The Burnout Machine (opens in new tab)

In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.

I have some conjectures as to why that may be:

1. High variability of pay, not only between companies but within companies. As a SWE your total compensation can be expected to double every two promotions, and promotions can be pretty fast. Promotions are also not purely a function of tenure like other professions with steep comp growth such as pilots.

2. "This is too good to be true" syndrome. You show up at your comfy 250k job with catered lunch, dinner, and maxed out benefits. After the first month, your workload is about 3-4 hours a day. Everything is flexible - the time you show up, the time you leave, the days you choose to come in to the office, what you wear. Everyone is smart and nice. Free snacks. Imposter syndrome and paranoia set in. Am I doing enough? Should I look at this P2 prod bug on a Satuday? I guess I only worked 20 hours last week so it's fair to work a couple of hours on the weekend. Everything I do needs to be perfect or they could've just hired someone in India for 1/10th my pay, right? etc. Then it snowballs. (I'm probably just describing imposter syndrome.)

In reality nothing really happens if you slow down and do things at a comfortable pace. Most managers want to cultivate reliable people who take long-term deep ownership, not productivity machines that just bang out features. If they needed more output, they'd just hire one more person.

> This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations.

On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.

My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.

I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.

IMO, this is a bad take. I've been in this industry long enough to have heard all the arguments presented here before— it's the classic ones: "pay is good", "not all jobs are bad", "others have it worse", etc.

We're in a strategic industry with lots of investment, and a lot of us who check Hacker News have good enough resumes to be in demand, but this doesn't change the fact we —software engineers as a whole— are workers. We might be well-paid, but we're still working class.

If you go outside the top-school bubble, or the usa-tech bubble, this is more evident. Take the money and generous stock grants away and the job is basically indistinguishable from any other white-collar job. Most software developers around the world can't work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to reinvent themselves. Or find freelance work that'd allow them to live comfortably with only a dozen hours of work a week.

The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more, for less. Thankfully in the USA especially the stars are aligned to give "top software engineering talent" enough leverage to enjoy career mobility and cushy pay. We're at the right place at the right time.

The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more for less, and trust me, they're trying. It might be AI, it might be a growing supply of developers, it might be a change in investment strategies— that "top software engineering talent" pool will shrink and a lot of developers will be hit with the realization they weren't some permanent exception in the system. We might feel like we're part of the bourgeoisie because we get big cheques from the companies we work for, but we're much closer factory-line work than a lot of people realize.

There's no reason why tech unions can't have solidarity with other unionization efforts (and there are thousands of reason why we should have that solidarity).

Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.

A perfect example is non-compete clauses. Tech workers enjoy high job mobility, which is only hindered by non-competes. It's no accident that major tech hubs were some of the first states to ban them, helping all workers.

I can't relate to "easy mode" past the layoffs. Everything has turned into a nightmare with employer expectations. Everyone I speak to feels the same. Things are not the way they are.

Absurd Schedules - Yes

Unrealistic Deadlines - Yes

Competing Colleageues -Yes

Toxic environment - Yes

Hard to switch - Yes

Outsourcing - Yes

Training your replacements -Yes

How is this easy mode? Mental labor can be as bad or even worse than Physical labor. Atleast you hit a brick wall with physical. Your enemy is inivisible when its mental.

My initial reaction to this whole thing was the same as yours (not that I have any love lost for academics). Software engineers do basically no physical labor and usually get paid better than many people who physically work way harder. On the whole, software engineers are not "the victim," as you said.

However, your examples made me think.

> In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job.

Can you? Can everyone? I've job hunted before and known many more people who've taken way longer than me to find a position at all, in several different locations throughout the country (not coastal metropolises). You're kind of suggesting that unemployment isn't an issue in the industry, which is a pretty blanketed take.

> Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage.

Can you meet friends while living in a remote cottage? Can you raise kids well in a remote cottage? (Does the remote cottage even have internet?) This one is technically true, but ignores many of the reasons most people work/live in the first place. I say that as someone who's considered going that route.

So while I agree software engineers aren't a "victim class" as compared to other industries, I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do. The majority of software engineers are middle-class, and when the middle-class is under attack, they're going down with the rest of the ship, not up. Perhaps it'd be better to foster a little more solidarity instead of inviting us vs. them mentality.

>Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference).

well I have worked all sorts of physically demanding jobs, digging ditches, building offices, tearing down offices...

So yes Software Engineering is easy - except when it's not. When it's easy it is real easy. When it's not it is significantly worse than most of the time at these other jobs. It is hard to explain the stress that a computer can give you when it is refusing for hours to do what you tell it to, but that stress is a lot worse than the stresses of landscaping in my experience.

