> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years
Sometimes I try to talk to my 83 year old dad, who was a Teamster at the same company for his entire 35 year career, about the software industry. He's so surprised how often people like me change jobs, how we switch companies as a way to get a raise, and just generally how different expectations are. When I told him about how I'd left a company partly because they didn't promote me after 18 months, he didn't say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. In his world, 18 months just isn't long enough to feel entitled to a promotion. Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation. It's a different world we're in, but I'm not sure exactly what makes it different: is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
One thing I'm fairly certain about is that companies don't treat us worse than they treated blue collar workers in the 70s. I think we'd all be surprised by the poor selection of candy in the catered employee cafeteria they had over at the shipping depot.
There are a lot of factors for the change in loyalty but I think the single biggest one is from when the managerial class went all-in on outsourcing. Those execs didn't care that they had a factory full of workers that had been loyal for decades, they happily sent those job oversees for a bump in that year's profit (and the resulting bonus). The people making those decisions didn't care that so many families, towns and cities were ruined by these actions, through no fault of the workers.
Given that betrayal of the old social contract, why on earth would anyone choose to be loyal to such companies? Work loyalty still exists with individual managers or owners of small businesses that actually interact with their workers, but these days most workers correctly assume that most corporations are being run with little regard to anything aside from profit; and those workers act accordingly.
Loyalty died because the C-suite are comically greedy idiots and don't care to keep the good workers by recognizing their worth. Mind you, they never really did, but people just realize it a bit more now, plus things have gotten worse in that regard.
I can't tell you the amount of good colleagues I've seen leave because management was too stubborn to give them a 7% raise. The most baffling thing is that they'll have no qualms (or perhaps no choice) to subsequently replace them with someone else for at minimum double of whatever 7% would've cost them. This causes a cascading issue where people are annoyed that new hires get such a big boost while the current staff have to fight for every measly percentage increase, so the older employees slowly trickle out.
I've had it happen myself too. A place I really enjoyed working at, I found the work great and had a great relationship... But the CTO stubbornly refused to give me a 9% raise. I referred my friend and started looking elsewhere. I got a roughly 30% paybump, and my friend got hired to replace me for roughly 20% more than what I asked for.
So why on earth would I be loyal? The people running the show are hilariously short-sighted and can only see the beacon emanating from their VC buddies shoveling money their way, so whatever, I don't care ultimately if something I worked on dies or not.
"keep flogging the same shitty technology while bribing gub'mnt officials to ban new stuff" is not especially smart. no need for an advanced degree for that.
but boy howdy does it work, and make a lot of money.
> Because to be successful being greedy you have to be smart
There are plenty of people who are greedy and not smart. I'm not sure what basis this statement has. Plenty are greedy and not smart for their entire lives.
They are not smart. For many stupid would be an understatement.
The amount of stupid people who fail upwards is far larger than the few and far between who get there on merit.
My direct boss at the moment is one of the smartest people I've ever met. The people running the plant are some of the stupidest I've ever seen. Constant mistakes, short-sightedness, asking questions anyone who works at the plant should know in their first week, etc.
Best part is it's a relatively small city, so everyone knows everyone kinda. Our plant manager (top guy on site) was in a middle management role at his old plant (the worst in the city), where he was fired for incompetence. He wound up with us and within the year was the highest role.
We have lost countless years of experience due to people leaving over this guy and his cronies. He has no formal education, hasnt been in the plant life long enough to know anything, constantly makes idiotic decisions, etc.
These are the people who wont get out of the way of the people doing the actual work, and make their lives/work measurably worse due to their stupidity, greed, and incompetence.
A tale as old as time, yet for some reason we keep letting it happen.
> They are either greedy or stupid. You have to pick one.
Nah. Some people are definitely both, and it's the "stupid" bit that causes the "greed" thing to be applied blindly therefore achieving the opposite of what they wanted.
ie they make poor decisions and lose money instead
They're greedy, so they refuse a small pay bump to keep the current people happy.
