up in the ghetto so how would you know? You never grew up in a single parent home.You never grew up having cancer (the worst thing of them all). Oh, your ideology talking.Screw off

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[thinkwaitfast]

They are the ones that label you as a troll also.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[thinkwaitfast]

I've lived in California and was recently back for a few weeks and did not see any crumbling infrastructure.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone reading this had a lucky break that routed you from a worse life. Most, several. Zero "earning", "deserved", or "bootstraps" involved.

Myself included. I take pride in my creations, not my fucking circumstances.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Another arrogant twat born on third thinking he hit a triple.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[apoc.famine]

if you live in an impoverished area and are not willing to move to where jobs are, you're relegating yourself to a pretty poor life, in general.

Our families are still unhappy that my wife and I moved far from them, but we make tons more than them, even taking into account cost of living. During the last recession jobs in our respective fields bumped all the way up to 4% unemployment in our area. We're back down to critical shortages of people in our fields now, where both of us could have another job within a month or so, should we find we need to change.
 
Jobs that don't exist where we grew up are paying us piles of money and we have an embarrassing number to choose from. I have no idea what we'd be doing back where we grew up, but it would probably suck, not pay a lot, and not come with meaningful benefits. A lot of people are amazed that we just left our families behind and moved, but I can't seeing not doing that, if there is so much opportunity elsewhere. We love our families, but if they want to live in the middle of nowhere in dying small towns, they're going to have to live there without us. Life is too short to spend it making bad choices because you're sentimental about your childhood.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Drive down wages

Brilliant fucking solution.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[imgod2u]

I don't know that the valuation is artificially low. I think, in this particular case, the market is pretty efficient at pricing out the relative value of cleaning toilets vs technical work.

The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not. If one person does work that sells to the whole world and the second person does something that's valuable to maybe 10 people in the building, the valuations for the former vs the latter is obviously going to be really off.

Of course, the self-righteous can always come up with some conclusion of "you don't really deserve that!". People on all sides think that, rich or poor. But that ignores the need for practical, not-subjective ways to improve people's lives.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Which, let's be real, is part of the poor black (and poor white in the south) communities.

Said another way would label you as racist.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoting Republican Jesus. Classic.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[thinkwaitfast]

Your problem is defining "success" as being "rich" ...

This idea is pervasive on /. and other sites. I've achieved great comfort and freedom over the last decade with very minimal money. I don't live in NYC, have a car valued over $1000, a cell phone or new clothes,but I'm currently supporting 4 other adults and a child with a nice warm safe house, good food and a lot of toys.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people are amazed that we just left our families behind and moved

Yes, people think that you are a terrible person because you have actively chosen to value money and spending time at a job more than your own family.

Those you left behind might not judge you too badly, but children, should you have any, never forgive once they are old enough to understand.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[jeff4747]

I spent my youth and college years bettering myself. Working the summers for experience and studying when not working. Then I immediately transitioned to a full time job and worked my ass off. You then expect me to feel sorry for someone who spent that time partying, having a grand time, taking copious mini-vacations and partying on weeknights because their job doesn't require much of them

No, we expect you to "feel sorry for" the people who also spent their youth and college years bettering themselves, but did not have your luck.

Because those people vastly outnumber the ones like you who did get lucky.

Want an example? My career as a software engineer exists because I graduated college near the beginning of the dot-com boom with a degree that isn't directly related to computers or software (still a science discipline though). Companies were desperate enough that they gave me a shot. By the time the dot-com bust happened, I had amassed enough experience for my degree to not matter much.

If I had been born 5 or so years later, I would have graduated into the bust. And that would have crippled my ability to start my career, most likely to the point where it could not have happened - it's not like I could afford to go get a second degree in CS and still eat.

That difference has nothing to do with working hard. It is luck. And I'm absolutely sure delving into your history you could find examples where your current situation is dependent on a roll of the dice. That friend/acquaintance who gave you an internship or other start. The cop who let you off with a warning instead of planting evidence. That time a close relative did not get sick and need you. And so on.

The Calvinism behind the philosophy of the US, where working hard means you will succeed, has a giant flaw: It ignores luck. Largely because acknowledging the affect of luck requires admitting that it's not all about hard work. Sometimes the hard workers get screwed. And sometimes the successful are handed their success with minimal effort.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

AC only cuz I'z been moddin'

Anyway. I was born into an upper-middle class white household in the midwest. Dad was a small biz owner, like his father and grandfather before him. He chose to sell musical instruments after the Army rather than sell groceries and butcher fresh meats. Mom was a data center operator for a tractor/farm implement company. Unfortunately, they passed away when I was young (both before I finished middle school), the family I went to live with were not great people and threw me out on the street at 14.

Faced with my new reality, there were choices to make. Big choices. My array of friends ranged everywhere from pot & coke heads to kids just trying to make it through school. My first need was shelter, and thankfully a recently divorced dad of one of my good friends decided to let me crash on the couch. I stayed there for almost a year, started picking up every hour at work I could (I had started working at 13) and pitched in to help pay the bills. From here it was a steady cycle of working hard and looking for the next step up the proverbial ladder. I finished high school, bought my first house at 20 years old, moved across the country, etc. Today I'm a management level executive with a wonderful family, nice things, and plenty of money.

One point though, my focus was never on money and still isn't. My goals are always personal accomplishments; new skills, new experiences, new ways of looking at a problem I'm working on, etc. If you improve yourself, you improve your situation, you improve your focus and money is a natural byproduct. I learned VERY quickly your destiny is what YOU make it. If you have even the thought of "can't ... because" in your head, you're going to FAIL. Change that to "haven't yet" and get to making plans on how to accomplish what you want, not just accept what you're struggling with. Blaming the condition of your life on ANYTHING but your own inaction? Foolish.

So many people look "up" to these CEOs and celebrities like they're somehow better specimens, and can do things that are simply unattainable by the "average" person. Bullshit. Every one of them is an average person who, in their own circumstances, decided to take a new path. Sometimes it pays off, most of the time it won't, but you will never know if you do NOTHING.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Darinbob]

You realize everyone's a little bit racist, right? Saying "racist Democrats", which sort of implying that Republicans are not, is disengenuous. Make one side look good and the other side look bad. Partisanship is the biggest evil in the world now. If you had a good point to make you lost it by being political. You could have just said "I think it is the racists who constantly..."

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[GameboyRMH]

What if the "least amount of money that the law will allow" were raised to well above subsistence level, causing top-end incomes to be pulled down to afford minimum wage workers? I wonder whether it would fix this hellworld or cause this awful economic system to collapse.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[GameboyRMH]

Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."

Replace the cherry with some plastic figures and the ice cream sundae with a wedding cake fit for royalty, and you have an excellent analogy for why CEOs are paid such ridiculous amounts.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[orgelspieler]

these people who clean their toilets and make their sandwiches

Hope it's not the same dude, or that at least he knows to wash his hands between the two tasks.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[orgelspieler]

WTF? You're a troll, but the other guy is at a 4? Who are they giving mod points to these days?!

