When I was younger, I also fell for this. Today, I shudder when I read this. In many cases, execs will abuse the family status to squeeze extra work out of you while you fail to even notice. Stay alert for sentences like "But, we are a family, so..."
Management mandated family with "living at work"? Run.
Normal work schedule with grunt employees doing not mandated stuff together once in a while after work? Okay, that's nice, but you should still have a social group that's not (only) coworkers.
I would even openly admit that I voted your comment up to mitigate the punishment for your mistake, but then they would vote me down.
So, I don't.
Just so as not to be misunderstood.
> The recent tech layoffs have shown that employees are disposable in the eyes of executives.
In reality they are. There may be only a handful of employees in the world who are truly irreplaceable. Without employee X the shelves will still get stacked, the reports written, the coffee made, the code written, the product sold.
Naturally this also applies to the executives too ...
If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're loyal -- and whether or not your employer is loyal to you in return.
Hint: in most companies, they aren't. It's exceedingly rare.
Base your decisions accordingly.
I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Of course, this is just the random off-the-cuff thoughts of someone who is currently far too alcoholated, so YMMV, and--
What annoys me, is when companies expect _you_ to be loyal, when they would get rid of you in a heartbeat.
For the vast majority of employment situations, it is simply a transaction. There needn't be any talk of "loyalty", which in my mind is usually just manipulation.
You should be looking at employment as a contract, and marriage (and other personal relationships) as a covenant. If you apply tit-for-tat with your spouse, at least one of you will end dissatisfied and hurt.
Who would want to be married with their company? You are finding dysfunction where there is none. Imagine expecting the employee or company to have the other party for better or for worse, till death do them apart. Talk about dysfunction!
No, not at all. You have missed the mark completely here. This is totally culturally dependent. In a culture where this is expected, this is indeed what will happen. If you've only ever lived in such a culture then, yeah, you might get the mistaken idea this is an intrinsic human universal truth.
But cultural norms are really powerful and can absolutely overcome natural game theory / self interest dynamics. If everyone you know would think less of you after you quit a job when it is known that employers are loyal, you won't do it. Same goes for the reverse.
An employment arrangement is a business deal, nothing more and nothing less. Whether or not it's adversarial depends on the nature of the deal and the entities involved.
The most common error I see in employment is the employees not understanding this basic truth. That leads to situations such as people thinking that an employer is doing them a favor in some way by hiring them, which leads to people giving up some of their power.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Can confirm. I myself am older and, admittedly, came into the job market as a very naive individual. But over the years I have watched the younger cohort and I am actually kinda impressed with the realistic ronin-like attitude. It is a lot more transactional for a reason; companies themselves have mostly destroyed it.
If anything, it is a perverse expression of US 'fuck you, got mine' system.
There is too much morally infused overinterpretation of Capitalism going on. Owners and workers have diametrically opposite interests which no law or moral judgment could put aside.
What one party perceives as a fair wage is nothing but profit dilution for the other side.
Remember, the only purpose of a business is - given money - to make more money. If you can't help them with that, either by being dirt cheap or have some marketable skill, you're literally useless and part of the Capitalist overpopulation... a class people who serve no use in the accumulation process.
I think this is true of businesses that outgrow their local economies. And since that's what most people see in their feeds and interact with every day, that's how they expect every company to function.
When every company that has any mind share is beholden to a bunch of external shareholders, it's no wonder "profit as much as possible" is the only reason for being anyone thinks of.
But it didn't used to be this way and it doesn't have to be this way. It's still possible for people to do well by doing good, providing, for example, quality housing at non-exploitative prices, or reliable and safe plumbing to handle their neighbors' water and sewer needs. And it still is being done.
Most of us just spend so much of our time online that we only ever hear about the companies with social media/marketing teams, so we get used to that way of thinking.
I think that it may not be just that people are spending too much time reading about non-local corporations. Rather, it may be that many industries today are not viable to operate at a local level. E.g. it's not really possible to have a small town semi-conductor fab. Even in software development, there's probably not much need for local companies besides certain more simple applications like WordPress sites.
Even so, it's not the only alternative is gigantic companies trying to get everyone using their product.
If every plumber in your area had a subscription to your software that was specifically tailored to your codes and the nuances of your area? Estimating costs based on actual local prices for things? Could you support the number of people it would take to keep such a thing running? Could you sell insights from the data to the local hardware store to help them figure out what kinds of changes (weather, construction, whatever) lead to what kinds of demand for products?
It doesn't have to be "you could walk to it" local, but if you really created the tool your area's local businesses couldn't live without, could you really not support yourself?
A lot of people prioritize working on software that intellectually stimulating. If someone is an expert in medical simulation, sonar, VLSI, etc. I don't think that they would consider developing plumbing software to be an equivalent job.
If they're an expert in medical simulation or sonar, aren't they likely already working for a relatively small company, and one that's located near, say, a hospital center like Boston, or an ocean? That's still a service within their locale and to their local community, even if the local community is also engaged in specialty work that benefits the whole world.
It's not just internet marketing. The 0.1% largest businesses in the USA represent around 60% of our GDP, and about half our employment. People really do interact with big business a lot. And the share for big business has only been gradually getting bigger over the last few decades.
Today we talk of globalization, but the mid to late twenteith century was the heyday of nationalization, of small local and regional businesses like the ones you describe -- businesses that were linked to and cared about their local communities or regions -- getting bought up and consolidated into large national businesses -- local owners getting replaced with hourly shift managers with less autonomy and incentive to care.
Today's American may wake up in their Toll Brothers built house, take a morning poop on their American Standard toilet, brush their teeth with Proctor & Gamble products, walk down the stairs built with wood from the Home Depot, pour themselves a bowl of Kellog's cereal into dishes and on a table bought from Ikea, read the news a bit on their Apple device, step into their Ford car sitting on their driveway built of asphalt made by Koch Industrial, then drive to work, stopping for gas at an ExxonMobil gas station, pulling in to their job as shift manager at a TGI Friday's, where they spend their day serving food made from ingredients bought from Sysco, the national distributor, ultimately bought from a few large processed food companies like whoever owns Kraft / Philip Morris these days.... finally after a long day they drive home, stopping at Wal*Mart for some essentials, finishing off the day with the refreshing taste of a Bud Lite.
