I get satisfaction from other people benefiting from my work. Why would I want to perform work that benefits no one or only myself? Seems selfish.
I assume you meant to imply that I'm being taken advantage of in some way by my employer but that is not the case. I enjoy managing computers and programming. I don't enjoy running a business, selling things to people, dealing with insurance companies directly, or many of the other things that I don't have to do because my employer does them.
Often times there are other people that enjoy those activities doing them. It's a symbiotic relationship, or at least it should be in an ideal world. It's possible for everyone to benefit even if some people benefit more financially than others.
The point is, you can have both.
I think broader realizations of this have led to the industry-wide investment in UX research in the past decade. Though I will acknowledge my own bias here in no longer being a software developer and now more of a UX researcher.
Like other commenters have said, you need a balance. A workplace where everyone does not understand what the customer wants is crazy. A workplace where (almost) everyone does not understand any technical details of how to build what the customer wants is also crazy.
Basically, you need enough people with enough domain knowledge to avoid this situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
If one does not know the first thing about software development I don't want to work with that person. Because if I do, then I will have to do two jobs for one pay and a lot of free stress.
Are You work in SpaceX?
A former colleague of mine hated that half our job was defense work. He managed to stay off those projects, but was never happy because he was always one day away from being assigned to them. He didn't hate the military, but had no desire to be involved in it. He got a job making systems that saved lives instead (infants, at that). Maybe someone else was still getting outsized profit off his labor, but the work he was (is?) doing had more value to him than his prior work.
No I don't feel like a pawn. I feel like I have been given a tremendous inheritance and now it's my turn to contribute. If anything I look at what those before me created and am disappointed that I'm not their equal.
I'd think about people who didn't go to college to study CS, who end up working in a factory or a grocery store. I wonder if they feel like pawns... Engineers are totally fine ;)
Now, in 2018, do engineers get treated like resources? Of course but that's another problem. Expensive resources still.
(not trying to go anywhere with this, just loud thinking)
Employers don't like hiring and interviewing any more than employees do.
In the typical case, the incentives and power to do anything about them are misaligned. For example, a peer's time will be consumed in interviewing a replacement, but that peer never had any power to raise the salary of the incumbent.
Typically, the decision to convert to contracting is between the worker and management, excluding the worker's peers and the company's owners (unless manager-owned).
That being said, if the balance isn't there, and you don't feel you are compensated fairly for your work and the non-ideal parts of the job, then it is time to talk to your boss and work it out. Either change the situation to match your ideals, change the compensation to make it worth it, or leave.
But that decision -- to stay, fight for change, or go -- is completely up to you.
The deeper question I've been trying to work out is how do we better spread out risk, control of the business, and the value created by our work?
Depends on how you look at this. Others are benefitting but you are also benefitting by making money and having a job, no ?
If you mean that engineers should work for themselves, they have to then decide to take more risk. All options are on the table but everything comes with a cost.
So no, I don't feel like a Pawn even though I totally get where you are coming from. If you don't like something about your life, only YOU can change it.
In the past, those who work organized around these issues, discussed them and had a common philosophy and so forth.
Those benefiting from your labor broke up or supplanted these organizations and now have control of the discourse. Many workers feel as you do, but the ones who benefit from exploiting you have been fairly successful from isolating you from the many who feel as you do.
I would suggest reading about the subject, then seeking out and dipping your toe in local organizations which deal with such things.
If I was feeling that way and was having trouble dealing with it, I'd probably try figure out some other way to earn a living.
This often leads to even more interesting & complex problems, and the market provides a decent feedback loop about what is and isn't valued.
If you don't like complicated problems as an engineer, you may be in the wrong role. If you'd rather deal with people, you could look into becoming a sales engineer. If you want more say in the product and direction of the business, you could consider joining a smaller company where your voice will likely have more weight.
The retirees, million and billionaires etc are the ones who don't have to do either, but some do to keep busy. Nothing worse than an idle mind.
So as a maker you can do hard physical work, or do hard mental work.
The way to "deal" with it is to understand what employment is. Employment is the exchange of your time for money. Think of your body as an asset: like a house you rent out, or like renting out your car on Turo. Only, you're renting out your body and mind for 8 hours a day. Inexchange, you get a paycheck. What you choose to do with the rest of your life is up to you. Out of those 168 weekly hours, you still have 128 hours left to do whatever you like with. Historically speaking, that's not a bad deal.
I might have felt a tinge of that until I tried being an entrepreneur myself. Risk is a real thing.
Engineers get hammered on equity by Founders, who get hammered by Venture Capitalists, who hand over most of their profits to Institutional funds. It's a food chain thing, but I don't think it's worth getting that upset about.
