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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

As a retired programmer, the main part of my career was last century so if I could communicate this situation with my 20th century self he would be horrified by (among other things):

1) The lack of privacy

2) Being location tracked

3) The expectation that one should be available for work communications 24/7 for no extra pay

I'm sure he would say something like "Wow, it's too bad America is no longer a free country. We programmers are building the systems that enslave us. We're building our own cages, without asking if we should. In the future out employers will prioritize themselves over our families, partners, children and mental health. What do your kids have to say about this?"

We all dismissed the idea of unions because we were highly paid salaried professionals that employers bent over backwards for, but come to find out, unions are more than about money.

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Science has stolen everyone's privacy.

Militaries never stop developing new weapons or upgrading existing one's, they test them on unsuspecting members of the public.

Suicide is psychological murder.

First, this is what America being a free country means. It means you have the absolute right and freedom to build your own cage if you choose to.

Second, although building on that idea, as a tech worker you have choice. You can choose to work somewhere that requires this kind of connectedness and monitoring, or you can choose not to. There are very highly paid engineers with no access to their email except on a laptop and during work hours. Ask around, ask this question during interviews.

Freedom means responsibility. If you want to make more choices you are agreeing to live with those choices consequences. We're learning very quickly that a ton of people are not ok with that deal.

If there's a competitive advantage to not allowing your employees much freedom, then it may be impossible to find alternatives that actually survive and thrive. A race to the bottom in everything but profit. I don't think just using the word 'freedom' here is terribly compelling for that reason if the market is converging on hostile-to-worker practices.

That particular strawman is looking pretty flimsy given the ample evidence that some companies (the ones I was referring to that have strong work/life balance) see a competitive advantage in providing freedom to their employees.

Work/life balance makes people happy, which makes them do more work in less time with fewer errors. Everyone is aligned incentive-wise here, as long as management bothers to continue to learn.

Not everything is a 'strawman' just because it doesn't agree with your experience. There is indeed an if in the start of my comment and it seems pretty remarkable to just leave it to chance and hope it all works out positively. It'll suck remarkably badly if it doesn't.

IF being rhe keyword. If programmers as a whole do not tolerate such conditions, or if they are less productive, it won't be inescapable.

I'm not aware of mass resignations altering the trajectory of an industry outside of organised collective action. Are there any examples?

Yes

https://gizmodo.com/apple-return-to-work-policy-alphabet-mac...

> First, this is what America being a free country means. It means you have the absolute right and freedom to build your own cage if you choose to.

It also means we have the freedom to demand better treatment from our employers. I've never understood this attitude that we don't have a say in our workplaces and must always resort to leaving if we can't get what we want, even though companies bend over backwards trying to convince us that we do.

Clearly communicating to the business what our expectations are is important to getting what we want. We're seeing this play out in real-time during the pandemic.

Good, we agree, America is a free country where people have choices which impact the direction of their lives and of society.

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