Entitlement cuts both ways. Software development pays very well and largely has excellent working conditions, it’s basically a golden ticket. I know people who are essentially stuck in minimum or low wage jobs for life.
Don't for a moment miss that if "software development pays very well" then it pays the company even more than it pays you. Being employed by them is a win for the company they're not giving you free handouts, they should be willing to spend money to make money.
Entitlement doesn't "cut both ways", it's a mostly meaningless conversation stopping dismissive insult, but as far as power imbalances go one side is a company with millions of dollars and lawyers on hand or on retainer. If it's a big FAANG they likely union bust or block which is against employees interests, they possibly have stack ranking or other methods to divide and conquer employees by pitting them against each other, possibly has 'unlimited' vacation time which excuses them from rollover or payout for untaken vacation and maybe they don't approve vacation because everyone is always busy. Often they will be lobbying politicians to increase their power and decrease employee's power. Healthcare is tied to employment, which is in the company's interest and against the employee's interest because it makes leaving harder for the employee but does not affect firing or redundancy for the employer.
On the other hand you have a single lone human.
The employer also wants loyalty, often ownership of anything the employee creates on their own time while employed, often an NDR, and control over what the employee wears and says and the times they work.
And they want long days of interviews, often with terrible interview practises which don't give them good data (much discussed on HN year after year) - and they expect this effort and time which is ultimately for their benefit, for free.
Most tech jobs are not in FAANG.
> If you say "I need to spend a day doing work things on a company's terms for a potential deal which would benefit the company a lot, and I want to be paid for my time and effort" that's ... not entitlement.
I frankly don’t find it plausible that the work being done in a day or two during the interview process is valuable labor. Who is going to deploy that code and make it production ready? How would you even organise and plan that work? Is an engineer opening a PR internally with the interview code or something?
> Healthcare is tied to employment, which is in the company's interest and against the employee's interest because it makes leaving harder for the employee but does not affect firing or redundancy for the employer.
Fair. I live in a country with a public healthcare system so this doesn’t factor in for me.
It's the hiring of an employee who will make wealth for the company over their employment period which is the financial benefit, not the work done on the day. But the work done on the day is still value - it's signals of the quality of the candidate which is something the company wants (and therefore values, and therefore should buy). Second, if someone arranges for your time and tells you to do some task they choose, they don't then get to say 'I can't get value from your work so I'm not going to pay you'", that's not how things work.
> "they also deliver compensation packages that essentially guarantee a wealthy, comfortable lifestyle."
And what about the people who spent a day on the interview and did not get hired? The company gets time, effort, signal information which benefits the company ("no hire" has value too), and the candidate gets their time and effort wasted. Imagine if you had two contractors do a task you set, then turned to one and said "I'm not using your work so I'm not paying for it", how well would that go down? "Fuck you, pay me"[1] I expect. It's not like going to a shop and not buying some things, it's like asking the shops to deliver things to you and then refusing to pay for delivery on things you don't buy because the shop had a chance of getting your business so they should be grateful. (Worse if the company is constantly interviewing just to keep the pipelines warm, without any interest in actively hiring anyone right now).
