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Comment by jaymzcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we as an industry can sometimes forget just how good we have it. Many of my friends do not work in tech, they are low paid, they have stressful jobs with little autonomy, they are not challenged at all and they feel little personal accomplishment in their day today. I appreciate the author alludes to this but having seen friends recently job hunting (outside of tech) I am reminded that even on the worst days I have it many times better than a lot of people.

> If I won the lottery would I still code? I would, but it would not be like work. It would be projects I enjoyed. And it would be fewer hours.

But wouldn't we all love to do that no matter our vocation? Until basic income comes along I think we have to just get over it. Most jobs aren't going to provide you with fun for 8 hours a day. I feel like the older I get the more I understand that a job is a way for me to trade time for money, I don't have to (or should expect to) like it.

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This.

I find it very difficult to complain as a coder given the conditions at the moment. Companies battle to hire people and the pay is globally extremely good. Most of the time it is easy to get time off or to accommodate "errands" during the day.

As you said, I think a lot of us are out of touch about what it is to get a job outside of tech (and a couple other high demand privileged examples). You want to work from home one day a week ? Need 2 approvals of your N+2 manager. Coming late 3 times in a row? Let's talk about your "behavior". That coffee you just took over there ? It will be 1$ deduced from your paycheck.

I feel a lot of us live in the utopia that a job must be fun at all time and that we should always do what we like. Sorry but the world doesn't work like that.

Edit: I'm not saying that we shouldn't demand good condition. It is an "offer and demand" economic system after all. We should get what we can negociate to get in the market. I wanted to make the point however that >90% of regular jobs are not pleasant and fun at all time.

The churn rate is also high on most software teams. In some cases, successful companies struggle to find candidates because all the good people have worked there before and ran away.

One of the brightest developers I've worked with quit after 3 weeks at my company because they were underpaying her and wouldn't give her a raise. This same company complained regularly of not being able to find good talent.

Employers think they hold all the leverage and can treat developers how they want. They really don't. Why do you think half of software projects fail to deliver?

> Why do you think half of software projects fail to deliver?

A number of reasons:

1. Bikeshedding over the tech stack

2. A glut of CS grads who see a bunch of nails to hit with their textbook and data structures and algorithms knowledge failing to engage in a proper engineering process

3. Poorly defined requirements (blame aplenty to go around here: product development giving insufficient thought to the product details, sales over promising, and "engineers" failing to contribute by treating partnering with these folks as an onerous chore rather than a necessary task)

4. Insufficient resources

And many more, I'm sure.

Developers aren't blameless, here. In fact over the last couple of years I've come to see them as being at least as much to blame as non-technical people, perhaps even more so.

>quit after 3 weeks at my company because they were underpaying her and wouldn't give her a raise.

Why would she have accepted an offer she felt was too low?

Why wouldn't she? Maybe she wanted to get her foot in the door.

The point I'm trying to make is that the company needed her more than she needed them.

>Why wouldn't she?

Because it's unethical to agree to work for a rate you're not actually willing to work for. She wasted a lot of people's time and resources to bring her on board for those three weeks.

>The point I'm trying to make is that the company needed her more than she needed them.

I wouldn't want to work with a person who accepts an offer and then THREE WEEKS later starts demanding raises, no matter what their skill level.

Like I said, maybe she knew her worth and just wanted to get her foot in the door. I never said she asked for a raise. She just found a better offer elsewhere, and probably would had stayed for the right counteroffer.

I wouldn't want to work with a person who puts their own ideas about when it's appropriate to expect a raise over keeping bright people.

She didn't waste anyone's time; unlike most, she was productive from day one to the day she left. The company was wasting their own time by optimizing for low compensation and not engineering acumen.

Companies have no problem staffing projects they know will be canceled soon, or projects that are underfunded. It's a dog eat dog world, I'm afraid.

Counteroffers are widely regarded as a terrible thing to offer -- it sets a precedent that anyone, at any time, can attempt to hold your company hostage for more money. Most organizations with much industry experience will pass on any sort of counteroffer.

And it's likely that she _absolutely did_ waste people's time -- the company may have passed on other candidates to hire her and had to start over.

How are they holding the company hostage? You either agree to a salary or you don’t, and if you want to mitigate the risk of even having to discuss salary, you overpay. I realize from a mgmt perspective it sucks to lose someone you invested a decent chunk if change searching for, but it’s on you to mitigate that risk.

