Silicon Valley layoffs are a reminder that your job won’t love you back
vox.com
vox.com
I think I made the defection a decade ago when I, getting older, started taking an exercise break in the middle of the day — at first running for 20 to 30 minutes (later that became 20-30 minute walks as my knees got bad).
It seems a little odd that I should feel guilt about popping out for a half-hour each day to exercise. Perhaps the guilt was with regard to my co-workers who were still slaving away back at the bit-mill while I took in the sun and breeze of Cupertino. To be sure, I knew of some employees that popped off to take advantage of the gym that Apple provided. (I don't think I judged them per se — maybe wondered to myself how they coped with their own guilt, ha ha.)
But guilt is certainly what I felt and I think it took my aging and concern for my health that made me decide that there were a few things more important than my job. But this was maybe the first moment when I consciously thought, "Yeah, this is just a job; they don't really care about my health; I'm going to do this for me."
Acceptable Risk: I'm working my ass of for a company which has promise and the work i'm doing here is directly valuable and is teaching me many things. Even if this doesn't work out i would have been richer for having experienced it.
UnAcceptable Risk: At my big corp, i've worked 50 tickets this year at almost burnout pace while my coworkers only worked 25 (aren't i the man?)
So losing your job isn't just losing your livelihood - it affects social life, social standing, and even health.
When people ask "what do you do?" they are also asking for your professional affiliation and social status.
It's considered shameful to lose your job or be unemployed, which can certainly affect your mental and emotional health as well as social relationships.
I have the skills and resources to work in a crafting/cottage industry. However, I know a number of people who work in various cottage industries (massage therapy, tailoring, art). They all make significantly less than I do. The work is also often extremely unstable.
I don't have the resources or knowhow to start a business in a capital intensive industry like manufacturing or trucking.
the alternative is not chasing super high compensation packages and hustle culture copmanies but picking an employer who is oriented towards long term steady growth, low debt, fiscal responsibility, and so on. Plenty of them exist, usually family run businesses, even in the software industry. What we here in Germany call the Mittelstand.
I have seen much more German software engineers move to the US than vice versa, and there’s a reason for that.
There are many reasons for people to move countries for work, and they are not clear indicators of better relative pay or conditions, necessarily.
I don't know about Germany so I can't say what the situation is there, but the flow of migrant workers is a very unconvincing form of argument.
For a good portion of the US that's decent money. Now some areas of software you're going to see a little better, often, but not much.
In probably 80%+ of the country (at least geographically), it's 80-140k for experienced technical people. IT tends to do worse, unless you're the kind of IT that's very technical.
Now at the top end of that ~$120-140k, it may seem nice (btw this is "FAANG money" for a good portion of the country... no really, as in, this is literally what FAANG pays top engineers in many regions outside silicon valley). I wouldn't call that typical, though.
In the US we also expect engineers to move into technical management in order to advance their salaries beyond low six figures, or less. You do sometimes see "super-technical" roles, but if they do it right you have to be REALLY good, experienced, and essential to the organization (one of their top 3-5 MVPs across the entire organization, not just the technical side). I wouldn't be shocked if such roles happened from time to time in Europe, too.
Maybe, we aren't so different, but I do notice my co-workers staring longingly at the compensation we get here... which is again, limited to a small subset of jobs; if they were in the US working for the same company it wouldn't be much better, but they could move to SV.
Of course it won't love you back if you won't even take your seat at the negotiating table. Duh.
What is wrong with loving computer programming? Or baking cakes? Or whatever?
The social institution (the corporation) is a coercive structure which removes your autonomy, and working on command makes people feel hollow and unfulfilled. In much the same way as you feel when living with a partner who doesn't love you. Kind of because that's what it is. Of course you need to live in the reality where you recognise that you are coerced in to submitting tot his social structure for survival, and it obvious that this is much better for your mental health than deluding yourself into thinking the nature of the social structure is kind and caring and you are just broken and unworthy.
Human connection, shared goals, working together, these are things which don't feel fundamentally coercive, hollow, and exploitative. It seems self-evident that the only way you can make an institution that loves you back is by... (i mean, duh?) making an institution that loves you back (ie. that treats people decently). In our culture, unions are the only chance working people have at creating institutions based on mutual support, solidarity, and providing the opportunity to take back some autonomy over their working lives and create decent working conditions for themselves.
To other posters on the thread, the fact your union sucks is very much like the fact your democracy sucks. You have to ask the question: if we sit here complaining and waiting for it to be fixed, who will come along and fix that for us? Perhaps god will swoop down from the sky, or the BatMan? Or perhaps these institutions simply need your input if they are going to have a chance of functioning in the way you want them to function.
We should recognize the incentives of all the groups at the negotiating table and act accordingly.
Or tl;dr, if that wasn't their function, then what are you creating them for? If not for that, then its because you don't have that as a goal. So the question seems tautological under the assumption that you are a participant in a union that is democratically organised (and you don't hate yourself haha).
The fact that they haven't achieved 100% of all desirable social goals, to me, is a pretty strong indication that the labour movement is as vital as ever. And not a done deal that we inherited from prior generations and that requires zero care or maintenance.
By the way, I speak from a European perspective.