This is coordinated cost cutting across the largest employers during a time of record profitability. The goal of this is explicitly to use their monopsony power to transfer wealth from the workers to the investors at the expense of product quality (since they will lose some people that they need to keep the lights on).
These firms also happen to hold monopolies in many areas, so the amount of product enshitification the market will bear is practically unlimited.
The wage fixing and enshitification halves of this scheme are probably both in violation of anti-trust law, though enforcement of the law in either way would probably be novel. Here's a long writeup showing how Amazon (accidentally?) pioneered industry-wide wage suppression for minimum-wage workers.
I'm beginning to wonder if twitter was a dry run for the rest of the industry.
> As one industry analyst noted, “Amazon is almost becoming like the negotiator for all hourly wage workers to a certain extent.”90 It is tempting to argue that this is good for workers. But Amazon is an employer, not a union. While it is true that workers benefit when Amazon enters a labor market, Amazon has every incentive to use its wage leadership to ensure that a cartel wage is maintained rather than the competitive wage.
Edit: Here's the full post: https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-s.... Their website kind of sucks: when you click to see "all posts" about Microsoft, it actually just shows you "trending" posts (that are all a bunch of junk about interviews and offers).
Edit 2: It looks like it's Twitter's fault I can't see the content there, so it wasn't a tease on Blind's part.
Original comment: So is this a tease just to install their app? The tweet only seems to be a screenshot of the intro to the post, no link or anything. Can anyone post a link to or the content of this "long post"?
It's not a good community for discussions. It is a great community to find inside scoop on companies - which unfortunately leans towards toxicity because companies often secretly have toxic policies.
Blind is all toxic. My former company had some good parts and bad parts, but the conversation on Blind was 100% negative. If I were trying to get a sense of what working at a company was really like, Blind would not be a great place to go.
> It often feels like product ratings. Only the people who didn't like it bother to write a review.
In my experience, product ratings are not at all like that. Tons of people who like stuff leave positive reviews, and frequently leave evidence they have low standards or are not good at evaluating quality.
I can read all the good stories on Glassdoor. Hell, most of them I think are likely fake. I see much more value in learning about the ugly side of a company, even if I know this is unbalanced.
+1. it's a toxic community and don't believe anything that's said on Blind. Glassdoor recently released their version of conversations called 'Bowls' and it's much better. less anonymous and more user friendly/meaningful conversations.
This is immaterial when every community (Reddit, HN, twitter, fb groups, blind) calls each other "toxic." Spidermen_pointing.jpeg. Blind is by far the best for tech career advice. Toxic advice for a toxic world.
Anonymity can be both a good and bad thing. I think people are more willing to share their real thoughts in an anonymous Blind discussion than on somewhere like Glassdoor. The downside is the relentless trolling and focus on TC.
Originally, you couldn't see the reply count while looking at a tweet because the replies were just visible below the tweet itself. Then Musk pushed a ton of changes, and now there's still no reply count, but now you can't see those replies if you're not logged in. Really it's just that the sensible evolutionary changes haven't had a chance to catch up with the breakneck changes.
> Maybe it's obvious when it looks too quiet?
This is probably your best signal. The linked tweet currently has 37 retweets, 10 quote-tweets, and 240 likes, so it would be incredibly unusual if there were actually zero replies (barring tweets which have had their replies limited). But to know that, you'd have to know a bit about Twitter norms, and if you know that then you probably know that you can't see replies without being logged in.
they saw an opportunity to cut costs. the pandemic gave too much power to white collar wage workers and as churchill and later milton friedman said, never let a crisis go to waste.
The drive to cut staff was to push for a recession, and that was always clear. This same argument is being used to say wages or COVID relief are driving inflation.
The argument about what is causing our current inflation is a battleground for class warfare. But we don't talk about things in that context in this country, because the war (and almost every single battle) is being won by the rich.
IMO the US and many other developed countries are now carrying a large structural imbalance between the upper and middle/lower wealth brackets.
This will either be corrected by new growth, or zero-sum rebalancing via inflation. Currently most growth is captured via capital holders, and this is unlikely to change. Leaving the zero-sum options as the most likely outcome.
The current structure doesn’t appear sustainable. As a millennial parent, I’m starting to observe the majority of the people I know skip having children or stick to one. The common reason is that the costs of children and pressure of career are too much. Eventually, you get too old to have children.
What makes you think this should rebalance on its own? Historically - with the exception of the last ca. 80 years - these imbalances have been the norm. The idea that a person can climb the social ladder through labor is a very new one and I doubt it's going to stay around. Historically wealth and its returns have been inherited and wide-spread rebalancing only occurred during crises, wars or the occasional technological revolution.
My latter point was on the long-term stability of the status quo. In my view, the end-state of squeezing the middle class in a modern society may be a fertility crises as individuals choose not to have children. With modern birth control, this is the simplest means of reducing your costs in a modern society.
If the birth rate falls to .5-1.0, then the status quo will most likely end in economic crises as the future population can no longer support the liabilities of the prior population. While it's possible to print money and perform other games to hide this reality, I don't think it's possible to maintain the farse against the backdrop of a 3-4x population decline.
Violent revolutions are very rare and nowadays only happen if a significant part of the military takes part. Historically there was a short window of time when revolutions were likely to succeed; after the invention of the printing press and when reading became somewhat common (which allowed for the organization of a revolution) and basically up until the invention of tanks. After that any financially stable regime that maintains leadership of the army can in 99% of the cases suppress any revolutionary attempts. The gap in firepower between an armed militia (with rifles) and a modern military with drones, jets, MLRS, tanks, artillery etc. is simply too large.
How is wealth quantified? $19.95, $1K, $10K, $100K, $1M, $10M, $100M, $1B??? To a homeless person I'm pretty sure anyone not homeless appears to have wealth.
Surely, the democratic process could provide some arbitrary threshold. It does so for other things. If we can come up with a minimum wage, we can probably come up with a maximum wage (or maximum wealth) if there was the political will.
I think that answer here would be communism. You don’t own anything aside from small trinkets we call personal property. Redistribution in the form of everyone living in the same Soviet era style apartment s would work. No one gets a Victorian house. No gets a log home. Everyone has the same gray suit and live in the same gray buildings throughout the land.
I guess I just do not understand how moderation works here because I have seen comments not directly calling for violence get nuked within seconds of being posted, and this one and the one below which are explicitly advocating for murder are still here.
> [argument is] COVID relief are driving inflation
If you have a supply chain disruption limiting the supply of raw materials or finished goods to get into the market, and you increase the supply of money in consumers' hands without any corresponding increase in supply of goods/services, I wouldn't expect anything other than an increase in inflation.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't have been done, but to say it was done and didn't contribute significantly to inflation seems extremely unlikely to be correct.
People are not exclusively consumers and stockpiling is a dynamic thing.
