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Sounds like massive cope. If we don’t like work perhaps we can change it without waiting on favors to be handed down to us. Your boss won’t help unless market c

Sounds like massive cope. If we don’t like work perhaps we can change it without waiting on favors to be handed down to us. Your boss won’t help unless market conditions force their hand. The work conditions you mentioned (free weekday nights and the weekend) were fought for by organized workers and are very new, why stop there? I don't think we'll even keep those conditions if that's what we're satisfied with. We already see that in tech with Slack, uncompensated on-call, salaried overtime expectations set during hiring or onboarding, the expectation that prospective hires spend their free time on training projects, etc

AndrewKemendo 4y ago
100% this The idea that work is “over there” and life is “over here” is not only unique historically, it’s also the reason workers have no power. By failing to demand that companies and organizations adjust to us and telling them “this is how we are going to live and companies need to fit into that” then we tacitly let them collude to keep labor power down. If you are alienated from your work, and accept and lean into that alienation, then you have no personal drive to make work serve you and your community rather than you serving it. It’s a race to the bottom of alienation and the paved path of capitalism is basically scraping the bottom at this point.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
If you are a good, productive engineer, your boss will bend over backwards to not lose you. Or they should be. Your negotiation power is a lot stronger than you think. Plenty of jobs out there and it never hurts to remind them that they are replacable. I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 40 hour work weeks, 26 days of vacation per year, etc. Here in Germany, many companies even have policies that state people should not be sending emails or replying to those in their spare time. Such a simple thing. Easy to implement too. Just don't reply outside of work hours. Of course, I'm a startup CTO so I have none of that because I work for myself. But I still take my weekends and evenings because I'm simply less productive and creative when I'm tired and stressed out which is a different way of saying I'm useless when I'm like that. I need my brain to work properly to be effective. So I use my time wisely. And working on weekends or evenings simply isn't a good use of my time. So, I rarely do that. Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. Lots of people are not capable of reflecting on what they do or why they do it and afraid to change or challenge things. They just do the same thing day after day because that just is what they do; no matter how much it sucks. Change starts with you wanting things to change and then acting to make that happen.
- deprecative 4y ago
  > Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different. Take a software job in the US. You're working a minimum of 45 hours per week for 40 hours pay. If you have to work overtime you do so for free. If you get sick you have a mandated PTO allowance of 0. You might get two weeks. Your salary will be somewhere in the ballpark of $70k. Is that good? Yes. Is it enough? No. Not even close. If you change employer or region is any of that going to change? No. It won't. So, what's left? Easy: be born into wealth and retire on it. Just change your life, bro.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    Yes, all I suggested was that workers coordinate to demand conditions. Their reply was that individuals should talk to their bosses alone, or find a new boss. It's always mystified me why people will shoot down the idea of workers organizing, and meanwhile their managers, execs, investors, board and their industry connections routinely meet and coordinate over how to keep wages at a desired market position, in other words how to keep wages as suppressed as possible. They're organized as hell over this, why should workers stay atomized? There's a reason employers don't want workers talking about wages with anyone except their boss.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Sounds pretty miserable. Come to Europe and enjoy life. Plenty of work here in Germany or elsewhere in Europe and pretty easy to get a visa if you have skills. Berlin is absolutely crawling with smart people from the US living a great life here.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - lurking_swe 4y ago

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

100% this The idea that work is “over there” and life is “over here” is not only unique historically, it’s also the reason workers have no power. By failing to demand that companies and organizations adjust to us and telling them “this is how we are going to live and companies need to fit into that” then we tacitly let them collude to keep labor power down. If you are alienated from your work, and accept and lean into that alienation, then you have no personal drive to make work serve you and your community rather than you serving it. It’s a race to the bottom of alienation and the paved path of capitalism is basically scraping the bottom at this point.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

If you are a good, productive engineer, your boss will bend over backwards to not lose you. Or they should be. Your negotiation power is a lot stronger than you think. Plenty of jobs out there and it never hurts to remind them that they are replacable. I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 40 hour work weeks, 26 days of vacation per year, etc. Here in Germany, many companies even have policies that state people should not be sending emails or replying to those in their spare time. Such a simple thing. Easy to implement too. Just don't reply outside of work hours. Of course, I'm a startup CTO so I have none of that because I work for myself. But I still take my weekends and evenings because I'm simply less productive and creative when I'm tired and stressed out which is a different way of saying I'm useless when I'm like that. I need my brain to work properly to be effective. So I use my time wisely. And working on weekends or evenings simply isn't a good use of my time. So, I rarely do that. Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. Lots of people are not capable of reflecting on what they do or why they do it and afraid to change or challenge things. They just do the same thing day after day because that just is what they do; no matter how much it sucks. Change starts with you wanting things to change and then acting to make that happen.

deprecative 4y ago
> Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different. Take a software job in the US. You're working a minimum of 45 hours per week for 40 hours pay. If you have to work overtime you do so for free. If you get sick you have a mandated PTO allowance of 0. You might get two weeks. Your salary will be somewhere in the ballpark of $70k. Is that good? Yes. Is it enough? No. Not even close. If you change employer or region is any of that going to change? No. It won't. So, what's left? Easy: be born into wealth and retire on it. Just change your life, bro.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Yes, all I suggested was that workers coordinate to demand conditions. Their reply was that individuals should talk to their bosses alone, or find a new boss. It's always mystified me why people will shoot down the idea of workers organizing, and meanwhile their managers, execs, investors, board and their industry connections routinely meet and coordinate over how to keep wages at a desired market position, in other words how to keep wages as suppressed as possible. They're organized as hell over this, why should workers stay atomized? There's a reason employers don't want workers talking about wages with anyone except their boss.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Sounds pretty miserable. Come to Europe and enjoy life. Plenty of work here in Germany or elsewhere in Europe and pretty easy to get a visa if you have skills. Berlin is absolutely crawling with smart people from the US living a great life here.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lurking_swe 4y ago