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Tech Industry And Money
technotron writes " The latest from Bob Cringley is out on the Web. This time around, he talks about people who start start-ups with their money, and have reached the point of having so much money, they just keep starting more, but also mostly about the people in the tech industry, and the quality of life. "
I'm in the tech industry. I'm a poor geek boy. Wheres the justice?
-=>>=-
I'd program stuff even if I wasn't paid for it. The fact that I can pick up better hardware or a couple DVDs now and then is just an added bonus. I don't have a million bucks, but if I did I'd still be programming in the mornings - maybe different programs, but programs just the same. Spending is nice, but seeing something grow and flourish feels a whole lot nicer.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I remember when I got a first post... And there was much rejoicement...
Your number 1 source for vomit on the internet
Hey i could be onto something here...
-=>>=-
Notice if you will, she started the company and "...paid the programmers with food stamps..." i.e. she was not a programmer... she is one of the evil ones who get rich off of those of us who are too fascinated with what's on the screen to look at the real world... Now how do we become one of *them* i wonder?
This article is the basis of what made America the nation it is today - the fact that we DO NOT STOP. There is never 'enough'. We are a nation of people striving for more on a constant basis, and like it or not, it is what made us the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Once we stop thinking this way, we will slip back, and another hungrier country will take our place. Is this good/bad, I don't know. I do know however that once I make my first $10million I'm heading for the hills.....
I hate the way the IT industry operates (at least where I am). We push ourselves to put out product on time (which always requires OT) and we work the extra hours. But where I work we don't get overtime pay OR banked hours. So basically to meet the PHB's unreasonable deadlines I put in time and work for free.
The problem is, everybody does it 'cause they're too afraid of losing their jobs and being replaced!(we have a glut of unemployed IT people here)
This is what it's like for me, at least.
crazy dynamite monkey
Funny... All my neighbors do is smoke pot and drink beer...
Sure, some people get paid a nice sum - but not everybody. I'd even say - not the majority. I suspect that most slashdotters are in the same situation I am - slaving away in 60-80 hour work weeks fixing [y2k/server problem/failed router/late programming project]. Vacation is a joke, and so's your chances for getting one. While it may look nice to be getting paid $22 an hour.. after you break down the number of hours you really work... that figure drops down alot. And in silicon valley anyway, the cost of living is dramatically higher than in other parts of the country, further eating into your wallet (or so I've heard from people that live there).
TANSTAAFL. It's a motto to live by. There's no free and easy money in this industry, or any other. You gotta work for it. And maybe, just maybe, you might actually luck out and make some real money doing it.
--
Or am I just seeing too much subtext in everything
-- Oh Well
Now having Bill Gates worth BILLIONS of dollars makes being a nerd ok.
We are the ones laughing now!
Keyboard injured software engineer wins against Mattel!
What I really cant stand is the CTO's of these start up companies. They know absolutely nothing about the technology yet they make all the money and make all the dumb decisions, like not choosing one provider over the other because we didnt have 1 1/2ft raised floors in our OLD datacenter. Im just waiting for someone to give me a call so I can work as a CTO of a company, I already work as virtual CTO for almost all of our customers but I dont get payed the money. Pissed off worker. johncrisp@hotmail.com
But this time from the other side of the wall... the executives.
This is mildly disturbing. Push push push, money money money, and the last line of the article puts it all into a perspective...
These people don't have hobbies. They don't read books or paint or travel. They do this. They have nothing else to do. There is no way out.
Sorry. If this was my lifestyle, I'd find a way out after I made myself disgustingly wealthy where I wouldn't have to work again and be well off.
Again from the article, "There is no real estate left to buy without leaving the Valley, and nobody can risk doing that," says Winblad. "So there will be no big estates."
I'd buy an island. Screw it. What good is it if you can't enjoy it. You definitely "can't take it with you" after you die, so what are you doing with it? Commendable that they don't want to see their parents in a [retirement/old age] home. I sure don't want to see mine in one either. What happens, time will only tell.
For 5 to 7 years I might be able to be into this lifestyle. Sorry, I just don't understand how people can do this for a life.
There's more to life than work. Work to live, don't live to work -- as I always say when these California-work-a-life stories come around.
Then again, maybe that's why I'm an employee, not an employer. Then again I've seen more than 75% of the US in my travels. Over the next years I'll off to Europe. Co-workers have been as far as Kuala Lumpur. What kind of life is it if you can't leave 408, 415, 510, 650 and/or 925?
-m
In my area it seems to be similar. Where is this great shortage of "computer people" I keep hearing about? In "the valley?" Please. Nobody *really* wants to live and work there unless you plan on dying from pollution, ulcers and/or a stress-induced coronary at 35. And so I hear about yet another area with no tech jobs, yet a bunch of 'tech' people. All the while more and more programmers from India get off the boat.... Maybe it just hasn't proliferated throughout the entire country yet. I dunno. Maybe there's just too many 'NT-heads' who couldn't use a CLI to save themselves, and everyone's realizing that it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a good CS-oriented person) to point-n-click.
Blech. Signatures.
The situation you describe is precisely what has promoted the explosive growth of the contractor market. It allows you to practice your skills while negociating as a peer with those that pay you, instead of working as a slave.
Now it's up to you. Either go freelance or continue to moan about your plight, the cluelessness of PHBs, and the iniquities of the situation.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
is Fortune's look at what money has done to SV culture, and what SV residents do with their money. Fortune's conclusion is that people are more afraid than happy, and that money has become the only way of keeping score.
I doubt that; the survivors of General Magic are still regarded with respect, even though they didn't make a dime. Nonetheless, the article seems mostly accurate to me.
I'd love to move to SV, but I dread getting trapped there by an underwater mortgage. I've lived through the collapse of a housing bubble (Rte 128 in Boston after the minicomputer collapse in the late 80s). It's no fun making payments on a mortgage that's 120% of the house's value. And you can forget about refinancing, even when the rates drop...
