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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Warning: unpopular opinion here.
From the article:
So, I am an engineer/scientist. Products that I have developed/contributed to development are used by billions of people. Most likely you, the reader of this comment are using it right now, because some of the products I worked on are telecom products, that are widely used to transfer information.
The amount of secondary payouts I receive is EXACTLY ZERO.
My honest question is, why those writers should be any different? They should be paid when they make their products, according to the contract they signed. But why many think they entitled to something more?
And no, I do not think that argument "but it is difficult work, it is not constant" works here. There are lots of difficult, non-constant, seasonal, whatever jobs there that pay even less.
Crab in a bucket mentality.
"I don't receive residuals, so why should these writers? The executives are entitled to all the profit."
If all us engineers got paid every time our code was used, the Internet as it exists would be absurdly expensive. Really, it couldn't exist. Thank god engineers don't have the same "I need to be paid every time something I created is used by anybody" mentality. You're building on the work of millions of people before you, you owe it to others to contribute (and make a living in the process).
Of course, the industries are different in important ways. But you should be able to explain the differences, not just wave them away with "ur just jelly lol"
IMHO, copyright and IP law is ridiculously protective. People should get a few years to benefit from their creations, then they should be public domain. This lifetime-plus-70-years bullshit is stupid. Companies are exploiting those stupid laws to milk us on every platform for decades with each media artifact, and artists and writers just want to get a cut of the action. IMHO, it's the wrong fight, and I can't really support them in it: "give writers a share of the rent you milk from us" is not a cause I wanna get behind.
Why shouldn't we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?
I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.
Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.
Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.