Not what the contract says, nor how it works in practice. If I did the work in half the time and left early, I'd be fired. But conversely if I don't get the work done it's not a problem as long as I'm there for the hours.
I can forsee replies telling me to get a better job, but my experience is that most jobs are like this, even at trendy tech companies. And it's not a bad bargain all told; my employer takes on all the volatility, I can plan my time with knowledge of how long my job's going to take, while from their side the variations in productivity probably average out over x employees.
That's not actually the case at all companies. My employer has no problem with me waltzing in to work at 1:00 PM and leaving at 5:30, as long as I get my work done. (Granted, I'm still at work and it's 10:00 PM, so maybe it doesn't work that way. Some days of the week, though.) Conversely, if I don't get the work done, I'll be fired, even if I put in my 8 hours - I have one friend that this happens to.
It comes down to time. My employer pays me money with the understanding I will dedicate a slot of time to working solely on the projects he needs me to work on.
Yes, he's paying me to deliver. If he was paying for my time and I wasn't delivering then there's a problem. If I deliver, however, I can't just get up and walk out in the middle of the day.
If I deliver, however, I can't just get up and walk out in the middle of the day.
Then you're working outside the IT-sector or in an old fashioned company.
In modern IT-companies (most startups that I know, including some with >150 people that barely qualify as startup anymore) the above is perfectly acceptable and normal for programmers.
You are expected to meet your deadlines, to be present for appointed meetings, and usually during a fixed set of "core working hours". Sometimes there are Sprints or "crunches" during which everyone is expected to be a little more present than usual.
In these companies nobody cares what you do with your remaining time as long as you meet the above criteria. Quite a few of my co-workers I've never met in person or only after already skyping with them for months. Others I'll see every time I hit an office because they're more the 9-5 (or 11-22..) type of guys. The line between "employee" and "consultant" is blurring rapidly.
If I had to pick one thing I dislike about HN, this is it.
Not everybody works for a startup, and not everybody works in San Francisco. The majority of programmers work in 9-5 office jobs where if you left every day at 4 PM you'd be fired as soon as your supervisor(s) caught on. It doesn't mean you're working outside of IT (although that's likely) and it sure as hell doesn't mean you're working in an old fashioned company.
Do you think any bank, healthcare provider, or BigCo business lets the programmers come in whenever they want and leave whenever their work is "done?"
They are very good about making sure there's always more work for you to do.
I work as a coder in a business unit at Bank of America. What you say is true, to some extent.
If I need to take off for the day at 1 pm I just tell my boss I've got to go take care of some personal stuff and he's completely ok with that, since he knows I get my work done.
We're both lucky then in terms of programmers in BigCos. I'm a developer in a non-IT Fortune 1k company and it's very much the same here (honestly I didn't expect BOA would be that good to you). Truthfully, if I had to leave at 1 PM I'd probably have to take a half day of vacation, but 3-4 PM? Hasn't been a problem the few times I've asked.
I didn't mean to suggest you said everybody works for a startup or in SF, but the tone of the post was such that I felt you were implying most (or even a large minority) of programmers do.
> No, that's why I qualified my comment with "In modern IT-companies".
Upon rereading it a few times, it's likely I misunderstood the tone of your comment, but I took it to mean essentially "this is how it is for the majority of programmers[, and if it's any other way that's ridiculous and there's no reason for it]." I have lived and worked my entire life on the east coast of the US. Because I'm not in NYC which is probably the closest the SF this side of Austin, the odds of me getting a job where I'm not required to be in my chair from 8 AM to 5 PM is slim to none. I think even across the US that sort of freedom only applies to a very slim (and very lucky) minority.
The "core working hours" at any startup that I've worked at have been 40 hours or close to it. The expectation is that you work more than that, so sure you can leave "early" but that's based on a pretty high amount of hours you're going to spend in the office.
I work for a healthcare marketing company as the only programmer. A large part of what I do during the day isn't programming really but rather a big mix of stuff. It's definitely IT though.
Of course, I program. This isn't anything revolutionary and is mainly database CRUD-type stuff but this is mostly what the big players in private healthcare need in the UK.
I often do very menial tech. support such as showing someone how to set up an email address in Outlook (yes, this actually happens).
Clients often need their websites amending in some small way so I have to curate and distribute all of these requests from all our clients. These are mostly very small, trivial things like remove an outdated banner or adding a patient testimonial. These flood in great numbers though, which is where the challenge is.