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[thinkwaitfast]

Baumol's cost disease

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Money is not a natural byproduct of personal accomplishment. I have been developing open source software for 20 years. I have accomplished plenty, and I improve myself constantly. Not only has my work earned me nothing, I have no job and no prospects. But shit, dude, I got great skills. Where's my natural byproduct money, you fucking liar?

You're a fucking hypocrite, and your bullshit is typical of the poor hustler mentality. Skills pay off for you because you only pursue skills which you can use to scam your way into shittons of money. You say money was never your goal; YOU ARE A LIAR.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Wats the other difference between parent and grandparent? Personality. I wouldn't hire you either with that attitude.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[psycho12345]

"1. Get cost of living down by flooding the market with housing."

Will not happen because CA voters locked down a ton of the housing market with Proposition 13, which in effect punishes you for moving around, and strongly incentivizes not to sell. And ironically, this was brought about by the smallest government policies you can imagine, a combination of ballot propositions (so direct democracy, no government involved in passing it at all) and most city councils voting down construction projects (NIMBY ftw!).

That's the sad part, it will take big government to fix this, because the local government has every incentive to NOT build anything.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think it is a made up narrative? What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids, or arabic kids? Well they appear to be doing just fine.

they're not getting shot by police or sent to prison for for breathing.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

"When you get up into the middle and upper classes, the children can generally see hard work paying off, both in their guardians and elsewhere in their neighborhoods. People growing up in the ghetto don't get that."

That is called culture. If you say culture plays a role in poverty you are a racist. You are only allowed to blame outside forces. I understand that you are trying your best to spin this as an outside force per your liberal bias, but this problem has to be solved by the comunity in question; therfore you are implicitly blaming the victim.

It is liberal logic rule number one: no one playing the victim shall be held responsible for anything they do or fail to don't do, which would logically affect their victim status.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

*sundae

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read the summary? These people are paid way more than $7/hr. It looks like a slam-dunk open-and-shut case of businesses trivially obeying the law without even having to try. These people and minimum wage law are easy to reconcile.

Not that I'm advocating for minimum wage laws, but if you're thinking of using these people (of all the choices you have, why did you pick them?!) as poster boys for minimum wage being egregious, you're pretty much going to with the weakest-possible example and probably aren't going to find much sympathy from anyone.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why unskilled smooth talking scam artists get paid millions to sit on their asses and do nothing: personality. Without a smarmy scumbag winning personality, don't even bother accumulating knowledge and skills, because you will end up in the gutter, no matter what you do.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[apoc.famine]

Hilarious, AC. Spoken like someone who has never left suburbia or the city and spent time in one of the many small dying towns in the US. Love my family, and I love going back to visit, but it's a choice between managing a small business at $25k/year with no benefits vs actually having a solid retirement fund, money to travel, the ability to own a home, and knowledge that if my employer dries up, I'll have plenty of jobs to choose from. Out in the sticks, when you lose your job it's devastating, and you might not get another one for a long time. Around here it's an inconvenience to have to evaluate potential employers to figure out which one will be best to work at.
 
When I go back and see the family houses that have fallen into disrepair, with trailers parked out front, it makes me a little sick. But that's what the average family is able to scrape together who live there. And if I was living there, I'd likely be doing something similar too. There's just no money to be made in large parts of the US.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

interesting that the lucky folks usually are the ones who have been working on preparing for so long.
'luck is where opportunity and preparedness meet.'

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

The zip code you are born in is the single greatest predictor of material wealth/success in the US.

Think about that. And realize that I am not claiming to anchor baby in 90210 to perpetuate that.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

But quite often the "luck" is something that happens because you're in the right place at the right time because you worked hard in the first place to get to the right place at the right time. I've never met anyone who just sat at home and got a lucky call out of the blue with an offer for a 6 figure job. I've known a number of people who have gotten such a call but all of them had a track record in their field and their name got around.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[tsqr]

Will not happen because CA voters locked down a ton of the housing market with Proposition 13, which in effect punishes you for moving around, and strongly incentivizes not to sell.

Prop 13 incentivizes people who have owned their home for a long time not to sell. Otherwise, it's not that significant unless you're in a bubble. Upwardly mobile homeowners tend to trade up every 5 - 7 years.

The lack of available housing in California is more likely due to restrictions on development because ENVIRONMENT, especially in coastal urban areas where the good jobs are. There have been several attempts to overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act to ease restrictions on development, but they always run into resistance from entrenched environmental, labor and business interests.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[fluffernutter]

I'm moving to a place with much less population, many trees, brooks everywhere, a 2 acre lot and a house double the size for the same price. I haven't made any more money but i consider it a vast improvement to my families quality of life. So tired of living in a house shoehorned into a postage stamp lot surrounded in concrete.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[gfxguy]

Happiness is success. Having a gold plated Hummer H2 is not. Congratulations on your success.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[ranton]

Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.

Says the unlucky sod

Also says this very lucky sod. I have made numerous mistakes in my life, including flunking out of college for not attending classes and was still working as an assistant manager at KFC at the age of 24. I pulled my life back together in my late 20's and made a $150k salary by the age of 35 as a software engineer living in a Midwest suburb. Ultimately my own internal motivation pulled me out of my poor circumstances, but it would be ignorant of me to think the advantages of my birth weren't a significant enabler of my success.

The biggest factor is that while most kids get a desire to play/watch sports or hang out with friends from their parents, I got a love of learning from mine. They may not have done a good job of imparting respect for formal education, but they did make sure I knew the value of being educated. I was bought two different encyclopedia sets during my childhood (World Book and then Britannica), was taken to the library weekly, was bought Math textbooks when the speed of education in grade school frustrated me, and was bought programming books when I took an interest there. I had multiple computers as gifts before I was old enough to build my own, and was never significantly punished for taking apart family computers / VCRs / etc just to learn how they worked.

I was also born smart. There is an argument that my reading made me smarter, but overall I have probably had an easier path in life not through hard work but because of genetics. Even if it was my early reading which made me smarter, I enjoyed it so I still don't think I deserve much more credit than another kid who spent his time playing sports. It's not like I felt I was preparing myself for a future career; I just liked reading. That almost certainly has more to do with my environment or genetics than my own free will. Being smart has made many parts of my education and career far easier than most other people. It's not something I have necessarily earned but I certainly reap the rewards.

I also look like both a software engineer without being over the top "nerdy". I can easily just repeat the ideas of my female / minority coworkers during meetings and be given credit for them because I "look" more like someone who should know this stuff. When I explain my 20's to my peers I am more likely to be considered a Bill Gates type who didn't need college than a thug with no respect for authority.

I still had to work hard to get where I am, but no where near as hard as most people would have to if they made similar decisions in life. I am very gracious for the advantages I have been given, and for the opportunities I will be able to give my daughters. I just hope I will not raise them to be ignorant enough to deny their white upper middle class privilege.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[fluffernutter]

The thing is, I have a lot of side development projects on the go. Living in a place where we are relaxed instead of running around all the time and commuting to work will give me more time and energy for these projects.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimum wage earning parents means that the kids are POOR.
The kids will remain poor; any chances they have to go to school or start a business will be much harder because they are POOR.

