Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
They’ll say the work is not needed. That’s because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
They’ll say the work is not needed.
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t.
Knowing Amazon quite well, there definitely are sectors that are seriously deficient even new emerging ones within Amazon seem deficient.
It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
I agree it wasn’t painless in fact there is a high suicide rate within the computer sciences field. In fact it probably still isn’t painless. I also agree unions are useless but some government regulation wouldn’t be.
That just is.
Yea everything is. Until it isn’t.
Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it’s not something they negotiate and protect. “No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote.” Break the terms… instant strike.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, but then there’s not real point in debating the role of the union in that completely different context.
There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.
It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be
Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution
Thank you!
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it’s not really that bad. It’s not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it’s way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.
Ask a professional plumber which they find more taxing: being bent into awkward spaces on their hands and knees all day, or sitting at a desk thinking hard about a problem someone has likely already solved.
But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do
Borg Voice
"We Are Pipes. "
“Our Voice Is The Expression Of The Pipe.”
“The First Technology was The Pipe.”
“The Last Technology will be The Pipe.”
“Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Computer Pipes.”
“Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Shit Pipes”
“We Are One”
“We Are The Pipe.”
10/10 write up
I’m an infrastructure engineer working at a government contractor and I’m in a union with OPEIU 1010, the tech workers’ local. Others are unionizing independently, with CWA, etc… It’s still early days for the tech industry but there are examples. We’re really not that different from other industries with a larger union presence.
Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it’s hard to envision what I could actually do.
I’m very pro-union btw, it just seems like there are certain things that can sometimes make it more difficult to make happen
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as outsourcing.
Not even outsourcing, they are internal hires, just elsewhere.
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as *outsourcing
*Class Warfare
FTFY
I’m sure the software engineers in India and Mexico see it differently.
Companies like google pressuring governments in India and Mexico to crack down on unions and work protections there is what it looks like for them and limitations on immigration (and the freedoms of those do immigrate).
Free market of labor is never the real source of downward market pressure, IMHO. Its the veryil intentional policies ment to keep labor desperate.
Yes, Google is to blame for low salaries in India.
You know how most of the software engineers in India feel? Like they are even more micromanaged, overworked and deprived of agency in the work place than US tech workers.
I want software engineers and India and Mexico to earn a living wage just as much as I want software engineers living in my city to earn a living wage and have a workplace that treats them with decency (and doesn’t try to treat humans like robots).
I am sure most Indians and Mexican software engineers feel that way about software engineers from other countries too.
The only zero sum game here is between all of us and the ruling class and if you don’t see that now I hope one day in the future that thought will find you with an open mind.
I know how they feel because I work with them daily. They feel blessed because they earn sometimes 10 times more than their parents for work much less hard, in particular those coming from farming families. They are not earning a “living wage”, they are earning a “live almost in luxury” wage, 20 to 30 lakh a year, which is still 10 times less than silicon valley. They work in a nice office with Air Conditioning, or directly from home if they want.
That being said, software engineers EVERYWHERE are earning “a living wage” at least. We are way overpaid, in fact, compared to social workers or teachers. A company with hundreds of thousands of employees relocating some positions to other countries is just mundane.
That being said, software engineers EVERYWHERE are earning “a living wage” at least. We are way overpaid, in fact, compared to social workers or teachers. A company with hundreds of thousands of employees relocating some positions to other countries is just mundane.
Who said violence and class warfare can’t be mundane in practice?
We are way overpaid
No y’all aren’t, the problem is rather that everybody else is way underpaid
That’s the same thing, I explicitly compared it to other people. It’s relative.
Outsourcing is the problem and you are called racist or xenophobic if you even mention it. Unions have nothing to do with it, they would only exasperate the speed of the transfer of knowledge and jobs to lesser developed countries with lower cost labor.
The government needs to break up these oligopolies who have more money than the government itself. That money is spent on people who have no idea what is going on in the tech world, they just listen to the lobbyists, accept their checks and investment returns. They couldn’t care less about the long term effects.
You know, firing C level employees creates a lottttttttta cap space for actual employees!
This always comes down to the fact that labor is competitive. Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year? Competition drives the prices of labor down. Maybe there needs to be better regulation for labor competition like corporations enjoy.
What I don’t understand is why does competition matter for workers but somehow not for CEOs? I kind of understand and agree in the free market to an extent - if you’re fine with hiring a dev for $100 instead of another dev for $1000, and you’re okay with the difference in quality / time / etc. then go for it. But where is all this competition happening for CEOs?
Surely someone must be as qualified as Bitchai and willing to do the same job for a measly 100 million a year instead of his 200 million.
Ceo pay is advertised and used against each other to get top dollar. Lowers like us have out pay hidden so companies can low ball without us knowing. That’s what needs to change. It should be law to be advertised pay rate so the lowballers get exposed and no one applies, forcing pay to go up.
but somehow not for CEOs?
