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This reads to me as yet another screed by someone who has never worked outside the tech industry. Software Engineering is IMO the best, most privileged job avai

This reads to me as yet another screed by someone who has never worked outside the tech industry. Software Engineering is IMO the best, most privileged job available in the US, and I suspect in much of the world. Life-long tech workers have no idea how much worse conditions are even for “knowledge workers” in other fields. Case in point, when we get a tired of the office grind we can publish a manifesto that slams tons of people we’ve worked with in the past (with no fear of consequences from those burned bridges), move to a resort wherever we want, and still expect to either make great pay with benefits while fully remote, or realistically start our own business with a great chance of success (and can easily raise funding to defray the risk if we want to). I’m grateful to work in software. It’s a wonderful thing that we have so much privilege. And so of course, at a time when the world has been quite stirred up and most of our lives affected, it’s great to see many engineers have the freedom to change jobs to fit their lives better, and that they’re exercising that freedom. But could we observe and write about all that without the anger and entitlement? For anyone who has worked in other fields, or even less in-demand jobs in tech, it just comes across as whiny and out of touch.

twofornone 5y ago
>Case in point, when we get a tired of the office grind we can publish a manifesto that slams tons of people we’ve worked with in the past (with no fear of consequences from those burned bridges), move to a resort wherever we want, and still expect to either make great pay with benefits while fully remote, or realistically start our own business with a great chance of success (and can easily raise funding to defray the risk if we want to). It's not that I disagree in principle with what you're saying, but I think you're describing the top 10% range of programmers. Edit: and herein lies the danger in dismissing the complaints of entire swaths of people with concepts lile "privilege". It's just a socially acceptable form of prejudice that never applies to all people from the group.
- joedirt8383 5y ago
  more like 0.1%
diehunde 5y ago
Relative Privation fallacy[1]. Or just another case of: "But there's people starving in Africa". [1] - https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relative-Privation https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
alenmilk 5y ago
So when you sit in endless meaningless meetings and see how the management create insurmountable obstacles that make it impossible to actually do some meaningful work while whining about deadlines and changing the requirements on a whim, you should just be thankful that you have a nice paying job? Well you can be thankful and still cry inside since if the management were competent, you could get 3x done. If you feel this several decades you die inside little by little until you do what is described in the article.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  There are people who would do anything to make a FAANG salary. Acting like sitting in meetings is hard shows exactly how much of a bubble you are in. Imagine explaining this to a dirt poor Hatian: "You will have unimaginable wealth, but sometimes you have to sit in a meeting and do nothing. It's really hard"
  - AQuantized 5y ago
    The criteria was that is was the best job available in the world's wealthiest country, not that it was palatable to a someone living in a very poor country plagued with issues much lower on Maslow's hierarchy
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Lots of American developers would love for a FAANG salary too. Total comp at a FAANG is now, what like $500-800k for a mid-senior position? Outside of a handful of areas in the USA, that same person would be earning, maybe $100k, no stock, and passable benefits.
      - BurritoAlPastor 5y ago
        Mid-senior is more like $300-400k.
        HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
eigengrau5150 5y ago
> Life-long tech workers have no idea how much worse conditions are even for “knowledge workers” in other fields. I worked as a supermarket janitor in high school and college. Most of my work in tech has been for government contractors. Most days I feel like I'm still a janitor, only I'm coping with other people's tech debt instead of scrubbing toilets. The thing is, if scrubbing floors and toilets paid as well as coding I'd go back to pushing a mop in a heartbeat because at least janitorial work has a better-defined scope of work and definition of done than most of the development projects with which I've been involved.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> the best, most privileged job available in the US Not quite. Actors and musicians have it better, once they've established themselves. I'm not being facetious here - with people trying to "break in" to programming and endless auditions in the form of whiteboard interviews, I can't help but feel like we've ended up in a career with most of the downsides and few of the upsides of an entertainment career.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > Actors and musicians have it better citation needed > once they've established themselves. BIG if; the ones you're thinking of represent the 1% or less. Survivorship bias.
- cjaybo 5y ago
  This comment must be satire.
- manuel_w 5y ago
  > once they've established themselves. I only recently learned about the term "strawman argument", and I think this is one. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Parents post was not about SW devs who established themselves, but about SW devs in general. That you don't need to establish yourself to still live a good life is exactly one of the advantages of being a SW dev. Besides that: Establishing yourself as actor often involves attending partys of Harvey Weinstein kind of people.
  - AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