RICH people who have never wondered where the next meal comes from or if they will have a place to sleep at night love to say that 'money does not buy happiness', or that 'wealth and success are not the same thing'.

And they are not...AFTER you are secure enough to survive and spend money on risks that might have a reward.. Like starting a business, or spending time you could be working and making money to eat on education instead.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[skids]

The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not.

Yes, it does, as it is kinda hard for the techies to do their great globally-effective job while holding it in for fear of having to use the filthy can.

My point is all of us who have the privilege to work in fields where lots of people rely on us are in turn relying on other more humble people. We should be grateful for that and afford them the respect and dignity they deserve.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cayenne8]

A lot of people are amazed that we just left our families behind and moved,

What's the deal with this??

Is this something new where kids are afraid to move away from their parents/relatives when the become adults?

I live in a different state than ANY of my relatives....I moved away when I went to college, boomeranged back a couple of short times, and then finally out totally away from everyone.

I go back to visit from time to time, but really....is there something that has happened the last generation where kids are too afraid of something to go out on their own and move and live in different places?

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

They fail to see that it is the humility of these people who clean their toilets and make their sandwiches which enables them to excel in their fields. These people don't go to work with the motivation that they can "do great things"... they don't get any of that ego-nourishing fluff. But they put their backs into it anyway, often breaking their bodies over the long term in ways much worse than carpel tunnel syndrome or the back problems from sitting all day.

I bet a lot of them have children. It's pretty tough to psych yourself to that level without that kind of sense of responsibility.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[drinkypoo]

A strong work ethic ain't just something you're born with, either. It's taught. It can possibly be taught at any age, but people who have been taught that their hard work will not be rewarded can't be blamed for not wanting to work hard. For every person who worked hard and became financially successful, there's ten people who worked just as hard if not harder, and didn't.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[drinkypoo]

Is this something new where kids are afraid to move away from their parents/relatives when the become adults?

No, it's something old about when unemployment is high and there's no jobs available, kids can't afford to move out. It's still not socially acceptable for a young man to let a young woman pay his rent, so most of the youngsters staying at home are boys.

I moved out of the house when I was fifteen, but I had computer skills and the dot-com bubble was forming. That was a position of privilege. Without it, I would have been stuck at home with my emotionally abusive mother, or living on the streets and just trying to stay alive and whole.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Antifa gets some actual political traction and starts going door to door carrying out executions

You're despicable. You know that this will never happen, you know that group has no actual power, but you speak of it as if it could actually go somewhere. You're using it as a boogeyman excuse to marginalize people who disagree with you.

Antifa has no power, just like III% is a bunch of limp dicks. Both groups think they can retweet their way to the revolution. They will make a bunch of social media posts and some autistic thug from either group might shoot at a door in a pizzeria and make the news, but that'll be it.

Instead of talking about these pretend groups with all the power of a dry fart, focus on talking about the people who are actually in power right now.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[JohnFen]

This.

It's one of my pet peeves when people use the word "successful" as a synonym for "wealthy". They are two different things.

You are successful if you've achieved your goals. If those goals are to accumulate wealth, then being wealthy is being successful for you.

However, most people don't have "get rich" as their goal, so they can be successful without it.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Xyrus]

This is very much true. The "American Dream" has been little more than idealistic propaganda for quite some time. The hard work == success mantra is almost complete bullshit. Without luck to get your ass into a place where it is even possible to succeed, you can be holding down three jobs and you still won't go anywhere.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[0100010001010011]

Do rural poor whites count as a minority? Because you see the exact same issues you see with the black community. The reason you probably haven't seen it yet in the Chinese and Indian communities is that a majority of them 2nd or 3rd generation.

And while you talk about 'whites' as a monolithic group the descendants of Brits were saying the same thing about the Irish, Italians and Germans in the US when those demographics started to arrive here. They were pushed into their own communities (A college friend grew up deep in Chicago's polish neighborhoods) and then blamed issues on their ancestry.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Kids don't feel that strongly about relatives they hardly ever see. They care much note about that fog, video games and their friends.

Re: Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[gfxguy]

Actually, I'm not a neo-lib at all, so I don't know where that came from. I am exactly arguing what you are arguing. But what I am saying is it's not some kid's fault (and that it IS a matter of some luck) when that child is born into a loser family that raises them to play the victim instead of work hard. But I am also saying that there are parents, even in the ghetto, that encourage their kids to succeed and make it out of the ghetto - that the single biggest influence is the parents/guardians.

It IS easier to "succeed," or "live the American dream," which I believe is to be able to support yourself and family and live a comfortable life (not live some ostentatiously lavish rich lifestyle), it's easier when you are born into that lifestyle, where your parent(s) or guardian(s) work hard and provide for their family, and encourage those they are raising to do the same. It's far more difficult (but certainly nowhere near impossible) for people born in the ghetto to achieve that lifestyle. And it all boils down to the parents. Unless you're one of those nutjobs that believes you choose your family, you must admit it's a matter of "luck" (good ro bad) who your parents are.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[gfxguy]

No - you take what I said too far. Money can't buy happiness, but having enough of it can alleviate the worries of whether or not you can put food on the table for your families. It was a study a while back that showed people making $75k/year or more were, in fact, happier (on average) because of it. But when people say money can't buy happiness they mean that possessions are not what makes you truly happy - a big screen TV might give you some temporary elation, but it's not true happiness. Having a Telsa instead of a Prius might make you feel superior, but it doesn't give you true happiness. Money can buy sex, but it can't buy love or friendship. I defined success as being able to support yourself and your family - being able to provide for your family is something that brings happiness. Education and working hard are your best chance to attain that.

So wealth - yes, but the latter day neo-libs claim the "American Dream" is unattainable anymore - but only because they've redefined it as being ostentatiously wealthy. Blame "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" if you want - but people are too preoccupied with what other people have, and have decided (wrongly) that in order to be "happy," they must have more.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Miamicanes]

It's not "to nowhere" -- it's the new, high-speed middle segment of a route with existing tracks at both ends.

Long before CAHSR starts to officially run its OWN trains, Amtrak will be able to put the new tracks to good use. Once the first segment through the Central Valley is done (around 2019), it'll let Amtrak shave about 2-3 hours from their LA-Oakland travel time (via the San Joaquin train). Once the second segment (to a point somewhere around Merced) is done, it'll reduce Amtrak's LA-Oakland travel time to a semi-tolerable 5-6 hours.

It's no different than how I-4 was built in Florida. When the first segment of I-4 opened (between... Plant City and Lakeland...), people angrily called it a "boondoggle" and a "freeway to nowhere", even though it was common knowledge that FDOT already had plans to build it all the way from Daytona Beach through Orlando & Tampa to St. Petersburg (the St. Pete segment is now part of I-275). It didn't matter. People bitched about it anyway, just like people are bitching about California HSR now.