If the government is actively stopping goods production from increasing, the prices raising is a good default assumption. But it's not an universal consequence.
But anyway, the inflation spike happened much after the government stopped intervening and production of everything was already increasing quite quickly. But the main argument people use for that is that the COVID relief (and all the money going to workers) was tiny and irrelevant when compared to the direct interventions of the US government on its economy at the time, that had the explicit intent of creating inflation.
Don't forget get the suspension of student loan repayments.
Apparently most of that money went to entertainment, travel, etc., Not for any long-term life improvement (which is kinda in line with the insanity of the student loan business model)
Also, they win the war of framing issues, which automatically wins the war by setting context and reality.
Owning most / the loudest media outlets is a guarantee for this.
Whoever frames the issue, wins.
Defining people’s refusal to accept starvation wages as “nobody wants to work” is an example. See the work of George Lakoff on framing for details. His Framelab podcast is excellent.
I think you misunderstand. The reason people cut staff was fear of the upcoming recession as a result of the overnights rates going up. It still might happen as it is clear people are feeling the pinch of the rates.
Your argument is a bit of a stretch. Class warfare is some strong rhetoric that I don't think many people have adopted.
Unfortunately, only a few people - the hedge fund folks - need to adopt class warfare for it to be a reality.
There's piles of evidence that companies have been using the fears of recession and cover of inflation to increase prices simply to pad profit margins by increasing prices and lasting people off. That's the rich fucking over the poor and the working classes; or, as some might call it, class warfare.
That is really not how these things tend unfold within a corporation. There will be pitches to executives around how to price better, cut costs, strengthening in recession etc. - all designed to increase the firms objective function and then things will be actioned. It's like some weird AI.
We looked at our baked products line and found that we could increase shareholder value by improving the pricing model on our lowest-tier offering. Anyone who doesn't like it will have the option of engaging with our higher-tier offering, whose prices will remain unchanged.
The reference point you are using is a CEO of an Australian physical space developer -- not someone who has any meaningful opinion that would be equivalent in the tech world.
As well - as his business is development (like physical spaces) he is probably in a world of hurt with the interest rates absolutely killing the business model. Look at how much the real estate world and big developers have been crippled (I'm not saying you should feel bad for them - they took on that risk when they over levered themselves and reap what they sow). However I imagine because they are taking on losses their staff are going to feel the pain as are the investors (my speculation).
My point is your reference is a bad one for the topic of the thread.
> the pandemic gave too much power to white collar wage workers
It's quite interesting to look at job listings right now. Go have a look at some tech companies, and compare job types which currently allow remote work. You'll find that there are plenty of places offering remote work for most roles... but not for engineering.
How interesting. I'm sure it's not an concerted effort to get us back under control.
I'm not sure I would call losing 30-60% of your US + Europe ad revenue year-over-year [1] the same as "to no real consequence". Not that I'm a fan of ad-supported social media platforms, mind you, but that sort of drop would be an existential threat to many companies.
Is that really connected to the loss of staff? I get the impression that many of the advertisers dropped Twitter for political reasons not because some API wasn't as rock solid as it used to be.
I love these conspiracy theory level claims that groups like the ADL are massive power brokers with far reaching influence that can just dictate the advertising spend of multi-billion dollar companies without warrant. The ADL is only just a 100 million dollar non-profit with 26 regional offices and 501 employees.
At best function as a canary in a coal mine but realistically are more like the "shit's on fire, yo" meme in stating facts that should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
If things have gotten so bad that the ADL say you're toxic, you're likely a Superfund site.
> I love these conspiracy theory level claims that groups like the ADL are massive power brokers with far reaching influence that can just dictate the advertising spend of multi-billion dollar companies without warrant.
The bill was presented as an appeal to body autonomy in children and protecting their interest, however it was pointed out that Iceland allowed for operations on intersex babies without consent and would deport children back to countries where they were not protected.
It was a bill proposed by a progressive party member without consulting religious groups in the country. National polls never had more than 50% support, and it was challenged by both Muslim and Jewish communities in Iceland. There was a concern that it would set a precedent in Europe for religious discrimination. There was never a vote and it was withdrawn after international outcry.
So to frame it as though the ADL waved it's hand and made the government change it's mind is misleading and dishonest.
I'm old enough to remember when Al Sharpton used to do similar. "Your company has been accused of racism. I'll have 200 protestors outside your head office for 6 weeks unless you donate $2m to my charity to make this go away."
It's not exactly a conspiracy theory. ADL have very openly attacked Twitter, Musk says the ADL have been pressuring advertisers, and many different kinds of groups have complained about left wing pressure groups trying to cancel them by attacking advertisers. This isn't just an issue for Twitter but basically any conservative website or news channel, for example.
It'd actually be more surprising if the ADL wasn't trying to destroy Musk right now. That's just how those groups roll.
> If things have gotten so bad that the ADL say you're toxic, you're likely a Superfund site.
ADL define criticism of the ADL as anti-semitism, so it really means nothing.
The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is that Jews are perceived as power brokers controlling global financial markets and having massive sway. And that the ADL is some powerful lobbying group with the ability snap it's fingers and get multi-billion dollar corporations to do it's bidding.
No one is denying that the ADL is pressuring groups to boycott platforms and organization that are supporting anti-Semitic messages. The disconnect is that "Conservatives" think it is completely unfounded because they are incapable of self reflection. "Conservatives" feel that their entire ideology is being unfairly attacked by global Jewish power brokers while ignoring the blatant racist white nationalist venom spitting maggots infesting their ranks.
I say "Conservatives" because they aren't true conservatives and haven't held or are sacrificing most of those ideals for decades to "own the libs". Politics in America are no longer a divide between about progressive vs conservative ideals, but rather between a divide between those that would embrace people who are different and those that would rather hurt them.
Modern "Conservatives" are so blinded by hate that they are willing to forgo Individual Freedom, Limited Government, Fiscal Responsibility, and Human Dignity to hurt others. They cry foul when anyone attempts to uphold the Rule of Law, demonstrate Peace through Strength, or leverage the Free Markets against them. They are no longer conservatives but rather hate mongers who want to win at all costs.
> "Conservatives" feel that their entire ideology is being unfairly attacked by global Jewish power brokers
The Wall Street Journal, Mark Levin, and Mitch McConnell fret over these Jewish power brokers, do they?
Or did you mean the ultra-MAGA wing, where DeSantis flies to Israel to cheerfully sign a bill against anti-Semitic hate speech? Or Donald Trump himself, the most popular American president among Israelis?
The actual reason for advertisers fleeing Twitter was because they kept seeing their ads next to actual Nazis posting on Twitter. The reason they were seeing that was because Twitter fired most people weeding hate speech from Twitter.
