9 ms·

One of my most favorite essays on the subject: [0] In February 1968 New York City sanitation workers went on strike. After just six days a state of emergency w

One of my most favorite essays on the subject: [0] In February 1968 New York City sanitation workers went on strike. After just six days a state of emergency was declared, and after nine days the city had to give up and give the strikers their way. In May 1970 Ireland’s bank employees decided to go on strike. At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a standstill. > Heading into the summer of 1970, Ireland braced itself for the worst. > And then something odd happened. Or more accurately, nothing much happened at all. > In July, the The Times of England reported that the “figures and trends which are available indicate that the dispute has not had an adverse effect on the economy so far.” A few months later, the Central Bank of Ireland drew up the final balance. “The Irish economy continued to function for a reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for business,” it concluded. Not only that, the economy had continued to grow. In the end, the strike would last ... a whole six months! [0] http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/ http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b...

Roritharr 8y ago
I always love to imagine the havoc it would wreak if Sysadmins went on strike...
- Ntrails 8y ago
  Much like the bankers, the world would largely just keep running.
  - citation_please 8y ago
    I think we're merely highlighting the distinction between what level of responsivity a job actually requires. Those who deal with things that require near-immediate attention (janitors, sys admins, doctors) would stop the world. Everyone else the world can (by definition of responsibility) continue without any issue for awhile, and maybe at worst stagnate. I think this might be a completely orthogonal concept to measuring how "bull shit" a job is, despite how often it gets brought up in this context.
    - perfunctory 8y ago
      The article actually touches on this point. It doesn't claim that we don't need financial system. On the contrary. In fact, while bankers were striking people recreated their own financial system of some sort. Only it turned out you could do it more cheaply without mega bonuses.
      - deathhand 8y ago
        Bankers is a very broad term. "High financiers" are bankers and so are people who work at a bank who do not get 'mega bonuses'. The article was talking about the latter.
    - foxhop 8y ago
      I would like to add farmers, plumbers, utilities workers, and anyone who keeps ISP networks online, to your list. There are very few doing the essential jobs.
      - citation_please 8y ago
        I agree with your list! Except with your use of the word essential, because I was trying to draw attention to the fact that these jobs are highly reactive, which I think is orthogonal to how essential they are to society (i.e. not "bull shit"). As a counter-example, I think everyone who is currently working to reduce environmentally-damaging emissions of industrial processes are essential to society, but if they all disappeared tomorrow it would have little immediate impact.
  - rini17 8y ago
    Banking and few other things can be replaced by whiteboard, but not everything ( https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-45247499 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-45247499 )
  - code_duck 8y ago
    For a time. I think the situation would be similar to an auto mechanic strike - everything keeps working until it stops working, at which point society would start to experience considerable hardship.
  - maze-le 8y ago
    Right up until someone in your company decides it is a good idea to introduce this new piece of infrastructure...
- hw_penfold 8y ago
  The result would be mixed and scattered. Basically, we see exactly how it unfolds when a ransomware epidemic breaks out. Ransomware, in many ways tying people hands, such that an outage occurs. In many areas, servers would chug along undisturbed. In other areas some of them would halt, either requiring input from some attended task, or because of a fault of some kind. Two other considerations would remain variable, per specific scenario: remote sabotage in the form of zero days appearing in coordination with strike activities, or local on-prem sabotage, in the form of erased disk drives, unplugged cables, or physical damage however subtle. The remote sabotage could involve a nation-state advanced persistent threat swooping in, or sympathy attacks from external groups which may or may not include those striking, to exacerbate the circumstances. Meanwhile on-prem monkey wrenching would have to occur immediately prior to a walk-out/lock-out. So, pretty much the same disposition as any other strike, but with the added quirk of remote access, except any or all of the servers could theoretically run problem-free for the duration of the strike, and predicting which systems go down and when would almost always require insider knowlege to accurately estimate. Meanwhile, everywhere this happens, people in need of a database would just do stuff in Excel, and snailmail USB sticks everwhere. Once that starts happening, it’s anybody’s game.
