That, and powerful lobbyists keep anything from changing.
Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote also comes to mind here. It has far more broad application than merely as a suggested explanation for the failure of socialism to take root in America. I find it is a very useful shorthand to describe a great many interactions between labor and ownership in this country, whatever the industry.
The tech industry is especially bad in that regard. It's not just the startup culture; it's more general than that. Many programmers have serious ego issues (as in, big egos and unjustifiable arrogance) and, in a somewhat amusing and baffling way, believe very strongly in the notion that the software industry is a meritocracy.
Very well said. They take everything literally and accept management's account of all things uncritically, which makes it really easy to run divide-and-conquer games over them.
It also lowers their status (as I discussed here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other...) because they out themselves as chumps when they take a shitty deal. If you make it clear that you'll let people take advantage of you, they never stop doing so.
On the other hand, those who show themselves to be politically astute are either tapped for executive roles or "culture fitted" (read: fired for their threat to the cult of cluelessness, although it's often dressed as performance-based). Which of those two outcomes one gets tends to happen for political, rather than "meritocratic" reasons, and can be hard to predict before the fact. So that's a risky avenue, too.
What do you think of The Gervais Principle?
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
High Status = Sociopath, Low Status = Losers destined for Cluelessness?
And I don't think there are really any Losers destined for Cluelessness. The Clueless are the people who don't understand office politics, or think they can climb the career ladder simply by working hard and being loyal employees (not through strategic social climbing). Losers are people who understand and see the ladder there but choose not to be social climbers. They gossip, do crossword puzzles, punch out and go spend time with their kids. There are lots of Clueless destined to become Losers once they get burned out and realize what's up. Once you've learned that you can't unlearn it.
Low status people tend to divide into three camps: delusional, apathetic, and confrontational.
Low status, delusional: Clueless.
Low status, apathetic: Losers.
The confrontational ones either (a) learn how to play the game and become Sociopaths, (b) consciously develop apathy and learn how to slack and become losers, or (c) continue raging until they're expelled/fired from the organization.
Pretty much everyone is an at will employee, free to go find another job. Since these exempt positions tend to be high skill, the logic behind these laws is that these kinds of employees don't need this extra layer of government protection between them and their paycheck. They have the wherewithal to go find another employer if they feel they're being treated unfairly.
The left wing side of this argument is certainly getting a hearing, but coming to a different conclusion doesn't make you a deluded member of the under class (if I'm interpreting your claptrap correctly).
I am fairly certain that even if you include work outside of the 40 hours, my hourly rate is better than I would do otherwise.
On top of that, I can probably continue at this career for the next 35 years without a significant physical toll on my body.
If I thought otherwise, I would probably want to be an electrician; where if I owned my own business I still end up as an exempt employee.
I understand you are taking the "free market" side of the argument but at a certain point employers hold too much power and employees start fight back. Things like that are why unions exist which are also a part of the free market.
That completely misses the point.
The parent is observing a behavior in the industry as a whole, not a specific employer.
Argue that the industry doesn't evidence this or argue that programmers should become plumbers, but boiling it down to 'go find another job' is nonsense in the context of an entire industry demonstrating the issue you mean to avoid.
All I'm saying that given the job fluidity within the tech industry as a whole, it is unlikely that individuals are going to allow themselves to be compensated at rates very much less than the value they provide. Having the government force employers and employees to account for their work on an hourly basis, so that their labor is not "stolen," is a restriction on their respective individual freedom. So the other side to the parents argument is that maybe the tech industry as a whole is not deluded, maybe it just wants this freedom.
The industry is not necessarily fluid [1] and more importantly any intra-industry fluidity there might be is irrelevant in the context of an entire industry demonstrating the issue you mean to avoid.
>'So the other side to the parents argument is that maybe the tech industry as a whole is not deluded, maybe it just wants this freedom.'
I'd hardly call that 'the other side'. A possibility, sure and if you personally feel that way, fine.
To suggest that the industry as a whole would or does consciously trade an considerable amount of pay for that 'freedom' is absurd.
Also, please stop selectively quoting the grandparent (neatly avoiding the predicating 'partially' of course) in these responses as if you didn't just sum up and summarily dismiss an entire side of this discussion with 'go find another job' in the intervening posts.
1: http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-... - Note: 1M people is a enormous number in relation to an industry the BLS sizes at ~4M, plenty large enough to be worth considering as capable of characterizing an entire industry.
Implicit in your comment is an assumption that there is no information asymmetry and that power (real power--the social, political, and economic ability to actually assert oneself) is shared relatively equally between the owners of capital and laborers. I stopped being surprised that people actually believe such "claptrap" long ago, but am still amused by it.
"people who don't demand overtime pay are deluded/stupid/victims of false consciousness/act against their own interest"
right? This is was I took him gnu8 to mean when he said "... the startup culture stock option lottery deludes them into thinking they are a part of the ownership class rather than the working class. Thus, they allow basically all of the fruits of their labor to be stolen from them." What other point am I missing?
I think my post and the follow up make a pretty coherent argument that no, in fact, mass delusion on the part of tech industry workers is not the best explanation. The delusion argument is an argument from the "left wing," especially when given in terms of capital and labor and conflict between classes and so forth. That's just a positive statement, not a normative one, so I don't understand how that can constitute a "rant."
What I think might be illuminating to Europeans who are incredulous about how our workers would allow the "fruits of their labor to be stolen," would be to hear why they might not consider working unpaid overtime to be being stolen from.
You suggest that they look elsewhere for a better deal, as if the free market price for their labor is by definition a fair price, but it is not, because of the power differential between capital and labor. It's not that all business collude consciously against labor(1), it's simply that the exception in the law for tech workers drives the price down, because it's purely good management not to pay any more than necessary for labor.
I'm not suggesting mass strikes, labor unions, and Marxist claptrap as a solution. Removing the loophole would be an entirely reasonable starting point. I've never seen anything approaching a rational justification for the tech worker exemption.
(1) Except when they do, like with the recent wage fixing scandal amongst a subset of well known companies.