The key is recognizing your worth. I’m this programmer from this example where I work. In the last 3 years I negotiated two separate times for higher pay, collectively increasing my pay 80% and it was relatively easy. You have to be willing to walk out the door though if it doesn’t work out.
I’ve been offered the office job twice in my life now. I’ve always worked in a shop in industrial electrical manufacturing and field service. The first time was my old job, I ended up quitting entirely and walking out on a promotion for drafting, which paid less than my current job’s base salary and which has just exploded with raises, bonuses, overtime, double time on Sundays. I’m pretty happy where I’m at. But now my boss just mentioned there’s something available in the office at the end of the year and he’ll keep me in mind.
I’m kind of at a crossroads. Do I keep the job I physically enjoy doing more and keeps me busy and on my feet and hanging out with people who I enjoy their company? Or do I take the job which is gonna be a lot more boring, a lot of killing time, with relatively boring strangers, but would push me a lot into more knowledge and skills? And I’m genuinely interested in the field and want to learn more and apply myself, but I’ve never been someone who could sit at a desk all day. I’ve never had a job like that. But also I’m starting to outgrow my current position and it does get awfully repetitive testing and doing QA all day. I told him I’d think on it.
Keep in mind that more physically demanding jobs wear your body down faster. And if you took the office job and it wasn’t your cup of tea, how difficult would it be to go back to your current position?
My wife turned down an office promotion but negotiated basically all the pay and benefits of it to keep her current role, maybe you could give that a shot?
I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company – lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I’m not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they’re still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).
a stable of about 50 programmers
I did not know that a group of programmers were called a stable, but it’s part of my vocabulary now thank you
It’s because we’re studs 😏
*gets message in ear*
oh, it’s because we’re workhorses or donkeys 😞
it’s because we’re fussy gas bags that need constant de-farting to function
Hey, they won’t be getting hit with any ai slop coded vulnerabilities snuck into open source projects, so maybe if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?
Security through obscurity lol. If the code is old enough it’s secure because no one is assuming it’s that old. Also 50 programmers is like a lot. Ten dudes can get a billion dollar company rolling.
50 programmers who all knew how to write one function that none of the other ones did.
which is pretty common with legacy applications.
and moving off legacy applications you’ve been on for decades… takes a decade typically, sometimes longer.
I have a manual job that I could satisfactorily fulfill in 3 days a week, 2 if I get my head down but no, I waste my time for 5 days/40 hours a week.
I also have a manual job. But I get paid 34% of the price we charge the customer. It’s been a real game changer as far as not having to waste time milking the clock.
In the 70s my grandfather owned a muffler company and they’d all go to lunch at 11 till 3 and get good a drunk. Every day.
Your grandad is my type of guy.
Protip: dont be that programmer.
You might think that working hard and putting the weight of everything on your shoulders is honorable and will be rewarded. But, no one will care. No one will care until you stop. When you stop dragging everyone else, when they have to start pulling, they’ll blame you. To them, things were going great until you started slouching.
I learned this lesson after about 5 years into my 15 year career. Busting your ass and going above and beyond just rewards you with more work. When i discovered what i was capable of, rarely did i give over 80%. The bonus there was when something was actually high priority, you can turn it up to 100 and get the recognition for going above and beyond.
Ive cruised until those moments. Im now outranking some of my peers who have gone hard and always “exceeded expectations” on their performance eval. Corporate life is bullshit and totally not fair. Its very political and very much a buddy-buddy in group
Edit: grammar. Words are hard first thing in the morning
If you spend your whole time doing your job you dont leave any time to kiss the ass of the guy who decides if your job performance is worthy.
Anon is a programmer
I work 13 hour days, full of the risk of life and death, assault, cleaning up incontinent people, and massive legal liability. I barely make enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment with my bachelor’s in my “professional” degree. When I get my master’s, and I get to diagnose conditions and prescribe medications, I’ll get ~10,000 more per year.
Nursing? We treat nurses and EMTs like crap for hope much they have to deal with. You prior deserve to be treated like the insanely hard working and caring people you are, but in our society the more you care the less they pay you.
Judging by their username I feel they probably work in robotics.
I have the same impression. It’s like a hostage situation. When they protest or quit, people are going to die.
Yeah, also it’s outrageous because American style/insurance based healthcare generates extra large profit margins and the system doesn’t even capitalise on that by transferring the surplus down to the nurses - the actual legionaries of the Healthcare machine.
And some few people try to argue that nursing is easy, so anyone could step into the role (it’s not) - but even if that were the case, it’s:
- A “human contact” role; things like flight attendancy, car salespeople and many other things, they get duly compensated just because they provide the human face in a system that would otherwise be massively uncomfortable to interact with.
- A death facing role; anyone who has to see people dying deserves a lot of compensation for the psychological/mental health risk - NO job has this higher than nurses. Especially if we count people literally transitioning from alive to dead. Jobs like Morticians, Train drivers, Firefighters and soldiers are highly compensated along for the same principle.
- A high risk role; you risk probation constantly if you do something wrong or are thought to have done something wrong. You have to challenge doctors and other nurses on their decisions and be right when you do that.
- Communicating with disabled and foreign people role - it’s just tough. People all across industries are paid more to work with the disabled and try to communicate with foreign language speakers. Nurses are paid their same basic rate.
- Possibly a healthcare advisory role? We tend to consider advise giving and mentorship as a quality worthy of salary raise, both in the private and public sectors.
- on that note, In the case of my country, UK, it’s effectively a public servant role. Now while this does have favourable retirement conditions, it would, in bureaucratic roles, provide exceptionally bloated salaries for what the job at hand really is. Sigh.
