Re: OT: memory to share available

[Discipulus]

Hello shmem

I read the whole thread and is depressing. Damn bastards!

I can understand (and with reserves) when comapnies are in trouble but I cannot accept an even small company with a sane businnes firing people if they are not guilty of severe problems.

In IT this seems to me every year more frequent: fire "old" technicians to hire younger ones (tipically with worst contracts) or outsourcing wildly.

The phenomenon is very different and has different human consequences in distinct parts of the world: here in Eataly (yes Eataly!) is very different between northern and southern regions too. Many coworkers (tech people mostly, someone very good ones) from Milan quit en masse after the Spaghetti Company Merge. I'm near to 50, I'm not a guru at all, I'm not even super specialized in shining new technologies, I have a partime contract... in my sweet Roma I have few or no possibility to get another job for the same money. Or a job at all.

Trade unions? Here they are at least incompetent and prone to the Owner Will.

The moneycentric approach of most companies trascended the industrial idea of a (saner) capitalism. They loose in quality and they dont even know. Managers suppose their clouds and graphics about workflow are the world but infact they not even represent the real world. Here all tech and business idioms are in English: managers speaks 1/3 of their words in English even during common sentences and they dont know the Bus Factor. Shame!

Where is gone the responsability of the Company toward their workers? It is possible for a society to spit out from the work world techincians with decades of experience? They have to load even more the (where it exists) non-work money assistence paid by everyone? Are we living in a technologic era or what? When someone of your experience is fired, in a sane society, I would expect a call from Tech Ministry proposing a new position for the next Monday. SciFi.

Feeling bad for coworkers left in the shit? Well.. human empathy is a good thing, but wait you caused nothing of this! Dont fall in (auto)commiseration with no reason to be: you are the same of yesterday and you have done the same harm of yestaerday, ie: probably none.

So, as you were used at work to send binary messages with your hands, if you see your boss tell him printf '%010b',132 from my part!

My best wishes for a productive and wealthy future.

L*

[shmem]

Hello Discipulus,

thank you for your (in part ;-) uplifting words. Another fun fact: after being fired (yes, that's true, even when at last we quit the contract in mutual agreement) I was sent a christmas parcel from the company, bakery within, and a greeting card, reading:

No matter whether you have been with us for years or just a short time, you are part of the $company family.
And a family sticks together, even in turbulent times like these!

Fuck yeah, family. Meaningless blabber, internal marketing speech.

What you say about the moneycentric approach is so true, more so if a small company is stuck like a tick to the automotive or communications industry or both, where their income ist just a negligible record in all the money moved by those molochs, but their services crucial to functioning; and my income in turn also was a negligible part of the overall money that small company is moving. They are able to spit out experienced people because of the success of those people; computing is commodity, as are programs. We automate ourselves out of existence, in a way. After all, things like npm are so easy, right?

Today, people rather stich together FOSS to keep their technical debt small (which is good), but they aren't aware that they buy that with increasing external dependencies and are implementing a brittle fabric of disparate components which gets bigger, unflexible and more difficult to oversee, manage and adapt, without expertise and capacity to look under the hood of the components.

Outsourcing key components of the business never is a good idea, they must stay in own hands, be simplified as much as possible, flexible and robust. I've seen things going wrong for a long time now, spoke up and wasn't heard, and my following silence was held as consent, which ain't.

And no, I'm not guilty of anything. Well, unproductiveness may be. But why so? My programs run, they produce revenue, but $company decided that the rent from them is all theirs, not mine anymore, at all.

So, again, good riddance.

I might be doing computing stuff in the future, but only in educative, curative, palliative and subversive ways.

[afoken]

Trade unions? Here they are at least incompetent and prone to the Owner Will.

My oppinion about trade unions wasn't that good, either. Their most visible result were strikes of grunt workers and a lot of bullshit heared in TV interviews. My first job in a management consulting company didn't improve that picture. After all, I've spend a lot of time to learn my job, I'm everything but a grunt worker. I can talk eye-to-eye with my employer.

That slowly changed during the merger mentioned in Re: OT: memory to share available. The Betriebsrat (works council) worked closely together with the trade union (in that case, ver.di) to inform all employees about the merger and its consequences. Yes, the people from the trade union recommended joining the union. And apart from strike money, they had two very good arguments: free legal advice on labor law, and a legal expenses insurance for labor law included in the membership fee. ver.di and the other trade unions still emit with an SNR close to zero, and I don't agree with everything. But the legal advice service is great.

Alexander