Like the “job description” is often pretty vague which makes wage theft easy. If you’re working 996 without extra pay or less pay because everything that your “job description” has cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour work week, then it is by all means, free labor.
Just because you’re getting paid doesn’t mean the company doesn’t get free labor. The company paid for the regular hours and the rest was free labor.
they are just saying, if you are contracted to be payed x per hour at 8hrs a day, unless you work 8 + n hours, wherein n gives you no additional hourly pay, then its free labor to the company (above and beyond contracted work hours), not sure what is controversial about that?
I thought that in 2023 would be clear to everyone that only capitalist countries were able to improve the well being of the people. I see 0 boats from Miami to Cuba, just the other way around. So even though we can agree that people working in some fields have a hard life, for a fact, we know that in the communist countries they didn't have a better life than before, as we saw in the Holodomor, the famine that was caused by the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages.
Other capitalist countries managed to improve the well being of the people because of wars and financial imperialism.
Holodomor had a lot of reasons, collectivisation was not the main one.
It is not right. The same "collectivisation" was tried in different countries like GDR (1953 uprising), and China, great Famine, 1959. So same strategy led to same results in different countries.
Collectivization initially leads to decrease and then to increase. In USSR result got so bad due to collection of reasons, unrelated to collectivization. Collectivization was badly needed in USSR, since 95% of population were inefficient farmers. It was a must for later industrialization.
If I sell something with a 2-for-1 deal, what are the ways that’s different from selling two for 50% off?
If I am paid to work 40 hours a week, and I work 80, are the second 40 free, or are all 80 %50 my expected wage?
> free to leave
<spicy> Ah! I see we agree on the need for such a robust social safety net that employment isn’t any degree of necessary! </spicy>
I was talking about “free” and I was not talking about “stealing”. That’s why I used the word “free” and did not use the word “stealing”.
Regarding your hypothetical, I’d say they’d be giving you approximately free money in much the same was as in the prior hypothetical you’d be giving them approximately free labor.
See here [0] for more theory , but the basic tl;dr is since all value is created by labor being done (your employer, the capitalist doesn't actually do anything to create value) and not all of it is paid out in the form of wages, the workers are being exploited since value is being stolen. Reducing the amount of that wage theft is not the other side of the coin.
Isn't it why any serious engineering job will have stocks as part of the comp package? That's pretty much the whole point: if the company does better, your stock does better...
It's that old Supply & Demand thing again.
That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with cartels is the members cheat on them under the table. They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using the law to punish members who cheat).
I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth shut. Deal!
What is the basis for this assertion? Is this why OPEC exists?
Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.
A company raises the price for something, and it's called 'price leadership', other companies recognize it is in their interest to follow suit and prices go up. The same dynamic exists for wages. Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.
How do you explain price decreases?
> Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.
And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
2021 was the most profitable year for big corporations since 1950, with pre-tax profits rising to $2.5 trillion and after-tax profits surging 35%, enabling the 1% to finally overtake the middle class in share of overall wealth.
53% of price increases went straight to profit.
They've got you right where they want you.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2022/05/10/how-w...
> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
?? City traders can make millions, they actually get a cut of profits they generate.
Corporations decide to set their prices higher, and you have a price inflation. We know that this is not merely a function of their inputs going up because many companies have been pulling in record profits during this time period. Nobody needs to meet in a smoke filled room for this to happen.
> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
You're being distracted with a nickel while your pockets are being emptied. It's all relative. Look at the cash big tech firms have in the bank. Google used 60B dollars to inflate their stock price this year with stock buybacks at the same time they laid of 6% of their workforce.
OPEC has had a constant problem with cheaters selling oil under the table.
> Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
Yes, it was a cartel, and the companies were cheating on it. Remember when Jobs complained to Google that Google was cheating on it? There was nothing holding that cartel together.
> If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.
Cartels have never managed to do that, unless they were (ironically) enforced by law.
The american police often breaks the law themselves and kills people.
Does it mean we should get rid of police, they don't work just like cartels don't work?
Anyone reasonable agrees murder rate would be higher if there were no police at all.
A cartel does not need to be perfect to achieve wage supression.
You should look up work of Steve Keen in the theory of the firm. It's actually the other way around, the oligopoly pricing is stable, while pricing that sets marginal cost to marginal revenue is unstable.
This remark from TFA at least implies when it "is" part of your job, go for it.
Perhaps you have rejected, or simply not engaged with, the "call" to recognize class warfare, however, or if I can be silly I'll call you a "capital sympathizer". From the frame of recognizing workers vs capitalists, you can't just say write off being exploited as "well you were paid to be exploited" without coming down hard on the "sympathizer" side.
