There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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’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.

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.