What was behind Microsoft's layoffs of over 20k people in the last year?
twitter.com
twitter.com
These firms also happen to hold monopolies in many areas, so the amount of product enshitification the market will bear is practically unlimited.
The wage fixing and enshitification halves of this scheme are probably both in violation of anti-trust law, though enforcement of the law in either way would probably be novel. Here's a long writeup showing how Amazon (accidentally?) pioneered industry-wide wage suppression for minimum-wage workers.
I'm beginning to wonder if twitter was a dry run for the rest of the industry.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
> As one industry analyst noted, “Amazon is almost becoming like the negotiator for all hourly wage workers to a certain extent.”90 It is tempting to argue that this is good for workers. But Amazon is an employer, not a union. While it is true that workers benefit when Amazon enters a labor market, Amazon has every incentive to use its wage leadership to ensure that a cartel wage is maintained rather than the competitive wage.
Edit 2: It looks like it's Twitter's fault I can't see the content there, so it wasn't a tease on Blind's part.
Original comment: So is this a tease just to install their app? The tweet only seems to be a screenshot of the intro to the post, no link or anything. Can anyone post a link to or the content of this "long post"?
I'm not seeing a thread, just the single tweet with a single screenshot.
"Replies: 16 (log in to view)"
> Maybe it's obvious when it looks too quiet?
This is probably your best signal. The linked tweet currently has 37 retweets, 10 quote-tweets, and 240 likes, so it would be incredibly unusual if there were actually zero replies (barring tweets which have had their replies limited). But to know that, you'd have to know a bit about Twitter norms, and if you know that then you probably know that you can't see replies without being logged in.
It was a great place to vent, though.
The silent majority that's there for the subconsciously gets affected by the toxicity though.
In my experience, product ratings are not at all like that. Tons of people who like stuff leave positive reviews, and frequently leave evidence they have low standards or are not good at evaluating quality.
This is immaterial when every community (Reddit, HN, twitter, fb groups, blind) calls each other "toxic." Spidermen_pointing.jpeg. Blind is by far the best for tech career advice. Toxic advice for a toxic world.
that's what i thought.
another hedge fund douchebag sent a letter to google demanding it should cut back its workforce and lower pay around the same time: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...
they saw an opportunity to cut costs. the pandemic gave too much power to white collar wage workers and as churchill and later milton friedman said, never let a crisis go to waste.
The argument about what is causing our current inflation is a battleground for class warfare. But we don't talk about things in that context in this country, because the war (and almost every single battle) is being won by the rich.
Your argument is a bit of a stretch. Class warfare is some strong rhetoric that I don't think many people have adopted.
There's piles of evidence that companies have been using the fears of recession and cover of inflation to increase prices simply to pad profit margins by increasing prices and lasting people off. That's the rich fucking over the poor and the working classes; or, as some might call it, class warfare.
As well - as his business is development (like physical spaces) he is probably in a world of hurt with the interest rates absolutely killing the business model. Look at how much the real estate world and big developers have been crippled (I'm not saying you should feel bad for them - they took on that risk when they over levered themselves and reap what they sow). However I imagine because they are taking on losses their staff are going to feel the pain as are the investors (my speculation).
My point is your reference is a bad one for the topic of the thread.
If you have a supply chain disruption limiting the supply of raw materials or finished goods to get into the market, and you increase the supply of money in consumers' hands without any corresponding increase in supply of goods/services, I wouldn't expect anything other than an increase in inflation.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't have been done, but to say it was done and didn't contribute significantly to inflation seems extremely unlikely to be correct.
Apparently most of that money went to entertainment, travel, etc., Not for any long-term life improvement (which is kinda in line with the insanity of the student loan business model)
Do you have anything I can read on this?
People are not exclusively consumers and stockpiling is a dynamic thing.
If the government is actively stopping goods production from increasing, the prices raising is a good default assumption. But it's not an universal consequence.
But anyway, the inflation spike happened much after the government stopped intervening and production of everything was already increasing quite quickly. But the main argument people use for that is that the COVID relief (and all the money going to workers) was tiny and irrelevant when compared to the direct interventions of the US government on its economy at the time, that had the explicit intent of creating inflation.
This will either be corrected by new growth, or zero-sum rebalancing via inflation. Currently most growth is captured via capital holders, and this is unlikely to change. Leaving the zero-sum options as the most likely outcome.