    Maybe partially "strawman argument": when someone refutes an argument by proposing a counter point that refutes a related, but different, argument. It can even be stuff like: "Senator: I will vote to increase the public transportation budget. Public: Why don't you care about education?" So here maybe more "survivorship bias": the bias of looking only at the top performers / the most visible ones, or here "those who made it". Ex: "Interviewer: How did you get to your position? Politician: I worked hard! I spend countless hours doing XXX etc...". Many other persons might have worked just as hard or even harder, but lacked the connection or simply the luck to make it.
VictorPath 5y ago
> privileged...resort...great pay with benefits...privilege...entitlement....whiny and out of touch The post was written by someone who works about the management and shareholders of corporations. If privilege and entitlement are qualities of the people working on death marches at companies the DOJ said were illegally colluding to keep wages down, then what are the qualities of the heirs collecting dividends from these companies - expropriating the wealth of the surplus labor time of those creating the wealth. The system is the creation of heirs who never worked a day in your life, but you make the case of the parasites - that those actually working and creating wealth are the ones who are entitles, privileged etc.
- pydry 5y ago
  Jay Gould once bragged he could get one half of the working class to kill the other. It does seem to be a feature of the American working classes that they are led to be persistently, easily and even violently divided over wedge issues. Abortion, gender, race, "coastal elites" vs. "flyover country", millenial vs boomer, heck, or even, as in this case, "1 paycheck away from bankruptcy vs. financially stable". You'd think illegal collusion over wage suppression would unite people who... earn wages but it doesnt seem to. Not in the same way belonging to, say, an arbitrarily advertiser defined age cohort does. Which is really weird if you step out of American culture and look at it from the outside for a bit. Maybe this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about a lack of class consciousness.
  - Factorium 5y ago
    You can now add: mask vs maskless, pro vs anti-lockdown, vaxxed vs unvaxxed.
  - visarga 5y ago
    > Maybe this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about a lack of class consciousness. All these ideological movements such as communism, inquisition or social justice warriors subserve the individual to the collective struggle, usually by force. Who loves to be spoon fed propaganda or cancelled "for the success of the greater cause"? They attack their own people even more viciously than the others for crimes such as original thinking which is nothing else than heresy to them. They reject the very basis of debate and logic-based reasoning, preferring to spread stories with emotional appeal and moral judgements instead. They cause a chilling effect on society, people live in fear of being persecuted for any reason, learn to be docile and lack the courage to change anything.
devwastaken 5y ago
That's good. Don't advocate against yourself. Other kinds of work don't have this because they take on that idealogy of working against themselves. Be privileged and demand more. The companies are perfectly capable of paying it.
pelasaco 5y ago
I used to think like you, until I turned 40 and spent 3 years in a row, doing full SCRUM, babysitting developers while my "manager/PO/everything" does little regarding planning other than "I want this". Conclusion: I dropped to 24 hours/week and have a much better life quality now, working 3 days per week.
kodah 5y ago
I worked in the Marines and am now a software engineer at a large tech firm. The biggest joke in the military was danger pay, which was $7.50. $7.50 if I was working in an active warzone that day. I still stood in formations, pointlessly, for hours. I still watched people who shouldn't have been promoted get promoted over people who should. I still watched people fuck each other over. I still sat though pointless and grueling training videos. I still had 8-12 hour workdays. I still lived with the idea that my life would end early through mental or physical health issues. I could go on. The biggest difference I have is pay and the security to try and improve the system myself. I know if I get fired for trying to do the right thing that I'll find another job, whereas in the Marines as a four year corporal with one year total combat experience I made $20k and had no career prospects should the military see that I am a problem.
- ferryman 5y ago
  This is really eye opening. Thank you for sharing! Though I feel the military & the Marines specifically might be an outlier and not a valid comparison
  - kodah 5y ago
    They may be, tangentially, my experience resonates with blue collar and union workers that I know. Those were the negative examples. More positively, engineers are motivated by many of the same things Marines are and I use these aspects in my day-to-day leadership as well. I exercise transparency, when I know the team is shouldering a burden I acknowledge it and steps were taking to minimize it over time. Marines and engineers like knowing their purpose and place in the world. They both desire a framework that establishes a domain for their autonomy. They both desire leaders who are scrappy enough to fight in the trenches but with the tactical persuasion to have vision from above while leading from the front. They're both willing to put in whatever it takes to accomplish the mission but they want to be recognized for doing so, and not necessarily monetarily. Again, I could go on.
ericmcer 5y ago
Tech pays well and has benefits, beyond that it leaves a lot to be desired. Having worked “shit jobs” tech is great when it’s great but when it’s miserable it is worse than retail, construction, etc. Your self-worth and ego are closely entwined with your performance, and sometimes situations outside yourself can make it hard to perform. At least in retail you never dream about a problem or question if you are smart or good enough to do your job.
b20000 5y ago
best most priveleged job? no social status, pay below marketing and sales execs, relearning tools every year, assumed to be replaceable, leetcode BS every year, doing incredibly hard work with little credit, the list goes on. engineering only pays off if you are a founder and manage to sell the company for a lot of money, which is a gamble. also, no protections such as unions as engineering is a white collar job. sure, there are worse jobs. but claiming that this sort of work is the best job ever is ridiculous.