I lived there for 36 years until I came to the U.S. on an TN-1 (now H1B) visa two years ago. While I can't speak for everyone, I expect that my experience is typical:
1. If you quit at a bad time, you're likely to be blacklisted as "unreliable", and not be able to get another job.
2. If you're unemployed for any length of time, it is harder to get another job (some employers require periods of unemployment to be accounted for when applying for a job).
3. Overtime only has to be paid to salaried employees to the extent that you make minimum wage for 37-1/2 hours a week (maybe 40 some places), and 150% of that over 40 hours a week. There are special rules for working holidays, etc.
4. Two years ago, there was a real glut of IT people hungry for your job.
5. In Quebec, skills don't matter -- you have to communicate in French to get a job (i.e. it is a legal requirement) and can get fired if you don'd do it well enough. English-speaking IT people constantly have to prove that they speak French well enough.
6. Some of the issues above (like periods of unemployment mattering when applying for a job) are clearly illegal. But, in Canada, a lawyer can't take a case on a contingency basis. In practice, this means that if you're not independantly wealthy (i.e. need a job in the first place), or the beneficiary of a charity, you can't sue.
7. In Canada, the IT worker is in a "select, priveleged" profession and earns a high salary (typically US$35,000 when I left, though I earned more). Because of the socialist climate, such people are considered a "resource" and are expected to "support" the country via taxation on their earnings. Not working, threatinging to not work, or anything that would mean not getting paid, is considered "anti-social".
In Liberty, Rene
If there is no skills shortage where you are then business is lucky and you're unlucky.
In Europe (and here in the UK in particular), there is an immense skills shortage in the relevant areas. It's not good enough to know just one or two things though, because the current skills shortage is caused by convergence of many areas, and your skills have to match. If you have extensive knowledge in Internet networking, Unixes of various kinds (especially Solaris), server hardware and software administration, programming in C/C++, shell and Perl scripting, and experience with SQL databases, then you will find everyone scrambling to pay you more to work for them.
And the shortage is so bad that everyone is poaching from everyone else, but that again drives up the contract rates. (I'm not complaining.)
So, stop moaning, go freelance, and move where the work is.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
"Work to live, not live to work." If more people did this, we wouldn't hear about how people are too afraid of losing their job to walk out of the office before midnight.
I'm a consultant (aka "contractor scum"). I hate it, but I walk out the door at 5 except on rare occasions once or twice a year. Here's a tip for anyone thinking of looking for a new job: have the interview as late in the afternoon as you can. After the interview, don't just drive away from the place -- wait. Bring a book if you have to, to fill the time. But wait and see what at what time 70% of the employees' cars have left the parking lot. If that time is after 6 pm, drive away and never ever go back -- that company doesn't want your skills, they want your life and your soul. Screw 'em. Even if you end up managing a Radio Shack somewhere, you'll live a better life than coding your life away.
I will post this little story elsewhere, since it is a bit long:
http://www.chadhead.com/philosophy.txt
This actually made me think much harder about materialism than the Cringley article.
Ha,
Would he rather we smoke pot, snort crack, and shoot heroine like all the yuppy Stock Brokers
I see everyday on Wall Street ?. I don't understand how anyone can put down being rich, without being rich themselves. I program because
I enjoy it, I don't own a startup company, but I work for one who will have it's IPO soon. I plan on becoming filthy rich with it, but I don't plan on leaving. I enjoy what I do, I enjoy the smart people I work with. I'm 21 and 14 days old, but currently I make more money than a lot of these people who report on the IT Industry, or people who always liked putting me down. In High School I didn't have a car, and my friends made fun of me, now I have a brand new fully loaded 99 Nissan Altima(sure it's not a BMW, but how many 21 year olds BUY an $18,000 car with cash?). I still have more money in my bank account than a lot of the "jocks" and "cool" people make in one year.
I bought a new entertainment system and everything, the coolest thing about it is that I can afford the things I want. But I don't want a lot of things, I'm not flashy or anything, but I can buy nice clothes. I worked hard for it, I worked hard to know what I know, now if I'm looked down upon for working hard and enjoying the fruits, then screw you. Try working hard yourself.
I've earned everything I got, I wasn't awarded anything by the liberal government that wants to take my hard earned money and give to people who like to enjoy "working the system" and collect unemployment, and welfare. Ugh.. i'll stop now.
I worked in SV back when Racal Vadic mae 300/1200 modems the size of small VW's. Even back then the talk was all about money. People sat around in bars and constantly talked about the next big thing and how they were going to be in on the next company going public. It was almost like going to Hollywood to make it big in the movies. But I finally got fed up with the rush and the traffic and the hours and moved out to the midwest. I'm not rich, but now when I come home in the early evening I can take a walk and watch the sunset and not think about getting a bigger house or a better car. Maybe that is rich. We best think about what's important to us. America's culture has been built on "do more, faster" and that has made us a large and powerful nation, but I wonder if the next big change for America will be to realize as a nation that we've been chasing the wrong dream...
Isn't every Cringely on Slashdot now? And given that Baloney! doesn't seem to have much recent updating, is he acknowledging /. as the uber-forum for discussion of *everything*?
Hmm... getting a lot of server errors today, will this affect Andover's share price? :-)
--
'nuff said
Maybe the folks at the very top of this business live to work, but I think the Pulpit article is fastening on a glamorous-seeming minority that hasn't got too much in common with the people I actually program with every day.
Frankly, I think of most programmers I know as living to play. Programming is play; and we play hard. We also mountain bike hard, play Quake and Doom hard, love our families too hard sometimes...
