elsewhere, i forwarded the NYT piece on Overtime to a hacker list because one of the more conservative, flamboyant and intelligent posters has been discussing, actually, the chasm between the well off and the losers.
An immediate response was from "Joe":
"See to me this is the biggest problem facing America today. Not the long hours spent at work, but the fact that people call on the government to resolve these problems. People should be handling these problems on their own instead of asking government to resolve them. This is definitely due to what George Carlan refereed to as the Pussification of America. Maybe I am just a callused bastard but I have a real hard time felling sorry for Brent Churchill, if he would have had a pair of balls he would have told the company to FOAD after they called him at 1:00 am in the morning."
Chris Susi, also subbed to LBO and one of the more socially conscious posters but def a big capitalist :) (tho only recently accused of being a BIG commie. hah) , responded to object
[...]
> Sure, you go to the next job. But then when these good-times are over (and
> they will be). Guess what. These 100,000+ tech workers here on temporary
> Visa's aint gunna be leaving. You're gunna have to be competing for jobs
> with them when suddenly programmers are making $25,000 a year because Oracle
> skills (which were once a 100K job) are now worth $33,000 ($35,000 if you
> can speak english fluently). > Of course tech's wont organize because it's "too blue-collar, we are > professionals". So we have no strong lobbying force questioning why
> corporations are laying off departments and replacing them with
> "Consultants" from over-seas, or outsourcing the work elsewhere.
To which the reply from someone else was:
If you have to compete with those "techs", then you don't deserve the work.
Here's the way it _really_ works in the tech world: you train up Vishay and his buddies, and your boss keeps making things shitty for you. You leave to pursue your own career as a contractor. Old boss calls you in desperation next year to fix all the fuckups that Vishay and his cohorts have committed in the past year. You agree, charging $100/hr, and Old Boss is all too happy to have you. He pampers you and does everything he can to hire you back on full-time, and you gleefully spit in his face, knowing that he'll have to contract you again in another 6 months because Vishay & the Calcutta Crew are still fucking things up.
We don't need a lobbying force, because competent techs are already in a position of (effectively) extorting employers. And we'll stay in that position, because the employed work force is continually getting less and less competent, while contractors are becoming more so. Admittedly, there are lots of bozos in the contract force as well, and they're quite detectable, but lots of companies hire contractors through their HR departments, which are incapable of detecting competence in the first place. :(
(this is what i mean by the social organization of work on the shop floor and the position in the DOL. this "special" place allows people to believe what they believe above because they do feel they have this kind of autonomy. and if they don't, lists like DC stuff and elsewhere, make it clear that you better at least act like you do or you don't, obviously, have the balls or the skill to command that kind of autonomy. <aka dick slinging extraordinaire and ditto happens elsewhere too yes i know, it's not new>
-- Jon Paul Nollmann ne' Darren Senn sinster at balltech.net Unsolicited commercial email will be archived at $1/byte/day. Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise. Proverbs 17:28