I don’t know about you but if a publicly traded company, which was trading fairly to the market expectations (way cheaper than peers like FB, Snapchat, Pinterest etc) went private and is now worth less than a third of what it was worth, mostly because usage and advertising revenue are both down, even if you don’t admit it, it was most definitely a mistake.
I dunno, Twitter demonstrated that a company which has failed to grow and achieve its goals can drop a lot of staff and ... do significantly worse than before but without totally dying. It hasn't shown that the resulting skeleton crew can succeed and pursue ambitious goals. Their performance since all the layoffs is not a story that people necessarily want to recreate.
> Twitter demonstrated that a company which has failed to grow and achieve its goals can drop a lot of staff and ... do significantly worse than before but without totally dying
Haven't we known that for decades from the performance art piece that is Hewlett-Packard?
"No real consequence" is a big lie. mDAU are down so much they switched to mMAU instead and by his own tweets they're bringing in less ad revenue than before the take over.
They care, they have to to make money. Take any supposed new metric pushed by Elon with a big grain of salt especially something completely unmeasurable like "unregretted user minutes" that's supposed to be their new guiding light.
Given it's a completely impossible to measure metric I'm betting it's going to always be improving no matter what's happening on the platform to please the new ownership.
Twitter seems to be at that point where Wile-E-Coyote has already run off the cliff and is still treading thin air. Airplanes can glide a great distance even after the engine has been turned off. I'd be willing to bet Twitter is basically gliding now that all that staff that powered the engine is gone.
We were hearing that the day he bought it and started layoffs. Twitter will be crashed within a few days, we heard.
Clearly that never happened. Twitter is still online, making changes and executing. That's what executives are responding to here. They aren't going to draw a strong link between fewer people and less ad revenue when attacks on Twitter by advertisers are so clearly politically motivated, it's just not relevant for most companies business models. Overstaffing is.
Elon's algo is to push hard enough such that consequences are observed, then pull back a little. In twitter's case, moving an entire data center over christmas break was a too fast.
Also the fact that you cannot see any tweet or essentially even visit the website without a forced login prompt drives potential visits/eyes/views/users away— this is probably the stupidest thing they have done.
I’ve been hearing this meme for literally decades now and yet the engineering market outside India remains strong. Perhaps it’s true for a few rare companies (I think it’s a fair description of IBM in particular), but if it’s a general trend how could it not have happened yet?
How has this worked out for you? When I graduated college, I had an offer for a software engineering position and a sales engineer position. I went with the software engineering position as it paid better and I felt like it would be a safer career path, but I’ve always wondered what it was like for people in that line of work.
I know a Principal engineer who did, and he says it's been very lucrative. This was a guy who ran his own business for many years, wrote a few books and everything, before being hired as principal engineer where I worked at the time. He stuck it out as a principal for a few years before going to sales engineering.
I asked him why the switch and he just said, "You make a lot more money in sales engineering".
Not the parent but one of the requirements when I shifted into dedicated sales engineering was a healthy work life balance. It has worked out that way so far - I’m very happy and it’s relatively low stress.
Sometimes it's hell (like during prime selling season or trying to hit quota before end of quarter) because you'll be on calls and doing demos and the like almost constantly, but other times it is completely chill.
You can always give it a shot. I was on a kind of non traditional engineer path for most of my career (lots of startups with ambiguous roles) and transitioned into a large company as a sales engineer. Engineers who can talk to “normal” people are very valuable.
> Engineers who can talk to “normal” people are very valuable.
I am not a sales engineer, but this describes my current role well. (Technically my title is "Cloud Solution Architect", but it's about the 4th title I've had for doing the same job for the same department)
It's great if you don't mind travel and being in front of customers. You also won't make as much as a staff eng at a FAANG though you'll pull good money and don't have to live in an expensive city to get it
Work at a business that knows it's value is in producing stuff people want to buy.
Microsoft and Google haven't produced anything new in a long time, so engineering is a money pit.
Older companies with stable products, they don't see innovation as useful, engineers are just the factory workers. The cheaper to stamp out a widget, the better.
You are not fully wrong, but there is a good business reason why that is. Engineers salaries are still super inflated.I really don't think there is another position that comes close to software engineering in US in terms of salary/actual hours worked. New college grads are making six figures for effective 6 hour days.
High-End Prostitutes might make the highest money/minute (many charge like $1200/hour, obviously fully tax-free), short of things like pro-football players if you only count the minutes that the game clock is ticking.
There are close to 9000 total hours in a year. Someone who makes $11m a year makes more than that for every hour they're alive. There are thousands of people who make that much money in the US alone.
One of my greatest frustrations over the past few years was seeing any class of workers in the US gaining significant leverage over their employers for the first time since the 90s, and then spending all that leverage towards making it easier for companies to replace them with cheaper options abroad.
What is kind of bizarre is that big-tech companies recruit largely based on their brand image, not purely on high-pay. They receive so many applications per month that even if they just lowballed incoming college-grads, the ones that choose to take the job rather than go to a competitor would still be perfectly fine. Deal with the rest through normal attrition and in a few years you solve your wage/RSU problem. This is how smaller and less famous companies do it.
Yet why risk having to stir up some kind of illegal price fixing or collusion nonsense as a hedge fund manager? My guess is that the paradox is solved if you consider the saved cost of compensation vs the cost of litigation.
Proof point: Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon doesn't pay nearly as much as Google or Facebook in terms of total comp, yet they have no problem finding employees.
That's because Google doesn't use workers efficiently. They hire very smart people and then make them use things like Google Cloud and K8S and OKRs and no matter how many people they throw at the problem... progress... is.. slow...
Google was a center of technical excellence up until some time around 2005-2010 or so but their real exceptionalism is having the highly profitable near-monopoly advertising business which lets them sustain technological and management systems which wouldn't be sustainable anywhere else.
I did a shootout of 10 vision recognition APIs including AWS and Azure. I had all the other APIs working in under 20 minutes, but Google Cloud took 2 hours just to get authentication working and wound up trashing the Python installation on my machine and forced me to reinstall it.
It’s just not a member of the same probability distribution.
And it is all like that, what is dead easy with competitors is a struggle with Google Cloud because the maze is truly in the mouse.
Internal overhead at Google, in my experience, is almost entirely constrained to stuff that relates to regulatory pressure that other companies simply skip.
> Citation needed. I know Google has a problem finding people fast enough.
Could that be Google's cultural problem? I have not real knowledge or understanding of this, but I was under the vague impression Google is unusually picky and elitist about who it hires (e.g. they want advanced degrees, an elite school background, or a FAANG background, and will turn up their nose at most normal folks).
Caveat: hopefully my experience was a fluke and if I was to repeat it I would get a different outcome. I wouldn't want to judge them based on a single experience.
My last round of interviews they down leveled me, yet I had a lateral offer from Waymo, and other companies upleveled me.
