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As a job-hunting senior dev - this industry is jacked - all I know is that I know nothing - and all companies want to hire is an expert in their highly customized stack that nobody else uses like they do.
Reliance on contractors and high turnover rates aren't helping.
Reliance on contractors and high turnover rates aren't helping.
The recruitment industry only seems to be making it worse; every year people quit their recruitment firms to spin off new ones & the established firms replace them with younger people; and ignorance about the roles that they fill is rampant - they're just matching nonsense words
The level of disrespect these firms have is ridiculous - they only want their cut off the top of the talents salary, and if that means rushing people through the process and lying and nickel-and-diming them they'll do it all -- based solely on "these words match, so you fit"
They don't even care about what the talent cares about - the bigger ones have OK websites, but are generally still a hodgepodge of 3rd party tools; and the smaller ones have Wix sites with social media links out to Wix's accounts and not their own - hire a dev, dammit
The employers aren't much better, they don't see the problem with a high turnover rate, or that the 6 month term of a contact is just long enough to onboard somebody; and if they fail at onboarding it's on the talent, there's no feedback or assistance with growth, just churn
They don't even do exit interviews, there's no feedback in any direction; so it just continues as "this is the way it is, and it's always worked for us" - but their codebase is a mess, their best practices are on the whim of seniority, and seniority changes as contractors do
And it's not how it's "always" worked; this is an expanding issue that wasn't as egregious when I started out in this industry - direct hire is for old firms who've resisted this change thus far - having 60%+ of your staff on contract is the new normal - churn churn churn
I'm getting some feedback on this thread via alternate channels about how right I am, and about how afraid people are to say it or interact because of fear of the industry retaliating - and I get it - I'm nervous about even keeping it up because I need work to feed my family
BUT - leaving it unsaid - leaving it unchallenged - only entrenches the problems. Every day more people are figuring out it's all BS, but they can't say anything because we live in a society - appearances matter - acceptance matters - we can't afford to stand up and fight
it's absolutely terrifying - and more and more people are discovering the BS in their industry every day - people are banding together to form Unions, what was once the backbone of the Greatest Generation & strength of America -- but the generations before them fought and died
There's historical markers all over Pittsburgh, about railroad workers, about steel workers, going on strike over unfair wages & dangerous work conditions - they rose up to fight for what's right - and the national guard was sent in to shoot them for the robberbarons
and in the decades since then, the unions they fought for, the protections they fought for, were whittled away by the law; politicians beholden to special interests and not the people's interests -- and people are still fighting for these unions, they're just not being shot at
As a society we've discovered there's psychological methods to a quiet unrest - people need money to live, and the fear of being blacklisted works wonders when there's no other way to survive than "earning" it - victory gardens are nearly gone - small farms are nearly gone
But what are you gonna do? gotten eat to live, gotta work to eat. And all the while the next generation is spreading guillotine memes - something's gotta give eventually... People start off making jokes, then the jokes become real -- look at how internet Nazis were radicalized
The problems of yesterday are still the problems of today. The entrenched groups don't have to change yet because you can't veto the status quo, but you can veto the laws meant to fix the problems we face -- Corporate Persons are a legal fiction, but they're still more respected
Corporate Persons are nearly immortal; Citizens United claims their money is free speech, but that's money created by their employees, actual people, whose "excess profits" are funneled up and out to lobbyist groups to create these laws that only benefit the corporate "persons"
The immortal corporate person has a policy position, written it down, disseminated to the people who run the corporate persons like some Voltron/Gundam robot, it looks like a person but it's a machine filled with people - and these machines long outlive their humans
The small individuals who fight live and die, but the corporate person lives on long after their creators pass - look at Disney, always adding another appendage - always expanding copyright law protections just in time to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.
But what are you gonna do? there's always new people graduating college, new people joining the workforce, new inexperienced people who don't know any better, who don't know their true value, or the physical and psychological toll - they're still young, they can take it for now
and I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege here, there are people struggling much more than I am, fighting in different ways, suffering in different ways; and my heart aches for them, it truly does -- because if my ass has been kicked this hard, theirs has too.
All the promises that have been made have been broken, the unwritten social contract as well as the law; there's always a loophole, and it's often created by special interests - today it's contracting, and I know the govt's investigating the problem, but will they do anything?
Will they be allowed to do anything? There's people wanting the government to run as a business, there's CEOs in every branch and level of the government looking out for business; but damned few looking out for us average schmoes. The ones who do are vilified & ignored.
