Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come close.
The threat of violence that the worker wielded against their employer was indeed a good incentive to keep things amicable.
Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't need to be more than a handful of security guards, and AI/Robotics is diminishing the need for that handful of guards at all.
For those unfamiliar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution . Which from the UK's PoV had lead to a hellishly long, expensive, bloody, and existential series of wars. Right on the UK's doorstep. The memories of which were very much living in 1832, to undermine the usual "can't happen here" motivated reasoning of the 1%.
And it took further horrors, including the Great Famine in Ireland, to get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_laws repealed in 1846. Which, arguably, was a far greater reform - destroying the economic foundations of most of the wealthy land owners, and greatly reducing how many poor folks lived on the brink of "if you can't afford the food prices..." starvation.
ADDED:
> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't...
Sadly, it's far more complex than that. While amoral billionaires and mega-corps get the headlines, late-stage capitalism has very efficiently allocated nice-sounding slivers of its loot to a huge number of minor stakeholders. Pretty much everyone who has savings (for retirement or whatever) invested in equities. Pretty much every homeowner. And pretty much everyone who still believes that they'll somehow manage to break into those "just sit there and watch your wealth grow" classes.
I don't know why median house prices are even factor at all in what you think you wage you a wage you accept would be. If you can't afford a house, that means you have to lower your standard of living. There are lots of people who live in less than median houses. That's part of the way averages and statistics work. If you don't like the median house prices, you may have to look at what's going on in your city that the house prices are so high. There are certainly issues in Silicon Valley that need to be addressed, but they are not issues of wages. They are other issues that they need to address. You are always welcome to live in a house that is lower than the median wage and that may be what is needed in order to afford something.
I'm interpreting this as venting, but the attitude on display here is madness. It is totally unreasonable to throw these sort of temper tantrums because an employer isn't adding crazy high wages to what is already a quite pleasant and comfortable desk job. One of the issues tech workers have is that even at a slightly lower wage than median it'd still be a much better deal than what an average worker is being offered.
People do far more work for far less money to a high professional standard. And trying to burn down a business because the person offering you the best deal you can find isn't what you imagine yourself to be worth is entitled to an undignified extent.
If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.
If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.
If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.
This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.
Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.
When the incentives of workers favour burning buildings rather than working for wages, the next step is either to use force/control or to rebalance wages.
In the United Kingdom, a third of people claiming government assistance are in employment. Over 50% of those buying their first home get gifted money from their parents to do so. Starting from nothing means playing a rigged game. It's like playing Monopoly, where one player starts out with half of the cards and everyone else thinks they can win if they strategise well enough.
Many core economic theories that are taught about productivity and pay are wrong. Anyone living in the real world can see that marginal productivity and price theory are wrong. If the game was perfectly fair, these theories may have some weight, however there's a multitude of factors that skew the board. Poor compensation does have consequences, and they may be felt by individual businesses. However, by and large, these consequences are offloaded on to the rest of society.
Think he’s wrong about this being close to blowing up. Think that’s coloured by his own personal situation. I suspect unfortunately the powers that be correctly read the situation as significantly more room to squeeze.
It might read as bad to usa ears but keep in mind there are people breaking down ships with zero safety, zero job security, low pay, bad equipment and certain heath impact etc. People will bear crazy stuff and still show up to work
Today is international workers day and we are sharing a capuccino with my colleague.
He either worked for federal government for too long or just thinks world owns him something. Probably the latter, based on him being 4 months in unemployment and stating "Employment inquiries should check the TXT record on job.spacedino.net for contact info."
Signed, Anyone who you'd like to care
You pay workers well and retain institutional knowledge it helps you 5+ years down the road. Who in 5+ years is going to run a study that shows retaining the people that created a system made it easier to maintain that system?
Like think about Jack Welch who ran GE into the ground but keep the stock afloat through financial craftsmanship. He spawns a ton of copy-cats because despite making poor decisions he was visibly successful for a long time.
It's not like the NFL where if you decide to fire all your receivers and play the running game you'll immediately start losing next week.
This is a product of a resource rich economy, you can see it today.
It is calles Dutch disease
Rather, the powerful will turn on each other and start waging war eventually, and the expendable bodies used in that is everyone else.
The new deal in America roughly got things correct, and was followed by the greatest expansion of the middle class in history. What we're suffering from today is the systematic destruction of that social contract.
You could just as easily say Europeans are entitled because their salaries are high compared to an Ethiopian. It’s not a useful comparison
I'm writing this because I don't consider NL to be the top country in Europe where you can make a lot of money being a SWE. And I'm not talkin about FAANG salaries either, they are higher here.
Because the "in the real world" alternative is so much worse. In theory: "Workers unite!", in practice: "Lose your home".
> Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely.
The origins of currency are mysterious. There were certainly some number of kings and tribal chiefs who minted coins and handed them out, mostly I think to soldiers. There were also traders using whatever coins and other small valuable objects. But I don't think anybody decided anything, except when messing around with taxes. I suppose company scrip comes closest to this vision, where your lack of money is determined by the mastermind who also creates it and hands it out and decides everybody's roles. That or communism. Generally no, it's not a rigged game, it's a messy brawl.
Perhaps another US state would have been a better comparison. It might be hard for a software developer in Montana to identify with a Silicon Valley rant about salaries being too low.
It would not cross my mind personally to complain about low compensation for my skilled work, precisely because I know my collegaues from areas with lower compensation are just as skilled and earn less. In what way would the world be better off if I was better paid? If it helped my company increase their security posture then that would say more about the ineffective ways we organize work around here than anything else.
I disagree with the commenter that your replied to directly, who seems to believe the world is a zero-sum game. However it's also naive to believe that the game is not rigged, and that those who complain simply lack creativity.
In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world.
The difference is my desperation for the job. I had to pay for my studies back when 1$ an hour seemed like more than nothing.
Now working for less than 50$ feels like being exploited. This is the matter of perspective and situation in life, you can never fix it for everyone in the world. There will always will be people like me who will work for 1$ an hour because they have needs to meet and scholarships or handouts don't make up for it all.
Everyone would like to make more but I was interpreting this thread as suggesting a us dev whining that as a field they’re being mistreated comes off a bit gauche
Photo by Defrino Maasy / Unsplash
My fourth month of unemployment. I'm fresh off an interview with a senior technical role advertised with a decent compensation range whose upper end would let me make median rent, and whose lower range would not. At the end of an excellent interview, I am informed that said compensation range, contrary to the Base Compensation tag in the job description, is in fact all inclusive, and that the role actually tops out below the living wage threshold for a three adult household for its base compensation.
I feel it's highly relevant to note that this was a role where I would own the entire technology estate for an employer. Every switch, every firewall, every database, every server, every phone, every laptop, every cloud, every badge system. All data, everywhere, at any time.
Everything.
For an employer in the public safety industry.