- When they strike, healthcare is harder to access. If they were organised they could strike a lot (or do semi-strikes so as to not let patients die). I imagine that the US system in some part works against this. We get a lot of NHS strikes in the UK.
Similar here with almost all “social” jobs. Treated like shit but mostly from the inside. No money, super hard work with lots of risks but also super toxic work environments with psychopaths at the top and higher positions. At the same time the worker bees behave like hostages because if they protest or don’t work someone is going to die.
I don’t work a social job but my sister does and I’ve heard a lot to come to this conclusion.
I don’t have it as tough as you, mostly cleaning up incontinent baby people and massive legal liability but damn do the most important jobs get the least pay meanwhile real estate agents and shit get more than us.
I don’t get why people are so bitter about this stuff. Jealousy, I guess?
Like, yeah productivity has exploded and now most office jobs that used to take hours of manual work, take minutes of digital labor.
But right, everyone else’s job is bullshit except the brave lowly programmer… who is probably totally ignorant of what everyone else’s job is, just like they are ignorant of the programmer’s job… it’s almost that’s why you need so many people doing so many specialized tasks.
But I get it, this is bait for the ‘engineer/programmers are the only really productive members of society’ crowd. And you wonder why most people think you’re insufferable twats with complexes…
“engineer/programmers are the only really productive members of society’ crowd”
Is that a crowd? It seems so specific.
Yeah, it’s a crowd.
Mostly comprised of engineers and programmers
Yes, in real life and on the internet both. Maybe you don’t live in a tech-city, but I do and whiny brogrammers who look down on anyone who isn’t a programmer are like 1/3 of the crowd in any bar or cafe you go to here.
Though less so since the massive tech layoffs the past year, thank god. I am stoked to no longer listen to idiots be like ‘just learn to program bro! just get a 150K a job in intro software like me bro!’
and fwiw it’s not like programmers are the only profession that is like this. met tons of therapists, artists, and musicians who have this mindset as well. not so much teachers, nurses, or accountants though!
Yeah, but imnsho arrogant engineers and programmers are a higher ratio in their own field. A very undeserved arrogance, I’ll add.
at the age of 16 I was working for a local ISP doing dialup support when we got a call that couldn’t be resolved by level one techs … but was apparently in the same building, across the hall. After going around and around with them for 4+ calls and realizing we were right there, I just walked over on my lunch break, got hired as their helpdesk, walked back, quit, and started connecting all their desktops up to a novell netware network to use their paired ISDN line instead of having dozens of desktops dialing in for 28.8k
This work went on for 8 months, and I was always struck by how many desktops and offices they had, but so few people were ever there. Slept with my future wife on a couch in the lobby lol. Anyway, after almost a year of this, they were raided by the feds for selling fake ‘executive personality analysis’ and helping tons of companies pick their c-suites based on woo-woo garbage surveys they were selling to fortune 500 companies for thousands of dollars each. Turns out the entire business was lies layered on lies but I cashed the fuck outta those checks and appreciated not having to work fast food.
never underestimate money laundering and scams, there’s shittons out there
hey were raided by the feds for selling fake ‘executive personality analysis’ and helping tons of companies pick their c-suites based on woo-woo garbage surveys they were selling to fortune 500 companies for thousands of dollars each. Turns out the entire business was lies layered on lies
Obviously this is just a surface level description, but what you’ve described just sounds like capitalism to me. I’m struggling to figure out what law was broken.
I guess the mistake was ripping off wealthy people.
Obviously this is just a surface level description, but what you’ve described just sounds like capitalism to me. I’m struggling to figure out what law was broken.
valid. iirc the thing that broke the dam was their psychologist being disbarred or having their license revoked, and everything fell apart after that.
Ah yeah that could do it
After going around and around with them for 4+ calls and realizing we were right there, I just walked over on my lunch break, got hired as their helpdesk, walked back, quit
What made you switch over? Better conditions? Or just that the job sounded more interesting?
100% not having to answer calls. and it was $3 more per hour. easy choice. (iirc minimum wage at the time was 4 something? 1994-5 so that was huge for me)
I’m a proces operator. I think I do on average about 5 hours of actual work per week. Nobody gives a shit as long as the machines are running and they almost always are. Also, that sweet 30% untaxed shift allowance.
Shits’s fucking great!
They used to call this “fire fighter jobs” here. Nothing to do really, unless something is on fire.
If the cost of stuff being on fire is high enough, paying someone to stand around with a fire extinguisher is a bargain.
What kind of machines are you running?
Industrial scale coffee roasters and packaging lines.
So your workplace even smells awesome!
Interesting! I’ve worked in the paper industry but not as operator. I developed SCADA software so paper machine engineers could design the displays and views for the operators.
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what 3rd world country do I need to blow up schools in to land a job like that?
Basically every factory has people like that. I used to be one in an electronics plant. Basically you just start at a shit factory job, as long as you have 2 braincells to rub together you will eventually become a machine operator, then you just rotate around until you learn every machine. Once you know all the machines you’re basically a shoe in for an engineering support job like process technician. Then your whole job is to sit around and put out fires as needed.
That’s the neat part, you don’t!
Welp, seeing that the only other option is to get a manufacturing job in the states
Anyone hiring dragon slayers?
Sounds like somebody needs to learn to shut the fuck up.
Is it shut the fuck up Friday?
I think that’s precisely where the central problem of our time lies: in the imbalance between the value created and the social significance of jobs, on the one hand, and the compensation paid for those jobs compared to administrative and management positions, on the other.
The best example of this, in all its absurdity, is that billionaires are getting richer and richer—or rather, that they exist at all.
