In the midst of a roiling intra-party battle over H1-B visas no one will probably care about six months from now, Vivek Ramaswamy took a shot at what he called America’s culture of mediocrity:
Not everybody *can* work 80 hours a week. When Vivek and his techbro pals imply that everyone should be willing to work like they do, I find that condescending in the extreme.
Well, I find people who think they have the RIGHT to work the same job, the same way, in the same place for a lifetime and expect others to assure their prosperity FOR them ... and/or they believe that going beyond the minimum, unless they are immediately compensated for doing so, is the way of the sucker ... far more offensive.
That is the old, short-sighted mentality that drives the demands for minimum/living wages (aka promotions for automation and robotics) and the union-shop mentality that in times past led to the caution against buying a new car if it was assembled on a Monday or Friday.
It doesn't have to be (always, or even frequently) an 80-hour workweek ... what it has to be, is for each employee, from the C-suite to the factory floor, to be ready and willing to exercise their initiative and go beyond the minimum to get the job done in a way that keeps the business profitable.
And along with that, each employee growing and maintaining a skill set and work record that makes them a valuable asset to ANY employer, instead of an interchangeable commodity ... as well as managing their affairs .in a way that maintains the flexibility to fire their management and take their skill set and work record to someone who treats them as a valuable asset and not expect continual 80-hour workweeks, when their old employer gets stuck in stupid.
In other words, start thinking like businessmen, instead of wage-slaves.
Be competitive, for the alternative is to either lose your job, or collude with the powerful to cheat your neighbors as you have your job and wages "protected".
I don't think "Work your way into an early grave OR cheat prosperity out of those who do" is necessarily a binary proposition. In fact, I've managed to figure out a way to support myself on a part-time regular job with occasional freelancing/gigging side hustles. If the world were full of Elon Musks and Steve Jobses, there wouldn't be anything special about that kind of person.
Way, way, back in the day, I had a roommate who sold those big signs in front of restaurants for a living. He was good at it and apparently got a pretty decent cut of each sign he sold. He used to work 6 months, sell a ton of signs and take 6 months off. Is that what I would do in his position? Nope, but it doesn't have to be. Everybody isn't built the same way and everybody doesn't have the same goals and desires. Ultimately, as long as people pay their own way, are happy with their lives, and don't hurt other people, I have nothing negative to say about the way they live.
I am both a software developer and an actor, among other things. Being sensible, I realized that the former was a much better prospect for making a living than the latter, so I made acting my hobby (and have since moved from stage acting to voice acting).
I can tell you from personal experience that I received much more adulation as an actor than I ever have as a developer, and I don't think it's so much a question of applauding mediocrity as it is the social connection.
As an actor, people can see me work. They don't see the rehearsals or direction, but they do see the finished product and see me actively doing it. Similarly for professional athletes - the audience gets a sense that they can connect to what those folk are doing, and in many cases like to believe that they know them - especially if they see them perform over and over.
As a developer, though, I usually work alone and occasionally with a co-worker. I generally don't find that even my manager really understands my work in any detail. He can typically tell which parts of the system have the most problems, and that I can solve them faster than most people, but there's often no real personal connection, especially as we have transitioned to remote work. And what connection there is is much weaker with the higher-ups, much less our customers. So how would most people come to appreciate what I do?
You obviously have never built any software of any complexity or sophistication. I say that because I have, and I've never thought of it as "mundane", nor met any other software professional that would think it was. In fact, it's richly rewarding and stimulating, so I can only assume that you are unfamiliar with the sort of shops that produce good software. The fact that you, a tech-neophyte, thinks the work you received was "good" shows you were probably asking for something pretty unnoteworthy, because that's what guys that would call you up from the ICU because they are afraid of losing their jobs are capable of, and no more. (Trust me on this: Indians have no problem being pushy when they think they have the upper hand, technically speaking).
You are right about one thing: Companies want to exploit the desperation of the Desi bachelor, not because they work harder (nothing slows down a project like mediocre ideas and implementations coupled with an unwillingness to challenge an unrealistic managerial expectation) but to crush wages, and the H1B program works beautifully at that.
That's why it's the bastions of software mediocrity (banks, insurers, and other large corporations whose primary products aren't really software, so it rarely matters how inconvenient, slow, or uninspired their software is to their customers, (Ever wonder why a computer company like HP makes parasitic bloatware garbage for its printer utilities?) that are always the biggest consumers of the H1-B scam apart from the Indian outsourcing vendors like Tata, Infosys, Wipro, etc.
