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Home Sweet Sweatshop
gdbear writes "Found a very interesting article on digital corporations and the new work ethic of never leaving work. It's a bit disturbing.
" Reading was deja vu all over again-live in the place, work in the place. The 20 foot commute is a boon and a curse. The perks of the lifestyle sometimes cover up the huge suck of your life that jobs like this take.
How about the war against the American consumer? We are swiftly becoming a country run "by business, for business", and to hell with the consumer. Legislation everywhere is removing consumer's rights to sue corporations who defraud them (see http://www.gemhound.com for an example of such a corporation), while removing regulatory oversight over those very same corporations. Take the moving industry, for example. Since the Interstate Commerce Commission (which regulated it) was abolished in 1995, movers have had a field day, blatantly violating the law in full knowledge that for the most part it's more expensive to sue them for that fraudulent $3,000 that they held your furniture hostage for, than it is to pay the $3,000 in the first place.
It's like the claims that we have full employment. I drive down main street Guadalupe at 7am in the morning and see the Hispanic men standing on the streetcorners, hoping someone will stop and hire them to work in the fields. Tell these men that we have full employment. Yeah, right. The government uses fraudulent statistics (those men aren't unemployed, because they aren't registered at the unemployment office!) in order to keep the populance fat and happy and unconcerned... and gosh, you know what? It's working!
Big business got the shit scared out of them in the 60's, and bought up all major media sources in response so that we will never get balanced reporting again. Think of that, next time you see talk about the "worker shortage" and "historic low unemployment". Think about those men standing on the street corner, and how the government and the big-business-owned media has rendered them invisible.
--E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Nice work, if you can get it. To be fair you should also note that contracting has its downsides -- you have to be a little more socially aware than the typical hacker (the old word of mouth biz for getting your next contract, as well as being able to interact with essentially a new set of strangers every few months), there is typically some downtime between contracts (with resulting stress), there are no benefits (for true contract work, as vs. being an employee of a contracting firm), and the tax stuff is murder.
Which isn't to say that contracting is not great, just that roses have thorns too.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Rules for when to leave:
1) Your boss is an ex-used-car salesman who believes that anything can be fixed if he only yells and verbally abuses people a little harder.
2) You can no longer give status reports to your boss because he is always "in a meeting" or "has other appointments".
3) Because of the above, your boss has no idea what you do.
4) Paycheck bounces. (I have always made it clear that if my paycheck bounces, that is the end of my employement with that company).
5) Your co-workers are all worthless syncophants who were hired because they were college buddies of your boss, and you end up doing their work because they are incompetent. (I have had a co-worker like this, but both myself and my other co-workers who had to cover for him when deadline came and he disappeared raised hell and got him canned -- note that this only works when the top technical people are working together as a team and can gang up on the boss).
Basically, my no-nos are: verbal abuse (I don't do it, I don't tolerate it, if you have a problem tell me but I don't accept yelling or abusive language), lack of communication (if I have a problem I expect to be able to talk with my co-workers and manager about it, and vice-versa, don't give me any of this talking-behind-my-back bullshit), and of course not being paid! I've had good luck for the past four years in that my managers have been pretty cool (well, Will a couple of years back was a stubborn old bull and we fussed at each other a lot, but we damn well respected each other -- in fact, we're going out to lunch tomorrow afternoon).
Anyhow. There are good employers and managers who at least are supportive out there (may not agree with you, but they at least don't try to cut you down). It's a hard search, but worthwhile when you find it. And a note to employers -- that's how you keep me (or any good hacker) around for a while too. I was being seriously underpaid in one job that I worked for three years, but I kept working there because I liked the people I was working with, the working environment was hectic but the people I worked with were great people, and I liked the respect that I had from my co-workers and from the company's clients. If I had to deal with people verbally abusing me all day long, toady employees with nothing better to do than back-stab, and enforced long hours, I would have walked out the door within a month, not after three years.
Oh -- the BRU guys are great too (grin). It's great to be back programming neat stuff.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Can you get that 'first job' if you take that last vacation in college? If I look at the ads in the newspaper, or look at what recruiters post to the USENET, all of the ads say "experience required". Can you get a job in today's computer industry if you're not a 4.0 student (hackers rarely are, too much time programming neat hacks late at nite!) and you haven't taken internships or otherwise worked during your "vacations"?