In some sense, they wasted their own time by not overpaying.

You might have a point on a longer time scale. This is three weeks. She likely hadn't even gotten her first pay check. Her market value did not change that much in three weeks.

It's possibly more complex than that? Maybe she was willing to work for less given other soft-factors; when she arrived, perhaps she found those soft-factors illusory (different boss; different project or work scope; coworkers aren't so fun after all, etc). In that case, asking for a raise is pretty reasonable.

Also, she may have simply gotten an offer she couldn't refuse from another company. You could argue that this shows poor ethics, but don't delude yourself, everyone has a price. She may have been generous asking her company to match.

Let's not judge people based on thin second-hand accounts.

Given the fact that "she" is completely anonymous in this case, no one is judging a person, we're judging the situation as described. Get off your high horse.

Oh, no no no.

If they can fire us at any time, we can leave at any time.

There should be absolutely nothing in anyone that says "work for less than what you're worth".

Whatever her reasons for going for and getting what she wanted, good for her. And any ethical system that says "work for less than what you're worth in an at-will environment" is a bad ethical system, full stop.

You're arguing against a straw man. If she felt she was worth more than the salary she was offered, she shouldn't have accepted it in the first place. Simple as that.

Who can say what was going on in the inner world of this hypothetical second-hand story person's mind?

All we know is she took a job and then took a better one.

You're claiming that's an unethical act, and I'm saying, "it's the free market, baby!" They pushed for at-will, they got it, consequences and all.

And, more broadly, I grew up in the transitionary period from "one job for life" to "throw 'em to the wolves," and I have absolutely zero sympathy for employers, in this world their policies have wrought.

There's a local employer here that is a household name. They have a history of doing things like offering positions to entire teams of people and then laying them off before their first day at work. In spite of the fact that they are one of the largest employers in the area I refuse to work with them because of their unethical behavior. Just because there are not laws which ban unethical behavior does not mean there are no consequences. I'd generally rather not work with someone who has shown a history of quitting after 3 weeks.

A bit of anecdata: my second software only gig (started in IT) was offered a very lowball rate with a '90 day eval' to bump my pay that came and went. 12 weeks isn't 3 but it took getting another offer to get a raise I more than rightly deserved. I was killing it and everyone knew it.

While 3 weeks sounds like a very short evaluation period, there very much could've been an arrangement like this. I hesitate to use the word 'unethical' primarily due to how pervasive Hanlon's razor really is. She gave them 3 weeks of seemingly extremely productive work and gave them a taste of the caliber of developer they could hire if they just threw enough money at the problem but it sounds like they didn't learn. Every experience like this is a chance to learn something but some companies just fold churn into the equation without properly evaluating what they could do to prevent it. Usually its those companies that think developers are just equal cogs capable of performing all the same tasks at the same magically high productivity level. They rarely learn that you sometimes actually do get what you pay for.

She might have ended up liking the job enough to stay, just as the employer might have liked her enough to keep her. That's the extent of the obligation between employer and employee -- so called "employment at will." Companies have fought vigorously to maintain this arrangement.

Yeah I thought the same thing why would someone accept a position at a given rate and expect a raise in 3 weeks? The only logical way I can comprehend that sentence is that HE was there for 3 weeks and SHE was already working there and after being there for X amount of time realized she wasn’t being paid what she’s worth. X being at least 6 months but realistically a year or more there.

No they compete for unicorns. Normal developers who were privileged enough to be born in silicon valley and go to mit/Stanford/Caltech and aren't willing to work 16 out 24 hours of the day might as well not apply because you just get told to fuck off in every application

For the past decade I made it very clear during interviews that I value work-life balance and that in fact it increases my overall productivity. I was never told to fuck-off (And I'm in SV).

In fact any company that "requires" (explicitely or implicitely) employees to work more than 8-9 hours a day should be seen as a huge red flag IMO.

This supposes you can afford to get a job elsewhere. Most people need a job now.

Having and enforcing personal boundaries will change your life. People will respect you for it too, not turn you away.

You will not respect yourself even when your wallet is empty.

That said, it is currently reasonably easy to switch the job in our area.

That's why you (a) interview in batches, and (b) even after you have taken a shitty job that you needed _now_ you keep interviewing.

In the longer run: build up some emergency funds; and always keep interviewing as a low intensity background activity, so you have offers before you need them.

