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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43429259

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431883

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.