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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, I worked for a company in Kansas City where upper management genuinely had trouble with the idea that engineers were humans with lives outside the office. I was walking through their section of the office one day, and overheard the President of the company asking in tones of complete bewilderment why engineers were not voluntarily working twelve-hour days.

Suffice to say that his confusion was reflected in how engineers were treated.

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Had the same experience in the midwest early in my career. Underpaid, overworked, our boss expected us to work weekends without any extra pay because we "all needed to pitch in". Corporate culture in the midwest is horrifically outdated.

Yep, an obsession with (the appearance of) "hard work" and "frugality" combined with hardcore nepotism is the Midwestern way.

oh boy, nepotism is rampant. It might as well be a written rule, if your father works as a director, you can expect his kid gets to run a department for 6 figures a year

Honestly, I think this is less about the Midwest and more about purposely siting a company in a town with relatively low labor costs and few other options.

At the time, there were few other choices for technology work in Kansas City.

There was a time when that sort of made sense. When companies didn't lay people off during hard times, carried pensions that were risky for the company, etc. It seems like some didn't understand that loyalty goes both ways...pull one side and the other goes with it.

That was back in the day you trained and educated employees (to save money and built loyality). Back when they offered a living wage a single person could raise a family with.

What happened? Free trade.

Cheap goods from other countries gutted the local industries. Hard to compete on price when labour costs are so different. The only jobs remaining become min wage or importing.

People not working as hard as a generation ago doesn't factor in.

It's important to remember that free trade is not the ultimate cause. Greed among the wealthy elite is. What happened is that rich business owners deliberately pushed for free trade laws as a way to circumvent the laws the labor movement got passed to protect people.

They sold out American workers to increase their profit margins.

said in maybe a slightly different way:

"free trade" allows for the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labor which is stuck relatively immobile (except maybe from "cheaper" countries to the more "expensive" ones)

Honest question: How do you know what you are saying about how companies used to be was ever true?

Hah- any chance this was at a large EMR vendor? ;)

Nope!

Really, no reason to protect the guilty here. It was AdKnowledge.

Maybe the experience is regional then, just a shot in the dark.

I understand!

It's definitely a popular line of thought. Though having worked in multiple areas of the US, I don't think it is. You won't need to look hard in SF, NYC, or London to find corporate leadership that doesn't really consider engineers to be humans like them.

Is it possible people are looking for patterns in noise?

Personally, I find the purported cultural commentary of others on offer here to be an uncomfortable echo of the cultural snobbery one hears daily offered by Californians to the "flyover states".

You may be on to something; I will say I have enjoyed the cultural aspects of my west coast jobs very much more so than my east coast and Midwest jobs, but that is not probably some form of bias.

Reminds me of the Cerner/Patterson email: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...

(Cerner is in the KC area.)

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