Then color me entitled.

I've had these arguments about how many hours a salaried employee should work. Despite the law saying 40, the lawyer was insistent that they could make me work any amount of hours.

The next two weeks I put in 20 hours a week. Then I explained to her that any means any, and that if they didn't like it they could terminate my contract, go spend a month finding a replacement and then explain to the client why they had materially breached the contract. Or they could be reasonable and let me work an amount of hours that is reasonable (and probably more productive).

Often when employers demand the most ridiculous of hours are the times in which they are in the poorest of negotiating positions.

Businesses use their negotiating position all the time to lower wages, it's not called entitled, it's called business.

IMHO we need more of this (standing up for ourselves). I think there are some who don't fully realize the extent to which we have been lobbied against by just about everyone involved in this business to allow rates to be suppressed either through sanctioning of unpaid overtime or the facilitation of outsourcing.

If you like to work a lot, fine by me - I myself spend a ton of time outside of work building software. But think about how healthy it would be to be paid fairly for going the extra mile when needed on top of your regular duties - its been so long since that has existed in this field that I think hardly any of us have even considered it. I have a few family members who work in other fields in the private sector where overtime still exists - its the only reason I realize we've been hung out to dry by the government and corporations in some respects.

Some will argue that the free market removal of protections somehow makes us all better paid - I'm doubtful. I think if we had overtime pay it would create more jobs, promote a better working culture in our sector and attract a hell of a lot more people to want to work here.

I wish at least in the mid-size to big businesses, the workaholics would stop looking down at "Joe" for leaving after a solid 8 hours of work and instead would at least start to question why they themselves aren't getting paid extra for staying past 8 hours.

I try to raise this point every time someone says WLMT exploits their employees. Wal-Mart extracts about $6000 per employee in profit, this is about half the national average, and when you get to companies like GOOG, MSFT, APPL you're looking at an average of $200,000-$300,000.

Who exactly is being exploited with numbers like these? And why are we 'entitled' for demanding a fair share of the value we add to the modern economy?

Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone anymore than the King built Windsor castle. Windsor castle was built by masons and the iPhone by engineers.

Even Henry Ford, 80 years ago knew the key to growing the economy was freeing up time for consumption. If a 40 hour work week was necessary 80 years ago then you can be sure that a 20 to 30 hour work week is appropriate now, and would actually cause our economy to boom.

Woah, what. I was completely on the side that expecting reasonable hours and time off is not "entitlement", but yours strikes me as the exact attitude OP is railing against.

The exploitation people complain about re: Wal-Mart cannot be measured in profit-per-employee, because that's not how exploitation is commonly understood (though you are, of course, free to define that term however you see fit).

People complain about Wal-Mart because they routinely use socially unacceptable ways to curb employee costs - keeping a vast number of people in contract roles, even if their jobs are actually full-time, in order to deny them benefits, and more. This isn't about profit per employee, it's about taking advantage of unskilled labor and their relative lack of choice to treat them in ways that most of society finds reprehensible.

As compared to your standard MSFT, GOOG, and AAPL engineer who rides to work in a cushy bus with leather seats, WiFi, catered food, a 6-figure salary, a big house in a good school zone, exceptional health, dental, and vision benefits? You can say these guys are getting an unfair deal in that they generate exceptional profits relative to their compensation - but exploitation? Get real.

It's a free market, and software engineers have exceptional mobility (unlike, say, your Wal-Mart greeter). You are free to demand a $285,714 salary from Google (so that they still get their 5% cut). If you are exceptional enough I'm sure they'll agree, but otherwise... good luck!

"a big house in a good school zone"

A low end "six figure salary" in the bay area probably isn't enough to buy a big house in a good school zone. Two workers who earn this salary would have access to that kind of real estate though.

This is silly. You're only able to make 200-300k/year for the company because of the infrastructure and audience they've built for you and all the other engineers to use as leverage. It is orders of magnitude harder to make that much on your own, regardless of how good a coder you are.

Also - we need more consumption? Wealth comes from production, everything else is just shuffling money around. People in the US are complaining about decreased wages and underemployment, not that they need more vacation.

200,000-300,000 gross isn't that much really. ~150.00 an hour with 40 billable hours per week ~60 actual work hours if you're freelancing. Most good programmers should be able to hit that.

As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few years.

The reason we don't is because honestly we make six figures, it's easy, it's reliable, etc. and it more than enough to pay our bills.

When I say infrastructure/audience, I'm talking about the many millions of users in the ecosystem which your code will be used by, and the marketing machine to push it out there. The same code that's used by 10k people if you set out by yourself has a 100x impact if it's used by a million Google users. That's why Google has such a high revenue per engineer number, and you're not going to replicate that without a lot of brand building and marketing, which is hard, expensive, and takes a long time and a good amount of luck.

I don't know many freelancers that make 150/hr and have 40 hours of solid work a week every week at that rate - you'd spend a lot of time lining up that work. Sure it's possible, but it's much harder than if you're just working at a large successful company. I believe total compensation at Google is roughly around there for a good programmer anyway, without all the hustling for work or risk.

>As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few years.

Not without a huge amount of investment, you're underestimating even just the technical infrastructure at the SV giants.

I work at a SV giant. I'm aware of the infrastructure we have in place. This infrastructure is primarily here to combat the increased complexity brought on by having x employees running around. Configuring something like github, automated deployments, change management policies, marketing/advertising campaigns is significantly easier with fewer employers.

Further provided you're targeting niche markets where the economies of scale don't matter nearly as much as meeting the needs of the market you can see decent returns per developer with out pushing your wares out to millions of users.

>Businesses use their negotiating position all the time to lower wages, it's not called entitled, it's called business.

[Citation needed]

Wages are sticky. Very rarely do wages go down, at least in nominal terms. So unless you meant, employers negotiate to not raise wages, and this lowers an employee's real wage in an inflationary environment (in which case you should be more clear) then I don't see any facts to back up your assertation.