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Please note the topic is "Class _Warfare_ for the Software Engineer" and NOT "Fulfilling Your Expected Role as a Software Engineer"

This is the author's opinion of how Software's Labor can "fight back"

If you're not in an adversarial relationship with your employer then this advice will not be particularly useful/advantageous.

The author seems to be making statements about what the job is.

Are you saying we shouldn't take those literally, but as what the new (bad faith) thinking about the job should be?

Seems these people are in an adversarial relationship with doing actual work. They advocate for doing noting beyond the absolute minimum you are directly instructed to do.

So essentially taking out all independence from work and making it a dull box checking job.

So kind of like outsource workers but one might argue this has a social guided justification.

Sounds eerily similar to how companies generally operate, by paying the absolute minimum to get the job they want done. Interesting how people don't seem to like when labor takes the same aproach.

I don't have to defend any company out there, but that's not how in my 20+ years experience, i think it works. You do your work well, you show professionalism, does your manager think that you are important for the team? You are well paid. Are you just doing the regular stuff, not being active on meetings, not actually helping anyone, or doing anything other than what you think that "your job is": Then you are going to get just a regular salary. You do more, you get more. If you don't get more, you find a job where you get more. This weak man game like "oh i'm not going enough money, so i will stay here and do nothing", doesn't make sense in a market like ours with skill shortage. Worse developers are the spoiled one, that think that the whole world conspire against them.

Found that part odd as well. I think this would be the first labor movement I ever heard about that argues for less solidarity with your fellow workers.

Protip: Organising collective action will become impossible if everyone hates each other and keeps information from each other for fear of their own job security. That will help capital in the end.

Your comment helped me put words to my feelings about this article, thank you.

I think it's worth highlighting that the author explicitly treats the idea of forming/joining a union with sarcasm:

> Oh, yeah, we should also have a union. Sure. Let’s get on that one of these days.

It seems like a how-to guide for how you as an individual can push the value of your labor down to match the price that capital wants to pay for it, rather than trying to find a way to gain some leverage over capital in order to raise the price of your labor to reflect the value you currently provide. (Leverage like, say, collective action.)

> Once the company reaches the bottom, and capital starts suffering from the damage it is inflicting on the company, it will turn around.

Well, good luck surviving the extra rounds of layoffs between now and then if you're the one who stands out as not working well with others, I guess.

> No, I think most of these are usually part of the job of a software engineer, and it's part of developing solutions that work, rather than just gaming individual metrics.

If you speak to people who work in trading or finance, they do none of those things. They view each other as conpetitors and don't help each other. They aim to outgame and outdo each-other.

The culture in software is very different to most other industries. But if you look at other fields of engineering, you don't see people stepping outside their roles as much.

Engineering teams are necessarily about collaboration towards a shared goal.

I don't know in what aspects of trading or finance that collaboration is necessary (rather than applied game theory towards each other).

Trading and finance are interesting examples, because those are two places where a lot of money-driven students would go, before tech jobs because easy money (rather than something nerds did for the love of it).

Rather than "Greed is Good" Wall Street thinking taking over, we should say "Fine, we admit it, tech pays good money right now, but we do our best work by working as a team, and that's how we're going to do it."

Then we follow through by making the messaging consistent in offers, raises, bonuses, performance evaluations, promotions, project management, metrics, etc.

people who work in trading or finance would never write open source code. Why should we compare our profession with them?

Who should we compare outselves to? Can't be doctors - they risk deadly infection to save a life.

Lets not get carried away thinking we are specially noble.

> Lets not get carried away thinking we are specially noble.

The guy in Nebraska maintaining one of key dependencies of your project thanklessly disagrees[1].

Well, we build stuff. we praise the knowledge. We were called geeks, hackers, etc. I can just compare software engineering with science like math, * engineering, physics.

Finance market as put by the other contributor, is just what we are not, and why Linux exists, why FOSS exists, why internet exists and services like github, trello, gmail exists (even though you want to scream at me, they are there for profit, they were all created with one goal in common: Collaborate openly with others). Egoist finance sharks aren't example of success, virtue and happy life, no matter what.

[1] https://xkcd.com/2347/

What is the conclusion we should reach then -> engineers are unnecessarily noble and should not allow themselves to be exploited?

> What is the conclusion we should reach then -> engineers are unnecessarily noble and should not allow themselves to be exploited?

That's not the conclusion, unless you think that Class Warfare plays a role anywhere. I don't.

>> Engineering culture encourages workers to collectively improve the company’s effectiveness. It encourages them to share knowledge with one another. To train each other. To build tools for one another. To bring new workers up to speed, and review each other’s work. To speed the company up. To seek out weaknesses in the company and fix them. / Engineers do this while they’re doing their actual job, the one the company thinks it’s paying them for: tending the machine that makes money.

Isn't it why any serious engineering job will have stocks as part of the comp package? That's pretty much the whole point: if the company does better, your stock does better...

The company does better when they pay you less.

That depends. If they lose you to a competitor that pays more, then the company loses.

It's that old Supply & Demand thing again.

Well if everyone decides to pay less, like it’s being argued here, then there is no supply demand, that’s just the cost of your labor.

