Obvious link bait, but they call it bait because it works...
Seriously, fuck these people. Every month it seems that the WSJ or Fortune or Forbes is running some article about how 20-somethings are not willing to give 110% for the company. Well, you know what? Management is the whiniest bunch of entitled pricks to ever walk the Earth.
They feel entitled to developers' labor. They think that we should feel honored for the opportunity to work on their legacy Java in-house apps that have been ravaged by years of turnover, failed projects, arbitrary management requirements, low quality devs, and outsourcing. But it's an insult to their own egos for a lowly developer to ask to be paid as much as them or, quelle horreur, more!
Fun story: first job out of college, I was working in exactly this environment. It was terrible: ridiculous hours, low pay, boring projects, and lack of respect from management. After six months, I got another job offer for a company whose primary product is software, offering twice as much pay and better benefits. I went to HR, asked them to match it if they wanted me to stay, and they pretty much told me to fuck myself. Their counteroffer was a raise of around $5k and tons of opportunities for advancement.
A year later, the senior developer, who had worked for the company for 15 years and was in his 50s with a wife and kids, was fired. Not because of any performance reasons--he was pretty damn good at what he did--but because he was the highest paid person in the department and management wanted to cut costs for some kind of valuation or another. Yeah, he was quite the cost center at $90k a year. They were doing him a favor: now he's freelancing, working less, making more, and far, far happier.
Maybe in a different era it would make sense for a developer to be loyal to the company she works for. But we don't live in that world anymore. Management has done its damnedest to commodify labor and has more or less succeeded. So, let's be commodities! But if management wants to burn us like oil, they should expect to pay the market rate for it.
I couldn't believe what I was reading when he said "They leave after a year for better-paying jobs." No, really?! Imagine that! I wonder what might possibly help with retention...
He painted a typical story that management has to fight every day and you painted a typical story that bottom-er has to fight every day as well.
When you merged both stories, it sounds like a typical girl-girl room mate long-year fight: at some point, you don't know whose faults or who started the fight or the root cause of the problems.
It becomes she-says he-says. A dysfunctional relationship.
At its core, humans have certain level of selfishness and greediness. That is unavoidable.
Even after you pay good salary to young developers, if he/she has short attention span, you couldn't do anything about it. There are quite a few developers out there that are eager to jump the framework/language/storage bandwagon every second.
I don't have any problem if they want to try out new technologies at home, but don't bring smuginess to work and starting to get all gung-ho about new frameworks or shiny tools during meetings and threatened to leave. I want to get shit done as opposed to bet my ass on a new technology.
It is true, some of us do have short attention spans. And you're right, time has changed, and things are probably getting worse (depending whom you asked). I know there are a few of us who would love to use MongoDB or Hadoop or HBase or Node.JS to solve problems that don't exist just because they want to work in company "X" that just happened to publish a blog post about how awesome it is to work in their company (and we all know that some of these blogposts have a lot of marketing hype).
Obviously somewhat off-topic, but I'm irritated by this usage trend I see taking the internet by storm.
"Entitled" means "having a legal right to something", not "having a (spurious) sense of entitlement". Perhaps there's a one-word slur that means what you're trying to say, but "entitled" isn't it.
I think the meaning becomes clear because this sense of the word is almost always used as an attributive modifier of a pejorative term: e.g., "entitled pricks", "entitled, combative princess." I agree with you that it has a much more specific meaning as a predicate compliment: "I'm entitled to my own opinion."
Language changes. People sometimes still complain about "hopefully" being used as a sentence modifier, as in, "Hopefully language mavens will see their role in speech communities as custodians and curators of beneficial older conventions, rather than as guardians and protectors of acrolectic law." However, the etymologically literal sense of this word ("in a manner full of hope") has so little use that the non-standard meaning predominates.
Hmm, good catch, didn't know that. Though, I think the usage is common enough to be colloquial. The article itself talks about the sense of entitlement that developers have, for instance.
Maybe a word like arrogated would work? It isn't totally right, though, and it'd be sacrificing communication for the sake of formal correctness. I'm guessing entitled has taken on its contemporary meaning through a need for a word that didn't exist.
The other point I was passive-aggressively hoping to make by grammar nitpicking is that maybe we can do without a one-word slur meaning that, since its primary purpose is for one side in a negotiation to call the other side a bunch of big fat pussies in an attempt to shame them into weakening their demands.
I imagine we don't have one word that means "having a spurious sense of entitlement" because up until recently (the last one or two hundred years) it was generally crystal clear whether your station allowed you to demand something of someone else or not, so that you'd simply throw someone's station in their face instead of trying to make a sense of entitlement into a character flaw.
Oh, totally picked up on the other point. By pointedly ignoring it, I hinting that my original comment was purposefully made to be more polemic than rational argument, in case the "fuck these people" didn't give it away, and focus on linguistic nerddom which is more interesting anyway =)
I don't see it so much as a negotiating tool, though. Analyzing it, I'd say it's more an attempt to raise the relative status of the HN tribe by putting down the status of middle managers than anything else.
My 1991 copy of the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have any definition resembling 3, nor does my Tenth Edition Webster's, so whatever source you must have checked must be quite recent.
"Yeah, he was quite the cost center at $90k a year."
This is one of the keys to getting paid well and being valued appropriately by a company: position yourself as a profit center, not as a cost center. People who're viewed as cost centers are always facing the question "How can I get your job done with the least cost?", whereas people who're viewed as profit centers have obvious apparent value.
It's a broken system, and broken systems are opportunities for those who figure out how to benefit from them.
Comments
Obvious link bait, but they call it bait because it works...
