[ef4]

What nobody told this unfortunate person is that working for a tech company is not the same as being a tech worker.

I'm not defending the two-tier system inside many tech companies, just pointing out that it's real and it's maintained by market forces bigger than any one company.

If a big Seattle software company lays off a team of programmers, recruiters are swarming around them by the end of the same day.

[mmsimanga]

Then are tech workers working in none technical organisation. A programmer in financial services or retail company. IT is seen as just a cost centre and there always seems to be mistrust between the IT department and the business. Most tech jobs in my country are not with tech companies but within industries.

[fragmede]

If your tech company sees IT as a cost center, then you're not working for a "Tech" company as described in the article. The mythical, utopian "Tech" company the writer wanted to be at is built on top of gossip about the perks of working for Facebook and Google, where free lunch (M-F) is assumed, so the question is what are the breakfast specials and dinner options? How many free Uber credits do I get per month? When is massage-day?

IT for this kind of "Tech" company is not a cost center. There's a closet or a vending machine chock full of Apple magic keyboards and magic trackpads at ~$100 a pop, plus all the USB-C adapters that you could want (because everyone new gets a touchbar mac).

The attitude is that it's not worth anybody's time to sit there to dispense $100 keyboards or mice, and that promotes the feeling that the company just... trusts everybody there. However, it's undoubtedly more expensive to stock Apple mice and keyboards that way, than it would be to have much cheaper wired alternatives and a minimum wage worker to gatekeep - at least in terms of IT's balance sheet. However, if any employee has to taking an hour off working, to replace their mouse (starting with filing a ticket with IT), the company has lost more than the cost of basically giving away $100 keyboards in productivity.

[ljw1001]

That whole distinction between "IT" and "the business" makes me nuts. No one refers to marketing, sales, finance, production, etc., a thing separate from "the business" yet IT is just as fundamental to many businesses as any other function. Hearing IT people do it is worse.

[mmsimanga]

:-) I will be sure to be more specific. Actually, I think it is the other way round. All other business units marketing, finance, communication are fairly well understood by everyone. When it comes to IT they don't understand why the DBA seems to earn a big salary but he cannot help fix the MS Word issue. Afterall it is IT. Therein lies the problem.

[Kiro]

Yeah, either you're a programmer or you're a second-class citizen in many tech companies.

[pascalxus]

You gotta understand, it's a reflection of supply and demand. Companies will treat you exactly how well you are valued by the marketplace, no better, no worse (in the long term average). There's an extremely vast oversupply of non-engineering talents (MBAs) etc, so they're treated poorly. At least with engineering there is some semblance of balance. There's still some oversupply of engineers but it's not nearly as vast as other areas.

[RestlessMind]

Then I seriously don't understand why so many tech workers want to lower the bar for entrance into the profession and induce higher supply of tech workers. What they don't realize is that that won't make lives better for the new tech workers - it will just make it worse for existing tech workers (just like what mechanical engineers or lawyers went through).

This is probably the biggest con pulled by tech companies - play on egalitarian tendencies of tech workers to induce more supply and thus gain additional leverage over employees.

[jackhack]

Correct. And it's been this way for a long, long time.

Back in the early 1990s, I recall browsing the "open positions" list, posted in the cafeteria at work and being shocked at the variance in starting salaries: Windows (3.0) Programming positions (C & Visual Basic) requiring no more than a high school education were offered at $70,000. Positions for PhD Chemists began at $35,000 and demanded a long list of accomplishments not limited to publications in major journals. "listed as primary inventor on one or more patents, a plus!"

So in summary, one trade could be learnt by a motivated self-directed student in the span of a summer, for no more cost than a short stack of books. The other required at least 6 years of advanced education and likely $50,000+ of debt -- a serious investment not only in time and money but also opportunity cost, as those 6 years are NOT being spent earning. Yet the former paid twice the latter. (And may still, for all I know.)

Obviously, this was a lead-up to the great wave of offshoring efforts. Executives must have noticed this variance as well.

[sharemywin]

What's funny is it's completely the opposite in other industries. If your a tech worker for a non-tech company your the second class citizen.

[mnm1]

Absolutely. Not only that, but the experience as a tech worker is quite terrible at almost all companies and especially startups. The difference is, of course, that jobs are plenty and demand is high. If that's how they treat their developers, it should come as no surprise that everyone else is treated even worse. I can't imagine why anyone would want to work in this industry if they don't have some obsession with technology, nor that many people who don't have such an obsession make it long term. It's brutal, although probably less so out of the tech hubs like SF and Seattle, at small companies, and generally wherever people still have some human decency. Human decency in business, if it was ever there to begin with, seems to be declining heavily.

[aaronchall]

> the experience as a tech worker is quite terrible at almost all companies

But then you acknowledge the economics ("jobs are plenty and demand is high") and also say everyone else is treated worse - so "terrible" relative to what then?

Having been on the other side (hourly clerk and sales) I would say that tech workers are treated really really well.

[mnm1]

Having plenty of jobs and being in high demand have nothing to do with being treated well on the job.