I understand that my boss is not my friend, but to describe oneself as a “subject” is not something I relate to. In fact, I think it’s absurdly dramatic.
It’s not though - when you look at what really “drives” the relationship. You trade your labor for money in a system designed to keep us so anxious, we will accept as little wage as possible, by the same capital owning class.
We are subject to their desires as they are bound, by law, to choose profit for shareholders over employees.
We are their subjects. “Ain’t no war but class war” applies to us in tech as much as it does to the miners a mile underground in PA.
I’m sorry, but your description of a relationship with an employer doesn’t match mine at all.
I don’t feel anxious. I feel comfortable.
I don’t accept as little as possible. I negotiate with the knowledge that I have options.
I don’t toil in the mines for 80 hours a week to barely afford to feed myself. I spend 40-50 hours a week doing something I rather enjoy, and for that, I’m paid a salary that affords a lifestyle few could have imagined even fifty years ago.
I understand that my employer would pay me less if they could. Then again, if I could find a plumber who could fix my shower for $200 instead of $250, I’d patronize the former, all else equal. Does that make the plumber my “subject”? I don’t think so.
Your employer can also choose to terminate that relationship at any time. No problem, you could just get a job at another shop, right? Except when the black swan appears and all the other companies are doing layoffs and freezes, flooding the market with talent while limiting positions. Then, in that hour of crisis, is the true nature of the relationship revealed at last.
As software devs. we can save, right? :). Not sure the same logic applies to people on low wage jobs. Or people like the characters in the movie "Nomadland" (which is supposed to be true to life)
I know the feel, but I also think this is misplaced anxiety. Work can be difficult, stressful, feel pointless, etc, which is why we get paid to do it. And you need some level of stress to get over the hump and get it done, to fight off complacency. The problem starts when we start blaming the person telling us what to do, for having to do it.
Is being on call really a sign of low status? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure most doctors have an on-call schedule. And if you think doctors aren't in a high-status profession, I reckon your standards are wildly different from my own.
Long hours and little respect probably will vary from one employer to the next. However, I've been working as a developer for about ~10 years - most of it with a mid-size insurance company but the last couple with a large bank. I work longer hours than most of my colleagues, but I've rarely put in more than 50 hours in a week, and my average is probably closer to 45. And my non-engineering colleagues have always treated my fellow engineers and me with respect and an appreciation for the difficulty of what we do. If anything, they've usually been a bit too deferential.
YMMV, but I think our profession is probably among the best in the world for workers. If my child were about to enter the working world and had the ability + interest, I'd absolutely recommend this as a career.
I don't think on call is a sign of low status, but I think OP is correct that programming is a low status job. People respect the business guys with the big ideas, not the implementors and tbh I think that's fair. It's still one of the best jobs in terms of benefits, but you have to be willing to accept that your life as a corporate programmer is mainly carrying out someone else's ideas.
Being on call is just one sign, just as IT is more than just programming. Also the vast majority of doctors, especially the high status ones aren’t on call.
However, being on call is representative of something. Your electric company has linemen ready to respond at 2AM because they provide a service which needs to be available 24/7. However, good luck trying to contact your dermatologist, accountant, physical trainer etc at 2AM.
For all practical purposes, above a certain level of management, you are implicitly on call all the time. However, the bar to clear to engage you gets higher the further up the leadership layers you go. A manager of a handful of teams comprising about 100 staff gets engaged for less serious fires than the CEO, but both are "on call". It might take the board of directors chartering a helicopter to get to the CEO's fly fishing cabin during the CEO's vacation if a situation warranting such presents itself, but the CEO is absolutely on call 24x7x365.
The complexity of what engages the on call person I suspect is what connotes status. Called for clearing out disk space: low status. Called for application outage that has stumped multiple technical teams: higher status. Called for a production outage impacting the next day's C-level reports that requires engaging other management: higher status. Called for heading off a shareholder proxy battle: even higher status.
Note here complexity doesn't solely reside in the technical realm, but frequently is rather a blend of technical factors, social factors, and quickly making impactful decisions in low-information situations.
> The researchers can't say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness
My immediate thought was that people suffering from depression might eat more “junk food” due to the depression and that their poor diets might lay waste to their gut biomes. Of course, there may be other studies that contradict my hypothesis.
In this particular case, do you think non-US governments could protect the interests of consumers in their jurisdictions in a way that is less unfriendly to the businesses that want to sell to them?
We do have the Associated Press (AP), which seems similar to what you describe. That said, even such sources can be guilty of ideological bias if they choose to report certain facts and not others. In practice, I think AP is pretty even-handed, but I think that is as much a result of their editorial process as it is of their focus on factual reporting over opinion/analysis.
