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Comment by lampshades | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you. Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can. Don’t care if the company fails, don’t pay any mind to burning bridges, don’t bother giving two weeks, and certainly don’t do anything more than the bare minimum.

All true thought work should be done on your own time for your own projects. CEOs don’t deserve your mind, so don’t give it to them.

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My takeaway from what you said is that the employee-company relationship is inherently adversarial to a degree and to not forget that. In general, I wholeheartedly agree.

However,

> don’t pay any mind to burning bridges

not all bridges should be burned. If you mean the bridge between you and a company, yes, said bridges should not be treated as anything more than a rope bridge over a canyon. I would limit burning bridges between individuals because the relationships you create are more important than just about everything else you will do on the job. Unless I really hated my boss or supervisor, I would not be so quick to burn that level of bridges.

>is inherently adversarial

Until they invented stock options and started handing them out left right and centre.

This did not change the inherently adversarial nature. It just obscured it by adding a veneer of "see? our interests are the same as your interests!", despite this being true of just one (small) aspect of the union of all interests.

Well then any kind of trade is adversarial as it's beneficial to defraud your trade partners.

Something something prisoner's dilemma Nash equilibrium tit for tat.

No, the dilemma with employers and employees comes from the differing numbers thereof.

The fact that there are (relatively) few employers, and that these employers have already chosen to seek their fortune (or that of their shareholders) by tapping the excess value of their employees, means that it is much easier for their interests to all align, without coordination.

However, the vastly greater numbers that make up the employees have no natural alignment, and tend to be too diverse in their own personal agendas to align even deliberately.

This asymmetry is the principle reason why unions, though imperfect, are a great idea. They attempt to gloss over the vast range in the agendas of individual employees by forcing employers to deal with an aggregate. The alignment of interests among the employees may not be perfect with a union, but it is a lot closer than it would be otherwise, and can offer (sometimes) a real balance to the easily aligned interests of employers.

The inherent problem with a union is that, unlike with metalworkers, stonemasons or train drivers, there is still no way to tell a capable software developer from a bootcamp wannabe, and people in the same position can differ 10-100x in output.

Call me an elitist gatekeeper, I don't want to pay dues to protect dunces and have my employers keep paying them.

I want a guild that can drum dunces out and refuse to promote them past apprentice.

who's handing out equity "left right and centre?" Any place that I've worked or heard of has given comparative peanuts to workers while the people at the top / founders are paid 100-1000x.

> Do not help those who seek to devalue you

Excellent statement. The rest only applies if you can confirm that your company is seeking to devalue you. That is becoming more common but I don’t think it’s universally true.

All companies seek to devalue their workers. It is the nature of the profit motive. The less a company can pay for labor, the more it reaps as profit.

Some companies are worker-owned cooperatives.

Man, you must have worked for some terrible companies. I have friends at everywhere I ever worked and we always tried to cooperate.

So have I. I love the people I work with (usually). That doesn’t change the nature of the wage relationship. We workers produce value through our labor which companies pay for in wages. Capital (CEOs, founders, VCs) wants to maximize the ratio of value to cost, therefore they wish to pay us as little as possible while getting maximum efficiency. It has nothing to do with liking your coworkers.

Negotiation goes both ways, you want to be able to demonstrate your value and sometimes that comes by showing people that you can be paid more elsewhere. The game here is positive sum, not zero, you want to know and show what you add to the equation.

I've met everyone above me on the org chart. It's not that impressive because we're smaller, but we're also not doing layoffs and I can talk to people who make human decisions, rather than folks who are trying to cut 10% of expenses off of a spreadsheet by firing "resources."

So I don't think it's quite the same.

Most for profit companies seek to devalue their workers.

> Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people who run these companies are not your friends and they’re not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can.

And the opposite is true: if you are running a company, make it your employees priority that the company grows and incentivize them to achieve more!

Burning those bridges carries a cost to your career.

If you think about your retirement prospects as amassing wealth by optimizing the "Area under the graph", it's really important to build a professional network so if one job opportunity ends, you can quickly work your network to find another similarly paying job.

Failing that, you take a big pay cut, and impact your salary history. I can't imagine an employer making an offer to you which is competitive with your job from 5 years ago, instead of your job right now.

Also in some cases (maybe less engineering, but sometimes even then), your professional network is part of what your employer is buying when they hire you. This is true especially of ex-govvy security engineers.

TL;DR don't be a dick to your coworkers, even on your way out the door. It's in everyone's best interest.

> Burning those bridges carries a cost to your career.

I don't think this is borne out in practice. I've done very well and very poorly over the decades. It would have to be a very specific situation (lot of events unluckily coinciding) where coworkers/previous position could influence an interview process today.

Not necessarily influence an interview process, but connect you with jobs of your caliber, ones you may not be able to find (or which would not find you) otherwise.

I know people (the aforementioned ex-govvies) who have no need of LinkedIn, because this is how they navigate their careers. As you get more and more established in your career, the jobs for someone of your level are less and harder to find.

While I keep in contact with most people I’ve worked with in the past, I’ve never used them for a job. I still just go through LinkedIn and normally get callbacks from every company I apply to. I think you can offset connections with big names on your resume.

> If you think about your retirement prospects as amassing wealth by optimizing the "Area under the graph", it's really important to build a professional network so if one job opportunity ends, you can quickly work your network to find another similarly paying job.

Do you believe the supermarket shelf stockers think this way?

Yes, you've come to understand yourself to be in a different socio-economic class than supermarket shelf-stackers, the class of people who "optimize the area under the graph". But what you fail to see is that your employer has no incentive for maintaining your status in a different socio-economic class, and lots of incentives for changes that drive you, the exalted, mutually loved, always cooperative SWE into the same life+work situation as a supermarket shelf stocker.

(apologies, if necessary, to all the fine shelf stockers who are just living their best lives; all 3 of you)

> But what you fail to see

I don't fail to see the point of the article, I just think it's wrong.

> your employer has no incentive for maintaining your status in a different socio-economic class, and lots of incentives for changes that drive you, the exalted, mutually loved, always cooperative SWE into the same life+work situation as a supermarket shelf stocker.

Worker protections are good. So is being good at your job.

We can, and should, strive to have it both ways.

What's not good is disparaging people who don't have as prestigious a job as you. (And you are doing exactly that)

Even shelf stockers have basic human dignity; Don't be a dick.

> Even shelf stockers have basic human dignity

Sure, but no thanks to their employers. Are you telling me that you don't know anyone who doesn't actually like their job, and gets nothing from it except a paycheck? Because it certainly sounds that way.

I am certainly not saying that, but I am now sure that if you think that, that you probably didn't get my original post at all, and are unlikely to do so no matter how I explain it.

> Extract as much value for as little work as possible.

This only makes sense if you assume that work has negative value

Imo it's the other way around: more work has more value (up to a certain point) because you acquire new skills and grow, and have the satisfaction of solving interesting problems

> Extract as much value from as little effort as possible.

insert capitalism vs. communism handshake meme

Wait what? You did mean to add the /s at the end right?

/s for serious

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