It's frankly amazing small business still managed to produce 40% of our GDP, but make no mistake, it has been and is being driven to the least profitable margins and corners of every industry. Small business gets to operate the restaurant while big business owns the real estate. Small business gets to owner-operate tractor trailers while big business gets the lions' share of the actual retail profits. Etc, etc -- small business is increasingly stuck with the left over pieces that are too unprofitable for big business.
Unintentional or not, squeezing out small business owners from their share of the pie has been the process for big capital for decades. We talk a lot about how big capital has been trying to squeeze down the piece of the pie labor gets since the 70s, but we forget that small capital has also been the victim of this.
I live next to a Target. It's run by a handful of minimum wage high school kids and a couple of managers who probably earn $40k and have no standing in the community, no share in the success of the business, no way to grow along with it, and no discretion to change their store's behavior to accomodate any local community interest other than distant, distant shareholders getting more profits.
A few decades ago instead there would have been multiple stores, each with an OWNER who had all those things -- standing in the community, ownership over the profits, and the discretion to make decisions not purely on profit but also caring about the community they're indelibly tied up with. And this owner could pass the business to their kids, which the Target manager can't do either.
Small businesses have gradually been losing the fight to vertically integrated, more efficient corporations for several decades. I think these corporations genuinely play a larger role in our lives than before.
People lie all the time. For marketing, to be polite, for worse reasons. It’s in everyone’s best interest to stay on their toes and evaluate others’ motivations before accepting words at face value.
If a manager ever said that to me, I'd immediately start planning my exit. I don't want to work for anyone who engages in that level of emotional manipulation.
A complicating factor is that it is much easier for corporations to punish employees for being disloyal than for employees to punish corporations for disloyalty.
I.e. if your resume shows too much job hopping then that can hurt your ability to get a new job. However, a corporation is not nearly a badly hurt by repeatedly overhiring and laying off employees.
IMHO, dampen might be a more suitable verb. Unions are not a panacea to all issues an employee can face. And sometimes the union will put its own interests first, or the company’s, before the interests of the individual employee. But on the whole, unions can play a useful role on the market of labor.
> An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
That argument falls flat on its face as soon as you look at the balance sheet of these companies. They are exceeding expectations and still laying people off.
This reminds me of the argument GE made (from David Gelles book about Welch) that laying off staff is a kindness, as it lets them try and find a new job they’re “better suited for” sooner rather than later
Sounds like somebody who never had a mortgage payment overdue and the bank calling and threatening to confiscate the house / apartment, and with two pre-school kids constantly introducing unexpected expenses.
But then again, I never expected the ruling class to be empathetic.
Exactly. Laying people off isn't necessarily a bad thing by itself if it "needs" to happen, but (at least in the US) what follows is loss of health insurance and income money needed for mortgage. Millionaires don't have that problem and can easily tell peasants to suck it up.
Regarding unemployment benefits: In many countries there are unemployment insurance funds set up so that one can maintain a somewhat reasonable level of income even in the event of unemployment.
The upside of having a system like that is that the burden to ”care for” the employee’s economical safety is not put solely on their current employer, but not solely on the employee either. In order to be eligible for payouts the employee has to pay in to the fund every month (something like ~14 USD) – and all companies are mandated to contribute pay in to this system.
Personally, I see few downsides with this system.
It’s important for the general economy that companies can be flexible and change direction, e.g. when the economy cools off or in the face of competition. Therefore I believe layoffs are sometimes necessary for the company to survive. But it’s also important – both for ethical and economical reasons – that layoffs doesn’t wreak havoc with the personal finances of the people being let go.
Regarding healthcare: To me it does not seem like a good idea to tie a person’s health insurance to their current employer. AFAICT this is a remnant of the US war economy during WW2. But that doesn’t mean that a system like UK’s NIH is superior. To me, the German model looks very reasonable where citizens are required to sign up for insurance but the benefits are not tied to the person’s employment. One can read more about it here: https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/health-in-germany-h... I think Singapore has a similar system.
Yes, all stuff that the country's budget needs from you, you pay them manually each 1-3 months... or else.
That's more or less how it's best described. Once you are not an employee you need an accountant, or you need to be very well versed in the laws and the monthly payments to the country's budget yourself. If neither, some 6-12 months later you get persecuted and called in court, with the possibility to have some of your property confiscated.
>That argument falls flat on its face as soon as you look at the balance sheet of these companies. They are exceeding expectations and still laying people off.
I thought it was a discussion about generic companies, but it seems to be a discussion about specific ones?
This is talking about a generic company, in 2024. If you look at the layoffs that happened in recent years, the biggest ones were made by companies in profit or at least meeting their own projections.
It's not news and I think it's fairly widely accepted, but there are plenty of corollaries that people still reject.
I had a coworker who was actively hostile to the practice of writing documentation, for instance. He wasn't up front about it but he was plainly doing it to reduce his disposability. I think it probably worked because they kept him around longer than they clearly wanted to in spite of his very prickly personality.
As a strategy I thought it actually made a decent amount of sense given his circumstances - lots of debt/outgoings, he couldn't hop jobs easily and the company treated employees as extra disposable.
As the developer who came after him I was perplexed at the cries online people would make that "this practice only hurts the developer who comes after you" or "if the company does well you'll do well" (which I think is bullshit).
It definitely made me a LOT slower, but I still got paid the same.
> The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Starting any topic with kind/evil dichotomy is never a way to bring a rational perspective on the table, indeed.
Over-hiring can happen through different situation. One is bad luck: market evolution removed the the ground under the feet of a sound projection assuming a reasonably stable context.
An other possibility is incompetence: acting in reckless attitude with the business strategy as if it was a past time board game without considering it will have concrete impact on real people that will engage in its progression.
Yet an other one is draining all skills in the market to gain dominance on its segment. Thus endowed, it will be easy to kill any possibility of fair concurrence. Then later, drop the monopolized workforce out of the train, that was known to be superfluous to achieve production goals. Of course, this drop should occur only once there is no credible chance these employees could find a decent job in this sector anymore. That is after they contributed to the hegemonic position of the organization.
In short, over-hiring is not necessarily an error.
