cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34411807
While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”
Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.
Time to unionize.
Too many dudes who think their special and irreplaceable sadly.
if we unionize I may not get raises!
Employees are more threatened by the prospect of offshoring and H-1B replacement labor than by their egos. Unlike cops or plumbers who can’t be easily replaced by remote teams abroad, tech workers face the real risk of being replaced. Strong unions exist across many industries precisely because workers naturally form them to protect their interests and to preserve their way of life.
The ‘tech bro’ mentality is no different from ego in any other profession. Unionization isn’t about eliminating individual personalities, but about collective worker protection.
It’s bullshit for companies to lay people off and retain H1Bs. The government shouldn’t approve any new H1Bs for development positions until companies stop the layoffs and the amount of developers searching for work goes down significantly.
The whole purpose of the H1-B program is to deter American tech workers from unionizing and to undercut their legitimate demands for a slice of the pie. It should be shut down. Those tech bosses constantly yap about how much they believe in markets, let them deal with real market forces without the government giving them this huge subsidy at the expense of their staff.
tech workers face the real risk of being replaced
Having spent much of my career working alongside H1-B holders, an employer would have to be delusional to think that the quality of education of the average H1-B holder is comparable to that of someone from a good US or European university. There’s not even much assurance that the H1-B holder actually took the exams for the degree they purport to hold. And many of the universities are little better than trade schools.
Also, disempowered workers temporarily enslaved to their employers are never going to innovate like free people. They’re forced to be yes-(wo)men in order to survive and pay off the corrupt middlemen who got them their jobs. Megalomaniac CEOs might be OK with that, but that’s not how you get the Next Big Thing. That’s how you milk the idea your founders had two decades ago.
Since unions are about common interest and ideally orthogonal to ideology, I’ll add that my subjective interest, as someone living in Russia, is that US tech workers were offshored and/or replaced by immigrants. Because that will long-term weaken the US as an aggressive nation, by losing qualifications.
At the same time if US tech unionized, that could mean weakening the incentive for that aggressive behavior, and weakening big companies.
Hard to decide really. Basically the only bad variant is if it’s half-done, enough unionization to stabilize, but also not too much so that they’d still have enormous foreign labor resources. That would mean very powerful corporations and no change in politics.
ideally orthogonal to ideology
I couldn’t disagree more. Ideology and economic relations go hand in hand.
Unions’ power is in being inclusive. Ideology makes divisions.
They’ll just move the office to Austin.
When’s the second best time to plant a tree
I’m kind of LMAO because of course those places have turned into that. Look who runs them and look at the execs running it. These are not college grads literally living there and need to unwind while at work.
A lot of software companies especially the new ones who want young talent are running exactly the same as startups were 20 years ago just a lot more flashy and newer toys.
I worked for one of those 20 year startups. It was awful. Basically there was no drive, no vision. The entire place was a lot of faff and only existed to give bonuses to leadership. All of the interesting and motivated employees moved on long ago leaving only the mediocre types who play political games and favorites. I needed A job and took it when offered, but took the next job as soon as I could get out. I watched many others cycle through, some a lot faster than I did (I was waiting for a specific position to open).
I wonder if it’s inevitable that anywhere with enough humans working together will reach this point eventually?
When money and power are funneled to the few then yes. Something more cooperative or democratic probably wouldn’t have the same intensity of the problem.
I think it’s only inevitable because of how our society is structured.
No, not really. Where I work now is fantastic and we have great leadership. The moment your original visionary leader leaves and someone with an MBA gets in their place, it all goes to shit. This is LITERALLY what happened to Google and to Apple. Both super dynamic companies with great culture who were then gutted to generate shareholder value.
From what I’ve seen it starts with a few people who abuse the niceties, or the first downturn, or both, and suddenly they’ve got an excuse to strip it all back.
It’s always one or the other that starts it. You have an office game console and someone brings their kids who spill pop on it or they take the games home. You get that guy who takes a box of snacks home and the CEO complains for like 2 years about it. You get someone who orders pay per view on a business trip. Etc.
Once you get to like 300 employees this threshold starts getting reliably exceeded.
Since when is a 300 person company a startup? I feel like you lose any claim to that long before you hit 100.
Yeah, but that’s the size where things definitely start dying.
50 is probably my ideal company size.
Idk why people think this is news. It’s been an open thing for years now
What?
This has always been the case for decades and not even close to a new thing.
Rat race culture.
Google today is what IBM was to the early 2000s.
10,000 Shakespeares with typewriters doing the work of one monkey.
Nobody competent who’s early in their career would go into one of those bloated rent-seeking firms. They’d be looking for an interesting startup.
It’s funny that not too long ago getting a FAANG job right out of college was a recipe for success. Now many grads would prefer to avoid them because they’re so toxic, but can’t find a job and have to apply anyhow.
I posted a similar comment in another post of this article.
The elite 1% students who spent their lives pursuing this are getting exactly what they asked for. They sold their souls for a big paycheck and assumed that it was everyone else’s careers that were volatile. They’d have done better to work for a non-profit where at least they could say that they are making the world a better place.
It must be nice living in your imaginary world where everything is black and white.
Every year I tell my CS/CE/Info students that the market is saturated and that jobs are hard to find. I then tell them that they have to figure what motivates them: a paycheck or service. I then suggest that public service is generally stable while private enterprise can be volatile. I finish by telling them that they have to decide what among this fits them best.
The elite 1% students are going to be the ones fixing shit when AI breaks everything, because they’re the ones who spent countless hours learning math and algorithms and shit.
Meh I was a B student and run circles around my coworkers. Lots of people in this industry that aren’t actual nerds.
