There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

>seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy

Is this not true to a first approximation though? I mean you do have to "hide your power level" in some way, but the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind. It's a prisoner's dilemma type situation, and defect/defect seems to be the equilibrium we've converged at.

It’s not that simple. Even if you take the cynical view that the company is your adversary, the other people who work at the company (including founders, investors and execs) are actually playing a career-long collaborative game rather than a one-off prisoners dilemma.

There’s a big difference between somebody not being your friend and somebody being your enemy. I’ve had a similar experience with a sub par employee, who at some point admitted that he wasn’t doing his best at work because he was "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions".

That guy was absolutely immersed in internet culture, making him less self-aware and very unpleasant to work with.

This mindset existed well before reddit; hell, it existed well before the Internet.

Some people simply show up at work solely to put food on the table, doing the minimum amount of work so as not to get fired.

It's true for many companies, but to be successful it helps to act as though it isn't.

Senior leadership sincerely believes that they are a force for good even when they are doing things to harm their workers, their customers, or society at large. It's human nature to feel that way, and to contradict that is to offend them and risk getting labeled as "hopelessly immersed in Reddit toxicity".

And the easiest way to keep up the act is to fool yourself, because most of us aren't good at faking it. Find the best in senior leadership and emphasize it to yourself; find win-win opportunities (or make them!). Maybe it's even true that the company is a force for good! (I genuinely believe this about all my past employers in varying amounts, but I've been choosy and have made sacrifices.)

But be stern about never putting yourself in a position where you can be taken advantage of, because senior leadership, being weak humans like all of us, will succumb to temptation.

This mindset is completely sane. Sorry but if you work 40+ hours a week and barely can afford a vacation there is no reason for me to work hard. Especially not if I see managers with new cars every year.

The mindset exists because historically commercial entities have often been horrendously abusive to their workers. Dickens, anyone?

The flip side is the terror of an entrepreneur seeing their enterprise struggle.

In some sense this is the standard gambit of wage labor. If you want people to act like they have skin in the game, then they must have that. Tech is notable as a field for incentivizing overperformance and mission-driven-ness.

> >seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy

> Is this not true to a first approximation though?

No, not at all. The company wants the employee to do well so that the team does well and the company overall does well. If the company was "the enemy", they company would be wishing for the employee to fail, which is not why they spent a lot of time and money to hire you in the first place.

Now, of course the company isn't your friend (or family) either. The employer doesn't exist in the friend-enemy axis, they're just an employer which is a different type of relationship.

Also, who is "the company"? People in upper management and HR, i.e. those who see you as a number on a spreadsheet but don't ever interact with you personally.

But most of your interaction is with your first and second level managers who are specific people. One would certainly be well advised to cultivate a professional friendship with them. Not only will you do better, but work will be a lot more pleasant.

> "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions"

I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

There is in many teams a lot of busywork that for various reasons can't be automated (or new incoming busywork that takes over when the older one gets automated).

If an employee is content with just handling this kind of lower level busywork and go home at 4:30pm in exchange of not pursuing raises and promotions, there's nothing wrong with that. That work still needs to get done, so rather than getting a never ending stream of junior new hires constantly having to get trained, I'd be fine with having someone who is happy to stay at that level and take it easy.

Only in places with SV like culture.

In many countries being a developer is a plain office job just like everything else, and everyone that doesn't want to move into management after reaching seniority is seen as a failure.

> The company wants the employee to do well

> Also, who is "the company"?

The company doesn't "want" anything other than to become a bigger pile of money — it's an amoral abstract construction, lacking human wetware and all its messy idiosyncrasies. I think I'd express similar sentiments in a slightly different way: the company benefits when it gets maximum value for minimum outlay over the lifetime of the employment relationship.

That model allows for companies which act in ways wildly counter to the interests of their workers. For example, the private equity firms asset-stripping Toys 'r' Us and KMart mostly "cared" that the workers at a given retail facility not quit before they could be let go.

Up or out generally stops once someone reaches engineer or sr engineer. Most of the time a jr engineer is going to need substantial mentoring and support. Them never moving beyond that point likely results in a net negative gain if you need another person always available to provide that for their entire time there if it goes beyond 1-2 years.

How do candidates express that in interviews?

> I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

But companies live or die by talent / passion density. If you try to only hire talented / passionate people, then many of them will still just be fit for grunt work so grunt work still gets done. If you on the other hand hire for grunt work you wont find much talent at all so company fails after a while.

Sometimes it is, sometimes not.

In 2009 I worked for a really chill company with small but nice management. The owner/CEO wanted to turn it into a worker-owned co-op.

But one of my coworkers was so stuck in the "management is evil" mindset that he became hard to work with. (Although he also radicalized politically; I think he went from SNP to UKIP.)