As for the not spending our money part of the article -- this part I agree with. We don't spend our money on ostentation. Why not? Well, part of programming is about community. Most of you have probably read it, but check out Eric Raymond's Homesteading in the Noosphere if you really disagree with this statement. Anyhow, if we, as programmers, develop exclusionary "only the rich can play" habits, we isolate ourselves. Programming as a culture is about intellectual community and competition. Start buying toys other programmers can't afford and pretty soon you're outside your culture.
I guess my point is that the Pulpit article suggests we are all pitiful losers who can't do anything else and won't spend our money. To them I say this: I am happy. I am productive. I don't work like a slave, I play like a child. Lighten up!
--Scrappy
From the last paragraph of the article: They don't spend their money and they don't give it away. Their wealth is typically tied-up in equities they can't easily sell. So how do these people express their success? By doing it all over again. These people don't have hobbies. They don't read books or paint or travel. They do this. They have nothing else to do. There is no way out. Cringley makes it sound like these are 'poor little rich folk' trapped by their own success. That is a load of crap, these people do what they do because they like to do it. They get a kick out of it. Many of them would do much the same things if they didn't get half the money out of the effort simply because it is 'what they do'. Hell, most of us are no different. There was a time in my life when I thought I was going to be a mechanic forever, because that is all I was good at (that or become a rock star and die at 25, leaving a bunch of crying groupies and a horribly bloated corpse). But then I found computers. Now, if I was a mechanic, I would go home and program in my spare time. I don't have a vocation, I have an advocation. I love what I do, and making a good living from it is just gravy. The thing is that people who really like what they do is that they tend to be good at it. They read books and magazines about it. They pay attention to it and take notice when things are done well or badly -- and then use that knowledge to improve themselves. If the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs are good and/or lucky at what they do then they win. If they are bad and/or unlucky they loose. This is the rule of the game they play and they play it with their eyes open. If anyone here wants to bitch because "I didn't get the lucky show-biz break..." you can go ahead. But I think it is all just whining of the worst kind. If you don't like what you are doing or where you are doing it then move on. Find something you really like to do. The best part is that chances are you will probably be great at it. But don't complain because someone else found their personal contentment in playing a game where stocks and power are the counters. Or, like Bob Cringely, consider them trapped in a life of bondage to their jobs. Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Here is that myth again. The one abot "community". I don't know what you're talking abot, but all of the coders that I know are loners. I have no "community" to maintain, and I DO spend money. I have 2 cars, a house, and a Warhol hanging in my living room. I think the "community" thing is a lot of bunk. I make good money, and I spend it. I couldn't care less whether I got it from programming or selling crack. Work is work. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise. You'll just be disappointed.
Money is no use in itself, but it has one very useful property: it stops you from having to worry about money.
That's the really bad thing about being poor, IMO -- the fact that so much of your time and mental energy is taken up on such a draining subject. Having a stack of benjamins hanging round lets you take a lot of risks with the rest of your life.
jsm
Ahh, the foolishness of youth. When I was younger, I used to think like that. The year I graduated from college, Apple had their IPO. I lived in Carmel then, and followed Jobs' and his purchases almost like a hobby. I kept thinking, man one day, I'll have a four-car garage full of Italian sports cars. That hasn't happened. I still cringe when I see the bill at the grocery store or for the $1.75 per gallon for gas here.
Cringely said, "neighbors ... who already have more money than they can ever spend." Yeah, everyone in the valley is rich. I wish Cringely wouldn't propagate myths like that. Mostly, it's a bunch of poor geeks who drive bad cars. If everyone is so rich, why are most of the cars on 101 5+ years old and falling apart. I'm from Alabama and moved to CA when I was 12. When I go back to Alabama, I see better cars than I see in the valley. Over and over in the Bay area, I see young people working their asses off for not much. My last employeer's IPO made my boss (a PWB) over 25 million. Me, I made about minimum wage when you look at the number of hours I worked. It sucks working 7 days per week 12+ hours per day to just make ends meet. Last week at a friend's birthday party in Sunnyvale, the topic of discussion turned to health insurance. Not a single person there that had a technical degree, had it. Most of my friends have kids, and they had to take-out loans to pay the hospital bills. If I had worked on a education degree, I would have health insurance no. Instead, I worked my ass off for 7 years to get a masters in EE. I met Cringely once, and he seems like a nice guy. But please remember that most of what he writes is sensational. No, most people in the valley don't make the money he talks about.
What happened to my formatting? It looked OK when I did a preview, but all the HTML tags were stripped out when I clicked submit and now the post looks like crap. Dang!
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
So get off your ass and move! The only people that care what happens in the valley are those in the valley. I have a great job, a great house (that didn't cost 1/2 million) and best of all a great family that I spend several hours a day with. I live in Nebraska and the tech industry is flourishing here. If you are smart you can find a good job anywhere. I still drool every time I see a Ferrari but I'll get by just fine without one. No amount of money will replace the time I spent with my kids.
It's that special place you touch a computer to make it happy (and do what you want ;-)
+&x
If you have a masters in EE, and have a job without health insurance, then you are an idiot. Anyone who has a college degree in just about anything, who has a job without health insurance of some kind, is an idiot.
Go get a job with health insurance, because your current place of employment is a sweatshop. Oh, and be sure to tell your friends they're idiots too. They're trading their finacial well-being, and the health of their kids, for the wonderful privilege of living there. That's an idiotic thing to do.
Sorry, don't mean this as flamebait, but the SV folks need to get their priorites straight.
Every time I read one of these articles about the dismal life of Silicon Valley employees for some odd reason it makes me want to be there even more. Somehow it sounds exciting to me! The idea of being that wrapped up in my work! Wealth is a secondary motivator.
Teach a man to dish and he will gossip for life.