I've spent time recruiting i.e vetting CVs, interviewing and then making a decision.
There's probably even more stuff I do in my day to do, such as basic sys admin, graphics/web design (full websites, banners, sidebars, newsletters, landing pages), on-page SEO, copywriting and branded social media pages (we abstain from actual social media campaigns because we haven't seen measurable results within our niche at all - we may be doing this wrong).
We're a services company, we're not a startup and 7 hour workday is usually filled up quite easily and makes sense here. In fact, we have to be pretty careful about scheduling our workload over several days so that things get done on time. We do, however, have quiet periods, like immediately after New Year.
It's besides my core point really. In fact, it reinforces it since that's pretty much what I mean anyway.
The reason why I bring time into it is because, as I've said, if there was absolutely nothing to do, I couldn't just get up and leave mid-day. If there's nothing else to work on, stuff will be found for me and I can continue to use that time productively.
In my contract, I'm obligated to work 5 days a week, 7 hours per day. My income is worked out based on my value and the number of working days in a month. This is what I'm getting at - I'm obligated to spend that much time in the office, delivering.
If you rework what I said about outsourcing my workload so that it removes time and is replaced with delivering, it'd still make sense. Now that you mention, I prefer the sound of it:
My boss pays me to deliver. If I outsourced my workload, I could deliver more. My employer will then increase my pay.
This depends on individual agreements between employer/employee at the end of the day and also on the nature of the job.
There are certainly situations where it is advantageous to have your employees sitting at their desks in your building. So you know where they are if some emergency situation arises or if you need to ask them some questions or even just to make the place look big/busy.
At least half the people I've seen on Hacker News doing startups want people to relocate to NYC or SF. Apparently lots of folks think face to face / butt in chair time is important for "team building" or something.
There's definitely situations where you might want to have a programmer in the office (or at least "on the clock"). Perhaps your system goes down and you need it fixed ASAP, you don't want to be calling the programmer and hoping he hasn't gone to the movies and turned his phone off.
Likewise with mentoring/helping other staff, sometimes this is just far easier to do when you are physically present.
>Perhaps your system goes down and you need it fixed ASAP
So you're saying, all this person is hypothetically doing is sitting around waiting for something to break, presumably at night? You don't think the company would delegate other tasks as well?
>Likewise with mentoring/helping other staff, sometimes this is just far easier to do when you are physically present.
That's not benefiting the company in any way? How is that just "your time"
> In general yes. However in practice employers expect total dedication and focus, deliveries while _at the same time_ counting minutes.
Largely true.
> Employers are a lot like women. They have a hard time making up their mind about what they really want. Everything being the default answer.
This is silly. You're playing in to a narrative that's acceptable in some sub-cultures but that is basically ridiculous once you know enough people and try to debunk handed-down narratives.
When you purchase a product or service do you ever consider how long someone spent making that product/service when deciding what to buy?
Imagine someone saying something like "That Toyota Car is exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the workers at the GM factory spent way more time building the GM car, so I'm going to buy that GM car instead."
Obviously! If I purchased 1 hour of Day Care I would expect to receive 1 hour of day care.
However, if I paid someone to clean my house I would expect it to be clean after they were done. I don't care how long it takes. If it takes 10 hours and the floors a filthy I'm going to be upset. If it takes 1 hour and everything is very clean I'm going to be happy.
Does viewing videos of cats make your employer money? If you've already delivered what they paid you for today then go home and watch the videos there in your pajamas, if they're not paying you for your time.
"Your employer is paying you to deliver things that make them money. They're not paying you for your time."
Several people already pointed out how wrong you are...
In addition to that there are a lot of administration living of public funds whose goal is not to make money but to provide a service. I'm not saying at all that I like that (I think socialism already brought Greece to state default and we'll see more and more state defaulting in Europe soon).
I'm just stating a fact: in a lot of socialist countries (for example throughout Europe), there are a lot of jobs for programmers in administrations. There are cities where the biggest employer of computer programmers are administrations.
I'll just give one example: there are administration whose yearly budget is in the $bn range (eg european institutions) which have very strict pyramidal structure. When division x has a budget y and someone decides, for example, that each application in maintenance needs to have one programmer maintaining it, then there's a budget for that programmer (who very often is a contractor).
And the budget and number of hours MUST be respected precisely.
They do not care at all about you delivering anything: all they want is their arses covered in case the shit hit the fan.
You can be there, sitting 8 hours per day reading WoW forums (and some do just that), because they paid for your time.
