Why do you doubt working conditions are better? What other jobs have you held? I try to compare this to other jobs I've done. Right now, I'm in a lull due to waiting on hardware I can use for a customer engagement to connect to their systems, so not a whole lot to do, and I'm here sitting on my couch with a warm cat in my lap, reading Hacker News, getting paid. I've got no specific hour-by-hour requirements. As long as I get done what needs to be done in a particular week, I can nap half the day for all anyone cares.
Previous job I was an Army officer in a tank unit. It's certainly not a bad job. National surveys consistently showed military officer as the second most respected profession behind medical doctors by the general American public. Camaderie is great. Sense of purpose is there. But the material work conditions? I regularly worked 100 hour weeks, got an hour or two of sleep a night, sometimes outdoors when it was -14 degrees, sometimes outdoors when it was 130 degrees (both Fahrenheit). Inhaling diesel fumes all the time. Doing ridiculous nonsense like carrying telephone poles up and down a bunch of hills at 1 AM for 20 km to earn the right to wear silver spurs on my boots on Fridays. Couldn't see my family for months at a time. Ended up with ten screws in my spine from all the bodily damage. You think stack ranking is bad in the tech industry? In the military, you have a hard deadline that puts you in a cohort where you're up for promotion, and depending on personnel requirements at the time, you either get one chance or two to get promoted, and you're out of a career otherwise. There is no other military you can apply to if you get laid off. People are fired if they get fat. Your boss is not only allowed to verbally abuse and publicly humiliate you, it's basically expected and normal as a motivational tactic.
It's very hard for me to imagine considering what I'm going through now to be bad working conditions.
Personal experience as well as talking to other devs. I will caveat my assertion, though, by acknowledging that different people prefer different working conditions.
When I say that working conditions as a dev are poor, it's mostly because of the requirement to work in cube farms (or, worse, in an open-office layout) where you're constantly having to struggle to get things done amid a sea of interruptions and distractions.
> What other jobs have you held?
I've been a janitor, a hotel maid, a roofer, a ditch-digger, and various fast food positions.
I've done a few shit jobs as well, and I'll say that software development working conditions might not be awesome, but they suck the least. Of course, I've got a bad hip and live in South Texas, so the prospect of doing labor in 110 degree plus heat indexes is what I'm comparing against.
As it is, I'm almost 100% in-office which I prefer, but that also goes to liking my co-workers and company as well.
Ever been up on a roof when it's over one hundred degrees outside? $13/hour isn't going to get me up there. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on the work or the workers (though there is sometimes an earned reputation about construction crews), but roofing is just the suckiest of the suck, at least in South Texas.
>I regularly worked 100 hour weeks, got an hour or two of sleep a night, sometimes outdoors when it was -14 degrees, sometimes outdoors when it was 130 degrees (both Fahrenheit). Inhaling diesel fumes all the time. Doing ridiculous nonsense like carrying telephone poles up and down a bunch of hills at 1 AM for 20 km to earn the right to wear silver spurs on my boots on Fridays. Couldn't see my family for months at a time. Ended up with ten screws in my spine from all the bodily damage.
Surely you understand that this anecdote is the worst possible evidence of your thesis. Describing your before-vs-after delta as "statistically extreme" would be an understatement. This is like the most hyperbolic possible version of the "how can you complain when kids are starving in Africa" fallacy.
Previous job I was an Army officer in a tank unit. It's certainly not a bad job. National surveys consistently showed military officer as the second most respected profession behind medical doctors by the general American public. Camaderie is great. Sense of purpose is there. But the material work conditions? I regularly worked 100 hour weeks, got an hour or two of sleep a night, sometimes outdoors when it was -14 degrees, sometimes outdoors when it was 130 degrees (both Fahrenheit). Inhaling diesel fumes all the time. Doing ridiculous nonsense like carrying telephone poles up and down a bunch of hills at 1 AM for 20 km to earn the right to wear silver spurs on my boots on Fridays. Couldn't see my family for months at a time. Ended up with ten screws in my spine from all the bodily damage. You think stack ranking is bad in the tech industry? In the military, you have a hard deadline that puts you in a cohort where you're up for promotion, and depending on personnel requirements at the time, you either get one chance or two to get promoted, and you're out of a career otherwise. There is no other military you can apply to if you get laid off. People are fired if they get fat. Your boss is not only allowed to verbally abuse and publicly humiliate you, it's basically expected and normal as a motivational tactic.
It's very hard for me to imagine considering what I'm going through now to be bad working conditions.