Some people got a career path like this, and in fact I either personally have or know someone who has experienced all of the things you're listing here as perks. I'd even say you likely get all that if you're in the 95th percentile of seniority and job stability among devs, or if we're talkin' about ten or fifteen years ago. Sounds like you're in one of those categories? Congrats. I'm not doing terribly myself either, albeit not quite that well. This always seems to be the argument. "How very privileged we are! Devs have so much going for us, we ought to be grateful! Clearly there is no reason we should collectively bargain." I dunno. I'm not into doing oppression olympics about my working conditions? There are still things that suck about how labor arrangements are in this profession, and this has become especially apparent during the recent multiple-year enormous layoff cycles in tech, and this is also indicative that we are, as a profession, perhaps losing some of the very scarcity-driven leverage that creates these conditions. Also, this kind of view really seems almost explicitly designed to buck solidarity with people who, in the same career path, don't have as many options as us, possibly because they are more junior or have nontraditional backgrounds or whatever. In fact, working conditions having high variance between devs for various reasons is one of the problems unions try to solve

two things can be true:

- tech work is relatively privileged

- we, as tech workers, are losing out immensely due to a lack of collective bargaining

I look at the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as a reference: these are jobs with similarly privileged work conditions. However, there being a union meant they could inflict significant pain on industry players until their demands around AI training were met.

Meanwhile, we’re all just keeping our heads down hoping the market improves at the same time the biggest players are using our inputs to train even better models.

Just because our work conditions are better than other professions doesn’t negate the notion that we are being actively exploited to our own detriment.

> Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"

Is it though? People in software seem to be constantly talking about burnout/mental health issues.

Like we need some explanation as to why software has such high pay, flexibility, limited education requirements, and yet not everyone in the world is doing it. High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.

I have a sub-40 week at one of the big tech companies, idk why this article is being so confident that we are all pushing 80 hours?

We are tech workers, we need time to go to the bouldering gym and to take our Patagonia hoodies to see the outdoors.

Both you and this post can be correct. It is the case that being a software dev is a position of relative privilege. It is also the case that many people feel burnt out, the system doesn't support them, and labor solidarity is important. This is a classic trap. Just because your body isn't being abused by the system to the extent that others are doesn't mean that you can't argue and fight against the abuse you are suffering from.

This is true and not at all. Last year, I quit my job, because I was in the process of getting a burn-out. It was primarily because management refused to give me recognition for my efforts. (I dreamed about it last night.) While I was unemployed, I did voluntairy work at a farming coop, physical labour, often simple weeding. Working there for just one morning per week felt more rewarding than working as a SWE. You could always see the results of your work with your own eyes.

> In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional

Not disagreeing with your post in general, but the grind for medical specialists is only until 30 something. Once you are “consultant” (in Australia), it’s basically huge money with a job for life at whatever hours you want to work; almost anywhere in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, the grind until then is extreme, but it’s a weird comparison to make.

Overall, I agree that we are super privileged in the world of software.

You can have the most privileged occupation and bargain to make it better. Its not different from living in the USA, the wealthiest country in the world, and bargaining to make it better.

Generally, you change something you are a part of, not because its the most important thing in the world, but because you have a stake in it and understand it.

If your boss is constantly pressuring you to take on more work, then burnout is not a career choice. Ever have a coworker leave and get all their work dumped on you? Do your deadlines no longer allow time to relax and explore new ideas inbetween them? Managers all read the same magazines/blogs on how to get more out of their employees and it always seems to come down to beating the employees until they die, same as in the slave days. If you're not being pushed to do more, consider yourself lucky and stay there!

I don't think this rings true anymore for a lot of people, even those with "good experience."

It's a lot harder to even get interviews now--I'm one of several people in my social circle that are having difficulty even getting interviews with referrals.

Projecting forward, things looks worse than the present and far worse than the past.

I've notice that many engineers that have been inside cushy corporations for a while don't realize the bloodbath that is happening outside their corporate walls in the job markets. But your CEO definitely realizes it and they are tightening the screws because they haven't had this much power over employees in a long time. They're coming for you too sooner or later.

Okay. Reality check mate. It was like that till before COVID. Don’t be under the wrong assumption that it’s anything like that now, or ever will be. Maybe your experience was different? I can sure as hell relate to this and I’m not even in the valley.

This applies to some people (it certainly applies to me!) but not to everyone. Insofar as any white collar worker can be exploited, which they can, plenty of SWEs are making <$100k, work long hours, have poor healthcare, etc. etc. And even for those who are doing well -- isn't it better to stand alongside those who aren't? Why is the "proper" thing to do just going your own way and being happy that you got yours?

"I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference"

Pressures are different indeed, but let's not pretend academia of all places is any less "priviledged"

Btw, most professors age well into retirement. Trying to find a software engineer over 55 is looking for a needle in a haystack that definitely will not make it past the next boom/bust cycle.

Agism in this field is endemic, probably the worst of any in knowledge work.

1000% this. My partner is in the medical field, the absurd schedule they put up with and the amount they are required to work when tired is the worst. Some close friends do contracting / construction, it takes a tole on their bodies.

People that take above senior level roles or "FANG" jobs should expect to grind.

>In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.

That was the case a few years ago, when interest rates were 0 or below 0 and during the pandemics when IT experienced a boom.

I was layed off a the start of the year and it took two months to get some offers. It was much harder to find employment than 3 years ago. I went through more than 150 applications and tens of interviews.

I recommend this reading about where the valley heading. If you are not squeezed for work, you will be. Developers are becoming more disposable. Maybe you are not feeling but it's happening.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-industry-amazon-microso...

> Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.

