[flagged]
And FWIW, the jobless rate in tech is higher than most blue collar jobs and the national average. This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Losing a job is hard for everyone, regardless of the type of job it was. Jobs are where most of our social interactions happen, and where many people’s goals and aspirations are kept. Having that ripped away hurts, regardless of the salary the job paid. Hopefully he was good at managing his money (I’ve known high paid workers that weren’t) and will land on his feet, but you don’t know his circumstances and calling him names is just being a dick.
Maybe this is true, I don't actually know. But I'm quite skeptical that someone who worked at Google for a long time, and has work with their name on it they can point to, who can work remotely, will have a harder time finding gainful employment than a physical laborer.
I'm not trying to pile on the "screw this guy for whining" train, but I think it is important to recognize the privilege of working in tech.
But if you're a tech worker, it's really not a gravy train anymore. The number of open positions has dropped, the compensation ranges perhaps as well, and the interview process is more grueling and involved.
People who worked as salaried employees at BigCorps for years making big $$ definitely should have more savings, but they're still on the whole just the same as any other worker: they pay taxes, they don't own enough capital to make them independent of the market, and they are likely some number of months/years away from not being able to pay mortgage/rent/bills/groceries. Just like any other worker.
There are no "jobs" even in tech that give any kind of permanent escape from the need to beg for employment to make ends meet.
It has always been there. It usually gets downvoted away but it takes time. Inflammatory takes like this one are usually more popular when stories are fresh and then get downvoted as the story ages on. My theory is that these shallow, ragebait-ey takes appeal to people who are skimming stories for a chance to rage a bit, but then they get bored and move on to the next thing. It takes a while for people to read the story and come up with good discussion, which gets upvoted later.
It was at the top of the comments when I saw this hit HN, and it pissed me off to see a trollish shitpost in that position, especially when the post is about the community losing an awesome contributor (and a friend).
But I would caution people against writing public statements like this when they are still in shock, you might regret them later, better to try and regain some balance first.
Caring about marginalized and needy people = Cynical Loser.
That person is basically you under less dire circumstances.
It was written on his personal blog, announcing to the community of people who look up to him (and yes, there's a community) why he won't be in the places they expect.
Adam was a UX Engineer who saw a job that needed doing, but didn't exist, so he willed it into existence. He found a way to use his talents to literally make the world a better place. (I don't care if you think there are more important jobs - the truth is that the internet mediates most of our societal interactions, and he was making it better for everyone.)
He was doing a kickass job at it too. He should be hurt and angry to have that rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him.
He doesn't need to pay lip service to starving kids in $REMOTE_AND_DESTITUTE_PLACE or self-flagellatingly privilege check. His blog isn't here for your entertainment, and he doesn't need your approval.
There aren't many companies that have such a symbiotic relationship with the web platform to be willing to fund people to make the web a better place. For a while, Google was the foremost place that did.
Adam is immensely talented and a wonderful person on top of it. Hopefully a great opportunity will snatch him up quickly. But there aren't many places to do the work he was doing. He deserves to be mad to see the job he worked so hard to build swept away by some antisocial business school bullshit. And as the people who will miss out when he's not there to make the web a better place, we do too.
you gotta do more to make your point here, because that's not an obvious inference from what they wrote
Missed that by a mile.
If your intent is to further Marxist thought amongst the people on this site, you're missing the mark greatly. Perhaps more study is required.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
Only when laid off.
He has clearly invested a lot of his identity in his work at Google on Chrome etc - essentially his life's work. To have it flushed down the toilet via some opaque corporate process, cost-saving a company that basically prints its own profit has a terrible psychological impact... irrespective of whether investing one's personal dreams in a faceless multinational corporation was a rational idea in the first place.
Honestly, it's not as if the PMC classes have truly transcended the confines of generating someone else's profit, pushing them offside is probably quite unhelpful for solidarity in the labor movement, but whatever.
As opposed to you, the perfect human?
> blue collar jobs would take much longer to recover
So what are you saying? We should treat everyone like shit so everyone is equal? Or that only blue collar people have the right to complain?
How about we focus on raising the quality of living for everyone.
"shoulder to shoulder with incredible engineers, planning ways to make web developers life's easier while raising the quality level of the web."
when Google is primarily responsible for flooding us with ad capitalism and ruining the web, portrays not only a profound ignorance of how corporations work, but a total dissociation from the -very damaging- effects of his work-seen-holistically on the real world. You don't get a free pass working for Google just because you can rationalize your particular niche as "educating users" and "raising the quality level of the web".
Towards the end, it seems to dawn on him that yeah, he "was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp". Let's hope he carries that understanding forward and distills it into a moral and ethical framework that can make the world better.
> I was supposed to help with the developer keynote, ensuring things matched reality and were beautiful. Gone.
Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
This is clearly a person who loved their job, and took it seriously. They had worked hard on something and were looking forward to sharing it. That, frankly, seems healthy. It's the only way to give your everyday life worth and meaning as an employee. It's certainly something that Google cultivated and encouraged. And it's shocking to have it vanish so abruptly.
If you take a more cynical, realistic view, you could never seriously engage with your work. You realize the company doesn't care about you, and you return the sentiment. That might be a more realistic way of viewing your situation, but it's empty of meaning or satisfaction. You'd be correct but unhappy all day every day.
I was always kinda jealous of people who could drink the kool-ade. And even if there's a certain satisfaction in seeing them get a reality check, it's also a shame that somebody who thought they had found meaning and purpose in a community suddenly realize they were just a tool the whole time.
I take no satisfaction in seeing someone who has drank the kool-ade getting a wakeup call, it's just a shocking realization that there are people out there who still dont get it.