I've always felt that interviewing is a pretty high intensity activity. At least the ones I've been in, which are a parade 5-6 of interviewers asking you to do problems at a whiteboard in hour intervals. At the end of those days, I'm physically and mentally exhausted, and often hungry, as they tend to make me talk right through lunch. I really dread interviews like this.

You are right. My choice of words was confusing:

By low intensity background activity I didn't mean that interviews are easy. I meant to suggest, interview at one company every quarter (or a similar rate).

(Though interviewing does get easier with practice. I usually batch up a lot of applications to different companies when I'm about to seriously look for a new job, and when I'm properly in gear, I breeze through those full day ordeals without too much loss of sanity. After all, there are only so many different technical interviews questions in common use amongst the companies.)

I disagree with your point even if it's exaggerated. I'm a HS grad with about a decade of experience. At least for the past five years, I can find a decent job at a startup making well into the six figures at will. Last time I got laid off, I had multiple competitive offers a little over a week later. This was all from cold online applications, and I was not living in a strong market like San Francisco or Boston. I have no LinkedIn or references and I don't network. Granted, I'm pretty good at this and interview _really_ well, but what I just described would be impossible in most other white collar-ish industries, and a total pipe dream for a HS grad.

Unicorns definitely have it easier, but eg Google hires so many people these days that they have long exhausted the supply of unicorns. Nine to five and cushy job is definitely possible in today's job market---especially if you are willing to move cities or country.

I can totally understand why people wouldn’t enjoy being a software developer and would leave it for better opportunities if they could, but they should at least be aware what an amazing privilege it is, in the world today and in the history of the world to earn a living from thinking.

All this was sort of my impression too.

I always reflect on the anniversary of my first job in tech (hitting the 5 year mark in a few days) - I still remember the days where I didn’t have enough money to eat, and I would have to ration out oatmeal for a week just to survive. I remember my days in the Marine Corps in infantry, sometimes with days where I only had 2 hours of sleep, and any mistake negatively reinforced with less sleep - I remember being the recepient of all the shit jobs and low sleep for a field op because I lost a PEQ-16 on a night op, and we ended up combing the field for it (thankfully I remembered the right information to find it, and didn’t get written up).

I gladly do menial tasks, and go above and beyond at my craft - I don’t take things for granted because I hated life where I had to depend on the kindness of friends to live.

That said, I very much enjoy what I do given that context - I get to solve problems, and make any necessary changes to help make development experience nicer. It’s not as difficult as when I was in grad school, and it pays exceedingly well. I don’t have many complaints, unless management strangles our ability to deliver/have unrealistic expectations (expecting more than 40 hours a week as a rule, not an exception - I’m happy to work more sometimes, but on my terms). I don’t have that problem with my current job, and hope to not deal with it again.

That sort of comparative thinking is the sort many managers or shareholders would love to hear. “Put up with it, it could be worse.” The next section about BMI is a better response since you’re starting to expect more and well we all should, considering the planets wealth is increasing. Sabbaticals, 4 day work weeks is what we ought to be passionate about otherwise our passion is directed into the wallets of those who can convince us how great it will be to be passionate about adding value to their product.

In short labor should ask for more, since wealthy corporations are sitting on massive piles of money.

Sorry if I sounded like an apologist for management. I am a believer in better working conditions and reduced hours and flexible time for everyone and anyone. The article struck a nerve with me as friends have been recently looking for jobs and the way they are treated has been terrible. I have done long hours in bars, worked on building sites and temped and it was not good. It makes me very aware of what my work day is like compared to say my father who has spent 35 years in a factory.

There is something I think to be said for thinking of the job as just a paycheck and forgetting about pretending to have passion. When I stopped worrying about "the company" when things were bad and doing my hours and getting out of there I was a lot less stressed about feeling unfulfilled.

I really do wish the world would change in favour of the worker and not the 1% but things like the Paradise Papers have me assuming nothing much will change anytime soon so I should at least take comfort in the fact I could have it a lot worse. That doesn't stop me from wanting better conditions for my friends in their own working lives.

I think the point the OP was making is don't fall into the trap that capital wants you to fall into. They pay you what they pay you because you are worth it, then then subtract quite a bunch of what you are worth because they employ tactics to do so. Sometimes it's as simple as offering you less and seeing if you'll balk.