Their bet is that they won't actually leave if they get rejected on the raise. This is where the stupidity comes in, they actually think people would be loyal and stay despite requesting a tiny raise.
What happens instead is that people are, obviously, annoyed and start looking elsewhere, where they'll get a much larger pay bump anyway. Now the idiots are forced to look for new people at much above what they could've paid to keep the old person, because no one is going to accept a new job below market rate.
Paying more for worse staff is stupid. In some cases the employee is good at their job but has languished for so long they’ve burnt too many bridges to be promoted. The only response for these people is work to retirement or job hop.
Some of it is greedy incompetence but a lot of it is just incentives structures.
It is easier to make the justification in a lot of orgs that you need to go out and hire someone to replace someone who left at "market rate", than that you need to pay someone x% more, based on work that is probably nebulous to whoever you need to make the case to.
I don't think there has ever been a time where this has not been the case outside of very small companies or niche operations. The same sort of incentives are endemic in a business of any scale, because ultimately org structures end up as pyramids and people will intrinsically compete to be at the top
That's no kind of answer! The system made me do it is not an answer! Recall the incentive structures are made by management. So who in hell is in charge here? Management or the paperwork? People or the small 'c' culture of the company? There's no way to double talk or tap dance you're way out: management blew it. 9% is less than the new guy's pay. The old guy is pissed which is why he wrote post. And the rest of us have recorded one more reason "vaunted" American management is stuck on stupid.
(Note I am American and work for American companies. I've had good experiences and terrible in the ol' USA. We have the fundamentals here but damn it too many management people just don't listen to it.)
> Recall the incentive structures are made by management.
I think more incentive structures naturally emerge over time. Managers have other managers who have other managers... etc who have some different set of incentives. There are also shareholders
A lot of time the right smart thing is done anyway, but usually that's luck in having a couple of good smart people in your org chart chain, or just the rising tide of the economy making it easier for generosity to prevail
Management "blew it", but there were probably no negative consequences to them in the case. There are negative consequences for the shareholders when this sort of stuff happens over time in the aggregate... which I believe you get to call the "Principal Agent Problem" if you earn an Economics degree or understand game theory or something...
I hear you ... and in fact you make a good point re: couple of smart guys (or ladies - sometimes the guys are the problem). It's essential to have people with enough self awareness and security and medium to long term thinking to not bow to as I perjoriatively labeled it small 'c' culture (as opposed to the good cap 'C' culture). Culture like political parties are only as good as the fundamentals they hold up long term.
Part of that skill is knowing what can go wrong. And to that end there's no better short read than Ishikawa's tqm the japanese way.
I also agree with your other point: defects are often seen in aggregate when unfortunately the damage is done and cynasysm and infighting are almost unstoppable.
Unions reward seniority over everything else, including skill. I'd much rather have the current environment of being able to leave for something better without starting over again at the bottom of the pile.
> Unions reward seniority over everything else, including skill. I'd much rather have the current environment of being able to leave for something better without starting over again at the bottom of the pile.
Let's see if you still hold that opinion in a few years when you reach your 40s/50s, can't find a job because ageism, and you have to compete with people who work 16h/day surviving on cold pizza and Red Bull.
Already well into that age range and have no trouble finding jobs because I'm productive and continue to upgrade my skills. Those habits are rewarded, as opposed to rewarding you for simply existing longer/having gotten hired earlier.
I may be a "programmer type" but I do know 25kg isn't a lot of weight to carry around.
The article is specifically about tech workers in Amazon, so I think it's pretty clear from that and the rest of the context that I was discussing unions in relation to tech workers.
I was disputing the claim that you a) it's hard to get a job in your 40s or 50s, and b) if it is hard, it's because of ageism and not something you did (or didn't do). And as others have pointed out, there is certainly a class of employee who is going to be chugging energy drinks and working 16h a day but if you're 40+ you're not competing with them.