I'm curious about people who have done this and how they've handled things like insurance, taxes, and getting back into the workforce after such a long gap. It seems like a big risk since there's no guarantee of employment. I'd also imagine having a long break would be looked on unfavorably by interviewers and make it harder to get back in

I'm not a fan of the original post, but this is absurd and offensive. You're taking the creme-de-la-creme of tech workers and comparing them to medical interns. "Playing life in easy mode"? Would you say that an MD who chooses to specialize in, say, dermatology, and ends up the head of a department, and spends a lot of their 50s golfing, has lived life in easy mode? Probably not, because as you explained, grind is not optional to get to an optimal point in one's career.

Is it privileged to be able to live in a society where you can develop your career and not, like, have to go pick crops for three months? Yeah. Does the geographical freedom of SWEs (in a minority of cases) exceed that of a higher-paid traveling nurse? Sure, but that's a trade-off; the engineer takes less money than the nurse, but gets to travel further.

I'm not asserting that your comment was offensive because I'm whining about global systems of grind and exploitation. It's offensive because you seem to think that no one in the tech industry outside AAA game dev has come up from the mines. I started my career as an unpaid intern, then made $7.50/hr and freelanced on the side. I worked 12-16 hour days coding, and/or 8 hour days while doing 8 hour shifts as a waiter and taxi driver. So now, 30 years later, I can bill $300/hr and work a few hours a day. Is that easy mode?

And if you're referring to the people half my age who are trying to make it in this industry, they have it much harder than I did. They're living after the time when they can specialize and be adopted in as part of the technical debt for clients or companies. They have virtually no chance at job security. They have to constantly scrape and invent in order to stay relevant. So yes, people like me may appear to have easy lives compared with 24 year old medical students, but you seem to be taking for granted the lateral shift in your career - I suppose it's probably easier mucking with python than writing academic papers - but you're taking for granted your status, age, job security, etc. And missing the fact that other people do not get into this industry because it's easy, but rather because they are up for a challenge.

And how many people have said that working in academia is playing life in easy mode? That's the joke of the century.

This is the kicker:

> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?

Those unprivileged people that you're trying to compare tech workers to, in order to undermine this manifesto, are exactly those who are harmed by dark patterns.

Anyway that's besides the point. Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions. Your comments cannot be taken at face value, because you are incentivized to come up with any reason to side against this movement.

Incredible that people like you will watch the industry lay off hundreds of thousands of workers then turn around and make this argument. It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.

Academia is a much easier, low productivity, self-interested career than engineering in my experience. Most academics claim they work hard but have very poor time management and work intensely in short periods whilst taking huge amounts of holiday and flexible time off. Most universities are empty during the summer months. Even at top tier universities in the UK I was shocked how absent people were around anything remotely close to a holiday period.

In the commercial world you have to sing for your supper, as PG put it, and that is much much harder.

> one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"

you have never done 80 hour weeks in software?

Eh, most of the benefits are offset by the stress of having to care about the needs of corporate america and all the ensuing implications of making a living by destroying society. Just because it's not a physical job doesn't mean this stress won't kill you.

It's also worth noting that developers remain some of the most proportionately under-compensated jobs compared to the revenue we drive and we're all aware of it. It's the shareholders that need to justify their existence.

> But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.

Everyone can be victims of the "global system" at the same time, even if not to equal degrees.

I live in Latvia. Teachers here are underpaid. So are firefighters. So are nurses. So are software developers, compared to most other countries, or even with what people could historically afford on a single salary. The economy could be worse, but it also kinda sucks for everyone.

Using housing prices as a quick example:

> U.S. home prices are rising significantly faster than incomes. After accounting for inflation, home prices jumped 118% from 1965 to 2021, while income had only increased by 15%.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

> Between 2010 and the third quarter of 2023, house prices increased by 48% and rents by 22%. When comparing the third quarter of 2023 with 2010, house prices increased more than rents in 18 out of the 27 EU countries.

> Over this period, house prices more than tripled in Estonia (+210%) and more than doubled in Hungary (+185%), Lithuania (+158%), Latvia (+141%), Austria (+123%), Czechia (+122%) and Luxembourg (+107%). Decreases were observed in Greece (-14%, see methodological notes), Italy (-8%) and Cyprus (-2%).

> Rents increased in 26 EU countries with the highest rises in Estonia (+218%), Lithuania (+170%) and Ireland (+100%). The only decrease in rent prices was recorded in Greece (-20%). Latvia's rent increase was more modest than its house price increase at around 50%.

from https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/economy/11.01.2024-latvia... (more recent data, but the trend is pretty clear)

> According to Money.com.au, house prices have skyrocketed nationally by 3435 per cent since 1975 compared with just 1183 per cent growth in full-time wages.

from https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/interest-rates/proof...

Seems pretty global, same with the prices of various goods being more or less out of control, education costs, healthcare costs, everything. It doesn't mean that my profession isn't privileged in many ways, I still try to help my friends when I can.

Not all dev jobs are like that. There is only one country called the USA.

Some of you are outing yourselves as not having any real world, let's just call them... issues.

>as victims of the global system.

You know if I were to be REALLY generous and take your statements in good-faith, that still wouldn't change the fact that injustice is injustice. Being murdered is not the same thing as having your wallet stolen, but that doesn't mean you should throw up your hands with a thought-terminating cliche and go "well it could have been worse! Guess I should just let them have it and not do any follow up!"

Really, really confused take to be quite honest.

--redacted--

> Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"

...if you are born in US, maybe, but "somebody else has it worse" is pure whataboutism.