The current structure doesn’t appear sustainable. As a millennial parent, I’m starting to observe the majority of the people I know skip having children or stick to one. The common reason is that the costs of children and pressure of career are too much. Eventually, you get too old to have children.
Not only technological.
> Not only technological.
they mean violent. something that the bourgeoisie HN types need to keep in mind.
True, but just how many of the 1% and above are members of the military? "I ain't no Senator's son.", after all.
If the birth rate falls to .5-1.0, then the status quo will most likely end in economic crises as the future population can no longer support the liabilities of the prior population. While it's possible to print money and perform other games to hide this reality, I don't think it's possible to maintain the farse against the backdrop of a 3-4x population decline.
Owning most / the loudest media outlets is a guarantee for this.
Whoever frames the issue, wins.
Defining people’s refusal to accept starvation wages as “nobody wants to work” is an example. See the work of George Lakoff on framing for details. His Framelab podcast is excellent.
"perception is reality"
It's quite interesting to look at job listings right now. Go have a look at some tech companies, and compare job types which currently allow remote work. You'll find that there are plenty of places offering remote work for most roles... but not for engineering.
How interesting. I'm sure it's not an concerted effort to get us back under control.
Edit: actually increased engineering velocity
the jury is still out on the "no real consequence" piece, however
managers seem to ignore the fact that Twitter is private, so who knows how bad it's really doing these days
No observable impact. Until the whole thing implodes.
Clearly that never happened. Twitter is still online, making changes and executing. That's what executives are responding to here. They aren't going to draw a strong link between fewer people and less ad revenue when attacks on Twitter by advertisers are so clearly politically motivated, it's just not relevant for most companies business models. Overstaffing is.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
You'd think, though, in these days of AI there would be a way for someone to post what they like but be segregated from adverts.
At best function as a canary in a coal mine but realistically are more like the "shit's on fire, yo" meme in stating facts that should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
If things have gotten so bad that the ADL say you're toxic, you're likely a Superfund site.
It'd actually be more surprising if the ADL wasn't trying to destroy Musk right now. That's just how those groups roll.
> If things have gotten so bad that the ADL say you're toxic, you're likely a Superfund site.
ADL define criticism of the ADL as anti-semitism, so it really means nothing.
The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is that Jews are perceived as power brokers controlling global financial markets and having massive sway. And that the ADL is some powerful lobbying group with the ability snap it's fingers and get multi-billion dollar corporations to do it's bidding.
No one is denying that the ADL is pressuring groups to boycott platforms and organization that are supporting anti-Semitic messages. The disconnect is that "Conservatives" think it is completely unfounded because they are incapable of self reflection. "Conservatives" feel that their entire ideology is being unfairly attacked by global Jewish power brokers while ignoring the blatant racist white nationalist venom spitting maggots infesting their ranks.
I say "Conservatives" because they aren't true conservatives and haven't held or are sacrificing most of those ideals for decades to "own the libs". Politics in America are no longer a divide between about progressive vs conservative ideals, but rather between a divide between those that would embrace people who are different and those that would rather hurt them.
Modern "Conservatives" are so blinded by hate that they are willing to forgo Individual Freedom, Limited Government, Fiscal Responsibility, and Human Dignity to hurt others. They cry foul when anyone attempts to uphold the Rule of Law, demonstrate Peace through Strength, or leverage the Free Markets against them. They are no longer conservatives but rather hate mongers who want to win at all costs.
The Wall Street Journal, Mark Levin, and Mitch McConnell fret over these Jewish power brokers, do they?
Or did you mean the ultra-MAGA wing, where DeSantis flies to Israel to cheerfully sign a bill against anti-Semitic hate speech? Or Donald Trump himself, the most popular American president among Israelis?
The country of Iceland dropped plans to ban male circumcision after the ADL not-so-subtly threatened to, ironically, defame the country and tank its tourism industry https://grapevine.is/news/2018/03/22/american-anti-defamatio...
It was a bill proposed by a progressive party member without consulting religious groups in the country. National polls never had more than 50% support, and it was challenged by both Muslim and Jewish communities in Iceland. There was a concern that it would set a precedent in Europe for religious discrimination. There was never a vote and it was withdrawn after international outcry.
So to frame it as though the ADL waved it's hand and made the government change it's mind is misleading and dishonest.
The ADL just does it all electronically now.
Haven't we known that for decades from the performance art piece that is Hewlett-Packard?
