>Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor
Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.
Programmers eagerly work in EA style sweatshops producing games and other software with massive unpaid overtime, or count themselves lucky that IBM kept them for just a few extra months to train their replacements.
IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
> But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is anywhere near what custodians go through.
I used to work for one of these IBM-like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight from the web.
But more to the point, if you desire a work/life balance you absolutely can find a programming job that will allow it. It'll pay less than the unpaid overtime job, but it exists, and will still pay more than most occupations.
I've never met anyone nor worked with anyone who thought they were better than someone else because of their job. Maybe that's something you want to believe, but it isn't true. A great deal of the engineers I work with in the bay area are socially conscious to the tech sector's impact on the community. And really they're harmed by it too, a software engineer can't afford to buy a house either.
If what you really believed was true there's no way that someone like Barbara Lee could be in office with such huge wins every two years when so many of her constituents are the same people that work in the area you think is so terrible. Why are you even posting on HN? This is a technical news site.
I am not a programmer (although I can program) but I do a fairly important job at the company (that I own) that takes a great deal of thought, training and experience. So yes I do feel that I am "better" than a postal worker or a garbage man a job that doesn't take a great deal of thought, training, intelligence or experience or quite frankly in most (but not all cases) motivation. Of course there are people who are garbage men or postal workers that are there because of luck not intelligence or effort, but there are also people who grew up middle class like I did that aren't doing anything significant in their career either.
This idea that all of us are equal (we are not even factoring in luck) is really just a modern day PC version of the way the world is not.
I mean no offense by this, but how old are you? I ask because I used to believe the same thing, but as time passed I realized that being special and having specialized knowledge are not one and the same. Very few of us are truly special.
Well I'd rather not say how old I am but I will say that I am not young by HN standards.
The issue is not whether one is special but special relative to someone who does that type of menial repetitive job.
And just that I think I have more capabilities than the average garbage man or postal worker. And I grew up in a time when it was ok to say something like that by the way.
Are you better in terms of intrinsic worth as a human being? No, they're just as human as you are.
Are you better in terms of physical strength or stamina, as mattwood asked? No.
Are you better morally than them? (Remember that "morally" includes not just overt acts like theft or murder. It also includes things like pride.)
Or is it merely, as you said in your reply to mattwood, that you think you're better mentally? (And perhaps in terms of achieving financial results.) But of all the possible axes of measurement, why did you pick that one to be the definition of "better"? (Cynically, I wonder if you didn't pick it because it's the one you win on...)
Yes. And I really don't see why you'd bring up pride, since if that's something that comes to your mind when you think about moral superiority, then you're barking up the wrong tree with the rest of 'em.
LOL. I'm friends with sons of a garbage man. They are highly unionised with a bulletproof health plan, pension plan, college savings plan, etc. And if the city tries to take away even one of those things... ever see trash spontaneously combust when its been left to sit in its own juices for weeks.
The guys that haul trash have got it exactly right. It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth and when they demand they get it. If I lose Facebook for an hour its a bummer. If the trash isn't hauled away its a health hazard.
> so they know their worth and when they demand they get it
> It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth
Well not exactly. They have a union in most cities and some of those jobs the pay is so good there is a waiting line to get the job actually. And since they can strike in many contracts they have quite a bit of leverage (what you are saying).
Link below is without overtime pay. In some cases with overtime the pay can easily be 6 figure. I can assure you that there are many takers for this job, although perhaps where you live that might not be the case of course.
So, while I find your attitude rather repgnant, the truth is that you just refuted the parent comment's claim. Which, quite frankly, isn't hard to do (I've encountered the attitude frequently myself, and occasionally have to check myself from adopting it).
But the HN Hivemind doesn't want to hear this, apparently.
It's one thing to recognise abilities and capabilities. Or even to volunteer that somebody else as a greater human, particularly than yourself.
To self-nominate yourself as "more worthy" than others seems a road down a slippery and ugly path.
Then again, my worthy ancestors have fought on both sides of numerous bloody disagreements over this very concept.
More generally, and I mean this quite generally, I tend to find externally imposed tests far preferable to internally imposed ones. Human eugenics is internally imposed. The incestuous processes of party politics and academic mutual admiration societies strike me as similar. Likewise, to venture into more locally fraught, if less literally gut-spilling ground, defenses of Web or application layout and design which concern themselves with everything but what actual users actually need.
There's also the possibility that someday you'll find yourself less able, or perhaps just recognised and rewarded, than you are now. Will a deaf, or blinded, or crippled, or sick, or depressed, or senile you be less worthy than you are now? Be careful how you answer that, because the loads imposed should you find yourself there are all the more crushing.
Go out there. Do your fucking job, and do it well, for as long as you can.
You just told a lot of people that there's no difference between them and a garbagemen. I think you're pushing the point that unless you own a company, you're not "equal" to the people that do (and one assumes you don't mean that employees are better than entrepreneurs).
It doesn't even matter whether you're right or not but you can't attack people's self-worth and expect to be rewarded for it.
Sort of like if I were to say that all company owners and management are fraudulent exploitative criminals.
I disagree - I think that the right-wing opinion machine has been successfully busting unions and scapegoating labor for so long that the tech industry doesn't see the value-add of the union itself. I view it a bit like the anti-vax movement. Nobody today is dying of polio, so the necessity and urgency are lost. (And Americans are spectacularly bad at learning from history because exceptionalism)
I assume you're referring to the current fascination with socialism? You know, that great political innovation that lead to a hundred million murders in the 20th century.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
You should look into the history of unions. You might be surprised at their non-progressive / non-egalitarian origins. You don't need a "right-wing opinion machine" to besmirch the name of unions; you simply have to look at the long history of state-union corruption.
Socialism did what? Some despot puts Socialist in the state name and that makes it socialist? So North Korea is a shining example of democracy because it's right there Democratic People's Republic.
Does your 100million lives include the many millions the USA has helped see to their deaths?
Doctors have the AMA bargain for rules in statehouses and Congress. Same with lawyers and the American Bar Association. The trial lawyers are particularly adept at lobbying and "campaign contributions".
I'm pretty sure people in these professions consider themselves pretty special.
Perhaps if there's so much resistance to the idea to an IT union, we should buff up the IEEE so it can be a "professional association" on the level of the AMA or the ABA, at least.
I used to work in IT at an investment bank. We got no overtime, and had to work all hours - 9 hours a day, sometimes starting at 7 AM, weekend work, pages in the middle of the night.
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.