No hate for the middle class. I can’t help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
No hate for the middle class. I can’t help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
Startups love to hire kids out of college who can do anything U, I, or X related with regards to tech. My first programming job I made minimum wage for the first few years and then got a $0.50 per hour raise before the company went out of business.
There’s FAANG and then there’s everyone else. Some jobs can be pretty bad in terms of pay. That first job also had a seasoned professional graphic designer with multiple decades of experience and she wasn’t making much more than I was.
How seasoned could they be if they weren’t able to demand a raise or work somewhere else for more as a UX Designer? How could a seasoned professional be so close to entry level, and minimum wage?
Know your worth, companies aren’t just going to hand you money to be nice. Negotiate, and if they don’t play ball, prove you’re as good as you think you are somewhere else.
Not everyone lives in the bay area / silicon valley. Sometimes folks with tech talent live in more rural areas (or smaller college towns) and there may be only a few options around. It’s great that people have more opportunity to work from home, back then that wasn’t the case. If you did work remotely, you’d probably keep in touch on irc or icq and you’d periodically have a GoToMeeting or a WebEx conference (Zoom wasn’t a thing).
Also, skill level does not equal pay level. We don’t actually live in a meritocracy.
Some of us have been working remote since way before Covid.
Skill level doesn’t equal pay level directly, but if you have decades of experience in a technical field like UX Design and are still making close to minimum wage in the USA, that does sound like a skill issue.
Again, my guy we do not live in a meritocracy. If the businesses in your local area aren’t hiring UX (well at that time, they were just called “graphic designers” though they did UX work, we hadn’t defined UX as an industry at this time), then you don’t get a job, regardless of skill level.
You ignored the fact that myself and many others were working remote many years ago. Even using the old project middleman websites would have made more than minimum wage.
Why was moving impossible? Programming is full of foreign nationals who left their family, culture, languages, etc to try and make a better life for themselves but we can’t move to a different city and try?
Decades of UX Design experience, near minimum wage…
Victim Mentality
I didn’t actually. I mentioned GotoMeeting, WebEx and IRC as methods for ways to work remotely, but not things like github (because it wasn’t around). Sure, CVS was around, but not Mercurial or git. Everyone wanted to own a blazing fast T1 connection… Around the year 2000. I’m sure there were people working remotely because that was technically possible, but it wasn’t something everyone had access to.
Well for me I just graduated high school so I didn’t have the money to move yet. When I could afford it, I did move - to a HCOL area which didn’t pay well. I helped multiple startups and yeah, probably wasn’t paid what I was worth but then again few people actualy are.
For the person seasoned web designer (well, to be clear they were senior web designer, having worked as a web designer for multple years. I’m not sure how many years, but considering the web was invented in 1989, it couldn’t have been more than 11, though I think they was working as a graphic or digital designer prior to that.
You ok there kiddo? You seem to be harboring a lot of animosity on this subject. Yeah, I mean I can’t remember exactly the circumstances and I didn’t look outside the job market for my first real job in my industry which I got out of high school so I can’t speak to what the next biggest city was doing in terms of web dev agencies or other tech companies sprouting up. I think this was during the dotcom bubble so maybe I should’ve just predicted the future and up and moved myself and all the employees at the local web dev agency to silicon valley and got some of that sweet VC money. It worked out well for everyone involved, as I understand it.
First it was “decades of experience” now it’s “maybe 11 years” those are big differences.
I never mentioned silicon valley or VC bubbles, no one can predict the future. But if someone with decades of experience as you put it was making nearly minimum wage, they should have at least tried commuting or moving to their nearest Metropolitan area. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Yeah, so I don’t think I need to explain to you how time works but maybe I should clarify. We’re talking about a few different people and we’re talking about multiple points in time. All while I’m trying to anonymize the story so that I don’t get doxxed.
I was hired at a local web dev company around the year 2000. At this time, I had just graduated high school. I was working as a “web developer” which in modern day parlance means I’m doing the role of a full stack web developer. Keep in mind at this time javascript was pretty new and so there wasn’t a need to split between front and backend. That’s me though, I didn’t have the experience back then.
However, during that time, (the year 2000) at that same company was a person who had been working in the graphic design industry for most of her life. She was older than me, I think a grandmother at that time.
Now, the web itself was invented by CERN in 1989, so absolutely zero web designers existed (as a job title) prior to 1989. The people who became web designers were already working with some form of graphic design on digital media / computer-based graphic design. At a certain point (I’m not this person and I’m not an actual historian so I don’t know the date) in the past, prior to 1989, there were no such thing as computer based graphic artists, since no software existed to create computer graphics. The people who became graphic designers working with computer-based graphic design were artists, illustrators and designers working with physical media. Etc…
This is why I say someone (in the year 2000) was doing the work of building user experiences with decades of experience in their industry. In a meritocracy, this person would’ve been one of the more skilled web designers around and indeed they were and the firm was lucky to have hired them. The computer doesn’t make the UX happen, the people who have been studying and practicing design for years make it happen. That relevant graphic design experience doesn’t go away just because new technology comes out.
You may have been confused or I may have mistyped. I don’t know this person’s salary, but I know mine. I was paid minimum wage, and only ever got a $0.50 / hour raise. This company would also have their paychecks bounce and eventually went out of business. It’s entirely possible the senior web designer made a lot of money but from the sounds of it this was not the case.
My entire point here is you seem to be mistaken on the following:
My issue for a lot of my life was earnestly thinking that my loyalty to a company meant anything. I know better now. The larger part is that though I’m now making closer to what I probably should have been years ago (since I’ve been working as a full stack dev since 2000), but it’s still going to take me a bit to build up a buffer so I can feel confident losing my job for a few months while i find a new one. It seems to take about 3-6 months to find a new tech job, and that’s just how these things work these days. And now that tech firms are salivating at AI and we’re seeing more layoffs, I’m not entirely sure what the future holds.
One thing is for sure though, we aren’t living in a meritocracy. If we were, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because everyone at that company back in 2000 would have been paid what they were worth, and that company would have succeeded. In fact the one thing I learned from businesses is the best way to have a business succeed is to hire someone who has strong connections to people with deep pockets.
That’s crazy. And definitely not the norm, even outside of big tech.
I’ve been in 4 startups, no one was making that little money even 20 years ago.
Yep, I’ve worked at tech places with bad pay but never “decades of experience and only making a little more than minimum wage”. Especially if they held a Senior title. It’s been a wild ride listening to their story evolve.