But then again, Institutional Funds put billions at risk to into Venture Capital funds who put millions at risk to founders who take on more risk, and a boat loat more stress and hassle (usually) than their employees.
Software salespeople need to bring in 4-5x of what they cost. Lawyers and consultants are often tasked with bringing in 3-4x their cost. Why should engineers be any different?
My granddad told me a story a few years ago about a guy who was a fantastically successful oil trader. A buy the whole tanker oil trader kinda guy. One of the reasons he'd been so successful was that he always tried to leave a bit of margin there for other people.
I work as a recruiter. I know exactly how much money I've made my company and how much I've personally been paid. I could make more by starting out on my own. But I'd also take on a lot of hassle that I don't really want to bother with at this point in my life. As long as it remains a fairly reasonable trade, I'll be fine with it.
Be careful what you wish for. Risk is important, and if the "fruit" is zero, that's undesirable, too. We're seeing this in a microcosm of the "gig economy" with Uber pushing risk (and other externalities) onto drivers.
I believe that was part of the parent's point about running a business and "hassle". I think it's debatable whether that necessarily costs the vast majority of labor's output, as the parent contends, but I doubt it can cost zero, as you contend.
I'm ignoring capital (tools or even borrowing money) on purpose, in order to avoid the communism tangent.
I'm not making the argument, but I suspect the argument is along the lines that (certain) engineers are actually creating the wealth, while the other professions you mention are some form of overhead, merely moving the wealth around (if you'll pardon the oversimplification/potential-strawman).
Although I see the merit to arguments of that form, as someone in what is a service profession (IT/Ops, which is even traditionally "overhead" or "cost center"), I'm acutely aware of the value (i.e. wealth) that services provide.
That said, I don't think a generalization like "all the professions are the same" (and fractionial-value compensation being fair is merely a matter of degree) is any more valid than engineering exceptionalism. Witness the popularity of terms like "rent seeking" and (earlier) "disintermediation".
> I know exactly how much money I've made my company
> As long as it remains a fairly reasonable trade, I'll be fine with it.
This is probably the crux of the issue. Anyone in a non-sales/transactional role doesn't have this information, which makes it exceedingly difficult even to begin to decide if it's a fairly resonable trade.
Besides the information assymetry (not that the company actually knows how much a particular engineer "makes" them), some of the sentiment among engineers may be due to the notion that, for them, the multiple is much larger than the 3-5x that you quoted above. Would any non-service engineers care to comment on what you think your multiple is?
Where I get worried with these sort of questions is they mess up incentive structures and get really difficult so quickly! If we say some engineers (or perhaps more accurately, some engineering) creates the wealth, then do we say other types of engineering doesn't create the wealth? Is integrating a customer creating wealth (possibly?), how about developing a feature that no-one uses (hmm). What about engineering that destroys value / wealth?
I like sales because I have great information asymmetry, but it does come at its costs. I don't like doing things that aren't revenue generating, especially if they seem like moonshots. It makes you short term minded (to a degree), and focused on the dollars involved. Not that these are bad things, but they do limit the way you think about problems.
I think one thing we need to remember is that engineers* have pretty amazing job security. And that's the crux of my point. Should Facebooks engineers have been better compensated for the machine they've built? Possibly. Should they also be on the hook for the havoc they've created? I'd say yes if they're capturing a lot more value (just like Facebooks executives should very much be on the hook).
*in my experience knowing engineers, I have never been one
Yes, at least according to my strawman. Perhaps a better differentiator is creator/maker rather than "engineer", since it can be (and has been) argued that farmers and assembly workers are creating wealth with their labor, too.
> then do we say other types of engineering doesn't create the wealth? Is integrating a customer creating wealth (possibly?)
I think this is, essentially, the question of if a service can be wealth creation. I think it's pretty clear that it possibly can, but it's not clear that it always does/must.
As such, it's much harder to tell with a service if wealth/value is being created or just transferred, without careful examination, unlike with making something tangible (or at least visible, like computer code).
> how about developing a feature that no-one uses (hmm). What about engineering that destroys value / wealth?
I think you're talking about risk, which I mention in a different comment downthread.
Fortunately, I don't think there are, in general, engineers/markers/creators who make zero or negative value exclusively (especially across their entire careers), and, more often than not, even if that happens within a single company, they didn't have the choice/control over the value. This last part is, perhaps, most relevant to the OP's original question.
> I think one thing we need to remember is that engineers* have pretty amazing job security. And that's the crux of my point.
I don't think that's true, though, and replaceability has been brought up elsewhere in the thread. As such, I fear I'm missing your point.
But I do get paid well so I have nothing to complain about.