I was interviewing for a specific role, but my interviewers were from areas around the company that gave interview questions relevant to their area but not the area I was interviewing for, and was well outside my expertise. I objectively didn't do as well as other interviews.
Waymo, on the other hand stuck to my strengths in the interview process and was genuinely engaged with me finding a role there that Met my skills (I very regretfully turned the role down).
I believe Google actively, aggressively tries to downlevel people so that I can pay them less. And then move promo cycle to be as long as possible, also to suppress wages
Google is very picky about who they hire depending on which org you're being hired for, since you need to basically win a bunch of dice rolls to get interviewers who
1) understand what you're being interviewed for (are you a linux kernel programmer? better hope they don't assign you an Android Java Frontend guy)
2) are good at interviewing (this is a difficult skill!)
and 3) don't dislike you for any particular reason
I'm a self educated (white male, if that matters) and was actively recruited by Google for a TPM position multiple times.
Honestly, the only reason I'm not working there today is because I wasn't willing to relocate to NYC, and they (strangely) aren't very remote friendly.
My interpretation is one of “good cop bad cop”. Something similar happened to my employer but it was some activist investor demanding changes that sounded similar to what the company had been rumored to be wanting to do (but were difficult/unpopular). Then within a month the current CEO is fired and a new CEO, who was from the outside and I know had been courted for a while, joins, and begins implementing many of those rumored plans.
There have been questions and jokes for years wondering what all the people are doing at big tech firms - and then they hired like crazy during the pandemic. Eventually shareholders would start wondering the same thing, and push for cuts. Does Google need to employ people to make another chat app that they'll soon kill?
There’s some nuance to the RSU situation. The problem that Microsoft (and Amazon) faced with the equity portion of comp was dilution. Declining revenue with large outstanding stock grants leads to a massive EPS hit. That tanks your stock price, requiring more RSUs, rinse and repeat.
>Late 2022 Satya started taking about overall employment at Tech companies dropping due to AI. He said something like ‘Tech employment overall will grow but employment at tech companies will shrink’.
Normally, I am blase on the predictions that AI will replace dev jobs, but when one of the people saying this also happens to be one of the people with real power to make it happen I stand up and take notice. Yikes.
Like what exactly? More effective ads? More creative financial engineering products, like cryptocurrencies?
In a hypothetical world where chatbots are powerful enough to eat artist, writer, and programmer jobs, we've reached an end state where HCI is close to perfect. The entire idea of designing specific software products doesn't even make sense when you can just throw an LLM at the problem.
I remain skeptical that this is where we are, but if you take the first claim (that chatbots will imminently be capable of replacing existing tech roles) at face value, there aren't going to be any products left to build, because chatbots represent the final form of tech.
It's another riff on 'software is eating the world'.
Lots of companies would like custom software to help run their business, but are not, in fact, tech companies. If AI makes writing this software cheaper, and there is higher elastic demand at this lower price, then you'll see more devs working for old fashioned non tech companies.
Tech companies, meanwhile, can accomplish their goals with fewer employees, so the number of people working directly for FAANG companies will shrink.
Ok, that seems like generally a good thing for most of us? His prediction is that employment opportunities will increase, and there will be a much more diverse pool of companies you can choose to work at.
It's bad for technical workers because if you pivot from 'engineer #10 at a company that is big enough to have full-time QA, engineering managers, and an actual HR department' to 'engineer #2 at a company that doesn't have any QA or engineering managers', suddenly all of the important tasks those people were handling get handed off to whoever's unlucky enough to get the task, or worse, get handed off to the worst possible people.
Essentially, the pool may be more "diverse" in the sense that there are more companies doing different things with AI, but if suddenly 90% of your job openings are tiny startups that might shut down next year where the HR and finance departments are both the CEO's wife, it makes it harder to stay in the field.
It's mixed. The reason for higher demand would be lower cost. I.e. perhaps lower median wages for the vast majority of folks where we have a bimodal peak at tech companies who have a small percentage of overall workers.
> How can tech employment grow if tech company employment is shrinking?
He's saying that tech will be more accessible to small businesses and you'll have more internal tech teams working in non-tech companies. Similar to accounting, HR, etc.
If your firm cannot afford >= 400K salary engineers you will/cannot be big tech(not in the US). Good Engineers(in the US, EU etc) who command this will leave. You can be a dollar printing tech company and have good engineers but you can't be small. A lot of the economy and US tech dominance is alive because of such jobs and the larger ecosystem of evaluations(linked to GDP) that support this.
At the macro level the size of big tech is supported by evaluations: "How much it would cost to make the same thing?". This evaluation includes payroll costs. Those payroll costs are kept artificially high so that evaluations(in dollars) are high. the obscene salaries also keep the $ cost that companies charge for products, goods and services((daycare, medicine, labor, homes)) high which keep the evaluation high. You need the high evaluation to award Engineers wanting all those 400K+ salaries.
Also at this macro level the dollarized based evaluation is critical because with US's dollar dominance it can just spend to eliminate any and all competition. The government can borrow endlessly by selling debt(or so it seems).
So the key support thesis behind big tech is that if you can keep enough people, rich enough they will continue to buy and spend to support dollar evaluation of companies. The moment that is in jeopardy people(WS investors, Vice President of XYZ etc) will come out and defend it.
I think it's important that people understand what drives labor strategy within industry.
First of all, you should understand how your salary gets paid, as a tech worker. Much of the tech industry is unprofitable, so where does the money come from? It comes from the investments into the company. That money comes from venture capitalists, but not out of their actual pockets. Their money comes from their limited partners -- pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, insurance companies, etc. Even when it comes to profitable companies, like Microsoft, folks should understand that the people who pull the strings in the industry are the investors. AKA the owners of the company. Yesterday's investors generally get paid by tomorrow's. When there's uncertainty of future investment, things change real quick.
For a long period of time, we were in a zero-interest rate regime, and the investor class was obsessed with growth, over all else. Capital is easy to come by when interest rates are low, so the game they are playing is to try to pick sectoral winners, and worry about profitability in the long run. You can't win in the market without the best talent, and so there was an arms race to acquire that talent. Investors will endure dilution from employee stock grants as long as the growth makes up for it.
When interest rates started increasing, to combat inflation, everything changed. Capital was no longer cheap and businesses needed to be able to become self-sustaining, or risk going bankrupt. It's hard to overstate how sharp a change this was from years of declining interest rates.
Some leaders of companies are sociopaths, and others are great humans. In the end, both types of leaders need to be responsive to three forces: capital markets, supply chain markets, and customer markets. The latter two are peculiar to each business, but the macro capital market dynamics are pretty much shared. And that's why it seems like we've seen herd behavior among investors and executives.