I suspect much of the ageism in tech comes from talented/successful people filtering out of the mainstream workforce by 40s/50s. I think a lot of very skilled people end up with the means to focus on other parts of life, or to do whatever they want in tech and not be beholden to a corporate master.
Which isn’t to say that everyone who doesn’t retire by then is bad, just that the ratio is different than 20s and 30s and this probably colors people’s view of the group. Especially with the crazy industry growth we’ve seen over the career of the average 50 year old in tech.
The idea that a lot or even a sizeable percentage of tech workers can "focus on other parts of life" or "do whatever they want" within 15-20 years of working is frankly kind of ridiculous.
The median developer salary in the US is in the neighborhood of $110k/yr and includes $0 in bonuses and $0 in stock. Outside of the San Francisco bubble simply being able to type JavaScript into a computer does not put you on a trajectory to retire decades before your peers in other industries.
Is there significant ageism in other parts of the industry though?
I thought it was typical for, say, a regional bank software department, to be staffed with a mix of ages up to retirement age, not mostly people in their 20s and early 30s.
All of the ageism concern I’ve seen discussed has been about big tech and startups. Are 48 year olds being pushed out of working at mid sized insurance companies?
Of course it's a meaningful reference point. It is the primary reference point when discussing how much someone can expect to earn in a given profession. Half the developers in the country are making less than that and it's not because they started programming in 2018, it's because 99% of developers do not get any bonus, do not get any stock, and are lucky to hit $200k total comp in their life without going into management.
If you're going to say something like 90% of the workforce is under 30 you're going to need to cite something because I just absolutely do not believe that.
If you had such long career and still compete with these guys, perhaps consider a different career. I'm in my 30s and have no reason at all to worry about this, as my job is no longer about crunching code as quickly as possible - my input is on a much more strategic higher abstraction level that these younger code crunchers don't have the necessary experience for. The VP that manages me would consider 16h workdays and Redbulls a fireable offense at my position.
Yup. I watched a friend get fired because the union salary was double for people with 20 years of work. Yeah, they were more efficient and knowledgeable, but not 2x. So they replaced him with a younger new grad.
Pretty much all of them, really. Business concerns are always important because the union doesn't want to kill the business. That would be really bad.
In the case of this example, the manager was given a budget and that meant choosing staff. So she told my friend that he could go the easy way or the hard way. There are plenty of causes that the manager could dream up. It's not hard. If you want a cause, they can find one.
> So she told my friend that he could go the easy way or the hard way. There are plenty of causes that the manager could dream up.
That's avoiding union contracted processes. Union representation can help a worker when management is concocting bullshit issues. The "hard way" might make things more difficult for a worker (closer supervision, tedious training) but it's definitely harder for the manager than if the worker quits.
I'm in a union and they don't "reward seniority over everything else". In my experience this is either made up or affects some narrow class of jobs but is used as an excuse to bash all unions. As another response says, unions do what their members want.
Pilots bid for jobs based on seniority and are laid off in reverse order of seniority. Same with police officers. Every union job there is has a concept of seniority number and there's no way to get around that unless you go into management in which case you're no longer in the union (such as smaller police departments where the lieutenant and/or chief are not under union purview).
They also don't hire anyone. They are not the ones who do the hiring. Airlines it seems - for a current example - have relinquished some hiring / firing authority to union rules.
Seems to me (most) unions and old-style corporations reward seniority because they are captured.
(Roughly speaking) the old-timers stick together because they can and because there are old-timers. And few people get promoted because there is only a very narrow path upward (say, 6-10 lower to a ground-floor supervisor, 6 of these to a higher rank). That necessarily creates a very thin path up. And there is space up only when the previous person is promoted or leaves. There is respect for the skill of a senior employee when it has been proven but respect will only buy you so much. Mostly that skill is put to good effect without massive salary change. There is nominal seniority-based salary increase because that's affordable and easy to manage - and is captured. That is, this salary scale was designed by the previous seniors. Same for promotion order and layoff order.
