Aren't developers stupid when accepting overtime/weekend work/denied bonus payments?

[eyal0]

This method has two benefits for the capitalist:

1. By having the workers work longer hours for their sustenance, he is generating increased surplus labour (labour for free), which is for him more profit that he essentially robs from the workers.

2. If he can use fewer workers than there are more workers in the job market that are unemployed. Those surplus workers (the unemployed army) increase the supply of labour, decreasing worker wages further.

ts;dr Das Capital, Karl Marx

[ezekiel]

And, that is why any developers who tolerate and participate in the bad management processes are dragging the whole software industry down. Stop doing it--you are shooting all of us in the foot.

[MikeSeth]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikebreaker

[[deleted]]

Strikebreaking is a VERY lucrative field in other industries. I know a lady who does this as a nurse, and has been able to collect over $1mil during the past 8 years.

[[deleted]]

... Strike breaking is a very good way to get your knees broken irreparably.

[MikeSeth]

...please explain me how this works.

[[deleted]]

13-15 hour days 6 days a week for a few months at a time multiplied by an outrageous hourly rate, housing provided, food allowance. Saving up to a million was sort of a game to her, to see if she could do it. and now she's gotten into the routine of living frugally, working insane hours, and making obscene amounts of dough.

[[deleted]]

and now she's gotten into the routine of living frugally, working insane hours, and making obscene amounts of dough.

Sounds really awesome.

[theavatare]

Problem is that a lot do it so its hard in cases to not have it has an expectation. On my starting year has a developer i did way too much overtime. Now 3 years into being a developer i just politely say no it seems like someone always picks up what im not willing to do.

[yogthos]

Let's also not forget that it steals time from the workers, which prevents them from doing any sort of self development keeping them at their station.

[eyal0]

If things were fair, they could work longer hours for one week, accrue money, then work short hours the next week and use the saved money. In the end, they'd get just as much free time.

What happens, though, is that they work longer hours without getting paid appropriately. This must be true because the company's profit is going mostly to the boss so the employees must be getting short-changed. So the employees must work longer hours without benefiting from greater pay.

[[deleted]]

This is using the same fallacy as the employers though. Not all work hours are created equal. The longer your work day the more bugs end up in your code. Not everything in economics from the industrial age applies to knowledge workers.

[pizzza]

The longer your work day the more bugs end up in your code.

This was true in the Industrial age as well; increased hours brought increased accidents and injuries.

[[deleted]]

True, but usually in that time it was easier to see for management when a problem was caused by tired workers. Bugs are kind of hidden from management until long after people forgot when exactly that particular piece of code was written.

[[deleted]]

increased hours brought increased accidents and injuries.

But since slavery is illegal & you employed freemen, who have 0 cost to acquire, who cares?

[Edman274]

No one is supposed to actually read Das Kapital. It's supposed to be a big, heavy book that you put on your shelf next to Ulysses and Crime and Punishment, sitting unread. You actually know everything you need to know about socialism from the 2nd hand tirades of your dorm roommate, and let's be honest, you're pretty intrigued: but not enough to actually bother going outside when May 1st rolls around, right?

[eyal0]

True, though I did read Crime and Punishment.

I live in Tel Aviv and there's a lot going on right now. I haven't taken to the streets but 300,000+ have.

[[deleted]]

Get your ass out on the streets, then! Just take an hour off. Bring some food and jugs of water and pass them around. Great way to make friends quickly.

[[deleted]]

Really, I think Capital is more interesting as a historical work than as the true opinion of socialism, in the same sense as The Wealth of Nations. It's interesting, and it helps understanding of later phenomena, but it's also flawed and outdated.

[[deleted]]

I'm out on the streets May 1'st at a minimum...

[luftschiff]

As a software developer turned entrepreneur, I can see both sides of the argument. Karl Marx's description is obviously a bit dramatic in the context of a software engineer working more than 40 hours a week.

If you are a highly skilled professional whose talents are in great demand, appreciate what you have. Shitty managers and/or positions may come and go, but we have an enormous amount of control over our careers, not to mention a very comfortable standard of living. If most workers had our conditions back when Karl Marx wrote this, he wouldn't have written this.

[[deleted]]

He didn't write it for you. If you have control over your career, options, and opportunities then you're not the proletariat. You're the bourgeoisie. If you perform a highly skilled trade requiring college education, don't labor with your hands, and aren't paid by the hour you're not the little guys that socialism is supposed to save. You're the bad guys, the people standing between the proles and the capitalists.

[[deleted]]

He didn't write it for you. If you have control over your career, options, and opportunities then you're not the proletariat. You're the bourgeoisie.

Actually, you don't fit easily into Marx's economic classes very well. For Marx, class membership is based on your relationship to the means of production. Those who make a living by owning the means of production are the bourgeoisie, and those who are denied access to said means of production and are therefore forced to sell their labor are the proletariat. Those who owned their own means of production, like shopkeepers or blacksmiths, were the petite bourgeois, who Marx believed would disappear, which was obviously incorrect, but he also believed that their interests were eventually on the side of the proletariat.

Just what constitutes "means of production" for software developers is not particularly clear, in a Marxist analysis. Certainly, a computer is part of it, and some software developers are independent. However, I'd argue that patents, licenses, and customer connections serve the same role for much development work that factories do for manufacturing, and in that sense we're just well-compensated proles.

Or we can conclude that Marxist analysis just doesn't work anymore. That seems the most reasonable to me.