But I think it's important to be able to parse between what behaviors is vicious/selfish/exploitative vs. that which responding to changing market forces. I do think that when it's all said and done, we'll see which CEOs are actually able to guide their companies to produce value, and which CEOs just know how to do well with a tailwind.
Buffet's "When the tide goes out" line is something I thought of often during our Bull Decade. It guided my choices of employers. I missed out on some sexy trends by only ever choosing to go with extremely profitable monopolists, and within those companies I always try to be a key player on a project that leadership knows is what funds the crew on their yachts. It's my own insurance policy.
I started my career in 2008, and I talked to a lot of guys who started theirs in 2000. I have played defensively since then. It's worked out pretty well to be conservative.
Let’s take a less conspiratorial view and realize that when everyone showed they could work from home and clamored so vociferously for it to stay after the pandemic, that companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind.
I remember thinking “be careful what you are wishing for my dudes” when tech workers were loudly proclaiming how much work they could get done at home and never coming into the office. That office was your moat and now it’s gone.
I’ve been working remote since 2010 with teams all over the world. People that are reliable and productive and that communicate well are very hard to find and are still in short supply.
We made good money cleaning up messes caused by cheap offshoring deals.
Imo, time zone, culture, language, data and privacy regulations are also moats, although being physically present helps a ton.
I don't think there was anything stopping companies from outsourcing all engineering work pre-pandemic, but that model has been failing pretty consistently over the last couple decades.
Offshoring labor has been around for a long time, and the problems associated with it haven't magically disappeared because people know how to use Zoom.
I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home.
Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed.
The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us.
Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches.
I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.
>companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind.
Lets not pretend that companies haven't been trying to outsource pretty much everything they can possibly outsource since the early 2000's.
The truth of the matter is unless you're willing to put in a lot of effort into finding and directly hiring the best and the brightest in third world countries, you're probably going to be disappointed with the results you get from simply yeeting work over the fence to a third party contractor company.
It's funny - how the author claimed he got shouted down when he started posting to Blind about the layoffs.
Every single day of the week, people are posting on blind about upcoming RIF's. People have RIF fatigue. It's a case of "boy who cried wolf" and not the fault of the author, that's just how Blind is.
>Everyone in the industry (except apple) was doing it so nobody wanted to go against the wisdom of the collective. Raising debt to finance things was really cheap (especially for Microsoft given our bond rating) so everyone in the industry began hiring and collecting employees like Pokémon cards.
I mean Apple laid off recruiters and heavily slowed down hiring fall 2022, tried to force everyone back into offices and was.able to reap many resignations, and still laid off an undisclosed amount of working in the spring.
it sounds like Apple did the same crap, just with better pr and more strategically.
Disappointed that discussion has regressed into a naive "class war" narrative while no one is talking about the face value business implications of § 174 [1] now that the handout bankrolled by 2017 TCJA [2] is nerfed and tax code no longer permits outright expensing of software development.
I've seen a ton of different opinions on these changes but every startup techie/indie dev I've talked to got different answers from their accountant. Mine said I was fine. Is there a basis for arguing 174/TCJA are why these layoffs happened?
tl;dr wage suppression was behind it, with the pressure coming from wall street.
Since it was synchronized across all of tech this will likely mean that there is smoking gun evidence of illegal collusion lying around somewhere just like there was the last time this happened:
> Hiring market was booming late 2021 and early 2022. The RSU and signing bonuses were rising at an alarming rate irking wall st. The pace of stock grants for hiring talent was not sustainable. Wall st fund managers were especially critical about the dilution of the stock to sustain the hiring and retention.
> Major wall st fund managers and stock holders started putting together a plan to put pressure on the wage and RSU growth. There were multiple leaks on Reddit (which is where I got the early wind of these planned industry wide layoffs) where hedge fund employees and staff were talking about dumping as high as 300-500K tech employees over year to put serious pressure on wage growth.
> If the CEOs and CFOs were not receptive to the idea they would pressure the board. A lot of major share holders have their person on the boards of their major holding companies. Our overlords had made up their mind and nothing could stop them.
> I heard much later from someone who was present at Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Aug 2022 that these low-key discussions started taking place between CEOs, board members, large tech investors and large fund managers at Jackson hole.
I would like to see an investigation of this. It sounds plausable to me, but you never know with posts like this if they actually reflect inside info or are just some guy LARPing being an insider.
And one that is known, to a lesser degree than Davos but still, to the general public. I call conspiracy theory BS, based on some pretty standard cost cutting measures by reducing headcount. Besides big tech, every other industry has those rounds quote regularly.
Assuming that the original Twitter thread folk is not doing LARPing, this one bit summarizes the entire point why institutional investors like TCI [1] were demanding layoffs due to dilution via SBC [2].
I would prefer a precise definition from SEC regarding on how SBC is declared [3] (it it's Cash Expense or not) and establish a clear guidance for all investors to remove this generalized anxiety that put pressure on workers.
Definitely sounds like LARPing insider feeding a story that clearly hits all the right anger switches. I don't suspect whoever release this information has a narrative that they are working towards.
Why wouldn't shareholders object to dilution and increasing personnel costs in what might look like a lack of cost controls? And, yes, executives don't necessarily like cost programs so much because they are disruptive.
The bit about HFs wanting to engineer downward wage pressure is a bit crazy (also given the small influence on most big corporations) - evidence needed, I'd say, before credible. What would be credible is HFs expecting downward pressure on wages if there were larger tech redundancies.
My father is going into work today to collect his things. He worked for his company, and directly for the owner for 40 years. The company is being sold. The owner is walking away with millions. My father got nothing. Zero severance. After 40 years. My poor mother thought she found a law that required severance. I had to explain to her that was Canada. It really drives home the point that our laws are meant for the capital class. We have almost no worker rights here in the US.
But employees know that there's nothing protecting their employment or retirement, and take action to minimize risk / optimize outcome (eg job hopping).
On one hand, it's really sad that companies owe nothing to employees after decades of tenure, but on the other it's really hard to see how anyone would be surprised by getting laid off with no severance after 40 years and complain about not being compensated as well as the company's owners.
>it's really hard to see how anyone would be surprised by getting laid off with no severance after 40 years and complain about not being compensated as well as the company's owners.
No where did I say that he should be compensated as well as the owner. I said it was wrong to lay him off without severance when the owner was making millions on the deal.
My father worked in a small town with few 'good' jobs. This was one of them. It feels kind of inhumane to suggest it's somehow his fault for not uprooting our family every few years in order to not be exploited.
I accepted that bargain when I started working, but I would be lying if I told you I didn't suffer from far fewer ties to friends and family because of it. I've moved 8 times in the past 15 years. That makes it almost impossible to put down roots. I have a much shallower 'support system' because of it, and I've basically sacrificed part of my wellbeing on the alter 'at will' employment.
your father worked for free for 40 years?
your father had a chance to negotiate for ownership of the company, but didn't. And now you expect the owner to give up a stake during a sale?
