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Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

This is true... up to a point.

99% of employers will pick an acceptable salary range they want to pay you, and then offer you the low end of the range. If you ask, you'll get more, if you don't ask, you'll get less.

The employment relationship is inherently adversarial. They want to pay you less, you want to get paid more. (There are aspects that aren't adversarial: long hours are bad for both sides, even if many companies don't realize that.)

That doesn't mean you should be a jerk, or get angry, or be rude. It does mean you need to stand up for yourself, or you will get paid less and treated worse.

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> The employment relationship is inherently adversarial.

Not in our industry. Maybe so in retail, and minimum wage jobs, where margins are thin and workers are more of a commodity. But coding is something else. For us, it is, at worst, an impersonal business transaction, and at best, a productive partnership for both parties. If you believe that all employment is adversarial, you have not yet found a good boss or employer, but more importantly... that perspective will prevent you from having enough trust in your employer to find a healthy working relationship that allows for mentoring and personal growth within your career.

I've had good managers, and I've had good relationships with my managers in general, and my managers have usually been very happy with me.

But—I once got to visit the people who did a menial task for a Very Large Software Company That Pays Very Very Well. They were contractors (so the company wouldn't have to pay them benefits), they got paid low enough wages that the state would have to pay for their health insurance (we should have Medicare for All, but lacking that the company can damn well afford to pay for insurance).

I'm sure there are worse jobs, but it was a shit job, and the company could've afforded to pay them better and give them actual benefits.

A software engineer at same company would get paid top notch dollar and would be treated very very well. Why? Because the company has no choice, the market is very tight for hiring programmers right now. If the company could, they'd be treating the software engineers just as badly—think of all the savings.

A thought exercise: at how many companies can a software engineer, however well paid they are, complain to HR about sexual harassment by an executive and actually get real follow-up? (Asking the executive to leave with a multi-million-dollar check doesn't count as real follow-up.)

My guess is the percentage is less than 1. Possibly there are no such companies.

In the end we're workers, just like minimum wage workers.

> In the end we're workers, just like minimum wage workers.

As a former long-time wage worker, you are wrong.

There was no HR department at the restaurant where a coworker and I had to step in to get another adult employee to stop hitting on (read: sexually harassing) an underaged server after the general manger told us “boys will be boys”. There were no benefits for the sous-chef (my boss) whose Marine wife had excruciating pain from nerve damage in her hand. When one of your coworkers walks outside and starts vomiting and you can’t tell if it’s because he’s drunk or having withdrawals and you’re told that this means your shift isn’t ending and that you’ll have to stay at least another six hours and you can’t come in tomorrow because they don’t want to pay overtime then a day at your job will be like a day for a typical wage worker. A bad healthcare system, poor negotiation skills and severance packages do not make your experience anything like that of a wage slave.

1. Most startups either don't have HR departments, or have HR departments with no power at all, so sexual harassment scenario you describe can and does happen with no recourse. (Recent example: CEO harasses employee. Company does nothing, so employee leaves. Two other employees realize this happened, complain, get fired.)

2. Overall, though, yes, it's a much much worse working environment in minimum wage jobs. But the point isn't "my work environment as a programmer is bad", cause overall it isn't. The point is "my work environment is a lot better than minimum wage workers only because my skills are in demand".

So it's not about shared working conditions, it's about a shared inherent conflict with employers. And this is especially visible in companies that have both categories of workers, e.g. Amazon. Amazon isn't treating software engineers well because of some inherent goodness of their heart.

Since we'd all be treated the way minimum wage workers are given the chance, it's important to realize this, take advantage of the bargaining power we currently have, and actually negotiate (individually and collectively).

That's a good point, that the primary difference is the lack of bargaining power due to the way that demand for different types of work is viewed. Custodial work is viewed as being something that is in demand because only some people are willing to do it while engineering work is viewed as being in demand because only some people are capable of doing it. Your advice to use this to be one of the few people in the world who works in fair conditions is good advice.

I personally find that good work is difficult to source and beneficial in the long-term across all industries and skill levels. High employee turn-over of any kind makes it more difficult to hire, wastes money on training and recruiting and, in some notable cases, breeds resentment even among people who have never worked at that company or in that field (again, Amazon). Having employees who are sick due to lack of healthcare, pretending to be sick because it's the only way to get elected time off or, even worse, are coming to work sick because they don't have an option for paid time off is only going to cause more problems.

Yeah, a lot of worker/management conflict is result of some combination of prioritizing power over efficiency (overworked workers don't have time to complain/organize), and plain old bad management. Things like long working hours reduce output, and as you say having sick people come in is also stupid.

So smart companies won't e.g. overwork their employees. But some of the conflicts are inherent in the relationship, e.g. how much money goes to workers.

lol, dont be so naive.

As someone who has hired many engineers, management absolutely sees coders as a commodity.

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