50 years from now, the fight over CalHSR is going to seem as absurd & silly as the fights over I-4 and the Florida Turnpike were back in the 50s and 60s.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[JonnyCalcutta]

What about all the people who don't match your imaginary blue collar party guy? Does it make it easier to look down on them if you imagine they are all blowing their limited cash on parties, holidays and hanging with friends on a work day?

I would say well done for working your way up, but it seems to have just left you bitter.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[computational super]

Intelligent people.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[cayenne8]

"If you didn't make good decisions when you were at an age where your brain is not developed, and everyone makes shit decisions all the time, then you're fucked" is just not an acceptable statement. Especially this applies when most of the people making those bad decisions are living in a home where their parents just don't give a shit, and never point out to them that school actually matters (or anything else for that matter).

It doesn't mean you are necessarily fucked, but you DO have a lot of road to catch up on.

If you don't get it early, then you will need to work twice as hard AND sacrifice....to make up for lost time, but you still can.

You may need to defer getting married and especially NOT have kids...till you can afford to educate and get yourself in a position to have a real job that does earn > $7/hr and can support a family and lifestyle that you prefer.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[david_thornley]

The market does a crap job of pricing the relative value of various sorts of work. It prices replacement value.

It's easier to find someone who can clean the rest rooms than to find someone who can write useful software, so the software developer has a higher market value. That doesn't say anything about their relative value. It may be that we could get by with fewer developers a lot easier than fewer janitors.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[SandWyrm]

Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.

Luck is just when preparation finally meets opportunity.

Nobody gets "lucky" in life or business by sitting around staring at a wall. But if you're actively engaged in bettering yourself, or your skills, in some way, then "luck" will appear, like magic, on a regular basis.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Agent0013]

But I bet there are less people that find success without working at all. So the inverse is probably not true!

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[Agent0013]

You really want to claim that this is their own doing and not mostly pure luck? For real?

Most of those that "make it big" owe more to random chance and being lucky than any of the "hard work" they put in. Of course it requires you to take an opportunity when it comes, no doubt about this, but saying that people who ain't rich just are lazy bums is one of the worst insults possible when their biggest fault is that they simply never had the lucky opportunity cross their way.

I'm not trying to discount that luck is involved. But there is something to being ready when it comes, or to being in the right place at the right time. And the preparation you do earlier, education or working hard, can get you ready or position you to get the lucky break. If you were not ready you might not be able to take advantage of the lucky breaks that come your way, and if you are not where the lucky break appears, you won't even see it, someone else who is more prepared, or possible called "more lucky" would be able to take the shot that would have been yours if you were there.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[es330td]

The funny thing is that most people capable of posting on /. look rich by the standards of the average impoverished person. The only people safe in a revolution are those with nothing and those able to gather a mob projecting enough force to protect themselves. Everyone else's survival is a roll of the dice.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[drinkypoo]

But I bet there are less people that find success without working at all. So the inverse is probably not true!

The number of people who succeed without doing anything to earn it is small, but the amount of success they enjoy is massive.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[dunkelfalke]

Well, I guess I have touched a nerve there.

Re:Reconcile this with $7 minimum wage

[eric_harris_76]

Are you sure you want me to do this? It might cause you a brain cramp.

FIRST!!!

[cayenne8]

How do I apply for these jobs?!?!?!

Re: FIRST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The coffee mug read 'I drink and I know things'. Monopolies are about preventing competitive products from coming to market.

Re:FIRST!!!

[unixisc]

That was gonna be my question as well.

Re:FIRST!!!

[antdude]

Ditto. I need a well paying full-time IT job. :P

Re:FIRST!!!

[martinfb]

Applying is easy.
Qualifying - not so much. Can you prove yourself?

Institutional Knowledge

[psycho12345]

This seems like a good idea. So many companies are foolish and instead of paying for people to stay, they let years, sometimes decades of knowledge walk out of the door to replace them with someone who is cheaper but far less productive. I've watched it happen multiple times at my company over the last year, its mindboggling. Company is now spending way more as other people have to learn and fill in the missing knowledge and domain expertise. Would have been far cheaper just to give those people large raises.

Also the concept of using vesting stock options to hold on to people isn't new, it's called golden handcuffs, but I guess the new part is it being applied to top software engineers instead of executives.

Re:Institutional Knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also a shrewd strategy of keeping these folks from turning up on the payrolls of competitors.

Re:Institutional Knowledge

[Darinbob]

Watch out, sometimes they keep idiots around because they think the idiot knows something. Upper management doesn't really have a good idea of who's a valuable worker or not. They know who's rated highly but that is often political. Sometimes the person who designed the product is also an idiot, and do you really want to keep that person and their unmaintainable crap code or get someone who can fix it without being roadblocked. I see times when a person eventually leaves a company that others breathe a sigh of relief and start fixing things.

Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And then they start to pull 9-5 days"

Heaven forbid someone having a reasonable work-life balance in this day and age.

Still, for many I think this would be incredibly boring after a while. Still, there are golden sign-on bonuses if you are that strong and you need to be bought out of your current position.

Re:Good.

[OneSmartFellow]

Yeah, whomever the "former Facebook engineer" is, is clearly an idiot.

As if the whole point of being alive is to work for some shit company like FB for a very average wage.

Imagine the nerve of those people who work reasonable hours,  and get great pay too.  They're such capaitalists.

Re:Good.

[edxwelch]

9-5 is only a 7 hour day, unless you work non stop without any lunch break.

Re:Good.

[thinkwaitfast]

If NASA had stuck to 9 to 5 days during the Apollo era, they never would have made it to the moon.

Re:Good.

[JohnFen]

The moon shot was a balls-to-the-wall effort of the sort that can only be realistically pulled of for single projects of extreme urgency.

That level of effort is unsustainable, and should not be done as a routine matter. You burn out too many excellent people.

Secret information

[HBI]

The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product. They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference. The means whereby this valuation is calculated are sometimes crafty and a lot of times stupid. This is why most people don't work very hard - they've already grokked this and don't feel it worthwhile to attempt to find the places where they might have to work to get more money. They are comfortable with what they have, apparently.

If you are making $7/hr, you aren't trying very hard to get involved with this scrum.

Re:Secret information

[JonnyCalcutta]

Have you started shooting back yet?

Re:Secret information

[monkeyxpress]

The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product.

Actually it does, just not for people who have access to the money faucet that is the financial industry. If you are near the fountain of wealth that is perpetual arbitrary loan creation by private investment banks, backstopped by the fed, then I totally agree with your statement. However, for those still stuck in the real economy hyper competitive market forces are working quite well to pummel their value towards zero.

The difference now is that engineers were not traditionally so close to the money supply, but alas, someone has to be digging the hole, or else all the layers of management/consulting/finance have no foundation on which to build their scam.

Don't be fooled though - you are still the shovel worker in the hole compared to what the real players are getting.

