I have worked for a few companies that have gone out of business. Looking for work afterwards is mostly a screening job, picking the work I want to do out of the various offers. Every time, I have been hired for more money than I was making before (it is common knowledge that changing jobs is the best way to get raises)
It isn't like I am some hotshot developer, either. I am not a networking type person, so all of my contacts are just people I have worked with at previous shops. The reason it is so easy to find work is because there are simply more jobs available than qualified workers.
I know this because I have been on the other side, too (trying to hire people). It is really hard to find quality developers, because they always have multiple offers.
Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.
If this is actually true, in any situation where this happens, you are being underpaid, because it implies the employer is getting more out of your employment arrangement than you are.
I know what you meant, it is just the semantics of economics are precarious and a lot of people would fight tooth and nail to be in a position to bargain for more because of a situation where an employer values the worker much more than the worker values the employer. You want equilibrium where the worker gets as much from the employer as they can, which is when employer and work both get as much out as one another.
The only way an employee can be paid as much money as he brings in for the company is if he is self employed.
I know quite a few countries where being a IT person won't matter one tiny thing.
It is job hunting and begging like everyone else.
When the location doesn't matter, it is all about the price.
There is no shortage as such, what there is, are the conditions that many companies offer, where sometimes is better to not even have a job than working endless hours almost for free.
And if you want names for countries, in Portugal unless you are living in Porto or Lisbon there is a very thin possibility to land a developer job. And there aren't enough companies in those cities to employ everyone.
A large majority has been forced to go away to other countries.
Edit: And those that are above 40 have even a harder time finding something as a developer, because you are supposed to just be a manager.
Having been through two tech downturns, and unemployed at points in both of them, I can guarantee you the job environment you describe is temporary.
For now. We've had a good few years.
Every skilled craftsman in every generation in the history of civilization has made this claim. Why do you think your position of privilege is any more lasting than that of weavers or threshers?
At that point, I will need to learn a new skill (and/or retire).
Professionalization also helps in screening potential employees. Right now it's kind of a crapshoot unless you have some firm informal signal that the potential hire is quality. Usually that signal is past employment at well-known firm with high standards.
Demanding to the employer: "Either keep our jobs in this country or we're going to stop working!", seems like it would just accelerate the offshoring.
If every company is taxed heavily for outshoring work, it would be impossible for Joe's Call Center to employ 1,000 people and make enough profit for them to be competitive vs just hiring the workers directly.
Unless you forsee taxing all companies for all oversees work, I don't see how that can work.
And I'm not sure how you can effectively tax a company for all overseas labor, for example, a computer is made up of thousands of components with thousands of suppliers, how can you tax IBM for the low-paid subcontracted labor that mines the minerals that are sold to a manufacturer that makes the plastic that's sold to another manufacturer to create the dielectric for capacitors that's sold to another subcontractor that makes the capacitors that are sold to another subcontrator that glues them on the big tape reels that are sold to another subcontractor that loads them into the pick and place machines that are used by another contractor to build a board that's used by another subcontractor to build a computer for IBM.
How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation? It's easy to look at the simple case and say "Tax overseas workers!" but it's actually quite complicated to come up with rules do actually do so since there's no clear line that divides employees and non-employees. And if you draw that line, the company will move its workers to the otherside of the line.
Start with the low-hanging fruit and target specific industries. Call center, direct marketing, etc. Perhaps a tax break for not tasking, directly or indirectly, an offshore company for any primary business need. (The law has the benefit of not being code - a judge can see through most avoidance schemes)
There's probably a nontrivial healthcare cost benefit in reducing the collective country's blood pressure from being able to talk to someone they can understand when they need help..
(Only sort of kidding about that last bit...)
The reason H1Bs are popular is it allows cheap workers whom can be managed in the US onsite. The management that uses H1Bs doesn't want to move the whole department overseas; if they did, they themselves wouldn't be needed. Executives grow their departments as big as possible as a political goal.
Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.
The process might be disrupted seriously. But - who would care?
Or they fly him in from overseas and say "Hey, see that stack of forms? You are your team have to figure out how they get entered into the computer so we can make more Widgets"
Here in Germany, Nokia was forced to either find alternative jobs for the employees of a plant they were closing down or to return to the local government all the subsidies that had gotten to built the plant.
Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
But more to the point, if you desire a work/life balance you absolutely can find a programming job that will allow it. It'll pay less than the unpaid overtime job, but it exists, and will still pay more than most occupations.
