It's an extension of conservative absolutism. When presented with a solution that came from anywhere but the echo chamber, the right dismisses anything that isn't a magic bullet that fixes it 100% without any side effects.
I realize that's me calling the kettle black when I refer to the "right" as a monolithic entity, but the general philosophy is to dismiss anything that wasn't their idea, or is too complicated to think about in terms of shades of grey. Conservatives tend to latch on to the simple, ideological solutions without any concern for anything they don't care about. For example: It's all well and good that Trump wants to deport 12 million people. That's an attractive sound bite that fits nicely on a bumper sticker, but it ignores how complex the issue is. Complexity tends to mean expensive. Who's going to pay for identifying and rounding up all those folks? Where are they processed for deportation? How do we transport them to the border? Who replaces the cheap labor that the agricultural industry relies on? I find that they refuse to see the world as it is, but how they think it should be.
How fortunate that the Guardian isn't the only journalistic outlet out there...
They're not under any obligation to run a story just because you think that it's not fair. If you don't like their slant, then don't support them.
Also, if you could provide an example of where "vegan activists" have engaged in this sort of behavior, it would go a long way towards making your argument credible.
Employment contracts are rare and unenforceable here. You will do what management tells you to do or you will be fired.
2) The dev rejects the work citing that it is not part of her duties (saying "contract" is confrontational at that stage)
The dev's manager then has the dev fired for insubordination, to be replaced by someone cheaper and more compliant. In any case, most JDs here include the phrase "other duties as assigned by management", so they can do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do about it except exercise the only real right workers have in this country: You can walk out anytime you want.
You can always tell your boss - "You know when you brought me a coffee were you just being nice and helping out or is it part of your duties/contract?"
And your boss will say "You know the part where you still work here? That can go away if I decide to not be nice, so shut the fuck up and get my coffee."
Because holding on to experienced knowledge workers is often the best way to achieve a better work/cost ratio than throwing away years/decades of knowledge and experience to achieve minor short term goals.
This quarter's numbers are all most companies care about. Experienced employees are expensive and payroll is a cost to be minimized.
Often, mistakes are very costly and reproducing them over and over because you've let the ones who already made them and learned from them leave is more costly than minor changes that produce happy employees.
The losses due to repeated mistakes are hard to quantify, because nobody has a crystal ball. Treating the employees better costs a quantifiable amount of money RIGHT NOW for sure, so that's more significant. Yes, it's short-sighted and gives the bean counters enough rope to hang the company, but the MBAs making the decisions frequently have no vision beyond the numbers and can't think in terms of years instead of weeks.
Seen it time and time again, and poor management that doesn't understand why they are failing even though "productivity" is up.
Again, a lack of vision and ability to see the picture beyond the balance sheet. SOP for management in this case is to continue the beatings until morale improves, or offer useless "perks" like discounted movie tickets or an ice cream social a couple times a year.
The easy to measure productivity that doesn't include the cost of avoidable errors had they not driven good employees away.
This is the problem. How does one determine an "avoidable error"? How do you know that that mistake would not have been made by an experienced employee? You don't. Things like that are impossible to foresee with a level of accuracy that would be significant to management. No, it's much easier to call the worker who made the error stupid or lazy and threaten their job if they make the mistake again, so that's what they do. Errors are always the fault of the people who do actual work, not management's incompetence.
Management is paid (as part of their budget) to deliver business outcomes with the fiscal and human resources at their disposal.
Management has incentive to use as few of those resources as possible, so they need to get as much work out of you as they can. They have a vested interest in working you to death, so that's what most do.
The reason why HR always has a seat at the executive table is because fundamentally every business that does not [value] the well-being of their people as a high priority is destined to fail.
HR is at the executive table to ensure that the company does not break the rules badly enough that terminated workers have a legitimate case for a wrongful termination suit. Their job is to minimize risk. Sometimes treating the workers well is how they do that, sometimes pulling sleazy tricks is the best strategy. Again, they represent the company's interests, not the workers'. And the company's interests are frequently served by treating the employees badly.