Re:Secret information

[doctorvo]

They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference. The means whereby this valuation is calculated are sometimes crafty and a lot of times stupid

That analysis is actually quite inaccurate, because it misses much bigger effects. Yes, valuation of employees is subjective. But that's true for cars, iPads, loaves of bread, massages, flights, etc. as well. Far more important is that valuation of employees is relative to the needs of an employer. Furthermore, several employers usually bid for a single employee, leading to the Winner's Curse. My guess is that the winner's curse is probably the largest effect in software engineering salaries (it seems to be a big effect in NHL and NBA player salaries).

If you are making $7/hr, you aren't trying very hard to get involved with this scrum.

If you make $7/h, you get the winner's curse in reverse and probably are undervalued (though probably only by a tiny amount).

In any case, the important thing to keep in mind is that this is actually a pretty good system compared to the alternatives. Markets sometimes can be pretty poor at determining value, but they are still better than any alternative.

Unintentional insight

[DRJlaw]

"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days."

Such a shame. Its as if a business shouldn't be run in startup mode or run-up-to-deadline mode at every possible moment, and people might desire lives outside of work and sleep.

We can't have that.

This quote is an example of how the concept of "fuck you money" arose.

Where's the minimum wage figure...

[__aaclcg7560]

I keep seeing comments about $7 per hour but I don't see where that number came from in the summary or article. (My skinny vanilla latte probably haven't kicked in yet.) Federal minimum wage is $7.25. California minimum wage is $10. Silicon Valley minimum wage is $10 to $14.

Re:Where's the minimum wage figure...

[Anonymous Coward]

$7 per hour is the federal minimum wage, to 1 significant digit. Close enough for me.

Do particular cities in the SV area have higher minimum wages? I didn't know that.

Market value includes perceptions

[sjbe]

The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product. They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference.

That's largely a distinction without a difference. Your market value is by definition what you can convince someone else to pay you. Perception is a part of that. In most cases there is no objective way to value a particular set of skills.

Re:Market value includes perceptions

[Linsaran]

Of note however is that many of the hardest working people are actually paid the least. You can certainly argue that anyone who has put in the effort to rise above minimum wage can do so, and I would probably agree that for certain individuals it's possible. For the average person it's not realistic however. Furthermore the fact is that there is a finite job pool, so while putting in the effort to advance yourself can pay off for the individual, there will still be a need for the people filling minimum wage jobs; so if everyone becomes more educated and skilled; it will still be the people who are the least educated and skilled who take those jobs.

Minimum wage as it is now is modern slave labor; it doesn't pay enough to reasonably support a single person never mind a family. As a society we should find it ethically unconscionable to force the kind of living conditions many minimum wage workers have to deal with. People need to eat though, so if the choice is working a really crappy job or starving, people will put up with a lot.

Re:Market value includes perceptions

[thinkwaitfast]

How do you define hard work, in the physics sense? I worked for years doing lawn care. It was dirty, very hot, required great physical strength, but it was mostly relaxing, I got a good workout, could listen to music, make my own hours and could think my own thoughts.

I make 10-100x as much as an engineer, but it is much more physically and emotionally draining, I stay up nights worrying about problems, have to be there when the customer tells me and I am surrounded by people complaining about the same and who really don't know what their job is. Your degree says you studied engineering FFS, what did you do, cheat on all of your tests?

Re:Market value includes perceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

there will still be a need for the people filling minimum wage jobs; so if everyone becomes more educated and skilled; it will still be the people who are the least educated and skilled who take those jobs.

And this is why I don't feel the slightest bit guilty wanting my fast food and other products in life built by robots. We need robots to save us from the dangerous products of people society forces into these kinds of jobs, when in fact these people should be doing other things that are more genuinely productive and valuable for society, even if not in a capitalist way that yields >$7/hr.

Safety nets and some kind of disincentive on procreation is what I think we need. But people do get touchy and religious about reproductive freedom. I guess you have much better safety nets for children that are resistant to exploitation from bad parents.

9-5

[Viol8]

I've worked at a lot of companies in my career and some are fine with you doing a 9-5 so long as you get your work done well and on time. Others such as a certain investment bank I worked at were more interested in appearance than output - if you left at 5 they thought you were slacking even if you did twice as much work as the guy who spent most of the day surfing the web but left at 7pm. Sadly this shallow management mentality ended up with me in front of HR despite me closing more bug tickets than almost everyone else in the team. With that kind of small minded mentality its no wonder they couldn't keep the best for very long and IT was populated by people with little coding talend and no life to speak of who didn't mind spending 12 hours a day at their desk.

Re:9-5

[computational super]

as the guy who spent most of the day surfing the web but left at 7pm

Or if you showed up at 7 AM to begin with.

Re:9-5

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easier to watch porn at 7 AM since you're the only one there. After 9 AM, it becomes a bit uncomfortable for the other workers.

Re:9-5

[0100010001010011]

Am I one of the few that prefers to work like I did in college? Coast along doing small boring tasks ("homework") for a week or two then 'cramming' during a development sprint?

I've worked remotely for 7 years and I can't stand a consistent schedule, especially now that I'm primarily a stay at home working parent. Some days it's 7-9 until the kid wakes up. Then 1-3 during nap. Then 10pm-1a. Or any random combination therein.

Then when it's development sprint time I work on site in an office. I'll work 8a-12a. Put on a pot of coffee and do it again the next day, sometimes pulling an all nighter if I'm in a development groove. I've found I can get a normal '9-5x5' worth of work done in a single day if I eliminate interrupting my train of thought and having a nice quiet office.

Re:9-5

[Opportunist]

Why would I care? If you don't wanna see my dong, what are you doing in my cubicle?

Hey, if you put me in a pen like an animal, don't expect me to stay civilized!

Re:9-5

[JohnFen]

I've worked at a lot of companies in my career and some are fine with you doing a 9-5 so long as you get your work done well and on time.

This.

In my own companies, I never cared about how many hours my employees worked, or when they worked those hours (with the exception of positions that require coordination with others outside the company).

What I cared about was that deadlines were met and the work quality was acceptable. As long as that happens, nothing else matters.

When choosing where I want to work, I tend to look at this as well. If a company seems overly focused on "correct" working hour and durations, I tend to pass. I'm being paid for work product, not for how many hours I warm a chair. If a company doesn't see that, it's a strong indication that I'm a poor fit there.

Re:9-5

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I one of the few that prefers to work like I did in college? Coast along doing small boring tasks ("homework") for a week or two then 'cramming' during a development sprint?

Yes, you are the outlier. Humans in general are creatures of habit and prefer consistency in their life, especially for simple things like knowing that they will most likely be home for dinner on time most nights and have time in the evening to enjoy themselves before going to bed.

Re:9-5

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on if you have cubes, offices, or an open workspace...and the volume of your speakers.

Re:9-5

[0100010001010011]

[Citation Needed]?

If you look at history it's not like Native American hunting trips were a 9-5. They went on irregular expeditions that lasted days to a week. They worked until the job was done. The same with persistence hunters that would follow an animal until it was exhausted.

