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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'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 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
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.
--
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
What's CLI?
I'm working on my MCSE right now, but if CLI will help me earn more, I want to get that too.
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
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.
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