An analogy would be if you hired someone to build a deck on your home (and you paid them for the job), and then expected to get 5% of your home value when you sold it 10 years later. That is not expected in a civilized society.
Congrats, you're the second person to fail reading comprehension today, and it's less acceptable given I've already addressed this in another comment on this same thread. No where did I say I expected the owner to grant equity. My beef is laying off my father with zero notice and NO severance after 40 years of work.
> Genuine question: why does it need to be investigated? Is there a law against rich psychopaths being psychopaths with their own money?
Because if there isn't, there should be. It's not good policy to let psychopaths run amok. An investigation is the kind of thing that could get the political wheels turning against those "rich psychopaths."
But I wouldn't be surprised if something like this is illegal already. It has a smell of anti-competitive collusion.
> Is there a law against rich psychopaths being psychopaths with their own money
Being an abusive psychopath should not be a protected behavior just because the behavior is driven by money.
There is something deeply wrong with our society if $$ === correct. It's not. We need to speak up and do something about the disgusting precedent this sets.
I don't really buy the "evil money people pressured innocent big tech into firing under priviledged tech workers" narrative. First, big tech, tech and start-ups have all the incentives to reduce headcount, and cost, without third party intervention. Second, a lot of companies over hired during Covid, and then corrected. Everybody else followed suit with general cost cutting measures. And again, no outside pressure needed.
Claiming otherwise, especially the way Wall Street is usually portrayed, smells of conspiracy theory BS. But I guess someone has to be responsible if someone elses comfotrable bursts through contact with reality.
> I don't really buy the "evil money people pressured innocent big tech into firing under priviledged tech workers" narrative. First, big tech, tech and start-ups have all the incentives to reduce headcount, and cost, without third party intervention.
what incentive? Zuckerberg's or Pichai's etc income and stock wealth in the medium/long term is almost completely de-correlated with quarterly net profit or whatever, it's vibe-based, on if they look like masters of the universe who will continue to find ways to print money. their positions are also extremely safe for even stronger reasons - either dominating voting stock or being handpicked successors to the people who dominating voting stock.
> Second, a lot of companies over hired during Covid, and then corrected. Everybody else followed suit with general cost cutting measures. And again, no outside pressure needed.
... then hire less, or be stricter with PIPs or whatever, obliterating morale with your first-ever secret overnight mass layoffs is very stupid.
It’s entirely fair and rational for investors to urge companies they invest in to “focus on profitability” in particular during a possible economic downturn or looming recession.
>Since it was synchronized across all of tech this will likely mean that there is smoking gun evidence of illegal collusion lying around somewhere just like there was the last time this happened:
There's plenty of ways for it to be synchronized cross companies without outright collusion. Macroeconomic factors and/or trend chasing would be the obvious candidate.
> Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.
> According to a court filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold-call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"
> Since it was synchronized across all of tech this will likely mean that there is smoking gun evidence of illegal collusion lying around somewhere just like there was the last time this happened:
I've been suspecting this and was repeatedly branded as a tinfoil hat wearer. I'm so glad I'm not alone.
Lets call it what it is. One side is literally trying to kill the other. Whether you choke off oxygen or financial means to survival... you're killing people.
One side is wealthy enough to engage in this for fun and entertainment. They are so disconnected from reality that their actions are justified and their ethics totally evaporated.
How long till we conduct layoffs by allowing CEOs to meander open-floor offices and simply execute the employees they see as disposable?
I appreciate this constructive criticism. It's frustrating to feel targeted by the actions in the article but I can see how my comment is more antagonistic.
Appreciated. Yes, following the HN guidelines does involve learning to tolerate frustration, until it either goes away or transmutes into a more interesting comment. It takes work and practice. We're all learning this together as a community (definitely including me).
LOL. Maybe the professional class (doctors, lawyers) but most real working-class people do not bucket themselves in the category as the professional class. Yes, you are all salaried, but they don't get 6 figure RSU's or bonuses.
This is just class infighting, though. If you don't own the capital, you're labour. Yes, some labour is paid better, sometimes much better! But if you can be fired, you're labour, and fighting with other labour is counter-productive.
Instead of scrapping with someone who makes twice your wage for half your work, we should all be scrapping with those who own the capital, who are profiting from our labour, who even allow for such crappy jobs in the first place. We should ALL be paid well and have respectful work accommodations.
Working class means that you are earning a wage/salary and you don't own the means of your value production. Small businesses typically aren't working class, whereas sports professionals typically are working class.
If you want to talk about income levels, "working class" isn't a term you should be using; it's too big of a bucket.
Very valid point. One could extend this definition such that: When someone has enough wealth to make a comfortable living passively, they're no longer working class. I think that should sufficiently account for this.
All the doctors I know are workers for a corporation now, upper middle class. The days of a private practice professional class of doctors owning their own business is mostly gone. Those that did cried poverty at what medicare paid. Dentists are an exception because insurance companies haven't destroyed them yet.
It's still people who own vs. people who earn. Those people on 400k are on the same side of the capital divide as people who work at Starbucks.
Hedgies are trying to take a cut of both of their wages so they can buy more cocaine.
Obviously theyd prefer us to think we're special little creative snowflakes who don't need union membership like a common old factory workers. Or Tom Cruise. Or the hollywood writers who just won a massive victory.
> That isn’t working class. Thats the 1% from where I sit.
Your perception doesn't agree with reality. First of all, you need to earn at least double that to qualify for 1%. But that's a different story, as income is not what makes someone 'working class'. If you MUST work in order to survive, you are working class, which is the case even for people making $400k/year.
You're kind of working against your argument here. These things disappear when you lose your job, hence they need to work in order to have them, hence they're working class.
If you need someone to direct your anger towards, it's the people with trust funds, not the W2 workers who are making more than you. Think of it this way. Who benefits the most if your income goes down or stagnates? Other W2 workers? Or someone else who just loves it when you direct your energy against other workers?
There is no shortage of people to direct my anger towards. This community specifically is responsible for the creation, wide adoption of smartphones and the endless doom-scrolling addiction we’re all subjected to now. My ire is limitless; plenty to go around. I don’t require your permission or sign-off on my emotions.
> There is no shortage of people to direct my anger towards. This community specifically is responsible for the creation, wide adoption of smartphones and the endless doom-scrolling addiction we’re all subjected to now.
You're responsible as well, for supporting the infrastructure enabling these efforts.
But don't conflate issues. We were talking about whether or not someone working at BigCo making $400k/year is working class or not. They are, even if they're not blue-collar workers.
I don't really give a damn who or what you're literally angry about, I was just using a figure of speech.