Open Source offers another avenue -- work on a cool project, get a reputation, get money thrown at you. Still, it doesn't seem to me that college kids can be too sanguine about getting a job if they're going to "slack" during the summers the way our parents did.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Do jobs on the left/right coast all go this way? I'm wondering.....what do you all know about it?
Werd.
I must admit though, for those of us with a slightly higher intelegence, it sure is nice to have all you mindless worker ants making the world a better place for us.
Interesting spelling of intelligence, given the claim it is used in...
The problem is, as long as there are those who are willing to put in outrageous hours for next-to-nothing, that's what employers are going to expect and look for. Older, wiser people with responsibilities and common sense -- often the same people who in years past were the worker bees -- will find it harder to get employment.
One of my neighbors was asking me if I knew any programmers as her company was looking to hire. Then later she said it wasn't that they couldn't find anyone, it's just that the people they could find were so expensive. (Funny, I don't go in to my doctor's or lawyer's office and say "you do good work, but couldn't you do it for $35,000 a year?")
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
This is one of the most insightful comments I've seen in a while. We need three more moderators to bump it up :)
:) ]
:( They cry. You cry.
My father considered a Ph.D. many years ago (he already had an M.A.). It interested him, but I was 5 or six by then, and he didn't want to miss all of my growing up. He stayed a high school teacher, made a lot less, but left around 6:30 so that he could be home by 3:30 or so. We also had summers for family vacations.
As burnout got worse in my law practice, I realized that it was "now or never"--my oldest was 3, and the next was 2. I took the plunge, and defend a week from monday. [btw, anyonw need an attorney/economist/statistician with impressive programming skills for the next year
Teaching with the occasional antitrust case certainly will pay less than other options that I have and had, but there's no way in H*** that I'm not going to be around for my kids growing up. And if I take a year-round research job for the next couple of years, it's going to be with the understanding that I can take off additional unpaid time in addition to regular vacation. The job just pays the bills; family is what's important.
While I'm at it, I did work at home for a few months as I closed down my practice. The hardest part is that two year olds just can't understand that just because daddy's in the house doesn't mean he can play
hawk, esq., soon to be Ph.D., who's going nuts because his family's on the other side of the country due to an illness
Your next full night's sleep won't happen until you retire. In this economy if you expect to do anything with only a four year degree, let alone become an executive assistant, you're going to work 24/7.
That's B.S.!
A union would do nothing but make things worse. There are an enormous number of open positions in IT-related fields all over the country. If you don't like working in that sort of an environment, don't take the job!
Take something else. There are pleanty of people who love working in that sort of a creative, energetic environment. If your choice of employer doesn't fit your chosen lifestyle, its your choice of employer that's the problem, not the employer's way of doing business. This isn't the same as being a assembly line worker in a one-industry town where you have no choices.
If the pace of change and expectations of working environments in the IT industry don't mesh with anyone's ideas, they should rethink the field they're going into, or find a place that works for them. Don't expect the industry to change. The fact that there are so many jobs paying six figures to people too young to even rent a car is attributable to the fact that there is just energy and committment among those people. You can have the cooshy fourty hour a week job, or the fast-paced six figure job where you do nearly everything under the sun at any given point. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think, if anything, the greater problem is the number of companies that DON'T provide that sort of a working environment, and wonder why they can't hire people. There's been a lot of bitching this year here in Connecticut about "brain drain" and why companies here in state can't find technical workers. A local rag had an article this week saying that companies weren't looking in the right places, using highschool students and inner city kids as examples of untapped skill markets. They were completely off base though. Its a piece of cake to find a worker, but companies that don't realize the level of benefits that they need to give to their employees won't keep them.
When a worker slaves 40-50 hours a week at a mediocre pay sees that they could be working 60 hours a week, for more money in an environment where blowing off steam is expected through vicious games of parking-lot street hockey, pinball, beers in the fridge, or rides on the company yacht, there's not much reason for them to stay, particularly given the fact that the most easily available people for those positions are typically young men and women without families and a lot of ability to pick up and move.