- dagw 8y ago
  Unless the sysadmins had a big powerful union (or sabotaged the system on their way out the door) their tasks would just be handed off to other computer literate people in the company who would end up becoming de facto sysadmins.
  - lithos 8y ago
    I'd love to imagine them taking online help articles down for the duration of the strike. Blogs/whatever overflow/forum posts/similar.
    - colonelpopcorn 8y ago
      I thought about Stack Overflow going down for a minute, and I got really scared.
    - eru 8y ago
      That would take a world-wide strike and no strike breakers. Unlikely.
      - kazagistar 8y ago
        Doesn't need to be worldwide. A single tech company having everyone strike would be enough.
        eru 8y ago
        They could still hire strikebreakers world wide, or not?
    - antisthenes 8y ago
      That's sort of crossing the line between refusing to work and doing deliberate sabotage. Especially if the help articles are on an internal network.
  - beauzero 8y ago
    I used to think that until I worked at a couple different places as developer/sysadmin which was due to not being"core product". There were several systems that would have ceased functioning within a week and we're never allocated requested funds because "that's what we have you for."
- protonfish 8y ago
  Yes, because I have to have a sysadmin to run all my computers at home... Sysadmins in an org are there to stop you from doing things, not help you.
  - no_one_ever 8y ago
    Only if your computer is a black box isolated from the rest of the world...
  - jcadam 8y ago
    Yes, every company I've worked in, there's been an adversarial relationship between IT and the regular users. Software Engineers are especially hated by sysadmins.
- needlepont 8y ago
  Not so much these days with the devops reaction. Now you need to package your work and a good remote worker can figure out what is needed in a few minutes. Not a bad thing for either party TBH. Sysadmins can chase butterflies when they burn out and 3rd worlders get a remote gig to pay for food.
- snackbugs 8y ago
  The sysadmin field has always seemed more conservative in my experience. When I hang out with them or spend time in online spaces where they talk, water cooler discussions wander into things that seem informed by right-leaning perspectives. I feel like many sysadmins would proudly and happily scab or cross picket lines.
- kamaal 8y ago
  It will mostly be developers taking over their jobs and sysadmins being replaceable getting more pronounced. In fact in most companies this is always the case. They routinely lay off sysadmins, qa and other support personnel and ask developers to take over. I'm now seeing trends of tech leads sort of roles doing the same jobs as a managers. If your job involves some prime mover to which you are just a helper/enabler, its likely you can be easily eliminated.
dagw 8y ago
One big difference is these cases I suspect is the power of unions and regulations. If some enterprising people in New York had tried to set up their own ad hoc sanitation service where they'd drive around a neighborhood in a van and for a dollar a bag they'd drive your trash to the dump they'd be stomped down on by unions and regulations in a flash. If a hypothetical Irish banking union had sent thugs each pub acting as an ad hoc clearing house or convinced the brewers union to not deliver beer to 'strike breaking' pubs the the situation probably would have played out very differently. Basically the real conclusion should be that strikes only work if there is also some additional force preventing outside people from filling the void left by the striking workers.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  If someone tried to set up a waste disposal service like that in that time period, unions and regulations would have been the least of their problems. The mob and their body being found in the dump would be a bigger concern.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Which was essentially my point. It wasn't the striking sanitation workers that brought the city to a standstill, it was the external forces that prevented alternative solutions to the problem that caused the standstill. If that force is union thugs, mob hit men or government lawyers doesn't really matter. Had the unions threatened to stop deliveries to and/or break legs of shop owner who accepted non-official currency in the Ireland example, that strike would have also lasted less than a week as well.