So you've all seen the trailer for Fight Club, right? I'm sure you remember the part where Brad Pitt describes how our lives seem unfufilled because we've all been raised to think we're going to be movie stars and models. Or the part where Ed Norton evaluates his life in terms of an Ikea catalog, trying to figure out what message he's sending with his collection of consumer goods?
Sure sounds like Cringe is coping with the same issues. I think he should form his own Fight Club. I'd pay good money to see the Cringe and, say, Scott McNealy get into a no-holds barred down-and-dirty street fight.
As there is in this industry. And no, it's not among the programmers. It's among the leech VC's, know-nothing managers, and money-hungry sales people that smell their new Lexus everytime they see a brilliant programmer. Funny that Cringely would write an article talking about the great spirit of the Valley. You mean the spirit that causes everyone to one-up each other with new cars, fancy houses, and cocktail parties? The Valley of the 80's was about the technology. In the 90's, it's nothing but revolting greed.
:)
I don't think it's a far stretch to compare up programmers to the exploited child labor of third-world countries- yes, we all eat rather well and have the modern conveniences, but those of us who love what we do are exploited to all hell by the establishment.
Marxist-type rant finished.
-MVK
I got a first post yesterday. And it was on-topic, and is still scored in the positive domain.
Thing is, I posted it as an AC just as with this post.
So it's irrelevant to any personal scorecard one could keep.
Oh well.
At the risk overgeneralizing a complex topic, I think the reason why rich geeks rarely buy shiny pebbles with their wealth is because of our experience with computer gear.
In a spare bedroom I probably have about $200 worth of excess computer gear. I easily spent over $10,000 for it. Not much more than a decade ago I paid $500 (over $2000 in terms of today's salary) for a 40 MB hard disk *and was happy to get it at that price* I have a $3000 system which I can't give away today. Fortunately all I have from the 70's are old issue of _Byte_ magazine with ads for 360kb floppy drives for over $1000, or memory at $100+/*KB*. (This is why I roll my eyes when someone is shocked that my main system is "only" a 266 MHz P-II with 256 MB.)
Outside of the computers, my major expenses have been things like TVs and microwaves. The price of each today is less than half of it was in 1984, about 1/10th when you consider salary. Cars? You buy them then drive them until the cost of repairs exceeds the cost of car payments.
In this environment, you feel deep in your gut that money spent on objects is money lost. This isn't always true, but it's certainly true of the baubles most newly rich like to buy. I'm not surprised that most rich geeks aren't interested in buying material objects for their own sake.
(BTW, I'm not a millionaire but I did get a significant inheritance a few years ago. I replaced a 10-year-old car, installed central A/C in my condo, and had LASIK surgery. All boringly utilitarian uses.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Fulltime childcare is a rise in the standard of living? I would think having more time to be at home with your family would be better, instead of always being at work and having someone else live your life and raise your children for you.
I was reading a similar article in Info World where a man was quoted as saying "I'm gone on business all the time. My son's teacher didn't even believe I existed. Finally one day I made an appearance to show her my son really had a father."
I think it's pathetic that people think it's a Good Thing(tm) that they can pay someone else to raise their children full-time and that others find it comical that they are away from their families so much. To think that they wonder why they have so many problems with their children later in life. How stupid and self-centered can these people get? Are they really doing all this just to support their families? I think not.
I work at a school in a high income area where I see this happening to the kids all the time. Some of them are here from 7am to 7pm only to be picked up by a nanny, who usually ends up being the one to tuck them in at night. Sad.
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
Sigh. Do you actually have an engineering degree, work in your field, and have health insurance? Two of the three are easy, but getting all three at a time seems impossible. I don't know many people that do. I've worked in Alabama, Albany NY, Durham NC, and Sunnyvale CA. The only common trait between the companies I've worked for seems to be "screw the tech people." Every single one of them has that attitude. The janitors get health insurance, but the engineers don't. There almost always seems to be an attitude that clerks and janitors are loyal, and the engineers are expendable. Several companies I've worked for couldn't figure-out why their engineers never stay for more than a year. It's because they treat us like temps. No respect, no health insurance, and low pay makes us want to leave. The faster turn-over in engineers, the worse the new engineers are treated, so they want to leave sooner, so the new engineers are treated even worse, so they leave even faster, and so on. It's a feedback process that makes life worse for us, and I want out of it.
They're trading their finacial well-being, and the health of their kids...
That was the point I was trying to make. So many of my friends don't have health insurance for their wives or kids. It worries me when a guy who works 7 days per week has to borrow money so that his wife can have a baby in a hospital. This isn't backwoods Arkansas or Alabama during the depression. This is California for christ sake. Both sets of my grandparents had my parents outside of a hospital, because they couldn't afford it. I want to do better than that. A couple of my friend's wives are going to natural child birth classes, and another friend of mine just had her child at home with a mid-wife. It's depressing
Sorry, don't mean this as flamebait, but the SV folks need to get their priorites straight.
I think I have my priorities straight. I've talked it over with my wife and a counselor at a local college. I'm going to take the NTE (already passed a practise test easily) and get certified to teach. Teachers in my home town in Alabama with a masters and a few years experience make more than I do as an EE. I'm moving to the land of $1 a gallon gas, $100,000 nice houses, and job security. I'm looking forward to having 3 months off in the summer. That might give me time to finish another book or take-on an Open Source project. Engineering was a fun experiment for a while, but it's not a good life.
I'm 25. I'm just starting out, but companies are throwing themselves at my feet. It's not that hard to do. I'm no millionaire, but neither of my cars are old. The way the economy is today (not 20 years ago), you ARE doing something wrong if you're not getting paid well. I have a business degree, and I've been out of college for 3 years. I make well over $50/hour. I have several other friends doing the same. The only people in IT that are NOT doing well and the uber-geeks that have no idea how to negotiate.
