Ornoth

Say you were a young college student taking a programming class, and your aging computer science professor’s first assignment was for each student to write a program to print out their name and telephone number.

That wouldn’t be the least bit sus, now would it?

Apparently, back in 1984 it wasn’t! Lemme tell you a story…

I was recently bedridden with both a back injury and my first case of Covid. And having already purged many of my old books, I really had to stretch (metaphorically, of course) to find something to entertain myself with.

One book that followed me through my migrations – from Maine to (five different locations in) Massachusetts, then Pittsburgh, and finally Texas – was a college textbook that was highly cherished by most of the CS majors I knew back then: George Struble’s “Assembler Language Programming for the IBM System/370 Family”.

Yes, I was so bored that I started re-reading a 40 year old textbook on one of the driest topics in all of computer science, for a computer that no longer exists!

Chapter 1 is a snoozer (not unlike the rest of the book). It’s all about how mainframe computers used combinations of ones and zeroes to encode numbers and characters. Like any textbook, the end of Chapter 1 had a dozen exercises for the student to solve, to promote active learning and demonstrate a practical understanding of what’s been taught.

Here’s the text of Problem 1.3: (emphasis mine)

Each byte of storage in the IBM System/370 contains eight bits of information and one parity bit. The parity bit is redundant; it is used only to guarantee that information bits are not lost. The parity bit is set to 1 or 0 so as to make the sum of 1’s represented in the nine bits an odd number. For example, the character / is represented in eight bits (in EBCDIC) by 01100001. The parity bit to go with this character will be 0, because there are three 1’s among the information-carrying bits. The character Q is represented by 11011000, and the parity bit is set to 1, so there will be five 1-bits among the nine. These representations with parity bit (we call this “odd parity”) are also used in magnetic tape and disk storage associated with the IBM System/370. Using the character representation table of Appendix A, code your name and telephone number in eight-bit EBCDIC representations, and add the correct parity bit to each character.

That’s right: on just the third exercise in the entire book, Struble is asking the student to provide their personal contact info, presumably to their instructor. I can only imagine the repercussions if a professor presented this exercise to his or her class today.

To be fair, when Struble’s book came out (in 1969, then revised in 1974 and again in 1984) such an assignment simply wouldn’t have set off the red flags it does today. The author and his editors probably felt safe in the assumption that women wouldn’t be taking hard-core mainframe assembler classes. And for the odd exception, what harm could possibly come from a young coed revealing her phone number to an upstanding member of the academic community?

What harm, indeed.

I’m not one to condemn past generations for not living up to more modern social norms, but still… Today that exercise just screams of inappropriateness and invasion of privacy. For me, reading that was a head-scratching moment of astonishment from an unexpected source, a true blast from my past.

A recent visit to the international restaurant chain Texas Roadhouse got me thinking about the evergreen topic of corporate insensitivity.

Throughout the chain, the staff are required to do a country music line dance at least once per hour they work. That’s pretty demeaning in my eyes, but secondary to something else that wigged me out even more.

And that is this: the waitstaff—who are of course being paid well below minimum wage—are required to wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!”

I haven’t known many waitpersons who truly loved their jobs. In fact, most of them were waiting tables because they were trying to keep their heads above water financially and didn’t have any other marketable skills. I can’t imagine many of them would agree with the sentiment expressed by the corporate sloganeering that Texas Roadhouse employees are forced to wear.

Aside from being an intensely new low in demeaning the working class, the thing that irks me here is the amazing myopia or hubris of a corporation that thinks it has the right to assert an individual’s personal opinion and display that opinion publicly. It’s a violation of the employee’s privacy and the separation of one’s work life from one’s personal life.

There’s no meaningful legal difference between those tee shirts and a company putting out a television commercial that shows photographs of employees claiming that they voted for a particular political party or that they support a particular political position. And it’s a very short road from there to requiring that employees look, speak, act, buy, and vote according to the corporation’s demands.

Lest you think that’s a ridiculous assertion, consider that many employers already expect that employees will promote the company’s marketing efforts in social media by using their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.

What gets lost amidst all this corporate interference in people’s personal lives is that employment is a mutual agreement which is supposed to be in both parties’ interest, and that corporations should both ask and compensate employees for their sacrifices.

In the past, we saw how the labor market changed when corporations transitioned from a lifetime employment model to employment at will. When the corporate world unilaterally decided that company loyalty to the employee was outmoded, they eventually learned that they could no longer assume they would receive the same level of employee loyalty to the company in return. In short, loyalty—like everything else in the employer-employee relationship—is a two-way street.

Now that companies are finding new ways to assert control over their employees’ personal lives, they need to realize that if the company expects to intrude on an employee’s personal life, they also need to make room for the full reality of that employee’s personal life.

Unfortunately, that’s something most companies have yet to learn. I have a friend who is a software engineer. When his company asked its staff for ideas about how employees could further promote the company, he suggested that the best way he could contribute would be to post to a company-sponsored engineering blog, where he could discuss the technical details of some of the innovative work his team had done, giving the company some free credibility in the engineering community.

Needless to say, corporate leadership didn’t want anything to do with promoting the skills and reputation of its engineering team, for fear of losing them to other employers. As a result, my friend’s willingness to promote corporate marketing efforts on his personal Facebook and Twitter accounts—as well as his overall sense of loyalty to the company—have both been correspondingly lowered. Edit: And a few months later, he left the company.

Employment is a transaction which is supposed to be equitable and of mutual benefit. The perpetual efforts of corporations to wrest every last ounce of value from their employees, usually without offering fair compensation, has impact on employee loyalty and retention that is obvious, but which most companies utterly fail to consider.

Texas Roadhouse’s requirement that waitstaff wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!” doesn’t make me want to work there. In fact, quite the opposite: I’m moved to deep sympathy for their staff, who have to work in such a demeaning and humiliating environment created by their overbearing and insensitive employer.

Okay, so I finally succumbed and joined the inane self-indulgence that is LJ.

Why?

Well, primarily because an online journal is easier to write in than one stored only on my home machine. There are more opportunities for me to store pertinent thoughts, wherever they occur. And why should I create my own journaling system, when LJ has done a reliable job at it already?

But you shouldn't expect to see very much in the way of public postings here. Although I'm an exceedingly open person, I have no intention of using LJ as a public forum. If there are things I specifically want to share with people, they'll probably appear as friends-only posts; but my default will be to keep everything private.

If you're desperate to know what's going on in my life, you can always go to the online "newsletter" that I've been keeping since the beginning of 1998. You can find it at http://users.rcn.com/ornoth/.