41–50 of 434 posts
All it takes is a handful of big investors demanding it. It doesn't take very many people to agree that the tech workers are getting uppity and need to be taught a lesson about their replacability, if it is the right people. Nor does it really take a conspiracy, because as the author points out, many of those people are quite open about it.
For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood. The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from. The WGA, for example, allows the…
Those guilds are incredibly hard to break into. They're also why Georgia has been able to mop up all of the non union work. For better or for worse, they do their job but out of state scabs are a huge problem keeping industry work in LA.
Tech doesn’t need to copy Hollywood exactly (nor should it), but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.
In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst employees of bigtech which are now basically blue-chips like the GE and GM of old and now employ all kinds of people.
One consequence of this, I think, is that it is increasingly the case that the employees of a business and the leaders of that business don't really understand each other. Without moralizing either side, it is the case that there is a lot of misapprehension regarding what makes the other side tick.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but absent one we may see conflict in the form of both labor organization (from the workers) as well as more selective hiring (from the bosses).
For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood. The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from. The WGA, for example, allows the…
Not suggesting that "big tech" doesn't have advantages, but overall, there's an entire world of software development outside of those companies where developers can contract, compete from other countries, and companies are free to hire all sorts of contract labor free of control. You don't even need a college education to do most of the work in our industry.
For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood. The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from. The WGA, for example, allows the…
There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable industry they'll rack up high compensation as a matter of course, even in the most highly competitive, merit-based environment. That's why archaic and even medieval institutions such as guilds only make things worse by hobbling the industry.
During most of 2017 you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a journalist writing a major article about how tech workers were organizing, shaking off their chains, etc. Major foundations were going hat in hand to anyone who even mentioned workplace organizing, begging them to take their money. (I got turned down by one such foundation because I asked for a ~$80k budget; they told me my proposal would be accepted if I found a way to make it ten times bigger).
The part of this effort that I witnessed was met with a mix of derision and complete indifference. Programmers and designers were eager to cheerlead their colleagues in food service unionizing, but didn't want to make the slightest effort to safeguard their own status as the most pampered workforce in the country. Arguments that the gravy train could not last, and that they were creating the tools to automate away their own very lucrative future, fell on deaf ears. I am a highly apathetic guy, and yet even I was astonished by the level of apathy.
Now the good times are ending, a future of limitless high-wage programming jobs seems less secure, and people are justifiably mad. But fairness demands some of the victims of the current round of layoffs also go look in the mirror.
(* 'organize' here means use the pretty robust framework of US labor law to achieve some shared goal. Many people take it as a synonym for 'unionize', but there is no requirement that concerted workplace action result in a traditional union. You might just organize to secure a specific goal, like a board seat for employees, specific rules for doing layoffs, or equal treatment of H1-B colleagues.)
Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
When that's all you've got, arbitrary layoffs to boost market cap are the side effects.
Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
> The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the already-wealthy ghouls who cry about how workers don’t do enough for their paychecks.
I fear we're missing a bigger contextual change in the cost/benefit calculation that these people are making in regards to layoffs. For over a decade it was an absolute survival related imperative for these companies to hire as many people as possible , and to keep them from going to their competition. Google was so afraid of competition in the ads space that they bought entire companies for hundreds millions, and pa…
>Isn't Google worried that among the people it lays off (or fails to hire) there's someone who will finally conjure up a company that finally effectively takes marketshare from AdWords or Ad Exchange or whatever? From my experience working at FAANG, most of the developers working at these companies are the same skill as anywhere else, they just managed to pass the interview by studying and prepping for it slightly mo…
The really useful people at Google were the SREs.
In any case, its beside the point. The distribution of quality of the talent doesn't so much matter as the fact that Google & others wanted to hoard it all.