Don't compare yourself with factory workers, compare your self with doctors and lawyers and you'll get a better appreciation of your negotiation position.

> Until basic income comes along I think we have to just get over it. Most jobs aren't going to provide you with fun for 8 hours a day. I feel like the older I get the more I understand that a job is a way for me to trade time for money, I don't have to (or should expect to) like it.

This is something I think is a fault of my generation (née 1985), when we started to create this fairytail narrative of participation trophies, and tech-places covered in brightly colored toys and snacks, where every developer constructed their cube from Mountain Dew and Surge cans. This is not reality, and for a while we were able to fool our minders into believing that this is just "the silicon valley way" but increasingly, those few that just 'buckle down' and work hard in a normal setting are outperforming the ones that took ridiculous valuations and then squandered them on perishables and amenities.

I think what we're witnessing here is the maturation of our industry; it's not so much the wild west anymore, and nobody is generating breakthroughs in tech every week like we were in the 90's, everyone should act accordingly. These are jobs, we do our jobs then we go home, if we like our homes and things and activities, we need to go back to our jobs. There is a balance that must not be disturbed.

These are jobs, we do our jobs then we go home, if we like our homes and things and activities, we need to go back to our jobs. There is a balance that must not be disturbed.

It would be interesting to peek ahead a few centuries and see how much they agree with this.

Luckily "a few centuries ahead" is not the setting for this article, this discussion, or the current period. I'm not sure what relevance this has, when I'm sure the 'theys' from centuries before would have quite a few things to say about the way we live today, and it would be an opinion equally irrelevant.

There's no such thing as "a balance that must not be disturbed," and such beliefs tend to lead people into an unfulfilling life.

Throughout this thread, there is an undercurrent of "Shut up and put up with it, you have it pretty good." But everything is a balance, and the balance can swing both ways.

There is huge variation between developers' paychecks. I've seen devs who can barely afford food, let alone expensive toys. And not because they're unskilled.

Also, not everyone can simply go to a job and then go home. Some are forced to do remote work for medical reasons.

There are valid reasons to speak up.

There's still a huge divide in terms of talent, the vast majority of programming jobs outside silicon valley seem to be working on legacy code that is terribly architected (think Java apps written in a procedural style, etc) whereas top companies are making full use of more modern approaches and tools. It will be a very long time things even out and programming jobs are similar across the board.

> the vast majority of programming jobs outside silicon valley seem to be working on legacy code that is terribly architected

How can you say things like this? The internet is the great equalizer of distances; it does not matter what geographic location you live in, you could be working on anything.

On a sidenote, I can't tell if you are trying to be deliberately offensive or if you're someone who's never left SV.

>How can you say things like this? The internet is the great equalizer of distances; it does not matter what geographic location you live in, you could be working on anything.

It really is not. Culture matters. If you're from a conservative place, your boss and colleagues are likely to be conservative. It'll be JEE for you until the end of time.

Generally I don't necessarily think top companies are the ones using the newer stacks, with the exclusion of a few technology companies, but it's more so the newer companies that are.

Once a company builds a system, they don't want to spend to build it again. They'll bandaid the hell out of it. As long as it's doing what it's supposed to do. They're like farmers with these old beat to hell tractors. They're ugly and bitchy but they work, why spend $100K on a new one?

> legacy code that is terribly architected (think Java apps written in a procedural style, etc)

If anything, the hallmark of legacy Java is excessive object orientation for the sake of it. FactoryFactoryFactories. By comparison, in these more enlightened times, a class method to construct an instance may occasionally be countenanced without the programmer being burnt at the stake.

To be honest, I'm not sure if this kind of thinking is conducive to getting good work done. If someone is smart, self-motivated, and so on, you can mostly count on them to work hard on important stuff given a bit of direction. The "work sucks, do your job" attitude is, in my experience, one way to get workers to check out, stop caring, and start maneuvering politically so that they can do the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired. If you add to this that the threat of firing means little to a lot of younger folks with ability and a network, since they have very few financial liabilities and can easily find another entry-level job anyway, you risk easily creating a bunch of unmanageable low-effort workers. The worst part is that managers seem to kick into "just do it" mode when things are most precarious for the organization.

This seems to be common in other industries with liquid job markets and little financial benefit to staying in one company over another, ex young people in low-end retail jobs who live at home

One nitpick: we never asked for participation trophies. It was the last generation that invented that and foisted it on it.