Seriously, fuck these people. Every month it seems that the WSJ or Fortune or Forbes is running some article about how 20-somethings are not willing to give 110% for the company. Well, you know what? Management is the whiniest bunch of entitled pricks to ever walk the Earth.
They feel entitled to developers' labor. They think that we should feel honored for the opportunity to work on their legacy Java in-house apps that have been ravaged by years of turnover, failed projects, arbitrary management requirements, low quality devs, and outsourcing. But it's an insult to their own egos for a lowly developer to ask to be paid as much as them or, quelle horreur, more!
Fun story: first job out of college, I was working in exactly this environment. It was terrible: ridiculous hours, low pay, boring projects, and lack of respect from management. After six months, I got another job offer for a company whose primary product is software, offering twice as much pay and better benefits. I went to HR, asked them to match it if they wanted me to stay, and they pretty much told me to fuck myself. Their counteroffer was a raise of around $5k and tons of opportunities for advancement.
A year later, the senior developer, who had worked for the company for 15 years and was in his 50s with a wife and kids, was fired. Not because of any performance reasons--he was pretty damn good at what he did--but because he was the highest paid person in the department and management wanted to cut costs for some kind of valuation or another. Yeah, he was quite the cost center at $90k a year. They were doing him a favor: now he's freelancing, working less, making more, and far, far happier.
Maybe in a different era it would make sense for a developer to be loyal to the company she works for. But we don't live in that world anymore. Management has done its damnedest to commodify labor and has more or less succeeded. So, let's be commodities! But if management wants to burn us like oil, they should expect to pay the market rate for it.
I couldn't believe what I was reading when he said "They leave after a year for better-paying jobs." No, really?! Imagine that! I wonder what might possibly help with retention...
I think this goes both ways.
He painted a typical story that management has to fight every day and you painted a typical story that bottom-er has to fight every day as well.
When you merged both stories, it sounds like a typical girl-girl room mate long-year fight: at some point, you don't know whose faults or who started the fight or the root cause of the problems.
It becomes she-says he-says. A dysfunctional relationship.
At its core, humans have certain level of selfishness and greediness. That is unavoidable.
Even after you pay good salary to young developers, if he/she has short attention span, you couldn't do anything about it. There are quite a few developers out there that are eager to jump the framework/language/storage bandwagon every second.
I don't have any problem if they want to try out new technologies at home, but don't bring smuginess to work and starting to get all gung-ho about new frameworks or shiny tools during meetings and threatened to leave. I want to get shit done as opposed to bet my ass on a new technology.
It is true, some of us do have short attention spans. And you're right, time has changed, and things are probably getting worse (depending whom you asked). I know there are a few of us who would love to use MongoDB or Hadoop or HBase or Node.JS to solve problems that don't exist just because they want to work in company "X" that just happened to publish a blog post about how awesome it is to work in their company (and we all know that some of these blogposts have a lot of marketing hype).
Obviously somewhat off-topic, but I'm irritated by this usage trend I see taking the internet by storm.
"Entitled" means "having a legal right to something", not "having a (spurious) sense of entitlement". Perhaps there's a one-word slur that means what you're trying to say, but "entitled" isn't it.
I think the meaning becomes clear because this sense of the word is almost always used as an attributive modifier of a pejorative term: e.g., "entitled pricks", "entitled, combative princess." I agree with you that it has a much more specific meaning as a predicate compliment: "I'm entitled to my own opinion."
Language changes. People sometimes still complain about "hopefully" being used as a sentence modifier, as in, "Hopefully language mavens will see their role in speech communities as custodians and curators of beneficial older conventions, rather than as guardians and protectors of acrolectic law." However, the etymologically literal sense of this word ("in a manner full of hope") has so little use that the non-standard meaning predominates.
Hmm, good catch, didn't know that. Though, I think the usage is common enough to be colloquial. The article itself talks about the sense of entitlement that developers have, for instance.
Maybe a word like arrogated would work? It isn't totally right, though, and it'd be sacrificing communication for the sake of formal correctness. I'm guessing entitled has taken on its contemporary meaning through a need for a word that didn't exist.
The other point I was passive-aggressively hoping to make by grammar nitpicking is that maybe we can do without a one-word slur meaning that, since its primary purpose is for one side in a negotiation to call the other side a bunch of big fat pussies in an attempt to shame them into weakening their demands.
I imagine we don't have one word that means "having a spurious sense of entitlement" because up until recently (the last one or two hundred years) it was generally crystal clear whether your station allowed you to demand something of someone else or not, so that you'd simply throw someone's station in their face instead of trying to make a sense of entitlement into a character flaw.
Oh, totally picked up on the other point. By pointedly ignoring it, I hinting that my original comment was purposefully made to be more polemic than rational argument, in case the "fuck these people" didn't give it away, and focus on linguistic nerddom which is more interesting anyway =)
I don't see it so much as a negotiating tool, though. Analyzing it, I'd say it's more an attempt to raise the relative status of the HN tribe by putting down the status of middle managers than anything else.
ENTITLEMENT:
1a: the state or condition of being entitled
3: belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges.
Words sometimes have more than one meaning.
My 1991 copy of the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have any definition resembling 3, nor does my Tenth Edition Webster's, so whatever source you must have checked must be quite recent.
Your dictionary is 20 years old.
It's officially "old" for a language that has evolved dramatically in the past few decades.
"Yeah, he was quite the cost center at $90k a year."
This is one of the keys to getting paid well and being valued appropriately by a company: position yourself as a profit center, not as a cost center. People who're viewed as cost centers are always facing the question "How can I get your job done with the least cost?", whereas people who're viewed as profit centers have obvious apparent value.
It's a broken system, and broken systems are opportunities for those who figure out how to benefit from them.