I think we need to look at what we really mean when we say someone is loyal. What it means to be loyal is - this is related to the idea of a contract - that when you see a better opportunity, you do not leave your current relationship in favor of the new one. In other words, loyalty is what stops us from taking better opportunities that arise as circumstances change.
Same as when you are taking your vows, if you later come across a hotter, younger chick with your exact set if kinks, you do not just drop your wife and go looking for a new gimp suit.
Seen from this perspective, it is clear that businesses tend to have very little loyalty. The ethos of most of the business world at the moment is short term bean-counting optimization. If employees can be fired and replaced by cheaper foreign workers, they will be. The only rationale allowable is one that balances costs and benefits, in the bean-counting sense, and it is not an accounting that includes any weight for loyalty. You could imagine a spreadsheet where the company said "hey I'm gonna put a hurdle of $100k per employee on the 'stay in America' side, and I'll only move the factory if it's still in favor of moving abroad". But when has this ever happened?
On the other hand, employees probably have more loyalty than zero. Almost everyone has a story about they were approached by a recruiter offering a higher salary, but they didn't take it. Part of this is explicable by risk, offsetting the higher salary with a chance of not settling at the new work, that kind of thing. But if you were to count the bean again, almost every knows a bunch of people who could have jumped ship for a higher salary but didn't, even when you count that risk.
> If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're loyal -- and whether or not your employer is loyal to you in return.
As someone who works at a 2 person company (my boss and me), it's the good relationship with him along with the relaxed work environment. Sure, we have to be profitable, but not exceedingly so.
> I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
> The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Those are mostly a problem at larger companies, IME.
I was exceedingly lucky with most of my jobs so far, in the sense that I mostly got good work environments where employees are actually valued beyond mere numbers. I wish others would be as lucky as I was.
I have personal experience of a company keeping me employed WAY beyond where it was profitable for them, as they simply didn't have the need for me due to not enough contracts. They provided me with a lot of learning resources. I went almost half a year in total without any real work for me to do. They were aware of that.
They really tried hard to find a way to keep me on, so while I was disposable in the end, they truly did try to keep me on, and to me, that indicates them valuing me beyond the mere numbers.
Why’d they keep you on? Are you just a really nice person? Are they just really nice people? Or did they think you’d be profitable to them in the future? Or some combination of all 3?
Option 2 and 3 for sure. I can't say whether option 1 applies. But my opinion on them is not just informed by keeping me on for longer than necessary, but rather many additional supporting experiences. Like actually getting to talk to the C levels and bringing in suggestions/asking questions and such.
My understanding of your messages indicates to me that you think I was saying that the company doesn't care about numbers. While I was meaning that the company treated me as an actual valued human and did well to me.
But they probably thought there would be more contracts, and keeping you on for 6 months, or even a year, would probably be cheaper than hiring and onboarding someone new.
This, 1000 times this. I have said this and seen it so many times (I work in diligence looking at companies). The big sin in tech is over-hiring to look like success. This is the act I consider reprehensible - making people believe they have a career when they got hired at an unsustainable burn rate to make number go up on an investment slide deck - fully aware that post-transaction (sale to next investor) half of them get the headsman's axe.
When I'm evaluating whether or not I want to take a position at a company, once of the things I look for is that company's history of layoffs. Some companies have a habit of engaging in them, and I prefer to avoid them. In part out of self-defense and in part because I think it's indicative of a general business mindset that I wouldn't get along with.
> The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
This is an underappreciated aspect of psychopathic corporate life and "Human resource" thinking, I think. It's hard to avoid the feeling that companies -- particularly big tech -- feel empowered to hire lots of people quickly precisely because firing people has become so easy.
Such that when one big company has a round of layoffs, competitors genuinely feel some pressure to follow suit almost arbitrarily, because it's an expected part of a cycle; a numbers game, a way to appear "lean", etc.
Context: big American tech, hiring tens of thousands of “engineers” through leetcode during a financial boom, and then firing a substantial part with an email during the bust.
“There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them,” Mr Gurner said. “We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
As much of a tool as this guy seems to be, it's hard to say he's wrong here. I've also been noticing a surge of tech people treating companies as some kind of social service / adult daycare where it's the company's responsibility to make sure the employee and their family are living a good life. It's really bizarre.
It's not that black and white. The relationship between employer and employee should be far more symbiotic than what Gurner states. Both should benefit equally from the system. That is no longer the case.
I think this guy is the kind of person that will fire an employee out of spite, even if it will damage the business.
‘the peasants should know their place’
I am not clear on this whole ‘employees want too much’ issue - we are still talking about companies like FANG that have giant profits and insane capitalisation? Why is having employees claim larger share of the pie a bad thing?
The money they pay in salaries actually gets taxes and enters the real economy. The money they stash in tax heavens does not
A company can remain operational for quite a while if the business owner walks out.
A company has to shut down pretty much entirely if all the workers walk out.
As both a worker and a business owner (and formerly an employer) I can tell you that this will always hold true. Sure, in most companies the business owner will also be the general manager or CEO of the company and actively steer the long-term trajectory and development of the company as well as manage day-to-day regulatory compliance and other concerns of "business as usual" but all of this is literally just work and owning the company is neither necessary nor sufficient for doing this work (except when it comes to legally representing the company but that too can be delegated to a person who doesn't have to be the owner).
What a business owner brings to the table, like a landlord, is capital. It doesn't matter if this capital was accumulated through hard work, exploitative business practices, bank loans, inheritance or anything else. At the end of the day the difference is a business owner has capital, a worker only has their own labor to sell.
I'm not sure why you're blaming employees for treating companies like "adult daycare" when you're even saying it's something you observed the development of. If you did, you surely know the origins, most prominently Google and all of its cultural copycats. Startups having foosball tables was a cliché over the past decades for a good reason. In a market where experienced and skilled developers were rare and job openings for them were plenty, companies tried to attract and retain them at any cost.