The daddy of no consequences, Elon, himself admits the company is worth way less now. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit...]
Which means the company is probably worth even less than that. [https://apnews.com/article/twitter-fidelity-musk-value]
Then he got held to it and they wouldn't let him back out, even after 3 attempts to break free of it.
So now he's got lemons and is making lemonade the only way he knows how.
The only value viewed by business is themselves. Everyone else is a cost.
seems becoming a SDM would be included
I know a Principal engineer who did, and he says it's been very lucrative. This was a guy who ran his own business for many years, wrote a few books and everything, before being hired as principal engineer where I worked at the time. He stuck it out as a principal for a few years before going to sales engineering.
I asked him why the switch and he just said, "You make a lot more money in sales engineering".
I am not a sales engineer, but this describes my current role well. (Technically my title is "Cloud Solution Architect", but it's about the 4th title I've had for doing the same job for the same department)
Microsoft and Google haven't produced anything new in a long time, so engineering is a money pit. Older companies with stable products, they don't see innovation as useful, engineers are just the factory workers. The cheaper to stamp out a widget, the better.
Plenty of people make more than software engineers on an hourly basis. It's impossible for anyone to work more than 16h/day.
How exactly it’s reported may be up for debate but they’re certainly not getting away “tax free”.
Engineers can sit 2 weeks on their asses blocked by stuff and still get paid, all because of the eventual value add when they start coding.
Yet why risk having to stir up some kind of illegal price fixing or collusion nonsense as a hedge fund manager? My guess is that the paradox is solved if you consider the saved cost of compensation vs the cost of litigation.
Proof point: Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon doesn't pay nearly as much as Google or Facebook in terms of total comp, yet they have no problem finding employees.
Citation needed. I know Google has a problem finding people fast enough.
Could that be Google's cultural problem? I have not real knowledge or understanding of this, but I was under the vague impression Google is unusually picky and elitist about who it hires (e.g. they want advanced degrees, an elite school background, or a FAANG background, and will turn up their nose at most normal folks).
My last round of interviews they down leveled me, yet I had a lateral offer from Waymo, and other companies upleveled me.
I was interviewing for a specific role, but my interviewers were from areas around the company that gave interview questions relevant to their area but not the area I was interviewing for, and was well outside my expertise. I objectively didn't do as well as other interviews.
Waymo, on the other hand stuck to my strengths in the interview process and was genuinely engaged with me finding a role there that Met my skills (I very regretfully turned the role down).
I'm a self educated (white male, if that matters) and was actively recruited by Google for a TPM position multiple times.
Honestly, the only reason I'm not working there today is because I wasn't willing to relocate to NYC, and they (strangely) aren't very remote friendly.
1) understand what you're being interviewed for (are you a linux kernel programmer? better hope they don't assign you an Android Java Frontend guy)
2) are good at interviewing (this is a difficult skill!)
and 3) don't dislike you for any particular reason
Google was a center of technical excellence up until some time around 2005-2010 or so but their real exceptionalism is having the highly profitable near-monopoly advertising business which lets them sustain technological and management systems which wouldn't be sustainable anywhere else.
Use google cloud? as opposed to what exactly?
I did a shootout of 10 vision recognition APIs including AWS and Azure. I had all the other APIs working in under 20 minutes, but Google Cloud took 2 hours just to get authentication working and wound up trashing the Python installation on my machine and forced me to reinstall it.
It’s just not a member of the same probability distribution.
And it is all like that, what is dead easy with competitors is a struggle with Google Cloud because the maze is truly in the mouse.
You did this while you worked for google?!
Internal overhead at Google, in my experience, is almost entirely constrained to stuff that relates to regulatory pressure that other companies simply skip.
Normally, I am blase on the predictions that AI will replace dev jobs, but when one of the people saying this also happens to be one of the people with real power to make it happen I stand up and take notice. Yikes.
Lots of companies would like custom software to help run their business, but are not, in fact, tech companies. If AI makes writing this software cheaper, and there is higher elastic demand at this lower price, then you'll see more devs working for old fashioned non tech companies.
Tech companies, meanwhile, can accomplish their goals with fewer employees, so the number of people working directly for FAANG companies will shrink.
That's my take on his comment, anyway.
Essentially, the pool may be more "diverse" in the sense that there are more companies doing different things with AI, but if suddenly 90% of your job openings are tiny startups that might shut down next year where the HR and finance departments are both the CEO's wife, it makes it harder to stay in the field.