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      The crux of the argument in the article is that strikes in sectors that are undesirable/hard/underpaid are harder to replace, so there is quite a difference: For the meagre effort of keeping a few extra tabs (something they were already used to) they could earn increased reputation or advertisement (while you go the pub 'bank' you might as well have a drink on your way out). The realy price at which people start providing banking functionality is much lower than the average wage of a banker (the banking sector is permission oriented!). The price to get non-garbage collector to start collecting garbage tends to be much higher than the average wage of a garbage collector (the underbelly of society is obligation oriented!) Stated otherwise, if everyone received the average rent, wages for dirty/unhealthy/boring/complicated/... jobs would rise, simply because they can stay home and live cheap. This would be the most neutral and emergent determination of wages since there is no master table from Washington/Moscow/Brussels to decree the relative wages. No need for endless protests and strikes. Examples: - dirty: toilet cleaner, garbage collector - unhealthy or risky: fire fighter, chemical sector - boring: monotonous factory work, high quality assurance inspection - complicated: physics, engineering, ... This does not mean everyone would end up with the same wage, the more collectively undesirable a job, the higher it would earn on top of your average rent.
throwawayjava 8y ago
> [0] http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b.. http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b.... This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former. In general, that's not actually true. * Nurses make good money. E.g., NPs and PAs make six figures even in smaller cities with low CoLs. It's not hedge fund money, but then, 90% of people who work in banking don't make hedge-fund money either. Also, 90k in a small city is pretty comparable to 200k in Manhattan. * Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird. A couple of more apt comparisons: - At the lower end of the salary scale: Teacher/police officer vs bank teller. The teacher/police officer make more. - At the higher end of the salary scale: Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader vs. hedge fund guy. * Farming is also extremely lucrative -- the owner of a large farm can easily make out much better than the owner of a community bank. And the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks. Even the title of the article -- why garbagemen should make more than bankers -- succumbs to this fallacy. Most bank workers are tellers and other low-level employees who ARE making a bit less (or not much more) than garbagemen!
- FlipperBucket 8y ago
  > This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former. > In general, that's not actually true. Please do cursory searches for data to backup what you imagine to be true. > Nurses make good money. On average, no. There's the eventual objection about what "compensation" means versus "salary", but moving the bar introduces a number of other variables. Keep it simple, as per the article. Feel free to goole nursing salary - not counting the issue of registered nurses acting as sergeants for teams of nursing assistants who perform the vast majority of the care, they are arguably underpaid (and assistants are shamefully underpaid). This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries. > Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate". > Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader Whatever that means. Making some other unclear comparison serves what purpose? Law enforcement entry pay is less/parity with a teacher, but is less than a federal worker at the post office in salary and definitely in other benefits. > the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks. Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation. The world isn't in the state you believe it is.

