- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- enshittification@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- enshittification@lemmy.world
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“I fight for the user” has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that “I don’t need a union, I’m a temporarily embarrassed founder.”
Oof. I don’t like this sentence, because I’m in it.
Damn bro, you ain’t pitching the next disruptive idea to VC parasites?!?!
Fucking pleb
All respect to Mr Doctorow, but he’s got this wrong:
Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they’d built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe.
…and…
Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents’ funerals and their kids’ graduations to ship on time.
It wasn’t “vocational awe” it was money that lead tech workers to work long hours and sacrifice. Lots and lots of money, five to ten times what your non-tech same-aged peers were getting. It was so much money that if you didn’t live too high on the hog, it set you up for a very nice retirement and having “fuck you” money in your late 30s and 40s. During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.
With all the tech layoffs and enshitification, those meteoric salaries are starting to come down to Earth. They’re still high comparatively to other professions though. So I think tech unions will gain more traction now, but employers also have more tech workers (right now) so they can bully their current workers to try to avoid unions. However, tech is cyclical, as is hiring. I’ve been in tech long enough to see 3 large downturns, but when the pendulum swings, the hiring returns and (so far) those high salaries have too. If the pendulum swings too quickly and the high salaries (and now “work from home” requirement) returns, tech unions will be back to where they were struggling to establish themselves in the industry of job hoppers jumping ship from one employer in under a year or less chasing the larger compensation.
Pease tell me you know of someone where this actually was true: that they made crazy money and they’re set for life.
Because, based on 30 years in and a complete lack of knowledge of anyone who got out and retired early, either personally and via someone I know, I conclude the only people for whom this worked were C-level. Even the smartest man I know didn’t cash in and get out.
I do know someone who retired at 48, though. He was a heavy duty mechanic. Paid off his house in a town he chose specifically for location, and bikes and kite-surfs all summer and skis all winter.
Yeah, mechanic. Union. Half pay for life is still half pay, but it’s FOR LIFE. He won.
Pease tell me you know of someone where this actually was true:
I know many personally that earned this kind of money.
that they made crazy money and they’re set for life.
Yes, but only for some of those because most chose lifestyle increases instead of savings. So I know tens of the folks that can retire right now and have more than twice the median income of the USA for their entire life without running out of money. This means they’d have a couple million in the bank. This would be an annual retirement income of about $80k-$90k/year USD for one person (thats also without any Social Security benefit added on top yet). Many times a married couple both work in tech so that would be household retirement income of $160k-$180k/year for as long as they live (again I’m not even adding in Social Security benefits in this yet) if they chose to retire early. These folks have another 7 to 15 years in the workforce if they choose to retire in their mid 60s.
Thats not “chartering jets to Monaco” money, but its a very comfortable retirement. That was realistically attainable for lots and lots of people in tech after working for 15-25 years.
Because, based on 30 years in and a complete lack of knowledge of anyone who got out and retired early, either personally and via someone I know,
There were lots of IT jobs that paid decently (not amazingly) and if you worked for that one company for 20 years you would NOT have the money I’m talking about. To get this in IT required chasing newer technologies (or sometimes chasing specific older ones), and changing jobs frequently, usually every year or two but sometimes as short as only a few months. The trick is (which took me longer to figure out than I’d like to admit) that corporate annual raises were minuscule. You’d work your ass off for maybe a 2%-5% raise each year. Whereas if you did the exact same work and effort and changed jobs your new employer would give you essentially as low as 15% and sometimes as high as 400% salary increases in a year. You can quickly imagine that you only have to do this a handful of times for your annual salary to be huge. Think about how long it would take you to have a million dollars if you were making $180k to $400k and invest that savings ten years ago.
I know many one that has actually chosen to retire early even though many have the funds to do so. When you’re at the end, you’re at your peak earning phase. So working just a few more years means massive increases in retirement income. This is the bit of a trap that keeps you working voluntarily. Sometimes retirement gets forced early with RIF/redundancy/layoffs in your 60s and you may not be able to get another tech job however.
The even more risky path if you want the many multimillionaire path, is you started your own business. High risk of failure, especially tech types that don’t know the business side, but for those that have the right partners/help and can thread the needle, this is the tech path to the tens of millions of dollars of wealth.
I conclude the only people for whom this worked were C-level. Even the smartest man I know didn’t cash in and get out.
I’m talking all non-C level here, just technologists/individual contributors. At most they might be project or tech leads, but they’re still not executives. I don’t know the executive C-level advancement track so I can’t speak to it. Maybe the folks you know were the ones Doctorow was talking about. If the smartest man you know didn’t know to trade up or cash out, then maybe he was one that was in it for “vocational awe”. Do you have any knowledge as to why he didn’t trade up or cash out?
I think the key was the income was so high, even surpassing PhDs who have been slaving at their fields for decades, and only ended up in academia. It
“The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.”
– from George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda
vs
“Vocational awe” describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in “caring professions.”
I do not like the 21st century. Richard Scary you were my only hope.
Nice thing about gen Z it seems like they finally going to refuse to do these shit fucking jobs for peanuts because.
The parasite class either gonna have to start paying PR more likely quality of these services will be gutted even further.
I’m not holding my breath. We have a Z that insists no one in her generation wants to put up with the 24/7 availability expected from those who want to advance in our industry. Yet I received emails from her over the weekend.
They’re human, same as the rest of us, and will justify all the bad labor hygiene that older generations have.
Blame the “corporate buzzword”
“The web” “The cloud” “Blockchain” “AI”
Get non-technical management out of technology and you’ll see a 180° change
I would say the only silver lining here is that the exploitation of labor puts these giants in a precarious position where all of their critical work is being done by unhappy, extrinsically motivated people who are often only still there because they’re relatively immobile (i.e., they aren’t good enough at their job to find another one easily) or they were kept on because their salary is lower and they’re less experienced. It makes these massively complicated technology ecosystems extremely brittle, which is why software has been shit across the board for the past decade or so. It’s possible there will be a pendulum swing if and when quality becomes an attainable and marketable feature again.
Full-stack and DevOps were enshittification events in my book.
Devops for sure. (“Why have IT people when we can just make developers do it?” Fucking brilliant ☹️)
But why full stack? If you can develop a feature in a vertical slice across all layers that’s the kind of person you want to have on your team.
Devops for sure. (“Why have IT people when we can just make developers do it?” Fucking brilliant ☹️)
I’m not sure if you’re tracking Enterprise IT trends these days, but its evolving yet again with “Why have Devops people when we can just make the USERS do it?”
Suffice to say, those of us that know how to clean up messes (or realistically become Shadow IT) will have gainful employment for the foreseeable future.
How will they make users do it?
Today for example our dev ops is in charge of deploying a new release of our service on our servers. We wouldn’t give customers that type of access.
If your users are external to the org then this probably doesn’t apply. However, if your users are internal, you give them a repo of their own and grant them access to publish to the pipeline.
Full stack cause most developers are shitty database architects. I’ve seen so many problems at this bedrock level.
