You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company.
You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company".
Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay.
In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.
This is a reasonable ask. It's easily addressable - build a notice period into the offers (for example, if you've been with the company more than a year, you get at least 4 weeks notice).
The problem with any sort of exclusive guild is that it becomes more difficult to break into, which is bad for a growing industry.
The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce than individual employees.
In other countries the notice periods are written in law. But then again, do we really want to wait(& trust) for the govt which is heavily lobbied by FAANG to legislate this? Isn't it more efficient to organize and demand your terms from the employer.
It's the same. If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.
Heck, any smart company might do it voluntarily to make it harder for their employees to be poached by other companies that only offer a fire-at-will employment (the legal default).
A few posts on Medium/Substack might catalyze this change.
Yes definitely they will.."today". Companies don't need to do anything special if supply overtakes demand. We feel we are special today only because IT is still relatively a new field and the demand still outweighs supply.
But the rate at which universities across the world are churning out CS grads and the increasing focus on automation, supply will definitely overtake demand. And when that happens we will end up in the same predicament as other professions. At that point, companies don't have to cave in to the demands from their employees or the people they want to hire.
It’s one of the reasons we see layoffs during a time of record profits. It’s easy to turn humans out to boost the profit margin and the stock value.
But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.
I thought the goal was for people to make a good living and have good working conditions - most SV/hi-tech types have those things already, so why should they care that the union doesn't exist or doesn't have power?
I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.
The end goal is to balance the power dynamic between capital owners and the labor. As of today especially in US, the labor has little to none bargaining power and capital owners have infinite power to even influence govt.
The only reason we had relatively higher salaries than other fields "till now" is because of lower supply/demand ratio and it's still a relatively new profession than others. This ratio will eventually balance out and when it happens we will be left with no bargaining power.
>> I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.
We're definitely not getting our fair share of the value we produce and that's just theft to me.
The words "middle class" use this slight of hand. Anyone who is not literally burger flipping can be called "middle class" simply by pointing at the people below them. Politicians regularly use it [1]. The proportion doesn't matter if people don't ask. If people knew the proportions, that'd be bad. So please also never talk about your salary with anyone but your closest partner, and never ask how much your executive makes.
The two classes that are important are capital-owning and worker. Even the best paid workers are disposable (see this thread, or Google layoffs) and will never be close to accumulating the wealth someone with generational wealth has. The difference is simply too big. No laying off the avocado toast will fix this. The mobility between those two classes is non-existent, aside from freak accidents.
> The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the already-wealthy ghouls who cry about how workers don’t do enough for their paychecks.
Additionally, it’s a straw man argument to say that everyone who is being let go currently at a time of record profits is just being a lay about. It’s easy to say until it happens to you, and it shouldn’t. People—our neighbors and fellow humans—deserve better treatment than to be cast aside to make the stock price rise again.
Some people have been hard at work on products that were never great, but the direction they took came from leadership. That’s as much a strawman argument, but it belabors the point that making broad judgements on a group is the wrong way to go about taking a position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
I wouldn’t really say it’s a cloak of victimhood as much as a disillusionment of those that aren’t acknowledging they’re labor is being exploited combined with the fact that attempting to organize can be met with a loss of work.
Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by attempting to organize.
The excuses really are endless in this business.
Sounds like they had a great need to organize, and they were able to— I’m trying to extract patterns that could be applied to other organizations. Do you have any insights on that, or would you simply like to dunk on the out of touch techies that have it oh-so-good?
> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer ...
I used to think we (high tech labor) didn't need unions (you can actually find comments of mine here on HN several years ago arguing that.) Then this crazy and illegal scheme came to light. Now I think that we need something, maybe not a union per se, but something, to "flex [our] considerable latent power", eh?
The thing that really grosses me out about the "no-poaching" collusion is that Apple, at least, famously has more money than Scrooge MacDuck yet still actively and stridently worked to rip off their own people.
The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...
(not to mention how much U.S. software developers benefit from an overly restrictive immigration policy which limits programmer supply)
Expressing for 2.5 years that we’re able to work from anywhere, then immediately saying “well actually come back in for a day… or 2… now come back in everyday” is a misuse of power because the workers have no say in the conversation, the only option is to express your discontent and leave.
Abuse doesn’t have to mean they’re hitting us, but it can mean a misuse of power which is one of the main points of the article.
The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations
That is such a naive perspective of the world. These are businesses and their goal is to make as much money as possible. That means they strive to be as efficient as possible. I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.
Personally I think it comes from many of these people being young (under about 33-35), and having worked almost their entire careers in a booming economy where things always went up in a straight line; you would need to have about 15 years working as an adult to have lived thru the last big down cycle in 2008.
The idea that a company can produce a product without caring about the quality of how the product is produced is laughable in any Econ 101 classroom. Additionally there are plenty of models of businesses in the US and Europe where the labor force is included in business decisions.
Your idea that the people making a living from building a product want to destroy it and their own livings, are some how not aligned with the customers—who want a good product and will return if it is good—is completely without logic or knowledge of market economics.
When that's all you've got, arbitrary layoffs to boost market cap are the side effects.
Look here, kids, go ask those graybeards you laugh at behind their backs what it was like during the dotcom bust.
The heirs who own the majority of most of the FAANG stock created none of the wealth, did none of the work. These rich kids of Instagram never worked, never will - nor did their parents, nor did their parents.
So your argument is the workers creating the wealth should fork over the amount of surplus labor value to these heirs, that is being expropriated.
What about these parasitical heirs you are arguing for? The ones who live off the dividend check wealth created by those who work? "I can't even begin to comprehend your POV". If the worker creating wealth keeping it is an entitled attitude, what is the attitude of these parasitical heirs who do not work?