The way I explain it is that your company is not your friend, but that doesn’t make them your enemy.

The trap is when they see everything as a false dichotomy between friend and enemy. Enemies are something you avoid or even work against. When someone starts seeing their employer as the enemy and they don’t want to do things that help out their enemy, they trick themselves into poor performance out of spite.

Which leads to performance management and eventually firing if they don’t get a handle on it. This makes them even angrier, confirming their belief that their company is out to get them, leading to deeper spiraling into spite and poor performance.

Breaking someone out of that mentality is hard but everyone is so much happier once you’ve cracked them out of the “friend or enemy” dichotomous thinking.

> Sorry but if you work 40+ hours a week and barely can afford a vacation

Software developers are relatively highly paid. When they start acting like they’re minimum wage workers flipping burgers at a dead-end job, they’re missing the big picture. That’s the problem I’m trying to communicate.

Showing up to work and actually doing their job, even if it’s the minimum, would be an upgrade over the Reddit toxic mindset I was describing about.

The problematic juniors show up to their jobs determined to be uncooperative, sow discontent among coworkers, stonewall progress in meetings, and think they’re just going to job-hop to the next company before the performance management catches up to them. They see the jobs or even the concept of working to live in general as a scam and feel like they’re winning some deep cultural war if they collect paychecks while making life difficult for their manager.

This is a generalization. Salary in Europe is different to salary in the USA for example. I earn median wage currently. Also lots of non degree having devs out there that aren't 6 figure earners.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Something like the analogue to the “Reddit-infused worker” archetype, where leadership is inappropriately cynical about their workers and see them as “the enemy”?

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Of course. If you don’t see that, you’re missing the point.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee? Or do you assume all employees are inherently good and do appropriate work for their pay and don’t need constant performance management to simply do their job?

In my posts I’m not talking about all juniors. I’m talking about a problematic subset. You seem to be assuming I’m generalizing to all of them. I am not. This is a phenomenon specific to a subset of juniors that is unfortunately a repeated pattern where they all share some very common and obvious characteristics. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to break them out of that mindset and have them join their much happier peers, but to be honest once someone is that deep into the cynical mindset it’s hard to wake them out of it.

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee?

Of course — I implied as much via the “inappropriately cynical“ characterization.

The tension between capital and labor is inescapable and ancient.

I didn’t think you were generalizing to all juniors. Rather, what caught my interest was that before this last message I perceived the perspective of capital in your words.

Companies require different attributes in various roles. Those attributes extend far beyond passion and talent. The trouble with hiring based on those two attributes alone is that you're setting up a culture where the people who do the necessary grunt work are failed hires and where the employee themself feels held back. In otherwords, you are setting up a toxic workplace.

> the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind.

That's completely different than being your enemy.

What you want to avoid are work environments where most workers are focused on gaming internal politics to get ahead. Those environments are soul destroying.

But that's not all work environments. And most work environments are some mix of internal politics and wanting to actually create good and useful products.

Then find a different job with better compensation.

That's the tradeoff you're making for universal health care and generous public benefits.

I never saw a company hire grunt programmers separately though, and when you suggest that they should people also get angry at you here. So what do you want really? Do you want to have to pass the same tests as these roles, or do you want to pass grunt tests and have a different role? You can only have one of those.

Who would've thought that decades of wage repression that fell especially badly on the young would lead to a surly and uncooperative workforce.

Yes. if the work is installing software and being on pager duty then we can really stop pretending that identifying O(nlog(n))is relevant. And if the job is to write a compiler optimizer, it's pretty important you know the basics of CS (like decidability).

smashing these two together and pretending they are the same has been a huge source of cognitive dissonance in the industry and serves no one.

To add clarity, that's caused by social programming not human nature.

Have companies given any of these young people a reason to think differently?

“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it further” has been the majority of my career and my peers. Very few people(as a percentage of population) actually have had enough leverage at any point to not have to eat shit if their company says so.

This is the type of toxic, cynical attitude GP is talking about. It doesn’t have to be this way, and you approaching it with this expectation is possibly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Programmers are incredibly well paid.

I disagree. The tendency towards self justification is a universal human trait. Even if some may overcome that tendency, it is still qualifies as “human nature”.

This is germane because while labor and capital may perceive each other as the “enemy” and may in fact act counter to each other’s interests, nearly everyone perceives their own actions as justified.

To the extent that there is “social programming” involved which could conceivably change (unlike “human nature”), it has to do with the acts themselves, not the strong impulse to believe that your own acts are justified.

