Work

TechnoProletarians, continued

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An article in the WSJ…Tech Workers Are Just Like the Rest of Us:  Miserable at Work…reminded me of my 2016 post TechnoProletarians?

(I thought the ‘just like the rest of us’ part of the article’s title was a little odd.  Is the headline writer miserable at work? Are his fellow WSJ writers and editors miserable? Does he believe that the majority of WSJ subscribers are miserable in their jobs?)

The article talks about the decline in perks at companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce; most importantly, increased work pressures and reduced compensation and upside.

Observations:

The article is focused on prominent ‘tech’ companies that are very large and mostly SF-area based. It doesn’t discuss the environment at smaller early-stage companies and startups, or for tech people working in banks, manufacturing companies, retailers, etc.

Most of the phenomena discussed in the article are probably common to people in ‘symbolic-analyst’ type jobs of any kind, not just so-called tech jobs, and especially in large companies and other organizations.

Offshoring has to be playing a role in the reduced relative power of workers in these jobs; see my post Telemigration.  As another example, there was a recent WSJ article on the offshoring to India of engineering and geologist jobs in the oil and gas industry.

I’m not fond of the ‘tech’ term (short for ‘technology’, of course) the way it is usually employed. It seems silly that writing scripts to perform some function for a consumer-facing web site is considered a technology job but being a metallurgist working on jet engines is not.

Your thoughts?

On the emotional nature of work and business

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As a medical student during the early nineties, I used to ‘decompress’ by reading light-hearted fiction; warm, simple stories about normal human problems. No War and Peace for me. Too ambitious. At the time, I liked  to read  Maeve Binchy. You’ve probably seen her fiction displayed in bookstores. One story  in particular, titled “Marble Arch”, about a  young female entrepreneur, struck a chord. By a lot of unglamorous hard work,  she’s learned to make a living selling hand-stitched handbags. Her family is nonplussed that she left a salaried position selling cosmetics to strike out on her own:

“Her mother had worked regularly and quietly in a restaurant. She said that her one ambition was that Sophie should never have a job which meant walking and standing, and dealing with dirty plates and difficult customers. She was happy when Sophie was selling nice, fresh, good-smelling oils and paints for people’s faces. She was worried when she seemed to become a person of no account sitting in a little stall shouting her wares to the public.”

It’s an attitude I heard growing up where a nice safe credentialed job was lauded, while business was seen as mercurial and unsafe. Well, starting a small business is risky. The story continues:

“Sophie sighed, thinking how little everyone around her knew about business…….Really she had made very little impression on anyone, with her own businesslike attitudes. Nobody realized that it wasn’t easy to be organized and disciplined and to make money. It took a lot of time, and worry, and ate into all those hours you could be sitting around and enjoying yourself. Nobody ever got drawn into her belief that people might be on this earth to work hard.”

Nobody ever got drawn into her belief that people might be on this earth to work hard.  Sounds like every lecture ever given to me as a young person –  by my parents. I think they were exasperated by my youthful ideas about work and life. I thought, I really thought, that everything should be sweet, easy and pleasant. Ah, that dangerous expectation: that work should always and everywhere be fulfilling, whatever that means.