I have a CS degree, work in my field, have health insurance, have stock options, (and have increased my salary by over 45% in less than 2 years.) And I'm only 24. 5% average yearly increases? what type of a joke is that? Oh yeah, I don't live in SV, I live in a low cost area in the north east. It's better go get paid more early in life - because all your raises will compound. Obviously you should never, ever take a job that pay equal or less than your current one. Even if I don't make it big, by the time I'm 30 I'll make at least 100k a year, based on continued wage increases alone.
Health insurance costs me $45/month for total coverage (I buy my own). It's not a big deal, at all. Again, if you don't have health insurance, that's just stupid. You might as well drive around without a seat belt and complain that you can't afford one. It makes no sense.
Sorry, but it sounds like you really don't know what you're doing. Of course it depends on exactly what you do, but you shouldn't be borrowing money for stuff like that. You need to learn what you should be making, and then learn how to negotiate. You can't really complain if you're allowing yourself to be taken advantage of.
Yes, for you. I pay almost $600 per month for me, my wife, and two kids. I had a kidney stone about 4 years ago, and my health insurance went-up tremendously. Almost half of my income after taxes goes towards health insurance. I'm only 27, and it's going to get worse. If it goes up much more, I'm going to either have to get a second job (even less time with my kids, sigh) or drop the insurance. Geez, $45 per month. You're young, not married, and don't have kids. Most of us can't get insurance that cheap.
Not that I believe most of the above, but the one sentence above is a very good insight. A close Uncle of mine worked for Allied Signal Aerospace for over 15 years. He made less than $25,000, and was *the* plant engineer. Allied closed the plant, and now he has spent over a year trying to find a job making decent money. No one will pay an engineer what they're worth if they worked for so little for so long. In a sense, even though he has 20 years of experience as an electrical engineer, he is having to start over. The years of working cheap, not only costed him then, but they're probably going to cost him the rest of his life.
I've been looking for a job for about 16 months now, and I've found most places won't pay you over 20% more than you made on your old job. I make about $12,000 per year working for a small ISP, and that's all they can afford to pay. I really don't mind, because I get to work on what I want, when I want (and I have a T1 to my house). BellSouth.net just recently offered me a job in Atlanta. Their offer was ridiculous, and their justification was that the offer was for almost twice what I'm making now. So, think twice before working cheap. When you're young, those years of increasing your pay each year mean the most. As the previous poster said, "all your raises will compound."
Ouch! Are living/working in all the wrong places. I have a CS degree and work exactly 37.5 hours per week in a salaried position. Overtime, no problem. Formula = (time X 1.5) All this in a relatively small city. Yes, I could move to a large metro area. But, why? I'll pay 3X the mortgage costs and commute 2 hours a day. Now I have a leasurely 10 minute drive to work. I guess my point is you are what you make of it. Suck it up and get the hell away from the dead end job your in. There are millions of opportunities out there for SKILLED people.
Maybe you will make over 100k, maybe you wont. 45% increase in two years is a lot. I doubt the trend will continue.
I too have a CS degree, and have been out of school for a couple of years. I was getting underpaid when I first left school. I've jumped about 30% since my first job, but that's because I am at least getting what I deserve. The increases will be much slower from now on.
However, to disagree with the original poster. I work in my field, have health insurance, 401k, etc. I do agree that companies treat their engineers poorly. But we as engineers are letting them do this to us. Don't take a job if they won't pay health insurance. They will continue to screw people as long as people will take it from them.
Demand more money. I went to one interview where the guy offered me less than what I was currently making. I said, "Good luck finding someone good at that price!" Another problem I see, is that people who don't have the credentials are entering this field, writing crappy, unmaintainable code, and are taking jobs for less money. This brings down everyone's overall earning potential. Employers think fine, this guy has a CS degree, but wants $60k. This guy doesn't have a CS degree and wants $45k. Lets hire the guy for $45k to save money. What they don't realize is in the long run it will probably cost more for them.
Why do lawyers make so much? Because everyone demands that price. I support some sort of centralized exam (similar to the bar), where people can really be tested on what they know. These platform dependent (MCSD) exams, have the right idea, but aren't quite there yet.
I'm just pissed off, because I had to fix some contractors program yesterday and today, and he obviously has had no formal teaching. I hate it! Learn to code people! Read "The Practice of Programming", or "Code Complete". Do SOMETHING to improve!
$600/month? That sounds like a crock to me. You're getting screwed - there's no way you should be paying $7200 a year for health insurance. You'd better start shopping around. As for the pay - any decent EE with a masters will definitely get paid in the 70K range... I know - several of my friends are them... Again, you are definitely not doing something right or are not qualified in your area... peace. JOe... ps -> I have a masters in CS and make over a $100/hour doing java... Again, you're doing something extremely wrong here...
peace. JOe...
That's sometimes a difficult problem. About 9 years ago, I designed a terminal to go on a sewing machine, and one company made and installed almost 40,000 of them. I'm now negotiating for a job with this company to replace a guy who died last month. He made less than $20K/year, and got hit and killed by a car as he was walking home from work at 1 AM. It's sad that he couldn't afford a car, and that's what killed him. (he had a mental disorder and would have to sometimes take-off a week or two at a time, the $20K was for only about 40 weeks of work per year) What is this job worth? This company made over $4 million in profit last year on service and adding custom features to the terminals. (yes, they still milk over $100 per terminal per year out of their customers) So, is it worth $500K/year to hire me, because they're going to make $4M? Or is it worth $20K, because that's what they paid the last guy? Or, should they pay me less than $20K, because the last guy had a PhD and I only have a Masters. I can tell you what a teacher or a fireman should make in a given area, but for many technical jobs, the question is a lot harder to answer.
then learn how to negotiate.