And I do have a regular, consistent cycle. It's just not based on a 24 hour clock it's on a 4 week basis. Personally I'd rather 'sprint' for a week and take 3 weeks off than try and maintain a regular daily schedule. I also do that with other tasks like grocery shopping. We make a month plan, spend half a day shopping, put everything away and eat for a month+.

At the end of the month I find that I have more time because it's not being 'killed by a thousand cuts'. Just being able to shop at 9AM on a Monday saves a considerable amount of time over shopping when everyone else is.

Re:9-5

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

I'll just leave this here:
George Constanza's rules for 'working hard'

Re:9-5

[thinkwaitfast]

Warm body. Check, Breathing - optional. A lot of this was due to cost plus accounting in companies where I've worked, where your salary is based on the your cost to the customer. Somebody who fixes a problem in one hour is much less valuable than someone who takes three weeks.

Not only that, but a manager's salary is based off of the cumulative cost of all underlings so a manager of a large team of mostly incompetent people will be making much more than someone over a small team of highly competent people, no matter how much more they are paid individually over the incompetent ones.

Re:9-5

[thinkwaitfast]

What would you expect a factory job to be like?

Re:9-5

[kschendel]

I don't know how normal it is, but that's certainly how I like to work. I'll work vaguely normal hours for a while, get stuck into something, and put in a 70 hour week or three. Then when it's over I might do little enough for a few days. Fortunately, in my position I can be useful even when not churning out code or bug fixes; I can grease the skids for support issues, help out other folks, dig around for weaknesses, etc.

Re:9-5

[0100010001010011]

I can grease the skids for support issues, help out other folks, dig around for weaknesses, etc.

Helping out on tiny menial tasks / scripts seems to help your career more than actual big development (even if big development needs the most work). If I know a task will take under 2 hours I'll volunteer, which leads to a lot of happy co-workers.

I also spend a lot of that time learning new languages or how to do things. ("How to mysql in python", "How to read xml in Python", "How to automate python with Jenkins", ...) Leaving my sprint to concentrate on implementation: Writing a custom mysqlxml writer for one of our internal apps and automating it .

Re:9-5

[jouassou]

I'm the same way: it usually takes a few hours of focusing to really get in the zone and reach peak productivity, and it usually requires that I'm especially well rested before I start. My most productive days are therefore when I wake up without an alarm clock, overdose on energy drinks, put on some music, and procede to pull an intensive all-nighter. Under ideal conditions, one such burst can easily be more productive than a week of 9-5 days.

Re:9-5

[Anonymous Coward]

So since you never paid attention to hours, people were probably overworked trying to hit your deadline and quality metrics. If you want people to maintain reasonable hours then you specifically need to pay attention to that. If not, there's either a fast or slow snowball effect towards longer and longer hours. You can always demand too early deadlines and too high of quality for the time you have, but it's far more noticeable when you start demanding more hours.

Re:9-5

[Anonymous Coward]

That may not be the best example, considering that the vast majority of human civilizations stopped relying on hunting and gathering since the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry.

I don't know if the Native Americans proactively decided, eh, well farming is boring, I'm going to walk dozens of miles and risk getting hurt or losing the trail instead. It might have just been the most practical option at the time. After all, it took thousands of years of selective breeding for maize to evolve from tiny pea-sized grass offshoots into a practical food source.

Re:9-5

[david_thornley]

We evolved as hunter-gatherers, and that's actually a pretty healthy lifestyle. What happened is that farming could support many more people per square mile, so the hunter-gatherers got pushed into places that were bad for agriculture.

Re:9-5

[Agent0013]

Don't forget that agriculture has the wait and do nothing then do a bunch of work pattern involved also.

Re:9-5

[david_thornley]

It doesn't have the same leisure hours as hunting and gathering. It tends to overwork people.

Re:9-5

[OneSmartFellow]

Let me guess, Goldman Suchs ?

9-5 Days

[Anonymous Coward]

"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"

You mean like the rest of the world?

Re:9-5 Days

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the world outside SV.

If they're smart, they make the best use of it

[computational super]

I often find myself in "slow periods" in between big projects - I'm not one of these "coasters" by any means (no real equity, and no sense from management that they couldn't throw a rock and find another dozen of me), but there are times when I'm not racing against the clock to meet some arbitrary deadline either. I do my best to use that time to learn as much as possible, so that when the inevitable crunch time comes back around, I'll be able to fall back on some extra knowledge.

Re:If they're smart, they make the best use of it

[JohnFen]

I use the slower times to catch up on all the routine work that tends to get back-burnered during crunch time. Fixing those annoying little problems that aren't urgent enough to make it onto the formal schedule, improving infrastructure, writing internal documentation, etc.

IN short

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, working hard is for suckers.

This cultural myth of "the harder you work, the better off you'll be" isn't true.

If anything, it'll ruin your health and any marginal economic benefit you may have gotten from living to work will be eaten up in medical bills - and a ruined career having to spend a lot of time shuttling between doctor's offices.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the whole objective of hard working in the early years? I'd love to be a coaster by now, I know every aspect of IT and work managing infrastructure service performed by third-party companies now. I love not to have to work long shifts in the weekends or logging on into servers or storage or databases or switches or whatever to troubleshoot them like I did years ago. I surely am not a coaster with stock in the pocket but I think is a gradual evolution from hardworking....IT wears your ass off. I'm tired and want to relax.

Re:WTF?

[JohnFen]

Isn't that the whole objective of hard working in the early years?

For some people, obviously, but certainly not for everybody!

"Coasters" because they work normal hours?

[ErichTheRed]

"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"

Working massive numbers of hours weeks is not normal. For a startup, yes...but once a company is out of the "get big fast" phase and actually making money, there's no excuse to burn people out and run the place like a startup. I know younger tech employees want to continue the college dorm lifestyle and live at work, but I dislike the trend of calling anyone who wants to work a sane number of hours a week "coasters."

Lots of big, successful companies have "Distinguished Engineer" positions and use them for different reasons, such as:
- To have a raft of smart people on staff, not necessarily to do nuts-and-bolts work but to provide top-level guidance to those who do
- To have a position that, because of the pay structure of the organization, is the only technical position that pays high enough to reward a technical person for things like inventing the company's cash cow products, etc.
- For vanity or bragging rights...such as having Linus Torvalds or Vint Cerf on your payroll
- And of course, to pay these people enough to keep them from jumping to your competitors

Distinguished Engineers are mostly accomplished enough that they don't really have to worry about finding a job. They're getting paid handsomely, and/or able to live off the crazy amounts of money they've made already. It's basically the prize for winning the meritocracy lottery. It's also the closest any of us techies will get to the level of a corporate CxO -- paid handsomely in cash, stock and free stuff by their primary company, plus getting the salary, perks and influence associated with "sitting" on a ton of other companies' boards. I wouldn't call them "coasters." I'd call them savvy!

Irreconcilable with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought about the way this was described in the summary was: must be fucking nice.

Employer: 'hey, Joe, we're literally gonna throw money at you, while do you nothing.'

Joe: 'if I have to.'