twofornone 5y ago

>Case in point, when we get a tired of the office grind we can publish a manifesto that slams tons of people we’ve worked with in the past (with no fear of consequences from those burned bridges), move to a resort wherever we want, and still expect to either make great pay with benefits while fully remote, or realistically start our own business with a great chance of success (and can easily raise funding to defray the risk if we want to). It's not that I disagree in principle with what you're saying, but I think you're describing the top 10% range of programmers. Edit: and herein lies the danger in dismissing the complaints of entire swaths of people with concepts lile "privilege". It's just a socially acceptable form of prejudice that never applies to all people from the group.

joedirt8383 5y ago
more like 0.1%

diehunde 5y ago

Relative Privation fallacy[1]. Or just another case of: "But there's people starving in Africa". [1] - https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relative-Privation https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...

alenmilk 5y ago

So when you sit in endless meaningless meetings and see how the management create insurmountable obstacles that make it impossible to actually do some meaningful work while whining about deadlines and changing the requirements on a whim, you should just be thankful that you have a nice paying job? Well you can be thankful and still cry inside since if the management were competent, you could get 3x done. If you feel this several decades you die inside little by little until you do what is described in the article.

dahfizz 5y ago
There are people who would do anything to make a FAANG salary. Acting like sitting in meetings is hard shows exactly how much of a bubble you are in. Imagine explaining this to a dirt poor Hatian: "You will have unimaginable wealth, but sometimes you have to sit in a meeting and do nothing. It's really hard"
- AQuantized 5y ago
  The criteria was that is was the best job available in the world's wealthiest country, not that it was palatable to a someone living in a very poor country plagued with issues much lower on Maslow's hierarchy
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Lots of American developers would love for a FAANG salary too. Total comp at a FAANG is now, what like $500-800k for a mid-senior position? Outside of a handful of areas in the USA, that same person would be earning, maybe $100k, no stock, and passable benefits.
    - BurritoAlPastor 5y ago
      Mid-senior is more like $300-400k.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

eigengrau5150 5y ago

> Life-long tech workers have no idea how much worse conditions are even for “knowledge workers” in other fields. I worked as a supermarket janitor in high school and college. Most of my work in tech has been for government contractors. Most days I feel like I'm still a janitor, only I'm coping with other people's tech debt instead of scrubbing toilets. The thing is, if scrubbing floors and toilets paid as well as coding I'd go back to pushing a mop in a heartbeat because at least janitorial work has a better-defined scope of work and definition of done than most of the development projects with which I've been involved.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> the best, most privileged job available in the US Not quite. Actors and musicians have it better, once they've established themselves. I'm not being facetious here - with people trying to "break in" to programming and endless auditions in the form of whiteboard interviews, I can't help but feel like we've ended up in a career with most of the downsides and few of the upsides of an entertainment career.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> Actors and musicians have it better citation needed > once they've established themselves. BIG if; the ones you're thinking of represent the 1% or less. Survivorship bias.
cjaybo 5y ago
This comment must be satire.
manuel_w 5y ago
> once they've established themselves. I only recently learned about the term "strawman argument", and I think this is one. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Parents post was not about SW devs who established themselves, but about SW devs in general. That you don't need to establish yourself to still live a good life is exactly one of the advantages of being a SW dev. Besides that: Establishing yourself as actor often involves attending partys of Harvey Weinstein kind of people.
- AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
  Maybe partially "strawman argument": when someone refutes an argument by proposing a counter point that refutes a related, but different, argument. It can even be stuff like: "Senator: I will vote to increase the public transportation budget. Public: Why don't you care about education?" So here maybe more "survivorship bias": the bias of looking only at the top performers / the most visible ones, or here "those who made it". Ex: "Interviewer: How did you get to your position? Politician: I worked hard! I spend countless hours doing XXX etc...". Many other persons might have worked just as hard or even harder, but lacked the connection or simply the luck to make it.