Seniority then becomes a way to "force" loyalty: If you jump, you may not be one of the top dogs who think they have captured the system. No need for (much) higher salaries if the staff themselves support seniority.
My brother works in a grocery warehouse in CA. Their union seems very seniority focused. He’s worried about being laid off but doesn’t want to look for a new job as he said his seniority clock would start over at the new place.
Don’t you have like scales that automatically increase with age? Of course there’s different levels of scales, but I’m fairly certain there is an age component.
One thing to understand is that while the US and Europe both have a thing called "unions", they are different enough beasts that any comparison between the two are essentially meaningless. Even comparing "unions" between European countries is pretty tricky.
Democracy does what their people want, yet about half the population are really unhappy after each election. You as an individual can't change things in most cases, you get what the union gives.
>>Unions reward seniority over everything else, including skill. I'd much rather have the current environment of being able to leave for something better without starting over again at the bottom of the pile.
You are arguing against the very idea of a Union. The whole point of a union is people sticking together for long to tend to each other's interests.
Why should a union reward someone known to be a grifter?
The people with stake in the game (seniority, been together longer) can stick together and continue to drive what they think has worked for them (seniority). I haven't needed to mention skill or effort or initiative one bit here.
While the newcomers have little stake in the game, perhaps don't even vote, vote in dispersed order, etc.
>The whole point of a union is people sticking together for long to tend to each other's interests.
I spent almost a decade doing union labour in Canada (auto industry). The idea that they "stick together" any more than any other group is not my experience.
During one of our negotiations, the company proposed making everyone hired after a certain start date a "temporary employee" (no benefits, lower pay, can be laid off or recalled with 24h notice). This would affect 25% of the employees. In return, the company offered a bigger signing bonus: $2500 vs the usual $1000.
The union leadership recommended voting against the contract; the fact they even brought it to the table is crazy. And the union membership voted it in anyway. Screwed over fellow workers for $1500 a head. It was that easy. Us "temporary workers" were now working beside people making 30% more money, doing the same job but facing more uncertainty. We were gradually laid off over a couple years, all in the name of "corporate viability". I had spent years hearing about "solidarity", but the second an extra paycheque was on the table no one cared about their "union brother".
Joke's on that union, I guess: the plant closed during the 2008 financial crisis and everyone lost their job. Hope that $1500 lasted!
If Adam was there with the Union for 3 more years, then union obviously rewards Adam more than Bob.
The word 'Union' itself means a association of people with a purpose of taking care of each other. You are free to not be a part of such an arrangement. But that doesn't mean that the association is wrong, or its members shouldn't look after each other, or they are wrong to do so.
In fact you are free to do whatever you want, and they are free to what they want. Its just history shows that if you can win big individually(outlier) you are not likely to love unions. But very few people can be outliers so for the bulk of the human race unions work just fine. You tend to do well on the average on the longer run.
Incidentally, this job-hopping is bad for software, because too much institutional knowledge is getting lost, and the job-hoppers don’t get to experience the long-term consequences of their design and implementation decisions.
It can be good for software too. Best practices and new ways of working slowly dissolve through other companies as employees move around. Many of the great technologies invented at the FAANGs eventually get recreated at other companies or in open source because of this movement.
> Best practices and new ways of working slowly dissolve through other companies as employees move around.
Doesn't help against cargo culting and reinventing wheels Just Because We Can And Have The Money.
Just because Google did Kubernetes everyone else followed suit despite there being competitors available (e.g. DCOS, but that one sadly failed because it was utter bananaware). Everyone followed Google for Angular and then went over to Facebook's React, and on the backend side it's Go here and Rust there.
All of those were made to solve problems with their predecessors and I believe that almost every one of them (Angular is debatable) has been a success in moving the needle.
