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The biggest negative change that I've seen since the 90s has been the adoption of agile methodologies.

We used to have decent cadence in releasing software - maybe every couple of months, or even six. Now, everyday seems like a fire drill or a race to nowhere in particular. Managers generally seem to have lost the ability to plan or predict out over periods longer than a month. I thought this was just my bad luck, but after talking with others, I realize this is commonplace.

And, everyone on the team could at least partially explain most things in the system. Now, I run into so much copy-paste code. When I ask the programmer about what it does, they say "Not sure. I found it online."

And, there was a time when the programmers used to be the ones with offices with doors, if you can believe that.

There was also a short period of time (around when programmer salaries went to 6-figures) when programmers used to make more than their managers. Then, managers scoffed. To account for the rise in salaries, managers gave themselves bigger raises and decided to not hire as many senior programmers, because they're too expensive (or too old).

Yeah, similar here. Twenty years ago, when I was freshly out of university, I had my office with a door I could close, and a window I could open. I was given a task (one task, not multiple tasks to do in parallel) and was left alone to do it. I asked what needs to be done, then I did it. I was treated like a competent adult.

These days (before COVID-19, because that made things a bit unusual) the industry standard is open spaces without fresh air. Daily meetings in the morning, and then optionally more meetings during the day. Doing a few things in parallel, almost every week is a deadline for something, no time to refactor or learn new things. Free coffee.

Agile gives management the illusion of insight into what the developer does without having to look into the code or understanding the technicalities. Talking about features and problems with your boss is so much more appropriate compared to processing Jira tickets at constant full speed grind without after-thought or planning.

Benefits have indeed gotten worse on average in my experience, and here are two hard examples. Leave and healthcare.

Leave: It used to be that most companies had a formula for accruing leave, and that vacation and sick were separate buckets and you could accumulate quite a bit. You earn X hours of vacation and Y hours of sick leave per 40 hours worked. This was nice because it was an asset that belonged to the employee and had to be paid out upon separation. Most companies also paid out unused leave over the rollover amount at each year end, and working overtime meant more leave would accrue. Now most companies put everything in the same bucket, give you 30 days, and it's "use it or lose it." This amounts to financial engineering on the company's part, as it makes their balance sheet look better by not carrying all those liabilities, and they generally twist it to make it seem better for the employee.

Health insurance: this just adds to the cacophony of voices lamenting the state of health care in the US today. When I first entered the workforce in 2002 health insurance provided way better benefits, more doctors took the typical insurance plans provided, you didn't have to fight the insurance company, file pre-authorization paperwork, etc. Now every time I get a medical procedure it's a battle waged via paperwork.

> 30 days

Where can I find a job with 30 days of leave? A lot of places seem to think 15 days is beyond generous because they treat all PTO as vacation time and ignore that sick time used to exist. Meanwhile, my health issues make it extremely difficult to bank any amount of PTO.

Unfortunately it’s not helpful to your situation, but these issues are handled much better in many countries. For example, in Netherlands there are statutory holidays (20 or so?) then many companies give additional days on top of that. 28+ isn’t uncommon.

Being absent due to illness has no bearing on holidays either…even if you’re sick in one of your holidays it doesn’t count against your holiday time. There’s no concept of a fixed number of sick days.

or even worse: "infinite PTO" aka you never take time off because you are scared of overusing the perk.

Untracked time off is a double-edged sword for sure. I just make sure to take more time off than I would have gotten at my last job, and I tell my employees to do the same.

There need to be cultural norms set from the top around its use for sure. Though I'm not sure, in general, it's worse than pooled vacation/sick time.

I would hope that coming out of the pandemic there would be some rethink of a system that basically provides a strong incentive to come into the office sick. (OTOH, there may be more flexibility in terms of WFH so that may do the job at least partway on its own.)

And the trick behind that is when you leave a company, they have to normally pay for unused PTO.... Unless the PTO is "unlimited" aka not accruing.

And much research done academically and in business magazines shows that people use LESS PTO when it's "unlimited".

Tl;Dr. It's another scam companies use to bilk workers.

fairly standard in Germany. And sick leave unlimited (doctor's note required).

the 30 includes federal holidays so it works out to about 20 in practice.

Over here, yes, it has gotten worse since 2001 -- asian shops press much harder now, cheap remote labor really easily available ... competition vent through the roof. Longer hours, guilt feels stronger, sloppier work, inter-team communication destroyed (all-email in some language foreign to everyone), and -- still more lost deals.

This is for everyone, workers and management.

True, people maybe feel more entitled. But I think we also are getting introduced to a phenomenon new since 2001 -- having a solid "living wage" (which Trubune says noting else replaces), but burning out repeatedly, hating the job but being unable to quit, as providing for family takes more now than it used to in 2001, too.

Yeah, but how much of that is your current employer fault? Let's take housing costs. Absolutely insane in California, Canada and some other places. Education/student loans - modern day slavery for many. Healthcare costs - seem to grow much faster than inflation or wage increase. The end result - destruction of the middle class as we know it. Or 'shrinking middle class' to put it less dramatically. So, I take it you live in Canada and this is the type of experience you describe. Is there a list of Canadian corporations that are to blame for this? Or is this more of a government fault? Or is this the problem that's not limited to Canada but is a general trend for most western countries because the neoliberal economic model is broken and it's silly to pretend that it's not? Personally, I am hesitant to blame some specific corporation for general economic misery.