For fuck's sake. Meanwhile, people in the same geographic areas who do actually work for a living, can't afford rent and groceries. Can't say I blame the engineer so much. It's the execs and board members and rich stockholders (not blaming the mutual fund shareholders who probably don't know a capital gain distribution from a dividend) who are swimming in money themselves and the government officials who pass laws enabling eternal corporations with personhood, that are setting up this system and screwing over the working class.

Re: Irreconcilable with $7 minimum wage

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Joe is paid more because he knows the meaning of the word literally?

Well BOB I just space out at my desk

[Joe_Dragon]

Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working and I have eight different bosses So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. So I just do the minimal amount of work not to get fired.

Re:Well BOB I just space out at my desk

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly what came to mind when I read the headline.

Re:Well BOB I just space out at my desk

[JohnFen]

You have 8 bosses??

I'd be looking for another job, personally.

Doesn't matter how much I get paid

[JohnFen]

Whether I'm making a little or a lot (and I've done both), I can't stand having to be at a workplace with nothing to do. The time goes so slowly, and it's pure torture, particularly when I could be doing what I love: engineering.

I have seen people who slack on the job, so I understand they exist -- but I will never understand how anyone can handle doing that. You literally could not pay me enough to put up with doing nothing.

Re:Doesn't matter how much I get paid

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG. I found another person like me. I've literally walked away from solid 6 figure jobs with no idea where I would be working next because I could not stand to sit at my desk doing nothing for one more day. I had a company offer me a $60k bonus to stay through Xmas (it was mid-October). Doing what work? Oh, we just want your expertise in case of... something. Thanks, but if that something comes to pass, call me in as a consultant. I've only got so many hours on this planet, and I'm not going to spend them at a desk warming a seat.

Re:Doesn't matter how much I get paid

[jeff4747]

Usually people stay because of the appearance that the slow period will end soon. "We'll start work on $thing_you_really_want_to_do right after we release _____". The contents of that blank change a few times. Each time it looks reasonable, and appears to be a short-lived condition.

Then 6 months have passed, you're ripping your hair out from boredom and they just changed the contents of the blank again. And by then you're deep in the sunk cost fallacy - you won't be able to get a job doing $thing elsewhere, so keep staying.

Re:Doesn't matter how much I get paid

[evil_aaronm]

Yep. Left my last job in part because of this. (Getting a modest inheritance from my mum helped a bit, too.) There were some days when things happened, and life was Ok, but I spent most days just watching the clock, waiting for quitting time to roll around. In spite of the regular paycheck, I couldn't handle the inactivity, and I didn't feel right doing side projects on company time.

Re: Doesn't matter how much I get paid

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't you do skill development in a vm in your laptop or something? I did that years ago and you can run while cluster on a laptop with containers etc now.

I don't quite understand....

[Anonymous Coward]

....so, in the US...in a decent managerial role...lets say..ahhh...300-400k job.... in the usual run of the mill pretty big blue chip private company....how many hours per week would you be expected to work ?

I'm just amazed that "9-5" is considered slacking...

Serious question.

Re:I don't quite understand....

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Learn bosses schedule.
Step 2: Attempt to arrive and appear productive just before they arrive to their desk.
Step 3: Follow them at discrete length as they leave the office.
Step 4 Schedule email/voicemail questions to them at all hours of the day and night.
Step 5: Profit.

Re:I don't quite understand....

[__aaclcg7560]

My nephew worked for one of the mortgage companies that was so instrumental to the economy going bust prior to the Great Recession. He routinely handled paperwork for $1M or less in mortgages, like so many of his coworkers. However, there was an older gentlemen who sat at his desk and read The Wall Street Journal all day long. The paperwork he handled once or twice a month was for $10M+ in mortgages.

Re:I don't quite understand....

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what your point is!

Re:I don't quite understand....

[ACE209]

Readers of The Wallstreet Journal are lazy but can afford it.

Re:I don't quite understand....

[thinkwaitfast]

My friend's sister is a director for the western US in a large Fortune 500 company, so much higher than managerial level and she only makes 250k/year.

use the time to contribute to OSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't want you to build anything else, because anything you built would be maintained by someone else.

Sure. So if you're in that position, just find an open source project that you can contribute to. The company can get kudos for helping the OSS community, and you get to keep your skills sharp.

As a developer, if you're sitting on your hands doing nothing, then you're falling behind. I'm sure that's less of a big deal if you're being paid gobs of money, but at some point you're going to want another job, and you'll need something to show for yourself at the interview.

Re:use the time to contribute to OSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure you contribute to a popular and trendy open source project. If you contribute to something nobody has heard of or, even worse, start your own project, you will be as worthless as your contribution is obscure.

Open source is irrelevant. Trendy or die.

Re:use the time to contribute to OSS?

[JohnFen]

That's not even remotely true.

What most employers want to see is recent examples of your work. Whether or not that work is "trendy" is far less important than it demonstrates the quality of your work and that you possess the sort of skills they are looking for.

If a potential employer is more impressed with how trendy your projects are than with the skill they demonstrate, then you really don't want to work there.

Re:use the time to contribute to OSS?

[david_thornley]

The company has to agree to having some of your work going into open source projects. Not all will.

Another site that stops reading due to ad blocks

[Mahldcat]

....which means another site that I guess I won't actually read the article to.....

meritocracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

bahahahahaha! meritocracy! lol.

meritocracy has ALWAYS been a myth and will always BE a myth.

Technology froth, or a rabid FANG?

[Anonymous Coward]

For each coaster I wonder how many got burned by options that never panned out?

It's not all fun and games

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure employees have the option to hangout, but people who dedicate their lives to making good grades in order to get noticed by big Tech Companies aren't going to do that and their employers know it. If they were wired that way, they never would have made it past the screening process. I can imagine that for many employees, playing pinball or putt putt on the job would actually be a source of anxiety and stress for them, even if encouraged by their employers. If they did happen to participate, most would probably work twice as hard afterwards to make up for the guilt of not getting enough work done. There are reasons many big Tech Firms have adopted this approach, it works, but there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Re:It's not all fun and games

[Anonymous Coward]

guilt of not getting enough work done

Brainwashed into slavery, are you?

Really stressful

[SoftwareArtist]

I've occasionally been in positions where I didn't have enough work to keep me busy, and I hate it. It's more stressful than being overworked in some ways.

For example, I once started a new job, and almost immediately my supervisor went on vacation for a month. Before he left we went over the project I was going to be working on, and he figured I had everything I needed to get a good start on it while he was away. Well, I finished the whole project in two weeks. So I spent the next two weeks wandering the office and asking everyone, "Can I do anything to help you out? Can you give me something useful to do? Please?" Mostly they didn't, so I sat at the computer and played games. You probably think that sounds fun, but believe me, it wasn't.

