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That is why software engineers also need unions. (but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)
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> Preventing efficiency in markets slows growth, which slows the progression of living standards.
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Not sure of your familiarity with FAANG pre-2022, but this is absolutely not the norm.
Can you elaborate? I've been working in tech for 15 years and FAANG for 5. We've always had layoffs.
(I am deeply curious what valhalla you are at that skipped this so much that it was a foreign idea! N or A, it must be one of those two)
https://www.nerdwallet.com/finance/learn/tech-layoffs
https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1ljvpr4/where_all_...
https://progresschamber.org/insights/tech-has-shed-nearly-20...
https://www.washington.edu/news/2025/05/14/tech-industry-lay...
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There's no unions for H1B workers. If there's any union stepping up for their interest, it would find mass enrollment tomorrow. Unfortunately, there isn't support by non-h1b engineers, let alone unions.
I am a non-h1b engineer and I declare it is in my best interest to advocate for h1-b engineers. Otherwise management would simply calculate why would they hire me and treat me well when they can hire a more desperate h1b holder and treat them like trash.
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It's not some global conspiracy, it just aligns with the end of the ZIRP era. Companies could ignore headcount and hire endlessly just to singla growth to investors, while free money was raining from the sky.
Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. That is, they made so much money they couldn't find any way to spend over five BILLION per month even with this 'excess' headcount.
Or is this like the old Soviet Union thing where people said they pretended to pay us and we pretended to work?
That is why software engineers also need unions. (but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)
Unions are only going to be effective in a domain where the job can’t be done just as well by someone on the other side of the planet. Think plumbers, electricians, etc. The fact that the work has to be done “here and now” is the leverage those workers have. A software engineer’s union would just kick whatever offshoring is happening into overdrive.
https://www.professionalsaustralia.org.au/Professionals/Prof...
United Kingdom:
https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers/
https://www.unitetheunion.org/what-we-do/unite-in-your-secto...
France: (Someone asking which of the many unions to join for SWE)
https://www.reddit.com/r/union/comments/1bcx6z6/which_union_...
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That’s just another way of admitting that H1-B was always about lowering costs rather than lack of talent.
It's comments like this that make those of us who are of immigrant origins or the children of immigrants indifferent to losses even if we are impacted as well. Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off. If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k…
However that doesn't mean that the real political support for masses of H1-Bs was ever about talent. It was about lowering labor costs by semi-exploiting large numbers of immigrants willing to work insane hours knowing they'd loose their visa's otherwise.
There's also lots of talented American's here by immigration or born here who were affected by all developer salaries being suppressed by the big H1-B visa abusers.
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There's no unions for H1B workers. If there's any union stepping up for their interest, it would find mass enrollment tomorrow. Unfortunately, there isn't support by non-h1b engineers, let alone unions.
Not everywhere is in America you know... And non-H1B workers are probably precisely the kinds of workers that should be the ones rocking the boat.
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What makes you think this is on top of some other layoff process?
I’ll say that the parent comment is correct and explain why I think it’s correct. Amazon has demonstrated a preference for “unregretted attrition” (URA). URA is the name for what happens when engineers exit the company and Amazon is happy that they do. The exit can either be due to a PIP failure (performance improvement plan) or just unhappiness with the company. If you believe URA works well, then URA is how Amazon…
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I’ll say that the parent comment is correct and explain why I think it’s correct. Amazon has demonstrated a preference for “unregretted attrition” (URA). URA is the name for what happens when engineers exit the company and Amazon is happy that they do. The exit can either be due to a PIP failure (performance improvement plan) or just unhappiness with the company. If you believe URA works well, then URA is how Amazon…
Meta also does something like 5% in unregretted attrition a year. I just don't know why you think AMZN wouldn't include those people in layoffs preferentially to higher performers.
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This is not a conspiracy theory, even though what I'm about to say will sound like it. If you can talk to someone from the exec class in confidence (which unfortunately may require a close personal relationship or high trust), they'll tell you there was a clear -- if somewhat tacit -- understanding that the job market had gotten too hot during Covid and something "had to be done" about it after ZIRP ended. Elon's lay…
Responding to identical market conditions in similar ways based on input from overlapping shareholders does not require collusion between execs.
"Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead."
When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually getting rather bad amongst the employees and from a product quality / safety perspective, the response was, "It doesn't matter. They've all decided the status quo must change and decided that they want to do the same things."
This rhymes with what I heard from other senior people as well. And suspiciously the same anti-employee tactics have been happening across the industry at the same time -- layoffs, forced attrition, shifting jobs offshore, RTO, increased workloads with reducing headcount leading to record levels of burnout...
Even if we charitably assume it's group-think, that's still a form of collusion.