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- cross-posted to:
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What I hate about IT is that you have to wear multiple hats. Not unique to IT in the slightest, but IT often has to do weird shit that IMO should not be at all in the job description. Management for some reason is convinced IT should be ok with doing physical labor to move shit around, should be ok to be part time logistics department, should be part time project manager, should be part time janitor, should be like HR, should be sales people, should be public speaker, should be part time QA, should be part time in legal, etc etc etc. It’s fucking ridiculous.
I just want to work with the tech. Get the people out of the fucking way. All I want is the tech ffs. It’s in my fucking title.
Omg, this. The part time legal thing is happening to me right now.
I’m building a small app for a (multimillion dollar) company. Nothing major. I tell the project manager: “hey, you guys need a EULA to publish in the app store. You can use the std apple one or write your own. Tell me what you want to do.”
This woman comes back to me with: “what do you think we should do?”
Like b#%^!, I don’t know! Why would you want me to tell you how define the legal relationship between you and your customers?
After some prodding, she forwards the request to legal and sends back a DRAFT EULA asks: “Can you review this?”
NO. I cannot review legal documents. I’m horrendously under qualified for that!!!
/end rant
Fuck the labour purchasers. The best time to unionise was decades ago, the next best time is right now. Fucking unionise now.
And help each other unionize!!!
Stealth mass unionize the company with a matrix community that helps coordinate everybody
Also making private unionized competitors to compete with stock non-unionized companies. The former will every time especially by making a better product, and take care of employees and customers
Let’s fucking goooooo!!!
WHAT? I’m shocked. I like dancing with AI and training them to make me homeless
I like dancing to businesses that value AI more than employees bankrupting themselves and being replaced with better. Let them be companyless and us owning all our stuff including our homes
No industry in the history of industry has ever wanted a union.
You get people pushing for unions because you deserve unions.
The tech industry is such a shitshow right now they deserve unions.
Hard agree. Every other day a big tech firm will conduct sweeping layoffs of thousands or tens of thousands of employees. These companies are not on the verge of bankrupcy.
Its like a bad ex you dont go back to them. You move on and find better. In this case join/make a better one, or if still in a company then mass unionize
The other thing is the management and boards of tech companies are incredibly incestuous. Your board is made up the boards of everyone else, they’re all CEOs competing for the same workers.
You’ve got two or three big investment firms that run the boards of all the major companies, which is anti competitive too. They’ll always push for a product they own to their other companies. They know when their other portfolio companies are doing layoffs, what they’re paying their staff, etc. they even share that with other companies so they can “compete” on salaries.
For an industry that cargo culted anti cargo culting, the management and execs all cargo cult the same over hiring and mass layoffs.
Employees get treated like crap now.
10 years ago I’d work overtime near a big release or when there was an outage. But now you get pinged all the time, there are no boundaries, and there’s an expectation. I’ve had CEOs joke about 9-9-6 work schedules and just openly flaunting how much worse they can make your life.
The terminal rot starts when your company brings in some ex Amazon or Meta execs (C suite, VP, director, whatever). They push for an almost pure numbers perspective. Judgement and morality be damned, think of the metric first.
Numbers are what these people know — these people survived the natural selection process at the most hostile and politicking companies you can think of. They’ll do anything to survive and get ahead.
You cut your support team as a cost centre — support doesn’t scale.
Then before you know it you’re 4 years into “we just have to push extra hard this year guys, the pace will slow down next year, we’ll get headcount too”. The whole time your performance reviews are getting more frequent and become more invasive — we’re adding an AI use component, make sure to list your growth areas and the impact (metrics!) of everything you’ve shipped. Remember, you’re competing with everyone we could hire, so how did you get better than them this quarter?
This field used to be good. And no, it wasn’t free lunches that made it good. It was having teams that gave a shit about the customer, it was putting the customer above all else, and it was going home feeling like you worked on something useful and good. You worked hard, you delivered value, and you got paid well.
It was good when it was new and growing and adding to innovation. Once the bean counters figured out the grey beards’ magic it got corrupted.
I grew up with stories of kids my age literally changing the world with new technologies and standards for the tech world. All the way into college, those people were innovating and developing things and having ethical back bones.
We were a generation of Nikola Teslas, but we didnt see the Edisons that were hiding in the wings.
It was having teams that gave a shit about the customer, it was putting the customer above all else, and it was going home feeling like you worked on something useful and good.
That was because there weren’t enough engineers back in the day. Then everybody went into learn to code, visa programs got scaled up, the after covid boom faded and the market became flooded enough to be employer owned.
Yeah, I fucking hate working with people who are those “learn to code for the paycheque” types.
I mean I get it, it paid well. But I can’t stand working with these people — they have no taste, they have no standards, they make it harder to get good jobs.
Depends on how you define “the industry.” The tech workers are the ones driving the actual production of goods and services, so it’s pretty reasonable to say that the workers are the industry.
Obviously this headline assumes that CEOs, managers, and investors are “the industry” in question, but I don’t necessarily agree.
The workers are the industry. The greedy shareholders are the problem.
Time to go to private unionized companies for existing and new alternatives to existing ones
It’s kind of dumb to say IT people want to union but “the industry” doesn’t want to.
Guess “who” is the industry? Yeah, you are right, it’s the IT people…
Guess who can be replaced in the long run: a company or a skilled person?
THE CEOS DONT
FTFY
Perhaps the majority of workers in the industry should have better say as opposed to the corpo parasites who want to suck the workforce dry of their net worth
The industry never wants it.
They should have unionized 20 years ago when it was easy instead of crowing about how useless the humanities were.
I have always found it odd that tech/IT is not more unionized and supervised by some sort of professional order.
Doctors, nurses, construction workers, airline pilots etc are all deemed important trades and professions that require some form of professional order to supervise and attest the competency of the labor.
But for some reason IT is all like “you watched some Youtube videos, got certified by Cisco 15 years ago? All set to configure the security of our healthcare network”. I am exaggerating obviously but still… IT is so intertwined in everything some sort of professional order would make sense. And union definitely.
There’s no central engineering order either.
Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren’t a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as “lone wolf frontiersmen” and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it’s very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.
Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is… well Valve, and even that’s not a true co-operative.
Also other than a few outliers (gaming) IT and development jobs have been pretty good in recent history. There hasn’t been much push for change until the circumstances shifted.
Valid point. Thus far, tech workers in general have had a pretty comfortable relationship with the executive class by comparison to other industries. That made it a little to easy to dismiss the risks of being that cozy with them without some kind of protection.
I don’t know if it’s just where I live but a lot of IT workers tend to be right leaning libertarians and want the “freedom” of being able to “negotiate on their terms.”
UNIONIZE
My union made my healthcare much better and is the reason behind my raise. Its great!
