Free food and misery: the life of a techie
economist.com
economist.com
However, there was no 401k matching. No tuition reimbursement. There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real. Basically, if you couldn't market the perk to 20-somethings, they slashed it.
Meanwhile I'm told that my very existence screws over the poor working class police officers and firefighters, who make 80% of what I make but have job security and lifetime pensions awaiting for them. And they get paid for overtime.
While I absolutely feel like I'm privileged in many ways to work in tech, the industry has many incentives to make tech workers look more 'spoiled' than they are, and so they work their PR engines to do exactly that.
I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.
recently learned that a lot of places give employees incentives to leave positive reviews on glassdoor.. hopefully glassdoor doesn't go the same way as yelp
Free lunch doesn't get them anything - you already expect to be at work before and after the lunch hour.
Free dinner gets you to stay until it arrives (6:30, I'd bet) and probably afterwards.
I am a 20-something who was woken up every day at 1am for weeks to "handle emergencies" that didn't exist -- are you telling me the standard is compensating people for this? I did get the sense that if it cost the company meaningful amounts of money they would have let me change the alerting system so that only real emergencies woke me up, instead of "not your department"ing me.
EDIT: Realized I didn't address the question of whether it is "standard". I've heard that DevOps engineers have a bit of a compensation consideration (maybe $10-20k/year in the Bay Area where I live) for the on-call nature of their jobs, but I am sure that they are mostly paid enough to be exempt employees. This is totally anecdotal/second-hand and it would not surprise me if their pay is at parity or even worse than other software engineers.
Unfortunately the rather depressing trend seems to be towards shoving it all on devs and not paying them more then justifying the reasoning as "if you are the one being paged then you are incentivized to fix things.
Unfortunately, and this is what you are seeing, too often they don't give you the resources to fix things and you just end up in ops hell.
They get away with this because we (devs) have allowed ourselves to get screwed over because we chug the koolaid. We don't get overtime because for some reason we're exempt, this lets companies get away (financially) with crunch time caused by incompetent management. Oncall rotations which don't pay extra are just another offshoot of this.
I can't contain my ire at being woken up for phantom emergencies, though. That would be a cause for a new job, personally.
Oh and this pathetic low-life still has a badge and a gun. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/...
Yes. Also assuming that everyone who works in tech is a ".com millionaire", because either you worked at a startup and made millions in your stock options or you work at google and of course make at least $500k.
"But you love doing it! You love this tech stuff!" Sorry. Not if I have a solution of the top of my head. 30$ of help please.
Call me crazy, but when I see there's an on call rotation, I figure that's part of the work I have to do as a salaried and not hourly employee, and I calculate the extra work into my total compensations vs. time worked estimate.
I totally agree with everything else you're saying, though.
And put their life on the line, every call out. Never forget this.
But.
I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives". It's true that there are police officers and firefighters and EMTs who work tough beats and have extremely dangerous lives. But by and large, these jobs are significantly less dangerous than many other jobs that pay less and don't come with the public respect of being a firefighter/PO/etc.
In NYC, for example, sanitation workers have higher rates of injury and death than police officers do by 2x[1]. Convenience store clerks and commercial fishermen also have much higher death and injury rates.
None of that means that we shouldn't respect and appreciate those who work hard to keep us safe. But it's also reasonable to recognize that these positions pay well and have excellent benefits relative to jobs with much higher risk and much lower social respect.
1. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-secr...
Just answering the original poster. Farming and construction are also dangerous and the risks, aside from random bad luck can be managed, while pay and conditions may vary. But that's not what was being discussed.
The OP was complaining about first responder over-time and pensions, while the most risk involved in well funded companies and startups is probably getting a paper cut. The distinction I draw is between the types of risk and reward being experienced.
Because, sure, if you're the person who does Crystal Reports at Bob's House of Widgets, or the VB person at Gary's Lawncare, or even (to some extent) one of the J2EE horde at MegaBankCorp, you're in a place where you're not core to the business, you're viewed as a cost center, you have a limited career path, and the main people at the company probably have you lumped in with HR and Accounting.
But I really, really, really doubt you're going to find that same sense of alienation, underappreciation, etc. at a tech company.
How many tech companies have you worked at?
There is a sense of alienation in being a small cog in a huge company shipping millions of devices, churning through code to get data from one point to another hoping that it'll make a difference to customers and that that feature isn't just another PR gizmo.
I don't think that software development is necessarily a bad career, but I do think it has been vastly oversold relative to other paths available to well educated, hardworking people who can choose their own career path in the US. And I think that this overselling is a big part of a PR campaign to convince congress and the public that there is a shortage of software developers.
IN short, while this article presents an unusually pessimistic image of software development as a career, and I may not fully agree with it, I do welcome this rebalancing.
So what other paths are nicer, while requiring less up-front risk?
Law? Totally flooded with first-jobbers and fresh graduates.
Medicine? Salaries being suppressed and debts inflating unless you hit the right specialty.
Academia? Oh boy, basically just triple what I said about medicine.
At some point we just have to accept that the university-educated, white-collar professional class is being subjected to exactly the same wage repression and rentiering (on housing and education costs) as everyone else. We are all working-class now.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...
That said, can you think of another field that experiences a similar same drum beat about a "shortage"? Maybe nursing, though out here in SF, nurses actually do out-earn software developers at the median (US News "best jobs" has a roundup of BLS data), and because (again, this is in SF) they have powerful unions, they don't experience the Disney-stye situation where middle aged nurses are fired and forced to train their replacements as a condition of receiving severance or holding onto their jobs for a while longer. I always have to make sure I say this when I make this comparison: I am absolutely ok with nurses outearning software developers, it's a tough job, they deserve to be well paid. But according to the US News site, even dental hygienists make roughly as much at the median as software developers. Again, I have no problem with this, but it is at odds with the notion that software developers are a wildly well paid group that experiences wonderful perks, and that the big problem is that there's a "shortage" of them. The economic article makes it clear that the aversion to this field may be very rational.
