partial_accumen

This is the first post you haven’t been praising the 1950s as a better time for workers.

Isn’t at all, but you’re reading whatever you want into my posts. So keep on keeping on. 👍

Do I need to quote you back to yourself? Okay, these are your words:

“If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a ‘company man’ was a celebrated one”

“but it’s worse now than it was in the – what I’m now calling the first – gilded age.”

I think we’ve hit the end of productive conversation between the two of us on this subject. I appreciate your conversation up to now. You’re welcome to keep going, but I won’t be responding on this thread anymore. I hope you have a great day!

I don’t understand what you’re trying to prove here to be honest. Of course there’s been shitty behavior all along.

This is the first post you haven’t been praising the 1950s as a better time for workers. Thats what I was trying to prove. All your prior posts were speaking nostalgically about the “better time” for workers in the 1950s. Besides a small set, it wasn’t better, and many times worse. Thats all.

My point is simple: corporations are a made-up concept and one of the main things people are supposed to get in the deal to allow them to exist in the first place is efficient allocation and utilization of human resources.

Efficient for the corporations. Not efficient for an individual.

It seems to me they are admitting that they cannot do that. In which case, the deal should be renegotiated.

Their goal isn’t your goal. There can be an argument made whether capitalism should exist, but under the current system they are behaving as capitalists. Workers welfare isn’t their primary goal, and in fact, only a goal at all as required by law (OSHA, DoL rules).

It wasn’t a utopia by any stretch, but in today’s economy Intel will openly celebrate laying people off and having less employees.

…and…

The wealth distribution wasn’t perfect, great, utopian, or even good during the entire history of the US, but it’s worse now than it was in the – what I’m now calling the first – gilded age.

You’re painting the 1950s as a better time for workers than today, and except for the white, male, white collar workers, I think your position is just fiction.

There were some bad things that were even worse in some cases happening back to lots of other groups (again besides white, male, white collar workers).

Things like:

• 1952 President Truman using the power of government to suppress wages of workers to keep the price of steel lower to fund the Korean war effort. source
• 1950, a record (for the time) 4843 work stoppages PDF source
• 1956 Whirlpool Tracking workers and firing any the exhibited “pro union” ideas source
• 1951 police jailing children of workers that were on a strike picket line source

I’m not defending corporations of today, I’m pointing out that there’s been shitty behavior all along. The 1950s were not a pro-worker era as you’re trying to paint it as…unless you were white, male, and white collared worker. If so, then yes, it was great.

In theory, it would allow them to reduce costs to compete better with rivals and sell more.

Selling more could mean lower profits over all. If you have to build out extra production capacity (new fixed costs) to create more product that you’re receiving a lower price on, then it could have been more profitable to sell fewer units but at a higher cost creating more profit.

Example: If you’re at 90% capacity on your $1 billion factory selling your product for high price/high profit, and you lower your price which increase sales by 20%, you now have to another $1 billion factory to product the 8% of product not producible at your first factory. You’ve now lost nearly $1 billon from your larger sales.

I blame bitlocker.

If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a “company man” was a celebrated one, and companies bragged about how they treated their employees. In that era, unlike today’s, shedding employees was not seen as an achievement but rather either a necessary evil, or a sign that the company was going down the tubes.

You’ve got rose colored glasses on. This was only true if you were white, male, and a white collar worker.

At the same time for everyone else, employers were increasing working hours, reducing workplace safety, in exchange for higher worker wages:

“During the years when wages were rising, working conditions were deteriorating. Employers made up for higher wages by negotiating higher levels of output into union contracts. And the labor leaders–seasoned veterans of business unionism by the 1960s–were all too willing to comply. Time off in the form of vacations, coffee breaks and sick leave all fell victim to new work standards negotiated in the 1950s and 1960s, while automation, forced overtime and speedups allowed management to more than compensate for high wages. During the period from 1955 to 1967, non-farm employees’ average work hours rose by 18 percent, while manufacturing workers’ increased by 14 percent. In the same period, labor costs in non-farm business rose 26 percent, while after-tax corporate profits soared 108 percent. And during the period between 1950 and 1968, while the number of manufacturing workers grew by 28.8 percent, manufacturing output increased by some 91 percent.”

source

These were horrible cameras that sold like crazy back then. Because a diskette only held 1.44MB and the write speed of floppies was so slow, Sony compresses the hell out of the images to that you can fit a higher number of images on a diskette and so that they write to the diskette quick enough to take the next picture.

