[TheForge] Re: guardrails and handrails

[Charle B Vincent]

Mike, he was talking about IT workers in the telecom industry.   Trust 
me, there it IS all about the bill.  When I started in the industry 
years ago, it paid OK(on par with engineers), but the real attraction 
was doing really neat shit with neat people - probably same as 
engineering years ago.   The advent of the late late 90's had us all 
making stupid money, and attracted the crowd for which it is ALL about 
the money.   It transformed the company I am working for from a place 
where I was chastised for working too much unpaid overtime and 
neglecting my family to one where I get text messaged at the hospital 
asking if I am still going to make my billable quota for the week.  
Annual billable hours are targeted at 2000.  That doesn't include 
travel, education or marketing.   The only reason someone would sign up 
for that IS the money, cause no love of doing your job will survive all 
of that.

Charles

Mike Spencer wrote:

>Andy quoth:
>
>  
>
>>the goal is to generate a bill.  And so it was true.  Without the
>>bill, it is as you say, nothing more than a hobby.
>>    
>>
>
>[Rant-mode ON]
>
>    This little squibb of mercenary pseudo-wisdom is a sour rendering
>    in the mode of pop anecdote of the feeble-minded reductionism of
>    MBA school, biz jargon nattering and religious economics.  You
>    flossinaucinihilipilify the numerous -- possibly arbitrarily
>    numerous -- dimensions of human intent and action into the single
>    dimension of bottom line.  That is the risible tool of all those
>    people in biz who can manage neither complexity nor ambiguity and
>    who consequently can achieve self-esteem only by attaching it to
>    the single variable of net cash.
>
>    Your pejorative "nothing more than a hobby" follows the lead of
>    the Religion of Economics in conflating all purpose, intent,
>    desire and creation not associated with a mercenary exchange into
>    putatively pointless frivolity and dismissing it as "friction" or
>    as an irrelevancy in the single-valued purity of commerce.
>
>    Bah.  Humbug.
>
>[Rant-mode OFF]
>
>There.  Now I feel better.
>
>  
>