Ah yeah I forgot that AP is American, it's my go-to place for non-italian news, yeah ok nevermind my reply then.. interesting the point you make about their bias, not being there and following the scenarios in person I can only read it from across the ocean so I didn't know that...
I think that's what the GP means by centralized control becoming worse. That is, information is less centralized now, and the sources that used to be at the center are now complaining about the issue.
On linux, I use ssh-agent. My key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa is encrypted.
When my shell starts, it boots ssh-agent (add "eval `ssh-agent`" to your ~/.bashrc)
Still in the shell boot, it tries to add the ssh key to the keychain (add "ssh-add" to your ~/.bashrc), and it asks for my private key password. Once I enter the password, my key is unlocked for as long at ssh-agent is running (usually until I shut down my computer).
My password is a long, I only need to enter it once a day so it's not really a problem. You can add multiple keys to the ssh-agent (ssh-add mykey.pem). The private key must have these permissions: 0400 (chmod 0400 mykey.pem).
Or you can restrict the file with the key to a specific user and only run the process as that user.
The point is, you haven't actually solved the problem. It's not magic. In a 2-system authentication scheme, where headless access is necessary, a key needs to be somewhere in plaintext accessible to the process. You can obfuscate this, or add OS controls, or hardware chips, or ssh-agent, or keystores, or web-services for keys, but it doesn't change this reality.
This is a great point. Non-compete agreements reduce risk of losing otherwise unprotected information to a competitor and probably increase retention of valuable employees. So preventing employers from using these agreements would increase risk and turnover, and employers might (read: probably would) decrease offered compensation in response.
Now, this effect might be dwarfed by the upward pressure on compensation caused by greater availability of alternative jobs for employees, but it’s not obvious to me that would be the case. I’d be interested to see some empirical studies on the subject.
I disagree with the assumption here that employers are offering increased compensation. When it's standard practice to have non competes _and_ they take years to be out of effect then you don't get competition that would require increased compensation for employees.
At this point even if a competitor jumped in and offered no non competes for the same wage, it wouldn't matter as no one can work for them. The mechanisms of capitalism require little to no barriers to entry and industry wide practices like non competes add large barriers which prevent the normal supply and demand mechanisms
I am bound by a non-compete agreement, but until a few months ago, I didn’t remember that I had signed it. At that time, I received an offer for much more money and more responsibility from a competitor. However, a close friend and co-worker reminded me about the agreement when I told him I was mulling the offer.
Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to risk asking my manager for a release, and I certainly didn’t want to violate an enforceable non-compete without the blessing of my employer. So I scuttled the move.
I was disappointed, but I hold nothing against my employer or against the laws of NY. They hid nothing from me when I accepted the offer, and the noncompete was very limited in scope (geography, industry, and duration). If I had left for the competitor, I would have brought a lot of knowledge that I gained as a result of my position in the company. Not legally protected IP, mind you, but still valuable technical know-how and information about our customers’ biggest problems and the trade offs of various solutions. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to allow organizations to protect that kind of information.
Edit to add that I don’t believe all non-compete agreements are reasonable. Just that I think it’s misguided to ban them wholesale.
Non-compete agreements severely disadvantage highly specialized professionals where there are only 2-3 employers in a specific area who can hire you for your skills. This reduces their leverage and allows companies to underpay their employees. This becomes a huge problem when you become experienced in your field and built up a network. One cannot simply restart their career in a different industry in many cases. With jobs becoming more specialized, this gives employers excessive leverage over employees.
As an alternative, I would prefer something like a fixed-term contract renewed every x years (typically 2-3 yrs) where you're free to move to a competitor at the end of your contract term. This protects the employers investment and also the employees leverage to negotiate higher wages or a promotion.
I would recommend looking at CA for the positive effects of banning non compete agreements.
If you're really working on proprietary material there are NDAs to protect the employer.
I'm sorry you feel this way. You lost out on a good opportunity because of an asymmetrically unfair legal agreement that you had to sign. I'm glad I live in California where it's not enforceable. If you came to California, you would see that your supposedly valuable knowledge isn't as valuable as you think. Certainly it has some value because you learned how to be good at your position, but it wouldn't tank the company, no one is that important.
> I don’t think it’s unreasonable to allow organizations to protect that kind of information.
Why though? As you pointed out, it isn't protected IP, but rather knowledge and skills that YOU have developed and hold in your head. Does the company legally or morally have any license over or?
I didn’t learn this information in a vacuum nor on my own time. I worked on systems where I saw abstractions that worked well and others that could be improved. I spoke and tested ideas with users. I attended meetings where people presented findings that were the product of hundreds of hours of work and read countless reports with similar information.
If I left for a competitor, I would be working on a lot of similar problems. Of course, I wouldn’t immediately tell my new employer everything valuable I learned in my old job, but in the normal course of doing my new job, I inevitably would reveal information that my old employer spent time and money to learn.