I've had the same experience -- employees who do the minimum and then whine when (one case) asked for a raise or he'd quit and I said sgtm; and (a different person) I chose to mentor and promote other people on the team. Some people can't wrap their minds around the idea that our interests aren't always aligned, but sometimes they are and also why would I invest in someone who doesn't invest here. Mentoring and promoting people is one of the best pieces of my job, but my time is finite and I want to also spend it productively :shrug:

I don't know why you come up with an ideological statement like that.

The management culture, anti software/nerd mindset among the population and eastern European competition in the offshoring market have a much bigger impact.

E.g. even though Germany is practicing mercantilist beggar thy neighbour export surplus policies, the country has failed to become an exporter of software or be known for quality software. Anyone who wants to work in the software industry is better off leaving the Eurozone and going to Switzerland where they get paid more in addition to the things you claim are the cause.

That's only true for the young. As they get older, or the exit grows large enough, some people smell that last iteration and defect hard.

Just the existence of the Bay Area tech antitrust suit and the pittance of a settlement should tell you otherwise. Who knows how sky high developer salaries would be if those companies hadn’t conspired to lower salaries during such a strong and low-interest-rate economy.

I didn’t really approach it that way. The companies did to me. My experience with companies has been entirely that unless the money is already in my pocket, I should expect them to renege on the deal.

At this point it’s in the corporations court. If you have managed to generate a relationship with your labor force where they are no longer lying flat, but actively trying to cause sabotage like you described then I think you(the companies in question, not you in particular) share some of the onus on how we got here

Edit: and to be clear I’ve been working in tech for over a decade, this is not a perspective from a new grad with only the internet as their source of information. The younger generation has seen their older siblings and cousins getting fucked over more and more each year and we’re reaching the point of societal unrest where a large group of people no longer think the “deal” society is offering them is worth it

A subset are paid incredibly well. For arbitrary lines im going to put that at 250k+/year in comp by year 2-3 of your career.

Another large cohort is paid pretty well with salaries from 110k-150k by that same point who have effectively no negotiation power and are given “take it or leave it” deals with the only leverage being to find another job

And even for the incredibly well paid ones, as the other commentator noted, there’s documented proof of organized wage suppression by the corporations

That is the antidote the toxic attitude.

Go into business yourself for a bit and see the world from an entirely different angle. If you don't make it and come back to employment (most likely) you will be a much humbled and more enlightened person.

>And the easiest way to keep up the act is to fool yourself, because most of us aren't good at faking it.

The better way is to work for a company that doesn't suck.

I mean with as many 'who do these simple Google bugs last for years' posts we see on HN, how much of the grind and grunt work is getting done? If everyone thinks they are a superstar then anything that's not an A+ project ends up on a 'killed by Google list'.

As bad as big non-tech companies are at things I quite often see they are better at providing fixes and updates for the little hidden pieces in the background because they have people that aren't fighting their way up the ladder.

When you look at the quality and the dog eat dog mentality of many CEOs out there do you expect any different? If you can look at modern capitalism without a cynical eye it's very likely you've lived a pretty privileged life.

I mean really no, and yes I've been on both sides. Owners have skin in the game. That's why when Musk says we should work 80+ hours a week he should be summarily ignored. He stands to gain billions while the rank and file stand to gain ulcers and an investor class that fights against them getting health insurance.

The number of absolutely toxic business owners is insane.

Thats not reality though.

I didn't get laid off 3 times because I have a bad attitude. I got laid off because:

1) it was cheaper for the company to move the software department over seas

2) The business got sold to Amazon and as part of that process they had to downsize

3) Company collapsed due to leadership failure

I had a good attitude until I saw how disposable I was to these companies. You're an asset until you aren't.

Product finished? downsizing. Financial crisis that doesn't effect our industry? downsizing. Company about to IPO? downsizing.

Companies have no loyalty, you shouldn't either.

Not in comparison to the value they provide.

A grocery store I worked at tracked finances and they were available to all employees. The grocery store made $270 per worker per hour. New hires were paid less than 1/10 of the value they provided.

I can only imagine how much more exploitative tech is

You don't solve the problem by "humbling the workers".

The solution is rewarding people when a company is successful and more importantly not punishing hard workers. Right now people are under the impression that slacking and working hard will be equally rewarded, because that is the truth. Hard workers also get laid off so that CEOs can make a few extra bucks.

Executives are almost solely focused on financial rewards.

Employees (middle management and down) are explicitly structured to use salaries (to reduce costs/earnings from going to them).

Salary is generally a flat monetary incentive, and bonuses aren't big enough typically. You make more money by promotion up a rigid hierarchy: so that is the true motivation.

And that is politics.

If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them.

Engineering workers are often idealistic, which is a different set of motivations to exploit by management for monetary advantage. But idealism/creation leads to turf wars and emotional investment in "your code", which is another entire axis of politics.

And? Part of the toxicity is coming from a misunderstanding that for some reason the company is morally obligated to keep offering you employment ad infinitum.

