The difference is that software engineers, especially those at Google, have high social mobility and are well educated. I think that unions are inefficient, but I'm sympathetic towards or even support most of them because those workers don't have a better option. Googlers just come off as entitled. They should be intelligent enough to acknowledge when they're making clickbaity populist arguments that misrepresent complex issues, but they turn a blind eye to it. Calling out these arguments doesn't mean I support large corporations trampling over the weak.
Funny how people only ever use "entitled" to describe labor demanding better treatment from management, but never to describe management demanding that labor do more for less.
> Funny how people only ever use "entitled" to describe labor demanding better treatment from management, but never to describe management demanding that labor do more for less.
“Entitled” is a term used by elites to describe their lessers seeking to be above their rightful station. It's only ever used to punch down.
Other terms are used for the already powerful seeking to retain power including some that reflect the speaker's perception that it is unjust power involved, but “entitled” just isn't generally used in that direction.
I regularly see "entitled" used as a slur against those seen as assuming privileges they should not have or do not deserve. I've seen it attached to the Covington teenagers more than once.
With that in mind, I think the word may have a general-purpose use to describe people grabbing for things the speaker things they should not have.
Adam Smith discusses this asymmetry in Wealth of Nations. He basically says both business owners and labor try to organize, but business owners tend to win because it's easier for them to make it illegal for labor to organize.
Edit: This is the passage I was thinking of
"We rarely hear ... of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines ... that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.... Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise the price of their labour.... But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters, upon these occasions, are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which ... generally end in nothing but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."
Have you ever lived or worked in a third world country and seen people struggle to make ends meet? I mean really struggle. I have. It makes me wish I could drop my kids off in Afghanistan or a Syrian refugee camp for two weeks so that they can see just how good they actually have it when they curiously find things to bitch about.
I have worked immediately next to a former South African military officer that now works as a senior software engineer at one of the most profitable companies in the world. This person has also seen and experienced unimaginable poverty first hand and its amazing how quickly these experiences bring people into a common understanding or appreciation.
I think the world entitled is completely appropriate in this context. To reaffirm that when employees walk out of Google for a protest it isn't the contractors or employees in the various support jobs who walk out. It is the entitled software engineers whose jobs are more mobile and face less income insecurity. Ask any Googler that walked out about that stratification.
Ok, but you haven't actually addressed the main point of my comment. If it's entitled for labor to demand better treatment when there are kids starving in Africa, why is it not also entitled for management to demand said labor do more work for less? Your comment is entirely orthogonal to this tension.
Those two things are highly subjective. If the treatment upon the labor could be improved then what are the problems worthy of addressing? It seems software developers at Google have it pretty nice.
As for management demanding more for less that is far more complex than it sounds. Does that imply pay reductions, improvements to efficiency, increased labor education, automation, something else, or a mix of various factors? Demanding more for less is perhaps one of the most solid ways a small shop can compete and take share from a giant titan.
> To reaffirm that when employees walk out of Google for a protest it isn't the contractors or employees in the various support jobs who walk out. It is the entitled software engineers whose jobs are more mobile and face less income insecurity. Ask any Googler that walked out about that stratification.
It does depend why they are walking out. If a software engineer walks out in support of a cleaner then this is the opposite of entitled behaviour. Unfortunately e.g. the UK has made this illegal.
You do realize that several of the walkout demands were specifically designed to improve treatment of temps, vendors, and contractors as well as full-timers, right? Most of the Googlers who walked out explicitly did so in support of the folks who couldn't.
Management can "demand" whatever they want, and employees can refuse whatever they want. It's how supply and demand works, and how free markets work.
The problems happen when the government interferes in this process. For example, recently Washington State removed the exemption mentally disabled workers have from minimum wage laws. This was hailed as a victory for justice and fairness. The result is those workers can't get a job anymore.
The spectacular performance of the US economy, 1800 to the present, relative to countries with varying levels of socialism. The poor performance of socialist industries in the US. The failure of any socialist/communal agricultural system to produce enough food to feed itself. (Even the Soviets gave up on collective farms.)
This isn’t a moral judgment. But a market propped up with strong tariffs is by definition not a free market. The American economy you’re lauding was a mixed economy.
You've just mentioned activities an employer (or government) does.
Market doesn't do any of these. Prices or wages do not set themselves "because market wills it". They are set because people will not accept a different outcome. If the employer is stubborn and there are few other options, nobody can really drive the wages up.
Taking anot market is like talking about evolution. It is not even a force, just a label for emergent behavior.
So the market is as free as people are, and the main damper are actually mobility and debt.
People who cannot move are limited to local market which can have a very different equilibrium. People who are in debt are forced to take immediately available offers.
And finally, a typical person cannot outwit or outwait a corporation, much less government.
Information asymmetry and availability of various instruments of pressure is vastly different.
