https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1346142918600437760?s=19
Also checkout this tweet on what they said about coal miners
https://twitter.com/gabrielwinant/status/1346176034429923335?s=19
https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1346142918600437760?s=19
Also checkout this tweet on what they said about coal miners
https://twitter.com/gabrielwinant/status/1346176034429923335?s=19
It's almost like they don't understand how fucked programmers get. Sure they're paid a cushy income of $75,000-$150,000, but they usually generate several million in profit per year, usually work insane hours, and get almost no ownership.
They're living cushy lives, but they're getting fucked exceedingly hard if you look at how much of their labor value is being siphoned.
Also, class isn't determined by comfort level, it's determined by ownership.
Edit: I am not saying programmers are the most oppressed group in america, as some people seem to think I said. I am just saying they're still workers and they still deserve to unionize. Unionizing will also help lift the illusion many coders have that they're special snowflakes who will one day be billionaires.
i usually work more than 40 and am constantly sidetracked to jump on fires. it has been having an awful effect on my physical and mental health ._.
i also don't even make 75k.
I recently linked to the SO survey elsewhere, but according to the data, the majority of developers work 40 hours, and programmers specifically work the least amount of hours than any of their colleagues (that participated in the survey).
The ones at google and other large companies sure don't.
Company size was also surveyed.
Interesting. Well that's nice to know. I guess the overwork is mostly a video game industry thing.
I started my career earning $17/hr at a boutique healthcare IT firm that billed me for $75/hr. 45-60 hrs/week was very normal at this company. I periodically traveled - at one point two hours a day to my job site, daily, for over a year. I worked all the way up to $35/hr (while they increased their billing rates to $85/hr). But they had me on projects that pushed me to 100+ hours a week. Burnt out, I went job-shopping and got an offer at an O&G firm for $43/hr + big boy bonuses. The President of the company asked me to stay, insisting that I was invaluable but saying he simply didn't have the cash flow necessary to compete with that offer. I asked for equity in the company in lieu of compensation. The conversation immediately ended, and I did not have another conversation with him before I left the firm.
Fuck petty business tyrants. Fuck the professional IT field. Fuck the white collar label. It's all bullshit.
I'm living the life of an 80s era blue-collar laborer. I'm Homer, from the Simpsons. A guy who has his eyes on a stable generally upward-mobile career and comfortable retirement, assuming nothing disastrous comes along and kicks my legs out from under me. I'm what unionization is supposed to create. And I'm watching people a generation behind me get increasingly raw deals as they try to reach where I am right now.
This should be the fucking baseline, not the dream.
I agree. GDP of the US, perfectly divided to every person (including elderly and children,) is around $120,000 a year. Programmer lifestyles (aka, not being constantly worried about bills and being able to afford moderate luxury,) should be the norm. Granted that GDP needs to go down to account for decolonialization and climate change, but most people should have an equivalent lifestyle to $80k a year. Anyone making less is getting robbed by capitalism.
The dirty secret about GDP is money isn't real.
Modernizing the US economy at the pace necessary to avert climate change could be a big boost to GDP. Real quality of life for the bulk of people doesn't need to go down. What would change is the methods that quality is delivered.
The obvious changes would be how we produce energy, how we transit, how we provide health and education, and how we build infrastructure. But there's also a lot of waste we could apply time and energy to address (the sheer volume of packaging going into landfills, the volume of food waste, our loss of biodiversity). Changes to and operation of a new system will take monumental amounts of time, effort, and entrepreneurship. All that makes Big Line Go Up. All of it should entitle participants a place in society that's comfortable.
If anything, median quality of life should continue to improve, even in the seat of empire. There's so much slack that it's still very possible.
deleted by creator
Replacing marketers with journalists would be nice. Less people trying to up your rate of consumption. More people documenting the historical, cultural, and natural.
That cushiness often means extra money which they spend on capital, because it's a "good investment" in our current system.
Could be stocks and bonds.
Could be real estate, like a couple condos or cottages, that they rent out, but don't consider themselves landlords because "it's only a couple properties". I've spoken to a fair amount of people in this situation already. Many liberal, a couple consider themselves leftist. Nonono they're not landlords, despite owning the properties and renting it out. Many don't even do their own property management. They just take the hit and have a separate company do it.