> Of course, I wouldn’t immediately tell my new employer everything valuable I learned in my old job, but in the normal course of doing my new job, I inevitably would reveal information that my old employer spent time and money to learn.
This is ridiculous. Modern employers don't even invest much in employee training anymore and expect you to come with all the skills you need. And non-competes are like -ve training where anything you learn you're expected not to use for a period (and you forget some of it in the meantime).
In the big-picture view this seems like a huge waste of a country's human resources. When people are switching jobs the match between employee <-> position is forced to be sub-optimal by non-competes, reducing overall productivity.
Edit: It's giving employers an awful lot of credit to say that they "spent time and money" to learn something. An employer is already short-changing their employees by paying them less than their productivity (see: profit). It's more accurate to say that you're spending time and money (in the form of profit you give up to the employer) to learn something for their benefit. And now the employer is expecting to have a monopoly on that as well. Terrible deal for a worker.
Contracts of all sorts increase switching costs, but they also potentially create value. Sure, in some cases, one or more parties could become better off by taking some action that is prohibited by the contract, but that doesn't mean that we would be better off as a society if we outlawed all contracts that have the potential to encumber somebody in the future.
The reason to ban non-competes wholesale is that they diminish the economic vitality of a region by inhibiting the formation of new ventures. This doesn't make them immoral; it just makes allowing them bad policy.
If non-competes are allowed, it's in every existing employer's interest to use them. This means that the constituency for keeping them is concentrated and well-funded, while the constituency for banning them is diffuse, consisting of the entire pool of employees as well as all the startups that don't exist yet. People who haven't lived and worked in California, such as yourself, may just not know what they are missing. So once they are entrenched, banning them comes to be very difficult politically.
I suggest looking at the issue from the perspective of competition between regions. It's ironic to me how much effort states and localities will go to to attract employers, when they hardly even consider trying to attract better workers. Companies come and go; workers tend to put down roots. When you get a concentration of highly skilled workers, as we have here in Silicon Valley, it naturally attracts businesses; the startup I work for now, for instance, could hardly have been formed anywhere else. And if it had been formed elsewhere, and tried to hire people away from the Valley, it would have great difficulty getting the best people, in no small part because they wouldn't want to sign a non-compete. I know I will never sign one!
I agree that companies should be able to enforce these contracts. But there should also be more realistic limitations. For one, there needs to be good compensation for the employee. Too often an employee signs a non-compete and gets locked in to a job that isn't paying market rates.
If the company fired you tomorrow, would you still be bound by the non compete?
Many people are and they receive no additional compensation. I think there need to be provisions requiring an additional non-compete accompanied with comeserate severance pay upon termination.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is not solely your decision to make. We as a society, as taxpayers and potential jury members, are being placed on the hook for the costs of enforcement and the negative consequences on the local economy that these agreements produce. If you and your employer want to engage in a non-enforceable personal agreement to avoid competition, that’s (mostly) your business. But if you ask us to use the court system we taxpayers pay for to enforce it, things are very different.
Can you point to empirical studies that demonstrate "the negative consequences on the local economy that these agreements produce"? This is an honest question. I think theoretical analyses point in a bunch of different directions, and I reckon data would help inform our arguments.
We have the natural experiment of California, which as I recall, if it were a country, would have the world's sixth or seventh largest economy.
Compare what's happened to the Boston metro area with Silicon Valley. Boston matches the Bay Area in top universities, and if you go back to the 1980s, had even more of the computer industry. But the Valley has outpaced it ever since, and by now has much greater economic vitality.
As a Bostonian I agree. There was some recent Massachusetts legislation to limit non-competes but I wish they'd done away with them entirely like in California.
Yes, my signing bonus was contingent on signing a non-compete, non-disclosure, and other agreements. It wasn’t much money, and in retrospect, I don’t think it was worth it. Still, I agreed to the terms, so I should be bound to them.
But labor force participation rates are still very, very low. If you'd like a job but don't have one, you don't get counted in any unemployment stats except the aggregate labor force participation.
This caught my attention so I looked for a source. Looks like this rate is the number of people who are Employed (60.7%) or have been actively seeking work in the last week (4%) out of the total population of people who are 16 years or older, not institutionalized, and not active military.
The source I found doesn't break down the remaining 35.3% of the population much, except to pull out about 2% as marginally attached or discouraged. Basically, people who have given up looking for work. I tried figuring out the makeup of the remaining 33%, but without much luck. How many 16 and older students are out there not working because they are full time committed to schooling? Hard to figure out, because so many students have part time jobs or are at least actively looking for part time jobs. Then, how many people are retired by choice, versus retired because there's no more work for them? How many homemakers are staying home with kids because they can't earn enough to significantly exceed childcare expenses versus those who stay home because they don't need or want to work?