I'm not saying it's "good". I think socialism is deeply flawed.
But I'm getting tired about reading the same old "Your employer is paying you to deliver things that make them money" (just as I'm tired of reading "if it's free, you're not the user, you're the product").
As a side note and as it has already been pointed out: that's not was most contract between employers and employees or contractors do state. Most contracts talk about number of hours / days and not about "project" or "things to deliver because it is going to make the company more money".
For socialism to work the nature of people has to change. The nature of people is to be greedy and keep what they "want" or think they "need", not just what they actually need. Socialism asks (and eventually commands) people to give up things they wouldn't otherwise give up for the good of others who don't have those things with the motivation being either A) it's for the good of everyone and ultimately B) you'll be breaking the law if you don't.
Capitalism on the other is based upon everyone desiring to make a profit and thereby providing their own wants/needs, with the wants/needs themselves being the motivation to do so. At first blush, it seems like everyone can't make a profit. Someone has to lose, right? But that thinking is incorrect.
In the words of Paul Graham himself:
"What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history."
In other words, profits come many times from created wealth that didn't otherwise exist.
So, while I don't know what particular flaws of capitalism you were referring to, capitalism is inherently based upon freedom of the individual while socialism is inherently based upon lack of freedom for the individual.
I'll take 100% capitalism with all of its flaws, no question, over most any brand of socialism, including the one we have now in the US.
> The nature of people is to be greedy and keep what they "want" or think they "need", not just what they actually need. Socialism asks (and eventually commands) people to give up things they wouldn't otherwise give up for the good of others
No, it doesn't.
First of all, socialism did not start off as an egalitarian ideology or idea. Saint Simon, who coined the term, was originally promoting a technocratic meritocracy, which would still have substantial hierarchy. The key was to pay people and give people power according to the value they created, rather than according to ownership of property or titles. Because this would have a de facto effect of massive redistribution of wealth, redistribution have come to be seen as a major defining aspect of socialist ideologies, often with welfare as an alternative mechanism of providing that redistribution, and this has coloured many later socialist ideologies.
Over the following decades, the term came to encompass ideologies all across the political spectrum, ranging from those who saw socialism in the context of religion or feudalism: A moral duty to take care of the weak or those whom you rule. To those who wanted an ideal, entirely egalitarian society built from scratch - the utopian socialists.
In between we find people like Marx, who devoted a chapter of the Communist Manifesto to denounce a long laundry list of the other forms of socialism, and who extensively criticised exactly the claim you make.
A key aspect of Marxism is the focus on the class struggle, and this has infused most later socialist ideologies, from the 1840's onwards. The key point Marx made was exactly opposite of what you claim:
The problem for socialists is to educate the working classes so that they understand their own self interest, and stand up for their own interests rather than accept and believe that the ruling class has their best interests at heart. That means for the working class to stand up and make their demands heard, and refuse to accept dictates from a non-working class minority.
The fantasy that socialism is about people "giving up things for the good of others" is an idea bandied about primarily by people who look at their own wealth or the wealth they aspire to (consider Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”) and sees that they would need to give things up in a socialist society (or they believe they eventually would, or that it would curtail their chance to get rich).
On the contrary: Marxist socialism which is usually what people talk about when they throw this idea about, is about the enlightened self interest of the working classes. About demanding a greater share. And if necessary about taking it, gun in hand, from those who Marx insist will use violence to prevent giving up their privilege.
The very insistence in Marxism on revolutions as the mechanism of social change is down to this fundamental belief in the selfish nature of man: Marx was very insistent that no privileged class will willingly give up its privilege, and so while it is useful for a class to organize and attempt to change things peacefully, ultimately it almost certainly will come down to a violent overthrow of the old regime.
He spent a great deal of time insulting dreamers who fantasized about building socialist communes and gradually and peacefully changing the world, or who thought socialism could realistically be achieved through elections (though he was not against attempts he expected any winning socialist party to face the use violence to prevent them from following through their programs - a prediction that has come true more than once).
If anything, then, Marxism not only assumes that people are selfish, but is predicated on the assumption that people are ultimately more selfish than their behaviour in capitalist society lets on: If only the working class is sufficiently taught about the realities of class struggle, Marx believed they would eventually rise up against it to demand more for themselves.
Marx further claims that the fundamental criteria for a socialist revolution to be successful, is that society both reaches a state where the majority of the population has become sufficiently poor as capitalism develops that redistribution will be to their advantage, and society as a whole has gotten so rich that such a redistribution will not only be a material advantage for the majority, but sufficient to lift them all out of poverty and provide sufficient wealth that there is little incentive to circumvent societal rules to obtain more.
