All workers can and should unite to protect themselves from the capitalist class. Tech professionals should not feel guilty merely because they are less oppressed than the other proles.
I have some conjectures as to why that may be:
1. High variability of pay, not only between companies but within companies. As a SWE your total compensation can be expected to double every two promotions, and promotions can be pretty fast. Promotions are also not purely a function of tenure like other professions with steep comp growth such as pilots.
2. "This is too good to be true" syndrome. You show up at your comfy 250k job with catered lunch, dinner, and maxed out benefits. After the first month, your workload is about 3-4 hours a day. Everything is flexible - the time you show up, the time you leave, the days you choose to come in to the office, what you wear. Everyone is smart and nice. Free snacks. Imposter syndrome and paranoia set in. Am I doing enough? Should I look at this P2 prod bug on a Satuday? I guess I only worked 20 hours last week so it's fair to work a couple of hours on the weekend. Everything I do needs to be perfect or they could've just hired someone in India for 1/10th my pay, right? etc. Then it snowballs. (I'm probably just describing imposter syndrome.)
In reality nothing really happens if you slow down and do things at a comfortable pace. Most managers want to cultivate reliable people who take long-term deep ownership, not productivity machines that just bang out features. If they needed more output, they'd just hire one more person.
Now, we're in a contract lull, so some of us are only charging part time (75%), while actually working overtime.
It's bananas.
The solution seems obvious. Decrease salaries and increase company stock offerings. Then, if you and your colleagues care to work harder and deliver outstanding product, your stock value will rise over time and you'll be a.) more wealthy than taking 'dumb' money, and b.) more physically and mentally healthy.
a) the people who have the stock now want to keep it and be more wealthy
b) they don’t have much regard for your physical or mental health
I guess HN just isn't for me after 10 years. Peace out.
However, decreasing salary != decreased total compensation.
Increase equity shares + decrease salary = improved work-life balance now and much healthier retirement in the future.
I generally assume it is due to lack of agency.
One of the things I value the most about working at startups in my early career is that it allows relatively "junior" folks more exposure to the big picture, and thus stay grounded in reality and not swayed by all the random narratives that are floated around in the corporate world. No matter how smart you are, or how honest and well intentioned the intent of the speaker, it takes experience to be able to parse through these and understand when and how they are relevant to your individual work. I see a lot of folks over the last 15 years who got hired into big tech during boom times, never got anywhere near the critical path of the business, and were exposed to all manner dysfunction by ambitious but incompetent social climbers who swelled the ranks of anything with the whiff of success. In these types of environment, people who just want to do good software engineering work can easily get swept into various dead end buckets of learned helpless, rest-and-vest, burnout, etc.
That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.
As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.
> As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.
No, your "observation" has a fundamental flaw: There's no general "net positive for most workplaces," because different groups have different interests.
Unionization is a "net negative" for certain groups (managers, owners) and a "net positive" for others (employees, if done right). That's why there are sustained agitation campaigns against it.
Add on top of that that a largish number of managers just plain suck at their job, so being in a union can be useful to push back against either lazy or incompetent managers.
Because there are far more people who leave their manager than leave their job.
Every single worker is ultimately disposable. If you think your employer is disposable to you, that's not because you're special but because so far you've been extremely lucky. It is far easier for a company to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace the company they work for - we just tend to see the "inability to find a new job" as a personal failure (i.e. bad performance at the job of "finding a job") whereas we take the existence of job vacancies for granted as a normal part of the market and maybe even a positive indicator for "growth" (which we define as desirable even if it's artificial or unsustainable).
By definition with sufficiently seperate interests, then anything (or nothing) goes.
Maybe not 100% of the time in 100% of societies, but certainly more than zero in every society I’ve ever heard of.
This is how control works in our society. It's true for all people.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains it well in "The Burnout Society".
Nothing happens in a vacuum and this "self-imposed" work pressure often happens within the a company culture that is either intentionally or accidentally highly demanding of individuals. The "self-imposed" is a false front for enforced expectations from colleagues, managers and clients.
We're all in unique situations and you can say if you don't like it then don't work there. However the hustle and start up cultures are viral and spread throughout the industry. Just look at all the talk of Elon Musk & his Twitter and Doge employees working 100 hours weeks and sleeping at the office. Regardless of politics, there are many people who talk about this insane, unhealthy and inefficient level of work as a good and worthy thing. It's the Puritan work ethic myth. In reality the majority of the benefit of this work does not go to the individual doing the work, instead they pay a heavy cost with their quality of life.
Except maybe the sweet gig SWEs got at Twitter before Musk.
No wonder you'd feel imposter syndrome if you'd landed a gig that good. Anyone would.
I try not to overdo it. You can still burn out from that sort of thing even if you like it. But as long as it's not excessive, I enjoy the occasional "Sorry it's late, but are you around to take a look at this?"
However, your examples made me think.
> In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job.
Can you? Can everyone? I've job hunted before and known many more people who've taken way longer than me to find a position at all, in several different locations throughout the country (not coastal metropolises). You're kind of suggesting that unemployment isn't an issue in the industry, which is a pretty blanketed take.
> Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage.
Can you meet friends while living in a remote cottage? Can you raise kids well in a remote cottage? (Does the remote cottage even have internet?) This one is technically true, but ignores many of the reasons most people work/live in the first place. I say that as someone who's considered going that route.
