Working 60+ hours a week for years is nothing to brag about. It just means your projects were mismanaged, done poorly and you were absolutely taken advantage of. You also mentioned in another comment that you are disposable if you are "slinging code" 40+ hours a week.
No, we weren’t being taken advantage of. We were working a project that changed an industry dramatically. The projects weren’t mismanaged. They were very aggressive to be sure, but that’s sometimes what it takes to be first and change things. We did it voluntarily and were well compensated for the times. As for disposable code slingers? That’s been true for the last 30+ years.
So which industry was changed dramatically by your team working 60+ hours a week for years? If you we’re compensated for overtime you can thank unions for that, if you worked voluntarily overtime you were by definition taken advantage of.
> As for disposable code slingers? That’s been true for the last 30+ years.
The last 30 years saw massive growth in SWE salaries. That doesn’t happen if SWEs are disposable.
We aren't talking true software engineers. We're talking about people that think their job is to write code and nothing else. Yes, SWE salaries have gone up a good deal in recent years. However, we heard the same outcries about unions in the late 80s-90s when outsourcing and offshoring began to flourish. As for compensation for voluntary overtime? It had nothing to do with unions and everything to do with visionary management and aggressive, committed team members. The average person in the industry today doesn't have the same drive. I saw that repeatedly the last few years I managed. Their expectations were based on what they had read about FAANG jobs, which didn't reflect the typical commercial situation. So while salaries did rise, they weren't competitive with the Big Tech firms. That's just reality. But those applying to the jobs thought differently. It was common to get college graduates from middle and lower tier schools or junior developers with 1-2 years experience expecting to make $150K+ and get 4 weeks of vacation. That's just not realistic at most companies. And if you were able to reach a mutual agreement, they seldom stayed more than a year or two before trying to leverage up another notch.
Brother, you voluntarily worked overtime without compensation because you "loved it" and thought you were already highly compensated. All this means is that your company took advantage of free labor and you missed out on being paid for your work. Whatever your compensation levels are, giving free labor to your employer is a foolish game. 60+ hours a week for years, come on...those projects are absolutely mismanaged if the work can’t be done without that much overtime.
> I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.
I don't think it's as simple as that. What will most likely happen is that the vibe coders will quickly eat up your time asking for validation and feedback if you are not careful. You are also now implicitly contributing to their project, which if it goes south, could come back to bite you. If the vibe coders are pushing code in the org, then they should become part of the formal review process like any other junior programmer.
They should also be forced to do daily stand-ups, sit in meetings and explain their code like the rest of us.
Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Unfortunately the Wall Street accountants who run our companies don't mind if you jump ship after your 2% 'reward' raise. Because when someone new comes and costs 10 % more plus recruiting costs, that latter person has 'proven' their worth in the market, similar to when a house goes up in value due to scarcity.
If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.
What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.
Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university.
Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff.
Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while
This is BS. A shareholder lawsuit against the CEO/board/executives for investing in the employees in the hope of long term profits would never succeed. The idea of a fiduciary duty doesn't mean that. It means the CEO can't take actions that intentionally hurt the company.
And there are very few large public companies with active enough investors to oust a CEO over this, and even fewer that have both active and activist investors that would be interested in such a thing.
You'd have to prove that the CEO knew that it would hurt the company and still did it or that it's so ridiculously negligent that any sane person should have known.
I suppose it's a cultural thing for Americans then too, given the current White House occupant? I don't know, maybe every culture just has their share of shitty people.
Just listen to him speak from a podium in a red state while claiming start of a golden age, revenue of $18 trillion from tariffs, and we won in Iran, at least 50% of the crowd starts clapping. Makes me feel either I'm living in an alternate world or they are.
I don't know how much it has to do with the administration and the top-level comment here was flagged so I'm lacking context but American exceptionalism is instilled here from birth so it does not surprise me in the slightest that founders grow up with the idea that they are built different and destined to change the world. Acting out the fantasy via fraud takes a special kind of person. It's not clear to me whether the dishonesty is uniquely American but I somewhat doubt it. The color of the delusion is, however.
The problem is, as is so often the case with our modern companies, the things that got broken were other people's things. The things that were gained were made theirs.
In other words, privatized profits and socialized costs. Again.
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