Yet another tech worker rants about being overentitled

YEP!!!

Ask me what my bug regression rate is after ten hours and then we will start talking headcount.

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Incidentally, while I was doing those 80hr weeks, I was living on a collection of teaching pay, scholarships and research grants.

About $35,000/year.

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…can I hire you as my intern? :smiling_imp:

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Tech workers and entitlement? As if that’s something new. Speaking as someone in the tech industry, my peers are often the most elitist, cheapest, and self entitled people I know.

“I work for so-and-so company. How dare you not offer me a discount! I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

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That’s my idea of an awesome vacation, incidentally - I’m jealous.

It’s 7:30pm Saturday and I’ve been here at work since before noon. Worked a full week, too. But one of the youngsters crapped out a key hypervisor and crashed a dozen mission-critical hosts, so I’ll be here a while longer…

But my boss is excellent; she’ll ignore the fact that I’ll take off a day or two during the week to compensate.

And yes I am way too old for this.

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I certainly wouldn’t complain about a repeat trip:

Click through for the album. I’m the one in the faded red pants, BTW.

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Holy schneikes, that looks incredible!

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A damn good and well-considered opinion, if I may say so.

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Exactly. In software, at least, beyond a certain point of overwork - and it’s going to be different hours per day or week for each person and from one week to the next - you are subtracting value for every extra hour you put in.

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I worked at a consolidated post-startup with ~20 employees, where yelling and pressure to work long hours and lowish pay was very much a part of corporate culture. While the boss was personally raking in >$5M a year (in Danish currency). The situation didn’t make sense, this is why some people want to create co-ops instead.

Maybe a factor is that this was webshop and most people there didn’t have a college degree. I only lasted 10 months, and now I’m a partner in a similarly sized software company which has none of these issues at all.

Once you overpay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Daneboss.

Maybe it’s more an aspect of Northern California culture rather than startup culture. Habitually flying off the handle is behavior that is, most generously, looked askance at. Nobody with a marketable skill puts up with a boss who acts like an infant or a drill instructor.

The preferred approach to employee relations is smiling passive-aggressive undercutting and backstabbing. Much more civilized.

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Well, there’s also the somehow not that popular alternative of simply being genuinely friendly and well-intentioned. At my present job, we’re fortunate enough to have a boss who is exactly like that. There’s always negotiation and it’s important to focus on things getting done as the company has to turn the wheels (turning i high profit is not all that important, but the numbers need to be in black every year - even though it’s what we call a “black zero”), but an honestly friendly attitude and spirit in the company really helps.

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This. Sure, for 4 weeks you can run people 16 hours a day. Then fatigue.

My general rule is that by 7pm, people are starting to act really dumb, if they’ve been doing actual work all day.

If people aren’t acting dumb, they haven’t been trying very hard. At all.

So you get this lovely paradox - where the clever, lazy, driven ones start beating on the clever, hardworking, responsible ones at around 7pm; by 8pm they’re done doing that and leave, and the workers carry on till midnight, taking four hours to do a 30 minute job.

Rise up people - rebel!

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Yes, but. Good advice! I’m actually working at a company where my time is invoiced by the hour, and I still prefer pulling salary to being a freelance consultant.

Why?

Two words: Sales work. In meagre times, i’d have to spend uncontrollable amounts of non-invoiceable time on sales work. If you’re in a good company and puill a good salary, that’s a more stable scenario.

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Who has had the worst work environment experience? - since we’re all overentitled /sarcasm

My first tech gig was a start-up doing contract work for the USAF building PTT’s for pilot training on the (then) new glass cockpits. I worked out of Centennial Airport and consulted with McConnell AFB and once flew a Cessna 170B there and back (I completed ground school as part of my OTJ training).

Sounds great right? That part of it was.

My “office”, however, was a converted storage closet - and by “converted” I mean, there was a flat space for a KVM and a chair. It was the standard work til you drop schedule, but the kicker, and why I submit it to the list of “worst working conditions” is that every afternoon beginning at 2:30/3 Care Flight and the local News choppers all got refueled and I shared a wall with the refueling station. The fumes from the AVGas made their way into the ventilation system and it got so toxic in there one afternoon I almost passed out before I realized I was being poisoned. I was used to the smell of aviation fuel, so smelling it didn’t strike me as odd - but when I started to lose focus and went to stand up but collapsed like a sack of potatoes - that, yea, knew there was something wrong.

What’s the worst place you worked? Keeping in mind that excessive hours for excessive periods of time for sub-par pay is typically the entry fee for the privilege of having a bad work experience in the tech sector.

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Catholic hospital as a temp hardware monkey. They were $8 million overbudget and 6 months behind schedule on upgrading their medical records system, which included a full hardware refresh. They hired me and 40 other people on, didn’t give us any direction, and expected us to pay our own way for mandatory TB tests and vaccinations. I don’t mind that they required said test and vaccines, but for fuck sake, if you’re requiring it, and you’re a hospital, then you can pay for it, and not the employee.

Anyway, the reason why this job sucked so badly, in my humble opinion, is that they had me spend three weeks in the hospital sanitation department, cleaning shit. You have to wear a bunny suit, and gloves, and eye-protection, and a fluids resistant mask down there at all times. It’s 90F down there at all times. There is 76dB of ambient noise down there at all times. It smells like a sewage plant down there. You can’t scratch your nose if it itches. I only had a 15 minute lunch break, because I guess I was too young and stupid to call them on it.

They also never sent my final paycheck when I was laid off.

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How do the pilots read their instruments in those? I’ve always wondered.

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