> 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.
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.