The result was really poor quality images out of these on the settings that everyone used.

I’m not sure I’d call it a “bug”. It can be exploited to obtain tax breaks, which benefits the “make money” primary goal.

It’s true that Intel probably shouldn’t be handing out UBI, but if companies want to promote how much they don’t need people’s labor anymore, then that should be taken into consideration in policy making.

Yes exactly, policy making at the government level, not at the corporate level as the author was suggesting.

To put it more simply, corporations aren’t allowed to exist purely because they “make money”.

Under capitalism, yes they are.

One of their primary functions is to employ people.

I’d argue under capitalism, that isn’t even a secondary function. Employing people may be tertiary at best.

If Intel had trotted out Chip and then announced it would be creating a universal basic income scheme based on the savings the company was amassing by using Chip, then I’d be clapping along with the audience. As it stands, it just seems like bad taste during a difficult time.

I’m not sure the author of the article has a realistic understanding of Intel’s role or ability to affect change public policy.

I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

You’re proving my original point. Staying at a single employer for years, and you’ll get minuscule raises irrespective of the level of your efforts. Further, you get a sham of job security. When tough times come (as I’ve seen three cycles in IT), layoffs can come and take your job anyway. Without having built up a war chest of savings to live on, your living situation and that of your family is at risk.

Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.

You’re trying to fix employers. You’re welcome to go that route. In the original article Doctorow posited that “vocational awe” was the reason IT people put up with such conditions. Apparently that’s true for some. However, I also know it was not true of others who preferred to make the money they needed to eventually stop working for someone else.

It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization).

If an org, under union influence, would do 15% to 400% salary increases year over year for their entire company/department, they’d likely go bankrupt. Yet that was possible on an individual level without a union in place. I didn’t really mention it before but employers that treated their workers poorly were many times an asset to this method. That bad behavior drove away workers, meaning the bad employers would have to increase their salary offerings much higher to attract a worker to join even with the bad behaving employer. It also meant that the IT worker, who may not have been entirely qualified, would would have a shot at getting the position (and become qualified on the job). Once that that worker is qualified (after the year or two), they can take that knowledge and experience and jump ship to a good quality employer, gaining yet another with a big raise. The worker also just collapsed 5 to 10 years of slow career growth into 1 or 2 years.

I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.

I’m guessing those quotes are about salary gains across a the entire company/department. This was nearly mercenary-mindset IT work. As in:

• Get in with the raise
• Learn the next thing you need
• Work the thing for a bit until you know it and have the experience and expertise at that employer
• Get out

Rinse repeat.

None of that is assisted with a collectivist union mindset or union implemented rules. Please correct me if I get any of the following union benefit bullet points wrong. As I understand it, the union would do everything to undo that situation. They’d:

• work to normalize pay across workers fairly.
• emphasize a proper work/life balance
• enforce conflict resolution with strong worker advocacy
• encourage/provide training across the company/department for continued competency among everyone
• establish rigid rules for promotion

IT has been a raging river, but if you were able to navigate it, you’d get to the end very quickly. You’d certainly come out with some cuts and bruises though. If getting to the end (comfortable money in our case) is what you were looking for, then it was the fastest way to it.

Shhh! We’re releasing that accuracy update in the next version of the product. We need to sell through our existing inventory of the less accurate ones.

I have a competing technology that is nearly as accurate. For only $50 I’ll send you this device that you will have unlimited license usage rights to. While not 53% accurate like my competitor, its proven by scientific studies to be 50% accurate. I also offer volume discounts if you buy 10 the price drops to only $45 per device. Sign up now!

Its not in place yet. I’m seeing it take shape. I don’t see how it can be successful on its own and will either lead to user teams adding their own Shadow IT or the skeleton IT Operations group balloon into a giant Shared Services outfit.

However, I thought I’d mention it as its the same mindset that lead to Devops, which was just a business reaction to finding a way to hire and maintain fewer IT roles. Its interesting to see the IT roles being pushed directly onto the users now.

If your users are external to the org then this probably doesn’t apply. However, if your users are internal, you give them a repo of their own and grant them access to publish to the pipeline.