Workers do the actual work. CEOs just make decisions that anyone can make and they have a board of people usually backing them up.
What I’m perplexed at is - what if I went to the board and said “I have a guaranteed way to increase profit by 150 million - just pay me 50 million a year and fire Bitchai”. I would legit do my best to make great decisions for 50 million.
Why doesn’t the board care about cutting costs by cutting CEO pay? I can’t imagine any difference that would really justify Bitchai 's pay difference.
I also cannot imagine they are all part of some secret conspiracy where they all know each other and like each other so much that they just want to pay him that money because they’re buddies.
Wouldn’t $150 million be more than enough justification to hire someone else?
People who sit on boards are also those very same CEOs at other companies…
This assumes that they aren’t hiring the CEO to be the fall guy. Someone who’s job is largely (as things stand now) meant to take on the risk that if the company does not increase profits or make shareholders happy, they will blame and fire that person and hire someone else.
Since a lot of CEOs kind of bet on this they take ridiculous chances (like getting paid in stock options that only mature at a certain point with the knowledge that they need to make stock options valuable so they can cash out).
Valuable doesn’t have to be long term. It just has to last long enough for the person in question to cash out.
CEOs just make decisions that anyone can make
LMK when your company hits a billion dollars in revenue and we’ll see how easy the job is.
Lol.
I can work for 20 dollars a year
Spez you just got a $193 million dollar compensation go buy TikTok or something.
Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a ‘reason’ that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, “If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there’s nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines.”
Outsourcing was a thing way before the pandemic, but it was always a failure for, they never dared replace us when they noticed the bad results.
To be fair there are still a bunch of other aspects that may prevent even full remote jobs to be outsourced to other countries. Among others: language skills, time zone differences, cultural differences, legal frameworks and probably many more.
To give an example for issues that may arise from these differences:
An employee might cost your german company triple the salary in Germany compared to India. On paper it seems like an easy choice, you just outsource and even if you have to pay 2 person to do the job you still save money. But suddenly you run into many problems:
-
They will likely not speak German and maybe not even great English. This might be irrelevant for the actual work to be done. But do they exactly understand what the task is, can they give accurate feedback, can they make use of existing resources or do those need to be translated, can they communicate with the rest of the company or your customers?
-
They work in different time zones. And while most remote work is probably time agnostic, meetings with other team members, departments or your customers suddenly become much harder to schedule.
-
Their culture might be different. So e.g. they might not be as straight forward when running into problems and instead try to hide them, which will mean everything looks fine until the house of cards suddenly crumbles.
-
Having employees in different countries means you will need to have different workflows for hr to deal with contracts, payrolls, retirement plans, health insurance and so on. Also how does the other country handle IP, patents and non compete clauses? Could the employee just walk away and start their own business or go to your competitor? Or in reverse can you ensure that they e.g. don’t copy/paste code from somewhere else ignoring licenses.
-
If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there’s nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."
That’s one of the reasons I went into a field of technology where the work is mostly hands-on.
Hardware maintenence, troubleshooting, installation and repair isn’t something that can effectively be done remotely.
Clever human!
There needs to be a tech workers union. The abuse from employers needs to end. Especially the endless free overtime.
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Every day, they somehow figure out ways to get even more evil. We’re dialed up way past 11 now.
Is it a move to save money or a move to weaken the position of all those employees who objected to the questionable contracts with many intelligence agencies?
I can bet that they will ensure that the new employees will be selected among those who have no qualms.
India is pro-israel. Especially upper class Hindus who are the majority of tech workers in IT companies.
Just got laid off 2 days ago. They laid off the entire marketing team leaving only the head developer and the web manager.
They then had the galls to ask us if we wanted to stay for 6 months so we can train OUR FUCKING POSITIONS TO INDIA FOR THEM. We could take that or just leave and take a 2 month severance.
1/2 of me wanted to take the opportunity so I can sabotage the company by making it worse for them, but my dignity wouldn’t let me do it.
Back to job boards again…
Also, while I’m on this soapbox, wtf is up with these fucking companies asking people to do FREE work just to be considered for an opportunity. Wait, this is a LIVE campaign? My work might be used for things other than to show my abilities.
arg~!
Standard capitalist playbook. Been that way since the 80s
I don’t understand why the US keeps allowing that. They should have learned that moving the production facilities to othercountries to reduce costs just lead to a massive job loss and brain drain in the manufacturing sector, now they allow the same to happen in the tech sector. It won’t be long until the US is a dried out husk of a country
Greed rules every sector of business Overarchingly so. No concern for anything except monetary profit.
Still keeping the Fart Button team?
I’m sorry who TF does your accounting?
Ok but like as an immature idiot that’s my jam please keep the fart button team Google, but you should’ve kept the others too.
