Comment Re:Database? (Score 1) 371
I don't know what exactly the point of this story is, however many people think they are not getting respect or their worth of whatever, not just engineers, and many people are of-course wrong.
An employee is part of a company, a company is a machine that makes the investor/owner money, and the way it makes investor/owner money is by implementing idea/solving a problem that the investor/owner is solving. [..] The employees are part of the system that is set up by the investor/owner to be productive. To talk about respect in this sense is meaningless [..] they are part of the machine that the owner/investor has created to make himself more productive in the market, to offer his solution to the market.
Ironically, by (possibly unintentionally) personalising the role of "investor/owner" you undermine the case I thought you were making (i.e. that of a corporation being an abstract, purely profit-maximising entity with no feelings and behaviour that would be considered "sociopathic" if they were human).
If the "investor/owner" was a single individual (or small group) that had personally planned out and set up every aspect of the functioning of the company- as the tone of your argument suggests- one could argue that he/she is a human being, and unless they are a sociopath, it'd be quite reasonable to expect him or her to view fellow human beings as more than just cogs in a machine, a means to an end. (*)
Of course, as mentioned above, in reality even the set up- let alone the running- of a larger company will require many people, to the point that people *are* cogs in a money-making machine, leading to the abstract, soulless "company" becoming something distinct from any of its employees.
That's the case I thought you were making at first, but even that well-worn argument would miss the point here.
Companies are still made up of individual people with a generally-shared group culture and values, and it's *those* values that one is ultimately talking about when we speak about companies "understanding" (or not understanding) and "respecting" engineers.
A "group" is- after all- just a set of individuals, but we talk about what certain groups of people think, their behaviours, their value judgements, etc. etc. because human beings *are* social creatures.
And even when such people are constrained by the fact they're working for a company whose ultimate aim is to make money, their interactions with each other still reflect the values and culture associated with that company. Those values may have been explicitly encouraged by those that run the company, they may have arisen indirectly due to the mentality of those at the top (e.g. lack of respect for engineers) percolating down, they might reflect behaviour that the structure of the company has encouraged.... whatever the reason, groups of humans share values even when that group is made up of millions of individuals (e.g. nations).
(*) Of course, many people running companies small and large *are* sociopaths anyway. But that'd be a reflection on them personally, and not the same thing as the purely profit-maximising "sociopathic" behaviour often ascribed to the abstract concept of a corporation.