Neither I nor any one of my peers ever liked "everyone's a winner" day, but when you're kids in school you kinda go along with what the adults say.

The rest, I agree with you. I just think it's important to make it clear that, especially when you're young and inexperienced, you're much more susceptible to other people telling you your job is your life.

Not that it's impossible to get past that, other people feeding us that garbage, but most of us aren't that clued into the world at a young age.

You don't have to like your job, but it's perfectly reasonable to expect equitable treatment and a non-hazardous work setup.

Injuries from bad ergonomics are real. I am dealing with a pinched nerve in my neck from 10 years of this and some days can barely sit up straight.

I get that there are people starving in China. It's not an issue of wanting a perfect job. I actually used to really enjoy my work before the pain started, and it all could have been avoided. I don't blame my employers for my injury, but I do wish ergonomics had more importance in dev culture.

The number of $1000+ Herman Miller chairs and standup desks I see tells me that they pay more than lip service to ergonomics.

Your company sounds like an exception, although I'd argue that "just stand up, then" is more of a cop-out than a solution.

The author says she didn't bring it up since she was afraid it would negatively impact her career. While I can certainly understand this is a real fear that is grounded in reality, I also feel that she has a responsibility to lift the issue internally to get appropriate furniture, tools (eg ergonomic keyboard), and treatment.

You can only expect to be taken seriously for requests like that if you have been diagnosed with a medical condition. By then, you've already experienced significant pain, so the damage has been done.

Ergonomics for developers is difficult. Damage sets in so slowly that you don't really notice it until it's too late.

By the time you've been diagnosed, its possibly already too late.

I bought a Kinesis Advantage2 (and foot pedal) earlier this year and after a few months of using it, I wish I'd got one years ago. I feel much less typing strain.

>You can only expect to be taken seriously for requests like that if you have been diagnosed with a medical condition

If their default setup is bad (crappy chairs, etc), and they have the attitude you mentioned, do not work there.

For me, it would be a condition of employment to get me a proper chair and desk.

There's another side of this story as well though. The consequence of having more intellectually challenging work to solve is that by the end of the day you're brain fried. For most people the only way you're really going to get anywhere in life is by staking it out on your own at some point. If you're not earning enough money to save away a sufficient stash, that means you need to be working your day job while also starting up your own project at home. In some cases this might be impossible due to the absurd contracts some companies expect devs to sign (all your work, even on your time off, belongs to them) and even when it's possible, it's made extremely difficult by the draining nature of more interesting work. Less interesting jobs may not be as satisfying in the short run, but can leave you with more energy to pursue what you actually want to do in the long run.

For me, intellectually challenging work is invigorating. I don't feel "brain fried".

I have this problem as well. I would see people who sit in meetings and send emails do very low-effort work all day, and think they were working hard. When a former manager started cracking down on developers walking outside to cool down and think or spending any idle time, I started putting the similar amount of thought and mental effort into my job, to get 8 full hours of 'work' done without burning out. During this period, I got basically nothing that wasn't super routine done. Any minor hinge in development would take days or weeks to work through instead of a few hours. Said manager was perplexed and began complaining constantly about how the pace of development was slowing down and that milestones were being missed.

I have quite a lot of autonomy now, but most programing positions don't have much autonomy. Between scrum, code review, management and architects, there is very little that is "on you".

Seriously tons of programmers just churn through tickets written by other people all day, its 100% process, they're part of an assembly line.

if you have to work for money, it's important to find a job you enjoy doing. not find a job doing something you enjoy, that's one of the worst things you can do. in my experience, that just turns something you enjoy into another chore.

but finding a job you enjoy doing is important. i spent years as a programmer just feeling sick. programming is something i enjoy, but not a job i enjoy doing, and working that job made me miserable in all the ways you're assigning to non-tech work. now i'm a janitor and i feel like a human being again. it's less money, but it's totally worth it.

trouble is, you need to work a job to know how apt you are for it. but then, to get into most classes of work, you need to spend the money to train yourself, with help from the general public perhaps. maybe you'll get a job, maybe not; maybe it'll be good for you and you for it, maybe not. it seems like a pretty sweet deal for the job creators though-- but i'm straying off-topic.

Some people in the industry in certain countries are definitely lucky, but as an industry we don't have it good. I mean most people can't get jobs in large corporations in the US and save enough money to leave in 5-10 years.

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