He's saying that tech will be more accessible to small businesses and you'll have more internal tech teams working in non-tech companies. Similar to accounting, HR, etc.
In a hypothetical world where chatbots are powerful enough to eat artist, writer, and programmer jobs, we've reached an end state where HCI is close to perfect. The entire idea of designing specific software products doesn't even make sense when you can just throw an LLM at the problem.
I remain skeptical that this is where we are, but if you take the first claim (that chatbots will imminently be capable of replacing existing tech roles) at face value, there aren't going to be any products left to build, because chatbots represent the final form of tech.
Other explanations are disingenuous.
At the macro level the size of big tech is supported by evaluations: "How much it would cost to make the same thing?". This evaluation includes payroll costs. Those payroll costs are kept artificially high so that evaluations(in dollars) are high. the obscene salaries also keep the $ cost that companies charge for products, goods and services((daycare, medicine, labor, homes)) high which keep the evaluation high. You need the high evaluation to award Engineers wanting all those 400K+ salaries.
Also at this macro level the dollarized based evaluation is critical because with US's dollar dominance it can just spend to eliminate any and all competition. The government can borrow endlessly by selling debt(or so it seems).
So the key support thesis behind big tech is that if you can keep enough people, rich enough they will continue to buy and spend to support dollar evaluation of companies. The moment that is in jeopardy people(WS investors, Vice President of XYZ etc) will come out and defend it.
I think it's important that people understand what drives labor strategy within industry.
First of all, you should understand how your salary gets paid, as a tech worker. Much of the tech industry is unprofitable, so where does the money come from? It comes from the investments into the company. That money comes from venture capitalists, but not out of their actual pockets. Their money comes from their limited partners -- pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, insurance companies, etc. Even when it comes to profitable companies, like Microsoft, folks should understand that the people who pull the strings in the industry are the investors. AKA the owners of the company. Yesterday's investors generally get paid by tomorrow's. When there's uncertainty of future investment, things change real quick.
For a long period of time, we were in a zero-interest rate regime, and the investor class was obsessed with growth, over all else. Capital is easy to come by when interest rates are low, so the game they are playing is to try to pick sectoral winners, and worry about profitability in the long run. You can't win in the market without the best talent, and so there was an arms race to acquire that talent. Investors will endure dilution from employee stock grants as long as the growth makes up for it.
When interest rates started increasing, to combat inflation, everything changed. Capital was no longer cheap and businesses needed to be able to become self-sustaining, or risk going bankrupt. It's hard to overstate how sharp a change this was from years of declining interest rates.
Some leaders of companies are sociopaths, and others are great humans. In the end, both types of leaders need to be responsive to three forces: capital markets, supply chain markets, and customer markets. The latter two are peculiar to each business, but the macro capital market dynamics are pretty much shared. And that's why it seems like we've seen herd behavior among investors and executives.
But I think it's important to be able to parse between what behaviors is vicious/selfish/exploitative vs. that which responding to changing market forces. I do think that when it's all said and done, we'll see which CEOs are actually able to guide their companies to produce value, and which CEOs just know how to do well with a tailwind.
I started my career in 2008, and I talked to a lot of guys who started theirs in 2000. I have played defensively since then. It's worked out pretty well to be conservative.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft...
I remember thinking “be careful what you are wishing for my dudes” when tech workers were loudly proclaiming how much work they could get done at home and never coming into the office. That office was your moat and now it’s gone.
This seemed so obvious to me, and yet none of my colleagues would hear it when we discussed remote work.
We made good money cleaning up messes caused by cheap offshoring deals.
I don't think there was anything stopping companies from outsourcing all engineering work pre-pandemic, but that model has been failing pretty consistently over the last couple decades.
I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home.
Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed.
The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us.
Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches.
I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.
Lets not pretend that companies haven't been trying to outsource pretty much everything they can possibly outsource since the early 2000's.
The truth of the matter is unless you're willing to put in a lot of effort into finding and directly hiring the best and the brightest in third world countries, you're probably going to be disappointed with the results you get from simply yeeting work over the fence to a third party contractor company.
Offshoring labor has been around for a long time, and the problems associated with it haven't magically disappeared because people know how to use Zoom.
1. During early pandemic phase MS Sr. leadership correctly guessed that the demand will be sky high due to lockdowns.
2. Most leadership went overboard in memetic fashion and projected unrealistic and unsustainable growth numbers. Sane voices were ignored.