Once you have an offer and acceptance it would be nice if all employees treated their colleagues up/down or adjacent with respect.
Yes, it would be nice. In the real world, sociopathic assholes are the ones who move up by stabbing people in the back. The current employment environment rewards that behavior. It's hard to put a number on employee satisfaction, so it's hard to make a case to the powers that be that they should treat their employees better. If you have a number, you can demonstrate a trend, and make a case for a policy that raises employee satisfaction because it saves money. But, since employee satisfaction does not show up on a balance sheet explicitly, nobody in the executive suite gives a fuck.
If you are truly working in an environment of "..most work out of you for the least pay.." then get the FUCK OUT OF THERE. In my experiences any workplace hostilities are because of individuals not because of a corporate structure designed to enslave you. If you feel that way then solve your problem by finding a career/life that is free of such things.
Like it or not, companies that treat their employees well cannot compete with companies that work people to death, because they have lower costs. It's business 101. The hard part is finding the point at which morale becomes so low that revenues start to drop and stopping just short of it. There are a few exceptions (Costco comes to mind) but making employees happy is frequently hard (read: expensive).to do, and not financially useful.
Mike Rowe makes a lot of sense to me. He's absolutely right about infrastructure and the skilled trades. If one of my boys said to me he'd like to go to a trade school for plumbing, or electrician training, or whatever, instead of going to college, I'd be all for it. College will be there if he wants to do it later. Or he can go to college, get a business degree, and open his own general contracting business. A good tradesman is worth his weight in gold to a homeowner.
But he's right that we've made blue-collar work out to be embarrassing, We denigrate people who get their hands dirty making our lives more comfortable. And that's not right. A carpenter does work equally or more valuable than the work I do sitting in a comfortable office.
GP is telling you that you don't have to accept an unhappy situation. You are perceiving millenials as entitled, selfish spoiled brats because they DARE to question why they have to accept the corporate cock up the ass in order to continue to eat. You've got Stockholm Syndrome. You're making all kinds of excuses in order to deny the fact that our corporate overlords do everything in their power to keep us docile and willing to accept the treatment they're giving out. Millenials are demanding fair treatment from their employers; things have been so shitty for so long, "fair treatment" looks like a ridiculous thing to seek by comparison. I say more power to them. They've realized that the system needs them just as much as it needs overpaid C-level executives. Without young workers the economy falls apart.
If everyone demanded fair treatment from their employers, they would have to give it to them or go out of business for lack of talent, to be replaced in their markets by companies that don't actively complain that they can't chain their workers to their desks (something about slavery being illegal or some other anti-business socialist fascist Kenyan nonsense). That's the free market. Millenials (supply) have something their employers need (demand). When you control the supply, and demand remains constant, prices (general treatment, not just salaries) are supposed to go up. The difference with this generation is that they are a hundred times more connected with their peers than any other before them. If someone's boss is an asshole, a hundred people know about it before the asshole's tirade stops echoing. If a company treats its people badly, thousands of people know by the end of the day. They know that their employers are lying to them when they tell them they're treated better than their contemporaries in other companies. They know that the salary they're being offered is 25% below market. They know when their workload is ridiculous. They know when there's a better job available (and that job is actively seeking them out). They know that the way workers get treated in this country is abusive as compared to other industrialized nations (no guaranteed vacation, no sick pay, no maternity leave, at-will employment that makes job security a fantasy). All this knowledge puts employers in a weaker position, and as we all know, that's anti-American. When they apply this knowledge, they are seen as "demanding" and "entitled" and "spoiled", when really what they're asking for is to not be lied to.
The problem isn't that Millenials are being too demanding, the problem is that previous generations weren't demanding enough.
Basically, I think it's a pack mentality. It's assumed that everyone wants to take the next step in their career after being at a particular level for 3-4 years (depending on industry). Junior dev wants to become senior, senior wants to be lead, lead wants to be architect/principal, etc. The trouble with being a lead/architect is that there's a management component to it, and as such, I want nothing to do with it.
