Oh gawd it’s
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3 years? Heck, I’ve been griping about moderation my whole life.
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I’m just going to blanket reply and say that I’m glad I left TOP and am now here…
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I shouldn’t judge too harshly-- I too have an oratorical style that I sometimes slip into when I think “this is important. you should listen to me.” Historically, it’s been quite effective; but I’m getting old now, and the youth of today haven’t the vocabulary or the sense of style to properly appreciate it.
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Ain’t just the other place…the original thread is unsurprising.
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I feel like I’m missing some context. His tweet is true. Tech, specifically software, is one of the few industries where hopping jobs every year or so is not a problem for your career, and talented people are in demand. You can easily jump way ahead of a typical cost of living increase or raise by going to a new company. Was he responding to something with this? Is it that he was acting as if the money made you better?
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some people can, others are already at or near their best possible spot
not everybody is the smartest guy in the room
but Silicon Valley ideology says if you’re not the übermensch you might as well not exist
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Or you might be in game development, one of the places in tech where there is a growing push towards unionization thanks to abusive labour practices, but which @codinghorror thinks is evil and should just be straight out eradicated.
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For some values of “talented”.
If you are talented, even talented and at the front of the industry, but over a certain age, or a woman, or Black… it’s going to be a lot harder.
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I was on an ipad last night, where typing is a huge pain in the ass. I think it’s all been mentioned, but my frustration is around the fact that the tech stereotype is limited and there are many people with widely divergent experiences.
Job hopping to get more money is all well and good, until someone decides they want to use it as a cudgel against you. For instance, when they can’t say the real reason (like, we don’t want to hire women/POC/disabled/LGBTQ/etc) they can use it as reason to exclude the people they want to exclude, and give a good-ol-boy pass to people more like themselves.
Anti-union sentiment is sounding increasingly like “I don’t like it when other people demand to be treated with respect” to me. Some talk about it it like it’s all about money, but it is more than that.
There might not be as much health and safety concern for keyboard jockeys as for assembly line workers (as an example), but either one could be discriminated against, mistreated, taken advantage of, harassed, or face retribution for speaking up about something wrong.
Everyone who deems themself a rockstar thinks it could never happen to them, but it can. Just because one privilege or another has sheltered that “rockstar” in the past, doesn’t mean they can’t end up on the wrong side of it at some point in the future.
If a system is only fair toward a specific group, while it screws over other groups, it’s an unfair system. We live in a wildly unfair system, and making it more fair is only a problem for the people who benefit from the unfairness.
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Yeah! There aren’t any other professions with both highly-paid people and unions! I mean, have you ever heard of an actors’ union? Or an airline pilots’ union? Or, heaven forbid, a professional sports players’ union?
I mean, the very concept is ridiculous.
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Entry level, no experience IT jobs make $60k a year? I feel like he’s also had his perceptions warped by the specific region he’s in.
…of course, he also says elsewhere that his own entry level job made $25k in today’s dollars. Which makes me think he’s being wilfully obtuse.
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The idea that unions and unionization is solely about money is one of the pieces of propaganda that was used to bust people’s faith in them.
Unions are about security. About knowing you can’t be fired simply so the boss’ nephew can have something to do. Unions mean that when you refuse patently unsafe work, you can’t be fired on the spot. Sure, there are labour laws, but companies know that in most cases, employees end up with the burden of proof on them. Unions throw that back on the employer.
Good unions. Someone can always find someone whose local didn’t do shit. Those people are beloved by the busters who haul them out every time that there’s a whisper of organizing. But unions are also only as good as their members. If you don’t care enough to show up at the AGM, ever, don’t be surprised when your union accomplishes less than you would like.
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Yes tech pays well, and it’s relatively easy to get another decent-paying job, but a lot of tech has some dark aspects. Expectations of 80-hour workweeks, late-night deployments but you’d better still be in the office by 9am or you get written up, even though you worked a 20-hour shift the day/night before and didn’t get out of work until 5am, assumptions that you’ll be on-call 24/7 including days off and vacations, very subtle discrimination, promises of year-end bonuses which are dependent on some project that someone else cancels, bullpens and open-offices, embracing remote work and then after a change of mind suddenly laying off all the remote workers, requiring dark patterns (tracking, spamming, misleading UIs, DRM, etc.) that the developers don’t agree with, etc.
There are plenty of reasons to unionize to improve the state of the industry, even if salary and job availability are quite good. It’s easy enough to think that anyone dealing with any of those dark aspects could just jump jobs, but they’re likely to end up dealing with the same or some of the others at the new place.
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And all that is after you factor in the gamble and time/money spend on a college degree (because what tech job hires people without a degree?), and then continuing education/certifications which you may end up having to pay for out of pocket (I’ve worked in places where people in charge flat-out said they wouldn’t pay for classes or certifications because it’s just a reason for employees to get the certs and then leave for a better job… which sounds like a good argument for unions right there…)
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Just in time for our fourth anniversary, the angry orange owl looks ready to declare war on Discourse itself.
Between this and his shutting down of a conversation around the anonymization feature I have to wonder how long he’s going to let the BBS continue as-is.
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jlw: “Nothing calms down a riled-up user like an automated message suggesting they be more thoughtful.”
Yeah, much better to just ban them for a while with no message at all. That’ll really show them their place, and in no way encourage frustration.
*ahem* sorry, got some sarcasm stuck in my throat.
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I wonder if they can adopt a system to automatically ban people if the connection drops at the wrong time.
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I don’t really understand why he’s involved with the site in the first place
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