Ask HN: Engineers, don't you feel like pawns?

> while others benefit from it

I get satisfaction from other people benefiting from my work. Why would I want to perform work that benefits no one or only myself? Seems selfish.

I assume you meant to imply that I'm being taken advantage of in some way by my employer but that is not the case. I enjoy managing computers and programming. I don't enjoy running a business, selling things to people, dealing with insurance companies directly, or many of the other things that I don't have to do because my employer does them.

Often times there are other people that enjoy those activities doing them. It's a symbiotic relationship, or at least it should be in an ideal world. It's possible for everyone to benefit even if some people benefit more financially than others.

I work in a place where my boss is an engineer, his boss is an engineer, and his boss is an engineer. I've found this feeling is helped a lot by your superiors actually understanding what you are doing and why. I'm still a pawn, but I feel appreciated.

Find a way to be better compensated. Find a way to solve more interesting (to you, not just the company) problems. Find a way to solve meaningful-to-society problems.

A former colleague of mine hated that half our job was defense work. He managed to stay off those projects, but was never happy because he was always one day away from being assigned to them. He didn't hate the military, but had no desire to be involved in it. He got a job making systems that saved lives instead (infants, at that). Maybe someone else was still getting outsized profit off his labor, but the work he was (is?) doing had more value to him than his prior work.

Most of human history is defined by doing manual labor until crippled or dead. Only a subset of people in history have ever had any sort of engineering role. Only in the last few decades have jobs like mine been invented.

No I don't feel like a pawn. I feel like I have been given a tremendous inheritance and now it's my turn to contribute. If anything I look at what those before me created and am disappointed that I'm not their equal.

Unless you're doing this for free, it's a pretty lucrative way to make money. Isn't it? I think we do benefit from it too.

I'd think about people who didn't go to college to study CS, who end up working in a factory or a grocery store. I wonder if they feel like pawns... Engineers are totally fine ;)

Now, in 2018, do engineers get treated like resources? Of course but that's another problem. Expensive resources still.

IMHO You're only a pawn if you're trading hours of your life for amounts of money that can't buy your freedom. So you're not a pawn if you run a company and you're not a pawn if you're an employee with enough equity to make FU money.

http://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

No, I feel like an important member of a team who is building out a good product. Sure, there are discrepancies between my ideal world, and the ideal world our leadership is taking us to, but that doesn't make me a pawn. I am paid fairly for my work, and in my mind I balance that compensation with the differences between how I would do things vs. how things actually are. Most of the time, the balance is there and I continue with the team, doing my part and fulfilling my role so that everyone else can fulfill theirs.

That being said, if the balance isn't there, and you don't feel you are compensated fairly for your work and the non-ideal parts of the job, then it is time to talk to your boss and work it out. Either change the situation to match your ideals, change the compensation to make it worth it, or leave.

But that decision -- to stay, fight for change, or go -- is completely up to you.

Yes.

The deeper question I've been trying to work out is how do we better spread out risk, control of the business, and the value created by our work?

What bothers me is the CEO goes out and recruits (convinces) the best people he/she can find. Gets them to work for the company. And the founders/CEO/principals collect almost all of the money. Based on the hard work of others. All the money goes to number 1. If you want to be well compensated you have to start your own company. Or come across a Steve Case, or Khosla/McNealy. And even then you may have to demand (Joy/Andy Bechtolsheim) better compensation.