The trouble comes in a job interview when you have to explain why you've been a senior dev for 6 years instead of moving up to lead/architect or whatever. It is assumed that everyone wants to move ahead. So, you might be happy at the level you are at and not seeking "advancement", but to a potential employer, it's a red flag. It can mean one of two things:
1) You're a shitty dev and haven't had the option to move up, or 2) You lack ambition and are therefore lazy.
I'm perfectly happy at the senior dev level. But, if and when I interview for another position, I will have to explain why I've been at this level for X years. At my age, it's very suspicious to not have made lead/architect, or moved into management. I'm perfectly happy writing code. It's what I want to do. I don't want to manage people. An honest answer would be "I'm happy where I am and have no interest in moving up", but that's a death sentence in a job interview. That either sounds like "I'm lazy and have no ambition, so I'm going to coast along where I am for as long as someone will pay me", or "I'm actually really bad at my job, but I'm going to take the inverse sour grapes route and say I'm happy where I am". I can't think of an answer that wouldn't be awkward or an outright lie.
So, you say, why interview? If you're happy with the job you have, why would you look elsewhere? Three words: "two percent raise". The only way to get a raise of any significance (>10%) is by switching companies. Plus, at some point your current employer is going to become suspicious of your perceived lack of ambition and either try to force the issue (like what happened to my manager, he's bad at it and doesn't want to do it), or curtail your opportunities for growth until you're unmarketable, and therefore they can treat you like shit.
Employers hate it when you're comfortable. You're much easier to manipulate when you're stressed out.
There's a reason those idiot bosses have the jobs they do. If they weren't management, they'd have to do actual work. The reason they don't do actual work is because they're rubbish at it, so they were moved to a role where they can do less damage. Peter Principle, I think; you rise to the level of your incompetence.
Last job I had, I saw 3-4 people quit because of our idiot asshole CTO who they reported to. This guy was not only bad at his job, he had no idea about any tech that has come into usage in the last 10 years, and was singlehandedly responsible for the fact that we were running a mission-critical data store on software written by a company that went out of business 20 years ago. The app was keeping them on Windows XP because apparently anything newer had a command line that didn't work with the product. Yes, it was a DOS app. No, I'm not kidding. If we'd lost the application server and we couldn't restore backups, we'd be fucked, because we wouldn't be able to re-install the product; he'd lost the install media years ago.
Plus, he was a shit manager. He'd yell, backstab, kiss up, hoard knowledge, not answer questions, not return email, and generally do anything he could to protect himself (usually at the expense of his reports). I heard through the grapevine that they'd been trying to fire him for more than a year but couldn't make anything stick, or get enough information out of him to sanely replace him.
That's because it isn't about how much work you do at all. It's about control. Your employer wants to exert as much control over you as they can; requiring arbitrary butt-in-seat time is one example. If they have more control over you they can make you do the work of 3 people for 75% of a salary.
What's actionable here? Employment is terminated, employee becomes trespasser. Trespasser is ordered out of building, refuses. Security forcibly removes trespasser from premises.
No, it's not right, but as far as I can tell they're within their rights to do this.
That's the new American Dream. It used to be "work hard, play by the rules, you'll get a middle-class existence and the chance to provide better opportunities for your children". Now it's "Get some socially inept chump to break his back without paying him overtime and keep all the money for yourself".
Or the engineers see what a pile of horse shit management is at most companies and just NOPE their way away from any management training or experience. I've been offered positions that have a management component, even if it's just supervising 2 or 3 devs. I've turned them down; ain't nobody got time for that. I just want to code. Unfortunately, for some insane reason the next step in my career path requires that I manage people. I can't manage people. I'm shit at it; I've tried. I just don't have the patience, skills, or attitude that is required of a manager.
"Training managers" makes me think of trying to teach a pig to sing. It's not only that most managers either aren't smart enough to understand IT, or that they lack the interest or motivation to really understand the issues, it's that by the time you finish training up the manager, the computing environment has changed and the training is largely irrelevant. Even if you do manage to get relevant training into their heads, chances are they'll use that knowledge relatively rarely and won't become proficient. I happen to have a manager who codes (poorly), but that's because he was hired as a developer, but then was basically told by middle management that he could take the manager position or he could find another job.