A good suggestion. Before you take a job, consider hiring someone else to do the negotiation. Rather than making yourself look bad, you can make the negotiator you hire look like the bad guy because he's the one making requests for salary, vacation time, stock options, or health insurance, rather than you. It's best that you don't make enemies, before you even start working. If you already have a job, I found that wives can be a great help. They can bug the boss at any and all company functions about the fact that they pay you less than you could make elsewhere, or that only 2 days per year of vacation time just isn't enough. The boss might not like your wife, but your relationship with him doesn't suffer.
I had a kidney stone, and my wife had trouble druing the birth of the our second child and had to spend a night in the hospital. That's the problem. I tried shopping around, but most companies won't even give me a quote. When I was single and 21, I paid $300 per *year* with a $10,000 deductable. It covered only expenses incurred in a hospital. As for the $600/month, that is with a small hospital deductable ($2,500), and it includes yearly check-ups, pre-natal care, child birth, dental, and vision for the four of us. It's almost as good as my friends who are teachers and have insurance through the state. The lowest price I found for insurance, was 25% less expensive for 75% less coverages. I'm just stuck in a bad position.
I was always impressed by the ability of US nation to absorb new, usefull and :)
amazing things from around the world. So what happened to this great nation now?
People, look around, it's easy now to see farther than another coast. Not everything is going around the money!
The whole civilizations are build around more crucial and eternal things.
You don't need another car. Your kids won't drive it.
Do yourself a favour, relax.
And when the hard day is over, take a walk and enjoy the roses
KuroiNeko
Where? Where? Where?
I've spent years (and a lot of money and time) going through newspapers in many different areas looking for a good tech job. I've contacted the career centers at both of the colleges I have degrees from, and the college I teach at. There isn't much work for a good technical person now. Go to job fairs at a local college. See the huge number of people hiring for business majors, and look at the almost complete lack of people hiring engineers. If I wanted to use a point and drool interface, I could find a job tomorrow, but I want a technical position in my field. Millions of jobs? Geez, you have one, so it looks like everyone should have one. Open your eyes, and look around. Talk to people who work in malls, Wal-Mart/K-Mart/Costco, and fast food places where you live. You'll be surprised at the large number of them that have technical degrees that can't find work. I went to a large college and still live near it. It's interesting to see all of my old classmates around town. I couldn't even give you a good guess as to how many of them I've seen waiting tables. My wife was a CS professor at a small college. Rather often, her former students fill our water glasses or bring us food in restaraunts. They're not programming, they're serving food! My sister is HR director for a chain of department stores. Everytime I see her, she brags about how many EE's she's hired (to make fun of me and the fact that she makes 7x my salary with an easy to get degree). Millions of jobs? More like a few jobs and a few lucky winners, and the winners are too blind to see how lucky they are.
Please, appreciate how good you have it.
This has to be one of the sadder statements I've read in a while. Having enough money makes you more comfortable because you can aford to keep your kids in daycare while you work all those long hours? If I had more money than I knew what to do with I'd be cuttin' back on the hours and pulling my kid out of daycare early so I could spend more time with him. I realize that being able to afford daycare is a necessary and difficult thing for a lot of people without premium jobs but I think this is different.
My kid is too special to me and he is growing up faster than I'm ready for as it is. I don't know much of anything about Judy Estrin so I'm hoping that this was just a careless phrase on her part. Maybe if I had as cool a job as CTO for Cisco I'd feel differently about where I spent my time, I dunno, but with the so-so job I have I'd much rather be at home enjoying the familly.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
$1.75 per gallon for gas here
Yikes. I thought it was highway robbery the other day when I filled up and it was $1.18 a gallon.
It sucks working 7 days per week 12+ hours per day to just make ends meet
If everyone is so rich, why are most of the cars on 101 5+ years old and falling apart
I've got three cars... One brand new one, a pickup that is about 8 years old (but not falling apart, its got only about 70k miles on it), and an early 70's muscle car. One reason I can think of why you wouldn't want a nice car if you were commuting into downtown SF, is that you'd have to be worried about it getting stolen/vandalized. A crappy commuter car is worthwhile having in such an area.
I never work much more than 40 hours a week, and I am making ends meet O.K. I live in the midwest. I tried moving to the SF Bay Area in the late 80's, but I couldn't find anything there that could make ends meet, so I came back here.
health insurance. Not a single person there that had a technical degree, had it
Out here even places like restaurants and convenience stores offer that. I have no degree (only went to college about 3 years), and I work as a software developer making what would be equivalent to around $120k in the Bay Area according to the online salary comparisons I've seen. I wouldn't consider a job that didn't offer free or cheap medical insurance coverage, and I haven't seen any non-contract jobs that didn't offer it recently.
Frankly, I don't feel too sorry for you, because you could definitely do much better if you wanted.
the company where i work is practically BEGGING for java coders (silicon valley based). if all the whining posters above can't find job using C then they need to learn java or some other language thats more in demand...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Where? Where? Where?
Out here in the midwest we can't get enough educated and experienced people. Kids just out of college with a CS degree are getting $30-40K starting around here (would be about $60-$80K in the bay area). I make significantly more than that and I have no degree at all (though over 10 years experience).
I went to a large college and still live near it
Big mistake. College towns have oddly upset job markets (there are too many overeducated people trapped there due to SO in college, etc). I grew up in and attended college in a mid-sized university town (about 50K population, about 25K enrollment). I couldn't make 1/2 there what I make where I live now, only about 45 miles away in a town of about 300K population.
More like a few jobs and a few lucky winners, and the winners are too blind to see how lucky they are.
Nothing lucky about my situation around here. I could easily change jobs if I wanted to (I've had offers and headhunters call on a regular basis).
I'm just stuck in a bad position.