Re:Really stressful

[__aaclcg7560]

I've been in this situation a few times. My solution for staying busy — besides playing with the trolls on Slashdot — is to find the one problem that no one else is willing to deal with. For many IT departments that I've worked in, it's usually a storage closet filled with old hardware that no one has touched in years. IT managers loved to reclaim space that was previously unavailable.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

In a world where California is full of actor-waiters, you specialize yourself as the IT-janitor. When you work in IT but willfully demote yourself to janitor, no wonder you get paid the wages of a janitor.

Re:Really stressful

[__aaclcg7560]

In a world where California is full of actor-waiters, you specialize yourself as the IT-janitor.

I specialized in finding solutions to problems that IT people don't want to deal with. Most often because they think it's someone else's problem rather their own. There are IT closets that the janitors won't even touch.

When you work in IT but willfully demote yourself to janitor, no wonder you get paid the wages of a janitor.

Why do you care how much I get paid for cleaning up other people's messes? For the line of work I'm doing, I get paid quite well.

Re:Really stressful

[__aaclcg7560]

Because maybe if you got paid more for your day job then you wouldn't annoy everyone by spamming affiliate links all day to supplement your income.

You seriously think I need extra coffee money to supplement my income?

If only someone would do the community a favor and pay you shut-the-fuck-up money.

The proper term is "fuck you" money.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the proper term is "sofa change". As usual, you completely misunderstand a simple idiom and misapply it.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-...

Re:Really stressful

[__aaclcg7560]

As usual, you completely misunderstand a simple idiom and misapply it.

Uh, no. That's one definition. The most common definition that I've read regarding Silicon Valley is providing enough money to get someone to leave the company and avoid a lawsuit. Hence, "fuck you" money is substantially more than severance money.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

So how are the Amazon affiliate links providing you with that? Is someone threatening you with a lawsuit? Are you threatening someone with a lawsuit? You make no sense as usual.

"The most common definition that I've read "

Citation, please. You've "read" it, so feel free to provide a link.

http://www.urbandictionary.com...
https://www.quora.com/What-is-...
https://kopywritingkourse.com/...

The only place where your made-up definition applies is on your mother ship, as usual.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. That's one definition. The most common definition that I've read regarding Silicon Valley is providing enough money to get someone to leave the company and avoid a lawsuit. Hence, "fuck you" money is substantially more than severance money.

I'm the one who first used that term in reference to you, as far as I can recall, and in NO way does it mean that.

"Fuck You" money means you have enough money to say "fuck you" to anybody you want to, and not suffer (at least financially) from doing so. Instead of kissing ass and being a good little corporate janitor, you have the money to say, "Fuck off, I'm feeling too good to come in to work today, so instead, I'm going to the strip club and then out for beers with my friends."

I have NEVER heard it applied in any way to "hush money" required to get someone to leave the company and drop some complaint they have. In fact, that's the opposite of fuck-you money: you're taking enough money to NOT say "fuck you" to the company offering it. Hush money and fuck-you money are very different concepts, creimer. GP is right: you've managed to completely mangle the idiom, idiot.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

NOW do you see why interacting with Creimerus Idioticus Thickus is so addictive?

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

For the line of work I'm doing, I get paid quite well.

Yes, that's true. Mean hourly wage for janitors & cleaning staff was $12.99 per hour, which translates to a mean salary of $27,030 per year. Median is around $25k per year.

So for janitorial work, you're right - you're paid quite well.

Of course, for Computer Support Specialists, who have a median pay rate of $23.74 per hour ($49,390 per year), your pay is pretty much middle of the road. Especially given your years of experience, that you're only making the median, is a pretty sad commentary on your ambition and drive. 90th percentile makes $39.50 per hour ($82,160 per year). 75th percentile makes $30.64/hr or $63,740 per year. So what you mean to say is:

"I get paid right in the middle of my pay band, because even with all my 'experience,' I am an unremarkable, unaccomplished support tech who spends more time shitposting on Slashdot than I do actually getting actual work done. I call myself a miracle worker, mostly because I manage to stay employed as a computer support specialist when I'm actually doing the work of the janitorial staff."

I think that's more accurate - don't you?

Re:Really stressful

[geekymachoman]

> Mostly they didn't, so I sat at the computer and played games. You probably think that sounds fun, but believe me, it wasn't.

Maybe not if you dislike games or by games you mean Minesweaper. I like games and disconnecting from reality... I would give my left nut away to be able to play games like that. There's so many things that one can do if he didn't need to sit in an office 9 to 5, or in my case, 8 to 5.

Re:Really stressful

[__aaclcg7560]

NOW do you see why interacting with Creimerus Idioticus Thickus is so addictive?

That's a good name for my trolls who have nothing better to do with their life than reply to my comments.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

So... as good name for your trolls... is the name that insults you.

And what are you doing with your life but replying to me? I have three monitors going, one is for Japanese BBW facesitting porn, one for tranny gape porn, and one just for following you. That is the sickest monitor by far.

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you're asking Thicky to think?

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why do you care how much I get paid for cleaning up other people's messes?"

Why do you keep posting how much you make if you think we don't care?

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

You seriously think I need extra coffee money to supplement my income?

Haven't you just spent the last three months telling us precisely that?

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

Read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think we found a modern-day William McGonagall.

- He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.
- He found lucrative work performing his poetry at a local circus. He read his poems while the crowd was permitted to pelt him with eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes and stale bread. For this, he received fifteen shillings a night. McGonagall seemed happy with this arrangement.

Hilarious!

- speculates in his biography of McGonagall that the poetaster may have been on the "autism-Asperger's spectrum". Christopher Hart, writing in The Sunday Times, says that this seems "likely".

We are picking on the retard... but it's so much fun, and the retard seems to enjoy it!

Re:Really stressful

[Anonymous Coward]

"Minesweaper"???

STEM shortage?

[Sir Holo]

FTA:"You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model."

Tell me again how we have a STEM shortage in the US?

Re:STEM shortage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ageism and prejudice against the unemployed guarantees there are old unemployed losers who will never work again. Such a shame, they're all unemployable. If only they could just be younger and be presently employed, there wouldn't be a shortage of employable STEM workers.

college for all + loans is killing us

[Joe_Dragon]

college for all + loans and the black eye that trades get is killing us.

How much better off would we be with alt history in where X happens?

The same college for all for push but with Bankruptcy for student loans?

College for some and trades / tech / schools for (not part of the degree system) for others with out Bankruptcy for student loans?

College for all* (with trades / tech / schools at more less the same college accreditation level?)

community college becomes part of the k-12 system (say K-14 with trade choices and 2-3+ year add on college track)

Yeah, those dumb whiny bluecollars!

[Rujiel]

... now I'm going to spend three paragraphs complaining about their complaining.

Call HR Immediately!

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, right? The OG's are slacking, only putting in 40 hour work weeks! The shame of it all, the shame!

It's a scandal. Call a Presidential Commission! Call the police! Start an HR investigation!

And Facebook, you disappoint me. Engineers working 9 to 5. Where will this end? I'll tell you where; employees are going to take their vacation time too! Do you want that? Do you!?

Shame!

AKA

[NewYork]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Experience

[NewYork]

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" --Oscar Wilde