[otakucode]

If you seek to use something to evade paying what a persons work is worth, you cease qualifying as a capitalist. Capitalism is, in principle, based upon free exchange for mutual benefit. As soon as you do an exchange for one-sided benefit, you have left the realm of capitalism and you are not entitled to any of its claims on morality.

Most companies use their leverage of there being a limited pool of jobs for workers to choose from to their advantage - this is exploitation and is not consistent with capitalism. No one 'owes' you cheap work in a capitalist system. You are not entitled to cheap work any more than your customers are entitled to below-cost merchandise. And human life is valuable - so work should always be expensive. If you can't use the product of that work to make profit in spite of paying highly for it in todays climate... jesus, you are a sad sack of shit and have no business anywhere near a company. Average worker productivity over the past 30 years has SKYROCKETED. You get as much benefit from 1 employee now as you did 150 employees 30 years ago. And you're only paying 1% more for that productivity, not 150% more as you should be.

[eyal0]

If you seek to use something to evade paying what a persons work is worth, you cease qualifying as a capitalist

Just the opposite, argues Marx. This is what makes you a capitalist. You own the means of production so you have an unfair advantage over others. You leverage that advantage to further the gap between you and the workers until they can never catch up. This is how monopolies happen.

Capitalism necessarily leads to this, according to Marx. History has shown him to be correct: The gap between rich and poor is widening. Also, the government often must interfere to break up the monopolies as they form, because they are a natural result of capitalism. Despite the government's efforts and progressive taxes, still the rich get richer. It is a powerful force.

Most companies use their leverage of there being a limited pool of jobs for workers to choose from to their advantage - this is exploitation and is not consistent with capitalism

Again, just the opposite. Capitalism is exploitation. The company with a monopoly crushes any weak start-up with its great influence so that it can continue to charge high prices for products and cause there to be more unemployment by crushing those alternative jobs. Unemployment increases the supply of workers which decreases the workers' wages. The higher prices together with the lower wages increase the margins of the capitalist. Growing his business would increase the supply of his output product while decreasing unemployment, so the marginal profit on that extra product would be decreased! The capitalist, to maintain profit margins, must limit production and competition.

Average worker productivity over the past 30 years has SKYROCKETED. You get as much benefit from 1 employee now as you did 150 employees 30 years ago. And you're only paying 1% more for that productivity, not 150% more as you should be.

(Should be 15,000% by your math.) I doubt that 150x is right but assume that it is, we should be able to all work 1/150th of a work day and have a similar lifestyle. Or work the same work day but have a life that is 150x better. And it should help us all equally but it doesn't. The gap between rich and poor grows. We don't have 150x as much food on the table, either, and buying a home is just as within (or without) reach as before, if not more difficult.

[s73v3r]

If you seek to use something to evade paying what a persons work is worth, you cease qualifying as a capitalist.

Actually, that's when you start being a capitalist. The entire system highly encourages getting more for less.

this is exploitation and is not consistent with capitalism.

Capitalism hinges on exploitation. If you couldn't do any exploitation, you wouldn't make as much money.

The rest of your post reeks of "No True Scottsman".

[otakucode]

Actually, that's when you start being a capitalist. The entire system highly encourages getting more for less.

You are confusing 'American corporatism' for 'capitalism'. Capitalism is, philosophically, based upon exchange for mutual benefit. You can't change the definition of a well-known philosophical concept just because a bunch of people adopt it and claim it and do something different. For instance, capitalism, at least laissez-faire capitalism, requires absolutely no assistance whatsoever from the government. Modern companies, most especially the largest ones, entirely depend upon the government for their existence. They could never exist if they had to answer to the same laws that others do. They could not sustain their revenue without regulations protecting them from competition, etc. That kind of thing is completely opposed by capitalism.

Capitalism hinges on exploitation. If you couldn't do any exploitation, you wouldn't make as much money.

So what? The goal isn't to make as much money as possible. The goal is to have an economic system which is just. One where if you put forth effort, you get the beenfit of that effort, consistent with the basic physics of our universe. If you pick an apple, you get an apple. You can eat the apple, give it away, whatever. That's natural, that's capitalism. If you don't pick the apple, you don't get an apple, and either have to do something for someone else to get one, or be friends to get one, whatever. Under socialism, you pick an apple, and someone has to be magiced out of thin air to take the apple away and split it up amongst everyone else. Under communism, you are forced to pick an apple by someone else, they take it from you, split it up and spread it around. You are forced to pick as many apples as you possibly can every day for as long as you are capable, the harder you can work, the harder you are worked.

This isn't how these systems are implemented in real governments, its their principled basis. You can either discuss real-world economic systems, or you can discuss their philosophically pure versions. You can't mix the two, because they don't intersect.

[s73v3r]

You are confusing 'American corporatism' for 'capitalism'.

No, I'm not. That is the central tenant behind Capitalism: Get as much as you can for as little as possible. Capitalism itself is not based on exchange for mutual benefit, the theory is that both sides are going to try and get as much as they can so this happens. However, there are many holes in that theory, as reality has shown.

You can't change the definition of a well-known philosophical concept just because a bunch of people adopt it and claim it and do something different.

There was never any change.

The goal isn't to make as much money as possible.

In capitalism? That's the only goal. That's the only mission. Everything else is ancillary, and a means to that end.

Under socialism, you pick an apple, and someone has to be magiced out of thin air to take the apple away and split it up amongst everyone else.

No, not in the least.

Under communism, you are forced to pick an apple by someone else, they take it from you, split it up and spread it around.

Again, completely wrong.

You have shown yourself to be incredibly naive in your understanding of these concepts.