So while I agree software engineers aren't a "victim class" as compared to other industries, I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do. The majority of software engineers are middle-class, and when the middle-class is under attack, they're going down with the rest of the ship, not up. Perhaps it'd be better to foster a little more solidarity instead of inviting us vs. them mentality.
Still, absolutely everything about this industry is inflated. Pepsi just bought Poppi for $1.5B. That’s a HUGE DEAL, but hardly worth mentioning when compared with the $70B that Microsoft spent on Activision-Blizzard.
Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
Hell, you don’t even need a degree to get in. Just the knowledge to back yourself up in an interview.
I’m old enough to remember the hiring frenzy of the dot-com bubble, as well as many smaller hiring frenzies since.
Having watched my parents claw their way to a very happy retirement, it’s insane how easy life is in this career field.
I bring great energy to my teams, but technically I’m not incredible. I’ve never been Big-N quality. Still, I’m going to retire earlier in my life than my dad, who (very regrettably) even got an infusion of life insurance cash via my mom’s passing. I’ll retire with more spending power too. I have one nice toy - a car I spent $45k on. Otherwise, I live a modest life on my income, but all of this is based on watching my parents’ spending habits and lifestyle, so it feels like a fair comparison to me at least.
This is an absolutely blessed field. Can’t imagine where I’d be if I’d been born even just a hundred years ago.
I'd like to draw a distinction here:
$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.
$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.
The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".
So yeah, you may be loyal to the company, and you may show loyalty by coming to all the "mandatory fun" events as well as the "all hands meetings." But the reality is that they pay the minimum what they can get away with. And the more loyal you are, the more they can pay less.
If you think about it, on one hand it's a market based approach -- which is probably the right answer for management to do. On the other hand, if there's no incentive for you to go out of your way, you won't. Nor will you work harder if all you're going to get is a %2 pay raise, even though the last year you closed on average 3 tickets per work day.
The nation has like 4 million square miles - we can focus on more than 80 of them.
I’d also argue that we shouldn’t call “I’ll give you $50 coke money if you off that guy” should be called “contract killing”.
IE things like sports or music where the top 1% make f*k-you money and the rest either get by or struggle. Do they have to do the occasional public performance to build hype?
Or maybe it's more like a tradie. I always thought Leon:The Professional was a story about an apprenticeship, not that movies are a source of truth on real life.
I developed debilitating tendinitis in both wrists right about the time I graduated college. A decade later, I developed a bulged disc in my neck that ended my career.
There are very real risks to your body from sitting at a computer, deep in thought all day. There's a whole other swath of health issues, too, beside injury risks.
Why do you need help?
I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
If our industry fills with unions, suddenly I won't be able to job hop to positions that look interesting to me. I'll have to consider things like seniority and tenure and a bunch of artificial rules. It'll be like going back to high school. I prefer to break rules, color outside the lines, and set my own path.
It sounds like your idea about what unions are and do are deeply informed by abnormal circumstances.
In fact, they've told me so, in so many words.
In general it’s surprisingly difficult to compare salaries, because the US is a complete anomaly here. The tech bubble, stock inflation, real estate prices in SF and NY, student debt are all contributing factors.
In my anecdotal experience, there is little difference in actual disposable income for software engineers in the US and North West Europe, even when one makes $200,000/year and the other makes €100,000/year.
You live in a society. All I'm hearing is I need to vote to raise taxes to bring you back down to reality.
So it will be.
You should not require unions just to get help with your health problems.
> pause employment
Rather than retiring on that money, I'm back at it again, and I'm working even harder.
I know what mediocrity and complacency is. I've worked surrounded by it, and I'll do anything to avoid it. I don't want that bullshit where coworkers strive to do the minimum and everybody plays hot potato to see who will take responsibility.
I'll take responsibility. And I'll take the high comp that comes with it. Not have some union pencil in my salary band according to arbitrary rules that don't directly map to solving customer problems.
It's an entirely different matter if you stand to make huge gains if the company succeeds. That is not the majority of jobs in the field. Most of us will never even have the opportunity to be involved in one of those. That's not what this discussion is about.
I still can't fathom the headspace of people wanting to do less and be entitled to more while the rest of the world is catching up and offering a better value. The lasier we get, the less likely we'll be picked to do the work. And this is such a goddamned cushy job. Are we so fucking entitled we're complaining about our career? Seriously?
I also can't reason about why people think this is about money rather than building cool shit. If this is your hobby and you enjoy building, why wouldn't you want to do this? Especially if you pick your problem space?
Why are there so many people like this on a startup forum? Shouldn't everyone here be hustling and working hard? I don't get this attitude, and I don't want people like that on my team to drag me down.
I'm working to make money to pay my mortgage, put food on the table, save for retirement, and build a better life for my small family. That is the motivation that keeps me showing up.
If I want to build cool shit then I'll do it on my own time. Unfortunately, not everyone can build a startup.
The fact that you think a union only exists to "drag (you) down" speaks a lot about you.
Its how you exploit other people is where you get $1,000,000,000 or a billion worth.
But don't enforce that on your underlings. I have such a boss and let me tell you, it sucks!
