The tech industry is filled with a special kind of person who thinks they are the best at what they do. They get paid a lot (for now) so they make the mistake of thinking they’re at the same level of real professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The industry encourages this delusion by throwing around essentially made-up feel-good titles like “software engineer”, “senior software engineer”, “staff software engineer”, etc.

When these people begin to doubt themselves and their line of work, they’re told they have “impostor syndrome” and everything is fine.

The reason the industry does all of this is because it discourages their workers from forming unions. They trick their workers into thinking unions will slow them down.

There will come a day when the industry is flooded with enough saps that their high salary is pulled out from under them and they’ll understand the reality of the situation. They’ll be left working for pennies and at odd hours of the day.

That day will literally never come. Software is too hard for average people to get good at in numbers that will displace our salaries.

Covid remote jobs are incapable of lowering USA salaries despite the fears of outsourcing. Your fears of people thinking they are better than they actually are are wrong - and so is the implication that "we will get what we deserve" - well, unless what we deserve is another doubling of compensation for switching jobs every 2 years...

And at that point unions will make sense, like in any other low paid, undifferentiated type of work where the worker has a really hard time "just changing jobs" when things get abusive. That is not the situation in IT now.

The sensible time to use bargaining power is before you lose it.

You should also be compensated for the time you spend on-call (which means you can't take on other commitments you otherwise might.) Anything less and it's outright exploitation. "We pay you well" is a non-sequitur.

> "We pay you well" is a non-sequitur.

Not at all. The choice might be between $60k salary plus around $20k for overtime in one career, vs another career with $200k+ salary plus crazy benefits (gym memberships, a variety of mental health services, $20k in fertility treatments (no joke), 3+ months paternity leave, over 10 more things I can't even name they make no sense...)

I don't even use any of the benefits, just the money (and the parental leave) but calling a few on-call nights per month "abuse" or "exploitation" is just ... without perspective. Nobody that does real work has it this cushy - not doctors, not teachers, not construction workers. Maybe aristocratic political appointees or something, but jeez, no field that is accessible to anyone with an old laptop and sufficient motivation. This is as cushy as it gets, for a real job. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Agreed.

My brother makes about what I do, but he is an MBA and a plant manager with background in logistics.

Sometimes he gets calls and has to go in to work. Hell there has been at least one instance where he had to drop everything and courier a bag of parts on a commercial flight so a line wouldn't stop.

That said, I have worked in 'abusive' on call environments. I.e. we had a system that would break at least once a week between 3am and 6am (like, multiple times in that period). But because the oncall labor to remediate was 'free', fixing the problem was never a priority over the 2 years I worked there.

“We pay you well” just means “the labor market favors us so much that we can hire a replacement for you to do it.” Charitably, it’s because their pay is above a willingness to work threshold in the market. As a market participant, the supply side of labor typically is too large, not at all organized, and lacks information and any market power to price these things into valuations.

It's the "superhero" complex so many software engineers have. The dopamine hit they get when they resolve some outage or thorny bug or whatever (and the ensuing accolades from their peers) interferes with their ability to reason clearly about their compensation and the circumstances of their employment.

I guess I don’t understand the line you’re drawing here. If they enjoy the circumstances of their work, why should they go out of their way to “reason clearly” about how it’s actually bad? I could understand if there’s a collective action problem, but as many people in this thread have attested, people who want a job without oncall duty can get one.

Remaining neutral on the on-call point, but as a practical/logical matter, things that feel good and make you happy can still be bad for you personally, especially if they're multiplied over the long term. Three or four gin and tonics every night feels great until your doctor reveals that your unexplained weight loss is from cirrhosis, or cancer.

I guess that's pretty fair. I have to admit I've seen people who genuinely enjoy some terrible overloaded schedule right up to the time they burn out.

Yeah the scenario where they're proud of some outage/bug they resolve and it's cool to discuss it. OK. Management should be asking: how do we make sure it never happens again?

Management should be looking to reduce callouts to zero over time.

They don't have a union so they hoover up the boss' arbitrary bullshit. Very simple. Most people just comply. They are the worse because they set unreasonable expectations for everyone else. Unions protect you from the other emoloyees' bad deals.

Submit an invoice for a minimum 1 hour charge for any after hours work/calls. Devs need to start billing like lawyers.

The "personal responsibility" narrative has seeped far to far into American life to be tolerable. Back then, we had industrial operations that were running 24 hours/day, things like factory assembly lines, steelmaking, the electric and gas utilities, and they had on-call rotas. But then we also had proper engineering practices, none of this "take ownership" crap, which reduced incidents, and we had unions that were in a position to push back on employer demands.

Instead we have self-indulgent junk like that. Wonder what my uncle would say, he was chief engineer for the gas company back in the day.

I always managed to get out of doing any on call work by pushing this point. There was a price for being put in the list of numbers that would reach my phone during non work hours and then further charges if I had to answer a call. Was always a pretty tense discussion with managers but they never wanted to pay for it and I never worked for free.