221–230 of 469 posts
I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing. Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strateg…
I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing. Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strateg…
You realize more than a decade ago a cartel of tech companies (two of which being Google and Apple) literally had no poach agreements in order to suppress salaries right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
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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...
It's a mixed bag... when your near the ceiling for a given area, it's harder to think about scaling back. These past few months in tech have been really reminding me of the .com bust in 2000-2002, where a lot of the big tech companies scaled back, others fell over (mostly coastal areas) and about a year later it hit secondary cities (Phoenix, SLC, Houston, etc)... I was pretty much unable to find anything for about 6…
A union doesn't necessarily have to negotiate maximum ceiling salaries. It doesn't have to negotiate salaries at all. It can just be an entity to prevent the company from letting you go just because the numbers look 2% better.
I think the best of both worlds is when the union only negotiates a minimum salary.
I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing. Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strateg…
1. Big tech would be willing to burn billions of dollars to crush any chance of tech unions forming.
2. Big tech is known to collude (even to conspire! ) to keep tech wages depressed.
3. Big tech’s biggest cost, by a huge margin, is labor; any reductions there could easily dwarf other shareholder-appeasing cost cutting measures.
4. Tech worker salaries have skyrocketed since they lost their collusion lawsuit, and the general sense among big tech workers was (in most cases) “they need me more than I need them, I could find another amazing job no problem by just responding to one of the many recruiters badgering me on LinkedIn”.
Speaking just for google, 6 months ago all the internal forums were obsessed with the idea that SWEs were underpaid, that google should give raises to match inflation, and that google no longer paid top of market. Today I’m pretty sure 100% of the top posts on the biggest internal forum are about layoffs - how random they seemed, how anxious people are to see if they’re going to be cut, and how vastly their perception of the company has changed. If this writer’s take is close, it seems like it kinda worked.
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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 b illionaire” phenomenon that I love to w…
It's not very surprising though. Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian. VCs doing zero labour and getting rich off the backs of workers is a phenomena that cant easily be defended unless you buy into this ideology.
For example, libertarians have been screaming from the rooftops about needing a flat tax for the longest time. Know what would accelerate socialist reforms in the US faster than any other?
A flat tax.
Public sentiment would turn on a dime as soon as people saw how much they were getting screwed.
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I'm not sure that they have changed. People brought it up before and people are bringing it up now and they'll continue bringing it up. I think the tech workers are generally still opposed to the idea
The reaction I got from previous pithy comments on unionization in past years vs. the reaction I got today from a pithy comment about unionization is absolutely night and day. The volume and pace of upvotes was eye popping and the comments have actually been discussing the merits of unionization and the realities of big tech as a labor force instead of incoherent screeching about the benevolence of FAANG
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You do not have to divulge the basis of your departure from a company. "Creative differences".
hiring managers are not that dumb ... if you prior job is amazon, and you are applying for a new job 2 months after 18K have been laid off - they can put 2 and 2 together pretty easily. Even if you did leave on your own accord, they will likely assume you were let go. It's almost always easier to get a new job, when you still have one.
This 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…
Look at Amazon now with outright fraud happening, Amazon being a market for knockoffs, and the goto fence for thieves and stickup kids. Again, if that was a local business they would be so hit and management would be risking jail time.
It seems like corporations are given this pass everywhere, yet average Americans get called as shills for just wanting basic corporate accountability.
So 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.
Unemployment doesn’t show laid off employees who aren’t yet collecting unemployment benefits. These tech workers got at least 60 days of severance thanks to the warn act.
And that's assuming all those 220,000 were laid off in the US which they were not.
Right before COVID-19 stay at home order in Chicago, a bunch of improvisers who preformed at the popular i.o theater put together a list of demands which basically asked for a bunch of changes to make the lives of performers better. They were not going to perform until those changes were made. The owner didnt respond for a few days and then said, "Hey! Heard you. Great valid concerns. But I'm actually shutting the th…
I mean isn't that default position? Everyone has to go into situations like this with eyes open. If there was no risk to striking or demanding better working conditions, it wouldn't be as rare as it is. I think everyone is aware that by default "the companies" have more power than the individual or the worker class. What's unusual is that in 2021 the balance shifted for a little while for the privileged tech worker c…
One thing I like about government offices is that the people most motivated to live in insane bureaucracies, punch a card, act entitled, and hurt customers go to work for them. At least it exits a large fraction of nightmare employees from the private sector pool.