A union won't change that. A union would slow the pace of innovation, hurt the pay scales (since unions have a tendancy to even out pay scales -- you'll no longer be payed $40k more than your next door cube mate on account of your greater skills...), and hurt the ability for companies to change and move quickly in the market.
Unions are a plague in this country... they've served no useful purpose since work environments stopped being dangerous, and in most industries where they exist, they serve to line the pockets of the union leaders and keep underqualified and incompetant workers employed.
If you're in IT, you don't need a union to protect your rights, you just need your feet. Walk out the door, the place across the street will probably give you 20% more anyway. The only workers unions will help will be the ones who overstate their qualifications and experience anyway.
The problem I ran into comes from the fact that I really enjoy what I do for a living. I constantly found myself putting in these insanely long days... often 14+ hours in front of a computer. It didn't seem so long or so bad because here I was at home... my music on, relaxed, snacking, etc... The problem is that suddenly this huge void of time has passed. Days quickly turned into weeks into... you get the idea. The longer you do it the more you find yourself looking for excuses to get out of the house 'cuz you *never* leave. This isn't just computer people either. Anyone who works at home exclusively suffers from this (writers/artists/etc...).
F /...
With that said however, I do prefer to work at home occasionally. I think a 3 or 4 day work week at the office is great. It lets you interact face to face with other real people and limit your time and exposure to the work enviroment. Forces you out of your safe comfortable home and keeps you in touch with how lame the real world can be sometimes.
The company I work for has mostly bought into the work equals home concept. Free snacks, very relaxed atmosphere... they buy your dinner if you stay past 7. But I am too wise and cynical now to fall for the sell my life to the company for a free meal deal. Lots of people who haven't worked at home before here think all this free stuph and this home/work atmosphere is the best thing ever. I just try and remind them its a company and not your family.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
If you're doing this for the money, YOU WILL BURN OUT. Fast. People who get CS degrees with dollar signs in their eyes don't last long. They're also generally really bad programmers (see point 1).
THIS is why free/open source is winning. The ones who care about doing it right so bad it hurts are the ones who start and run all these projects because it has to be done RIGHT, darn it! The hordes of wannabes and apathetic check cashers send us complaints about it not working right, and if we're lucky they're good enough to spot the bug. Ocasionally, they pick up enough as they go along to become real hackers.
You can't hire that, because money isn't what motivates it. "I can do better" ego and a raging sence of injustice that some idiot was getting paid for doing it wrong in the first place started Richard Stallman with the GNU project. Yearning for a decent intellectual challenge (a specialized kind of boredom), and that nasty urge to take the refrigerator apart and see how it works prodded Torvalds to complete it with the Linux kernel. Apache was just a bunch of people tinkering with a defective tool they used regularly and a "wow, cool, can I borrow that" attitude, who were lazy enough to want to make things easier on themselves by sharing the work.
Then pride, fan mail, and a general sense of accomplishment kick in and look out, 200+% annual growth.
And if we can all make money off of this kind of thing, even do it as a day job, well that's a bonus.
Rob
If you've ever had to say "no, not like that" to somebody, you understand open source.
They think that because they work 18 hours a day, neglect their home life, end up divorced, have kids that don't know them, and few real friends, they are "Heros". They gave their all, 110%. Guess what, for that 110%, you will get a watch and maybe a small pention when you retire. You will dye alone, and no one that ever worked with you will care. There is so much more to life than the grind. People who overwork themselves aren't heros, they are idiots. I must admit though, for those of us with a slightly higher intelegence, it sure is nice to have all you mindless worker ants making the world a better place for us. In fact, tonight, I am going to go home, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. I'll be sure to dream a dream for you, while I rest assured in my bed tonight. Onward my little worker ants :)
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
This article certainly gives food for thought. I really don't want to be 'eased out' when I am 35 years old, and I do want some sort of life outside work. (Actually, I work at a university, so I think that we don't get exploited as much as in the corporate world ... though, allegedly, we don't get paid as much as those in the corporate world, either!) I have forwarded the URL to several friends who are also working in New Media/IT.