See section 2. The trend is pretty clear: The upper class is transferring wealth from the middle class. So, demanding that firms cut wages on middle class workers has been standard practice for decades. They're running out of money to extract from there, so they're going after the bottom half of the uppe class next.
I suggest joining a startup; investors that are willing to put cash into companies in times like this end up getting outsized returns on investment (since anyone that can leave the big companies does, the big company's R&D projects get cancelled during downturns, and general morale issues prevent minor product improvements from shipping).
(Also, median of middle class is $90K, and median of upper is $219K. Lower class is $29K. If they broke upper class into 2-4 separate tiers, there'd also be a clear skew in wage growth toward the top of the upper class.)
The TLDR of that article is that most of the "shrinking middle class" can be explained by changing demographics in the US - i.e. the country is getting older.
Older people, pre-retirement, generally earn more then younger people. As it should be - they've spent their lives growing their net worth and gaining experience.
Most "class warfare" can be explained by this - except that it doesn't get clickbait outrage reaction to say "older, experienced people are wealthier than young people starting their careers".
It's much more exciting to skew charts and graphs to show massive wealth disparity, as if there's a sinister cabal of wealthy folks that for some reason don't want others to succeed.
These charts are utterly meaningless if they aren't broken down by age group. You're putting someone who has 30+ years of career growth against someone out of high school and then screaming about wealth disparity.
The article itself even points this out - they say most of the loss of money in middle income was made up for in the 45-65 year old bracket. After 65 (surprise) when folks are retired, this drops off.
The issue isn't some sort of "class warfare" boogeyman. The issue is that we've made it damn near impossible to have a large family these days, and our population demographics are reflecting that, along with income.
Also note: the article doesn't talk about absolute numbers or wealth. It's all percentile stuff. It's easy to play statistics tricks with that.
Your definition of “class” seems to be a kind of vague proxy for “income”. The original comment was using a more accurate definition aligning more with a capital vs labor distinction: are you paid in wages or are you paid in profits?
"middle class" was the starting point of the discussion, with the poster trying to make believe that being a worker means you are middle class
As I commented somewhere else, if you are making 400k a year and are not investing the surplus income as capital for someone else's business then you are probably not making good life decisions. You certainly are making enough to be a rentier
It's a case of the terminology of "class" becoming muddled, which creates such divisions. "Middle class" is the wrong concept here - capital versus labor is what matters.
Somebody in the labor class making that kind of money may be able to springboard themselves into the capital class by investment, but they aren't automatically there based solely on their income.
If you depend on a salary to make ends meet you're working class.
This further division of the working class into upper and lower classes based on income is just another method to implement divide-and-conquer by pitting workers against themselves. Yes, software engineers earn a lot more than other salaried professions, it does not mean that software engineers control the means of production. Until a salaried worker earn enough to become part of the capital class and not need to work anymore we are all part of the working class.
Blue-collar/lower income workers might take offense in that, as they'd look at someone making US$200-400k/year as part of the elite, it does not mean that workers earning that shouldn't look at themselves as they are: workers, subjected to an elite class controlling the means of production and hence, their lives.
> Blue-collar/lower income workers might take offense in that, as they'd look at someone making US$200-400k/year as part of the elite, it does not mean that workers earning that shouldn't look at themselves as they are: workers, subjected to an elite class controlling the means of production and hence, their lives.
I was making 400k/year at one time, I also had a few million dollars (that I earned by being "working class" in SV) invested in the S&P500. Which is why your argument has no merit. I could have stopped being "working class" with a 400k/year salary any time I wanted and lived from my investments but I didn't.
I kept being "working class" in SV and I ended up growing my compensation package to nearly 1 million dollars a year. That's what being "working class" in SV can amount to. But please try to convince me that I should take to the streets with my working-class brethren that work at Starbucks because I'm being exploited by the elites.
> Which is why your argument has no merit. I could have stopped being "working class" with a 400k/year salary any time I wanted and lived from my investments but I didn't.
You owned capital investments that kept you comfortable without the need to be exploited, at that point you crossed the class division from worker to a capitalist. You said it yourself...
I picked the 200-400k range because it's been thrown around on this thread, that compensation is far away for most of SWEs in the world. Of course if you earn that and invest (and thus becoming a capitalist) you can be free from exploitation. Most workers, even SWEs, in the world cannot cross that chasm.
You are a capitalist, not working class. You just choose to work.
If you own capital (factories, businesses, capital investments) you don't depend on a salary, you're not working class... It's not meaningless, the division is pretty clear.
Do you depend on an employer to afford your life? If you got disabled and couldn't work a single day again in your life, would you be able to afford it without stress? There it is, that's the meaning of "you depend on salary"...
Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
The people that I know that own the means of production work extraordinarily hard.
Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
> The people that I know that own the means of production work extraordinarily hard.
This is not the point I'm making.
> Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
Of course you can buy insurance, again, this is not the point I'm making, it's an analogy to the point of: do you depend on someone employing you, and paying you, to live (and have a meaningful life somehow)? You can only pay insurance if you are earning money, usually through a salary...
It's meaningless in that it doesn't describe a societal division that actually matters. A retail worker making 40k a year is not going to identify with a highly paid software engineer. Their life stresses are worlds apart as is their level of financial security.
You're the one trying to divide and conquer by pushing an abstract, out of touch political ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions
>Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
It's not a societal division, it's an economic division, and one that very much matters, more so every day. What happens when automation eliminates a job? The ownership class (who are making their money off of owning the means of production) get a massive boost to profits. Labor loses their livelihood.
You might be able to make a compelling argument that, as the people pushing that automation forward, high-paid software developers are class traitors, like cops. But cops are still working class, even if they're being paid to betray their own and others in their class's interests.
> It's meaningless in that it doesn't describe a societal division that actually matters. A retail worker making 40k a year is not going to identify with a highly paid software engineer. Their life stresses are worlds apart as is their level of financial security.
They won't but the software engineer should identify with the plights of the worker making 40k. That's the issue, quite a lot of SWEs and other high income professions see themselves as separate from the working class.
> You're the one trying to divide and conquer by pushing an abstract, out of touch political ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions
I'm not pushing socialism, talking about class warfare does not mean I'm a communist, stop that line of thinking as you are assuming something I have not said. At no point in my comments I've mentioned communism or socialism, I use their terms since it's a good analysis of the powers of capital, that's all. This knee-jerk reaction to some terms is absolutely ridiculous and taints your comment, from that you derived I'm somehow a communist and your only retort is talking about "the deaths of millions" caused by it. Capitalism has also contributed to the death and injury of hundreds of millions. That's not the fucking point...
> Right back at you comrade!
"No, you" stops being a retort you can use by 4th grade, again I insist: be a better contributor to discussions, so far you haven't done much.
Working class is defined as needing to work to live.
Even people making 400K are still working class.
