Microsoft workers protest 'landmark year' CEO memo following pay freeze
techradar.com
techradar.com
Overall housing affordability for the average person who needs a mortgage is still worse now because house prices haven't fallen enough to offset the rate hikes.
Literally the only people who will benefit are cash rich wealthy who don't need to borrow, and landlords who can use high rates and high inflation as an excuse to put up rents.
Is that really just an excuse? Why shouldn't rents increase in an inflationary environment? What makes them more special than food products for example?
If your wealth derives primarily from your labor, you are in the working class.
If your wealth derives primarily from your wealth, you are in the ownership class.
Do you have an alternative definition?
Both views have their merits. A software engineer and a nanny both sell their labor... on the other hand, the fact that the former can employ the latter and the reverse is not true suggests their position is not entirely the same.
If you insist on reducing all of us to only two classes, then working vs owning is one way to do it... but not the only way. One could also divide the "paying" class from the "charity" class, for instance.
And a software engineer at Microsoft with a 401k and a portfolio of stock grants has one foot in the ownership class, even if they still work.
General observation: Anyone who says "there are only two X..." is trying to make you view the world in reductionist terms, and they're choosing the terms to make you focus on the issue that they want you to focus on. But the world has a lot more nuance than that, and some of the other nuances also matter.
Capitalists have capital.
The rest of us are born with only our labor to sell, whether that labor is blue collar or white collar.
The middle class is was and always has been a lie to separate the working class.
I put my best effort into waking up for bullshit 6am scrum meetings with my global team a few times a week, eventually with the constant stress of some bug being discovered and having to hold for the next sprint and dreading 1-on-1s with this asshole manager who'd consume the entire time with me having to justify why I "wasn't coding faster"; eventually getting laid off during the worst downturn in the tech job market I've ever seen.
People move between income sources...
I don't know Zuckerberg's biography but I'd wager to say he didn't have to work or starve ever in his life. And I'm no Bhaskar Sunkara but I'd also wager to say >50% of zuckerbergs wealth is due to the surplus labor value his employees create, not his labor. So in a material examination of Zuckerberg you'd say indeed the issue is not the phase of his life where he worked for a living, but the phase where he is extracts maximum surplus labor value from his workers. That phase constitutes X-99.9% of his wealth, so he is not exactly some hard to pin down edge case
This isn't to say that any company that derives a profit is an evil exploitation factory, it's just an idiots understanding of a useful jumping off point for material analysis.
If a trucking company is losing money, they still have to pay market wages for drivers if they want any trucks to move.
If a trucking company is making large profits because of the types of trucks they bought, their niche, their sales teams, they still basically pay market prices for drivers I would assume.
freezing the pay sends the message of: "we don't really care about the workers and we will extract as much value as it's possible for the lowest possible fee". The problem with knowledge workers is that sometimes it literally takes years to build the skill needed and if you don't actively work on retaining people you will end up with empire building and the minimum work not to get fired instead of exceptional people that can move the needle - the brain drain is real.
to drive this point home: if you have 100 people that you are paying 100 dollars you are paying 10k. if you give them a raise and now you are paying them 105 dollars you are not paying 10.5k. if you don't give them a raise and you tell them to suck it up, 20 people leave and now you need to hire 40 people to be able to pickup the work they were doing, now you will pay 14k. So while in theory you are getting a bargain keeping the comp at 100, you in reality are paying more. Even worse, you may get ideas that you don't need 100 people and layoff 30 people with the remaining people doing the work of 100 people - so in effect you are getting more work for that 100$ and people are actually taking a paycut relative to how much they are working.
It’s not a charity. Neither are we as engineers - the job hopping we’re famous for is evidence of that.
Proper planning, execution, building knowledge? Fuck that. We'll just jerk people around. What are they going to do? Form an union?
Also, you don't like people wanting to make more money? That's like capitalism 101. What's next? People volunteering to work for free and living outdoors?
I call this "business as usual". Whenever I need to choose between prioritizing myself vs prioritizing my employer, I try to use the "business as usual" philosophy in which I understand that the employer would fire me if they had to choose to save money (rather than for example cutting CEO's salary or in any other way looking at employee's interests). So I prioritize myself. I learned this lesson when I was contracting for a client and the client told me, on Friday afternoon that starting from next week he doesn't need my services anymore. Basically he fired me on the spot. Next week I noticed that someone was still making programming changes to the site. Seems like he hired a bunch of inexperienced inexpensive developers to do the work. Needless to say, a year later he asked me to jump back in, and I did for double the price. He, in his true "business as usual" style, didn't even blink. He needed the job done and was willing to pay the price I offered. Business as usual. Great life lesson.