No kidding. If you were in a decent position, then you would get the same group rate regardless of your medical history (like I do). Where I work we can choose between four different health plans, and everyone who is enrolled in a given plan pays the same amount. You do have to pay extra to put a spouse on (its typically a little over double what the price is for the single rate), and you have to pay extra for children (a little more than the spouse additional price -- but that covers multiple kids if you have them). I think the worst price you would have to pay on the most expensive plan for employee, spouse and kids coverage would still be less than $150 per month.
The plan I am on costs me roughly $75 per month (medical, dental and vision), and has a $2500 deductible with a $10 copay on office visits and for prescriptions. I'd say it is better than the plan most of the schools around here use (I used to have that company a long time ago, and their service stank).
My previous employer paid 100% of my health care insurance (you had to pay extra for spouse or kids, but I don't know how much since I wasn't married back then and don't have kids). I was offered a job with a different company recently which was a similar sort of deal. My overall compensation where I am at now is better than those other jobs though, which is why I don't mind paying a little for health insurance.
> While I can't speak for everyone, I expect that my experience is typical:
You do not speak for everyone. Your experience is atypical.
I live and work in Canada, and this simply isn't true. This is a /great/ place to be if you have some talent and initiative. Even if not, it's not bad.
Taking your points one at a time:
1. Blacklisting: if you screw your former employer, you will have a hard time getting jobs unless someone will vouch for you. This is true everywhere. I've never heard of anyone having problems after giving the former employer adequate (2-4 weeks) notice.
2. Explaining Gaps: see #6 below.
3. OT Pay: So? The company is offering $X for Y amount of work. If OT pay were mandatory, they'd simply lower the per-hour wage until the aggregate cost was back to $X. If it makes you unhappy, get a job that pays OT. I know mine does.
4. Oversupply: My company spent a good chunk of change and effort recruiting in 1997, and I can remember sitting in on interview after interview with candidates that simply weren't up to par. If you were inexperienced / unskilled / unable to hold yourself together through an interview, then yes, you were competing with a 'glut' of people for any job. If you had some kind of skill, OTOH, you could walk into a job with minimal effort.
5. Mandatory French: Untrue. I live just across the river from Quebec, and can assure you that many unilingual English-speakers are employed there. None of them are afraid of being fired.
6. Gaps in the Record: This is just too much. Since when is it illegal to disqualify applicants based on previous unemployment? If a guy hasn't worked in five years, then he likely lacks current skills. If he's hopped between 15 jobs in the last 8 years, with 24 months of cumulative downtime mixed in, that makes you wonder how reliable he'll be in his next position.
If it's illegal to consider [un]employment history when reviewing applicants, then what criteria do you think employers should use?
7. Taxation: You're straying into tin-foil-hat land here. First, able-bodied adults who don't work without good reason are considered anti-social because it implies they're living off the labours of others. Where do you suppose welfare/UI/etc. monies come from?
Second, Canada's high taxes are overhyped. I paid somewhere around 35% income tax last year, on a comfortable, above-the-mean salary. That's not outrageous, considering that I live in a country with no impending Social Security debacle, ~zero crime, free health care, clean air, and so on.
The standard of living here is one of the highest in the world.
My biggest worry is that the secret will get out, and mass immigration will cause property values to skyrocket.
cheers,
mike
This poster is exactly right. All future employers will judge you, and offer you according to what you have been paid, and base their offer on that figure.
The trouble with this is that the same people with no direction other than to make more and more money, with nothing else in their lives, are also typically fooling with stock options which are not vested immediately.
;) ), pay off some senators and legislators to pass legislation letting us hire some more people easily locked into this mode of life, for that matter let's allocate some money to seeding government and the military with our stuff so we can lock 'em down good and tight, oh and while we're at it, company X is really firing on all cylinders so we'll buy that, take their best people and assign them to debugging Excel macros and lay off the rest of the cylinders."
;) however, the claim of being solid and not overfragile must continue to be a reasonable one.
It's a recipe for an entire industry full of people solely dedicated to pissing in everybody else's punchbowls so nothing interferes with their option vesting. I'm surprised there isn't more outright sabotage going on. Of course, who could tell? Hmmmm.
It's an empty enough goal even _without_ the mechanism of vesting.
"Make more money!"
"To do what?"
"To, uh, make more money!"
"Yes, but what are you going to do when you have it?"
"Er, make more of it!"
The trouble is, once 'options' get involved in the equation, the logical (amoral) answer becomes,
"Hire away the competition's best brains and set them to knitting just to keep them from producing anything that might hurt us, buy good reviews in ZDnet publications (
"And now that you have effectively gutted the market economy and done an end run around the theoretical capacity of people to exert selfwill, how about sharing with us the purpose for which you've caused all this destruction?"
"To make more money!"
"Why?"
"So we can do it all even more."
Sorry: this is pathological and destructive. It's cancer as applied to sociology and the computer industry instead of the usual application to biology. It will end in the competitors getting so much better at destroying than creating, that the result becomes stagnation and even fallback, the loss of what usefulness used to exist in the face of competitive pressure gone awry.
In order for it to truly run amok certain changes have to be made, such as it becoming a crime to investigate exactly what the software is doing, and for the software company living according to this creed to be immune to any form of accountability for its actions. However, these exact changes _are_ being made, so we can expect an absolute scorched earth policy of commercial software.
With luck Linux can be relatively immune to this stuff- it will be immune to the exact degree that it can disdain interoperability with the amok commercial stuff. Strategically, control of the internet backbones and most ISPs must remain either with free software or with commercial Unices that aren't too worried about seizing the mainstream. Tactically, it depends on how willing people are to take no for an answer. In general, commercial software is willing to _promise_ anything to win: it often can't deliver, but something like Linux cannot effectively take on a purely reactive role, constantly trying to achieve feature parity or match grandiose claims with grandiose claims. The result would be 'everybody lies and nothing works, only with Windows there's more software to not work, and sometimes it does stuff for you without screwing it up'. It's better tactically for Linux to set its own terms for growth, and not be too quick to lie or hype for the sake of a temporary win.
