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by orionblastar 3976 days ago
Most likely this submission will be flagged as most sexism or racism articles get flagged.

Corporate American needs a major reform. US society need a major reform. Our culture and community need major reforms. The way boys and girls are raised need to be changed, the way they are educated and develop social skills and people skills need to change as well.

As it is Corporate America and the Tech industry has developed a certain mindset based on the power elite of Silicon Valley that controls VC and who gets on the board of directors via shareholders. Everyone has to work 80+ hours a week, and it is hostile to trying to raise a family. Corporations favor the worker who is single over one that is married and has children. They don't like it when there is responsibilities other than work that an employees has. Which is why there is no good maternity leave, or even child care services. Heck in most cases you have to drop your religion and become non-practicing so you don't attend services so you can work more hours.

When I was a young boy in the 1970s it was different, people got the weekends off and spent it with the family with family picnics and they only worked 40+ hours a week, and took off for family matters. The 1980s and 1990s changed that and the Dotcom Boom made the Startups and marathon coding that required more time per week to work. People got less sleep, worked more hours, gave up relationships and family, and put everything into working a job.

For me it got so stressful that in June 2001 I developed a mental illness from all of the stress I was under and all of the extra hours I worked. I took time off to pick up my son from a babysitter because child care was not offered and my wife worked a different shift, and I got made fun of because I was taking care of my son instead of my wife. I ended up on short term disability and when I returned I was fired for being sick. You see once you become mentally ill they don't want you, even if you were hurt in the line of duty. Which is why so many mentally ill people hide their illnesses and go untreated and then do a suicide later on. I ended up on disability in 2003.

I never made it back to work. But I know of all of the problems in the industry and can talk about them freely without worrying that I'll be fired for talking about them.

In order to make up diversity, many tech companies use the H1B Visa program to hire people from India because they are not white males and because they will work for less money. Being from India gives them a more diverse work force, and they are disposable employees. If they don't do what they are told, the Visa is canceled and they go back to their native country. Then the company hires someone else. It is a big racket.

3 comments

> When I was a young boy in the 1970s it was different

People in the 70's thought work life was hellacious and going deeper into hell, just like today, and every decade since (and probably every prior decade). I recall people declaring they weren't going to have children and bring them into the rotten world. Of course, the politicians all campaigned on fixing everything, just like today, and nothing changed, just like today.

Source: I was working for a living in the 70's.

As I grew up in the 1970s we knew it wasn't a perfect world. My father's generation wanted to fix things and make it better for our generation.

We had family picnics on the weekends because back then hardly anyone worked on the weekends.

Around the 1980s that had changed and the family picnics had stopped. It was the Me decade, Reagan was in charge, everything had changed and the PC Era had just started with the IBM PC and DOS dominating business.

I got an Amiga 1000 with the 1020 5.25" floppy drive and PC-Transformer software to emulate DOS on it. That way I had all the features of the Amiga and could still run DOS programs like Turbo Pascal for my college on it. Later on I got the Amax dongle and Mac 128 ROM chip to run Mac software on the Amiga. The fact that it ran DOS and Mac software didn't matter as the PCs had dominated the Amiga when VGA and Sound Blaster cards became standard.

I think since the 1970s that the world did get better because we got easier to use software and easier to use computers to make things easier for a lot of people. The Internet made buying things easier and web sites automated things to cut down on costs.

What got worse is that our advanced technology needs carbon burning power sources that contribute to global warming aka climate change. The world is still hell to some people and they might not want to raise children, but some people still raise children anyway.

The truth is most of the people do the hard work to make the elite 1% richer who profit from their labor. The only exception to this is doing your own startup and then building something worth value and then IPOing for millions to make yourself rich. The trick is having a business plan that works, and not just another Dotcom cookie cutter business plan ripped off from another company.

>I recall people declaring they weren't going to have children and bring them into the rotten world

People still declare that: http://www.vhemt.org/

> For me it got so stressful that in June 2001 I developed a mental illness from all of the stress I was under and all of the extra hours I worked.

It's seriously a damn shame you worked yourself into a nervous breakdown. I can't possibly stress that enough.

I've spent about ten years working a couple of tech jobs. Over those years, I've probably put in a few hundred hours of OT (unpaid or otherwise). If we're pessimistic and call it an even 1k hours of OT, this means that I've spent an average of somewhere between 42 and 45 hours per week at work over my entire career so far.

I -and others in tech that I know- have never been required to work anywhere near point of burnout, let alone breakdown. Moreover, from what I understand of tech sector hiring practices during the Dot Com Era, anyone who could spell SQL and/or HTML could get a well-paying job in the industry.

Maybe those practices also included a near-universal culture of overwork, but -based on what I hear from a few folks who were working in The Valley at the time- I'm pretty certain that that's not true. If management was pressuring you to work those insane hours, you would have very probably found better treatment at another company. It seems like the lower hiring bar would have given a seasoned veteran quite some mobility during the boom. The situation after the bust is another story all together.

Since you stopped working in the industry in 2003 and claim over 25 years of industry experience, would you be so kind compare and contrast the work ethic and attitudes of tech company management during the Dot Com boom of the late 1990s to those of tech company management during the PC Boom of the 1980s and very early 1990s?

Thanks!

In the 1980s and early 1990s there was no HTML and JavaScript yet. Some companies still used IBM mainframes and I had to know JCL/JECL and COBOL before I converted the programs to a different language like Turbo Pascal to run on a PC using DOS. Back then it was hard to learn how to program, not everyone could do it. I learned from books at the library and going to the right high school and college.