Now between the working class, there’s a lot of difference too. The thing is, that difference is on an entirely different scale than the difference between the working class and the owner class.
The 400k is a red herring anyways. Not every engineer makes that, and not ever person who laid off was an engineer. The layoffs affected recruiters, marketing, sales, and a ton of areas that were not engineers. Lower level engineers were also targeted more than the higher level engineers, and even more importantly the hiring freezes and reductions blocked a ton of new grads from getting jobs.
This comment can only be made by someone who isn't paying any attention at all.
The layoffs affected recruiters, marketing, sales, and a ton of areas that were not engineers. Lower level engineers were also targeted more than the higher level engineers, and even more importantly the hiring freezes and reductions blocked a ton of new grads from getting jobs.
As a 400k/year engineer I was fine. My colleagues unfortunately were not.
Yep, I swear people see one SWE at Google making crazy amounts of money and forget that that's the far right of the distribution. Your typical SWE pay is $75-$150k which don't let the zeros fool you is working class. The fact that crazy high inflation and housing costs has made everyone so much fucking poorer overnight and changed the relative comparison doesn't change the absolute one.
Here's what $100k is depending on where your perception of money is anchored.
Baby Boomeer: $100k would have been $12k when you were growing up.
In theory those making more money would be the most threatening, having enough extra money to translate into political power.
Also in theory, pensioners and the insured are the beneficiaries of hedge fund profits via their institutions investments. But nobody is policing the thoughts of the fund managers.
> In theory those making more money would be the most threatening, having enough extra money to translate into political power.
In theory. In reality, higher salary workers are easier to propagandize, because they have a tendency to LARP "being a capitalist" with their 401k. They also tend to be modestly smart technicians, which generally gives them a greater capacity for self-deception and delusion. The end result is that most of them politically self-neutralize.
What happens if those making 400k a year in order to buy a shack in a HCOL area don’t actually have to do that? They can be free to work on what they want instead of adshit or high frequency algorithms and actually maybe work for themselves?
You got a source for that number? Not all devs are working in the bay area. Some of us are out here in middle america working for far less. Nice try at invalidating the pain of others though...
> Class warfare against those making $400k/year...
IIRC, if your income comes from wages or salary, you're part of the working class. It doesn't matter how much you make. Wall Street wants to kick your ass to the curb and replace you with a robot just the same as a dude working in a factory.
However, when people make salaries that high, they often confuse themselves for capitalists.
Ideally at that income level you’re buying your way into becoming a capitalist. You should be able to make it into the capitalist class in about 10 years with that kind of salary.
I agree. Everyone making that much money (as I do) can decide for themselves: Do I want to live in the Bay Area and drive a Model X, or do I want to negotiate myself to a cheaper state, drive a 10 year old Toyota (perfectly fine! More reliable than a Tesla!), and buy $250k of equities per year, thus buying their way in to the true capitalist class in half the time that real working class people have to stick to their careers?
Did you read the part about Satya Nadella getting himself a big fat bonus while laying off tons of people? Doesn't seem like this "difficult decision" really hurt him that much... in fact he seems to feel justified in being rewarded for these actions.
Spoils of war? Cost of doing business? What excuses are we using to discard ethics today?
Why shouldn't running a large cost cutting exercise be rewarded (provided it was profit accretive)? Not that easy to do - a lot firms struggle with those. There is a different discussion on the level of executive compensation.
In the end, it really comes down to what you think a stock corporation is for. If it is some sort of profit maximizer, then cost control is part of running it.
Why should the financial gains of the company be completely disconnected from how it treats the people it employs? There is a perverse lack of incentive for people at the top to be good to people at the bottom.
If a CEO is rewarded handsomely for tricking / deceiving a large population of his employees (at the expense of the employees, benefit enjoyed exclusively by company) should this now be seen as an accepted business practice? How slippery do we have to get this slope before it just turns into a meat grinder where all issues ethical or otherwise uncomfortable are just hand-waved away into "but it's profitable!" sausage?
> People choose their employers in a fair number of situations.
When was the last time you were out of work? Have you ever been let go from a job for reasons completely disconnected from your performance?
I think the idea that people are able to "vote with their feet" is a capitalist fantasy told by the ruling class. The actual opportunity on the ground is much lower and you often have to compromise your values, ethics and morals to pay the bills.
Of course if you make enough money it's easy to insulate yourself from the things us dirty peasants concern ourselves with, so I can understand if you don't get it.
Don't think that is deception, happens rather frequently especially if firms don't have good experience with downturns or changes.
I would agree with the notion that by far not everyone has real choice, hence organized labour as one defense. Reality is, some firms care much more than others, not all run by greedy psychopaths in my experience.
If you want total freedom on what you do then can only do things that don't need clients/customers, though. Some compromise is somewhere is likely.
You're on a site for venture capitalists, wannabe startup founders and employees hoping to strike it rich, employees of FAANG and other big tech companies who gained much of their wealth through their stock grants and options (i.e. are making money from growth of their capital) and are expecting sympathy for class warfare rhetoric? Good luck with that.
Not to mention people whose salaries are 3x, 4x, 5x or even more than the median wage attempting to LARP as the oppressed proletariat is cringe inducing as heck. If all out class warfare broke out, the proletariat knows darned well that we're not feeling anything like the financial pain that they've endured. We'd be treated as enemies just as much as the wealthy and it's much, much easier for a mob to get their hands on you and I than it is for the truly wealthy.
I don't think it requires elaboration. Claiming that firing people is equivalent to killing them is hyperbole. Claiming that we're close to literally executing employees in the office is absolutely ridiculous. These kinds of comments completely derail any sort of rational conversation about labor rights.
> Claiming that we're close to literally executing employees in the office is absolutely ridiculous.
I think from a "do we care about the people we employ" perspective the whole idea of laying people off and then hiring them back is callous at best, and psychopathic / sociopathic at worst. The conditions these actions create at the companies people are employed at are toxic and negative.
I've never had a 400k salary, I've barely cracked six figures. The reality is that the class war actions taken have decimated the middle and lower end of the tech job market and people like me are just plain fucked with little options other than burger king when you get done doom scrolling the same 10 job boards every day. It doesn't matter if you've done DBA or are a competent developer with real world experience, once you get kicked down the ladder you are black-marked for life. Good luck getting back up when the ladder has been set on fire and the ashes dropped on your head.
This has nothing to do with "class warfare". Big companies are capable of hiring thousands of people, and have the cash to do so. If they decide that they no longer need those people, they will fire them. At no point is some mustache-twirling villain "plotting against" you. They do not care about you. You have skills, they hired you for those skills; they no longer need your skills, so you are let go with benefits (because we fought for those).
What policies are you actually proposing? Because I really don't know where you're going with this. Ban firing? Forced hiring?
https://nitter.net/TeamBlind/status/1706266044871086271