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by drzaiusapelord 3955 days ago
>Most of them could easily find another job someplace else

Not too long ago we laughed at open offices and tiny cubes with half or quarter height walls as just desserts for low wage workers like call center operators. After all, if they wanted better conditions they should make themselves more marketable. Now coders are having to deal with these punishing layouts due to them being a current executive fad.

Now every executive at every company is buying into this "treat them like shit" philosophy. Between this and H1B visa abuse, where exactly do domestic workers flee to? You can work for company X with a crappy culture or company Y with a crappy culture. Illusion of choice isn't choice.
1 comments
inversionOf 3955 days ago
Terrible working conditions have been the norm for many coders for as long as there has been coding. In the late 90s, Joel Spolsky rose by being a contrarian and advocating good work conditions. Microsoft was always held as an extreme outlier with its good conditions. Everyone was agape about the .com bubble because companies were giving employees nice chairs (which in retrospect seems absurd...something so minor as a signal of excess).

The point, I suppose, is that our own information funnels often mislead us into trends and "averages", when it's just cycles.

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drzaiusapelord 3955 days ago
Maybe, but I'm probably a lot older than your average HN'er and I remember my first few jobs. Everyone had an office. The sysadmin had one, the developers each had one, the manager did, etc. Or at the very least had a proper full size cube with proper size walls. There was an emphasis of privacy and quiet time because everyone needed to concentrate to get shit done. Walking into IT was like walking into a library.

10+ years ago was the last time I saw IT staff in offices outside of management or even a proper full sized, full walled cube.

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hga 3955 days ago
Indeed, I myself started working in 1980 and it sure seems like it was better then, but I can't isolate that from working in the Boston area until its high tech scene finished dying a hard death in the early '90s (the web created a new one a little later) and I moved to the D.C. area which you might say didn't have as high standards.
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