bitshepherd

I'm going to have to be the dissenter here.

Namecheap also does domain name front running and tasting, so it's not really any different.

Not really, no.

Raising the price of gas negatively affects the working poor more than helps the environment. That subset of society may not live in an area accessible by transit, or their employment requires them to be in a different location than is feasible to travel to by transit.

This happened to me at Amazon the first time I visited HQ.

The interviewer was standing about six feet away intently watching for every mark I made, which made me freeze up and start rambling about stars shining, or something equally nonsensical.

Having deployed and maintained both Confluence and MediaWiki, users like Confluence better.

Going from that to MediaWiki would feel cheap to them, or they just wouldn't use it because it would feel "hard".

As a former devout Fluxbox user, I concur with this comment. I use a pretty bog standard Gnome now. It's not really an active thought so much as something that Mostly Just Works.

My productivity is about the same, since I use the same applications. The only thing I don't have is an incessant need to fiddle and tweak.

Coincidentally, some of those same people who would say they don't primarily consider degrees will outright ask about education background when talking to a candidate.

The conversation will go generally positive. A month later of no contact/ghosting, and a form letter rejection pops out, with either the position being closed or "Unfortunately, we have decided to pursue other candidates whose background appears to match our needs more closely."

And that will be that.

> That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization.

The inverse is exactly that, though. Higher wages give certain skilled individuals enough personal comfort to the point that they don't feel they need to stick their neck out for some group of randos. Sure, that $125k job with a small sack of RSUs looks pretty on paper, but break it down with all of the extra-curricular obligations, the occasional long week that happens a little too often, housing costs, commuting, and it doesn't look too appealing.

Once you have enough 'highly' paid individuals in a group -- we'll cut the number at $100k, even though that's the poverty level in the Bay Area -- then a backbuilding narrative begins to create itself, that because 'everyone' is at a a certain level, it's kind of just okay.

The trope of high demand, low supply of qualified individuals is pervasive in tech recruiting, to the point where some of the same individuals being oppressed question if there's an actual problem. It could also be explained away as that we're all just that unique and special, but that's stitching together another reality entirely.

Instead of agreeing that fellow humans are being oppressed, we tech workers muse and question the merit of sticking together, for one another. We question the quality of one's skills or ability to comprehend with not another thought. We even sometimes question if we're overly compensated, when overt actions or results would prove otherwise.

Sysadmins have guild-style organizations (see: USENIX, LOPSA) but they've not had as much impact on hiring and income as would like to be believed. If anything, they've served as a filter for HR, who immediately tried to weaponize it.

I'm not saying a traditional union is the Way, but tech workers as a whole are severely lacking a cohesive voice, any voice. The egregious hiring practices, which have been turned into a game at the highest levels, are symptoms of this madness. When was the last time a doctor had to bring Frankenstein's monster back from the grave with no tools while blindfolded? In tech, that's a fairly typical interview question.

It shows in the amount of overwork-related discussions, shrugged off as part of being a highly-paid, salaried employee. All the while, sharing on LinkedIn this great new shiny your company's CEO really, really wants people to see.

The incentive to come together as a group is not about how much an individual is paid, but to come together over a common ground and influence change that benefits the many over the few. Income is one of the most common things to throw out there because it encompasses pretty much everyone's life.

An individual can be paid handsomely, even if the group average is a fraction of the individual's number. Though you believe you are paid well, and you may very well be, it does not mean actions do not happen to suppress the momentum of someone sitting a desk or two away working toward the same goal as you.

With such a level of cynicism, nobody would ever be hired.

People game the system because a system exists to be gamed.

You'd be surprised. :)

I was almost there with you until the bit about the gig economy. This reads more like an advert for Upwork.

People giving up leverage with labor just gives 'them' the upper hand. Why it's so hard for tech workers to band together over something as common as income is the problem, regardless of the disparity.

Teachers in my area are striking over much less money than tech workers fritter away on a daily basis. Sometimes it's worth standing outside with signs and waving at people passing.

This does not reflect my experience at the >10k employee level of company. I've had a more reasonable work week out of the 150 employee consulting firm than I have the 10k employee public software company.

At the >=100k employee, multiple-decades-in-business, old guard type of company, I had the inverse of what you're relaying, as well. On-call was routinely referred to as the 'week of hell'. Fires tended to crop up due to complacency, general feelings of 'job security', and lack of routine upkeep. These sessions in self-flagellation are dutifully shouldered as 'just the thing it does around this time of month'. These aren't fly by night, back of a postcard companies, but instantly recognizable brands, known as market leaders and 'best company to work for' in their community.

The long hours aren't encouraged, but outright mandated with 50 person standups to keep the Confluence pages up to date when email would better suit the task. We mustn't forget the alignment meeting to have the pre-meeting to talk about the plan of the backlog grooming planning meeting.

My last 'coding interview' consisted of a debugging a broken live VM, with a Java app waiting at the end of the rainbow.

The job was for working on bare metal provisioning using yaml and Python, but I could 'use your favorite programming language'.

Before you think this was some third-rate body snatcher, it's a more well-known name that you've heard of.

They still ghosted me, after telling me what an 'amazing' job I did.