Roritharr 8y ago

I always love to imagine the havoc it would wreak if Sysadmins went on strike...

Ntrails 8y ago
Much like the bankers, the world would largely just keep running.
- citation_please 8y ago
  I think we're merely highlighting the distinction between what level of responsivity a job actually requires. Those who deal with things that require near-immediate attention (janitors, sys admins, doctors) would stop the world. Everyone else the world can (by definition of responsibility) continue without any issue for awhile, and maybe at worst stagnate. I think this might be a completely orthogonal concept to measuring how "bull shit" a job is, despite how often it gets brought up in this context.
  - perfunctory 8y ago
    The article actually touches on this point. It doesn't claim that we don't need financial system. On the contrary. In fact, while bankers were striking people recreated their own financial system of some sort. Only it turned out you could do it more cheaply without mega bonuses.
    - deathhand 8y ago
      Bankers is a very broad term. "High financiers" are bankers and so are people who work at a bank who do not get 'mega bonuses'. The article was talking about the latter.
  - foxhop 8y ago
    I would like to add farmers, plumbers, utilities workers, and anyone who keeps ISP networks online, to your list. There are very few doing the essential jobs.
    - citation_please 8y ago
      I agree with your list! Except with your use of the word essential, because I was trying to draw attention to the fact that these jobs are highly reactive, which I think is orthogonal to how essential they are to society (i.e. not "bull shit"). As a counter-example, I think everyone who is currently working to reduce environmentally-damaging emissions of industrial processes are essential to society, but if they all disappeared tomorrow it would have little immediate impact.
- rini17 8y ago
  Banking and few other things can be replaced by whiteboard, but not everything ( https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-45247499 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-45247499 )
- code_duck 8y ago
  For a time. I think the situation would be similar to an auto mechanic strike - everything keeps working until it stops working, at which point society would start to experience considerable hardship.
- maze-le 8y ago
  Right up until someone in your company decides it is a good idea to introduce this new piece of infrastructure...
hw_penfold 8y ago
The result would be mixed and scattered. Basically, we see exactly how it unfolds when a ransomware epidemic breaks out. Ransomware, in many ways tying people hands, such that an outage occurs. In many areas, servers would chug along undisturbed. In other areas some of them would halt, either requiring input from some attended task, or because of a fault of some kind. Two other considerations would remain variable, per specific scenario: remote sabotage in the form of zero days appearing in coordination with strike activities, or local on-prem sabotage, in the form of erased disk drives, unplugged cables, or physical damage however subtle. The remote sabotage could involve a nation-state advanced persistent threat swooping in, or sympathy attacks from external groups which may or may not include those striking, to exacerbate the circumstances. Meanwhile on-prem monkey wrenching would have to occur immediately prior to a walk-out/lock-out. So, pretty much the same disposition as any other strike, but with the added quirk of remote access, except any or all of the servers could theoretically run problem-free for the duration of the strike, and predicting which systems go down and when would almost always require insider knowlege to accurately estimate. Meanwhile, everywhere this happens, people in need of a database would just do stuff in Excel, and snailmail USB sticks everwhere. Once that starts happening, it’s anybody’s game.
dagw 8y ago
Unless the sysadmins had a big powerful union (or sabotaged the system on their way out the door) their tasks would just be handed off to other computer literate people in the company who would end up becoming de facto sysadmins.
- lithos 8y ago
  I'd love to imagine them taking online help articles down for the duration of the strike. Blogs/whatever overflow/forum posts/similar.
  - colonelpopcorn 8y ago
    I thought about Stack Overflow going down for a minute, and I got really scared.
  - eru 8y ago
    That would take a world-wide strike and no strike breakers. Unlikely.
    - kazagistar 8y ago
      Doesn't need to be worldwide. A single tech company having everyone strike would be enough.
      - eru 8y ago
        They could still hire strikebreakers world wide, or not?
  - antisthenes 8y ago
    That's sort of crossing the line between refusing to work and doing deliberate sabotage. Especially if the help articles are on an internal network.
- beauzero 8y ago
  I used to think that until I worked at a couple different places as developer/sysadmin which was due to not being"core product". There were several systems that would have ceased functioning within a week and we're never allocated requested funds because "that's what we have you for."
protonfish 8y ago
Yes, because I have to have a sysadmin to run all my computers at home... Sysadmins in an org are there to stop you from doing things, not help you.
- no_one_ever 8y ago
  Only if your computer is a black box isolated from the rest of the world...
- jcadam 8y ago
  Yes, every company I've worked in, there's been an adversarial relationship between IT and the regular users. Software Engineers are especially hated by sysadmins.
needlepont 8y ago
Not so much these days with the devops reaction. Now you need to package your work and a good remote worker can figure out what is needed in a few minutes. Not a bad thing for either party TBH. Sysadmins can chase butterflies when they burn out and 3rd worlders get a remote gig to pay for food.
snackbugs 8y ago
The sysadmin field has always seemed more conservative in my experience. When I hang out with them or spend time in online spaces where they talk, water cooler discussions wander into things that seem informed by right-leaning perspectives. I feel like many sysadmins would proudly and happily scab or cross picket lines.
kamaal 8y ago
It will mostly be developers taking over their jobs and sysadmins being replaceable getting more pronounced. In fact in most companies this is always the case. They routinely lay off sysadmins, qa and other support personnel and ask developers to take over. I'm now seeing trends of tech leads sort of roles doing the same jobs as a managers. If your job involves some prime mover to which you are just a helper/enabler, its likely you can be easily eliminated.