It is possible to simultaneously be a victim of the system and for other people to be worse off victims of the system.

All workers can and should unite to protect themselves from the capitalist class. Tech professionals should not feel guilty merely because they are less oppressed than the other workers.

We're definitely not victims. It's impossible to rationalise what we do.

Use this to your advantage.

Hows that boot taste?

> Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.

Not having it as bad as others is not the same as not being a victim. We really need to drop this attitude because it misaligns our loyalties with those who have no reason to be loyal to us in return. It's a false consciousness.

Wealth and income are widely pushed as "class" distinctors in culture and media for a reason. They blur the lines and mislead us about our place in the system. Yes, many software jobs pay handsome salaries for now. But as soon as they can, companies will drop those salaries and cut those jobs because we're a cost center, even if the "assets" we create pad out the balance sheet more than a cleaner or receptionist could.

Wealth can enable you to become an enterpreneur which in turn can enable you to become part of the billionaire class if you make it through all of the filters against all the odds. But even small business owners are only a few bad months (or in the US maybe even just one bad health event) away from the rest of us plebs, unless they are so tightly integrated (which almost always means family, i.e. something outside their control) that they can get the support to recover.

We're all suffering from grind and exploitation. Some of us suffer more directly but just having lucked into a position so far ahead from the bulldozer chasing us that you can't see it, doesn't mean it won't run you over if you have to stop or fall and can't get up in time. That bulldozer exists by choice. You didn't get a say in it, nor did I, but that doesn't mean its existence is inevitable or unchangeable. Capitalism isn't a law of nature any more than feudalism was. Nor does capitalism have to evolve (and it has evolved, likely even within your lifetime) into something better, especially if those at the receiving end of it are placated by being told that others having it worse.

The issue is the idea that there’s something that can magically solve all your problems. If you believe in panaceas, everything will disappoint you.

Unions are a tool, and tools have tradeoffs. They will be able to solve some of your problems — most importantly, the power imbalance between employer and employee — and introduce new ones you didn’t have before. The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly, they will solve more problems than they create; that we will, on balance, be better off.

> What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.

South Korean search giant Naver. Union website here: https://www.naverunion.com/

I'd like to see unions negotiate better equity deals. For pre-IPO companies, it's typical that the equity is worth nothing, and employees can actually lose money on their equity by buying it during early exercise or when they leave. For a typical employee, equity is too risky and too detached from their individual activity to be part of compensation, and it makes more sense to have different incentives. E.g. SAFEs or convertible notes where you can get paid at the next funding round instead of the IPO between 10 years and never. Alternatively, a union would have leverage and scale to arrange tender offers that individuals wouldn't. Also, during an acquisition, the union can negotiate to waive liquidation preference, since an acquirer doesn't want to buy a company where the employees don't get paid and strike on the first day.

I'd be particularly interested in cases where unionization led to better products and processes. Like in a world where management just wanted to ship everything half baked, the union gave the workforce the voice required to insist on accurate and up to date documentation, comprehensive testing, proper dependency tracking and security practices, etc.

I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.

IFPTE, UAW, CWA (which just recently welcomed workers in the video game industry: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-launc...)

I think a lot of people might consider taking a pay cut in return for an easier tech job. In theory working in an equally profitable company by lowering stress and comp for everyone and hiring more seems possible, but I'm not certain that it'd work out in practice because of increased coordination overhead etc.,.

In Sweden, devs and IT can just join the office worker union...

https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen

It helps because at the end of the day you are just an excel sheet with numbers to your employer.

The main thing a union does is shift power from the employer to the employee. How that power is used is up to each union, and its members.

One of the problems with real world union examples is all the laws that weakened and destroyed unions over the years. Even if there were few or no examples of thriving unions today because of issues with the legal regime, that does not strictly imply that better conditions are not possible. For example wildcat strikes and sympathy strikes have been illegal since 1947, putting more power in the hands of union management and taking power away from unions. That’s both unfair from a libertarian perspective (if workers want to strike there should not be a law preventing them from doing so) and it undermines the concept of worker power which unions otherwise aim to uphold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

So it may be instructive to look at past examples when unions were strong and compare the working conditions of workers in unions and workers not in unions. Or to look at unions in other countries like Germany where they have board seats and better legal accommodation.

> "elect me and I'll solve your problems."

Isn't that a function of living within hierarchies?

Can you describe a system of change where one person is not ultimately responsible for the changes?

Unions exist as a structure of power, but that power still has contend with company power. Good outcomes are proportional to challenging someone else's power, and people use their power to punish challengers and reward loyalists.

That means good outcomes, no matter what the system, are a function of pain tolerance and people's willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Unions are a higher leverage vehicle for making sacrifices, but if there is no tolerance for pain or sacrifice then your only option is submission and hoping those with more power than you use it responsibly rather than becoming increasingly more despotic.

Seems like a good time to unionize is when you don't need it, while the job is good. Get the union in place and work through issues like on-call, laying out actual articulable and measurable performance targets for review time, work-life balance rules and other "small" things while the job is good. That way when the money grubbing starts, the true horror-show policies are attempted, etc - you have an established union and a better bargaining position. Better than waiting until the job is shit and having to fight an uphill battle all the way.

> I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."

