Also, there are very few exceptional leaders and there's some degree of copycatting here.
But what do I know.
While you're arguing class warfare, I think it is worth asking whether the "serfs" (dictionary: "an agricultural laborer bound under the feudal system to work on their lord's estate") at Meta are working on things that improve society... Isn't the typical developer at Meta making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year making systems that are destructive to the social fabric and cohesion of society?
So far, the arguments against that I’ve seen have been hypotheticals and boogeymen.
Tons of farmers supplied the compost that Haber-Bosch used to perfect their way of making amonia, later used to make hydrogen cyanide (a pesticide later used in late 30s germany for non farming purposes)
You can be a serf and be a necesary cog in a machine for destructive purposes.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars a year still keeps those devs much closer to a homeless person than to any single Billionaire. A rich serf, is still a serf.
I hate to be argumentative, but you really need to educate yourself on serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
You aren't, thats a nitpick not an argument
> you really need to educate yourself on serfdom
Sure, I could make a long explanation about middle engalnd feudal titles and how despite our modern conception of most poor people as serfs, a middle class of Franklin existed, that comprised the kind of freemason associations that now still exist in the City of London as Guilds, although most are currently NGOs and charities some still work on their original mission.
Or I could use serf as "non ruling class" following the comment I replied to, because that is how OP used it. Although technically he probably meant peasant as that was the class which no land whether serf or just labourers, I understood what he meant and replied tongue in cheekly about how some farming chemist aided the nazis, I say tongue in cheek because I made the farming connection to serfs
Hopefully the analogy works for you now that is being laid out.
But, looking at this another way, when you make an example of a highly compensated, in demand worker (like a senior SW engineer), what message does that send to everyone else without the same qualifications?
The idea that facebook developers are “the working class” engaged in a class struggle to overcome oppression is just.. wow way out there! The struggle exists but it’s not at Meta engineering.
EDIT: I’m not saying layoffs aren’t mean/stupid/preventable. I’m only saying that it’s not oppression or class struggle. I can’t understand that people can write this stuff on HN while living in a country where it’s legal to pay restaurant staff below minimum wage cause hey tips amirite. There’s plenty class struggle in America, let alone the world, but not a whole lot of it at Meta.
Context: I live in $NOT_BAY_AREA and the amount of money you folks make while complaining as if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker really rubs me the wrong way. It seems to me that Bay Area tech people (or at least the ones in this thread) lost all sense of reality.
I get that getting fired is stressful but if your skillset is in such high demand as tech skills are in SFBA, it’s not class struggle.
I don’t disagree that layoffs like these are stupid, preventable and maybe even mean, I merely disagree that it’s oppression. It hurts the people who do get oppressed and not paid a living wage.
All people who sell their labor are in the worker class, period. Pretending that being paid a token amount to feel special and make them see fellow workers as not in the same boat is unhelpful.
The serf analogy makes sense for low-income Americans who essentially have to pay more to the capital class: payday loans, cannot afford bulk discounts due to low cash reserves, rent vs buy, crippling debt, etc
FB white collar workers are literally the capital class, eg, paid in RSUs and LI profiles advertising as angel investors
The only reason I am writing this is it's super disheartening to start the day with seeing engineers not understanding how historically lucky they are, and much more importantly, how rotten the situation is for their neighbors. "Tell me you and your family have never struggled without.."
As a historical note, most Americans are taught enough empathy to not joke about slavery. But guess what: serfdom was happening around the same time, has a lot of violent similarities, and also has descendants who are not thrilled by it. But don't let this distract from my primary point about misunderstanding that technologists are the gentry here, not the serfs, in this terrible analogy.
Contrast this with a person with many millions or billions in wealth. That person literally does not ever need another paycheck to live. In other words, they do not need to work to live, unlike a typical worker making wages.
What does that mean?
The 300K is the paycheck (annualized). It's what they use to pay expenses to live. If the paycheck goes away you no longer can pay those expenses.
i.e. of course they need the paycheck to live.
Are you suggesting someone who made 300K once can now retire instantly and never again need a paycheck? It doesn't feel like the above quote is fully thought through.
Now, sure, if they've been making 300K for a couple decades, hopefully they've stashed away enough to eventually retire. But that's a very different statement.
I don't think it's really surprising that most of tech thinks wealth inequality is not about them while being in the 1%.
Or moving and driving up prices in places with much lower median incomes so they can have a better quality of living.
It's the amorphous, abstract, system you see, not them. They are not part of the problem.