However, this isn't the only career with these sorts of problems. Before becoming a programmer, I was a graduate student in micro/molecular biology. As a graduate student I was expected to work far more than 40 hours a week on a stipend of approx 15K/yr (at the University I attended - this will vary depending on the institution, city, etc.) This included my lab work and teaching. What happens when you finish your doctorate? Why, you continue with post-doctorate work (or training). Post-docs tend to be 1-5 year positions, usually salaried between 20-35 K/year, few benefits, if any. And once you have finished one or two post-docs, THEN you can apply for a permanent job! The good ones are apparently hard to get - with cutbacks in education, many professorial jobs are being eliminated. Industry jobs are often less than secure in biotechnology. Most of these jobs are not lucrative, either (with the odd exception, of course!), and there is sometimes a bias against older applicants, or people with gaps in publication records. (If you are a female scientist, wanting to have a family, you will likely be creating those dreaded publication gaps.) Life is expected to revolve around your science, and from what I have seen, young scientists spend more time in the lab than programmers in the office around here!
Anyhow, it is tough to be an educated professional these days, in several fields. I enjoy what I am doing at the moment, and it pays reasonably well. Someday, I may have to switch careers again (when I am eased out at 35, perhaps?), but I know I won't be the only person in this boat. I don't see any immediate solutions to the overall problems in the industry, so it is probably up to each individual to keep their own options open, and decide the order of priorities in their lives.
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
It may suck, but for those of us who still have to "suit up", act corporately attentive in meetings, and generally drone away - and still often pull those sorts of hours, companies that let you take some of your life with you when you work don't look all that bad. A case of "the grass is always greener..." perhaps?
The company had a lot of online software running on NT/IIS with Active Server Pages. Every now and then, IIS would lock up and stop responding. When that happened, the monitoring computer would fire off pages to everyone (including the company president).
IIRC, the head NT administrator had the ability to do remote reboots. I didn't and since I lived fairly close, I would usually make the drive so I could troubleshoot the problem right away. I learned that if I didn't check on it ASAP, I would either (a) get called in anyway, or (b) have to answer "what went wrong" questions first thing next morning.
We also had a policy of "no software installs/upgrades during peak hours". For ISPs, that means 3:00pm to midnight. This usually meant doing the NT software install/reboot process in the wee hours when the least people would notice.
I didn't mind the late-night/early-morning installs, but having the pager go off during a date was a bummer.
Oh, and to preempt the "Can't you keep NT running?" attacks. Most of the problems were due to DLL versions being mismatched on servers and developer machines. Upgrading the servers to the same DLLs as the dev machines made everything unstable. There were also a few issues with the database server on which the web servers depended. This was before Transaction Server was used, so hung server-side objects tended to make IIS flaky.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Let's see.... there was the ultra-hip software company where the owners provided free soft drinks, coffee, and snacks. The snacks stopped when the company president realized just how many PowerBars a 200-pound powerlifter could eat -- oops.
:)
Then there was the up-and-coming ISP with a habit of telling my team about urgent projects two days before they were due. They used the "you'll get stock when we go public" tactic. After too many 12-hour shifts and 3:00 am drive-to-the-office server reboots, I used the "I'll end up divorced if I stay here" resignation.
Overall, though, it's been a fun ride so far. I wonder what's next.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
This stuff sickens a bit. I like computers and all, but I've got a LIFE.
Scenes like this are why I'm not directly in CS. With a wife and kids, I'll put in a good 40 hour week, thanks, and then GO HOME.
My aunt complains of deafness from too much loud music 20 years ago. I wonder what not enough sleep will do to these folks in the long run.
------ Nope, Not me, you can't prove I said that!
I did my first workterm doing process automation with embedded controllers (Z180). In fact, I was the only employee for much of that term. I really like working for small companies. The ones I've worked for don't care how you dress, wear your hair (I have long hair), and most importantly what tools you use. I try to use Cygwin32 for win development as much as possible (unless I have to use a 3rd party lib, like NiDAQ, etc). I use an editor of my choosing (In win, Programmer's File Editor, PFE. I was impressed to find that Microchip's MPLAB IDE was based on it, it's funny using an embedded controller dev system for windows that has TeX support) and I get to decide which controllers and tools the company buys. I brought Protel into my last job and showed the guy that hired me, and he loved it. I also tended to bring my own hand tools, soldering iron, DMM, etc..