> All of those were made to solve problems with their predecessors
This is not really a question, yes. But... they're sledgehammers and most of the people used them because "the large ones are doing it" - for a loooot of use cases simpler solutions such as plain old jQuery+SCSS / Portainer or Docker Swarm/Compose would have been more than enough.
I have worked with both DCOS and Kubernetes - the latter is way more coordinated and polished, with also better fundamentals underneath.
This results in a situation where a lot of different places have logical, reasonable reasons to pick k8s because it matches reasonably well 80% of their needs, and while everyone's 80% is different, there's enough overlap. This pulls in, like frame dragging, others who might not actually need it, but it's not because some scaling memes.
In practice, a lot of initial intake for k8s was not bananas scaling arguments, but it actually solving problems for people who either had growing complex messes, or considered the spend associated with "good practices" that are often thrown as argument against kubernetes, like running separate cloud instances for every application.
Similarly, everytime I look at Nomad and related stack, it turns out that various bits are missing, and DIY will be harder than with k8s-like stack because it's not properly designed to be extensible.
Having good documentation is great, but there is nevertheless a substantive cost in high turnover even if you have good documentation. Documentation doesn’t replace experience with the product or project, nor is it ever complete.
Looking back at my own career, I do not jump ship every 18 months, and I have been able to accumulate deep knowledge that are broadly applicable, that has enabled a lot of options when it is time to go to a new company.
So in addition to having better continuity of institutional knowledge, there is a benefit to staying on longer (at least for me).
I've seen former coworkers brag on their CVs about "highlights" for work they did that was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. But they didn't stay long enough to watch the meltdown.
Middle-upper management also excels at this method of escaping blame/consequences. Move in, talk big and change a bunch of stuff, then on to the next before the tickets start coming in.
The thing that is different is the ridiculously high demand for developers since the 1990s, minus downturns like the dot com bust. Developers can job hop and get perks because software is still in the process of eating the world.
But no boom lasts forever. In other creative fields or games development, where supply far exceeds demand, the situation is much less favorable for workers and that's eventually where the software industry is going to be as well.
I am not so sure that's true. Almost anything that gets created today involves some software, and infrequently some new software, in the pipeline.
Do remember that there is a whole bunch of software that needs to be created for our household appliances, any electronic device (those tiny little SoCs that control a sensor or voltage or whatever), or tools used to make anything else. We are also in the midst of a push to get everything "digitized", including our entire homes, cars, buses, libraries, movie catalogs, music libraries, battery charging, communication infrastructure etc. And everyone keeps a computer or two or three (phone, smartwatch, tablet, fitness trackers) on them at almost all times — all these need software to do something useful.
Basically, I think software developers are going to remain in need as long as we rely on computers. And just like farming has never gotten obsoleted because we continue to need food (though increasing the brute force of the tools we have has allowed us to rely on fewer farmers), we'll continue to need new software (it's still an open question if there are tools like Copilot that will enable us to achieve similar efficiency improvement and rely on fewer software developers, but my guess is no).
>is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
Well unions are pretty well known for prioritizing seniority above all else.
It's one of the biggest negatives that come up against them.
> Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation.
Because truckers don't "create value" the same way that software engineers do. If you had a company of 100 of the "top 0.1%" truck drivers, maybe you could charge a bit more because your insurance would be lower and you'd have fewer accidents and late deliveries. If you had a company with 100 of the "top 0.1%" software engineers there's a good chance you're on your way to having a company worth billions of dollars.
Truckers with solid driving records and good ability get specialized jobs.
If you have the top percentile of drivers chances are you’re making heaps of money moving oversized loads, nuclear materials or running time sensitive contracts.
You trained yourself, you paid for your schooling, you continue to learn on your own dollar for the company. The company doesn't pay for any of that anymore like back in the day, so yes, you must do what you can to keep your career flowing, jobs are just stepping stones, they aren't entitled to loyalty, because they stopped being loyal first.