That would track if you were asked to elect anyone. You aren't. You're told to get your shit together, talk to your coworkers, and _solve your shit_ together. And when you do that - that's a labor union. Maybe not necessarily in the legal sense, but in a very real, material sense.

A big one would be ensuring adequate staffing on call rotation. If you are never truly off duty, at some point your mind will break.

> I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."

Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).

Unions need to stop marketing themselves as a way to get better work-life balance. The main benefit of unions is that employees are protected from individual abuse, because the entire union can put pressure on management in support of individuals who are being mistreated, underpaid, etc.

Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen.

I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.

I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.

Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.

Unions could address on-call rotations, that seems like a low hanging fruit.

> What does it look like when rubber meets the road?

The book The Logic of Collective Action helped me understand.

TLDR: Collective bargaining helps prevent the free rider problem. It's just game theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

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I have so many complaints about unions. Very briefly.

#1 Suboptimal governance. Especially when leadership gets "captured". But that's always true of all human orgs. I have nothing helpful to add here.

#2 Accelerating inequity. Corporate profits up while wages remain stagnant. Just as u/singron commented elsethread. I just don't understand how this isn't the central issue. For every person, union, voter, policy maker. For everyone.

#3 Adversarial relationship (in the USA). Labor and Capital (via their proxy, Management) need to work together. My only notion is to encourage member (employee) owned and managed co-ops. (Which would need access to financial support of come kind, eg "slow capital". Which is antithetical to Wall St, neoliberalism, rent seeking, yadda, yadda.)

That said... I'm very pro-Labor. And unenthusiastically pro-union, out of necessity, until we figure out something better.

Like you suggest, no way simply unionizing magically resolves my complaints. Meta stuff like culture, policy, laws, expectations would have to change, to create the space for "better" unions. Stuff like repeal Taft Hartley Act, institute sectorial bargaining, investment banks structured to support social endeavors (like co-ops), yadda yadda.

And I have no clue where to start.

I'm sure many of us have figured this out, it's just that there's no alternative for most.

I live in Europe and we are all unionized and I hate to break it to you but we're still creating much more value than we earn for someone else. Our work conditions may be significantly better - I work 40h/week with unlimited vacation (within reason ofc) and sick days - yet still burnout happens frequently and necessitates costly rehabilitation trajectories.

We deal with the consequences better, and I'm grateful for the conditions here, they may well be much worse elsewhere, but the core issues remain. Humans aren't built to work mentally straining jobs for 8 or more hours per day, and the fruit baskets and vacations only do so much. I believe a four day work week would help some of it.

Though you'll need to deduct a lot of SG&A, etc. overheads from that as well, and it often looks far worse.

Big Tech companies (ie ones close to monopolies) still extract a ton of net cash flow that ends up going to investors and top management, though you could then ask why those monopolies extract cash from their customers as well, etc.

My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change. I get why bus drivers, etc. in stable systems should organize and could do so without adversely affecting system performance, but in tech/startups, I don't think those companies would exist in unionized form for very long before being put out of business.

Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.

Interesting approach. Did you ever try to include other factors into the model ? Such as :

  * cost of sales (and crm, and billing)
  * cost of infra
  * taxes (on income and profits)
  * taxes (on salary)
  * cost per employee (office, PC, software licenses)
  * cost of loans needed for the investment

Would be curious to see how big the ratio remains.

The alternative is to start your own company or start consulting. I've been doing this for over a decade and make great money compared to a salaried employee.

Doing this has also made me realize that development is only a small part of the overall process.

Most developers just want to code.

10x is purely on payroll, which is not that great. there are a lot of other things you have to account for. There are companies that do 100x or more.

the other commenter said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436688

This is overly simplistic. I don’t fault you for it, but it shows a lack of understanding how a business functions.

There is a lot of overhead that goes into running a business, as others have mentioned. Taxes. Rent. Utilities. Licenses. Certifications. HR, testers, project managers, product managers, people managers, directors, marketing, customer service, sales, C suite, and on and on.

I know right now you might be saying “those people don’t even do anything! Developers are the only people making the damn product!”. Again, a business is kind of like a product of its own. It takes many moving parts to take a usable product and get it to market, fight off competition, work with government for regulations (or keep from getting regulated), find and get customers, etc.

Once you try and “go it alone” you will realize that creating the product is only one small part of making a functional and profitable business.

I run a small business. I don’t use half of those roles I mentioned and there is still a lot of overhead. It is very easy to underestimate the amount of extra work involved.

>> We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary.

Start your own company, hire the developers for $200,000, double their income and get rich.

Isn't this how business works?

For example, walmart revenue per employee is $300k but they mostly make minimum wage.

starbucks is $94k/employee

The income of the company is not the "fruits of the labour" of the people that work there. There is no logical connection there.

You don't "create" all the value just because you work there.

Also the total cost of employment is much higher than salaries, and there are big overheads in any business that aren't wages.

Well if it's that simple go ahead and start a company, generate $1M per employee and pay everybody their fair share. If you're right you'll get the top 0.1% talent in that market, no question.

Let's see how you do, best of luck.

And how will you leverage that as a developer? Only making a startup seems to work.

And then it gets even worse in Europe.