One of the points I assume the author was making is that much of this isn't your actual job, and voluntarily performing work that ultimately costs you is exploitative and adversarial and, well, stupid. Even if you're paid to do it.
About 20 years ago my employer informed the entire company that we would be working December and January without pay and if we didn't like it we would be "laid off" (much of that work would be spent training team members of an offshore/outsourcing firm). State labor law disagreed with them regarding work without compensation so they were forced to pay "minimum wage" (for software developers and DBAs!). You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.
> You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.
Working for minimum wage wasn't part of the contract you signed ("your job"), so your example isn't valid.
The article is, ostensibly, a call to recognize class warfare, and certain elements of "engineering culture" as aspects of same. Did you sign up for class warfare?
If you simply refuse to participate in the notion of seeing this as class warfare, super!, but that's actively disengaging from the substance of the article.
There seems to be lots of nasty class stuff going on, throughout society.
But TFA just seems to hurt legitimate discussion of class issues.
Imagine you're skeptical of the suggestion of class problems, but since a post about that was upvoted on HN, and you're open to being convinced, you took a look. Unfortunately, after reading it, you have to chalk it up as a data point: of someone who thinks there's class warfare on tech jobs also having very unfortunate idea of what the nature of that job is.
If you speak to people who work in trading or finance, they do none of those things. They view each other as conpetitors and don't help each other. They aim to outgame and outdo each-other.
The culture in software is very different to most other industries. But if you look at other fields of engineering, you don't see people stepping outside their roles as much.
I don't know in what aspects of trading or finance that collaboration is necessary (rather than applied game theory towards each other).
Trading and finance are interesting examples, because those are two places where a lot of money-driven students would go, before tech jobs because easy money (rather than something nerds did for the love of it).
Rather than "Greed is Good" Wall Street thinking take over, we should say "Fine, we admit it, tech pays good money right now, but we do our best work by working as a team, and that's how we're going to do it."
Then we follow through by making the messaging consistent in offers, raises, bonuses, performance evaluations, promotions, project management, metrics, etc.
Lets not get carried away thinking we are specially noble.
The guy in Nebraska maintaining one of key dependencies of your project thanklessly disagrees[1].
Well, we build stuff. we praise the knowledge. We were called geeks, hackers, etc. I can just compare software engineering with science like math, * engineering, physics.
Finance market as put by the other contributor, is just what we are not, and why Linux exists, why FOSS exists, why internet exists and services like github, trello, gmail exists (even though you want to scream at me, they are there for profit, they were all created with one goal in common: Collaborate openly with others). Egoist finance sharks aren't example of success, virtue and happy life, no matter what.
That's not the conclusion, unless you think that Class Warfare plays a role anywhere. I don't.
Protip: Organising collective action will become impossible if everyone hates each other and keeps information from each other for fear of their own job security. That will help capital in the end.
> Oh, yeah, we should also have a union. Sure. Let’s get on that one of these days.
It seems like a how-to guide for how you as an individual can push the value of your labor down to match the price that capital wants to pay for it, rather than trying to find a way to gain some leverage over capital in order to raise the price of your labor to reflect the value you currently provide. (Leverage like, say, collective action.)
> Once the company reaches the bottom, and capital starts suffering from the damage it is inflicting on the company, it will turn around.
Well, good luck surviving the extra rounds of layoffs between now and then if you're the one who stands out as not working well with others, I guess.
This is the author's opinion of how Software's Labor can "fight back"
If you're not in an adversarial relationship with your employer then this advice will not be particularly useful/advantageous.
Are you saying we shouldn't take those literally, but as what the new (bad faith) thinking about the job should be?
So essentially taking out all independence from work and making it a dull box checking job.
And actually, the best thing that can happen to you as an investor / capitalist. Let employees create their own peer pressured environment. The same phenomenon how coal miners used to conduct.
You just lean back and enjoy the benefits of them controlling and supporting each other
No, I think most of these are usually part of the job of a software engineer, and it's part of developing solutions that work, rather than just gaming individual metrics. (And, at Staff+, all of these are.)
> There is no reason at all for engineers to continue performing this kind of free labor for entities that are trying to cut their wages. It is in their interest to do the exact opposite.
It's not free labor. It's part of the job for which we're paid.
Seems like anyone on a project team who doesn't share knowledge, help other team members, document, etc., would soon be disliked by team members who are focused on the project and team.