One other non-obvious fact: Software isn't like banging out widgets. Working 80 hours a week would be like letting an incompetent accountant work in your books for twice as long as necessary: All you have is a bigger mess to clean up.
Most people who develop software are working on unnoteworthy software. They are working adding new functionality to the billing system, or the customer information system, or the accounts payable/receivable system, or the inventory system, etc. That is what I have been doing for nearly forty years anyway.
I want to split the difference between Hal and Pan. Yes, elite coders have an order of magnitude advantage in productivity, and don't need to work 80 hours a week. But a lot of real world work is grunt work, and a lot of jobs only require a moderately skilled person who is trainable and has good work ethics. If all such jobs are filled with H1 engineers, it will hollow out hiring for domestic graduates.
Frankly the biggest threat to domestic graduates AND H1b's is Chat GPT. Not that Chat GPT could create an app to save its life (it's the same Karl Popper "It's impossible to speak in such a way that can't be misunderstood" problem that regularly afflicts software projects) but because ChatGPT can answer in seconds what I would typically assign a jr level programmer to research for a few days: Something esoteric for which I need some good options. Without Jr devs you'll run out of Sr devs, and that's a problem I see no ready solution for. But there's an existing threat to domestic grads that deserves mentioning: Indian Hiring managers are notorious for ignoring anyone that's not Indian, and they don't care that it's blatantly illegal under US law (a lot of H1B's work under Bonds that are illegal under the 13th Amendment, for example) That puts domestic grads in a bad spot for a lot of positions that would normally be a perfect start for their careers. It's a garbage program that hurts the American tech workforce, and it should be abolished outright.
I'm one of those who can't. But we don't need everyone to work 80 hours a week. What Vivek and others want is a whole bunch of people, not everyone, who will work 80 hours a week. And a whole lot of those people are in, or came from, India.
>>>You can tell a lot about a culture by who it gives attention, rewards, and makes into heroes.
Was there ever a golden age in America where we venerated nerds as opposed to jocks? To clarify my point a bit more, if there was a period in America where we were successful because we worshipped homework nerds, and Vivek wants to bring back that period, what was it?
Not everybody *can* work 80 hours a week. When Vivek and his techbro pals imply that everyone should be willing to work like they do, I find that condescending in the extreme.
Well, I find people who think they have the RIGHT to work the same job, the same way, in the same place for a lifetime and expect others to assure their prosperity FOR them ... and/or they believe that going beyond the minimum, unless they are immediately compensated for doing so, is the way of the sucker ... far more offensive.
That is the old, short-sighted mentality that drives the demands for minimum/living wages (aka promotions for automation and robotics) and the union-shop mentality that in times past led to the caution against buying a new car if it was assembled on a Monday or Friday.
It doesn't have to be (always, or even frequently) an 80-hour workweek ... what it has to be, is for each employee, from the C-suite to the factory floor, to be ready and willing to exercise their initiative and go beyond the minimum to get the job done in a way that keeps the business profitable.
And along with that, each employee growing and maintaining a skill set and work record that makes them a valuable asset to ANY employer, instead of an interchangeable commodity ... as well as managing their affairs .in a way that maintains the flexibility to fire their management and take their skill set and work record to someone who treats them as a valuable asset and not expect continual 80-hour workweeks, when their old employer gets stuck in stupid.
In other words, start thinking like businessmen, instead of wage-slaves.
https://thenayborhood.substack.com/p/cutting-to-the-chase
Be competitive, for the alternative is to either lose your job, or collude with the powerful to cheat your neighbors as you have your job and wages "protected".
I don't think "Work your way into an early grave OR cheat prosperity out of those who do" is necessarily a binary proposition. In fact, I've managed to figure out a way to support myself on a part-time regular job with occasional freelancing/gigging side hustles. If the world were full of Elon Musks and Steve Jobses, there wouldn't be anything special about that kind of person.
Way, way, back in the day, I had a roommate who sold those big signs in front of restaurants for a living. He was good at it and apparently got a pretty decent cut of each sign he sold. He used to work 6 months, sell a ton of signs and take 6 months off. Is that what I would do in his position? Nope, but it doesn't have to be. Everybody isn't built the same way and everybody doesn't have the same goals and desires. Ultimately, as long as people pay their own way, are happy with their lives, and don't hurt other people, I have nothing negative to say about the way they live.