What is happening now seems to be a claim of not being rich at all, which is honestly just weird.
>the average one percent household in the larger San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City region makes a whopping $3.5 million plus.
You can also use the average instead of the median, and get a much higher required income for the top 1% :)
The median household (ie entire family) income in the US is 70k. Even in california it's ~100k.
The point was clear - Tech is very wealthy, and believes they are just the random common person.
The senior software engineer at Meta has far more in common with a blue collar guy living paycheck to paycheck than he has with a CEO whose wealth grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.
I've said this before but the way I see it, almost all of us are N missed paychecks away from bankruptcy. For a lot of people, that N is 1, for some, it's 2 or 3, or even higher if you managed to save wisely. But we all have some number N. And the fact that we have that number should unite us against the few people on the far side of the derivative curve whose N is infinite. Tech workers had their relatively brief moment in the sun where their N was maybe 10-20, it got to our heads a little, and we started thinking we were "very different than a blue-collar worker".
The nice explanation is that if you’re doing well, you may be happy to pay lots of taxes so others can do well too.
The selfish explanation is that you want to live in a community with low crime and high trust, which requires a certain baseline living standard for everybody.
Only with the, in my experience uniquely American, idea that people can’t possibly be in against a policy or situation if they’re not immediately short-term personally hurt by it do you need this doublethink that tech staff at Meta are being oppressed.
No. The senior software engineer at Meta and the CEO can both afford a comfortable lifestyle. Yes the CEO can afford a more comfortable lifestyle, but they're still limited by things like health. The blue collar worker earning $30k a year is in a different position entirely.
I know both people who are very rich and people who are poor. The very rich and the senior-engineer types both live comfortable lives. Yes the very rich can have more luxuries if they so desire, but who cares? Not even they do...
The poor live a different life: Freezing winters without heating, 8°C inside their home. No access to warm water. Calculating cost vs calories for food they buy so they get the calories while spending as little as possible.
I'm perplexed by postings like this, HN should be rejoicing in these right-sizings and the maximization of opportunities for those no longer bound to such inefficiencies.
Plus if remote work really takes off, there's no need to crowd all those people into the downtown cores of a few cities anyway. It'd shift housing demand to cheaper, more naturally desirable locations.
What'll happen is that a few firms with ineffective cost structures will go bankrupt, a few major cities will become hollowed-out wastelands the way NYC was in the 1970s or Boston was in the 1950s, and economic growth will pick up in other areas, with new startups and new desirable hubs.
Except in SF or NYC, there aren't that many desirable "different locations" left. Which is why freeing up the poorly used space in city centers can be a net positive for society rather than keeping to maintain these white elephants.
Have you heard of sunk cost fallacy?
WFH is a loss of control. For some leaders, being a "boss" is more important than what's good for the business.
WFH also requires the right culture. I've seen it abused when I worked at Intel, and when Yahoo cracked down on it, the abuses were similar.
I should point out that I've predominately WFH for almost a decade; but it works because I'm trustworthy and I work for people who are managers instead of "bosses." In an environment where the workers aren't trustworthy, or the management structure is more about being a "boss," it won't work.
It's most definitely about money, all the way.
Do you have stats? Or do you even have one good and compelling example?
The "executive class" stand to lose a lot more than the "laptop class" if staff don't return to the office.
Musk has be expressing concern even though it reduces emissions, nominally his primary goal, far more than electric commuting, and he himself heads so many companies that he mostly works remotely at all of them.
He says some contrived argument like that because people who deliver food and work in factories can't work at home, it isn't fair for office workers to so they should suffer as penance to balance out the karma scales. It's like saying if you eat Alaskan crab legs, your little league baseball coach job should be done on a boat in the Bering sea.
He tied the company into a 3 year lease and then sold our company to a multi-national company. Not the company that owned the office just the company using it nice extra little earner for him considering he also set the rent amount as well.
Companies like Meta were all gung ho about remote work in 2021, when they hadn't seen the long term impact of it. The push inside Meta for WFH not being as effective for new employees started coming up in 2023 after the performance evaluations were done and they noticed a trend. You might argue that the data analysis might have been incorrect, but that's another question. The same company is also heavily cutting on office space.
I know people in tech are pro remote but let us not come up with these wild unsubstantiated theories to support what we like.
Remote work might not be as effective for every company on the same level, maybe it is the culture, maybe it is role dependent, but it is simplistically not just about some shadowy real estate moguls.
Those sound as though they overlap
The productivity of the future (or now) has already been borrowed from, and it has to be delivered on, even if only nominally.