Laundry services, on-site gyms and three warm meals at work meant less private life and more reliance on the company for everyday necessities, it also meant overtime was less visible because you're "living in the office" anyway. The "adult daycare" phenomenon existed as much to pamper high-value employees as to lock them in (psychologically at least) and to trick them into fully identifying with the company they work for (and give up their private life for it). It's functionally equivalent to any run of the mill cult. The crux here is that the companies didn't want to make sure the employee's family was living a good life, they wanted to make sure the employee didn't get distracted. Heck, companies like Google have sponsored freezing their employees' eggs to incentivize them delaying their family planning. There's a reason former Google employees still call themselves "Xooglers" because having worked at Google is still ingrained into their identity.
Also, conveniently, all these benefits and affordances ensure employees don't think they need a union or can be told that unions would actually get in the way by asking inconvient questions or demanding separation of work time and private time or fair treatment of individuals who don't want to or can't participate in "the lifestyle".
That's due to tax laws that effectively make it cheaper to compensate healthcare than in cash. Since everyone needs healthcare it's a standard offering.
But you're free to purchase it privately. I've bought health insurance privately when unemployed easy peasy.
Well yeah if you want things in life you need to offer something in return, obviously the doctor isn't a slave at your command to work for you for free. But you need not be employed to employ his services, merely need to compensate him for his employment in your service.
Your options are to offer the doctor something, ask for charity, or use violence (either yourself or through the state) to force someone to give you what you want.
Obviously I am not going to advocate for violence.
One may be that in their particular case they can get away with it, it works, and they can blame the victim as not having a right to keep what they took in the first place.
We can go full postmodern - what gives anyone a right to anything in the first place anyway? In the end, isn't it whoever has the most capacity for violence who has the "right"?
You could consider that, but focusing on the violent option (curiously so far to the exclusion of everything else) and then beyond that focusing on rights based on capacity for violence may not be the path that comes out with the most benefit to the disabled.
If you believe your company has your best interests at heart then you're just a mark waiting to be given some unpleasant news some day soon.
As a manager I've personally saved a few folks over the years from a very arbitrary sacking, and it often comes down to a few VPs scheming in some back room with little or no context on what they're planning, and pure luck that you can get to them before they make any announcements.
The only metric they worry about each day, looking good for their C-suite bosses. Genuinely, they'll go and say they've reduced costs and their orgs headcount by whatever, and absolutely NOBODY will ever ask the follow-up about what functions those folks managed or what institutional knowledge has just walked out the door never to return.
The same goes for all human relationships, you might as well include your parents or spouse. Or the government or your local grocery store that might close when you least expect it. I think it feels bad in a special way with the companies because you spend so much time with them which should trigger all kinds of tribal loyalties but the system simply isn't set up this way and there is no real tribe.
I'm pretty tired of having to argue with leadership about adjusting salaries by inflation. Of course they will begrudgingly eat up increases in other costs due to inflation, but the buck stops with the employees. Keep people that are performing on par or more happy? Naaaah, let's lose internal knowledge and money onboarding a new employee.
This AND you get to read about the great financial position company is in, dividends and stock buyback planned and scheduled, rounds of bonuses for the hardworking executives, who toil in anonymity to ensure good returns for shareholders by culling dead weight.
What? You want your salary to match inflation? On the list you go.
This hits hard. I just got my “pay rise”, that is below inflation, with no real comment. “Was it my performance?” “No, your performance was great”. “Can I look at other advancement?” “We will look next year”.
So yet again, I feel the pressure to look for a new company. I am so so tired.
I'm a contractor and one of my client has grown considerably and shifted their attitude towards me from "external expert who helps us in their field of expertise" to "employee with fewer protections" over the years and this is very much true.
Previously I'd tell them I need to raise my rate for one reason or another but I'd also temporarily reduce it when they were struggling with the market during COVID or suspend raising it. When I finally told them I needed to raise it because of inflation and nothing else, they kept hiding behind their own bureaucracy and eventually insisted on finalizing the adjusted contract as part of a round of "pay raises" in the company. I wasn't "asking for a raise", I was informing them of a change in my rate. And it wouldn't have been a raise anyway as it literally barely covered the rise in inflation. When HR eventually sent me the updated contract it felt like they expected me to make a happy dance or something.
I'd say the nature of a contractual relationship fundamentally differs from that of an employee-employer dynamic. As a contractor, you're not requesting a raise but rather renegotiating the terms of your engagement, which is a standard practice as contracts come up for renewal.
Working with a lawyer for your contract negotiations can ensure that your interests are well-protected. They can help include provisions such as inflation-adjusted rate increases and other legal protections to safeguard your position.
Ultimately, the outcome of such negotiations hinges on the power dynamics and mutual dependence between you and your client and your leverage is never higher than at the start of your employment/contract.
It’s not good to keep fixating on how much the cruel executives make. They are employees just like you, and they have similar worries and concerns.
Also, loyalty cuts both ways. Companies will invest more time and energy in employees they know they can count on. You have to decide whether to take that risk or remain suspicious and bitter. Even with all that, both sides have the right to cut ties at any time. Its not so much like a marriage as it is a long time living arrangement.
100% this. Even when executives aren't the owners, they still have a very different position of power than even upper management. The industrial era black-and-white model of worker vs capitalist may not be a good fit for the way large companies are structured but executives are very much the true labor aristocracy, acting more like the royal guard to keep the rabble in check than like a fellow worker who shares your fears and needs.
I didn’t mean that they were exactly the same as you. But they do tend to get fired all the time and in many cases they have to be compensated in order to induce them to leave their current job.
I do agree that keeping the rabble in check is part of their job, but that role extends all the way down an organisation to the chief bottlewasher.
Regarding the prior comment, Elon Musk is obviously a very special case since he is the owner and he DID get the stock up way beyond what anyone would have imagined! I don’t think we want to build a generalization around him :-)
We put our savings on Wall Street firms aiming to "maximize shareholder value at any cost" and then complain when these companies end up treating employees like cattle.
Tragedy of the commons. You're right though, saying 'take 10% of my pay check, invest it, and get as high a return as possible' is at odds with 'pay me more'.
I was disposed of recently after 4 years. Looking back now I feel I put in too many hours, filled in for roles and responsibilities without financial compensation. I'm 40 and still making these types of mistakes. Just an overwhelming feeling of sadness and frustration.
High five for all the other recently made redundant peeps.
The opposite is also true: as an employer, you are disposable.
