With the whole #StartupsAreAwesome and media that has been devoted to software engineering, a ton of new students will be entering the workforce pretty soon.
Bill Gates has made efforts to teach everyone code at a young age, and advertising how much he's doing that.
Also, there's been a massive campaign led by all major software companies and the government, plus universities as well to get women to enter tech. This campaign also brings much more visibility to computer science in general.
My university (not the one in pic) for example, the undergrad enrollment rose from 40 in 2011 to 80 in 2012 and to 110 in 2013.
Whether the corporations and government are purposely flooding the market with software engineer workers or are doing it with good intent is irrelevant.
We don't have unions in an already competitive environment. There's been a ton of cases of workers getting screwed by companies colluding against their interests. Our salaries can only get lower from here on out. Our benefits will disappear the next recession and never come back. You will be fired because you will become too expensive compared to the new laborers. Your workplace will become like a startup. You will be expected to work more than 8 hours. The workplace will get absurdly competitive You will eventually lose to an adderalled up recent grad. We already have the whole coding interview meme, and it will get worse.
What's worse, people are absurdly classcucked in our industry and are anti union. What do?
Some comments I've heard from coworkers: Suuuure, it's not like the top companies get together to set base salary standards… they wouldn't do that! not a coworker but a friend: >At _company_ the culture is all about trust. The CEO makes weekly meetings and we can ask all types of questions, there is really no limit, so if things get worse, we would be able to voice our discontent to the CEO.
Also related, I hate the cult of looooving the company you work for :( I sell my labor! I don't work for charity. What is wrong with these people.
Every STEMlord I have ever met, with no exceptions, has been a massive classcuck.
Nathaniel Cruz
I wish I would've done something useful but I'm too far in and going part-time as it is.
Ian Jenkins
Have you taken the post-keynesian pill?
Gabriel Lee
this is my dream. I really want to make a co-op with offices all over the world.
Zachary Butler
Fellow dev here.. just wanna say I share your rage man. I work with 50+ year old boomers in a defense contractor… and lemme tell you yes these are the most class cucked cocksucking pig fuckers in the world !!!
And ditto on 'loving your company' .. god what propaganda this is. I love that i have a stable enough job to pay bills and save for retirement, but this isn't something i thank capitalism for. its something that should be a basic thing for everybody that capitalism actively finds a way to erode for EVERYONE. Yet, people at my company will twist this aorund like, 'oh, thank god the system works this way or we wouldn't have X salary and benefits'…
this is a slave mentality and i will never understand it ffs
Mason Cooper
and of course my boomer parents and union dad has no understanding of how stressful white collar work can be iether. he thinks its all sunshine and rainbows, has no idea that office politics are shite, and people regularly manipulate you
Alexander Bennett
he basically thinks because you're 'stem' that you are literally a 1%'er or something… buys into all the CNN propaganda about how engineers make 'top salaries' and shit…
so of course, people don't see your grievances as legitimate. and your own coworkers insist that 'everything is fine' due to their own buy in of capitalist propaganda.
i couldn't imagine agitating any of my coworkers. they would see it as upsetting the apple cart, and i can guarantee i'd be fired and intimidated… or just outright bullied by coworkers.
Brayden Kelly
kill me
Dominic Nelson
Don't let your dreams be dreams
Isaac Collins
Accept your death fam. Like you said CS is classcucked as fuck. I'm finishing my first year and I was thinking about just going to college for machining, but the unions are dying there and the jobs are shit (10 hour fucking shifts for CNC machinists).
The future just looks dark as fuck. The red scare and anti-union brainwashing worked. Even when I graduate there will be no jobs where I live (everyone moves to California) and the pay will keep diving and diving. I don't know what to do with my life.
This but in a serious manner.
Asher Harris
The wobblies have a computer and software workers union but I'm unsure how large or effective it is.
There are several issues I see with unionizing or organizing the software and computer industry in general. The biggest is just that people think they have it good right now and don't want to do anything to rock the boat. When people were more afraid of outsourcing there was some collective will to change the industry but since that doomsday never came everyone just wants to sit on their asses and let their stock vest.
Samuel Bailey
What you guys complaining about, you get to work in funspaces with ping pong tables and arcade games!
You know, I actually love my job, I don't feel alienated and I appreciate the working conditions. But that doesn't mean is not exploitive, that doesn't mean that I can't strive for a more fair world. So yeah, I fucking hate how classcucked my fellow workers are.
Food for thought, right now I'm slowly spreading some leftism on my circle, I found that people are receptive on the idea that the manager's job is to screw you over if you frame it within the hiring process. People are scared about communism because of the propaganda, but they're not entirely blind to the power dynamics. Let's try to spread class conciousness little by little.
Nicholas Roberts
It would seem that people with these kinds of technical skills would be an ideal group to organize and coordinate in a clandestine way, using all the cybertools available to them. If you folks haven't started an underground programmer/administrator/dev/… vanguard movement, I can only ask in wonderment… why not???
Camden Garcia
Too many classcucks among IT guys.
Brandon Price
I hate to just have to say "culture". Is it that IT folk just aren't miserable enough yet, a labour aristocracy?
Anyway, it doesn't matter: vanguard movements only need the masses at the point of revolt. Organize over the net with what few people you have, you guys run the fucking thing.
Jonathan Gutierrez
Go be a fucking bigot elsewhere, just because you've slathered your ignorant opinions in the autistic ramblings of marx doesn't make it right.
Hudson Rogers
...
Daniel Smith
*giggles*
Jordan Williams
Well chalk it up to Poe's Law then
Liam Davis
>>>/tumblr/
Isaiah Edwards
Because of all our comfy salaries and benefits, we're basically more petit-bourgeoise than working class.
The last true lefties in our field of work were the old school 80s/90s hackers and those ponytails building GNU tools from their trailers. The current generation is completely de-politicised and way up that neoliberal butthole.
If we did unionise, what would it look like? What sort of demands should we be making? We're already very well paid, have decent working conditions and even the new wave of kiddy devs coming soon still need some level of experience before they're actually valuable. So what would a software developers' union fight for?
In Brazil, I know there are unions for IT workers. You give a portion of your salary to the union and then everyone automatically get a raise during the year when they get into collective bargaining. Apart from that, I don't think they do much.