Your underlings have lives and passions that have nothing to do with you or your work, and more importantly they don't have that founders' equity and opportunity for a 10-figure exit.
If you want that kind of excellence, be prepared to pay for it dearly. Market-rate TCO is not nearly enough.
I have no idea why you replied to me with this irrelevant nonsense, but a unions regularly protect injured workers from being fired (often for fabricated reasons). This is also why companies love illegal immigrants. When José loses a finger at the cannery, management just slips him a bus ticket back to Mexico and mentions that if he comes back they'll have to call immigration about some irregularities.
I was lucky enough that this happened before the modern era of cutthroat corporate behavior, and I was able to get physical therapy and ergonomic changes to fix the problem.
I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
All I did was point out that sedentary jobs still have plenty of injury risk.
You are describing factory work. This has no relevancy to our career. We are in one of the cushiest job sectors on the planet currently.
I have literally never seen anything in my entire professional career in software that would necessitate a union to "protect" us. My last employer gave us massages at work, FFS, and I've always had flexible working hours where I can show up at the office pretty much any time I want.
I had a few colleagues develop carpal tunnel and work always provided time off, medical benefits, special accommodations, standing desks, monitor risers, ergo keyboards, etc.
> Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
Sorry, most of this thread is about unions and I accidentally roped you into that. I don't want the specter of carpel tunnel to be a rationalization for unions.
Unions are a tool to prevent abuse of workers. We do not have a systemic issue with that in our field - conversely, we have one the cushiest careers on the planet.
I don't want us to install unions. There's very little reason to do so, and it'll damage the incredibly cushy status quo we have going for us:
1. Union seniority often means you have to stay at the same job or within the same set of employers as your union, which fractures the labor market, leads to unnecessary job specialization, and prevents mobility. This also ossifies institutional knowledge as the free exchange of ideas slows.
2. Union seniority perks mean new employees do the drudge work and senior employees get the perks. This is the wrong incentive alignment.
3. Creating barriers to fire underperforming workers will lead to offshoring. Offshoring will happen naturally as other countries get better at labor export, but unionization will prematurely accelerate this. We shouldn't be seeking to do less than our overseas counterparts, especially when our comp levels remain higher than most other professions. (I'm not biased against folks overseas, just stating that the labor markets will not mix if we don't accelerate it ourselves.)
4. Tech sectors in countries with unions pay workers significantly less and have fewer innovative companies (by volume). The tradeoff for "job security" is not worth it. Currently "job security" is the ability to provide value to your organization, and that works pretty well. This is what I mean by I don't want unions limiting my career - I have a pretty good success rate getting the jobs I want. Unions create a check box of criteria and fence people in.
5. The correct way to mitigate injuries is disability insurance, not unions. Companies shouldn't be saddled with employees that can no longer work. Companies (and employees) should instead pay for disability insurance.
There are a lot of other points, but you can see the outline of my argument. We're creating reasons to be less desirable to employers and installing barriers to career mobility.
If the situation on the ground changes, I might change my mind about unions. But as things currently stand, we still have almost everything going for us.
The real "anti-corporate" issue we should be fighting for is a trust-busting breakup of big tech into smaller firms. The FAANG companies control too much surface area, monopolize their platforms, and create barriers to entry for new companies and new markets - despite their high comp, this is what's putting the most downward pressure on the overall labor market.
> I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
And you're punching down at someone who didn't have the genes you had?
Huh? Says who?
I know this is not like lifing boxes or bricks, but my main labor is a 2+hr commute each way to work -- why?
1. Because so many decent paying tech jobs are close to expensive cities
2. Because the jobs pay well, but not enough to live super close to the offices
3. Even if i lived closed to the office, the jobs are so volatile and changing you'd switch from south bay to SF to Oakland back to Fremont so you cant pick a single spot to live
4. You do this stupid 2hr commute only to go into a phonebooth "office" and sit alone on zoom calls with people in Asia who arent even in the same office
I started having wrist pain years ago and switched to an ergonomic split keyboard years ago which completely fixed that problem. Little laptop keyboard are terrible for any extensive typing.
Thank you for the lecture about problems I solved decades ago.
I started having wrist pain years ago and switched to an ergonomic split keyboard
Oh, wooow, such sage advice. If you spend some time dealing with repetitive stress injuries, you'll learn that causes and solutions vary tremendously.
Little laptop keyboard are terrible for any extensive typing.
Why are you telling me this?
Unions fuck up the incentives. Tenured positions are coveted and come with privileges that make the job easier and the position more cushy. New hires want those perks and will rest once they attain them. This is the opposite of what you want in a workforce: you want the top 50% to work hard and fight for raises and promotions.
In our industry, when we don't get the promotions or raises we want, we switch jobs. Job switching has been an incredible means of advancing our careers and being exposed to new tech and new problems. Because of tenure and different jobs using different unions, unions will lead to fewer job changes and more "lifers" that stick around at a single job for a long time. That ossifies code, stops the influx of new ideas and talent, and causes super weird code / business unit ownership drama. It's also super boring.
Tech companies aren't afraid of high salaries (evidently so!) as much as they are of non-fungibility and ossification of the workforce. Unions make slow businesses even slower. Because of this, unions lead to offshoring.