It's your company's fault because their leadership (you know, the one percent) got on the neoliberal, supply-side, tax cutting, privatization train ahead of the rest of the population and then worked like hell to condition everyone below them to believe it was going to be all unicorns and rainbows. Now that the experiment is failing (as evidenced by a renewed interest in Keynes -- at least for the FIRE sector), they're all going around saying, "Not me! Work-life balance! Inclusion! Human capital!" Except that they've spent four decades wasting and destroying the value of that human capital the way they did the rainforests, coral reefs, rivers and lakes, and the climate. Just dealing with all the piles of spent nuclear fuel is going to be a massively expensive, ten millenia project, but these people can't reliably plan out further than a few quarters.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am far from blaming employer on that. Or anyone for that matter (not Canadian, Europe, our govt does what they can ... you cannot break bones to national business culture in one-election-term timeframe).

It is just that it feels hopeless either way: companies who strip it down bare to what the employed work really is -- a wolf-pack hunting together -- don't feel that great, and the opposite, pretending that we all are in the middle of a nice cozy great-place-to-work -- gets down on nerves after some point too.

The only solution, switch jobs regularly by all means. Play the national lottery.

>If you are miserable in your current workplace, the only real change you can make is moving to job that brings you joy.

I have no doubt some people manage to find this, but at this point I want a job that pays well and is tolerable, I've done the fun job for less money enough to know I'm terrible at predicting what's going to be "fun" to work on.

If I'm paid more I need to sell less of my time and get to find things that are enjoyable without my livelihood being tied up with it.

Work is work, not personal entertainment. Once one learns to accepts that, they will be in a much, much better path to life satisfaction.

Definitely look for a job with high pay, good benefits, lots of time off, etc., etc., But it's extremely unlikely you're going to find one that actually brings you joy - so learn to live with that.

Agile, lean - the idea of moving faster because you're always sprinting, always doing things just in time - has taken a lot of slack out of systems.

Something has to give when you need to making up time, when there's no slack. That's where the wellbeing deficit comes from.

Maybe entitled is the word but I think people just want to be miserable in peace, rather than having clown shows to remind them that they are indeed miserable.

Yeah, working conditions have become much worse. I am not sure if there is data to prove this, but my gut feeling is that employees are more productive and their compensation has not kept up to the increased productivity.

Alternatively, I would really love to keep the same pay levels, but reduced working hours, to account for increased productivity.

> I am not sure if there is data to prove this, but my gut feeling is that employees are more productive and their compensation has not kept up to the increased productivity.

You are not wrong, from the BLS:

"For several decades beginning in the 1940s, productivity had risen in tandem with employees’ compensation. However, since the 1970s, productivity and compensation have steadily diverged." [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/understanding-the-labo...

Is compensation really meant to derive from productivity? In practice, your compensation is a factor of how difficult it is to find someone else to do your job.

Yep. If compensation was a function of productivity, farmers would be the richest people in the world, because their productivity is something like 50-100 times than it was pre-mechanization and pre-green revolution.

You're not wrong about farmers, but it's in a tons of different professions. I mean, think how much more productive software devs are right now than the age of punch cards.

It was probably some efficiency involved in having computer clerks running mainframes for calculations and card deck (database) processing.

Nowadays people are supposed to do their own Excel sheets and use complex internal systems, instead of letting specialists do it.

So devs are way more efficient but are too fine dining to do every day Excel.

Measuring productivity is unintuitive because it's not linear.

Sure, if there were no farmers, there'd be no food.

But if there were no mechanization, the current number of farmers would be wildly insufficient.

We're adding 1 + 1 and getting 102, and the tricky part is dividing the extra 100 points amongst everyone.

> We're adding 1 + 1 and getting 102, and the tricky part is dividing the extra 100 points amongst everyone.

If Georgism is right, in long term the extra 100 points go to those who own the land, via rent.

Not just the rent you pay directly for the place where you live, but also indirectly whenever you buy someone's product or services, because that other person also had to include their rent in the cost of their product or service. Thus when the rents increase, everything gets more expensive, and ironically that makes it more difficult to notice that most of that money ultimately goes towards paying someone's rent.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

> Your average corporation is a soulless greedy machine, constructed purely for extracting money. Trying to put a lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig.

I think average working conditions did get worse over the past few decades, primarily because so many more jobs are working for such companies. Consider how many more grocery store jobs are working for a huge supermarket chain vs owning your own small store in 2021 vs 50 years ago.

Owning your small store is extremely stressful, and arguably provides worse working conditions (on average) than the equivalent middle-management job in a supermarket chain. However, it might well be perceived as more satisfying by the worker, because s/he is less alienated from business outcomes and more autonomous in long-term choices. In this, the article probably has a point (although coops are not a panacea - if you don’t enjoy the political process, you might even find them more annoying than a traditional structure).

Having worked for a midsize customer owned cooperative with a large engineering shop, I think there is something to be said about the structure. Our board was our customers, who cared about continued support and customer service rather than quarterly earnings. Things did go downhill correlated with a new CEO, but it was a great culture to work in for a while.

> Did working conditions really got much worse over the past 20 years?

In terms of salary and purchasing power in Western countries, yes I think so.

I think developer salaries outpaced inflation by a decent margin.

And housing costs have outpaced salary growth by a similar margin.

In SV, sure, but I don't think that holds true in other parts of the world, even in major cities like London.

So I just did a quick google on London and I don't know if I'm missing something but it seems like senior software developer salary is less than the avarage salary (senior developer 77,500, avarage is 86,400). On glass door I see 50-70k GBP for senior developers.

This sounds horrible, but I have a feeling London/Wester Europe is unique in this regard, I can make that kind of money remoting from Croatia.

I think your average salary figure is wrong

Speaking as a survivor of the EA Spouse era, the last 20 years have been holding the status quo of abuse established by EA during the 90's. Their horrible form of 24/7 crunch time management has simply spread throughout the rest of the corporate world, but not as extreme as they drove it.