How does that relate to the Cringely article? Well, the secret here is that Silicon Valley _can't_ be honest at this point. The biggest gorilla (MS, but it could just as well have been any of them) sets the tone for all of them, and if you are playing the same game you have to play by the same rules or you're just roadkill, fast.
There is a possibility of changing the rules without telling them. It has everything to do with staying within reality, plodding along trying to produce genuinely helpful stuff even if it's not glamorous, and above all by not being frightened into accepting 'silicon valley time' in which you never do anything right, only FAST and buggy and temporary.
Doing this, Linux people and slashdotters and free software programmers can ensure that they are laughed at and always out-hyped... and, in the end, not taken seriously enough. It's a stealth tactic, an infiltrate and assimilate tactic, because there will always be a percentage of people who will accept being inconvenienced for even whimsical or personal reasons. Eventually, the stealth maneuver pays off as you become an accepted part of the landscape, just part of the scenery with a reputation widely known through word of mouth.
Linux can endure any amount of 'tough, geeky, iconoclastic' reputation as long as it doesn't develop a reputation for lies and deception. Claiming to be userfriendly doesn't count as nobody believes that
Hey guy, I'm a type I diabetic (for 30 years) and haven't had health insurance for over 10 years. I'm not stupid. I just have a disease that is not profitable for insurance companies with stockholders and greedsters. I damn all the money grubbing with healthcare in the U.S. What does being a "techie" have to do with not being sick and a risk? Get real sick you idiot and find out. Get a real disease and find out how much capitalism, hospitals, doctors and HMOs love you. Maybe get Lou Gehrig's disease so you can't haughtily type your social classes in your Java Bean and find out the hypocrisy in the HR/HMO/Benefit brochures. Better yet a crippling car accident. Find out the true cost of healthcare when you don't have good health. Hyper-techno capitalism doesn't love the sick and the poor.
That's not a good comparison, at all. Here (northern GA/western SC) damn clerks in 7/11's get health insurance, but most engineer's don't. My father's employer owns a chain of convience stores and a shop that designs high-end textile machinary. He offers health insurance to the clerks at the convience store, but not the engineers at the machine shop. He says that's because he can hire all the ME's and CS's (yes, there are *lots* of processors in the machinary) he needs for less than $30K/year. In contrast, at the convience store, he can't get many people to work for $8/hour without benefits. He said it is more effective and cheaper to offer health insurance as an enticement for potential new hires at his stores, than it is to pay them more. He claims that he only spends an extra $1.25 per hour on benefits for the clerks, and gets away with paying $2 less per hour (a profit of $0.75 per hour or about $120 per employee per month saved).
In addition, he claims that his radio ads for clerks that mention health insurance are much more effective than the ones that mention the higher pay (extra $2/hour) w/o insurance. His classified ads in the paper looking for ME's and CS's are most effective when he mentions flextime, 4K per year equipment budget, and his new equipment, than are the ones that mention good benefits.
Here's the insight, the reason in this case for engineers not usually getting health insurance (or 401K's or vacation time, etc.) is that they care more about the work conditions and the equipment when selecting a job, than they do the benefits. Whereas in your example, waiters and convenience store clerks care more about pay and benefits.
he can hire all the ME's and CS's (yes, there are *lots* of processors in the machinary) he needs for less than $30K/year
Crazy, you can easily get twice that where I live and the cost of living is half as much. I can't believe anyone with 1/4 of a brain would put up with that.
Well, you don't have Ga. Tech, Univ. of S. Carolina, Clemson, and Univ. of Georgia (plus over a dozen small colleges within a 120 miles from here) pumping out new engineers and CS majors at twice the rate that new tech jobs are created. A huge supply of qualified unemployeed workers == low pay. (well, when I say qualified, I'm not talking about the UGA graduates) Simple supply and demand.
and the cost of living is half as much. I can't believe anyone with 1/4 of a brain would put up with that.
Half as much? I doubt that. From your previous message, you said you lived in the midwest. I seriously doubt that the cost of living is that much less anywhere in the country when compared to backwoods Georgia.
1/4 brain? I know quite a number of intelligent people who put up with it, because it's better than doing construction, working in a textile mill, or working in a a chicken processing factory (yes, lots of chicken farms around here, and they smell extremely bad).
Well, you don't have Ga. Tech, Univ. of S. Carolina, Clemson, and Univ. of Georgia (plus over a dozen small colleges within a 120 miles from here) pumping out new engineers and CS majors at twice the rate that new tech jobs are created
:-(
You think there are no engineering/CS schools in the midwest? There are quite a few within a 250 mile radius or so from where I live. While the oversupply phenomenon you mention happens in the specific college town in question, it doesn't seem to extend much past 20-25 miles outside them.
Perhaps the university sponsored/affiliated 'development park'/'incubator' office park/environments around the universities in this area are working better than I thought they were.
Half as much? I doubt that.
Actually, the half as much was in response to the original poster, who lives in the SF Bay Area. The cost of living in the midwest where I live is about 1/2 that of the Bay Area. Georgia is probably actually pretty comparable to where I live in terms of cost of living.
This is one of the annoyances of anonymous posting, you can't always tell who you are responding to in a long thread.
lots of chicken farms around here, and they smell extremely bad
Quitcher bitchin. We have lots of hog farms around here, and they smell just as bad if not worse than chickens...
There is a large front page article in the local paper about the 'crisis' of lack of skilled workers (and even unskilled workers) in the state. Unemployment nationally is just over 4%. Locally it is under 3%. They are saying that it is so bad its going to start causing a slowdown in the economy due to causing limited production or forcing companies to look out of state for workers or new plant locations.