Most developers are paid more than 2x the median wage. For HN, that difference is probably 3x-5x or more. If class consciousness is on the rise, HN's readership is in the classes that the lower economic strata are going to be rising up against. If you have any illusions that the proletariat will welcome you with open arms for your claimed solidarity, think again or you might be in for a shock; specifically, a short, sharp shock.

I strongly feel that groups within the "classes" often have vast differences that make me question the idea of class consciousness. A well off tech emloyee has interests that align far more with those with wealth than a small business owner who might have interests far more aligned with blue collar workers. And don't even get me started on social differences, like LGBT right etc that divide people.

I watched season 1 of severance. What did I miss? I don't remember any lessons on class consciousness

> Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist

More like people who work in some media companies have certain political beliefs that may or may not be out of touch of broader society. Witness their constant surprise at election results as an example.

I dunno, I live in a nice house in Kansas and work from home for a nice company and have nice benefits. What am I gonna be disillusioned about? My life is literally the best it has ever been.

It’s certainly one thing in the zeitgeist but I still have the sense that culture war stuff has a much firmer grip on a larger number of people and has a lot more power to swing elections.

That includes both its left wing “woke” form and its right wing reactionary form.

Very anecdotal but it also seems that the culture war stuff is stronger among those making less money, which would be the target audience for any class revolt rhetoric. Could be wrong though. Maybe my sample size is just small.

.

Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.

A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.

Yeah, great, give programming a high entry barrier for new people. One of the worst ideas I've heard today.

Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?"

The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."

When would it kick in, do you think?

Would you need a JSON loisence? A bash loisence? Is Javascript ok but only in the browser, and only under 500 lines?

At what point does the bobby say Oi! ?

I can't imagine anything worse than that.

That sounds awful.

I am not really decided if i am pro or anti tech unions yet but this argument always comes up and falls flat for me. It just smells like pitting the working classes against each other. Are we more privileged than most? Sure. We are still closer to broke then we are to the 1%.

On the other hand, your post "rinks" of a general ignorance of labor history in the US, where unions have (at least, historically) been able to support each other across industries and facilitate class solidarity amongst workers. Perhaps if you showed up to some picket lines in your city and worked to build connections with your fellow workers by providing support in their struggles, you'd find that they're supportive of yours in return.

Couldn't agree more. My friend broke his finger and I told him how privileged it is to go to the doctor when there are plenty of people in the world with cancer and other more serious diseases.

I think it is possible to acknowledge that privilege, while still highlighting the things that suck for us, and the ways unions can help. I wish the article did this. I firmly believe there is a strong case to be made here. It gets muffled by the narrowness of the author's perspective.

I've worked in a kitchen and a warehouse for a while, I absolutely know how good we've got it. I have friends who tell me about people dying at their workplaces. Pretty much everyone I know who's not a programmer is living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm still incredibly burnt out, and probably couldn't continue for another 6 months if my life depended on it.

"As long as other jobs suck more, be grateful and don't investigate legal avenues to improve your life"

> It's not because they're evil, it's just good business

Almost everything I have ever heard described as "good business" is pretty evil

You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"

It's always stuff like "we put 10000 orphans through a meat grinder to make 10 cents, it wasn't personal it was just good business"

Edit: of course that is an exaggeration

But more realistic examples include things like "we laid off 200 people the week before Christmas so we hit our targets for the next year. Not personal, just good business"

Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place

Startups are risky and unionizing won't force them to keep you employed. In fact, it will create an environment of less startups and more large companies with less choices for the employee.

Union heavy countries like Sweden have almost no startup scene and wages are normalized (ie: almost all the same across white collar industries).

This just sounds like you and your colleagues work for shitty companies.

This doesn't generalize to all companies! After all, if you started a company, certainly you'd do things differently... Right?

> They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible

It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.

> I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work.

Did everyone feel that way?

I work at a FANG. Senior SDE. I don't have slack on my phone. I don't read emails (unless someone tells me out of band that one needs a response). Once I close this laptop work is dead to me until the following day.

You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends. I do have to do oncall rotations, and it sucks, but I mark that up to "what the money is for."

My only point being, one of these rants makes it to the front page every few months. "Unionize" gets thrown around. People complain as though it must be done. I've only worked 2 legit 80 weeks in my life. I decided I didn't like it, so I stopped doing it.

That means I cannot compete inside of this place with the people that work non-stop, live on slack, and devote their lives to their job. And that's OK. They can have the Top Tier rating and the salary that comes with it. I prefer to just make my little slice of the world good during the hours that I'm paid to do it. Then I go do something else.

Balance is a choice.

The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.

You're right that these are not the only place that people can write software and that many of us have recognized for a very long while that these are noxious places to write software, or that they were eventually going to become so.

Billion dollar FAANGs and their smaller, cargo culting, shadows represent a certain sector with a certain work atmosphere, much as game development companies and hedge/trading firms do. 15 years ago, during the ascent of Facebook and Google, this atmosphere was different than it is now -- innovative and luxurious and inviting -- and some people still look see them through the lens of the past, but they're much larger machines now, with different priorities and incentive structures, and as the author notes, those are mostly not aligned with sustainable, satisfying, or healthy environments for most of the engineers who've found themselves inside of them.

Like finance, they pay extremely well, and like games, they can make you feel like you're part of something you can brag about at a dinner party, but also like both, they have little concern about chewing you up for as long as you're willing to bear it.