Why do you hate America? Clearly playing golf with the right people makes you more qualified to make technical decisions than the guys who do actual work implementing the shit ideas you insist they use.
No, management is paid to get the most work out of you for the least pay. "Motivating" people to work these days frequently takes the form of "work harder or we'll fire you", instead of something constructive like making the employee feel involved, or valued, or anything else but a greedy lazy interchangeable cog.
And I don't see where GP mentioned unions. He mentioned "job descriptions", which are difficult (or, frequently, impossible) to enforce without a union. This should not be the case. If I get hired to write code, and the first day of work I get told I'm going to be doing sysadmin work instead, there's not much I can do about it except quit. If job descriptions were enforceable, I would have the right to say "That is not what you hired me for. Make my job duties line up with the description that I accepted or face large fines." Employees should not have to suffer for management's incompetence or lying.
Not everyone can just walk away from a job because they think they're underpaid. Underpaid is better than not paid at all, especially when you're the sole source of support for your family. And not everyone is in a market where jobs are plentiful; this guy could live in East Asshole, Flyover State, USA, where there are more cows than people and you have to drive 45 minutes to buy groceries.
As far as bad attitudes correlating with low pay.. Does the bad attitude come as a result of the low pay, or does the low pay come as a result of the bad attitude? Either way, a raise will most likely improve things; however, I'm guessing that his employer doesn't give a fuck about his well-being and happily uses his "bad attitude" to deny him raises and promotions.
PHP was special-purpose in the days where it was that or cgi-perl, but I'm not sure what the fuck PHP is now. It still feels like BASIC but for web programmers.
Now it's the language that drives more than 80% of the web. There's this thing called "Wordpress", you may have heard of it. The code is shit, to be sure, and it's much more popular than it is good, but it's still a thing. More modern frameworks (Zend Framework 1/2, both of which I've contributed to, Laravel, Symfony, etc) are much better. Maybe it isn't the most well designed or efficient language, but it lets you get shit done, which at the end of the day is the idea. Rapid development is important; hardware is cheap, developers are expensive.
While you're correct that she was a mathematician, I think it might be more relevant that she is considered by many to be the first computer programmer.
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It's an extension of conservative absolutism. When presented with a solution that came from anywhere but the echo chamber, the right dismisses anything that isn't a magic bullet that fixes it 100% without any side effects.
I realize that's me calling the kettle black when I refer to the "right" as a monolithic entity, but the general philosophy is to dismiss anything that wasn't their idea, or is too complicated to think about in terms of shades of grey. Conservatives tend to latch on to the simple, ideological solutions without any concern for anything they don't care about. For example: It's all well and good that Trump wants to deport 12 million people. That's an attractive sound bite that fits nicely on a bumper sticker, but it ignores how complex the issue is. Complexity tends to mean expensive. Who's going to pay for identifying and rounding up all those folks? Where are they processed for deportation? How do we transport them to the border? Who replaces the cheap labor that the agricultural industry relies on? I find that they refuse to see the world as it is, but how they think it should be.
How fortunate that the Guardian isn't the only journalistic outlet out there...
They're not under any obligation to run a story just because you think that it's not fair. If you don't like their slant, then don't support them.
Also, if you could provide an example of where "vegan activists" have engaged in this sort of behavior, it would go a long way towards making your argument credible.
Employment contracts are rare and unenforceable here. You will do what management tells you to do or you will be fired.
The dev's manager then has the dev fired for insubordination, to be replaced by someone cheaper and more compliant. In any case, most JDs here include the phrase "other duties as assigned by management", so they can do whatever they want and there's nothing you can do about it except exercise the only real right workers have in this country: You can walk out anytime you want.
And your boss will say "You know the part where you still work here? That can go away if I decide to not be nice, so shut the fuck up and get my coffee."
