This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing.
It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.
But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.
And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.
And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.