3. These numbers didn’t materialise and by mid ‘22 they made the mind to layoff people
4. OpenAI pulled a reverse MS-IBM on MS and Satya and others were enamoured by ChatGPT demo.
5. Investors saw the rapid hiring as diluting the stock value and backed the layoffs.
6. Layoffs happen and thousands are caught in that turmoil.
Every single day of the week, people are posting on blind about upcoming RIF's. People have RIF fatigue. It's a case of "boy who cried wolf" and not the fault of the author, that's just how Blind is.
Except Apple.
it sounds like Apple did the same crap, just with better pr and more strategically.
The main reason. Same with the hiring boom, same with the firing boom.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/te...
Since it was synchronized across all of tech this will likely mean that there is smoking gun evidence of illegal collusion lying around somewhere just like there was the last time this happened:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
> Hiring market was booming late 2021 and early 2022. The RSU and signing bonuses were rising at an alarming rate irking wall st. The pace of stock grants for hiring talent was not sustainable. Wall st fund managers were especially critical about the dilution of the stock to sustain the hiring and retention.
> Major wall st fund managers and stock holders started putting together a plan to put pressure on the wage and RSU growth. There were multiple leaks on Reddit (which is where I got the early wind of these planned industry wide layoffs) where hedge fund employees and staff were talking about dumping as high as 300-500K tech employees over year to put serious pressure on wage growth.
> If the CEOs and CFOs were not receptive to the idea they would pressure the board. A lot of major share holders have their person on the boards of their major holding companies. Our overlords had made up their mind and nothing could stop them.
> I heard much later from someone who was present at Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Aug 2022 that these low-key discussions started taking place between CEOs, board members, large tech investors and large fund managers at Jackson hole.
I would like to see an investigation of this. It sounds plausable to me, but you never know with posts like this if they actually reflect inside info or are just some guy LARPing being an insider.
Because if there isn't, there should be. It's not good policy to let psychopaths run amok. An investigation is the kind of thing that could get the political wheels turning against those "rich psychopaths."
But I wouldn't be surprised if something like this is illegal already. It has a smell of anti-competitive collusion.
On one hand, it's really sad that companies owe nothing to employees after decades of tenure, but on the other it's really hard to see how anyone would be surprised by getting laid off with no severance after 40 years and complain about not being compensated as well as the company's owners.
No where did I say that he should be compensated as well as the owner. I said it was wrong to lay him off without severance when the owner was making millions on the deal.
My father worked in a small town with few 'good' jobs. This was one of them. It feels kind of inhumane to suggest it's somehow his fault for not uprooting our family every few years in order to not be exploited.
I accepted that bargain when I started working, but I would be lying if I told you I didn't suffer from far fewer ties to friends and family because of it. I've moved 8 times in the past 15 years. That makes it almost impossible to put down roots. I have a much shallower 'support system' because of it, and I've basically sacrificed part of my wellbeing on the alter 'at will' employment.
An analogy would be if you hired someone to build a deck on your home (and you paid them for the job), and then expected to get 5% of your home value when you sold it 10 years later. That is not expected in a civilized society.
Being an abusive psychopath should not be a protected behavior just because the behavior is driven by money.
There is something deeply wrong with our society if $$ === correct. It's not. We need to speak up and do something about the disgusting precedent this sets.
The fact they used this specific conference just screams crazy. It's like they only know of one conference
However, their fees are completely justified and should not be questioned...
The bit about HFs wanting to engineer downward wage pressure is a bit crazy (also given the small influence on most big corporations) - evidence needed, I'd say, before credible. What would be credible is HFs expecting downward pressure on wages if there were larger tech redundancies.
Assuming that the original Twitter thread folk is not doing LARPing, this one bit summarizes the entire point why institutional investors like TCI [1] were demanding layoffs due to dilution via SBC [2].
I would prefer a precise definition from SEC regarding on how SBC is declared [3] (it it's Cash Expense or not) and establish a clear guidance for all investors to remove this generalized anxiety that put pressure on workers.
[1] - https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/... [2] - https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/02/stock-based-emp... [3] - https://www.eigercapital.com/stock-based-compensation/
Do you have any idea what "illegal collusion" looks like?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
> Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.
