This is just history repeating itself, like with the 2.0 web bubble. Cheap money is dumb money. Dumb money is scaredy-cat money.
Let's not pretend that we aren't heading bal...erm I mean, head-first into a recession.
Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
161–170 of 469 posts
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#162So big tech has 220,000 layoffs and there is not the merest hint of a blip in the unemployment rate. This is not a tragedy - these people are going to find jobs, good jobs. In fact it's quite likely that they will go into roles which might do something other than online advertising. You know, something useful.
Big tech layoffs should work differently than most industries and may not impact unemployment as much. Big tech employees a lot of H1B visas holders. If they cannot quickly find a new job, they will have to leave the country.
On an individual level, I really feel bad for anyone put in that positions. I can't imagine how stressful that would be for anyone going through that. I wouldn't want anyone to go through that.
Taking the emotion out of it and looking at a macro level though, I think the program has been abused by big tech to bring in workers who have less bargaining power and I'm all for it getting a bit of a reset. The purpose of the program is to bring in in-demand, high skill workers that employers cannot find in the US. If these employees cannot find other jobs quickly, it makes me question how in-demand their skills actually were.
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the last decade or so, there were several times I brought this up on HN (anonymously), and each time my opinion was attacked as not making any sense. Times change.
I've been making pithy comments about tech bro unionization on the orange site for years now and I know exactly what you're talking about. Anything that even smelled like worker solidarity was shot down with vacuous logic about how the 10x engineers in big tech can't possibly be asked to associate with a lowly web master in a fly-over state. Then suddenly today I said something and instantly got 100 upvotes...
Vacuous: "having or showing a lack of thought or intelligence; mindless."
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people on HN think of themselves as "top talent" (a barf phrase if there ever was one) and convinced themselves that they would be the ones held back by a union.
As a developer without any formal education (I dropped out of high school) my worry is that unions will be used to enforce credentialism.
I wouldn't worry about that. There are literally too many people with your background for this too matter.
I think there will be a form of credential-ism and it will continue to be similar to the tech interview.
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#165So big tech has 220,000 layoffs and there is not the merest hint of a blip in the unemployment rate. This is not a tragedy - these people are going to find jobs, good jobs. In fact it's quite likely that they will go into roles which might do something other than online advertising. You know, something useful.
How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the last decade or so, there were several times I brought this up on HN (anonymously), and each time my opinion was attacked as not making any sense. Times change.
Short term is still good for engineers: - The economics of supply and demand will swing back to software engineers in the short term, because there aren't enough of us to power every tech company's product roadmap on their desired timeline. - Laid off workers will start new companies that will threaten the companies that laid them off. - The macro environment will swing back eventually to favor fast growth. Long term…
This has been happening for decades. The only maybe novel side of the story is that post COVID, there may be a hope that remote workers are paid at least respectable wages vs their head office peers living in extraordinarily expensive cities.
That hurts the developed cities and countries more than the individuals though. Expect a lot of heat out of civic conferences the next few years as they start to re-assess their budgets/roles.
Some equalization is only fair in the end. Your output / cost should be the same as any other. Not all developing economies have talent that can fit these companies today, but there's no reason that can't change tomorrow.
The major gap from my perspective is fair and equitable ways of gauging performance (tech specifically but in general).
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think unions bring anything to the table for Tech workers that can't be done without one. Us workers already have Universal protections and job security while striking even if they're not in a union.
> Us workers already have Universal protections and job security while striking even if they're not in a union. No need for sick time, huh. Mat leave, pat leave. Generally US worker protections are some of the weakest in the developed world. So yeah I mean it's possible that these can be achieved without unionization, they definitely haven't been. A lot of those protections you allude to were actually obtained becaus…
We are specifically talking about tech workers here. They generally do have extensive sick time and leave policies.
>So yeah I mean it's possible that these can be achieved without unionization, they definitely haven't been.
Maybe I'm missing something, but almost all big tech companies have these and never had a union.
>The weekend, and not locking workers in leading to them burning to death in downtown New York are all thanks to organized labor.
When was the last time US programmers were locked in an office? I have never heard of this as a big issue.
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#168I’ve never worked for Big Tech, I’ve never even worked in one of the big tech hubs (Bay Area, anywhere in California, Seattle, Austin, NY, etc.), but I do have a hefty 6 figure salary because of the tech workers in those areas. My worry is my company will start to look at laying us off so they can replace us with laid off tech workers at a much lower rate.
I don't think you need to worry too much - those laid off workers are coming off hot SF salaries. Most of them won't really be at a "lower rate." A 5-year Googler laid off from $300k+ TC isn't going to just up and move to a low-COL area and displace someone for $100k-$150k.
I gather there are a lot of smaller companies in the tech hubs that are happy to pay $200k+ for a former FAANG'er, and moving is hard - most people won't want to move, so they'll probably stick around in the tech hubs. And now that remote-for-everyone has transitioned into remote-for-some-hybrid-for-most, I don't think the tech workforce is as location-fluid as some might expect.
Basically I think most people who aren't FAANG'ers, living outside the hubs and making "ok" money, are probably safe from getting displaced by the layoffs. A huge amount of the layoffs aren't even really coders, lots of recruiters/HR/support staff and so on are part of this, since they were making boatloads too but for arguably more replaceable work.
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#169Guess tech workers should have unionized when they had the chance. As if capital was going to let the most powerful group of workers that's ever existed continue to slip their noose
In the last decade or so, there were several times I brought this up on HN (anonymously), and each time my opinion was attacked as not making any sense. Times change.
There has always been a large (or very vocal) part of the HN userbase that’s very anti-union.
I can’t say why with certainty, but I suspect it’s the veneration of the idea of the mythical “10x zero to one founder” that single-handedly props up the sky and produces billions of dollars of value for their (equally venerable) VC “partners”.
It’s kind of a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” phenomenon that I love to watch on here.
Re: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power
#170This claim violates Hanlon’s Razor “Never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.” Over-hiring, over-salarying and not anticipating the consequences of a pandemic and post-pandemic on business might qualify as “incompetence” The thing that bothers me is this tone I'm seeing online and in particular in this discussion where people presume that a salary is owed no matter what, and t…
> “Never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.” In the cutthroat randian landscape of the US business, it is the opposite: “Never attribute to incompetence, that which can adequately be explained by malice.” Incompetence, neglience, oversight etc are concepts frequently employed by the corporations to escape not only public opinion backlash, but also actually escape legal conseq…
That's fair. Claiming "we didn't know the consequences" (while those consequences weren't completely impossible to predict and coincidentally benefited the defendant) would be one possible strategy.