If you're trying to get promoted by doing unpaid overtime and/or unpaid oncall shifts, you're a class traitor screwing over your colleagues. Help them by setting healthy boundaries even if you don't actually need them yourself.
This is just not a good outlook. Class traitor is ridiculous. If someone is of marrying age and/or child rearing age, are they a traitor to their class because they choose to work instead of whatever your preconceived notions are? People are different and have different work/life conditions than you. You're just going to need to come to terms with this.
It might make them a sucker, it might make them a sycophant, but you have no right to dictate someone else's values like that. I think this sort of tankie rhetoric is worse than useless.
if they want to work because they have no life, that's fine and really none of your business. if you work for a company where working off the clock like this is accepted, then it should be taken as a red flag.
when employees are on the clock, there are protections established for both employee and employer. if someone is injured while on the clock, workers comp is at play as well as corp insurance. if someone is working off the clock and injury occurs, shit storms are coming. if you were clocked out and working because company expects it, you can sue them. if you were doing it on your own to be "a good employee", you can get the blame.
in terms of coders, say you're off the clock and you accidentally truncate a table while connected to production when you thought you were in dev. if you're off the clock, you can actually be accused of "hacking" and doing a malicious act by the corp. if you were on the clock, then they would have a harder time with those accusations.
on the other end, i've worked for companies that were very good on the on clock/off clock recognition. if you were on a paid vacation and the company needed you to answer a call or respond to email, they would credit you that vacation day back even if it only took 5 mins. i miss that company. best work/life balance company i every worked.
Abusive employers classify many de facto line workers as overtime-exempt, often illegally, and workers should not be complicit in this. An employer who tried to treat a unionized industry the way programmers are treated would be laughed at.
> Also what's a class traitor? it's not like I'm working so hard not to become filthy rich. All my colleagues are doing the same.
Sure, but remember that you're not actually a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" - you most likely have much more common interest with your colleagues than with your bosses. When you find yourself in a prisoner's dilemma situation, remember that the correct metastrategy is to cooperate with people like you and with people who will cooperate themselves, not with a group that's well known to select for sociopathy.
I talk about class issues and economic justice a lot, but nobody owes prior allegiance to a particular class in a way that you can call them a traitor, unless it's some extreme example like a union official being willingly corrupted by a corporate fat cat - in which case a person is reneging on a promise they made, not some unilateral obligation.
You might not like or disapprove of someone's work/life choices or values, this person's certainly don't appeal to me as expressed. But someone's failure to share my values does not in any way make them a 'traitor'. That sort of assumption of mandatory loyalty and cultish denouncement isn't any kind of socialism or liberation; you cannot bully people into freedom.
This is an asinine and immature way of doing politics and I urge you grow out of it.
They're framing their position as wanting to "help their colleagues" and not be a "mercenary", while in actually they're harming those colleagues for the sake of their "big promotion"; they're not just embracing a different value system but performing allegiance to communal values while actually undermining them. I'd have a certain respect for someone who openly acknowledged that they were trying to win a race to the bottom, but not for that kind of disingenuity and hypocrisy.
That kind of reasoning is a great way to impress other Marxist-Leninists (of which I am not one) and alienate everyone else. I seriously doubt this person has ever professed or aimed to perform 'allegiance to communal values'; You're excoriating them for going back on a promise they never made, which is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. Whether that's what you intended or a reflex you've developed, it has no basis in reality.
As I said, I don't think much of this person's choices or attitudes, but you can't betray that which you never signed up for to begin with.
I'm by no means a Marxist-Leninist; I meant communal in the normal everyday sense of "belonging to this community". Again, they talk about wanting to help their colleagues and not wanting to be too mercenary - values most of us will sympathise with - but their actions are actually opposed to those values.
As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance. I also have responsibilities to my family and to my colleagues, and balancing those is difficult. Especially during a pandemic with no child care - I'm full time working and full time parenting.
> As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance.
If you're working overtime and on-call outside of work hours then no, you don't. That's not healthy and there's no way to make it healthy. You talk about "owning" responsibility for fixing this thing if it breaks, but real ownership is two-sided - do you have a meaningful equity stake (token stock options don't count) in whatever that system does so that you're getting the upside as well as the downside?
If you're choosing to spend your life and health on something you actually own, fair enough, it's your funeral. But if you're a worker then it's not your job to deal with that. I can understand that as a parent you're vulnerable, you don't want to lose your job, and when the bosses say the business wouldn't be viable if they had to pay for a proper night shift (or whatever rate it would take for them to get enough coverage from you and your colleagues voluntarily taking those shifts - funny how the biggest fans of "free markets" don't seem to like being on the receiving end) then it's hard to stand up to that. But doing free favours for the bosses is like paying Danegeld - once you start it will only get worse.
You keep talking about responsibility to your colleagues, but what you're doing hurts them a lot. That's where my anger comes from.
I am working a more flexible schedule where I handle some details from my phone AFK and work dedicated hours at times that fit better with family obligations.
I actually believe setting that expectation helps my colleagues.
And again, I work at small companies by choice. If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.
> If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.
My view remains that if you're going above and beyond then that shouldn't be just to avoid the downside - you should also be getting a proportionate piece of the upside. For a small software company skilled workers are often bringing most of the value to the table, so you should have a corresponding ownership stake (I don't mean that purely rhetorically - from a friend who works at a consultancy that's structured as a cooperative it sounds like it's very much a "normal job" in practice).
Of course in a more capital-intensive business, or if you're blitzscaling, then maybe the owners are bringing something else to the table that you couldn't replicate with just a gang of programmers. But in that case capital is almost always a part of what they're bringing, and that means the company should be in a position to be paying what things cost.
You are wasting your breath. You know he thinks most people are lazy and earning below 200k "for a reason."
A guy won Nobel prize proving your quality of life or happiness does not improve above 75k. Thats what you need.
And in IT you dont need to do unpaid overtime or sacrifice your time with family to get to 75k. Everything above that and you are doing it on purpose cause you value money over family and personal relationships. And that is your choice. But that is not healthy and that should not be norm.
And if you need your workers to work 16h a day with unpaid overtime but they are refusing your workers are not lazy you are incompetent CEO. Or just evil level of greedy.
That study is old, but I still suspect there’s a grain of truth that the financial cutoff is lower than many would suspect.
A rough off-the-cuff calculation is that $75k is roughly double the median US income. If the same rough estimate is applied to SV, that’s about $110k. I bet that’s much much lower than many SV/HN would suspect for a happiness threshold. If you can’t find a way to be happy on double the median income, it implies the system is rigged to make an awfully lot of people miserable.
The problem is often not that happiness isn’t possible, but that we compare ourselves to our peer group to calibrate our expectations. As Roosevelt said, comparison is the thief of joy.