You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is anywhere near what custodians go through. I used to work for one of these IBM-like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight from the web.
Because the union scandals of the 60s and 70s never happened, of course.
I assume you're referring to the current fascination with socialism? You know, that great political innovation that lead to a hundred million murders in the 20th century.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
You should look into the history of unions. You might be surprised at their non-progressive / non-egalitarian origins. You don't need a "right-wing opinion machine" to besmirch the name of unions; you simply have to look at the long history of state-union corruption.
Does your 100million lives include the many millions the USA has helped see to their deaths?
I couldn't resist.
Maybe a mix of Glass Door with Adhocracy or Liquid Feedback
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
If what you really believed was true there's no way that someone like Barbara Lee could be in office with such huge wins every two years when so many of her constituents are the same people that work in the area you think is so terrible. Why are you even posting on HN? This is a technical news site.
This idea that all of us are equal (we are not even factoring in luck) is really just a modern day PC version of the way the world is not.
As an aside, I always leave the garbage man Gatorades because frankly the job looks like it sucks.
The guys that haul trash have got it exactly right. It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth and when they demand they get it. If I lose Facebook for an hour its a bummer. If the trash isn't hauled away its a health hazard.
> It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth
Well not exactly. They have a union in most cities and some of those jobs the pay is so good there is a waiting line to get the job actually. And since they can strike in many contracts they have quite a bit of leverage (what you are saying).
Link below is without overtime pay. In some cases with overtime the pay can easily be 6 figure. I can assure you that there are many takers for this job, although perhaps where you live that might not be the case of course.
Examples:
New York:
http://salarygenius.com/ny/new-york/salary/garbage-man-salar...
Cincinnati:
http://salarygenius.com/oh/cincinnati/salary/garbage-man-sal...
The issue is not whether one is special but special relative to someone who does that type of menial repetitive job.
And just that I think I have more capabilities than the average garbage man or postal worker. And I grew up in a time when it was ok to say something like that by the way.
But the HN Hivemind doesn't want to hear this, apparently.
It doesn't even matter whether you're right or not but you can't attack people's self-worth and expect to be rewarded for it.
Sort of like if I were to say that all company owners and management are fraudulent exploitative criminals.
Were you expecting upvotes ?
To self-nominate yourself as "more worthy" than others seems a road down a slippery and ugly path.
Then again, my worthy ancestors have fought on both sides of numerous bloody disagreements over this very concept.
More generally, and I mean this quite generally, I tend to find externally imposed tests far preferable to internally imposed ones. Human eugenics is internally imposed. The incestuous processes of party politics and academic mutual admiration societies strike me as similar. Likewise, to venture into more locally fraught, if less literally gut-spilling ground, defenses of Web or application layout and design which concern themselves with everything but what actual users actually need.
There's also the possibility that someday you'll find yourself less able, or perhaps just recognised and rewarded, than you are now. Will a deaf, or blinded, or crippled, or sick, or depressed, or senile you be less worthy than you are now? Be careful how you answer that, because the loads imposed should you find yourself there are all the more crushing.
Go out there. Do your fucking job, and do it well, for as long as you can.
But let others tell you you're a good person.
It's one of the better ways to be one.
Are you better in terms of intrinsic worth as a human being? No, they're just as human as you are.
Are you better in terms of physical strength or stamina, as mattwood asked? No.
Are you better morally than them? (Remember that "morally" includes not just overt acts like theft or murder. It also includes things like pride.)
Or is it merely, as you said in your reply to mattwood, that you think you're better mentally? (And perhaps in terms of achieving financial results.) But of all the possible axes of measurement, why did you pick that one to be the definition of "better"? (Cynically, I wonder if you didn't pick it because it's the one you win on...)
Yes. And I really don't see why you'd bring up pride, since if that's something that comes to your mind when you think about moral superiority, then you're barking up the wrong tree with the rest of 'em.
Yes, some people get to buy new yachts when they stop buying labor from American workers. We could prevent them from buying labor from other workers, or we could do something about the yachts.
Let's try these first, see how it works.
We should celebrate when problems become cheaper to solve.
Personally, I'd rather see the wealthy fund more public goods. Few people are struggling, and we should support them. Other than that, let's pursue abundance together instead of trying to adjust relative wealth.
You have an interesting take on it; I'll respect that and leave it at that.
The ironic part is we have close to 10 million people out of work (not including those who have permanently fallen out of the workforce) - you think at least some of those people could fill those jobs?
Most of the applicants would provide negative value if hired.