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Comment by bsvalley | Hacker News Reader

Unless you're doing this for free, it's a pretty lucrative way to make money. Isn't it? I think we do benefit from it too.

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.

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that's my point, in theory we do some quite complex stuff so why are we ok with being resources? we do have the opportunity to realize this and make a change, factory workers might not..

(not trying to go anywhere with this, just loud thinking)

as long as we are replaceable we can't change anything. I think all engineers are replaceable so business owners have very little motivation to keep us happy and pay us more.

Business owners have a big incentive to keep you: They don't want you to leave. Hiring a replacement is time consuming and expensive.

Employers don't like hiring and interviewing any more than employees do.

These assertions may be true if the business is sole-proprietor owner-operator, but, beyond that, the assymetry grows quite a bit, including what I posit is a huge step function when the executives are no longer majority owners (or even are just not involved in hiring/firing).

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.

In practice, you can sometimes switch to contracting for the same company (vs being an employee). The limits for contracting rates are usually much higher than limits for salaries, so there's plenty of room for a raise. I don't know if it's legal in the US, but I've seen it happen in Europe (Poland, Sweden).

AFAIK, it's legal in the US, too, but I'm not sure what point you're making in the context of the sub-thread.

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).

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