VictorPath 5y ago

> privileged...resort...great pay with benefits...privilege...entitlement....whiny and out of touch The post was written by someone who works about the management and shareholders of corporations. If privilege and entitlement are qualities of the people working on death marches at companies the DOJ said were illegally colluding to keep wages down, then what are the qualities of the heirs collecting dividends from these companies - expropriating the wealth of the surplus labor time of those creating the wealth. The system is the creation of heirs who never worked a day in your life, but you make the case of the parasites - that those actually working and creating wealth are the ones who are entitles, privileged etc.

pydry 5y ago
Jay Gould once bragged he could get one half of the working class to kill the other. It does seem to be a feature of the American working classes that they are led to be persistently, easily and even violently divided over wedge issues. Abortion, gender, race, "coastal elites" vs. "flyover country", millenial vs boomer, heck, or even, as in this case, "1 paycheck away from bankruptcy vs. financially stable". You'd think illegal collusion over wage suppression would unite people who... earn wages but it doesnt seem to. Not in the same way belonging to, say, an arbitrarily advertiser defined age cohort does. Which is really weird if you step out of American culture and look at it from the outside for a bit. Maybe this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about a lack of class consciousness.
- Factorium 5y ago
  You can now add: mask vs maskless, pro vs anti-lockdown, vaxxed vs unvaxxed.
- visarga 5y ago
  > Maybe this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about a lack of class consciousness. All these ideological movements such as communism, inquisition or social justice warriors subserve the individual to the collective struggle, usually by force. Who loves to be spoon fed propaganda or cancelled "for the success of the greater cause"? They attack their own people even more viciously than the others for crimes such as original thinking which is nothing else than heresy to them. They reject the very basis of debate and logic-based reasoning, preferring to spread stories with emotional appeal and moral judgements instead. They cause a chilling effect on society, people live in fear of being persecuted for any reason, learn to be docile and lack the courage to change anything.

devwastaken 5y ago

That's good. Don't advocate against yourself. Other kinds of work don't have this because they take on that idealogy of working against themselves. Be privileged and demand more. The companies are perfectly capable of paying it.

pelasaco 5y ago

I used to think like you, until I turned 40 and spent 3 years in a row, doing full SCRUM, babysitting developers while my "manager/PO/everything" does little regarding planning other than "I want this". Conclusion: I dropped to 24 hours/week and have a much better life quality now, working 3 days per week.

kodah 5y ago

I worked in the Marines and am now a software engineer at a large tech firm. The biggest joke in the military was danger pay, which was $7.50. $7.50 if I was working in an active warzone that day. I still stood in formations, pointlessly, for hours. I still watched people who shouldn't have been promoted get promoted over people who should. I still watched people fuck each other over. I still sat though pointless and grueling training videos. I still had 8-12 hour workdays. I still lived with the idea that my life would end early through mental or physical health issues. I could go on. The biggest difference I have is pay and the security to try and improve the system myself. I know if I get fired for trying to do the right thing that I'll find another job, whereas in the Marines as a four year corporal with one year total combat experience I made $20k and had no career prospects should the military see that I am a problem.

ferryman 5y ago
This is really eye opening. Thank you for sharing! Though I feel the military & the Marines specifically might be an outlier and not a valid comparison
- kodah 5y ago
  They may be, tangentially, my experience resonates with blue collar and union workers that I know. Those were the negative examples. More positively, engineers are motivated by many of the same things Marines are and I use these aspects in my day-to-day leadership as well. I exercise transparency, when I know the team is shouldering a burden I acknowledge it and steps were taking to minimize it over time. Marines and engineers like knowing their purpose and place in the world. They both desire a framework that establishes a domain for their autonomy. They both desire leaders who are scrappy enough to fight in the trenches but with the tactical persuasion to have vision from above while leading from the front. They're both willing to put in whatever it takes to accomplish the mission but they want to be recognized for doing so, and not necessarily monetarily. Again, I could go on.

ericmcer 5y ago

Tech pays well and has benefits, beyond that it leaves a lot to be desired. Having worked “shit jobs” tech is great when it’s great but when it’s miserable it is worse than retail, construction, etc. Your self-worth and ego are closely entwined with your performance, and sometimes situations outside yourself can make it hard to perform. At least in retail you never dream about a problem or question if you are smart or good enough to do your job.

b20000 5y ago

best most priveleged job? no social status, pay below marketing and sales execs, relearning tools every year, assumed to be replaceable, leetcode BS every year, doing incredibly hard work with little credit, the list goes on. engineering only pays off if you are a founder and manage to sell the company for a lot of money, which is a gamble. also, no protections such as unions as engineering is a white collar job. sure, there are worse jobs. but claiming that this sort of work is the best job ever is ridiculous.