4 ms·
Am I the only one to cringe at the attitude of the author?
by allochthon 12y ago
Am I the only one to cringe at the attitude of the author?
- calibraxis 12y agoOne of my hats is manager, and I find it amusingly honest. My job is to command, and they obey. Buying someone (chattel slavery) is worse than renting them (wage slavery), but it's a matter of degree. Ok, I admittedly expend serious effort at inverting my authority... which is hilariously undermined by the devs I manage, because they're trained to be obedient specialist cogs and it's like pulling teeth to get them to act independently outside a narrow range. So there's pressures towards authoritarianism. But I don't manage only devs (and I'm supporting non-devs to become devs), so it's not all bad.
- fsk 12y agoThere are some differences between being a chattel slave and a wage slave. If you have a chattel slave, you won't waste money investing in teaching them new skills. If you have a wage slave, why would you invest in teaching someone a new skill? After they master the skill, you now have to pay them market rate for that skill (or they'll leave). So why not just pay market rate from the beginning rather than investing in training someone?
- Kalium 12y ago> So why not just pay market rate from the beginning rather than investing in training someone? Limited availability? Need for combining a skill with other skills? There are good reasons.
- Gifford 12y agoA slave master is highly motivated to invest in a slave's skills, because the master extracts the profit of that investment.
- nandemo 12y agoThat's what gp comment is saying. Rewriting it for clarity: "If you have a chattel slave, investing in teaching them new skills is not a waste of money".
- walterbell 12y agoMore interesting would have been a discussion of hierarchy: how were "management" tiers motivated, where did ordered delegation stop and palace coups begin, what are the modern equivalents of that top tier boundary?