Seriously, this is a company first responders rely on for tech, and they want to pay below subsistence wages to senior technical people!
This is not the first time that compensation has been mismatched to the role, but it is the first time it's happened with a role so critically important to a company playing such an outsized role in as critical an area as public safety.
Which got me thinking: have employers just lost the plot on what compensation is actually for? What its intended function is? Because it seems to me that everyone thinks compensation is merely payment for labor and nothing more, a number to be driven down by any means necessary in order to keep more for those at the top.
And oh my god it is so much more than that.
We live in a society. This society has been arranged around using currency to purchase necessities, because some people decided that necessities are not guaranteed. You acquire currency by either investing currency you already have to compound it through the labor of others, or you labor in order to earn less currency than investors do.
Is that a gross oversimplification? You betcha, but I'm really trying to stay on topic and not fill this with reaction GIFs.
Author's Note: I failed.
Anyway, everyone needs currency to afford everything. Rent costs currency, food costs currency, electricity costs currency, water and sewage and garbage and healthcare and childcare and education all cost currency. Only after your essentials have been paid for, can you use excess currency to save for tomorrow - buying a home, or a car, or a retirement if you're really lucky.
Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely. The thinking was simple: trading time for currency in the form of labor was a sucker's game, and those with currency deserve more currency because they already had currency. Companies in particular deserved more money than the people who worked for the company, at least according to Powell.
Thus labor was reframed into those terms: wages were merely a payment to those who did labor, and labor was only to be paid the minimal amount possible in the marketplace for said labor, and not one cent more, regardless of external forces (like the cost of living). Minimum wages are bad, because wages should only ever go down relative to inflation and productivity, never up. Only those who own business deserve more currency, because they're the real workers.
Again, a gross oversimplification coming from an openly biased dinosaur. That's not the point.
The point is that wages aren't meant to merely compensate labor; they're also meant to protect the company.

Tony Soprano reminding you that this is a business.
I'll just be blunt: wages are also protection money. They're not just compensation for doing your job, they're compensation for not burning down warehouses, not going on strike, not sabotaging workloads, and not unionizing in the first place. It's the longest unspoken social contract dating back to pre-history: you pay me to live, or else.
Occasionally, employers will call labor's bluff. If twenty-thousand years of history is any indication, their temporary wins are always undone by the sheer ratio of workers to wealthy owners, though not before employers provoke and employ violence first. We are going through such a phase right now, if the above links are any indication.
Employers haven't paid their dues to labor in decades. Labor, kind as we are, have cut back on our lives as much as we're able to. We've given up homeownership, we're dropping out of healthcare, we're begging from food pantries, we're taking on gig work, and we've seen none of the wage gains from productivity our elders enjoyed. It's gotten so bad that, with workers having sacrificed our very ability to move up the socioeconomic ladder, the economy has gone K-shaped.
Despite this, employers seem to think there's more room for workers to yield. I say this because despite median wages being unable to afford median homes, I'm still finding employers offering lower and lower pay for work on their job descriptions. This isn't just economics anymore, this is a security risk, and employers are playing with fire.