I think, according to the comments I see on HN, it is a bit too much, on both sides. Employees get laid off for no good reason, we already know that part, but many employees don't hesitate to quit when the company needs them the most.
I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides. You don't have to get married to your employer, but I have the feeling that with a bit more loyalty, both employees and employers could make more beneficial long term plans.
> The opposite is also true: as an employer, you are disposable.
Noone claims otherwise, but the difference is power dynamics and economic output of the state - if the unemployment is super low (like 1-2%) then it's super easy to jump jobs. But in regular, healthy market (3-5% unemployment) employer always have upper hand...
I have a feeling you havent worked long because in the last 20 years of my experience I cant remember of one example where "but many employees don't hesitate to quit when the company needs them the most." was correct. It was always employees being let go suddenly and on a whim.
I have worked long. And I can think of many, many examples of people quitting suddenly and leaving everything hanging, in companies of various sizes.
These days I run a solo business. I do not want to have any employees. I've been burned too many times in the past — and my experience (generalizing horribly) is that most programmers think they are the cream of the crop, superstars that deserve salary, benefits, perks, bonuses, vacations, and fantastic treatment. But then it turns out that a) they don't perform as superstars, and b) the company deserves absolutely nothing in return, so people leave suddenly and without warning.
In the businesses I've seen, the relationship was very asymmetric, heavily biased towards the comfort of employees.
Entitled people exist in all areas, that's a fact.
But you are being too weird in your generalization that usually the table is tilted in favor of the employees. For 22 years of career I've never once seen it.
If you make yourself a niche consultant and can command insane fees then nice, but for everybody else they are just cogs that can and are replaced on a whim.
> It was always employees being let go suddenly and on a whim.
I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go. Meanwhile many of them have gone through 4 or 5 employers in the past 15 years.
> I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go.
In the last 27 years, I've worked for more than 20 companies. Maybe 5 as a contractor that didn't go FT. Many startups, some name brands. I have been let go (or ongoing contract not renewed) ~6 times - hard to know with contracting when it's sometimes a factor of budgeting. Suffice to say, I have quit far more positions than removed by the actions of my employers. I have been at my current position ~7 years with 1 promotion. I fully expect that I will be let go out of the blue one day.
To prepare for this, I save aggressively. I do interviews with other companies from time to time for practice. Meta, Indeed, Nintendo, whatever. I work on the weekends from time to time, trying new technologies and picking at the low-hanging fruit that might make me more robust in the job market.
This is the state of the industry and will be for the foreseeable future. Losing a job involuntarily sucks. Interviewing sucks. Looking for jobs sucks. All that being said, it's still the best way to get a better job (whatever that means to you). I'm an old man and I'm at the peak of my ability. I do wonder when it will go upside down for me.
Employees are more likely to quit than get made redundant. Therefore it would seem that employers are more disposable than employees. You can't quit a job for another job with a higher salary and then moan about being made redundant.
Generally I think you hope for the best and plan for the worst. If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you. If you're not then what do you expect? You wouldn't stay with a shitty job.
> If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you.
That's very generously assuming somebody above you actually has a clue who's valuable and who is not, which I have to tell you that I have witnessed, yes, but rarely.
I would say then you have chosen the wrong employers. If you're working for someone who doesn't see your value then you're unlikely to be properly recompensed for it. Choosing a company with less hierarchy and more of a meritocracy would help.
It is far easier to switch an employee than employer, as decision is made assymetrically - the decision maker, the manager of your manager, for example, has zero emotional investment in you, compared to you and your being accustomed to your place, social relationships etc.
EDIT: It is also true that too frequent switching jobs will have negative consequences for your employability; and high attrition, even if it becomes a public fact, would have little consequences for desirability of the job.
My working career spans ~25 years. Less than 5 of those years have I been a permanent employee.
Most people view this sort of employment pattern as being risky. It certainly has it's ups and downs but it does also mean you are never tied to an employer or really that vulnerable to layoffs or similar. I have had contracts cut short because of organisational crisis but moving on is usually trivial.
People make choices and trade-offs when they choose their employer/how they are employed.
I don't understand why people think a large or even middling organisation is going to consider individual employees over other likely more pressing factors like short and long term survival. I do understand why it would be painful and stressful.
I feel like there's a general shift away from contractors happening though, which is weird because at least in tech, it's often a strictly better situation for both employees and employers.
Contractors get paid a lot more than FTEs in the same position, employers save on lots of overhead for healthcare and stuff. At least for younger people without chronic illness, this is often a way better deal. Employers can not only have the truly elastic work force that they seem want, but they can also actually remove staff where it's not working out without facing some kind of lawsuit. And without waiting for huge rounds of general layoffs while they keep useless/ignorant folks for years and task more productive people with trying to minimize the damage they cause. And yet.. if you want part-time or contract work, it's crickets when it comes to find/filter. The increasingly monolithic staffing empires at big websites like Indeed apparently have so few of these jobs listed that they just ignore the filter and show all the full-time positions anyway.
I don't have a great theory about why. Could be the economy in general, could be AI removing the 1% of actually thoughtful recruiters from the loop recently, or changing tax laws, or employers just enjoying leverage while they use the classic healthcare/employment situation in the US as a cudgel in negotiations, or it could be the perverse incentives to engage in arbitrary hiring/firing to manipulate hype and stock-prices. If anyone can speak to this from the perspective of an employer (or better yet an economist..) it's probably an interesting story.
Whatever the reason, this is all so stupid. Why vacuum up huge numbers of people who are actually looking for stability and disappoint them, and refuse to engage with people who are looking for more casual employment? I will probably live to regret this, but I have wished there was a actually functioning market for gig-work in tech. More and more small/boutique consultancies are shutting down, staffing agencies still barely understand the domain they try to serve, companies usually don't want to talk to people angling for contracts showing up to FTE positions, and the scammy little ecosystem for temp-work in tech is probably little better than hustling on craigslist in the early 2000's. What's up with that?
I can really only talk about the UK but I'd agree there has been a move away from better paid technical contract positions. Mostly this has been due to policy change to remove tax advantages that can come with contracting.
For large scale organisations or government organisations navigating these sort policies just isn't worth it so they simplify it and apply the same policy to everyone, which means the risk/reward isn't quite as balanced as it used to be.