This. So much this. :)
No, it is not mediocrity that we celebrate.
I am both a software developer and an actor, among other things. Being sensible, I realized that the former was a much better prospect for making a living than the latter, so I made acting my hobby (and have since moved from stage acting to voice acting).
I can tell you from personal experience that I received much more adulation as an actor than I ever have as a developer, and I don't think it's so much a question of applauding mediocrity as it is the social connection.
As an actor, people can see me work. They don't see the rehearsals or direction, but they do see the finished product and see me actively doing it. Similarly for professional athletes - the audience gets a sense that they can connect to what those folk are doing, and in many cases like to believe that they know them - especially if they see them perform over and over.
As a developer, though, I usually work alone and occasionally with a co-worker. I generally don't find that even my manager really understands my work in any detail. He can typically tell which parts of the system have the most problems, and that I can solve them faster than most people, but there's often no real personal connection, especially as we have transitioned to remote work. And what connection there is is much weaker with the higher-ups, much less our customers. So how would most people come to appreciate what I do?
You obviously have never built any software of any complexity or sophistication. I say that because I have, and I've never thought of it as "mundane", nor met any other software professional that would think it was. In fact, it's richly rewarding and stimulating, so I can only assume that you are unfamiliar with the sort of shops that produce good software. The fact that you, a tech-neophyte, thinks the work you received was "good" shows you were probably asking for something pretty unnoteworthy, because that's what guys that would call you up from the ICU because they are afraid of losing their jobs are capable of, and no more. (Trust me on this: Indians have no problem being pushy when they think they have the upper hand, technically speaking).
You are right about one thing: Companies want to exploit the desperation of the Desi bachelor, not because they work harder (nothing slows down a project like mediocre ideas and implementations coupled with an unwillingness to challenge an unrealistic managerial expectation) but to crush wages, and the H1B program works beautifully at that.
That's why it's the bastions of software mediocrity (banks, insurers, and other large corporations whose primary products aren't really software, so it rarely matters how inconvenient, slow, or uninspired their software is to their customers, (Ever wonder why a computer company like HP makes parasitic bloatware garbage for its printer utilities?) that are always the biggest consumers of the H1-B scam apart from the Indian outsourcing vendors like Tata, Infosys, Wipro, etc.
One other non-obvious fact: Software isn't like banging out widgets. Working 80 hours a week would be like letting an incompetent accountant work in your books for twice as long as necessary: All you have is a bigger mess to clean up.
Most people who develop software are working on unnoteworthy software. They are working adding new functionality to the billing system, or the customer information system, or the accounts payable/receivable system, or the inventory system, etc. That is what I have been doing for nearly forty years anyway.
I want to split the difference between Hal and Pan. Yes, elite coders have an order of magnitude advantage in productivity, and don't need to work 80 hours a week. But a lot of real world work is grunt work, and a lot of jobs only require a moderately skilled person who is trainable and has good work ethics. If all such jobs are filled with H1 engineers, it will hollow out hiring for domestic graduates.
Frankly the biggest threat to domestic graduates AND H1b's is Chat GPT. Not that Chat GPT could create an app to save its life (it's the same Karl Popper "It's impossible to speak in such a way that can't be misunderstood" problem that regularly afflicts software projects) but because ChatGPT can answer in seconds what I would typically assign a jr level programmer to research for a few days: Something esoteric for which I need some good options. Without Jr devs you'll run out of Sr devs, and that's a problem I see no ready solution for. But there's an existing threat to domestic grads that deserves mentioning: Indian Hiring managers are notorious for ignoring anyone that's not Indian, and they don't care that it's blatantly illegal under US law (a lot of H1B's work under Bonds that are illegal under the 13th Amendment, for example) That puts domestic grads in a bad spot for a lot of positions that would normally be a perfect start for their careers. It's a garbage program that hurts the American tech workforce, and it should be abolished outright.
I'm one of those who can't. But we don't need everyone to work 80 hours a week. What Vivek and others want is a whole bunch of people, not everyone, who will work 80 hours a week. And a whole lot of those people are in, or came from, India.
>>>You can tell a lot about a culture by who it gives attention, rewards, and makes into heroes.
Was there ever a golden age in America where we venerated nerds as opposed to jocks? To clarify my point a bit more, if there was a period in America where we were successful because we worshipped homework nerds, and Vivek wants to bring back that period, what was it?