Programmer here. The hobby became my job and it’s pretty great when there isn’t a layer of corporate bullshit on top and I can just be creative to satisfy that itch.
Works out most of the time but I’m also able to contribute to open source when in at work so that helps.
I have a job I love 99% of the time. And I have hobbies. I worked really fucking hard to get to where I am. 80+ hour weeks for months at a time for years.
We also have other younger guys come in, and some of them want to learn, and they go right on up the chain. Then, we have people that want things handed to them, don’t wanna do anything, and wonder why they’re not getting promotions. I’ve even given them incentives, raises, and tried to coach them on what they should do to meet a goal we both set. Some just want to point fingers and blame everyone else, and never take responsibility for their actions
But we have more success stories than “failures.” It’s good company to work for.
Definitely something white-collar in any case. Nobody is working 80 hours a week for months on end as a roofer or brick-layer. Even fishermen only work 16 hour days for 2 week stretches which are physically punishing enough. The average human body just isn’t up to months of 80 hours/week of manual labor.
I got close being a framer from 2012-2016. 6 12s in construction was pretty fulfilling and I really liked working with my hands even if the pay was crap. Now I’m an office drone and it’s just okay doing a regular 40 for waaay more pay and benefits. I keep doing it because now I have the space to do and buy the stuff I want and not feel economic pressures like I used to.
Sometimes I miss the blue collar job, though. I’m glad I did it but I’m even more glad I made the career change.
It’s not white collar. It’s powerplants. I do work in management, but the deal when I moved up was that I still got to work in the field 50% of the time. I get burned out sitting in my office. And I definitely did not start in management, but at the very bottom
And as far as the hours… there’s only so many people you can put on some jobs, so hiring others will just have them standing around
Also, I’d say 90% of the people that work with me love their jobs. I’ve seen quite a few of them turn down better pay because we’re pretty chill and honest about work and expectations. We keep good people around as long as possible.
Yea, it’s a good job. And it’s nothing about hiring more people. Some jobs can only be done by a few people, so we just go around the clock until it’s fixed and bring home big paychecks
This is also exactly my situation. I worked hard for my dream job and now it doesn’t feel like work but a fun game instead. I know that’s not the case for most, and I’m grateful for it.
I do hire people for my department, and want to give them the same opportunity to be happy. It’s really hard to find someone who is as excited as me for what I do. It’s not so much they don’t want to work, but they don’t want to work HERE.
Hoping to be a software dev or some other similar job someday. I’ve been writing code in some capacity ever since I could write (thanks to an uncle who got me into it and paid for all kinds of learning opportunities), some kind of job revolving around it has been my dream for most of my life. I’m 20 now, tried getting into college this year but life is good at turning your plans upside down. I’ve still got plenty of time to chase that dream job at least, I just gotta get the knowledge and the degree
I forgot about my comment and just tried out Sync, and saw the replies…
That’s great, though. This wasn’t my dream job, but I kind of fell into what I wanted to do along the way. It turns out that it’s very fulfilling and pays well. And I can’t think of anyone that is above me that I don’t like. No one has given me a reason to hate them, and I think they feel the same about me. The people that work for me like me, even though they’re constantly giving me shit
I do like how this site (pretty much Reddit) acts like every employer is out to fuck them, and everyone is as miserable as they are.
Perhaps there’s a company out there where there’s an exception, but an 80+ hr work week means this company desperately needed to hire, or if you were salaried and especially not earning overtime, it was exploiting your value to get paid without sharing that compensation with you.
If it was under the promise of future compensation, then it’s a case of I’d gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today–still scummy.
Internal promotion is pretty rare these days in my field. Usually, you have to jump ship and you learn quickly not to get too attached to a company.
It’s because you can only put a few people on these jobs at a time, and you want damn good workers that do quality work. You don’t want multiple crews messing with some things because it can cause confusion or things to be missed
And it wasn’t promised to me, but I did make it up the ladder some, and still have places I can go up to. It’s actually a really good job, pays damn good, but requires a person to put in some work.
But, it’s nothing to go work a month like this, pay all your bills and have $15k extra after it’s all done
That’s me but they are underpaying me and are very nitpicky and pedantic in return and have no respect for the time I put into their stupid enterprise.
As a result the can soon do the shit themselves.
Their efforts of finding people with an iq over 100 have been mixed in the last few years. I am wishing them all the best.
There are always underlying assumptions made by people who support industrial-age work for every human being. Things like… 9 to 5 work schedule (or longer) being compatible with their genetics, year round - winter or summer. Paperwork appreciation, having to fill out job applications often with high amounts of redundancy in the questions and formats. Red tape for getting paychecks and accounting. Dress codes and even uniform requirements. Businessmen preferences for rectangle and high-rise buildings that few other animals from Earth seem to construct or use to build loyal followers.