The more people they lay off while keeping that dumpster fire going the more alarm bells go off in my head around the long term viability of their stock. It definitely doesn't belong in a pension.
Its fashionable among herd mentality investors now to do noisy lay-offs, but the smart money is probably quietly hiring these days.
a) it isn't making progress
b) it isn't going away
c) you can count on it
Including towards a potential revenue stream?
Tech workers have been warned about this all through the latest tech boom. It might be too late. Any union formed now will be broke and desperate at any negotiation. It's like trying to buy flood insurance while you're on the roof waiting for rescue.
I imagine if we do see tech collective action it'll probably be done quietly in the form of silently exploding technical debt, with documentation that misleads more than it informs and products that collapse under the weight of their own unmaintainability.
Work to rule would kill any tech company. Imagine your biggest contract having to wait 2 weeks before you can fix the bug that is crashing their business.
Imagine zero tech support because unpaid after hours tech support is horse shit.
Off the top of my head, paths to explore would include:
- no full-time/paid positions as union officials
- term limits on union officials
- limited budget
Perhaps I’m naive, but the last item seems especially appealing. I don’t quite see why unions need big budgets, as it seems to me their activities should more or less revolve around the kind of collective discussions that can take place on Zoom or a forum. As such, expenses would be more or less limited to operational expenses for these tools.
I’d actually consider joining a union that was sufficiently restricted in scope, and narrow in its focus.
The trickier question is how to avoid the failure mode of unions defending known-bad employees. Having worked a few union jobs in the past, there were more than a handful of colleagues I sincerely wished would get fired, but for whom the union afforded undue protection.
I might be wrong, but I don't think the average employee salary would be nearly as high as they are, given unionisation costs quite a lot of money, that drives up the cost per-employee massively. You might say now is the best moment ever to do this, but I don't see why that would be true.
In what made up reality is that even remotely true?
Everyone I know in a union pays a couple hundred bucks tops. Is it really not worth an xbox to help your fellow worker be happy, healthy, and sustainable?
WFH means work-from-anywhere, which dooms the leverage of a union
30 years after first trying to replace all of us, they have still been unable to do so because it just doesn't work that well, even with a hybrid WHF company.
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
300K puts someone at 97 percentile (top 3%). Nice, but nowhere near top 0.01%
It doesn't have the resolution to go into fractions of percent. Found this older (2018) article which says that 0.01% top income would be an income of $35 million a year. But that's 2018, so should be quite a bit more today.
So, it's safe to say that there are a hanful few people at Meta in the top 0.01%, but not many.
So I would assume your quoted numbers means top 3% of the US, whereas I've argued world?
I have been searching for some time now without success, even ChatGPT tells me there is no such number, because many countries don't have the statistics, different taxation systems exist etc.
Some numbers I have found are around the 0.1% percentile for $300k yearly income compared to the world.
With both members of the household working at Meta/in the valley and and household income of 600k/y we get below 0.1%, because in many countries even households with high income do not have double-earners with that kind of income.
The upper class has no skills other than dealing with money. Their power is the value we assign to money.
If we all decided tomorrow to use another currency and exclude the upper class from using it, in 1 week they would be starving.
How come serfs are richer than the capital class?
Chris Rock explained the difference well when he said, “Shaq is rich, but the white man that signs his check is wealthy.”
You don't go from worker to owner until you buy three properties to rent out or start your own business.
A mere millionaire is a lot less rich today b/c inflation (though probably still at least petit bourgeois.)
understood the theory isn't all about that. I reflect on work because I think so much of liberation can begin with freeing peoples time/regaining 'real' control of their time
Not to mention the fact that unions often support politicians I would never vote for, let alone donate to or organize for.
When you get fired from Facebook and then try to save money by canceling Netflix, then Netflix isn't going to be very happy about that, whilst they very much are capitalist. Most companies depend on customers having disposable income.
As George Carlin said: "They are getting fcked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fcking years ago."
100% agree when it comes to the 2008 crisis, and the bailouts, and the zero percent interest rates for 20 years.
But what has this got to do with layoffs at meta? Did they get a government bailout?
Can we stop saying this? Many taxes are paid before profits exist. Taxes are the sure thing; profits might happen, or you might go bust and investors lose all the money. That's not socialised losses. That's privatised risk, losses, then socialised taxes, then whatever's left is "privatised profits" - i.e. people actually getting a return on a risky investment.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/former-meta-recruiter-paid-200-144500...