Unions have ground so many industries to a halt in the US. Manufacturing, automotive. Most recently, the film industry (particularly crew) have been offshored -- in the last several years productions have moved to Eastern Europe and Asia sans any US workforce. They fly the cast (without crew) out for the shoots. It's all because of unions.
If we wish this upon ourselves -- in one of the cushiest careers in the world -- we'll soon find all of our jobs moving overseas.
It's the same thing that happens with industrialization.
This will naturally happen over time anyway, but unions will accelerate the trend.
This imbalance not only justifies the need for collective bargaining, but that there should be more regulations wielded against Capital to stop this imbalance.
A flourishing middle class helps a country prosper, a flourishing middle class means a strong labor class where Capital has limits and regulations on what they can inflict against civilians.
Go ask the IATSE (film) folks how many jobs they're getting this year. (All their jobs left to developing economies in Eastern Europe and Asia. Cast gets flown out, but the crew are hired and based overseas.)
Unions contributed to the decline of US steel, US shipbuilding, US automotive, etc.
A worker can be both fungible and highly compensated. None of us are irreplaceable, and nor should we be. A union tries to put in artificial barriers where businesses need flexibility, and businesses really don't like that.
Look at what you're arguing here dude. You're blaming workers for trying to protect their jobs when the issue is that capital is too powerful and needs to be regulated more.
Even more odd you're mentioning shipbuilding an industry that use to have its workers centrally planned by the US government to provide educated skilled labor but was killed off in the 80s by the pro-corpo Reagan admin.
I do agree with you that we should do this more, regulate companies harsher while giving more protections to workers.
It was killed off by the Jones Act, which "shielded" us from having to be competitive. Tariffs are one lever for establishing fractional protectionism, but the Jones Act was absolute. It essentially turned our industry into the Dodo with no competitive exposure.
> You're blaming workers for trying to protect their jobs when the issue is that capital is too powerful and needs to be regulated more.
The rest of the world is already getting really good at film and entertainment. We're no longer in a blessed position of being number one with a wide margin, and our goods have to compete in a worldwide marketplace. You want to make our product even more expensive to produce at a time when it should be getting cheaper? That's literally going to kill our industry. And then those people will have nowhere to work anyway.
> regulate companies harsher while giving more protections to workers.
This kills the companies, and then there are no jobs.
Companies don't exist to provide jobs. Companies exist to create value for those buying their goods and services. The minute companies stop being about that, they get out-competed.
Jobs and the nature of work changes all the time. Regulations and unions make companies stagnant and ossified. When they're put into straight jackets, they can't move nimbly enough to provide value.
If you want unions, then you must also be a big fan of tariffs. Because switching to domestic only production and keeping our entire market isolationist is the only way an expensive and inflexible labor equation works out. It's big fish, small pond thinking rather than small fish, big pond. (Or actually giant fish, big pond - which is what we are, but will cease to be if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.)
Do you want to allow affordable and advanced BYD cars into the American market? They weren't produced with unionized labor. Their employees are working their asses off. What do you think that'll do?
What about production companies, some foreign capital financed, that hire American actors and fly them to a cheap Asian or Eastern European country to be filmed with cheap local crew labor? How do we stack up against that? Do we need more unions?
its better out there man. i miss it.
I was waking up with no alarm to blue sky and chirping birds, and then I could read papers and to pytorch all day. Never heard a car.
well now we are married, baby is due soon. and i can speak japanese.
in a couple years well be making a slightly larger cottage back in the US and then ill be a cottage man again.
whenever we are having a tough day, we just think of waking up to the blue sky and chirping birds in the countryside. but now the vision includes little feet
An even deeper point though from "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702023453/http://www.whywor... "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. ..."
Or, from a different direction, from "Buddhist Economics" by EF Schumacher: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-econ... "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
And also from an even different direction by Marshall Sahlins' "The Original Affluent Society": https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori... "For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. ... The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. ..."
Or from an even different direction as a cautionary tale (spoilers if you read the Wikipedia article beyond what I quoted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_... ""With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette[1] by American writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006). In writing it, Willamson was influenced by the aftermath of World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[2] ... Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. ..."
Or also touching on that theme, "The Skills of Xanadu" story by Theodore Sturgeon that helped create Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" and hypertext and so indirectly the world wide web: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...
Or also on re-envisioning work and status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians."
Or more down-to-Earth by Doug Engelbart (creator of the 1960s Mother of All Demos showing interactive collaborative computing and teleconferencing and the mouse): https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/191/ "In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability or condition. Some examples include a professional association, a community of practice, consortium, humanitarian initiative, initiatives to reform education, healthcare, government, corporate initiatives, a medical research community seeking to cure a specific disease. An improvement community that also puts focused attention on improving how it engages, and how it improves, by employing better and better practices and tools, is a networked improvement community (NIC)."
Where a "networked improvement community" also connects with Brian Eno's idea of "Scenius": https://medium.com/salvo-faraday/what-is-the-scenius-15409eb... "There’s a common myth that genius is only produced and achieved in isolation. This is commonly referred to as the “Great Man Theory”, that innovation in art and culture only comes from great men working in solitude. Brian Eno, musician, producer, and inventor of the term “scenius”, describes scenius as similar to genius except embedded in a scene rather than in genes. ..."