With generic randomness alone, I suspect that 20%+ of a population on Pale Blue Dot never fit in with what their local society considers perfectly “normal” conformity and biological needs in industrialized world.
My boss has been looking for new technicians since I joined but has had no luck. His excuse is the classic “Nobody wants to work”, but then I saw what he’s paying for entry level for the positions. It’s so low you’re better off working at McDonalds or slinging Amazon packages bad.
Change My View: Its not the business owner’s fault that they can’t pay enough wages to hire enough people. It is the landowners and land speculators fault for raising the rent / price of land to the point where the businessowers don’t have enough money to pay.people because all their revenue is going to the landowners. I believe we need a land value tax to fix this issue.
If landlords don’t want to hemorrhage money by not having a paying tenant on their land, they will lower their prices. The problem with land is that we can’t create more of it. It is not a commodity supply can be artificially restricted to the detriment of the rest of society. If land holders constantly lost money for not having their land generate wealth, there would be no incentive to artificially reduce supply.
Idk what definition of commodity you are using, but I will say that it seems that by wikipedia’s definition something like food or manufactured goods are more of a commodity than land, something that can not be created.
I would agree that housing is a commodity though, so long as there is more land to build it on.
Capitalism is commodity-producing society. In this political economy, the means of subsistence – things we need to survive – are produced for their exchange value and their use value. Socially necessary labour time is the only source of this value. This roughly coincides with your definition, that a commodity must be manufactured in some way.
But the Wikipedia definition is incomplete. At some point in history of capitalism, humans come to fetishise commodities. At this point, even things that are not produced as commodities, such as land (including their minerals, trees, etc) are treated as if they have value and, from then on, are commofied.
It is the same process that commodifies women, meta data, etc. These things are not produced as commodities, yet they are treated as having a use value and an exchange value. One of the ways that this occurs is through financial derivatives, such as potato futures. This allows someone to buy and exchange something that does not yet exist: hence the commodification of everything under capitalism, even things that aren’t ‘produced’ or aren’t yet produced.
This is favourably referred to in the Wikipedia article that you referred to, under ‘commodification of labor’. A direct reading of Marx and an analysis of the implications of his work reveals the additional argument that I provided about the commodofication of land.
This ‘commodity form’ is the root of the problem that you identified to begin with, about rent/wages. I have prepared something about that, which I will post soon.
Sure, but at least companies can be competed with and if they get too big, are subject to government scrutiny. On the other hand, its really hard to control a large population of landowners and speculators who have a personal incentive to do whatever they can to increase the perceived price of their owned land.
This is a very Polyannaish take and places way too much faith in a “free market” and government oversight. There is no free market when we are regularly allowing companies to get massive and become practical monopolies. When was the last time a company faced serious repercussions for getting too big?
There is certainly some more competition among smaller, local businesses. And the price of land/real estate can be an issue for them. But I would also ask to see how much the business owner is making in relation to their employees.
All that being said, I would like to see landownership completely overhauled, if not abolished.
It’s actually no one’s fault per se that useful land is more expensive. After 2008 there was a major lack of investment into housing that reared its ugly head around 2019. COVID amplified the existing problems making it harder to build and get materials, and created soaring inflation.
There are things we can do now such as change zoning and make permit times faster but it’s going to take a while even in a best case scenario to move the housing stock and commercial real estate supply to where it needs to be.
I think a land value tax would speed up the process of building more houses, and would make housing denser because owners of the land would be incentivised to build as many houses as possible to not loose money to the land value tax.
It’s the fault of capitalism. In socialist theory, a distinction is (generally, since there are always many schools of thought) made between the Bourgeoisie, basically the ultra rich at the very top like Musk and Bezos, and the Petty Bourgeoisie, which is your average restaurant owner and such. The former is what we refer to when we say things like “down with the Bourgeoisie,” we’re not actually dreaming of sticking the manager of the McDonald’s down the street in a guillotine. The Petty Bourgeoisie are also chained into capitalism like the workers.
Okay deleted my previous comment because this CMV is not really about socialism vs capitalism.
You are technically correct in saying that people not wanting to work because they aren’t paid enough is a capitalism problem, but it doesn’t really change my view on the solution of a land value tax, as it is a capitalist solution that I think only applies to a capitalist system.
There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):
This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.
Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415
One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.
The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.
You can read about this in:
Hayek, for a right-wing liberal perspective, called ‘conservative’ in the US today,
Piketty, for a left-wing liberal perspective, called ‘liberal’ in the US today, or
The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.
If money were somehow not an object, i would also be free to work on my friends and families houses too, or even say a library or school in the community with the skills i have, contributing to the community that way. If i were doing it for people or something i cared about, it wouldnt feel like work.
Absolutely. I would do more volunteer work in a heartbeat. The moments I felt like I was actually helping contribute to our society was cooking breakfast for our unhoused community. I mean in a better society we wouldn’t have food insecurity so that volunteering would go elsewhere but can’t we just use our free time to just help people? Nope, we gotta stress about working and trying to not get fired.