To quote Marx from "The German Ideology" (1845):
'This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; '
This was in fact a key aspect of the schism between the Bolcheviks and the rest of the Russian communists. The Bolcheviks, amongst other differences, rejected this idea in favour of a doctrine published by Lenin in 1893 that outlined how he believed that the Russian landless peasants would come to the defence of a socialist revolution. They did not, and the eventual outcome was what Marx had predicted: "all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced", in the form of the Soviet regime that no sooner had they torn down the last vestiges of the old, they rebuilt the same types of power structures and class rule in their own image, and started grasping for the same privileges they had fought.
> capitalism is inherently based upon freedom of the individual while socialism is inherently based upon lack of freedom for the individual.
No. Capitalism is inherently based upon the free exchange of property rights. While socialism is inherently based on reward following merit rather than property ownership. The two are not opposites. Nor are they even similar things.
Socialism is not an economic system, but a set of properties shared by vastly different ideologies across the political spectrum. If you when you say "socialism" speak of Stalinism or Maoism, or a similar feudal or state capitalist ideology with socialist features, you are right. If you when you say "socialism" speak of Marxism you would be wrong, as would you for dozens of other socialist ideologies.
A major part of the disconnect is that US style "libertarians" tend to define property as a natural right, and then evaluate freedom in terms of whether or not already partitioned property rights are infringed on, and expect either government protection of those "rights" or the right to restrict others freedoms to keep them off the land, while most far left socialist ideologies starts with the individual and asks what restricts the individuals actions. Thus we arrive at statements like Proudhons "property is theft": Resources are limited, and thus any act that assigns property rights take rights away from others, and limits their freedoms.
You can not have maximal freedom without substantially curtailing property rights. You can also not have maximal freedom without some rights to property, though whether or not those rights include actual ownership in the capitalist sense is orthogonal to the issue of maximising freedom.
Most nations implicitly acknowledge parts of this: Many property rights are protected from private ownership and/or much property is held in public trust in the interest of guaranteeing people the freedom to make use of the land. E.g. in my native Norway, anyone has right of way through forests and any other undeveloped areas, even if someone has private ownership rights to it. You can walk through it. You can camp. And the owner can do very little about that. This is because society explicitly acknowledge that the moment you let someone throw others off the land, that person has had their freedoms restricted. At the same time, the law recognizes trespass that infringes on the private sphere: Entering a garden surrounding a house is entirely different. While restricting access is reducing other peoples rights, allowing unfettered access is a much stronger and more direct infringement of the rights of those who live there.
Getting a tradeoff that maximizes freedom is hard, but it most certainly does not involve unfettered rights to private property.
You know what tends to freak guys like you off the most? Despite the above, in discussions chances are you'd find more common ground with me than either of us would find with a social democrat or mainstream European "socialist", because they tend to be "big government" socialists, while as a Marxist I see the end goal as the wholesale abolition of the state.
Back in the day, I had libertarians cry in debates because they hated it when I agreed more with them than with the people they tried to lump me with...
> You know what tends to freak guys like you off the most? Despite the above, in discussions chances are you'd find more common ground with me than either of us would find with a social democrat or mainstream European "socialist", because they tend to be "big government" socialists, while as a Marxist I see the end goal as the wholesale abolition of the state.
I think Capitalism--property rights--does the best job of maximizing freedom. Minimally-regulated Capitalism rewards those who work smarter and harder. No it does not provide equal opportunity to every one because equal opportunity does not, and never will, exist.
The rewards of a Capitalist system are not perfect. But redistributing wealth simply because people are not afforded the same opportunities does not maximize freedom either.
Meritocracy is a pipe dream. How does one go about determining a person's value to society? It's entirely subjective and relies upon everyone having equal opportunity which as I stated before, does not exist.
And by the way, if the poor were to rise up overthrow the government/justice system, take up arms, and demand property from those who have it now:
A) How would that be a merit-based system?
B) At it's very core that would be a form of Capitalism: seizing an opportunity with hard work and innovative thinking.
I can forsee replies telling me to get a better job, but my experience is that most jobs are like this, even at trendy tech companies. And it's not a bad bargain all told; my employer takes on all the volatility, I can plan my time with knowledge of how long my job's going to take, while from their side the variations in productivity probably average out over x employees.