Devops for sure. (“Why have IT people when we can just make developers do it?” Fucking brilliant ☹️)

I’m not sure if you’re tracking Enterprise IT trends these days, but its evolving yet again with “Why have Devops people when we can just make the USERS do it?”

Suffice to say, those of us that know how to clean up messes (or realistically become Shadow IT) will have gainful employment for the foreseeable future.

Pease tell me you know of someone where this actually was true:

I know many personally that earned this kind of money.

that they made crazy money and they’re set for life.

Yes, but only for some of those because most chose lifestyle increases instead of savings. So I know tens of the folks that can retire right now and have more than twice the median income of the USA for their entire life without running out of money. This means they’d have a couple million in the bank. This would be an annual retirement income of about $80k-$90k/year USD for one person (thats also without any Social Security benefit added on top yet). Many times a married couple both work in tech so that would be household retirement income of $160k-$180k/year for as long as they live (again I’m not even adding in Social Security benefits in this yet) if they chose to retire early. These folks have another 7 to 15 years in the workforce if they choose to retire in their mid 60s.

Thats not “chartering jets to Monaco” money, but its a very comfortable retirement. That was realistically attainable for lots and lots of people in tech after working for 15-25 years.

Because, based on 30 years in and a complete lack of knowledge of anyone who got out and retired early, either personally and via someone I know,

There were lots of IT jobs that paid decently (not amazingly) and if you worked for that one company for 20 years you would NOT have the money I’m talking about. To get this in IT required chasing newer technologies (or sometimes chasing specific older ones), and changing jobs frequently, usually every year or two but sometimes as short as only a few months. The trick is (which took me longer to figure out than I’d like to admit) that corporate annual raises were minuscule. You’d work your ass off for maybe a 2%-5% raise each year. Whereas if you did the exact same work and effort and changed jobs your new employer would give you essentially as low as 15% and sometimes as high as 400% salary increases in a year. You can quickly imagine that you only have to do this a handful of times for your annual salary to be huge. Think about how long it would take you to have a million dollars if you were making $180k to $400k and invest that savings ten years ago.

I know many one that has actually chosen to retire early even though many have the funds to do so. When you’re at the end, you’re at your peak earning phase. So working just a few more years means massive increases in retirement income. This is the bit of a trap that keeps you working voluntarily. Sometimes retirement gets forced early with RIF/redundancy/layoffs in your 60s and you may not be able to get another tech job however.

The even more risky path if you want the many multimillionaire path, is you started your own business. High risk of failure, especially tech types that don’t know the business side, but for those that have the right partners/help and can thread the needle, this is the tech path to the tens of millions of dollars of wealth.

I conclude the only people for whom this worked were C-level. Even the smartest man I know didn’t cash in and get out.

I’m talking all non-C level here, just technologists/individual contributors. At most they might be project or tech leads, but they’re still not executives. I don’t know the executive C-level advancement track so I can’t speak to it. Maybe the folks you know were the ones Doctorow was talking about. If the smartest man you know didn’t know to trade up or cash out, then maybe he was one that was in it for “vocational awe”. Do you have any knowledge as to why he didn’t trade up or cash out?

All respect to Mr Doctorow, but he’s got this wrong:

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they’d built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe.

…and…

Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents’ funerals and their kids’ graduations to ship on time.

It wasn’t “vocational awe” it was money that lead tech workers to work long hours and sacrifice. Lots and lots of money, five to ten times what your non-tech same-aged peers were getting. It was so much money that if you didn’t live too high on the hog, it set you up for a very nice retirement and having “fuck you” money in your late 30s and 40s. During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

With all the tech layoffs and enshitification, those meteoric salaries are starting to come down to Earth. They’re still high comparatively to other professions though. So I think tech unions will gain more traction now, but employers also have more tech workers (right now) so they can bully their current workers to try to avoid unions. However, tech is cyclical, as is hiring. I’ve been in tech long enough to see 3 large downturns, but when the pendulum swings, the hiring returns and (so far) those high salaries have too. If the pendulum swings too quickly and the high salaries (and now “work from home” requirement) returns, tech unions will be back to where they were struggling to establish themselves in the industry of job hoppers jumping ship from one employer in under a year or less chasing the larger compensation.

We can do this without anyone dying, as long as we all work together.

Have you met humanity? We don’t do “all work together”.