Ironically, for me at least this has increased what I make as I have years of navigating the landscape, but for others it's definitely less attractive.
The more insidious side of contracting is that there has been an enormous expansion in "outsourcing" contracts that are entirely about lowering organisational costs and employer responsibilities and are exploitative without any real benefits to those employed. The majority of those contracted in these cases are almost certainly made up of outsourced ex-employees or those that would in the past have been recruited directly by organisations. In the UK and local government departments are one of the worst, having been forced to make cuts to cope with diminishing budgets.
> I can really only talk about the UK but I'd agree there has been a move away from better paid technical contract positions. Mostly this has been due to policy change to remove tax advantages that can come with contracting.
To be fair, the pre IR35 situation was super dodgy.
To counterpoint that, I live in Ireland where there's absolutely no tax advantage to being a contractor (slightly less NI equivalent, way less benefits and a special dividend tax to prevent those kinds of shenanigans) and yet there appears to be a thriving contractor market, so it feels like there's more going on here.
Now a bunch of those contract positions are far too low in terms of day rate, so maybe it's just an attempt to cut costs while giving naive people what looks like a good deal, because they don't account for all the costs.
This is why we need labor unions. The power dynamics are almost universally stacked in favor of the employer. Unions can equalize this to an extent. You will still be disposable, but at least you will get better terms if you end up getting disposed of.
Oh, but my employer is different and a union would only make business more complicated and less likely to give me raises and promotions! I’m a rising star, you know.
Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?
When life is working out for folks and they make a decent income, they tend not to complain or want to rock the boat so as not to risk things. Can’t think of anything that would risk ones income capability more than being seen by companies as a union organizer - retribution is illegal but can’t be enforced, so it is de facto legal. See: starbucks suddenly closing all the stores that decided to unionize.
People who own companies are not known for being nice but the best way to get the full force and fury of a billion dollars arrayed against you is to suggest unionization.
Software developers _are_ mostly factory workers, it's just that their factories make software.
But titles aside - only some software developers are highly paid; some aren't. And we are not "special people" - that's just company propaganda. There are millions and millions of us around the world. And in most of our companies, there are a lot. And our employment conditions are not "special", they are like the other SW developers, and - guess what? Pretty much like those of most of the other non-manual-labor workers, even if the salaries differ by profession.
Most employers, and the media, do a lot to inculcate us with this belief in distancing ourselves from each other, emphasizing differences and supposed uniqueness, so that our interactions go through them; and that we not think of doing things - professionally and otherwise - by direct coordination and collaboration, but rather through the mediation of management.
But if there's anyone who has the capacity to imagine things operating differently than they do today, surely it must be us SW devs - if we don't limit our critical scrutiny to just the computers we work on but direct it also towards surrounding social structures.
I do think the high level of autodidacts makes it very different from anything else. It doesn't feel like a "trade", those involve building things with your hands. It's perhaps more similar to a "profession", like the much older ones of lawyers and doctors, but it hasn't developed the professional organization structure to go with it.
Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.
The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.
(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)
It is because software developers are the capital and managerial class and they are the rich guy with the boot that stomps all the lower earning working class schleps , not the other way around.
> Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.
You reached reductio ad absurdum in two tiny steps. So unions are seeking rent by virtue of legal ownership of the motion physical bodies, just as property owners seek rent by virtue of ownership of real estate.
Unions benefit workers by giving them leverage through collective bargaining. For the US specifically, demand has been so astronomical for developers for the past couple of decades that most wouldn't have gained additional leverage from joining a union. Don't like your working conditions? Just job hop and get a pay increase as a bonus.
That calculus might change if demand for developers cools down as a long term trend but it's not going to be anytime soon.
You’re not wrong, but in Australia where I work only 12.5% of all workers are in unions. We have some moderately union-hostile legislation (strikes are hard to pull off lawfully) but nothing preventing union organisation in principle for most workers. So evidently it’s not only software developers who think this way.
So workers are prosecuted for withholding labor in negotiations with management, these are moderately union-hostile laws. I'm told Henry Clay Frick was somewhat disinclined in his opinion of unions as well.
You'd be surprised. Tech is full of special snowflakes who don't need a union because they're one of the deserving extremely talented net contributors who earned their special privileges and don't have any problems working unpaid overtime because their employer would certainly have their back if they ever needed time off or their productivity declined because of bad health or personal issues and don't want the undeserving underperforming underachievers and talentless diversity hires to get a leg up and steal their glory.
I'm not even kidding, this is almost verbatim the attitude of plenty of (white, male, able-bodied tho at times mildly autistic) developers I've talked to throughout my career and at meetups and conferences, though few would be bold enough to spell it out this explicitly. Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability. If anything, developers working at smaller tech companies or in technical roles at non-technical companies were worse because they'd often see unions as only relevant for jobs that were "beneath them".
Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
> Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability.
If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
> Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
> Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur if you have any idea of how the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence treated unions. Just look at modern China if you need a refresher on what authoritrian states think about workers unionizing.
Also unions are not communism and neither did any of those countries ever experience "communism". The USSR never claimed to have "achieved communism", in fact the expression "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") was coined by these governments to denounce critics who demanded steps towards communism as "utopian" idealists. China today even has a full roadmap towards communism with different labeled steps to justify why it hasn't achieved communism yet and needs to be authoritarian for just a little while longer because the state will wither away eventually really soon trust me bro.
> If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
Not with that attitude they won't. Do you think we got legally mandated 40 hour work weeks, paid sick leave and mandatory rest periods out of the goodness of the hearts of business owners?
After taxes, but before healthcare and the fact that most employment is at-will.
I'll take higher taxes, healthcare through general taxation and relatively strong job security over a fixed dollar amount any day. Everyone is different though.
> After taxes, but before healthcare and the fact that most employment is at-will.
That combined doesn't even remotely cost that gap of 60k per year (plus strictly speaking this is not true since many employers would provide IT people with insurance).
> I'll take higher taxes,
It's not higher taxes. It's much lower salaries + much higher taxes combined. 60k a year in savings will provide you far more security and bargaining power than any strictest EU trade code would (and this is IMO one of the reasons for higher salaries in the US).