If the work runs out, find another job. Nothing wrong with that.

> And?

It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy like claimed above.

The number of absolutely toxic employees is also insane. Are businesses justified to treat employees as if all of them were that toxic? Should not employees then not treat their employers as if all of them are toxic?

That is true, but the problem is that nearly everyone believes it. Every dictator and revolutionary thinks they are doing good.

I can understand what you are suggesting, but the balancing act of assuming they are acting for the best and also ensuring you do not let yourself get taken advantage of is very difficult.

Try measuring how much house a median junior programmer salary will buy and compare it to how much house a median wage of the 1950s would buy.

The results will surprise you.

> The way I explain it is that your company is not your friend, but that doesn’t make them your enemy.

Or to hijack Bryan Cantrill, do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing your employer.

They are not your enemy, you are far too small for them to care.

I think it’s important to distinguish between human leadership and the capitalist entities they work within.

I’ve worked for multiple small businesses, led by wonderful humans, which ran out of money. When those businesses went under, it tore their leaders apart to let workers go — but those leaders were still constrained in how the could act by economic realities.

There are both leaders and workers who are too cynical about each other. But it makes sense to be guarded with every company, even if I think it’s debatable how best to act — and how we might dream of improving matters at the macroeconomic level.

I don't disagree about the number of absolutely toxic business owners and I've worked for a few of them.

But there are some real bad employees too that don't understand how the world works.

Maybe the toxic business owners should work in the coal mines for a bit?

No. opposition is not the right model

It’s just business. You have something they want, they have something you want. Try to take advantage of places where your incentives aligned and watch out when they are not.

CEOs are also employees. This is a weird thing where you have invented enemies in your head you’ve never talked to.

Yeah capitalism is sad in a lot of ways - particular the modes of possible value. But we are actually talking about working in hierarchical management organizations which have existed forever and have nothing to do exclusively with capitalism.

> Executives are almost solely focused on financial rewards.

This is not true at all. Far more important in upper management is ego - they will lose money to improve their legacy or beat a competitor.

> If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them

Nobody said politics do not exist.

So let’s take what you said at face value - management is paying for jobs but they are looking to cut costs, etc.

Is that arrangement something you can use to benefit your life for a season? Or an inherent war zone?

I mean ... if a junior can stonewall a progress on a meeting then seniors there somehow horribly failed the meeting moderation. I have literally never seen that, because you can just make meeting without them the next time

Second, I seriously doubt juniors ability to "sow discontent" among more experienced seniors. They can latch on existing discontent, but juniors are too low on hierarchy and seniors have too much of opinions for juniors to have much power there.

It is not toxicity if they are expressing pragmatic reality of how employment works. It is just being respectful and direct.

I wouldn't call the categories calcified in a conflict-oriented prescriptive ideology dating to the 19th century to be "ancient", but I suppose YMMV.

> It's true for many companies, but to be successful it helps to act as though it isn't.

"lie through your teeth 8 hours a day to people you see at least 5 days a week"

depends entirely on the size of the company, or size of the team.

I’ve seen it. In my organization, open discussion and creating space for disagreement and alternate perspectives are the norm. A couple of junior programmers were upset about a process change, and weaponized the process to sow discontent at every retrospective, usually through vague “a lot of people have told me they’re unhappy about X” comments. A huge amount of energy was spent trying to take their concerns seriously and address them.

Eventually they were removed from the team. It should have been sooner, but the manager is very empathetic and supportive of his team. Morale immediately shot up and things are much better now, as well as more productive.

Not every workplace is a dog-eat-dog hellscape. In fact, I’d say they’re the minority. But you do reap what you sow: if you’re determined to see it as a zero-sum game and go looking for conflict, you’ll find it.

Any company has bigger ambitions than just you.

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Yes. My employer has gone all in on the AI bandwagon. To achieve this, they lay off around 10% of the workforce every February to free up capital for whichever AI fad they wish to pursue that FY, all the while spouting the usual bullshit about being a "family".

I could make a lot more money elsewhere working 12 month fixed term contracts, with possible extensions, than I do as a "permanent" employee doing effectively the same thing.

qu'ils mangent de la brioche?

and yet their wages are still supressed

it sounds like you had a bad experience with two coworkers and are using them to generalize an entire generation.

I’m not sure how you’re getting that at all. GGP said they didn’t see how junior developers could “sow dissent” and I shared an example of where it happened. I wasn’t making any generalizations. (I also wasn’t on that team.)

Companies brought this on themselves, they treated their employees as disposable cogs and then started complaining when employees returned the favour.

You can't complain about people becoming cynical when right now you can see all the tech giants investing ridiculous sums in order to eliminate staff from their payroll.