And by Howard Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": https://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas."
Other stuff I have collected on improving organizations (and ourselves): https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...
Anyway, people can debate on whether unions will improve the day-to-day experience of software developers including regarding "burnout", but that is just scratching the surface of social change related to work compared to ideas like above.
On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.
I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.
I can explain it pretty well.
You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning.
A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data.
Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it.
Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job.
The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own.
This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well.
Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.
But generally what actually causes burnout for me is a sense of pointlessness, that the work is nothing but the pay because it's, for example, just some B2B finance adjacent system or something.
One should also consider the "outside" environment. We jumped from covid right into war without a break in between and now we are being told that we will be replaced by AI, while expecting the stock market to crash and increase unemployment. Ah and also the inflation (wage reduction) that has been going on for the last five years and doesn't show a sign of stopping.
Burnout is when you are overworked with regular activities that you see no other way to accomplish.
Why do companies hire self-directed SMEs for six figures, only to put them in a micromanagement box and override their advice?
You don’t need to.
The WHO has already done so:
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
The problem is that everybody just makes up their own definition.
Ive been burned out and am VERY good at reasoning. In fact, my burnout was largely because my role went from relatively undisturbed reasoning most of the time with long, but not extreme hours, to extreme hours where I was actively punished for reasoning - all while being micromanaged and pulled in many directions.
And yet, if I had found the new role to be meaningful and, moreover, with and for decent people (rather than a psychopath), I could totally have done all of that.
Burnout comes from when your life has no meaning and, worse, your attempts to find/create meaning are prevented (or worse).
"Those who have a why to live can endure almost any how"
1. builders (maps to reasoning)
2. fixers
3. maintainers (maps to map lookups)
Companies are often a mixture of these 3 classifications. How they skew often depends on maturity (startup vs enterprise).
It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it.
If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.
Many jobs, including construction, service jobs, even many medical jobs, do not require even the thought of work outside of working hours.
Anecdotally many in these positions that I am friends with will attest that it's great to get off work and pretend work didn't happen and go on with their real life, because they don't have deadlines or projects to stress over, arduous performance reviews, or extensive office politicking and empire-building.
There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.
Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms)
I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.
It is a blessing, but it’s also important to recognize who tends to end up in the tech industry.
Many of us are well-suited for software work because disabilities or other constraints make many other careers inaccessible.
The alternative is poverty.
Absurd Schedules - Yes
Unrealistic Deadlines - Yes
Competing Colleageues -Yes
Toxic environment - Yes
Hard to switch - Yes
Outsourcing - Yes
Training your replacements -Yes
How is this easy mode? Mental labor can be as bad or even worse than Physical labor. Atleast you hit a brick wall with physical. Your enemy is inivisible when its mental.
There's jobs where you work 80 hours per week to maybe make $50-60k, and are so physical your body will be shot by 40 or 50...
Devs get compensated extremely well.
Because that's the alternative. Either we advocate or they take more and more
But have some perspective, there's a ton of far worse jobs...
Yes, there are far worse jobs. Yes, being a slave is infinitely worse than being a software engineer.
But that's like saying "oh, using 3G isn't that bad, dial-up is worse." Sure, but if you can get fiber-optic, that's better. A lot better. And you'll do better work that way (assuming you use the internet in your work, which, if you're a dev, you probably do).
"Oh, running our entire infrastructure on a 10 year old ThinkPad isn't that bad, it could be worse, we could have a PDP-11". Sure, and you could also rent a beast of a server from OVH/Hetzner/etc for relatively cheap, and that might make life a little nicer, for you, and for your customers.
If you've got half your workforce burning out, that's a fucking issue, and while yes, compared to 99% of jobs that ever existed (medival peasant, prostitute, garbage man, street musician, cashier) this is quite nice, if people keep developing mental health issues as a result of it, that's an issue.
And in that case, if the "market solution" is basically unionize to demand better conditions...
Workers can't influence markets like the billionaire class, that's why they need to be heavily regulated with social protections enshrined in law.
Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.
A perfect example is non-compete clauses. Tech workers enjoy high job mobility, which is only hindered by non-competes. It's no accident that major tech hubs were some of the first states to ban them, helping all workers.
Yes.
A bit of context here: I am European and take for granted many things related to social safety (healthcare, benefits, parental leave, or various sorts) and equal opportunity (free education, public transportation, etc.). Many views of Bernie Sanders are mainstream by European standards (vide https://www.quora.com/How-far-to-the-left-is-Bernie-Sanders-...).
Yet, in Poland, there are various lower taxes for software engineers (and some other similar professionals). I don't consider it fair. Yes, many people feel that they work hard (and they do!) or that their friends earn even more.
But at the same time, it takes talking with anyone in education, retail, or care to see that what is considered unacceptable pay for any IT job is, for many, a dream salary. While inequality is not nearly as enormous as in the US, it is still.
So yes, if these are system changes that benefit all workers - wonderful!
> A perfect example is non-compete clauses.
Yes.
In Europe, you are often paid by the previous employer if you have such a clause. So, it only makes sense in a reasonable case where you could directly pass know-how on to the competitors. But not as a leash.
It's a lot harder to even get interviews now--I'm one of several people in my social circle that are having difficulty even getting interviews with referrals.
