Did you use the extra money you didn’t give to the insurance company to buy more gin & juice? 
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cold pressed, from a delicious slurry bag.
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Ah the fabled Boozero machine. Only the best for you.
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I’m thinking… Boozebro? Nothing but the finest juniper, quinine, and wood grain alcohol for my discerning customer.
It’s delivered in a standard bottle, but you have to buy my patented $40,000 tipping machine for the full experience.
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Yes but the proper tipping of alcohol is what really sets off the flavor. I hope it’s made with a plethora of custom machined aluminum.
And if you don’t have a profession, there’s a good chance that you’re getting paid so little that you need a plethora of OT or a second income to cover your expenses. And then you don’t even get the romanticism—you’re just shamed for being stupid and lazy and dragging the rest of society down because you don’t want to spend 2/3 of your life working and 1/3 sleeping.
That’s not to say that academia and tech don’t represent the extremes of workplace culture, but these aren’t entirely industry-specific trends. Everyone is being expected is work harder for less, with the billionaire class meanwhile picking our pockets because what’s good for them is supposedly good for us.
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I didn’t, but I have a dram of single malt left in the cupboard, and I will drink to that.
Regarding the insurance mentioned below, I seriously hope you haven’t had a c_holler experience. =/ (Caused quite a stir on German twitter a while ago.) Even if you haven’t had anything in that league, I would definitely add a very sympathetic reactiongif if I weren’t on edge and roaming currently, travelling between countries.
I hope you are fine, and may your health insurance cover never cease to cover you again.
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I’m a software dev. I don’t think my entire industry is fueled by shit head schemes like this, but enough of it is to make me embarrassed. I’ve spent the majority doing “enterprise” work for various industries not sexy not exciting but pays well enough. I worked for a start up for two years, it was all right I don’t think our product was evil, our CEO was probably a sociopath of sorts (not in the murdering way). I used to want nothing more than to live in the Bay area. I still love the area, but it’s in spite of my industry not because of it.
Rentberry seems downright evil. Not sure what the answer to it is though or if “outlawing” it is appropriate. I’d like to live in a world where it fails because people refuse to engage with it.
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FTA:
call it “Smart,” and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair.
Wow, that’s a nice bit of projection there.
While I agree with many of the points the article made, its mean-spirited and nasty delivery isn’t charming or clever, it’s just mean-spirited and nasty.
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I missed the dot com boom/bust (took my time enjoying college). I mostly worked enterprisey stuff for DOD or various large corporations. Only time I worked 90 hours in a week was as a consultant and I got paid for every hour of it. I did do far too many 60 hour weeks at a startup. Glad I left when I compare the money I made there (even after exercising options) to the money I made at the Insurance company before… I wish I had stayed at the Insurance company for those two years. Still there’s some ego stroking from having worked on an app/service that gets used by thousands of people as opposed to 10’s or 100’s of people. Glad to be done with it.
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Musician here as well; while I sympathize I find it hard to relate to the angstiness in these stories because this is so totally normal for musicians, and when its the water you swim in it seems perfectly natural.
And I for one will stick up for freelancing, it has its downsides sure but it has its upsides as well and if a law were passed tomorrow forcing all work to w-2s and banning 1099 work at least half my work would simply disappear.
This is another data point in my “careful what you complain about” theory. Wasn’t that long ago that the paternalistic model of long term employment was cause for rebellion, and now it’s being pined for nostalgically. Turns out the grey flannel suit doesn’t seem so bad now.
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I was into my late 20s by then and while it was a big corporate bureaucracy my coworkers were as diverse as one can get for the area and all great people who taught me a lot about keeping windows servers from acting up.
Good luck with your career, this short story about ambitions might amuse you.
Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush
http://www.zumsteg.net/toothbrush/toothbrush_conversations.html
I graduated in 2002, didn’t find a job “in the field” until 2003 which was at an internal help desk to a DOD project (at 12 bucks an hour). They put me to work building a web application for the rest of the help desk team and then seemed confused when I took another job less than a year later after getting an across the board “stellar review” but no raise. SMH. Next company was better 15 bucks doing XML tagging for two weeks until they learned I could code. They at least bumped me up in pay. Man the early 2000’s were a weird time.
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There is no real need for long time requirements to be coupled with poor pay. In my real job, I am more or less always on duty, and when things are happening, I work 24 hours a day, with little catnaps when I can fit them in. That pace is only sustainable for a few days at a time, but it is part of the job.
At the same time, Every hour worked gets paid for. There is even a pay structure when I am on call, but don’t actually get called out to work. I still have to keep the radio with me, and cannot go into town. That gets compensated. If lunch is a sandwich that I grab and eat while walking back out on deck, they pay me for the hour I would normally have to sit down and eat. If I don’t even have a chance to grab a sandwich, there is a payroll code for that.
But the point is that a business that requires extraordinary amounts of time or work, should be able to compensate people required to work like that.
Not that the company cares about me. Most of the time, they are required to to have people with certain qualifications supervising certain types of work, and those qualifications are difficult to acquire. My whole theory of making myself nonreplacable has revolved around going to schools to get all kinds of obscure qualifications. Heavy lift crane operations, aircraft firefighting, Chemical weapons defense. Whatever.
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I like the thesis, but I don’t like the writing. If we’re so superior to schlubby dads then why are we about to throw ourselves in front of the train? If the piece tried to resolve that somehow, then I would like it very much. But it doesn’t do that.
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I dunno the posting spoke to me. I’m schlubby but I have no babies, I spent 200 dollars on a fitness tracker not 800 bucks on a smart watch. Still I appreciate the nihilistic writing style especially considering the way we seem hell bent upon creating some sort of dystopian society.
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I am trying to imply that it might be that the standards for tech are set by people who expect everyone to be happy to exploit themselves. And since it’s the defining industry of our time, all other branches of industry and society, there is a true trickle-down effect.
Trickling down my spine.
I’m reminded of this post from last year:
And, unfortunately, this one:
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While there are a many shades of grey, the sparkling electric cowboy suit of neoliberal overloard just glitters more nicely in the colour of the American dream…