I'm glad there's people like @BernieSanders, @AOC, @Ilhan, @RashidaTlaib pushing against this corruption; but look at how they're treated by big-money corporate media and their ex-CEO peers, and their ex-peer lobbyists -- everything's fucked up and bullshit. what's next???
But, I'm digressing pretty damned far right now; my area of expertise is the web, I've been making websites for about 23 years; from geocities to pubnix systems, home servers, dedicated servers, virtualized machines, in and out of the cloud; I love the web, there's so many...
... People out there, doing so many interesting things; and there's so much competition to make newer and better things with what we've learned; but so many have forgotten where we came from; how hard we've fought to get here, how much better we have it than the old IE6 days
there's artists out there making beautiful things online - hit Jodi.org a few dozen times to get redirected to some of it - hit tildeverse.org to find enclaves of net-lovers across the globe - we don't need gigs of buildsystems to make something meaningful
heck, most of the internet isn't even IN your browser, but there's ways to visit from there; portals into BBS & gopherspace & IRC, even as the WWW & darkweb grow - "dead" technologies still thriving because of new people discovering them & old people who never forgot.
They're other ways, different ways, old ways, arcane ways; humans have been making things forever; in communities, secret enclaves, affinity groups, movements, and everyone, EVERYONE, has a role to play - if they only find the others. And now the internet connects us. Find them!
But that's a whole new problem, discoverability, google doesn't have everything, Bing, Duckduckgo, lycos, dogpile, metacrawler - there's too much internet for even them to discover; petabytes of storage to search and more petabytes to discover - get out of the FAANG bubble!
seriously, out of the 30 or 40 recruiters I've known (I used to share officespace with a recruiting firm, even helped get one hired as an in-house recruiter) - out of all of them only one went to dev meetups & took notes, she wasn't a dev, didn't grok it, but she at least TRIED
I don't want people going out and learning how to hate, but this fascist resurgence is the most researched topic of the past couple years - and it shows how easily people can be persuaded by emotional arguments, for better or worse - take a big dose of @ContraPoints for safety.
the timescales of government movement are long, legislation and debate takes time, it's hard to build a movement & get people on board, change their thinking, because we only know the way things are and don't have the time, energy, opportunity, or raw power to dream & fight
Trump got elected on the promise to end corruption and #DrainTheSwamp - then he filled every position he could with special interest big-money powerbrokers who are on the record vowing to destroy the regulators they were appointed to, we all want change; but it's easier to lie
we're lucky to not live in shantytowns anymore, sharing a room with a dozen people; but the government is forcing these conditions on people crossing the border for a chance at what America has promised; but this country has never lived up to its bold ideals, always excluded some
It's easy to convince people of something if their livelihood depends on it; we imagine the Nazis as some pure ultimate evil, but they were normal people like us radicalized by their society and promised a better future if they stole it from somebody else & kill the others.
Democracy is fragile, we all have to be educated in it and active in it for it to work; Ben Franklin said we can only have this republic if we keep it, but are we really being stewards of the world/people? Or are we being convinced to commit atrocities to steal a better future?
I'm an artist, too - I went to Art Institute, I only ever wanted to go to Art Institute; my brother-in-law learned to paint there in the 70's & it was a respected school - by the time I arrived EDMC turned it into a profit-making machine & eventually got sued into oblivion
The government figured out that For-Profit schools were a scam, and wrote legislation forcing them to actually TEACH people; well, the Art Institute sent me a form to send their message about how great "my" experience with them was, so I deleted it and wrote my own with the truth
the law passed, the schools that cared about their mission changed to be better for students; but places like Art Institute shrunk and eventually died instead. My degree was worthless for continuing my education, my dreams of higher education smashed, now I'll have to start over
Apparently while I was writing about why Tech's gig economy shift is screwing us, this thread about publishing was somewhere midstream.... If writers, who thrived on the gig economy are being pushed to work for exposure, where do you think Tech's going?
Hell, most of tech runs on Free Open Source Software; do you think the people working on these systems are well paid? They're not; but the companies using this tech report massively mind-numbing profits, and success means the graph goes up and to the right forever
The profit isn't being distributed to the people who work on FOSS, it's not being distributed to the contractors who get nickel-and-dimed on these gigs. Even when a company is bought out, the bulk of the money isn't going to the employees. Where does it go?
It seems the only people actually making money are founders and managers, not the grunts in the text editors making it all work; so the only way to make real money is to find people with real money to invest then find people making crap money to pay for your product, or push ads
