And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.
It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.