> According to a court filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold-call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"
Claiming otherwise, especially the way Wall Street is usually portrayed, smells of conspiracy theory BS. But I guess someone has to be responsible if someone elses comfotrable bursts through contact with reality.
what incentive? Zuckerberg's or Pichai's etc income and stock wealth in the medium/long term is almost completely de-correlated with quarterly net profit or whatever, it's vibe-based, on if they look like masters of the universe who will continue to find ways to print money. their positions are also extremely safe for even stronger reasons - either dominating voting stock or being handpicked successors to the people who dominating voting stock.
> Second, a lot of companies over hired during Covid, and then corrected. Everybody else followed suit with general cost cutting measures. And again, no outside pressure needed.
... then hire less, or be stricter with PIPs or whatever, obliterating morale with your first-ever secret overnight mass layoffs is very stupid.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/activists-back-off-salesf...
I don't believe anyone told them to fire people. It's just the quickest way to 'focus on profitability'.
There's plenty of ways for it to be synchronized cross companies without outright collusion. Macroeconomic factors and/or trend chasing would be the obvious candidate.
I've been suspecting this and was repeatedly branded as a tinfoil hat wearer. I'm so glad I'm not alone.
Lets call it what it is. One side is literally trying to kill the other. Whether you choke off oxygen or financial means to survival... you're killing people.
One side is wealthy enough to engage in this for fun and entertainment. They are so disconnected from reality that their actions are justified and their ethics totally evaporated.
How long till we conduct layoffs by allowing CEOs to meander open-floor offices and simply execute the employees they see as disposable?
Don't fool yourself: Software engineers are working class.
$65k is the middle of "middle class".
As I commented somewhere else, if you are making 400k a year and are not investing the surplus income as capital for someone else's business then you are probably not making good life decisions. You certainly are making enough to be a rentier
Somebody in the labor class making that kind of money may be able to springboard themselves into the capital class by investment, but they aren't automatically there based solely on their income.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
See section 2. The trend is pretty clear: The upper class is transferring wealth from the middle class. So, demanding that firms cut wages on middle class workers has been standard practice for decades. They're running out of money to extract from there, so they're going after the bottom half of the uppe class next.
I suggest joining a startup; investors that are willing to put cash into companies in times like this end up getting outsized returns on investment (since anyone that can leave the big companies does, the big company's R&D projects get cancelled during downturns, and general morale issues prevent minor product improvements from shipping).
(Also, median of middle class is $90K, and median of upper is $219K. Lower class is $29K. If they broke upper class into 2-4 separate tiers, there'd also be a clear skew in wage growth toward the top of the upper class.)
Older people, pre-retirement, generally earn more then younger people. As it should be - they've spent their lives growing their net worth and gaining experience.
Most "class warfare" can be explained by this - except that it doesn't get clickbait outrage reaction to say "older, experienced people are wealthier than young people starting their careers".
It's much more exciting to skew charts and graphs to show massive wealth disparity, as if there's a sinister cabal of wealthy folks that for some reason don't want others to succeed.
These charts are utterly meaningless if they aren't broken down by age group. You're putting someone who has 30+ years of career growth against someone out of high school and then screaming about wealth disparity.
The article itself even points this out - they say most of the loss of money in middle income was made up for in the 45-65 year old bracket. After 65 (surprise) when folks are retired, this drops off.
The issue isn't some sort of "class warfare" boogeyman. The issue is that we've made it damn near impossible to have a large family these days, and our population demographics are reflecting that, along with income.
Also note: the article doesn't talk about absolute numbers or wealth. It's all percentile stuff. It's easy to play statistics tricks with that.
This further division of the working class into upper and lower classes based on income is just another method to implement divide-and-conquer by pitting workers against themselves. Yes, software engineers earn a lot more than other salaried professions, it does not mean that software engineers control the means of production. Until a salaried worker earn enough to become part of the capital class and not need to work anymore we are all part of the working class.
Blue-collar/lower income workers might take offense in that, as they'd look at someone making US$200-400k/year as part of the elite, it does not mean that workers earning that shouldn't look at themselves as they are: workers, subjected to an elite class controlling the means of production and hence, their lives.
Then its a meaningless phrase
Do you depend on an employer to afford your life? If you got disabled and couldn't work a single day again in your life, would you be able to afford it without stress? There it is, that's the meaning of "you depend on salary"...
Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
This is not the point I'm making.
> Long-term disability insurance has nothing to do with whether you are an owner or a worker, but whether you make enough money to afford the insurance premium - - and you can earn that money either by salary or dividends (and their proxies).