This quarter's numbers are all most companies care about. Experienced employees are expensive and payroll is a cost to be minimized.
The losses due to repeated mistakes are hard to quantify, because nobody has a crystal ball. Treating the employees better costs a quantifiable amount of money RIGHT NOW for sure, so that's more significant. Yes, it's short-sighted and gives the bean counters enough rope to hang the company, but the MBAs making the decisions frequently have no vision beyond the numbers and can't think in terms of years instead of weeks.
Again, a lack of vision and ability to see the picture beyond the balance sheet. SOP for management in this case is to continue the beatings until morale improves, or offer useless "perks" like discounted movie tickets or an ice cream social a couple times a year.
This is the problem. How does one determine an "avoidable error"? How do you know that that mistake would not have been made by an experienced employee? You don't. Things like that are impossible to foresee with a level of accuracy that would be significant to management. No, it's much easier to call the worker who made the error stupid or lazy and threaten their job if they make the mistake again, so that's what they do. Errors are always the fault of the people who do actual work, not management's incompetence.
Management has incentive to use as few of those resources as possible, so they need to get as much work out of you as they can. They have a vested interest in working you to death, so that's what most do.
HR is at the executive table to ensure that the company does not break the rules badly enough that terminated workers have a legitimate case for a wrongful termination suit. Their job is to minimize risk. Sometimes treating the workers well is how they do that, sometimes pulling sleazy tricks is the best strategy. Again, they represent the company's interests, not the workers'. And the company's interests are frequently served by treating the employees badly.
Yes, it would be nice. In the real world, sociopathic assholes are the ones who move up by stabbing people in the back. The current employment environment rewards that behavior. It's hard to put a number on employee satisfaction, so it's hard to make a case to the powers that be that they should treat their employees better. If you have a number, you can demonstrate a trend, and make a case for a policy that raises employee satisfaction because it saves money. But, since employee satisfaction does not show up on a balance sheet explicitly, nobody in the executive suite gives a fuck.
Like it or not, companies that treat their employees well cannot compete with companies that work people to death, because they have lower costs. It's business 101. The hard part is finding the point at which morale becomes so low that revenues start to drop and stopping just short of it. There are a few exceptions (Costco comes to mind) but making employees happy is frequently hard (read: expensive).to do, and not financially useful.
Bullshit. That might be the status quo now, but throwing your hands up and saying "there's nothing I can do" is the worst thing you could do.
Enlightened, highly successful companies find other ways to motivate their workers besides fear of termination.
Mike Rowe makes a lot of sense to me. He's absolutely right about infrastructure and the skilled trades. If one of my boys said to me he'd like to go to a trade school for plumbing, or electrician training, or whatever, instead of going to college, I'd be all for it. College will be there if he wants to do it later. Or he can go to college, get a business degree, and open his own general contracting business. A good tradesman is worth his weight in gold to a homeowner.
But he's right that we've made blue-collar work out to be embarrassing, We denigrate people who get their hands dirty making our lives more comfortable. And that's not right. A carpenter does work equally or more valuable than the work I do sitting in a comfortable office.
That's probably 99% of all jobs out there... They say there are mythical people who enjoy their jobs, but I haven't found one yet.
It's probably not a significant motivator because they're not being paid enough to be motivated...
GP is telling you that you don't have to accept an unhappy situation. You are perceiving millenials as entitled, selfish spoiled brats because they DARE to question why they have to accept the corporate cock up the ass in order to continue to eat. You've got Stockholm Syndrome. You're making all kinds of excuses in order to deny the fact that our corporate overlords do everything in their power to keep us docile and willing to accept the treatment they're giving out. Millenials are demanding fair treatment from their employers; things have been so shitty for so long, "fair treatment" looks like a ridiculous thing to seek by comparison. I say more power to them. They've realized that the system needs them just as much as it needs overpaid C-level executives. Without young workers the economy falls apart.