Projecting forward, things looks worse than the present and far worse than the past.
Still, I think a lot of people treat being a dev as more of an identity than a career. Those with such identities will have a harder time adjusting.
Personally, I like to create and build things. I will try to continue to do so, if not as a dev, then as some other profession.
We are tech workers, we need time to go to the bouldering gym and to take our Patagonia hoodies to see the outdoors.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-industry-amazon-microso...
Generally, you change something you are a part of, not because its the most important thing in the world, but because you have a stake in it and understand it.
Is it though? People in software seem to be constantly talking about burnout/mental health issues.
Like we need some explanation as to why software has such high pay, flexibility, limited education requirements, and yet not everyone in the world is doing it. High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.
Not everyone in the world is doing it - because not everyone can do it and not everyone is motivated to get to the point where they can do it, even if they could.
Nonetheless, I would obviously take more money, if offered, but I don't feel the need to frantically run around in the rat-race for it. I seriously cannot imagine what more money would do for me. I already feel like I make plenty just to push buttons on a keyboard.
Or that it requires a set of skills that not everybody has, or that there is a competitive market where employees can select jobs based on pay. Those are two other reasons.
Indeed, I have to question the premise that high pay and shitty jobs go together. I can think of plenty of shitty, low-paid jobs.
Sure, but its skills easy enough that teenagers self-teaching is considered common. Its much easier than most "professional" jobs, like doctor.
When we hear stories like those the reaction tends to be "damn that must be a really smart kid".
I don't see any reason why equally smart kids couldn't teach themselves medicine, just as many professional sports players, artists, musicians, mathematicians, etc, tend to start playing from a very young age.
Some external differentiators seem to be "access to learning materials" and "regulation of access to a profession". As an example for that second point: there is absolutely a level of professional and personal maturity I expect from a doctor, that I don't expect the tech industry to screen for. Though I'm also not suggesting the current student -> doctor pipeline is ideal either.
Self-teaching is also possible and a common route for auto mechanics, who make about as much as tech workers. They know how to do things that both doctors and SWEs are willing to pay for. Can your doctor rebuild his own car engine?
When I explain my job to people, I usually compare it to being an auto mechanic, not a doctor. That is what most software engineering boils down to. And in fact, our paths are converging with mechanics.
High pay means that the person creates a lot of value and that there's low supply relative to demand. High pay is offered because employers want to attract workers. If they're paying well, they're probably going to try other things to attract workers as well, such as offering better working conditions.
Low pay means you don't have to try too hard to get workers. That means you don't have to be nice to them.
If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too.
Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still.
The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or "basketball player" and "gymnast" might be more apt. You can be good at one thing and not good at a related thing, even if both require 'using your brain a lot' or 'using your body a lot'
Academic degrees and programming are a lot more similar than programming and ballet. People who got engineering and science degrees, as a population, are going to be more likely to become software engineers vs. the general population. This seems like a pretty obviously true claim. It's not a claim that people without degrees can't be software engineers. That's a pretty large population and I am a counter-example. My point is even within a population of people who in theory are more likely to become good, and who have had some motivation and invested time, it often does not work.
If anyone could program then we wouldn't be getting paid what we are. The reason why random people aren't all competing for our programming jobs isn't that our jobs are the worst. There are much worse jobs that people are competing over.
EDIT: and by the way, athletes in general do much better than the non-athlete population even in areas very dissimilar to the current sport.
People that take above senior level roles or "FANG" jobs should expect to grind.
People who take senior roles are paid for the things they are accountable for. They don't have to do 80 hours in front of a screen, they need to drive outcomes and be accountable.
Tell your nurse this the next time you go to the doctor.
Perhaps it's because my brain is full of software issues itself, but I don't have enough energy nor motivation before/after work to do anything else. Luckily, I am somehow healthy-ish in terms of medical metrics, but I know at my current trajectory, I won't be able to sustain it for many more years.
We're in a strategic industry with lots of investment, and a lot of us who check Hacker News have good enough resumes to be in demand, but this doesn't change the fact we —software engineers as a whole— are workers. We might be well-paid, but we're still working class.
If you go outside the top-school bubble, or the usa-tech bubble, this is more evident. Take the money and generous stock grants away and the job is basically indistinguishable from any other white-collar job. Most software developers around the world can't work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to reinvent themselves. Or find freelance work that'd allow them to live comfortably with only a dozen hours of work a week.
The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more, for less. Thankfully in the USA especially the stars are aligned to give "top software engineering talent" enough leverage to enjoy career mobility and cushy pay. We're at the right place at the right time.
The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more for less, and trust me, they're trying. It might be AI, it might be a growing supply of developers, it might be a change in investment strategies— that "top software engineering talent" pool will shrink and a lot of developers will be hit with the realization they weren't some permanent exception in the system. We might feel like we're part of the bourgeoisie because we get big cheques from the companies we work for, but we're much closer factory-line work than a lot of people realize.
Not disagreeing with your post in general, but the grind for medical specialists is only until 30 something. Once you are “consultant” (in Australia), it’s basically huge money with a job for life at whatever hours you want to work; almost anywhere in the world.
Don’t get me wrong, the grind until then is extreme, but it’s a weird comparison to make.
Overall, I agree that we are super privileged in the world of software.