Modern employers
Take your CPA, for instance, median pay of $81,680 a year and at moderate exposure to AI displacement according to Anthropic. These are people who know your books better than you. Where every penny goes, and where every penny can be silently swindled. They also audit your fancy new AI financial workflows, making corrections when it goes off the rails, and know where all your financial skeletons are buried.
Do you really want to pay your accountant so little that they can't make rent or buy a home? Do you really want them going to a food bank instead of a grocery store? They're excellent at judging risk, and know exactly what that pay gap is worth to them if the timing is right. Maybe it's blowing the whistle before you can fix an issue and leading to a costly investigation, maybe it's sharing your supply chain costs with a competitor for a higher paying job, or maybe it's committing outright embezzlement that they're sure your fancy AI tooling will miss.

Are you sure underpaying your accountant is a good idea?
Tech work, the last bastion of Middle Class employment, isn't doing any better. Take Computer and Network Architects, with a median pay of $130,390 per year; or the Computer Systems Analysts, median pay of $103,790 per year; or the Systems Administrators, with a median pay of $96,800 per year. These groups have the keys to your systems, your data, your endpoints, your real estate. They can see and do anything with a keystroke, including destroying billion-dollar businesses. The reason for the comparatively high wages was their comparatively high degree of trust.
Instead, employers outsourced to MSPs, then offshored overseas, then on-shored to underpaid and exploited H1Bs shackled to their employer's temporary sponsorship, then briefly hired North Korean spies, and are now attempting to replace the technical workers outright with AI that routinely drops production systems. All the while they lay off workers by the tens of thousands, over and over again.
I feel like there's an example of the consequences of not treating your technical experts with respect in popular media...

Dennis Nedry is a fucking asshole whose actions endangering personnel and guests were reprehensible, but he did repeatedly make it clear he felt undervalued relative to his contributions...
I'm not Dennis Nedry, but I've worked with folks like them before. Brilliant minds who can debug complex architectures and systems, who pour their lives quite literally into the work because they have a passion for it...and increasingly are all too willing to burn it to the ground when they feel slighted. Spend time around actual engineers and the like in most orgs, and you'll see patterns of ill-health: smokers, drinkers, chewers, vapers, over-eaters, out-of-shapers, poor posture, bags under eyes, thinning and greying hair, high amounts of stress, messy desks. All signs of humans sacrificing their own health for their employers, prioritizing work over life, overworked to an early grave.
Most folks aren't as egalitarian as I am, and as someone who has sacrificed physical, mental, emotional, and psychological health to the field for over fifteen years, I sympathize with where my peers are coming from. Most people aren't wired to "do no harm" no matter what, which means most people are a huge security risk if they're undercompensated.
Thing is, undercompensation isn't limited merely to your specialists and senior workers. Fast food workers will slow down lines to give themselves breathing room due to understaffing, and retail workers won't put in the added effort of store maintenance when they can't even maintain a roof over their heads. Office workers doing more menial tasks aren't going to follow through on security best practices if they're more worried about how to pay the electric bill this month while also affording insulin. Your contracted-out security staff aren't likely to pay close attention to camera feeds since they know they'll be replaced in three months before benefits kick in. Your MSP or offshored technical staff won't be invested in your long-term success when their KPIs only cover ticket counts and response times, and their competitors are already preparing to underbid at renewal anyhow.
The workers have been incredibly clear about their problems for twenty years, now, especially the younger cohorts. Employers haven't wanted to listen, believing one more technical control or one more AI system will finally give them the permanent, unassailable leverage they need to keep all the money and fire all the workers.

Fuck you, pay me.
I don't really have a positive way to end this. This is a warning, another canary in an increasingly smoke-choked mine. We're at the point that workers are quite literally burning down infrastructure and engaging in violence against leadership, and the response from those who can change things - our politicians, our corporate leaders, the investor class that's richer than ever in human history - don't really seem to give a fuck. There's this thick tension in the air between workers scrambling to survive, and monied classes who feel the demands of the workers are wholly unreasonable.
History paints a pretty clear picture of how this ultimately ends, but for what it's worth, I still feel like I should at least try to warn folks about the consequences of undercompensation.
Failing to pay your workers the money they need to live is breaking the social contract. It's the single biggest security vulnerability in your organization, and I promise you that there is not, and never will be, a technological control that can protect against it.
You gotta pay up, or you're going to get burned down.

Milton was right.
An addendum.
AI is making it faster and easier to brute-force security vulnerabilities at a time when open source is falling apart due to lack of funding and successors. Major companies are firing engineers to replace them with AI tooling, then hiring them back at lower pay packages when the AI fails, but still holding the AI Sword of Damocles over their heads. Software is expanding rapidly at a time when employers seek to eliminate the technical professionals who ensure their safety and prosperity, who can translate institutional processes and knowledge into cost-effective infrastructure.
Housing prices are up. Rent is up. Utilities are up because of AI datacenter builds. Food costs are rising due to global conflicts instigated by America. So too are energy prices, tariffs, inflation, and interest rates.
You, the employer, have a decision to make: do you start raising wages, working with policymakers to immediately address affordability, cease arbitrary layoffs, invest in worker futures, and promote regulatory schemes that reign in the worst myopic excesses of your peers for society's collective benefit?
Or do you take up smoking cigarettes while sitting inside a warehouse of loose gunpowder and dynamite, with a mob of torches and pitchforks right outside?

Coco has had it up to here with your bullshit.