> if everyone decides to pay less

That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with cartels is the members cheat on them under the table. They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using the law to punish members who cheat).

I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth shut. Deal!

> They're unstable, unless maintained by force

What is the basis for this assertion? Is this why OPEC exists?

Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay

If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.

And this wage suppression was direct collusion, corporations have such an oligopoly now they hardly need to explicitly collude, both on wages or prices.

A company raises the price for something, and it's called 'price leadership', other companies recognize it is in their interest to follow suit and prices go up. The same dynamic exists for wages. Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.

We've seen across the board price increases recently, but it was inflation, not collusion.

How do you explain price decreases?

> Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.

And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?

Inflation is just tge cover story.

2021 was the most profitable year for big corporations since 1950, with pre-tax profits rising to $2.5 trillion and after-tax profits surging 35%, enabling the 1% to finally overtake the middle class in share of overall wealth.

53% of price increases went straight to profit.

They've got you right where they want you.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2022/05/10/how-w...

> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?

?? City traders can make millions, they actually get a cut of profits they generate.

I'm not sure what you think inflation is, but it is just the prices of certain key items going up: food, housing, transportation are the main ones.

Corporations decide to set their prices higher, and you have a price inflation. We know that this is not merely a function of their inputs going up because many companies have been pulling in record profits during this time period. Nobody needs to meet in a smoke filled room for this to happen.

> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?

You're being distracted with a nickel while your pockets are being emptied. It's all relative. Look at the cash big tech firms have in the bank. Google used 60B dollars to inflate their stock price this year with stock buybacks at the same time they laid of 6% of their workforce.

> Is this why OPEC exists?

OPEC has had a constant problem with cheaters selling oil under the table.

> Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay

Yes, it was a cartel, and the companies were cheating on it. Remember when Jobs complained to Google that Google was cheating on it? There was nothing holding that cartel together.

> If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.

Cartels have never managed to do that, unless they were (ironically) enforced by law.

> Yes, it was a cartel, and the companies were cheating on it.

The american police often breaks the law themselves and kills people.

Does it mean we should get rid of police, they don't work just like cartels don't work?

Anyone reasonable agrees murder rate would be higher if there were no police at all.

A cartel does not need to be perfect to achieve wage supression.

> They're unstable, unless maintained by force

You should look up work of Steve Keen in the theory of the firm. It's actually the other way around, the oligopoly pricing is stable, while pricing that sets marginal cost to marginal revenue is unstable.

Eventually the risk/reward to trying to make it with your side project gets in favor of taking the risk.

BlackBerry figured it out the hard way; Apple and Google won the talent war. The rest is history.

Sure it’s part of the description. But it is also free labor when you’re automatically expected to do the work of two people for the price of one. Or when you’re expected to do more for less pay.

Like the “job description” is often pretty vague which makes wage theft easy. If you’re working 996 without extra pay or less pay because everything that your “job description” has cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour work week, then it is by all means, free labor.

If you're getting paid to work on something, it's not 'free labor', unless you're unable to leave. By behaving as if you've agreed to this undocumented arrangement, you've formed a 'constructive contract'.

No matter how you sugarcoat it, the extra hours you make people work for no extra increase in wages, is free labor.

Just because you’re getting paid doesn’t mean the company doesn’t get free labor. The company paid for the regular hours and the rest was free labor.

What if you get a pay bump for no increase in hours? Is that free money?

its an interesting question, but im not sure what it has to do with the comment your replying to?

they are just saying, if you are contracted to be payed x per hour at 8hrs a day, unless you work 8 + n hours, wherein n gives you no additional hourly pay, then its free labor to the company (above and beyond contracted work hours), not sure what is controversial about that?

you have an answer in marx's capital: all surplus is wage theft because the capitalist, who does nothing, gets money from those who do the work. so any more money you get is not free, it's just a slight reduction in the money which is getting stolen from you.

what insane idea, don't believe people still citing Marx in 2023, coming from a communist country, I can just laugh hard on you. I'm working on a open source software, and our money depends directly on our work. Our CTO works side by side with us, and our bonus are all the same. That's just BS. If you want the same conditions, there are plenty of companies doing the same. Just find one.

Coming from a capitalist country, I say that money here do not depend directly on our work. The majority of people in my country works a lot and receives very little. The life for workers on farms, and meat-packing industries are particularly difficult and cruel. There are lots of people that becomes sick, or that became unable to work because of lesions. And guess that: they keep being poor and their employers are rich despite working much less. People in developed countries would understand better why Marx is still considered relevant and has worldwide appeal looking outside the comfort bubble that only a small part of countries in the world enjoy. Tech industries are not so terrible? Sure, they are not, and jobs in developed countries also are much better. But let's not forget that the goal in capitalism is increase profits, not well being of people. If and when it is necessary, the well being can be sacrificed. And even if you work in much better conditions, all the increase in productivity that you achieve will go to increase profits, not your wage. Sure, sometimes you can receive a little bonus and a good environment as a "thank you", that returns to you a small part of what you produced.

> the goal in capitalism is increase profits, not well being of people.

