The more likely response is that a qualified employee will simply quit an abusive job and sell their skills to a more reasonable employer. This is certainly the case in US software development.
> or try to get a highly sought-after position with a benevolent or wise employer who takes care not burn out their employees; but the former doesn't sound like freedom at all, and the latter still leaves the majority of normal people vulnerable to exploitation.
Really? Maybe it depends on the specialty, because every single company I know that works with Drupal has more work than they can handle and is hiring developers.
This mentality is a little bit crazymaking (but it may just be that I'm crazy). It's always bad for someone out there. The market is not great for SPARC assembly programmers, or for Turbo Pascal programmers, or for Motif UX specialists.
I don't believe the market actually is bad for people with a modern systems programming skillset (not least because we have trouble hiring those people), but I don't doubt that there are systems jobs that used to be common that no longer are.
Nobody has a license not to adapt. If you're stuck in a crappy job working overtime solely because you're stuck maintaining AIX database applications, it's hard to blame the structure of the job market on that. Get thee to Github.
The more likely response is that a qualified employee will simply quit an abusive job and sell their skills to a more reasonable employer. This is certainly the case in US software development.
And the attitude displayed in this argument, is part of the problem, IMHO. Because it translates to only "rock-star" (as denoted by the "qualified") programmers/employees getting to benefit from such an environment. It's as if, if some person isn't a top-notch in his field, it's ok to suffer that kind of abuse from his employer.
Yet, companies don't run only with "qualified" guys that can easily shop around for new jobs, they also use lots of run-of-the-mill programmers, sometimes even purposefully ("we get a few greats to design the program architecture, and dozens of monkeys to code the parts"). They also should not have to work for unpaid overtime.
(I'm not talking as a sprint to finish before some deadline once in a while, I'm talking as a regular occurrence).
None of the points you're arguing with follow from my comment.
Huh?
You specifically said in your comment that: "a qualified employee will simply quit an abusive job and sell their skills to a more reasonable employer".
No, it clearly isn't. You used a series of terms that I didn't that changed the meaning of what I said, then argued against that instead of what I actually said.
Well, what you said is "qualified guys can quit and shop around".
You might not have meant that "thus average guys are ok to suffer unpaid overtime", but I didn't argue against what you "actually said" or "meant to say", I argued about what the above stance implies.
And, yes, for a lot of people, it implies "and screw the average guy".