Of course you can buy insurance, again, this is not the point I'm making, it's an analogy to the point of: do you depend on someone employing you, and paying you, to live (and have a meaningful life somehow)? You can only pay insurance if you are earning money, usually through a salary...
You're the one trying to divide and conquer by pushing an abstract, out of touch political ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions
>Edit: I also noticed that usually your comments don't really add much to discussions on HN, could you change that behaviour a little bit, please?
Right back at you comrade!
You might be able to make a compelling argument that, as the people pushing that automation forward, high-paid software developers are class traitors, like cops. But cops are still working class, even if they're being paid to betray their own and others in their class's interests.
They won't but the software engineer should identify with the plights of the worker making 40k. That's the issue, quite a lot of SWEs and other high income professions see themselves as separate from the working class.
> You're the one trying to divide and conquer by pushing an abstract, out of touch political ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions
I'm not pushing socialism, talking about class warfare does not mean I'm a communist, stop that line of thinking as you are assuming something I have not said. At no point in my comments I've mentioned communism or socialism, I use their terms since it's a good analysis of the powers of capital, that's all. This knee-jerk reaction to some terms is absolutely ridiculous and taints your comment, from that you derived I'm somehow a communist and your only retort is talking about "the deaths of millions" caused by it. Capitalism has also contributed to the death and injury of hundreds of millions. That's not the fucking point...
> Right back at you comrade!
"No, you" stops being a retort you can use by 4th grade, again I insist: be a better contributor to discussions, so far you haven't done much.
I was making 400k/year at one time, I also had a few million dollars (that I earned by being "working class" in SV) invested in the S&P500. Which is why your argument has no merit. I could have stopped being "working class" with a 400k/year salary any time I wanted and lived from my investments but I didn't.
I kept being "working class" in SV and I ended up growing my compensation package to nearly 1 million dollars a year. That's what being "working class" in SV can amount to. But please try to convince me that I should take to the streets with my working-class brethren that work at Starbucks because I'm being exploited by the elites.
> Which is why your argument has no merit. I could have stopped being "working class" with a 400k/year salary any time I wanted and lived from my investments but I didn't.
You owned capital investments that kept you comfortable without the need to be exploited, at that point you crossed the class division from worker to a capitalist. You said it yourself...
I picked the 200-400k range because it's been thrown around on this thread, that compensation is far away for most of SWEs in the world. Of course if you earn that and invest (and thus becoming a capitalist) you can be free from exploitation. Most workers, even SWEs, in the world cannot cross that chasm.
You are a capitalist, not working class. You just choose to work.
Instead of scrapping with someone who makes twice your wage for half your work, we should all be scrapping with those who own the capital, who are profiting from our labour, who even allow for such crappy jobs in the first place. We should ALL be paid well and have respectful work accommodations.
And that investment is the capital for someone else's business.
And you don't have a large surplus at that salary, you are also a fool.
Hedgies are trying to take a cut of both of their wages so they can buy more cocaine.
Obviously theyd prefer us to think we're special little creative snowflakes who don't need union membership like a common old factory workers. Or Tom Cruise. Or the hollywood writers who just won a massive victory.
If you want to talk about income levels, "working class" isn't a term you should be using; it's too big of a bucket.
Do you not work, just get your income from investments and portfolios? Then you aren't working class.
Even people making 400K are still working class.
Now between the working class, there’s a lot of difference too. The thing is, that difference is on an entirely different scale than the difference between the working class and the owner class.
That’s a silly distinction for what “working class” is.
You guys in your nice offices with catered lunches, free drinks, unlimited sick time, RSUs, bonuses, etc?
That isn’t working class. Thats the 1% from where I sit.
Your perception doesn't agree with reality. First of all, you need to earn at least double that to qualify for 1%. But that's a different story, as income is not what makes someone 'working class'. If you MUST work in order to survive, you are working class, which is the case even for people making $400k/year.
> catered lunches, free drinks, unlimited sick time, RSUs, bonuses, etc
You're kind of working against your argument here. These things disappear when you lose your job, hence they need to work in order to have them, hence they're working class.
If you need someone to direct your anger towards, it's the people with trust funds, not the W2 workers who are making more than you. Think of it this way. Who benefits the most if your income goes down or stagnates? Other W2 workers? Or someone else who just loves it when you direct your energy against other workers?
You're responsible as well, for supporting the infrastructure enabling these efforts.