Well. On the other hand, I can not be laid off easily, and will need to be told at least three months in advance; if my girlfriend gets pregnant, I can take a few months off, too; if the child is sick, I can stay at home too*; if I get sick, I’ll continue to get paid; if I have back pain, I can request to get expensive ergonomic equipment from my employer; if I need to see a specialist, or get insanely expensive treatment, I don’t have to worry; I have 30 days of vacation, of which I must take at least two weeks of consecutive time off, without any negative consequences for my job; if my children go to university, it’s pretty much free, as it was for me; I can’t ever get paid less by my employer, only more; I can take a few days of external educational courses of my choice every year, and my employer has to accept that (and pay for it!); and I probably forgot a bunch of other advantages here.
Specifically on insurance: how much is that worth if it’s bound to your employer? What if you get laid off and don’t find a job in time, then get sick? What if your father is laid off at 55, nobody wants to hire him anymore due to his age and he develops cancer? I can tell you what happens in Germany: nothing. Both of you go to the MD and get treated as appropriate.
You’ll never get me to trade all of this for a bit more money that I need to spend on health care, ridiculous tips, and overpriced apartments anyway.
Over here (austria) the unions, which are pretty powerful, argue on behalf of ALL employees in that field. They basically set the minimum pay/benefits across the country for the kinds of jobs they represent by negotiating with the industrial association. By law, the result of those negotiations are the baseline for everyone. And everyone can still negotiate for better terms with their employer.
One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.
So you’re sure it will stay that way, because you trust management to do the right thing? Even as you get older, life treats you harshly, or the economy goes down and suddenly you’re expected to work twenty extra hours?
> So you’re sure it will stay that way, because you trust management to do the right thing
Because they’ve given me reason to believe they will? But mostly because the law makes it really hard to let go of employees when your company is doing well enough to keep them.
If you work at a Union place, you know the complications are absurd.
I've worked at both, and the efficiency, friendliness, experience were all absurdly better without unions. With unions, everyone was trying to get each other written up, seniority mattered more than performance, politics were half the conversations at work.
Engineering would be miserable with a union, you'd be basically locked into an employer climbing the totem pole.
These comments miss so much nuance. This isn't black and white.
I don't want to work for a union not because I'm a rising star. It's because I know I'm on the right of a normal distribution. I don't want to revert to median pay. No thanks.
How do you know compensation is a normal distribution, and that you are on a particular side of it? Everyone on HN thinks they are a highly-paid, irreplaceable Captain Of Industry who, by their brilliant skill and shrewd negotiating power is making much more than the average. "Surely a union would bring -my- compensation and working conditions down!" they imagine.
lol nice story. But we also have tools like Levels.fyi and networks. I have asked all my friends how much they make and some of them have spreadsheets where they track the pay of whoever they ask. It’s not that hard to get an idea where you land these days.
I also don’t want it to be hard to fire people. I’ve worked with or adjacent with 2-3 people who got fired for performance and in every case I was so glad they did and am glad I don’t live in EU or a union where the process would have been harder than it already was.
I don't want to be "equalized". I'm happy to negotiate my own terms. In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent. The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.
If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
> The unions in NYC protect the union. They care about little else.
That's their fiat. They're supposed to be like that.
I'm really hoping that unions are learning a bit of humility from the last few years. We'll see.
Japan (and Germany, I hear), has unions that are stakeholders (and, often board members) of corporations. They seem to work quite well, and are very powerful.
Particularly in Germany, unions are quite literally unions of workers that band together, not menacing cartels. By law, companies must not interfere with workers organising themselves in a Betriebsrat, basically a company-internal union, which (as you mentioned) by mere forming becomes a stakeholder and needs to be involved in certain decisions.
This doesn’t automatically mean you have a mandatory tariff for everyone, just that there is an organisation in your workplace that you can turn to, which will have your interests in mind, without you having to be a member. They can protect you from overreaching managers, baseless accusations, or unwarranted layoffs. And of course, they usually negotiate on behalf of the entire staff, especially on HR topics.
While this isn’t always working perfectly, it’s still a big achievement in terms of equality and worker rights.
It’s unfortunate, I think, that the US has such an awful history in terms of unions. There are far more nuances than discussions on HN make it seem, and virtually nobody looses if employees have strong protections against their employers.
>If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.
Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.
If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?
This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.
I am interested in your parallel universe where software doesn't underpin every business... What line of business do you work in that doesn't need software for accounting, banking, invoicing, payroll, communications, yadda yadda.
Consumer software doesn't run the world. I think your negative examples of software scams and hucksters are consumer based.
> just to skirt the laws and scam VCs
VCs are not generally seen as victims!
> you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix
And that plumber depends directly or indirectly on plenty of software to get their job done, from the basics of getting paid to the more complex of sourcing parts. And they use a mobile phone, which is 99.9% software with a little bit of hardware.
So we started out with the idea that unions are good for software developers, and now it’s about how you can’t eat software anyway and society should really value someone else? Yeah I get it…
No, I was just pointing out that what London, NYC, SF, are doing might not be the best for everyone even if they host the topo SW companies in the world.
This is a heart felt message but has nothing to do with SWE pay. You don't make any suggestions here at all, am I supposed to interrupt this as everyone gets paid the same? If that is the case, say it.
If everyone is paid the same, who sets these salaries, unions? Then who sets the non union pay? Or does everyone work for the union or government?
Where did I say everyone should get paid the same? All I said was that focusing on producing the world's top SW companies doesn't seem to produce the societies with the best quality of life, and that that should be the main focus of a healthy society IMO.
Yeah, what I said is not a solution to such problems, just an observation to the Original grandparent comment who tried to point out a few cities that have the best SW compensation as if that should be the end goal for every country.
You already are - by your employer. Mostly equalized at the absolute bottom of every situation where you disagree with your superiors or need to rely on the company for something.
> I'm happy to negotiate my own terms.
And your employer is even happier for you to believe you are actually negotiating your own terms.
> In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent.
That is certainly a potential problem. But think about the distribution of status, benefits and compensation of owners, managers, and employees - that's even more extreme, and prevalent, than misdeeds by union leaders.
This sounds like a bit of a "democracy can have corruption so let's support the monarchy" kind of an argument.
> The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.
