If you still get paid for a job not well done… it’s still hurts the company. Believe me, there has been an attack on tech workers by the industry. Firing people during record profits, using LLMs to upset the negotiating power of artists and software people alike, not giving inflation adjusted pay hikes, etc. You can even see the billionaire owned media grind their gears trying to come up with words to discredit workers doing their bare-minimum such as “quiet quitting”.

It shouldn’t be a conspiracy theory to claim that a few people control the reins of a lot of workers… in reality it’s a community of few thousand billionaires cooperating to oppress workers.

Edit:

Just because we don’t physically picket in front of our offices, does not mean we are not protesting. It’s just not visible in an outward manner.

And just because we all seem to be doing our own thing, doesn’t mean we aren’t organizing. We just consider organizing as just quietly aligning our wallets and behaviours without being overt about it. I am sure there are a lot of organization for software developers for people who do want to be loud about it too.

Labour is physical work but working your eyes and brain is also taxing. It’s just a different set of muscles/organs. Sitting at the desk all day is also taxing. it’s just not evident enough to people who see an AC and think that’s comfortable. It’s not healthy long term. Leads to all sorts of health issues.

Many of us tech workers joke that we will make our bag of money, retire, and go do farming. But you must understand why we joke like that.

For a lack of physical activity, desk workers suffer numerous health issues due to sitting all day/lack of movement. We are deprived of natural sunlight and wind in our badly lit offices staring at bright screens.

My point is that I said i felt isolated by blue collar workers not considering tech workers as the same class. You just went ahead and proved my point.

this is one of the reasons you don’t see class solidarity from tech workers. The blue collar bunch think we are somehow same as the capitalist class.

Edit:

I also think the definition of labourer is not as myopic as you make it out to be. If one sells their time/works for money then they are labourers. Only those who make their money/capital/resources work for them cannot be considered labourer. Even a manager is a labourer. I would exclude CEOs because they invest and are also board members in their buddies’ companies. Their employ is just a facade to maintain control and keep the power “within the family” so to speak.

you should try to get off of your imaginary high horse or you might hurt yourself.

A strike is a refusal to commit labour to the company. Same as not doing a good job. In japan the ticket checkers had a strike where they did their job as usual but did not collect the payment for issuing tickets. THAT was considered a strike.

why must quiet quitting not be considered too? We don’t participate in whatever greedy venture by doing the bare minimum.

I didn’t blame blue collar workers. I said I was isolated because even though both white collar and blue collar workers sell their labour for a living, somehow we are never accepted as real labour just because the elite among us make $500k a year for instance.

Eh… having unions sounds good to me… a white collar worker. I am just not considered part of the labour class by blue collar workers. So it makes me feel isolated. Don’t be mistaken, we keyboard thumpers already fight corporate bullshit daily. Th e disdain is from blue collar workers.

we all ARE striking daily. We’re fighting bullshit RTO mandates and quiet quitting everyday

grep -B should be more concise

on the other hand challenges like these give us valuable experience. Its not often one has the opportunity to write two programs in different languages from scratch and figure out the coupling. I know I would be excited if I got paid to do such things.

And loose coupling is a good constraint to force a good design for your application.