I'm curious about people who have done this and how they've handled things like insurance, taxes, and getting back into the workforce after such a long gap. It seems like a big risk since there's no guarantee of employment. I'd also imagine having a long break would be looked on unfavorably by interviewers and make it harder to get back in
Getting back to work was as simple as making a few phone calls essentially and exploring my network. Granted, it was a different time (decades ago) and I didn't look for a mega corp job that requires arduous interview process.
Since then when changing jobs and interviewing I've only ever been asked once about those "gaps" in my resume and I said that I took time off to travel and explore and was greeted with enthusiasm only.
I was able to take some much needed time off to focus on personal projects and I'm extremely grateful I was able to do it.
My friends who didn't take time off were able to advance more in their careers, but I think it is a fair trade.
you have never done 80 hour weeks in software?
No, it's because we know how good we have it. Yes tech layoffs can be brutal but we all signed up for that. I knew even back in college that tech jobs can be flaky and I was likely to be out on my ass a few times in career. But I took the deal anyways because I can make six figures wearing pajamas in my basement.
Should poor performers be immune from layoffs? When is a layoff justifiable?
I'm free to leave my job at any time, so why shouldn't my employer be free to leave me?
I invite you to read earnings reports from any of the FAANG companies in the last 5 years. Go ahead, I'll wait.
You need your employer to stay fed and housed.
There is a lot more downside for you than your employer, thus a massive power asymmetry. The only way to restore the balance is solidarity between workers and it’s usually a union (or a guild)
Realistically, if I were laid off today I'd likely land a better paying job than this one. I choose to stay because I like my boss, my work, and my coworkers.
If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off then I should be laid off. Why should anyone be obligated to pay my salary if I'm not offering commensurate value?
> If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off
Companies don't always do things that make sense.
Look how well it worked for the mass layoffs.
You can invent strawmen like poor performers and failing companies all day long but the facts differ quite a lot from your perception.
I think that comes from seeing our field filled with people only in it for the money, doing the bare minimum that’ll keep them employed.
The bare minimum is what everyone should be doing, because nobody owes their employers more than that
It leads to scrum culture, because you need accountability for the people that aren’t self-motivated enough to proceed with work without extrinsic motivation (their ideal situation is nothing to do but still get paid).
That’s my theory anyway. Previously the assumption seems to have been that the nerd was gonna nerd, and the only thing you sometimes needed to do was reign them in.
But what’s happening post covid is a mess and we’ll see how the future looks for us in tech.
It's not just devs, but the crowd in here.
Use this to your advantage.
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
Those unprivileged people that you're trying to compare tech workers to, in order to undermine this manifesto, are exactly those who are harmed by dark patterns.
Anyway that's besides the point. Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions. Your comments cannot be taken at face value, because you are incentivized to come up with any reason to side against this movement.
This is also a point that is not only in the range of "lack of perspective" but actively dishonest. Yes, you can say "no," - which is not true for occupations with codified career paths (medicine, academia, law, military) and all jobs in which you literally cannot afford 2 months to search for a job.
I turned down quite a few offers in markets that (according to my beliefs) I feel are harming the world. Yes, it means turning down offers with 2x salary. Just because there is a temptation does not mean we must follow it.
> Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions
Bolt to assume that. I had a start-up for 2.5 years. Before that (and now), I worked freelance consulting and contract work.
In any case, I am based in Europe and believe in the European approach to social security, healthcare, free education, and minimal wage. I vote for parties that opt for higher taxes to support such.
>as victims of the global system.
You know if I were to be REALLY generous and take your statements in good-faith, that still wouldn't change the fact that injustice is injustice. Being murdered is not the same thing as having your wallet stolen, but that doesn't mean you should throw up your hands with a thought-terminating cliche and go "well it could have been worse! Guess I should just let them have it and not do any follow up!"
Really, really confused take to be quite honest.
- tech work is relatively privileged
- we, as tech workers, are losing out immensely due to a lack of collective bargaining
I look at the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as a reference: these are jobs with similarly privileged work conditions. However, there being a union meant they could inflict significant pain on industry players until their demands around AI training were met.
Meanwhile, we’re all just keeping our heads down hoping the market improves at the same time the biggest players are using our inputs to train even better models.
Just because our work conditions are better than other professions doesn’t negate the notion that we are being actively exploited to our own detriment.
well I have worked all sorts of physically demanding jobs, digging ditches, building offices, tearing down offices...
So yes Software Engineering is easy - except when it's not. When it's easy it is real easy. When it's not it is significantly worse than most of the time at these other jobs. It is hard to explain the stress that a computer can give you when it is refusing for hours to do what you tell it to, but that stress is a lot worse than the stresses of landscaping in my experience.
Volunteering three hours at the food bank makes me feel better than any day I spent at that job.
That was the case a few years ago, when interest rates were 0 or below 0 and during the pandemics when IT experienced a boom.
I was layed off a the start of the year and it took two months to get some offers. It was much harder to find employment than 3 years ago. I went through more than 150 applications and tens of interviews.
It's also worth noting that developers remain some of the most proportionately under-compensated jobs compared to the revenue we drive and we're all aware of it. It's the shareholders that need to justify their existence.
Everyone can be victims of the "global system" at the same time, even if not to equal degrees.