Just Doctorow’s enshitification in action.
Removed by mod
Not sure what you’re referring to, but Microsoft has always had security incidents because they make the platform(s) that almost everyone uses, and so is commonly the target for malicious actors. This has been the case with Microsoft as long as Windows has been the dominant OS which is since the 90s. Not sure what hiring people outside of the US has to do with this.
It’s also because they fucking suck at managing complexity. Almost everything they make is fourteen arbitrarily named editions of the exact same bug-riddled trash we know and love. 365/Azure/fuckingentrawhat are barely usable. It’s almost like they specialize in UI synchronization bugs - but I remember this being a problem even with Windows 3.1.
I realize this isn’t a particularly hot take on Lemmy, but let’s not pretend that all software is equally deficient - because there absolutely are better options.
He’s referring to cheap labor and cheap code written by people who don’t care and who are managed by a chain of people with a different set of goals, values and national loyalties.
The plan for world domination by M$ has always been about building up countries to save $. Especially one in particular with 3-4x the “human resources” that allow themselves to be mined at a fraction of the price that still gives them a better life.
with a different set of goals, values
Absolutely true. Profit motive, JIT employment, etc
and national loyalties.
I’m sorry, what? Indian programmers are a problem because they’re disloyal?
Not necessarily disloyal. But different loyalties.
Microsoft makes software used by governments all over the world. Any government that want to gather intelligence or blackmail another government could do it through inserted exploits in Microsoft’s code. The US could go straight to Microsoft to this in an official capacity. Other nations would influence the individuals working on the project to do it covertly. If your country asked you to do this, they are likely able to convince you it’s in the national interest and you would be harming your country if you didn’t.
It’s not that they wouldn’t be loyal, it’s who they would be loyal to.
Any government that want to gather intelligence or blackmail another government could do it through inserted exploits in Microsoft’s code.
You know, its funny. There was a recent documentary on Netflix, called “The Octopus Murders” that goes into a theft committed by the Reagan DOJ of a $6M software suite called PROMIS. The suite was edited and repackaged, then distributed to foreign governments under a new Reagan-Admin friendly vendor with a collection of backdoors and security bugs that US officials could use to infiltrate networks of allied nations.
If our efforts to rapidly and comprehensively outsource all our software overseas resulted in the same thing reflected back on us, I would find that very amusing.
But I’ve yet to see any actual evidence of malfeasance by overseas coders. More often - in my personal experience working with overseas software companies - they’re overworked, underpaid, and in a race deliver quantity over quality.
Not what I meant, more about the idea that they have their own loyalties to family, local businesses, growth of their own businesses if they leave (which they will start in their area), that type of thing. Not a slight on work ethic or generalization of actual people.
Hopefully that makes that more clear.
Coworkers India for Silicon Valley teams = hope you like standup before bed.
Coworkers from USA for Indian teams = hope you like to work from 4pm to 4am.
India, the nation everybody hires to when they need something hacked?
This seems really bad.
It’s like when we sent all our manufacturing to China.
Your comment is kinda racist.
You think about India as a call center scam country because that’s mostly the only personal experience you have with Indians.
Also, Indians are more commonly known for social engineering scams than anything. (which is also a pretty racist stereotype).
I think it’s bad form to call everyone who disagrees with offshored work a racist. Moving the entry level jobs away from the US has created this situation and that stereotype. You are denying the very real problem by saying it’s a racist/xenophobic stereotype. Like all stereotypes, there’s roots in reality.
The technology industry there has been growing since the US started giving away it’s entry level tech jobs and the training that comes with it. The enormous scamming industry is a direct result of the rejects from the call centers. Those call center rejects see their friends and neighbors succeed but can’t hack it in that environment but they too want their pieces of pie. They are useless to M$ (and the like) but even though they failed there, they picked up skills that make them valuable to criminals.
Same shit happens in the US, it’s how people who suck at their jobs generally continue to get hired. Nothing wrong with discussion about it just because it’s happening to another country.
Maybe we should stop letting companies become oligopolies through antitrust allowing them to dictate whole global markets and have more money than the governments of many entire nations.
I think it’s bad form to call everyone who disagrees with offshored work a racist.
They’re mostly just shitting on one specific nation, due to ideas formed from questionable stances.
Nations don’t have skin color, people do.
Please go accuse somebody more deserving of racism.
I feel like it’s more ethnocentric than racist, which is a bit less bad. Some developers have had negative experiences with offshore talent. I’ve personally had mixed experiences, and some of that comes down to communication issues and experience issues. Sometimes you get an offshore developer who is really skilled, but generally the very skilled developers get their work visa and come to the US.
You also get absolutely garbage developers in the states, but of course nobody ever mentions that. Lol
India and Indians, indicates a nation and a nationality, not an ethnicity. Therefore not racist at all.
Is there a word like ethnicist? Hmm