Although burnout affects everyone, I do think that software developers face greater age related employment issues than most fields as well.
I can't really quantify this, but I don't think that the PR around a "shortage" of nurses reaches the same fever pitch for software developers.
Overall, I'd recommend you just go through the "US News Best Jobs" list and check out salaries in high cost regions, relative to software development. Think about job security, stress levels, age discrimination, and so forth. Nothing's perfect, but I think you can make a good case that all of the fields in the top 10 may be preferable to software development.
Meanwhile, as this thread will surely very soon demonstrate, software developers have taken the old US notion of hating on unions, peppered in a lack of overtime pay, clauses that claim ownership to things developed in their free time, a culture of big company pretend startups (you know, 60h week little pay all the micro management none of the freedom and ownership) and an attitude towards their own field that equals that of pirates.
1. Because that's hard
2. Because it would require cooperation and coordination with large groups of people, and the grand mythos of the hacker is one of individualism. This applies to both personalities and projects
3. Disrupting US law isn't like disrupting taxis
4. There are powerful forces preventing labor organisation by hackers
5. Unions are viewed negatively by hackers (you actually covered this one)
So, I don't disagree with your points, but nurses and PTs have a lower ceiling than software engineers. By far.
How so?
That's pretty damn low for that amount of education and hours worked.
It's pretty difficult to beat the upfront cost/risk of "Fire up a web browser and a compiler/interpreter and start reading a tutorial". That can lead to an entry level job in 6mo - year or less. Software is really an anomaly in this area especially with tuition costs these days.
You can learn math or engineering on your own to lessen the risk of flunking out of a major, but you're still required to spend the time.
At one point I was given a Macbook Pro as a perk (iOS dev) which was slower than my personal Air because of the lack of SSD.
I mean, I don't feel as apriciated or have as much fun, but I put money in the bank, I'll have healthcare for my family, retirement for my self and better job security.
Everyone is feeling pressure from inflation and stagnating wages, but let's not pretend an SDE with a six figure income is some how part of the working class now. The working class was relieved of health care and security a decade or more ago.
For the record though, cleaning up involves driving a dump truck, bobcat or excavator. It's not like I have a shovel in hand for more than an hour in the week.
You don't want to divide you shift into 30 second increments then do the same cycle 1000 times a day.
I have to say I am a true old fuddy-duddy when it comes to Instagram as I can’t think of a single use for it that appeals to me.
Now everyone is on snapchat, which fortunately, nobody's parents will EVER be aware of.
Nope, you Gen-Xers have fscked yourselvs as far as that goes. Nobody in my generation in the West will ever be able to have children. Hope you like immigrants.
On Facebook, people present a polished version of their lives as if it's reflective of everything in their lives.
On Instagram, the purpose is to show polished (and "filtered") versions of what you're doing. I like that Instagram is a bit more honest about what it really is.
In regards to the perks, having access to all of them mentioned is the exception rather than the rule.
It is a sad indictment of work culture that the freedom to make your own hours or rest when tired is seen as an extravagant benefit.
In most white-collar roles, "advancement" is synonymous with "going into management", and software development is no different.
2. Management is not automatically higher-paying than development, until you get into the higher reaches of management, which not everyone will.
3. To the extent people are flatlining, it might just be a case of starting high; if you're hitting a wall with a number that's in the top 5% of individual income nationally, well, you're doing better than 95% of people out there, so consider that it might not be so bad after all.
Growth slows down as you get older and more experienced, not everyone can grow beyond some level. A company isn't going to keep giving big raises to someone who isn't growing that much anymore. That seems fair.
Worst case for most people is that they hit a reasonably high wage quickly and can stay there for a long time, even if the increases become modest at best. That's a good thing.
If you are willing to develop the skillset you can still move into management and continue to increase your earning power. That's good too.
It does suck to think that as a mid level engineer I'll most likely get to a senior level in a few years and rise no further, but it's just something you have to get over.
I wouldn't want to be doing anything else in my career and the tech press and media did little to influence or change it.
Netscape, then Google, then Digg, on to Facebook and Twitter, these were all early companies that got the press raving about how cool, how easy, how glamorous it was to work in startups and in tech. Yet at the end of the day, it's still solving mundane and sometimes really hard problems with you butt glued to the seat and writing a lot of code in a text editor.
I should also add that the biggest reward for me every day is solving a problem and finally getting that ah hah moment. It's not the foosball table or free lunch.
It was interesting to see, in another part of the article, the suggestion that knowing what a company's goals are in relation to one's work can make one's work more satisfying. That makes sense.
Funny thing is, if they would offer free lunch, they would get some more work out of me. They don't even offer free coffee; yes that's how fucking pathetic it is. Not even cheap black coffee. They'd improve employee health if they offered free fruit, but nope, that bag of apples from Costco is too fucking expensive. Instead they just fine us $2000 for not participating in biometrics.
Mind explaining?
Most programmers make about what they've always made, maybe less (adjusted for inflation). $120k/yr in 2001 is $160k/yr in 2015.
Keep shooting ourselves in the foot it is then. K. Carry on.
No career comes with a guarantee of job satisfaction, and very few come with much security. Less so in the tech industry, because tech itself is evolving quickly.
I'm a little disappointed that this reporter feels such a statement is newsworthy. To read this article, I would almost believe that its author doesn't believe in meritocracy or neo-liberalism, which is kind of bad faith, coming from The Economist.