During the 1990s during the Dotcom boom I was helping people learn how to program in Visual BASIC and ASP using VBScript and JavaScript. The company would hire people who didn't know what they were doing, and I had to mentor them. Visual Studio had Visual Interdev which made making ASP pages better with an IDE to highlight syntax and preview the page before publishing it.

I learned stuff like Python and Java but most of what I worked for was Microsoft IT shops. My wife wouldn't let me relocate so I was stuck in the Saint Louis Missouri area.

I worked for a law firm that did VC funding and many people who worked before me left to do their own startups. We helped out a lot of local startups.

On Linkedin most people sponsor me for Databases because I had to fix problems with the SQL Server tables and indexes a lot. They'd hire someone to do DBA work and they'd mess it all up and I had to fix it. I did the same thing for VB and ASP code. I was considered a super debugger at the time.

I can do HTML, SQL, JavaScript, I learned C# and other languages. I could still work in theory but I am not medically cleared to work yet.

Part of my breakdown is they changed the deadlines from months to weeks for my projects and I had over 141 projects to be done because nobody else could get them to work. When someone failed to get a project done, they transferred it to me. The code was undocumented, no comments, and a big spaghetti mess and it forced me to rewrite parts of it just to get it to compile without errors.

I tried looking for a different job, but nobody was hiring in St. Louis because there was a recession going on.

If I went back to work, I'd take an entry level programming position and work for less pay and have less stress. I wouldn't mind being a junior level developer after all my experience.

I still get job offers but they are for high level stuff I am out of practice in. If I do go back to work it would be an easier job with less stress. One that they could help me with my mental illness and support me with it.

Given that your high-level summary of your tasks during the 80s and 90s didn't include any descriptions of "long hours" or "frantic scrambles for deadlines", would it be fair to say that -in your experience- -during the PC boom- tech company management encouraged their workers to work no more than 40 hours per week and take as much leave as they required?

Now, you need to carefully read the rest of this paragraph and the next, and keep it in mind while you read the rest of my comment. I have direct personal experience with the sort of tunnel vision that one gets when one is stressed and has folks depending on one's paycheck. I know that solutions that seem blindingly obvious upon later reflection are utterly impossible to find when you're eyeball deep in the shit and slogging forward.

I also have direct personal experience with overworking oneself into a state of exhaustion and mental breakdown. What I have to say may seem glib and simplistic, but that is because it is the result of extended rumination on a long series of deeply unpleasant situations that I found myself in earlier in life. You have very likely come to the same or similar conclusions that I have. I only offer them because you might not have.

> Part of my breakdown is they changed the deadlines from months to weeks for my projects and I had over 141 projects to be done...

The moment that they changed the deadlines was the moment when you should have uttered an unconditional "No.". Because they had no-one else on staff who was capable of doing the work, you had all the power in that negotiation. You were -until the work was done- absolutely, completely untouchable. What were they going to actually do? Fire the only guy who could get the work done? That would have changed their situation from "Most of our customers are going to be angry." to "No-one sane will hire us for work ever again.".

I've worked with many sorts of managers. The best managers know when I've put too much on my plate, and know how to get me to realize it. Average managers almost always take my acceptance of another task as a signal that I'm not overworked; they require me to signal overload. Bad managers don't give a fuck.

I don't know the details and I wasn't there, but -if you never unconditionally said "No."- it might be possible that you had an average manager that was unable to see your severe overload. It's a pity that bad location and bad timing prevented you from jumping ship.

> If I do go back to work it would be an easier job with less stress. One that they could help me with my mental illness and support me with it.

I know some people who are very valuable employees, but are -for one reason or another- incapable of working full-time. The better tech companies recognise their value and work with them to find schedules that will allow the company to keep the worker on their staff.

In the 1980s I worked part-time and full-time jobs. It was hourly pay so overtime had to be approved by upper management before it could be done.

In the 1990s I was salary, which means they could make me work extra hours for no extra pay. NO need to get upper management approval.

When I was given 141 projects in our Project Manager app, I said no to them. It was too much and the deadlines were too short. I was told to do them or be fired. I had a house with a wife and son and if I quit I would not get unemployment and in St. Louis at the time finding IT work was hard. Once I got sick and mentally ill they fired me anyway. I heard they were struggling to make things work correctly, ex-coworkers contacted me to re-apply for my old job because the person they hired to replace me didn't know what they were doing. But I was not medically cleared to work and the company had a policy of not rehiring someone they fired.

I'm a dinosaur, PC tech has gotten super fast with a lot of RAM, so they don't need me to debug the programs so they run faster with almost no memory leaks. Just look at modern Windows apps in video games or even Adobe Creative Cloud suite, they are all bloated and buggy and crash and have exploits. That is because they got rid of people like me who knew how to fix the programming issues.

I don't know a single person who feels the need to work that hard, and benefits and conditions for parents have never been better. It doesn't make sense for a guy who hasn't worked in 12 years to tell us how it is. Sorry you couldn't handle the stress of life and the choices you made.
> Sorry you couldn't handle the stress of life and the choices you made.

Whoa. Meanness like that is not ok here. Please don't do this again.

Kicking someone when they're down makes it 10x worse.

There are a lot of people like that in the workplace when I worked. It is called kicking a person when they are down. Management had it as well which is why I got fired for getting sick on the job. Society in general hates the mentally ill. Every time there is a public shooting they claim the person is mentally ill and that paints all mentally ill people with the same broad brush. I'm non-violent and dysfunctional and could not do a public shooting. I have empathy and compassion that prevents me from doing something like that. The people who did the shootings are sociopaths that lack empathy and compassion.