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Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#51

Post by Zvez »

gorgoiler wrote: post #7

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…

simple answer - without you they easily find other developers. Without them you will have to find another exec to work for. And as long as it is easier for them to find replacement than for you to find another/better job, they have an upper hand.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#52

Post by golergka »

kqr wrote: post #12

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…

> better alternative course of action that we should take

Better for whom?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#53

Post by pbhjpbhj »

shever73 wrote: post #35
kqr wrote: post #12

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. True...contrast Microsoft's decision to take an $800m hit in letting go 10,000 employees with its earnings report showing $16.4b operating profits.

"I saved the company $800M, I should get 10% of that"?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#54

Post by quickthrower2 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #7

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…

Not all founders get a good exit though.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#55

Post by quickthrower2 »

roenxi wrote: post #31

Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better th…

The weirder thing is the overhiring in the first place. So only now the folly detectors are working?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#56

Post by Zvez »

jerrre wrote: post #21
gorgoiler wrote: post #7

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…

> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.

The (not so) fun fact here is that majority of IT workers won't do this. While exec might want their mansions, we want our latte and iphones. I work at a company which recently had big chunk of layoffs and I can clearly see how a lot of people are just relieved that they were not laid off. Yes, there are talks how everyone is outrageous, they are mostly kitchen talks. The company literally fired thousands of people with a single email and now we back to corptalk about family and values. So I don't see any major changes in unification of IT workers.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#57

Post by quickthrower2 »

meindnoch wrote: post #44

See, this is why you stay overemployed. If you're laid off from one of your jobs, you still get to keep the others. Companies are like sociopaths, so employees must act like sociopaths too when interacting with them.

Not even sociopathic: you basically a consult business with many customers.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#58

Post by pbhjpbhj »

yvdriess wrote: post #40
thewildginger wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Glad I'm not the only one who read that blog in Zap Brannigan's voice.

The quote was Lord Farquhard (not pronounced Fuckwad) in Shrek I, IIRC.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#59

Post by pbhjpbhj »

roenxi wrote: post #31

Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better th…

>because it works better than the alternatives.

Does it?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#60

Post by mshake2 »

arrrg wrote: post #49
mshake2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is it necessary to fire them? That's the relevant question we should ask ourselves. That's not the relevant question. The relevant questions are: were the layoffs illegal, and if they weren't, then why is it any of your business? If you don't want to live in that world, start your own startup, hire people, and never fire them. Nobody is stopping you.

Do you think it‘s pointless to talk about the ethics of decisions of other people, especially if those decisions affect several thousand people? Do you think anything that is legal is also ethical? Also, in general I don’t live in that world. It‘s much harder for sound companies to just lay off people in Germany (though not impossible).

I don't think it's productive or wise to speculate on decisions that restrict the free association of people. Outside of narrow circumstances, an employer should not be legally required to employ someone any more than an employee should be legally required to work at the company.
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