But don't conflate issues. We were talking about whether or not someone working at BigCo making $400k/year is working class or not. They are, even if they're not blue-collar workers.
I don't really give a damn who or what you're literally angry about, I was just using a figure of speech.
It is the inverse of minimum wage increases putting upward pressure on incomes above them.
That is one reason why solidarity works.
A couple thousand at the top don't represent all of us.
We need to unionize, the sooner the better.
Here's what $100k is depending on where your perception of money is anchored.
Baby Boomeer: $100k would have been $12k when you were growing up.
Gen X: That's about $35k
Millennials: That's about $63k
The layoffs affected recruiters, marketing, sales, and a ton of areas that were not engineers. Lower level engineers were also targeted more than the higher level engineers, and even more importantly the hiring freezes and reductions blocked a ton of new grads from getting jobs.
As a 400k/year engineer I was fine. My colleagues unfortunately were not.
I don't know what point you thought you were making. In the very least, middle class is still a class.
Also in theory, pensioners and the insured are the beneficiaries of hedge fund profits via their institutions investments. But nobody is policing the thoughts of the fund managers.
In theory. In reality, higher salary workers are easier to propagandize, because they have a tendency to LARP "being a capitalist" with their 401k. They also tend to be modestly smart technicians, which generally gives them a greater capacity for self-deception and delusion. The end result is that most of them politically self-neutralize.
> Class warfare against those making $400k/year...
IIRC, if your income comes from wages or salary, you're part of the working class. It doesn't matter how much you make. Wall Street wants to kick your ass to the curb and replace you with a robot just the same as a dude working in a factory.
However, when people make salaries that high, they often confuse themselves for capitalists.
It is your choice!
If a large majority of your income comes from selling your labor for a wage, you are working class.
Lower/middle/upper are mostly arbitrary definitions to divide and conquer the working class as a whole. And it works.
Spoils of war? Cost of doing business? What excuses are we using to discard ethics today?
In the end, it really comes down to what you think a stock corporation is for. If it is some sort of profit maximizer, then cost control is part of running it.
If a CEO is rewarded handsomely for tricking / deceiving a large population of his employees (at the expense of the employees, benefit enjoyed exclusively by company) should this now be seen as an accepted business practice? How slippery do we have to get this slope before it just turns into a meat grinder where all issues ethical or otherwise uncomfortable are just hand-waved away into "but it's profitable!" sausage?
How is the financial performance unrelated to how a firm treats employees? People choose their employers in a fair number of situations.
> People choose their employers in a fair number of situations.
When was the last time you were out of work? Have you ever been let go from a job for reasons completely disconnected from your performance?
I think the idea that people are able to "vote with their feet" is a capitalist fantasy told by the ruling class. The actual opportunity on the ground is much lower and you often have to compromise your values, ethics and morals to pay the bills.
Of course if you make enough money it's easy to insulate yourself from the things us dirty peasants concern ourselves with, so I can understand if you don't get it.
I would agree with the notion that by far not everyone has real choice, hence organized labour as one defense. Reality is, some firms care much more than others, not all run by greedy psychopaths in my experience.
If you want total freedom on what you do then can only do things that don't need clients/customers, though. Some compromise is somewhere is likely.
I think from a "do we care about the people we employ" perspective the whole idea of laying people off and then hiring them back is callous at best, and psychopathic / sociopathic at worst. The conditions these actions create at the companies people are employed at are toxic and negative.
I've never had a 400k salary, I've barely cracked six figures. The reality is that the class war actions taken have decimated the middle and lower end of the tech job market and people like me are just plain fucked with little options other than burger king when you get done doom scrolling the same 10 job boards every day. It doesn't matter if you've done DBA or are a competent developer with real world experience, once you get kicked down the ladder you are black-marked for life. Good luck getting back up when the ladder has been set on fire and the ashes dropped on your head.
What policies are you actually proposing? Because I really don't know where you're going with this. Ban firing? Forced hiring?
Not to mention people whose salaries are 3x, 4x, 5x or even more than the median wage attempting to LARP as the oppressed proletariat is cringe inducing as heck. If all out class warfare broke out, the proletariat knows darned well that we're not feeling anything like the financial pain that they've endured. We'd be treated as enemies just as much as the wealthy and it's much, much easier for a mob to get their hands on you and I than it is for the truly wealthy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37658410
I doubt this will get the engagement my flagged comment got, but let me know what you think.