Yeah that was my take away. I don't doubt there are many company cultures like that, and you see many highly influential tech bros advocate for it. But in my ~15 year career, most of my burnout was due to lack of progress and politics, not 80+ hour work weeks.

Now, I didnt make enough to retire in this time, but same as you I do just fine in a very high cost of living state. I've always planned my career to be 30+ years and optimized for that. I have no interest in working at a place where I'll make a million+ a year in exchange for my personal ethics and life. I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.

The dysfunction at those places is more than enough to cause burnout by itself. Source: I work at one such job now.

> This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies

Indeed.

80 hours a week (or even 60): Never had to deal with that in over a decade across 3 jobs. In fact, I've never had to work a weekend (and if I did, it was either to fix my own screwup, or because I intentionally slacked off during the week and needed to make up for it).

Slack/email off work hours? Just ask up front in the interview: "I turn off my laptop at the end of my work day, and don't install any work related items on the phone. Is that OK?"

On call? Lots of jobs that either don't involve running an online/web service, or if it does is for some internal company tool where the cost of it being down is low. I've never had on call. However, I did interview at places that did, so the questions to ask in the interview:

"What is the on-call rotation look like?" Typically it's one week per person, rotated by the number of people in the team. Team has 4 people? That's once every 4 weeks (too much for me).

"How often are people called during on-call?" I interviewed in one place where they got 2 calls out of work hours in the whole year. I can live with that.

"What's the process of evaluating those calls?" Do they just expect you to take care of it and move on, or do they have a process to analyze and prevent it from happening again? Some teams move too fast and there will always be calls - they don't want the hit in fixing things.

A union doesn't have to be "workers for company X employees". It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).

Neat thing about this type of organizing is that the union provides training and standardization paths. Both of those make moving between jobs easier.

They can also provide a standardized way of differentiating employee levels (e.g. union sets the standards for what a jr, sr, or whatever is). I'm not sure if that is good or not in tech, but it is a possiblility - and it's something that would definitely help employers too: rather than each company having to test each potential employee, a union certified X dev will have a certain skillset. Yes some X devs will be better than others, we're talking about humans here, but the minimum bars can be defined and the whole hiring process can become easier and more efficient.

Theres some interesting compensation challenges to get the idea of unionization more accepted in tech tho: stock based compensation and bonuses can get really tricky - something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.

> you're going to personally be better off changing companies

Job mobility for tech workers is a fluke of current economic conditions. If interest rates spike, or a recession happens, or a bubble bursts, this benefit would go away and you'd be stuck at that exploitative company or unemployed.

Unionization and labor laws can make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).

> When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway

The Unions that created this system essentially became the system themselves. The government will sure like it and stamp over it. If the Union gets paid regardless, then it'll essentially become useless. Unions where the syndicate has to fight for its salary will act as paid gangoons. They are essentially the police version of the workers.

It's almost like humans universally will use systems of power to further their own aims, rather than altruistic ends. And those who do have an advantage in the accumulation of that power.

> I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.

And i bet your boss is even happier!

The primary power of a union is the capacity to collectively bargain. It doesn't matter if you personally can't think of anything that you'd like to use that power for. If unionization is right for tech, others will. In the abstract debate it will always be abstract answers. Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers.

If factory workers could delete the processes and equipment they work on with the press of a button, they would be bought off too

Paying tech workers high wages reflects the need for them to side with capital when it comes to protecting assets

I had an Ask HN last weekend that did not get any responses but I would still love to learn what governance prevents workers from deleting key software products and their backups because I can't believe boards of directors are not responsible to guarantee product continuity to shareholders

Strong worker protections can help in all kinds of situations. Case in point, I have a friend in Switzerland. He burned out and had a panic attack at work. The reasons were plausibly personal, but work stress always takes its toll as well. Switzerland has very strong worker protections and with a doctor’s approval he was able to take 6 paid months off while he recovered from the burnout. That was years ago and he has been back to work productively ever since.

We recognize physical impairment such as a broken leg but seem to have very little sympathy for the mental and emotional wellbeing of others.

> But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them

It's hard not to read your comment as anything but virtue signaling, and doing so in a way that makes everyone worse off.

You seem to think being a part of a union means you think you have a bad job and everyone should pay special attention to you. Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired. That's perfectly sensible.

Most tech workers I know are well aware they have desirable positions and do not see it as a bad job. Is there something specific you want people to do to acknowledge their privilege? I would guess not, short of "don't ever complain about your job, ever," which is not realistic in any profession

And as a side note, "tech" means a lot of things. There are lots of people in tech making a teachers salary with no benefits. Doesn't mean it's the worst job ever, but it's probably not most people's image of what "tech" is.

> rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers

They most certainly do, but it says A LOT more about them that they see developers as overpaid rather than themselves as underpaid.

Propaganda from the owners of capital has worked well by ensuring that anyone relying on an income is more likely to look left, right, and strike down than to ever consider looking up.

in the grand scheme of things, it's true that tech workers have very cushy nice jobs. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make our jobs better.

tech workers should be at the vanguard and come up with imaginative ways to "disrupt employment" the same way we always talk about disrupting everything else. four day work weeks (or less), full remote, codetermination, equity/profit-sharing, etc.

we should use our privilege to raise the bar and set a precedent for better working conditions that apply upward pressure to make things better for all the less privelged jobs.

