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Funny enough, I have often have the same thought. I'm a military officer and the enlisted folks are often living not far from the Amazon warehouse workers. Inde
by killjoywashere 6y ago
Funny enough, I have often have the same thought. I'm a military officer and the enlisted folks are often living not far from the Amazon warehouse workers. Indeed, the highest paid officers in the military make less than 10x more than the most junior enlisted recruit. These are people who command hundreds of thousands of people.
I think a significant difference is that most folks in tech do not live and work among the skilled and unskilled laborers. In the military, you know the cook, the plumber, the electrician, and the riflemen, the air traffic controller, the network technician. Personally. You've been around the world together, you may have been in firefights together.
In the military, the headquarters jobs with the bean counters are rare. Bean counting is essentially synonymous with 'fat and happy'. In tech, the equivalent of bean-counting headquarters is 90% of the organization. It's extremely advanced bean-counting, but the field units have atrophied quite a little bit.
- randomsearch 6y agoThat's a great reply, thanks. I see from up/down votes that I've hit a nerve. I really like your perspective. Reminds me of the attempts in new towns in the UK to try to mix different socioeconomic classes on the same street. "Show me and I'll understand." I grew up in a deprived town (but my family was comfortable) and I've worked a lot of awful jobs, maybe that helps. So a good first step would be to integrate within companies more? Perhaps corporates deliberately avoid that. Much easier to treat warehouse staff badly if your valuable engineers don't know them personally.