After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.
The nice thing about working for someone else's company is you work 40 hours, then it leaves your mind for the rest of the time. If there's some problem at work, it's usually "not in my job description." Like, printer doesn't work? Call the Department of Inhuman Resources. Not your problem.
If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.
I'm not saying we should go back to being one problem away from death, but also solving problems that just fundamentally don't matter to us personally doesn't seem to be great either.
But working for someone else - payroll was not my department.
But a 24/7 stress of self-employment is not for the faint of heart either. What's the compromise?
Such places don't exist forever, and they don't tend to be massive growth situations. But they are probably what many people yearn for.
If only most people realized that :-)
Picture changes drastically if you have an abusive boss or a toxic work culture. There have to be a bunch of people on HN who physically cringed when they saw 40 hours, some have even talked themselves into being macho about it.
I'm one of them.
What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?
Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.
> If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.
Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.
The jobs I've held for the entirety of my so-far 8 year career, where I can count on my hands the number of times I've worked more than 40 hours in a week.
> Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.
The fact that I've done that, many times, and not gotten fired. If you are skilled and a good performer, you have a lot of leverage, doubly so in the current job market.
> Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.
What happens when a client decides not to pay you? What happens when you can't find enough work to make whatever amount you want to make? How do you establish a reliable client base that won't saddle you with those first 2 problems in the first place? That's just the tip of the iceberg of problems you'll have to deal with on your own if you go the freelance route, which a salaried job will abstract away from you. Not everyone wants to deal with those issues; I certainly don't.
Rush hour times makes it pretty obvious. Another thing is I've worked as both employer and employee. People leave after 8 hours.
> You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact.
Your 40 hour employee contract says 40 hours, literally. Why are you able to stand up for yourself as a contractor (who can be shown the door any second) but not as an employee?
> in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot
Only if they are looking for an excuse to get rid of you anyway. And contractors are easy to fire on the spot, there are no legal restrictions on that.
Also, if you're a contractor, you spend a lot of time looking for contracts. 24/7.
Psh, what preceded that was far worse and also involved a lifetime of laboring for someone else's benefit.
The yeoman artisan period has always been more myth than reality.
My take on this is that there's some part of our minds that knows we don't have to be servants to our companies. And knowing that, yet subjugating ourselves anyway creates an itch. That itch grows a little every day we wake up to an alarm and haul ourselves into the office for useless meetings. We know deep down this isn't an acceptable road for our lives. But we're here anyway, with a story that somehow justifies closing jira tickets - day in, day out.
Coincidentally, depression is an evolved mechanism for stopping you from doing something that you know deep down is unhealthy for your soul but habitual. It works by every day making it harder to do the thing you know you shouldn't do. The longer you resist it, the deeper depression burrows, until you finally can't bring yourself to make pleasantries with your spouse - or, in this case, haul yourself into the office.
For my money, burnout is a depression symptom which grows out of a long term, habitual suppression of your will. "I want X, but I can't have it because of <habitual rationalisation>". After growing up being told we can do anything, we aren't adapted for existence as a few pixels in a giant org chart. Burnout is a healthy backstop to force you to pursue the life you need, even if each day you can convince yourself you don't want it.
I was only responding to the implicit claim of the grand parent.
FWIW, I think "that's how it always has been" has no impact on the morality of something, so I am inclined to agree with you.
But we don't need to paint a rosy picture of a lost past to critique the status quo.
“…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…
…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.” ― Wilhelm von Humboldt
Mid- and post-industrial revolution Europe had many large companies with many employees. In fact, the British East India Company (founded in the year 1600) was the first company to sell shares of ownership to raise enough capital to buy/build the necessary supplies to do large-scale business (in their case, mostly ship construction).
Of course, modern labor laws were created in response to the horrible human rights abuses committed by business owners against their employees beginning at that time.
The opposition of "big capital" vs "labor" (and hence the philosophy built on that dichotomy that underpins Marxism) didn't really exist prior to these large industrial revolution companies.
Prior to that, small businesses (and banks/lenders) were the bread and butter of economic society.
Luckily Marxism hasn't really been taken seriously by economists since it couldn't resolve it's main tenant (labour theory of value) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_problem
You weren’t beholden to someone else’s corporation, but you were to someone else’s land or tribe/community.