Every company I've worked at has given me a yearly budget for education, or has just had a rubber stamp policy of paying for classes. I know a few older people whose companies paid for them to take night classes, but I didn't know it was as common as all that.
> is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
I would rather phrase the question as: why should any employee have loyalty towards a given company? The main goal of companies is to make money (if they could make money without employees, well imagine that). The main goal of an employee is also to make money. People don't usually work for free (there are exceptions, of course, I'm talking here about the vast majority of works and employees). Given these statements, it's natural that:
a) companies get rid of employees that don't make money (unproductive employees). Layoffs happen every single day
b) employees switch to other companies for more money. Obviously, this is easier to do in some industries than others, but the essence is the same in all of them
It didn't use to be that way, which is what OP was trying to get at. Companies used to reward loyalty with bonuses that scaled by tenure, and tried to retain workforces that they spent considerable resources on training, even through lean times.
Yeah the main issue I see now is that the only way to get more money is to be promoted into usually management. That causes everyone wanting to be mangers even though a lot of engineers should not be. However, they refuse to pay a senior engineer who runs circles around everyone more because they are at the top of the pay band. I would be perfectly fine staying at the same job with no promotion if it meant I got yearly raises/refreshers that outpaced inflation. In reality you have to job hop or get promoted to get a meaningful raise.
Things used to be more local, and less cynical. You're of course correct in your assessment, logically speaking. But with a shred of empathy—on both sides—it is also clear that loyalty to your employer is beneficial to them, since they can rely on their workforce even if they face a rough year, and loyalty to your employees is beneficial to them, since they can rely on a stable job, even if live gives them a hard time. Both situations do occur all the time, and are just part of human existence.
So I wonder if this is either the end-stage capitalism everyone is talking about, or the community aspect got thrown under the bus somewhere.
Yes, there's also that side. You're right. When I wrote my comment I was thinking more about the classic tech company/startup. But definitely there are other kind of companies more local (and in the past they were more common).
> company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation
Companies reward loyalty because they can keep you behind the market rates. Hiring a new person costs you market rates. Keeping you around with 2-3% increases every year with occasional promotions of 5% will ensure you stay behind the market.
I think the key is consistency, and it is consistency that is hard for a company to guarantee. If a company does not promote often, like Apple, employees will be content to stay where they are. But once the company starts to promote some people in a short time frame and especially some think the promoted do not deserve the promotion, the employees will start to envy, to demand a speedy promotion, and the company will slowly, sometimes even quickly, turn into a promotion-oriented culture. Case in point, working in Google was such a prestige 15 years ago, and few people would even think about reaching E6. What about now?
That loyalty makes zero sense when one will be downsized in 0.1 seconds if it would make the CEO 1% richer and staying in the same role means getting paid less than market rate including new folks in the same org.
As a uniom fellow he might well be overpaid if he at 30 years in makes a lot more than the 10 year guys while doing the same exact job as them.
Basically people like your dad were getting tithed by management for loyalty while wondering why you don't tithe your company for security in a market where the most important goods require 2-5x as much.
Many blue collar workers in the 70s could afford a house, a car and a wife who didn't work to take care of the home and kids.
Sometimes I try to talk to my 83 year old dad, who was a Teamster at the same company for his entire 35 year career, about the software industry. He's so surprised how often people like me change jobs, how we switch companies as a way to get a raise, and just generally how different expectations are. When I told him about how I'd left a company partly because they didn't promote me after 18 months, he didn't say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. In his world, 18 months just isn't long enough to feel entitled to a promotion. Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation. It's a different world we're in, but I'm not sure exactly what makes it different: is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
One thing I'm fairly certain about is that companies don't treat us worse than they treated blue collar workers in the 70s. I think we'd all be surprised by the poor selection of candy in the catered employee cafeteria they had over at the shipping depot.