Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was.
Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is just slavery, plain and simple
Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".
And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
Within tech specifically: I do think it's true that software employers shift and change their rhetoric and/or practices to meet the (sometimes entitled) demands of developers.
But some of the issues silicon valley tech firms are relentlessly unwilling to move on are ones around unionization and collective bargaining.
If employees are truly creating the market, and it's the companies that have to work to attract and retain them, then why are employers so fearful of anything except individual bargaining?
For people who are all of: confident, socially mobile (few family/social ties to bind them) and physically in good health you are probably absolutely correct. But I would wager that setting those expectations across entire populations doesn't scale.
""" And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. """ You are joining another one that has the same common goal.
""" And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce. """ Please tell that to the Amazon's warehouse workers who had to piss in a bottle, because they don't want a slippage in their quota.
Especially when they use phrases like "back breaking work".
It mainly indicates a severe lack of perspective.
Mercy.
I was raised in a generation that you had to prove you could in fact, do the work.
I appreciate and enjoy their confidence, and don't much care for what you might call "being entitled", though I can see this will become a protected phrase in the near future.
The word you're looking for is rape.
If working a cushy tech job is slavery then what would be working at a sand mine in cameroon called ?
1. cannot take a couple of days off, without informing their boss much in advance
2. cannot work on something in their off time, on their own computers without employer claiming ownership of it (I am talking specifically about software here)
3. cannot take a unpaid month off, to travel or just rest, for example without losing their jobs
4. have no hope of receiving pension, decent medical benefits etc
5. have no good way of progressing in their career, without having to play bullshit office politics
6. have no concept of maternal, paternal leave, beyond the token few days which is a joke
and so on...
Yes, it is slavery. Compared to Cameroon, this is much better, cushier, comfortable slavery, but it is still slavery, aka wage slavery. We have been brainwashed so much about work, being a good citizen etc etc, that most of us can't even recognize that we give away the best years of our lives in return for a car, a small house and some money - and this is just the lucky ones, most of us don't get even that.
Both are slavery, just different forms of it. Yes, one of them is much better than the other, but they are both slavery.
I suggest some travel in your near future.
Google offers unpaid time off, 12 weeks of maternal and paternal leave (more if you are a birth parent), is generally on the more flexible side of IP rights for a US company, provides decent medical benefits, and has a promo system through committees explicitly to minimize the amount of politicking one needs to do.
Had your dad expected to be promoted every 2 years like this guy, after 33 years he would have been CEO of the company. It is real that a lot of people today expect to get promoted fast for only doing their job.
Ask your dad what would he think if his job had all the perks that Google and FB give, including relative salary. You will see that it will sound like heaven for him. Why not just stay working there?
Working is not slavery, you work for money to do what you want.
You have a bad boss, can happen. Change jobs and it's done