By the way, corporate law and setting wages is also use of force. You do not get to really negotiate any of it from equal position. Likewise you are very limited in negotiating credit.
The difference is, law is at least slightly transparent and corporate law is not.
This is a strange logic. Your description of a job is more that of a glorified hobby.
Meanwhile, are you expecting that the relatives (if they exist at all) shoulder all the burden and costs of caring themselves?
Only because someone does not live alone doesn't mean they don't have a cost of living. Indeed, a disabled person's cost of living is likely higher than an able-bodied one. Nevertheless, they should be expected to compensate this with a lower income than everyone else?
then "entitled" does seem to be the same concept you refer to as "self-entitled" ...
I don't mind people proposing different uses of language, but the person you are responding to literally quoted "entitled" which in original context meant exactly what you refer to as "self-entitled"
so I really see no value in your "correction" or was that a "self-correction" ?
> There's a difference between "entitled" and "self-entitled"
The former is a superset of the latter and the former term is often used for the latter, as here, where the specific subset being referenced is clear from context.
> so many people abuse the word.
Not particularly; natural language is just subject to more contextual nuance in meaning than most computer code.
Every time an Googler has a minor complaint about something that is miles away from their area of expertise expertise, it blows up to the front page of Hacker News. That's what I find entitled. They can't accept that one of the largest companies in the world is not going to bend to the wills. This happened with the Damore memo or project Maven, so they feed misleading information to the media to get populist pressure on their company. Now, everyone is acting suprised that Google is looking into protective measures.
There is a fair and dirty way to fight. I think most people on HN agree that Damore was out of line to milk all the controversy when his memo leaked out. I would argue that similar things happened with Maven, Dragonfly, and exit payouts to execs, but I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
There is no dirty way to fight Google. It's not a person. Google lost its face years ago. Are you seriously arguing being nice to a lifeless construct? It's a mechanism, a machine, and it has buttons to interact with. Not everyone can reach the same buttons but that doesn't mean that some are dirty.
Being employed by Google should not give you special political or social privilege. For someone to have the privilege of deciding what one of the worlds largest companies does, they should stump up the resources to become a shareholder.
You do not want corporations becoming political. Grocers should not choose their customers based on their political leanings. That would be bad. The principles are the same.
Almost all the cooks/childcare providers, office support, etc are contractors not employees. A significant amount of SWE and other technical roles are contractors as well.
The mechanism by which they get paid (W2 vs 1099) isn't important. The parent comment was listing several occupations that people fill at Google that don't fit the idea of "highly compensated software engineer" as examples of people who may be interested in organizing in search of better working conditions.
For what it's worth, I don't agree with the implication of the comment--it isn't fair to say software engineers can't have any reason to organize or protest against things that their company does.
You know who companies spend a lot of time and resources trying to replace (even when it doesn't make sense)...their highest paid employees (that aren't executives, they earn their money! /s).
We get away with what we do because the number of (competent) programmers has lagged the demand for programmers since I was a kid back in the 80's.
I'm specifically referring to the well-compensated Google full time employees. These are the ones who are usually talked about in articles like this one.
If those at Google are truly top-tier talent (which I think many are) and if they work in an industry and for a company that is all about disruption, why is this even a valid mentality?
"This thing sucks, so let's just do business as usual." If they are truly talented disruptors, their mentality would be "this thing sucks, we can make it better and bring it into the 21st century."
"In addition, after Google became successful, the type of candidate who applied and was hired shifted from the entrepreneurial to the smart yet homogeneous type. (Shift was pronounced by 2005.) As I have observed previously, only disruptive people create disruptive companies. (Stated differently, great entrepreneurs do not tolerate rules and constraints very well). Google has screened out personalities of this sort since at least 2004 and maybe since 2002."
Well their moonshot (project X or whatever) companies/ideas say this. However, it is true that their a massive company and thus are less about disruption than start-ups. However, Silicon Valley and the people that work their seem to love to talk about "being disruptors," it seems to be quite the badge-of-honor even if your only knowledge of it is via HN.
Or are those with high social mobility and education more likely to be software engineers? Part of this issue is the need to include those with less social mobility at birth and those with less education in the software process. Correlation doesn’t imply causation: this goes both directions.
Only one data point but this [1] suggests otherwise. It invalidates the idea that the median is in the < 100k range however it does not speak to mobility, i.e. that you may be stuck with an entry level salary for a longtime because you are indentured to the company that facilitated your H1b.
$60-100K sounds really unlikely for engineering positions. A poster a bit down claims $127K, which sounds low but not unbelievably low for base salary.
I can only really talk about my own experience, but I think the paysa total comp numbers are close enough to throw rocks at the truth.
They do: I was. Admittedly, at the top end of that range, and so one might argue that inflation has hopefully made that statement not true now (I would hope Google's hiring salaries have kept up), but the person you're responding to is also discussing H-1B, and I would expect the salaries there are not as attractive as normal hires.