I live in Latvia. Teachers here are underpaid. So are firefighters. So are nurses. So are software developers, compared to most other countries, or even with what people could historically afford on a single salary. The economy could be worse, but it also kinda sucks for everyone.
Using housing prices as a quick example:
> U.S. home prices are rising significantly faster than incomes. After accounting for inflation, home prices jumped 118% from 1965 to 2021, while income had only increased by 15%.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...
> Between 2010 and the third quarter of 2023, house prices increased by 48% and rents by 22%. When comparing the third quarter of 2023 with 2010, house prices increased more than rents in 18 out of the 27 EU countries.
> Over this period, house prices more than tripled in Estonia (+210%) and more than doubled in Hungary (+185%), Lithuania (+158%), Latvia (+141%), Austria (+123%), Czechia (+122%) and Luxembourg (+107%). Decreases were observed in Greece (-14%, see methodological notes), Italy (-8%) and Cyprus (-2%).
> Rents increased in 26 EU countries with the highest rises in Estonia (+218%), Lithuania (+170%) and Ireland (+100%). The only decrease in rent prices was recorded in Greece (-20%). Latvia's rent increase was more modest than its house price increase at around 50%.
from https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/economy/11.01.2024-latvia... (more recent data, but the trend is pretty clear)
> According to Money.com.au, house prices have skyrocketed nationally by 3435 per cent since 1975 compared with just 1183 per cent growth in full-time wages.
from https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/interest-rates/proof...
Seems pretty global, same with the prices of various goods being more or less out of control, education costs, healthcare costs, everything. It doesn't mean that my profession isn't privileged in many ways, I still try to help my friends when I can.
Pressures are different indeed, but let's not pretend academia of all places is any less "priviledged"
Btw, most professors age well into retirement. Trying to find a software engineer over 55 is looking for a needle in a haystack that definitely will not make it past the next boom/bust cycle.
Agism in this field is endemic, probably the worst of any in knowledge work.
...if you are born in US, maybe, but "somebody else has it worse" is pure whataboutism.
Not having it as bad as others is not the same as not being a victim. We really need to drop this attitude because it misaligns our loyalties with those who have no reason to be loyal to us in return. It's a false consciousness.
Wealth and income are widely pushed as "class" distinctors in culture and media for a reason. They blur the lines and mislead us about our place in the system. Yes, many software jobs pay handsome salaries for now. But as soon as they can, companies will drop those salaries and cut those jobs because we're a cost center, even if the "assets" we create pad out the balance sheet more than a cleaner or receptionist could.
Wealth can enable you to become an enterpreneur which in turn can enable you to become part of the billionaire class if you make it through all of the filters against all the odds. But even small business owners are only a few bad months (or in the US maybe even just one bad health event) away from the rest of us plebs, unless they are so tightly integrated (which almost always means family, i.e. something outside their control) that they can get the support to recover.
We're all suffering from grind and exploitation. Some of us suffer more directly but just having lucked into a position so far ahead from the bulldozer chasing us that you can't see it, doesn't mean it won't run you over if you have to stop or fall and can't get up in time. That bulldozer exists by choice. You didn't get a say in it, nor did I, but that doesn't mean its existence is inevitable or unchangeable. Capitalism isn't a law of nature any more than feudalism was. Nor does capitalism have to evolve (and it has evolved, likely even within your lifetime) into something better, especially if those at the receiving end of it are placated by being told that others having it worse.
Is it privileged to be able to live in a society where you can develop your career and not, like, have to go pick crops for three months? Yeah. Does the geographical freedom of SWEs (in a minority of cases) exceed that of a higher-paid traveling nurse? Sure, but that's a trade-off; the engineer takes less money than the nurse, but gets to travel further.
I'm not asserting that your comment was offensive because I'm whining about global systems of grind and exploitation. It's offensive because you seem to think that no one in the tech industry outside AAA game dev has come up from the mines. I started my career as an unpaid intern, then made $7.50/hr and freelanced on the side. I worked 12-16 hour days coding, and/or 8 hour days while doing 8 hour shifts as a waiter and taxi driver. So now, 30 years later, I can bill $300/hr and work a few hours a day. Is that easy mode?
And if you're referring to the people half my age who are trying to make it in this industry, they have it much harder than I did. They're living after the time when they can specialize and be adopted in as part of the technical debt for clients or companies. They have virtually no chance at job security. They have to constantly scrape and invent in order to stay relevant. So yes, people like me may appear to have easy lives compared with 24 year old medical students, but you seem to be taking for granted the lateral shift in your career - I suppose it's probably easier mucking with python than writing academic papers - but you're taking for granted your status, age, job security, etc. And missing the fact that other people do not get into this industry because it's easy, but rather because they are up for a challenge.
And how many people have said that working in academia is playing life in easy mode? That's the joke of the century.
In the commercial world you have to sing for your supper, as PG put it, and that is much much harder.
> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Yet, it is up to us. In some software jobs (AAA game dev and a certain type of startup), you are expected to crunch beyond limits. In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job. Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage. Or work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.
Not many career choices support this freedom. In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional—you won't finish university, you won't get established, and that's the end of the story. In many other jobs, if you were freelancing a dozen hours a week, you would literally not be able to afford food. In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.
Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.