With unions, these jobs will be harder to find because I know that techs will be all over them to avoid being unionised (my brother was a courier who quit when the Teamsters took over).
On my first WT I worked on a project for Magna International (a piece of robotic factory machinery) and I spent a lot of time at a factory. They're completely non-union. The unions have tried, and failed, to come in. The workers are treated very well. All of the managers and high-up positions are filled by people who started on the factory floor. They give out $100 prizes to the person who submits the best entry in the suggestion box, which guarantees that workers' voices are heard and that they aren't afraid to make suggestions. The food in the (beautiful-looking) cafeteria is really good. Workers and their families can go on company vacations to various places (DisneyWorld, etc) for cheap. There's a whole lot more, but the most important thing is, it works.
And without greedy unions, which only serve to alienate workers and managers.
Your career is yours. You build it, you cultivate it. When you go somewhere, your career goes with you.
Your JOB is not yours. It belongs to the company you work for. At best it's on lease.
Don't get attached to a job. DO get attached to building a career.
They've got a point - particularly the part about 35+ yr. old programmers being squeezed out. I've been lucky enough to catch the wave just as Unix started to grow, and now with Linux rearing up like a tsumani, things are looking even better. You do have to hunt down the challenging work, employers look askance at those old people wanting to do grunt stuff that any bright kid can do. I'm working in Australia, where the situation is somewhat different. I believe (judging from the Jobserve ads I see) that the UK has some well paid work too.
I'm a senior at college working towards my BS/MS in Computer Engineering/Computer Science. Alot of people that started the world of college when I did graduated this past year. Most of them had interviews and offers flung at them as if they were beads at Mardi Gras.
One trend I notice to be very disturbing is the amount of overtime in the tech industry, observed from friends and internships. I can think of two reasons this is, and I don't know which is the greater cause. One is the obvious lack of workers.
But second, and what frightens me more, is the thinking that since college students coming out of college have alot of energy and no life, they can work 60, 70, 80+ hours a week and not miss a beat. There are companies that were hiring straight from college at my university this past year, and they just wanted the overachievers. It wasn't unheard of to be up 24-7 during training, and put in ungodly hours once they got out of that as well. The average time one was with that company was only 3 years. I suspect burnout.
I'm also currently working in an internship where if you're here after 5PM, something is terribly wrong. The environment here is very 8-5, suit, meeting driven, etc. etc. And I don't feel fulfilled. It's like I don't feel productive.
Yet at the same time, I don't want to go somewhere I can't back out of. I know that in a few years, I'm going to want to start a family. I want to come home every night and kiss my wife. I'm starting to wonder if there has to be a trade off.
But from the patterns I've seen, most companies like the out-of-college type because they can be overworked. And I don't want that. That scares me.
Maybe I should just go get my MBA and become a management drone. -sigh-
Texodore
This is certainly quite a change from the standard view. When I mention to people that I am a college student working towards a CS degree they immediately mention that there are many job opportunities. Everywhere I turn people are looking for experienced programmers. This story certainly makes one wonder about long term job security. Sure one can get that first job, but later? The example of the 40 year old with knowledge of multiple languages and OS's without a decent job was a bit scary...
When you say skills, what do you mean? Do you really mean skills (like knowing OO, knowing how to perform formal verification, knowing the design of an job-event loop? How a 3d renderer works? The nature of a relational database), or just knowing a particular tool like Java, C++, VC++, VB, Win32s, ORACLE?
Give us an example of what 'skills' you need. Or is it that you don't give much of a damn about 'skills', but just people who know a particular assortment of tools. Tools evolve at breakneck speed, skills change slowly,
OO is a skill, Java/C++/Objective C/VC/EGCS are just tools.
Database programming is a skill, Oracle/Developer/Db2/Informix are just tools.
CGI programming is a skill, Perl/ASP/Php3 are just tools.
(even-driven/threaded/message-driven) GUI programming is a skill, Win32s, X windows, Mac, those are just tools.
Do you really want skills, or do you just want people who know a few specific tools?
My business at Carnegie Mellon University is to learn skills, not to learn tools.
Whom do you want? Someone who understands the skills, or someone who just knows how to use some particular tools, tools that will be obsoleted in 2 years?