Here’s the thing - I want to work. I love it - I create solutions to problems. It’s who I am, and when I have nothing else to do I wander around turning scraps into something useful. I became a programmer because I could create without worries about wasting materials.
What I hate is being exploited like a resource - 40 hours a week is a lot. It’s enough I use every free moment just getting my energy back. I have no time to work on my own projects or properly socialize - I just get worn down until I burn out and can’t wake up in the morning.
I’m also very aware of the impact of my actions, and nearly every possible job involves draining the world of something to make money for someone who has plenty.
I don’t care if other people get to coast because of my work, I just want to solve hard problems in a way that adds to the world.
I do care when I’m used as a pawn in the game of capitalism - But meet my basic and I’d spend my time creating
I’m an audio technician who works at a news studio and this statement resonates with me strongly. I’m trying to learn game audio so I can spend more time doing something that I personally feel is productive towards society, hopefully I can make a better living doing that then what I currently do for money.
Cause 40hrs a week is a schedule for workers on a production line with machine tools doing monotonous work. It’s hard, but it doesn’t require you to think much. Thinking, changing contexts is hard.
Ah, also you really are a resource, only your employer is a resource for you too, to get money which you then use for your own purposes. You are mutually resources for each other, that’s the point.
Well, also it seems that in the olden days, when we didn’t have internet etc, it was a bit more normal to do your own hobbies etc at work, unofficial tea breaks, and in general many things other than work. Though I’m from Russia, and the Soviet joke says “they imitate pay, we imitate work”.
Some IT companies also try to make sure you can work on your hobbies in free Time ( in my case it works like this. Here is a room with 3d printers raspberry pi etc. Have fun, Just make sure your work is done and clients dont complain )
Yeah like, in my current WFH implementation support position I’m able to work on school work and paint Warhammer minis if everything else is done. I’m gaining new skills which will benefit the company thanks to going to school, thanks to the hobbying I’m happier so my mental health is better so I’m able to have near perfect attendance, and still all my work scheduled is done every day. I really don’t see why this idea that ppl need to be working 100% of the workday every day persists. The situation I’m in is basically a win all around, but some suit with a spreadsheet still sees only the opportunity cost lost by <100% productivity which yields .1% lower profits or something
You give as little as you can give for as much as you can get. I’d rather say distribution of negotiating power. And the way to fix this is making it easier to do business in your sphere as much as possible at all costs. And I don’t mean making it more profitable for existing businesses, I mean there being as many businesses as possible and them being easy to start, so that the negotiating power would even out.
Which moves us to the IP, patent, copyright laws, which make it hard starting a business in many areas, and any kind of regulation and certification that makes it seriously hard to start a business really. Which is, BTW, the reason regulatory laws directed at fighting Apple, Meta etc are also killing many other things we don’t even see cause it happens in conceptual stage.
I do workforce planning/management. No one wants to work by default. It is up to the organisation to do enough for their employees to compensate their employees so that they don’t mind having to work. Whether culture, financial, work-life balance, etc.
Employers need workers but employees just need money. It is up to the employer to make a convincing argument that what they offer in exchange for finite portions of a person’s life is reasonable, especially if they want to reduce costs with retention.
I work in permitting and I get to see a lot of businesses in a lot of industry types. Everything from small mom and pop places to places that have hundreds of employees, small contract jobs shops all the way up to massive chemical manufacturers. One common question I ask is about staffing, typically if a business doesn’t have enough staff to run the business appropriately it’s a good indicator of whether they will be able to meet their permit requirements.
By and large the only businesses who say, “Nobody wants to work anymore,” are places that don’t pay enough. Every single time it’s a pay issue, maybe rarely it’s a personality problem. I had one new business (that’s particularly dirty and hard to hire for) come in and they wanted to start up fast, rather than hiring and training new employees they literally went to their 3 competitors in town and hired their staff directly. An extra $2.5 an hour, 17 people left which nearly crippled the competition, and they had fully trained staff that were more than happy to work in that type of business.
My employer struggled to hire a meat guy for three years, as they only wanted to offer minimum wage without benefits. They’d score the occasional hire, but that hire would inevitably quit after a few weeks when they realized it wasn’t worth the pay. Both the store owner and the meat manager would continue to grumble about how “Nobody wants to work anymore”, rather than facing the reality that nobody wants to work for shit pay and no benefits, as evident by the multiple hires who said “Fuck this job” and took their services elsewhere. Eventually they coughed up more and wound up landing a certified meat cutter with experience. Crazy how nature do that.
I don’t know what the nobody wants to work crowd thinks the average non-contributer is doing to afford food and shelter. It’s as though they imagine these people just declare that they don’t want to work and receive government subsidies via the “I don’t want to work anymore” check-box.
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