If everyone demanded fair treatment from their employers, they would have to give it to them or go out of business for lack of talent, to be replaced in their markets by companies that don't actively complain that they can't chain their workers to their desks (something about slavery being illegal or some other anti-business socialist fascist Kenyan nonsense). That's the free market. Millenials (supply) have something their employers need (demand). When you control the supply, and demand remains constant, prices (general treatment, not just salaries) are supposed to go up. The difference with this generation is that they are a hundred times more connected with their peers than any other before them. If someone's boss is an asshole, a hundred people know about it before the asshole's tirade stops echoing. If a company treats its people badly, thousands of people know by the end of the day. They know that their employers are lying to them when they tell them they're treated better than their contemporaries in other companies. They know that the salary they're being offered is 25% below market. They know when their workload is ridiculous. They know when there's a better job available (and that job is actively seeking them out). They know that the way workers get treated in this country is abusive as compared to other industrialized nations (no guaranteed vacation, no sick pay, no maternity leave, at-will employment that makes job security a fantasy). All this knowledge puts employers in a weaker position, and as we all know, that's anti-American. When they apply this knowledge, they are seen as "demanding" and "entitled" and "spoiled", when really what they're asking for is to not be lied to.
The problem isn't that Millenials are being too demanding, the problem is that previous generations weren't demanding enough.
Basically, I think it's a pack mentality. It's assumed that everyone wants to take the next step in their career after being at a particular level for 3-4 years (depending on industry). Junior dev wants to become senior, senior wants to be lead, lead wants to be architect/principal, etc. The trouble with being a lead/architect is that there's a management component to it, and as such, I want nothing to do with it.
The trouble comes in a job interview when you have to explain why you've been a senior dev for 6 years instead of moving up to lead/architect or whatever. It is assumed that everyone wants to move ahead. So, you might be happy at the level you are at and not seeking "advancement", but to a potential employer, it's a red flag. It can mean one of two things:
1) You're a shitty dev and haven't had the option to move up, or
2) You lack ambition and are therefore lazy.
I'm perfectly happy at the senior dev level. But, if and when I interview for another position, I will have to explain why I've been at this level for X years. At my age, it's very suspicious to not have made lead/architect, or moved into management. I'm perfectly happy writing code. It's what I want to do. I don't want to manage people. An honest answer would be "I'm happy where I am and have no interest in moving up", but that's a death sentence in a job interview. That either sounds like "I'm lazy and have no ambition, so I'm going to coast along where I am for as long as someone will pay me", or "I'm actually really bad at my job, but I'm going to take the inverse sour grapes route and say I'm happy where I am". I can't think of an answer that wouldn't be awkward or an outright lie.
So, you say, why interview? If you're happy with the job you have, why would you look elsewhere? Three words: "two percent raise". The only way to get a raise of any significance (>10%) is by switching companies. Plus, at some point your current employer is going to become suspicious of your perceived lack of ambition and either try to force the issue (like what happened to my manager, he's bad at it and doesn't want to do it), or curtail your opportunities for growth until you're unmarketable, and therefore they can treat you like shit.
Employers hate it when you're comfortable. You're much easier to manipulate when you're stressed out.
There's a reason those idiot bosses have the jobs they do. If they weren't management, they'd have to do actual work . The reason they don't do actual work is because they're rubbish at it, so they were moved to a role where they can do less damage. Peter Principle, I think; you rise to the level of your incompetence.
Last job I had, I saw 3-4 people quit because of our idiot asshole CTO who they reported to. This guy was not only bad at his job, he had no idea about any tech that has come into usage in the last 10 years, and was singlehandedly responsible for the fact that we were running a mission-critical data store on software written by a company that went out of business 20 years ago. The app was keeping them on Windows XP because apparently anything newer had a command line that didn't work with the product. Yes, it was a DOS app. No, I'm not kidding. If we'd lost the application server and we couldn't restore backups, we'd be fucked, because we wouldn't be able to re-install the product; he'd lost the install media years ago.