dagw 8y ago

One big difference is these cases I suspect is the power of unions and regulations. If some enterprising people in New York had tried to set up their own ad hoc sanitation service where they'd drive around a neighborhood in a van and for a dollar a bag they'd drive your trash to the dump they'd be stomped down on by unions and regulations in a flash. If a hypothetical Irish banking union had sent thugs each pub acting as an ad hoc clearing house or convinced the brewers union to not deliver beer to 'strike breaking' pubs the the situation probably would have played out very differently. Basically the real conclusion should be that strikes only work if there is also some additional force preventing outside people from filling the void left by the striking workers.

paulie_a 8y ago
If someone tried to set up a waste disposal service like that in that time period, unions and regulations would have been the least of their problems. The mob and their body being found in the dump would be a bigger concern.
- dagw 8y ago
  Which was essentially my point. It wasn't the striking sanitation workers that brought the city to a standstill, it was the external forces that prevented alternative solutions to the problem that caused the standstill. If that force is union thugs, mob hit men or government lawyers doesn't really matter. Had the unions threatened to stop deliveries to and/or break legs of shop owner who accepted non-official currency in the Ireland example, that strike would have also lasted less than a week as well.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    The crux of the argument in the article is that strikes in sectors that are undesirable/hard/underpaid are harder to replace, so there is quite a difference: For the meagre effort of keeping a few extra tabs (something they were already used to) they could earn increased reputation or advertisement (while you go the pub 'bank' you might as well have a drink on your way out). The realy price at which people start providing banking functionality is much lower than the average wage of a banker (the banking sector is permission oriented!). The price to get non-garbage collector to start collecting garbage tends to be much higher than the average wage of a garbage collector (the underbelly of society is obligation oriented!) Stated otherwise, if everyone received the average rent, wages for dirty/unhealthy/boring/complicated/... jobs would rise, simply because they can stay home and live cheap. This would be the most neutral and emergent determination of wages since there is no master table from Washington/Moscow/Brussels to decree the relative wages. No need for endless protests and strikes. Examples: - dirty: toilet cleaner, garbage collector - unhealthy or risky: fire fighter, chemical sector - boring: monotonous factory work, high quality assurance inspection - complicated: physics, engineering, ... This does not mean everyone would end up with the same wage, the more collectively undesirable a job, the higher it would earn on top of your average rent.

throwawayjava 8y ago

> [0] http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b.. http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b.... This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former. In general, that's not actually true. * Nurses make good money. E.g., NPs and PAs make six figures even in smaller cities with low CoLs. It's not hedge fund money, but then, 90% of people who work in banking don't make hedge-fund money either. Also, 90k in a small city is pretty comparable to 200k in Manhattan. * Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird. A couple of more apt comparisons: - At the lower end of the salary scale: Teacher/police officer vs bank teller. The teacher/police officer make more. - At the higher end of the salary scale: Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader vs. hedge fund guy. * Farming is also extremely lucrative -- the owner of a large farm can easily make out much better than the owner of a community bank. And the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks. Even the title of the article -- why garbagemen should make more than bankers -- succumbs to this fallacy. Most bank workers are tellers and other low-level employees who ARE making a bit less (or not much more) than garbagemen!

FlipperBucket 8y ago
> This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former. > In general, that's not actually true. Please do cursory searches for data to backup what you imagine to be true. > Nurses make good money. On average, no. There's the eventual objection about what "compensation" means versus "salary", but moving the bar introduces a number of other variables. Keep it simple, as per the article. Feel free to goole nursing salary - not counting the issue of registered nurses acting as sergeants for teams of nursing assistants who perform the vast majority of the care, they are arguably underpaid (and assistants are shamefully underpaid). This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries. > Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate". > Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader Whatever that means. Making some other unclear comparison serves what purpose? Law enforcement entry pay is less/parity with a teacher, but is less than a federal worker at the post office in salary and definitely in other benefits. > the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks. Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation. The world isn't in the state you believe it is.