I work in a union shop and I admit that it doesn't seem to have all the problems I have with the big tech. People seem to care and have passion, but don't pretend to work 80 hours a week, some of them at least. Some of them are decades older then me. Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.

I have been part of quite successful unions in Germany and Latin America.

Even participated on a strike once.

The article mentions this union, not sure if it meets your definition of success: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins

Correct. Devs need to stop believing that business acumen is some special skill they can't develop. It's not magic. Your CEO isn't a better human than you despite what LinkedIn tells you.

Reminds me of this comment I saw recently

> Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what? End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43379353

I never worked harder in my life than when I worked for myself.

As LLMs get better and better at imitating bad writing it will become impossible to tell the difference

I was scrolling the comments waiting for someone to say this. And it was this same paragraph where the GPT smell got overwhelming. LLMs love punchy but meaningless metaphors (how are contractors and freelancers like cheap code? what is cheap code?) and punchy but generic turns of phrase ("that's for suckers", "let's get real for a minute", "don't get me started").

It reminds me of when Elon Musk used to show off how unfettered Grok was, how free to be edgy. Everything it said sounded like this.

It’s actually upsetting how lazy this is and it still made front page.

Agree. It seems that despite model improvements our brains can still distinguish many kinds of AI generated text from human writing.

Not burning your employees out is good. Totally unclear that working "80 hour weeks" is any more productive than a standard 40 hour week. Keeping employees around by slowing things down and making things more humane means you can retain employees for longer, build institutional knowledge, build a good culture at the company, etc. You can have a company full of atomized, dehumanized, and miserable workers... or not? Not seems better.

Oh, you miss the point. Nobody wants to overwork. The sweet spot is billing US company for enough hours for them to think you work more than their engineers, undercutting them in the absolute terms and getting more due to purchase power you have in your locale.

You get a nice piece of metal, come close and personal with coppers and live happily in exile in Europe ever after. Either that or you become a homeless drug addict. There are always exciting choices for these exciting times.

This was actually very popular with offshoring and the results spoke for themselves. I made a lot of money cleaning up those dumpster fires and it's hard for me to not encourage more of it.

I think what you're saying is coming for tech. It's just that we've been short 100s of thousands of engineers for so many decades. But both the training (education, hack schools etc) side is closing the gap, plus tooling is amplifying existing engineers such that the gap between supply and demand is closing.

There will be a reckoning when supply exceeds demand, and then talent and competition will reign supreme.

That being said there already is about a 10x spread between talent pay in tech (roughly $100k to $1M)

I think it makes sense when you look at it specifically with the "burnout" context in mind. The truth is, burnout can happen to anyone and it is often unclear whether there even is any real recovery.

And it can even happen not just necessarily due to overwork but due to lack of a clear goal, death by a thousand papercuts, complete riddance of passion and interest for certain reasons.

Sure it's nicer to work from your desk than to hang drywall but if you do end up burning out that will affect your brain and possibly permanently alter it. After that, who knows if you could even work in the industry at all anymore?

Personally I believe we way way underestimate it. Longevity is more important than exploiting the passion and overmotivation of potential burnout candidates for short term gains.

Tech is a big industry. It employs millions in the US. I’ve met people who only work 20-25 hours/week while pulling down $500k/yr+ at a known company that has a very toxic work culture. I’ve met people making under $150k who are working 60-70hr/week regularly at a supposed easy company. All within Silicon Valley.

The reality is that experiences vary widely in the industry even within each company - sometimes even within a team.

And even if you want to work onsite- ever notice that the near-universal distaste for open offices? Yet that's a trend in tech that refuses to die? There's an anti-open office layout story on HN every month, or used to be. For all of the power that software engineers think they have as an occupation, why can't they overcome being stuck in a bullpen, sometimes even in a floating desk setup?

Maybe all of the cushy perks are just what management is willing to bestow, and something as simple as getting cubicles or team cubes is beyond the reach for most staff engineers.

Would a labor union be overkill for getting such a concession? Perhaps. But in the absence of any sort of professional representation to push back or push for things, all you can do is blog stories that get upvoted on HN, and not much else.

I've never heard of hours like that outside of early high-growth startups. Have worked at FAANG and know many people who've worked at many of the FAANG companies.

Seems made up tbh

Others also noted this is AI slop.

Not demanding per se, but when you're stack ranked against people who ARE ...

Please can you give us a typical daily schedule of these 80 hour week folks?

Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days?

Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working?

I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable.

Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days.

Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours.

Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc.

It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.

I dunno. I've been waiting for that to happen since the 90s, when the D and R halves of the uniparty fully teamed up to make Wall Street and corporate profits their #1 priority and encouraged the exporting or outsourcing of every job possible. We've had 30+ years to do something about it, but we were always too independent and anti-social for that.

it’s because they used an LLM to edit the prose. It has all the signature marks.

There might be good content there, but it’s full of AI slop.

I’m salary software engineer lead and I work past five maybe two or three times a year. If I need my boss I have to call him after hours. There’s plenty of dev jobs that aren’t stressful.

+1 for rejecting anything that doesn’t pass a set of AI tests. I’ll take false positives to keep HN alive.