Plus, he was a shit manager. He'd yell, backstab, kiss up, hoard knowledge, not answer questions, not return email, and generally do anything he could to protect himself (usually at the expense of his reports). I heard through the grapevine that they'd been trying to fire him for more than a year but couldn't make anything stick, or get enough information out of him to sanely replace him.
Isn't it awesome that "computer professionals" are specifically exempt from overtime rules?
That's because it isn't about how much work you do at all. It's about control. Your employer wants to exert as much control over you as they can; requiring arbitrary butt-in-seat time is one example. If they have more control over you they can make you do the work of 3 people for 75% of a salary.
What's actionable here? Employment is terminated, employee becomes trespasser. Trespasser is ordered out of building, refuses. Security forcibly removes trespasser from premises.
No, it's not right, but as far as I can tell they're within their rights to do this.
That's the new American Dream. It used to be "work hard, play by the rules, you'll get a middle-class existence and the chance to provide better opportunities for your children". Now it's "Get some socially inept chump to break his back without paying him overtime and keep all the money for yourself".
Or the engineers see what a pile of horse shit management is at most companies and just NOPE their way away from any management training or experience. I've been offered positions that have a management component, even if it's just supervising 2 or 3 devs. I've turned them down; ain't nobody got time for that. I just want to code. Unfortunately, for some insane reason the next step in my career path requires that I manage people. I can't manage people. I'm shit at it; I've tried. I just don't have the patience, skills, or attitude that is required of a manager.
"Training managers" makes me think of trying to teach a pig to sing. It's not only that most managers either aren't smart enough to understand IT, or that they lack the interest or motivation to really understand the issues, it's that by the time you finish training up the manager, the computing environment has changed and the training is largely irrelevant. Even if you do manage to get relevant training into their heads, chances are they'll use that knowledge relatively rarely and won't become proficient. I happen to have a manager who codes (poorly), but that's because he was hired as a developer, but then was basically told by middle management that he could take the manager position or he could find another job.
Why do you hate America? Clearly playing golf with the right people makes you more qualified to make technical decisions than the guys who do actual work implementing the shit ideas you insist they use.
No, management is paid to get the most work out of you for the least pay. "Motivating" people to work these days frequently takes the form of "work harder or we'll fire you", instead of something constructive like making the employee feel involved, or valued, or anything else but a greedy lazy interchangeable cog.
And I don't see where GP mentioned unions. He mentioned "job descriptions", which are difficult (or, frequently, impossible) to enforce without a union. This should not be the case. If I get hired to write code, and the first day of work I get told I'm going to be doing sysadmin work instead, there's not much I can do about it except quit. If job descriptions were enforceable, I would have the right to say "That is not what you hired me for. Make my job duties line up with the description that I accepted or face large fines." Employees should not have to suffer for management's incompetence or lying.
Not everyone can just walk away from a job because they think they're underpaid. Underpaid is better than not paid at all, especially when you're the sole source of support for your family. And not everyone is in a market where jobs are plentiful; this guy could live in East Asshole, Flyover State, USA, where there are more cows than people and you have to drive 45 minutes to buy groceries.
As far as bad attitudes correlating with low pay.. Does the bad attitude come as a result of the low pay, or does the low pay come as a result of the bad attitude? Either way, a raise will most likely improve things; however, I'm guessing that his employer doesn't give a fuck about his well-being and happily uses his "bad attitude" to deny him raises and promotions.
Now it's the language that drives more than 80% of the web. There's this thing called "Wordpress", you may have heard of it. The code is shit, to be sure, and it's much more popular than it is good, but it's still a thing. More modern frameworks (Zend Framework 1/2, both of which I've contributed to, Laravel, Symfony, etc) are much better. Maybe it isn't the most well designed or efficient language, but it lets you get shit done, which at the end of the day is the idea. Rapid development is important; hardware is cheap, developers are expensive.
Some (probably most) people learn better in a group, where you can ask questions of your classmates and your instructor.
While you're correct that she was a mathematician, I think it might be more relevant that she is considered by many to be the first computer programmer.
Tough shit. If they sold something they couldn't deliver, then that's on them.