But either way, in order to preserve their extra income, they invest it in ways that cause them, by and large, to tend to side with the ruling class, over their fellow workers.
That extra money doesn't usually just sit in a checking account. And so, people who get "cushy" paychecks often become, effectively, nouveau petty bourgeois.
Of course, this is for people earning significantly more than their cost of living. Not people who earn what would be a lot, if they didn't live and work in an expensive city.
Buying stocks (usually 401k) is the only way to retire under our current system, so that's not surprising. Let's not alienate people for wanting to not work until their final day.
Yeah, it sucks, but people who have a lot invested in the market start to prioritize the health of the market over the conditions their "fellow workers" are experiencing.
It's part of the reason why boomers tend to suck so much ass: they got it relatively good, the younger generations don't, but them reaching over to help stop millennials from drowning might get their clothes wet. So they blame them for not learning how to swim.
Just like how people who invest in real estate tend to care more about keeping property taxes low than what increasing it can do for all of us who are struggling.
Most workers don't even get those opportunities anymore.
Back in the day, you could work an unskilled job, save and invest. Currently, nope.
Your grocery store cashier might have an okay-ish 401(k), and even that's starting to look iffy, nowadays, but who I'm talking about is the person who does a skilled job, earns significantly more than their cost of living and then spends that on getting their 401(k) nic and fat, sure, but still has money afterwards to "diversify" their investments.
I grew up on a four figure income and I'm still under the poverty line, but I live surrounded by "comfortable" middle class pmc types and yeah, it constantly grates on me. Because their jobs actively make shit worse for those on the lowest rungs of the ladder, yet they think that all they need to do is verbally acknowledge it and they're golden.
They're still actively gentrifying neighborhoods, but if they hold a fucking Marxist reading group, at an overpriced hipster cafe, somehow it makes everything better.
Talking about how they deserve the guillotine because they work a job exploiting other employees and get bonuses for it, rather than the actual workers doing the actual work, just goes to show how much they know they're not going to face any palpable repercussions. Because I highly doubt that same person would freely line up if they ever actually get built.
It's just acknowledging the problem without ever working towards fixing it.
It's lib shit.
They still call the cops when they feel "threatened" but they have an entire goddamn essay ready to go to rationalize away why this is different.
Or at least frustrate those trying to call them out on their shit.
If you push for higher property taxes on newer high income homeowners, or zoning laws to keep developers away from "expanding", they'll choke and stammer then push for some vague far off "revolution" instead, and ramble about how them paying higher taxes because they make an order of magnitude more than their "fellow worker" neighbors they're actively displacing is "non solidaristic".
Time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again, I've seen them talk about being proletariat and ramble about solidarity, yet refuse to offer anything but empty words to those "fellow workers" when the time comes for them to actually step up.
I consciously understand them as sort of a new form of petit bourgeois, at least in function. A social class of people who are proles yet are also conditioned to align with the bourgeois. Maybe not a true class, in terms of their relation to capital, but their effects are still present.
Similar to how centrifugal force is a fictional force, but, even if it happens for a less intuitive reason, the effects are still there.
You can't just declare it fake, stand up, and walk off the tilt a whirl.
However, on an emotional level, fuck them for using their free time to dominate the left and offering nothing but empty slogans and signs. And fuck you for trying to enforce civility norms on the part of the internet I go to to escape it.
deleted by creator
Ok
Tldr: GFYS
deleted by creator
Nah, don't think they deserve death.
Just personally aggrieved because I have to deal with these people all the time, and all they do is set up reading groups while actively gentrifying neighborhoods.
deleted by creator
I talk differently here than I do IRL, btw.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I started writing a much more convoluted way of saying this. Thank you.
deleted by creator
Programmers aren’t a class, my dude, you’re just generalizing in a really shallow and frankly silly way
Programmers are still workers, and yes the stereotype is that they're reactionary and petit bouge but clearly the ones that are unionizing are not and it's great that a group of workers with better material conditions than average is forming a union
The stereotype is also massively overblown. Most coders are just regular laborers. Though if you work at a startup you'll find far more tech bros.
deleted by creator