31–40 of 105 posts
Microsoft definitely does underpay the market significantly! Like 60% of what other companies of the same level pay, unless you're in the Copilot org. Maybe you'll get a little bit higher.
What companies do you think are at that level?
Amazon is in the same ballpark AFAIK, but the other two have noticeably better comp. The "Microsoft deal", such as it is, was that it's a place where you don't have to grind hard. This has changed now though.
I never took implicit “they pay less but it’s more chill” culture stories seriously. You can classify certain job functions this way more readily than company wide cultures.
I wish people were not so adverse to unions. The company will never be your friend. You will almost never have much leverage over what the company wants to do. The information you have will most likely be very asymmetrical to what the company has insight into, putting you at a disadvantage. Unions are imperfect. Unions will have its own inside politics. You will pay a union fee. I think humans are fundamentally flawe…
Most financial advisors tell you to keep a rainy day fund with a 3-6 month runway. Given what's been happening in the tech industry and the economy at large, I now keep a 1-year emergency fund in a money-market fund at 4% (Fidelity SPAXX). I'm probably losing out on some growth (SP500 grew 11% over the past year, despite the massive drop in April 2025), but at least I have liquidity in case I get laid off. That's the…
Same! Still good that you can get 4% on a risk free investment these days
> But something shifted. The powers that be realized an anxiety riddle fearful workforce can get stuff done too just fine as long as they don’t have a better option and you dangle the occasional carrot. So as long as all corporations move roughly in lockstep you can drastically change conditions without much consequences It’s a bit like the first big news website implementing a paywall was outrageous and deemed suici…
Aside from that, there's also the matter of fewer people tasked with the same amount of things. The official line on that is that AI makes the remaining employees more productive. The reality is that it's nowhere near good enough for many products, so it just means overworked people making more mistakes and burning out faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions don’t prevent layoffs. You’re bound by a union contract which will include conditions for layoffs. Unions can prevent overwork and burn out. They cannot prevent layoffs.
Unions can't (always) make an unprofitable company profitable, but they can prevent fake layoffs that aren't actually warranted by the company's economic condition, like the kind the article is talking about.
Indeed, I think their major trick (in America, anyway) is to make a profitable company unprofitable. Much like the bad forms of private equity from above, they bleed a business dry from below.
I wish people were not so adverse to unions. The company will never be your friend. You will almost never have much leverage over what the company wants to do. The information you have will most likely be very asymmetrical to what the company has insight into, putting you at a disadvantage. Unions are imperfect. Unions will have its own inside politics. You will pay a union fee. I think humans are fundamentally flawe…
Software developers have enjoyed decades of high demand for their skills and the companies that hired them have enjoyed decades of an abundance of capital against a low interest rate. You didn't need a union because you had leverage due to the demand for your skills and companies didn't need to be particularly efficient. This was a time where companies were hiring talented developers just to deny them to their compet…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still waiting for the Apple shoe to drop. Has Apple just not been as expansionist as these other companies? Or is it still coming?
Apple is famous for keeping a huge war chest and not reinvesting it, right?
I wish people were not so adverse to unions. The company will never be your friend. You will almost never have much leverage over what the company wants to do. The information you have will most likely be very asymmetrical to what the company has insight into, putting you at a disadvantage. Unions are imperfect. Unions will have its own inside politics. You will pay a union fee. I think humans are fundamentally flawe…
The amount of unioned workers keep decreasing because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced. I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy. The consolidation of patents in other engineering fields has killed the industry in the US.
Sorry, you misspelled "decades of Republicans disassembling labor protections and enacting garbage like right to work laws, corporations hiring thugs like the Pinkertons to break up and discourage them, and conservative media spewing lies to discourage membership".
Microsoft definitely does underpay the market significantly! Like 60% of what other companies of the same level pay, unless you're in the Copilot org. Maybe you'll get a little bit higher.