I thought that in 2023 would be clear to everyone that only capitalist countries were able to improve the well being of the people. I see 0 boats from Miami to Cuba, just the other way around. So even though we can agree that people working in some fields have a hard life, for a fact, we know that in the communist countries they didn't have a better life than before, as we saw in the Holodomor, the famine that was caused by the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages.

Soviet Union substantially improved well-being of its people, when compared to what Russian Empire was before.

Other capitalist countries managed to improve the well being of the people because of wars and financial imperialism.

Holodomor had a lot of reasons, collectivisation was not the main one.

> Holodomor had a lot of reasons, collectivisation was not the main one.

It is not right. The same "collectivisation" was tried in different countries like GDR (1953 uprising), and China, great Famine, 1959. So same strategy led to same results in different countries.

Not same, since none of them have such loud names as Holodomor and are not considered genocide anywhere.

Collectivization initially leads to decrease and then to increase. In USSR result got so bad due to collection of reasons, unrelated to collectivization. Collectivization was badly needed in USSR, since 95% of population were inefficient farmers. It was a must for later industrialization.

No company will pay for you more than what you produce, excluding exceptional circumstances. So no, it is not free money. Either it is money that you produced with your labor, or is an investment from the company to motivate you to produce more than what they are paying you for.

That sounds to me like it’s just accounting spin.

If I sell something with a 2-for-1 deal, what are the ways that’s different from selling two for 50% off?

If I am paid to work 40 hours a week, and I work 80, are the second 40 free, or are all 80 %50 my expected wage?

> free to leave

<spicy> Ah! I see we agree on the need for such a robust social safety net that employment isn’t any degree of necessary! </spicy>

If your employer knowingly and willfully doubles your pay without changing the contract, are you stealing from them? I think not, and it's just the other side of the coin.

Hold up. Your prior comment didn’t use the word “steal”, so I didn’t think you were talking about theft. Your prior comment used the word “free”, so I thought you were talking about “free”.

I was talking about “free” and I was not talking about “stealing”. That’s why I used the word “free” and did not use the word “stealing”.

Regarding your hypothetical, I’d say they’d be giving you approximately free money in much the same was as in the prior hypothetical you’d be giving them approximately free labor.

No, it would merely reduce the amount stolen from you.

See here [0] for more theory , but the basic tl;dr is since all value is created by labor being done (your employer, the capitalist doesn't actually do anything to create value) and not all of it is paid out in the form of wages, the workers are being exploited since value is being stolen. Reducing the amount of that wage theft is not the other side of the coin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value

I don't remember to see people doing over 40 hours work/week since the 90s. Today, people start at 10, go lunch at 12:00, and 16:00 they want to go home.. At least in Europe.

> Process improvement: Is this your job? Then no.

This remark from TFA at least implies when it "is" part of your job, go for it.

Perhaps you have rejected, or simply not engaged with, the "call" to recognize class warfare, however, or if I can be silly I'll call you a "capital sympathizer". From the frame of recognizing workers vs capitalists, you can't just say write off being exploited as "well you were paid to be exploited" without coming down hard on the "sympathizer" side.

One of the points I assume the author was making is that much of this isn't your actual job, and voluntarily performing work that ultimately costs you is exploitative and adversarial and, well, stupid. Even if you're paid to do it.

About 20 years ago my employer informed the entire company that we would be working December and January without pay and if we didn't like it we would be "laid off" (much of that work would be spent training team members of an offshore/outsourcing firm). State labor law disagreed with them regarding work without compensation so they were forced to pay "minimum wage" (for software developers and DBAs!). You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.

I think his point was that it's the job that you signed up for, so either do the job, or don't work there.

> You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.

Working for minimum wage wasn't part of the contract you signed ("your job"), so your example isn't valid.

> I think his point was that it's the job that you signed up for, so either do the job, or don't work there.

The article is, ostensibly, a call to recognize class warfare, and certain elements of "engineering culture" as aspects of same. Did you sign up for class warfare?

If you simply refuse to participate in the notion of seeing this as class warfare, super!, but that's actively disengaging from the substance of the article.

(Process improvement is often part of the official job of Staff+.)

There seems to be lots of nasty class stuff going on, throughout society.

But TFA just seems to hurt legitimate discussion of class issues.

Imagine you're skeptical of the suggestion of class problems, but since a post about that was upvoted on HN, and you're open to being convinced, you took a look. Unfortunately, after reading it, you have to chalk it up as a data point: of someone who thinks there's class warfare on tech jobs also having very unfortunate idea of what the nature of that job is.

The history of humanity is nasty class stuff going on. It's kind of amazing the 'pax capitalista' we've had for the last few decades, honestly.

Is TFA the new way of writing "the article"?

New? 20 years ago, maybe.

Was just about to say this. This act of "withholding" just gets you demoted or pipped or relegated stagnant perf categories. Why do you think "leadership" principles exist? Not to make you a better leader, but to make you hot-swappable".

People are social creatures. It is very easy to take advantage of that.

And actually, the best thing that can happen to you as an investor / capitalist. Let employees create their own peer pressured environment. The same phenomenon how coal miners used to conduct.

You just lean back and enjoy the benefits of them controlling and supporting each other