It has parallels to this Doordash delivery person who expected their tip to be based on the price of the customer's house rather than the price of the order.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doordash-driver-curses-...
There isn't great evidence for this. There was a burst of anti-tipping laws in the 19th century as aristocratic Americans imitated the Tudor English where modern tipping originated. It only became endemic in America during Prohibition, when a lack of alcohol-based income and the, ahem, two-way desire for favors, increased.
Not giving raises is another form of increasing gradual attrition on purpose as well.
Microsoft's play here is that even if their best engineers go look for greener pastures their profits won't be affected. It might be true, but that feels like a bold move.
It is. Anything an executive or company spokesperson says to the contrary is lying. If Microsoft really wanted to retain someone who said they were going to walk if they did not get an increase, then they would pony up.
Inflation with money printing is a round about way of raising taxes it seems.
...yes?
> Inflation with money printing is a round about way of raising taxes it seems.
Inflation in principle has "value" to the economy as it ostensibly reduces the cost of debt over time.
Of course it's kind of moot if the inflation is primarily a product of profiteering and price gouging - haven't multiple studies in multiple countries now shown that 50+% of the current "high inflation" is the result unwarranted price increases in monopoly and semi-monopoly industries?
This is ignoring things like published inflation rates not including inflation of the single large expense for 99% of the populace. The idea that inflation only just hit 8%, when year to year rent increases for the same property were routinely in excess of 10% for a decade is absurd. As is the value of a property (for the purpose of property taxes/council rates) not increasing at the same rate - which means offloading costs onto tax payer vs property owners, Yay!
New/increased taxes are extremely unpopular. This way they get all the benefits of shiny new social programs spending without getting the bad press of higher taxes.
This happens all the time, and it's called debt monetization, when the Fed buys Treasury debt instruments.
Though this often occurs at the same time :-/
When companies become more powerful than governments, this is to be expected.
That's a big claim to make without any evidence. Do you have anything to suggest that big companies in fact are colluding with the Federal Reserve to keep employee salaries down?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/business/economy/wages-fe...
It's no good if wages and prices go up, as that would will compound into a positive feedback loop until currency collapse.
I don't even know if an anticipated recession is in play here. The simple explanation is that safe investments are now pulling 4% returns (pre-inflation), so now riskier investments like stocks have to return more than 4% to account for the risk. Nobody wants stocks where the best outcome is matching inflation (unless safe investments are returning less than inflation).
If companies were involved in the discussion, I suspect they'd be most interested in getting interest rates back down to 0 because it pushes money into the stock market and raises their share price.
You are a programmer, right?
You understand the concept of indirection?
The only way I can imagine this wooshing is if you don't realize that indirection isn't just a technological mechanism. It is, in fact, near omnipresent, and reached for constantly by people in management positions. It's a sociological tool that imbues the wielder not just with great power to get things done while detaching themselves from the suffering created by doing so, but also gives them enough plausible psychological distance that even the masses tend to cut them a check when in reality, a bit of thought on the arrangement of things boils things down to "actor creates signal, signal hanfler handles"
When that happens it means they became too powerful. Political power can only come from votes.
The key to the negative vibe is the absurdity of it all: the expectations set swung _rapidly_, MS is clocked $18B in profit right before announcing these freezes, and no, revenues don't go up from freezing pay. Note also the savings from the pay freeze haven't happened yet - they're saying no raises until December 2024, so savings starts in December 2023.
If the leaders took the cut instead of the employees, then we'd actually see the entitlement come into play.
Revenue could go up 10% and you’re still losing money.
It’s a valid question.
Arguing increasing profit makes wage freezes unpalatable would be more accurate.
Because increasing salary when revenue increases is a positive way to ensure employer-employee relationship is reciprocal to some extent. Otherwise people will take or not take actions to ensure that relationship gets balanced back into reciprocity. Have you heard of quiet quitting?
If you’ve worked with executives you’d realized they get screwed over by companies all the time.