What companies prefer is to shepherd the flock themselves. Failing that, getting a collaborative shepherd. The challenge in unionization is disrupting the shepherding and allowing for conscious collective reflection and action.
> in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
The US is the center of the major world empire right now, and is not really comparable with most other places. However, even if you took the US - it's pretty much a hellscape, socially. Large tech companies are swimming in their ill-gotten gains while a huge number of people are homeless, many can only access contaminated water, students are in massive debt, infrastructure is in poor repair, public facilities and systems are under-developed...
It's why we need UBI and (in the US) universal healthcare, IMHO. there's a lot that's great about a dynamic and flexible economy, as long as it works for the people at large.
Labor unions are deeply corrupt. They serve the employer.
At my dad job their leaders of unions are literally paid as "leaders" xd No conflict of interest and the fact they always get so well with CEO and never with workers is not suspicious.
IMO the problem with unions is that they are still attached to a specific employer. I think a guild like structure would be better, where the guild would help you find employment along with improved terms.
In my early career, I used to believe in doing whatever it took to stay with a company, becoming emotionally invested in every line of code and system I developed. However, after a few negative experiences with bosses who didn't treat me well, I came to realize a few things:
- My code is disposable, and I should not become overly attached to it
- Loyalty should be mutual and based on a healthy relationship where both parties are willing to invest
When I started contracting, all the advice I saw was like "you need to have three months of income in savings and maintain this reserve or you will go bankrupt". I never had that much money in savings and to this day still don't but I still think it's good advice. I had of course other advantages that allowed me to overcome the hardships.
But more directly, I think "if you think employees are disposable, why are you still an employee" is a very naive - if obvious - question. Even as a contractor I'm functionally treated like an employee by many companies and if anything I'm more disposable this way than I would be with a salaried position and career. The question is "what else" and if there is a dichotomy, the answer is "be the employer" but that is simply not an option for most and if you find yourself being an employee you likely aren't in the position to become an employer because you don't have the funds to start a business without a significant existential risk.
The truth is not just that most business founders fail. The truth is also that most founders of the largest businesses that exist today either started when there was no competition nor regulation or they were already filthy (generationally) rich to begin with - or both. So what else is there? Not participate in the economy? You might as well insist people refuse to breathe.
Of course, it also depends on the local laws. In some countries, there are stronger employee protection laws.
My employer wanted to do layoffs. They had to come up with an offer that's so good that some employees accepted it (everyone who wanted to remain in the company did).
And if you work at a place as an employee that has made a situation where you ARN'T disposable, you should either try and change that or leave.
If there's a single point of failure like that, the company is being mismanaged. NOBODY leaving, getting sick, taking a holiday or even dying, should leave the rest of the company at risk.
Companies should most certainly value employees and treat us with respect, but they should also be setup to allow for employees not being around forever.
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Normal work schedule with grunt employees doing not mandated stuff together once in a while after work? Okay, that's nice, but you should still have a social group that's not (only) coworkers.
Huge difference.
I would even openly admit that I voted your comment up to mitigate the punishment for your mistake, but then they would vote me down. So, I don't. Just so as not to be misunderstood.
In reality they are. There may be only a handful of employees in the world who are truly irreplaceable. Without employee X the shelves will still get stacked, the reports written, the coffee made, the code written, the product sold.
Naturally this also applies to the executives too ...
If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're loyal -- and whether or not your employer is loyal to you in return.
Hint: in most companies, they aren't. It's exceedingly rare.
Base your decisions accordingly.
I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Of course, this is just the random off-the-cuff thoughts of someone who is currently far too alcoholated, so YMMV, and--
Look! A boulder of salt!
And on that note, I'm going to bed. Tootles!
For the vast majority of employment situations, it is simply a transaction. There needn't be any talk of "loyalty", which in my mind is usually just manipulation.
Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have.
> Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have.
Peachy.
Marriage was just an example that points out the absurd nature of the "loyalty" the user described.
You can't say "well, I am loyal as long as I don't have any other options"... that's not how loyalty works.
But cultural norms are really powerful and can absolutely overcome natural game theory / self interest dynamics. If everyone you know would think less of you after you quit a job when it is known that employers are loyal, you won't do it. Same goes for the reverse.
The most common error I see in employment is the employees not understanding this basic truth. That leads to situations such as people thinking that an employer is doing them a favor in some way by hiring them, which leads to people giving up some of their power.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
If anything, it is a perverse expression of US 'fuck you, got mine' system.
What one party perceives as a fair wage is nothing but profit dilution for the other side.
Remember, the only purpose of a business is - given money - to make more money. If you can't help them with that, either by being dirt cheap or have some marketable skill, you're literally useless and part of the Capitalist overpopulation... a class people who serve no use in the accumulation process.
When every company that has any mind share is beholden to a bunch of external shareholders, it's no wonder "profit as much as possible" is the only reason for being anyone thinks of.
But it didn't used to be this way and it doesn't have to be this way. It's still possible for people to do well by doing good, providing, for example, quality housing at non-exploitative prices, or reliable and safe plumbing to handle their neighbors' water and sewer needs. And it still is being done.
Most of us just spend so much of our time online that we only ever hear about the companies with social media/marketing teams, so we get used to that way of thinking.
If every plumber in your area had a subscription to your software that was specifically tailored to your codes and the nuances of your area? Estimating costs based on actual local prices for things? Could you support the number of people it would take to keep such a thing running? Could you sell insights from the data to the local hardware store to help them figure out what kinds of changes (weather, construction, whatever) lead to what kinds of demand for products?
It doesn't have to be "you could walk to it" local, but if you really created the tool your area's local businesses couldn't live without, could you really not support yourself?
Today we talk of globalization, but the mid to late twenteith century was the heyday of nationalization, of small local and regional businesses like the ones you describe -- businesses that were linked to and cared about their local communities or regions -- getting bought up and consolidated into large national businesses -- local owners getting replaced with hourly shift managers with less autonomy and incentive to care.
Today's American may wake up in their Toll Brothers built house, take a morning poop on their American Standard toilet, brush their teeth with Proctor & Gamble products, walk down the stairs built with wood from the Home Depot, pour themselves a bowl of Kellog's cereal into dishes and on a table bought from Ikea, read the news a bit on their Apple device, step into their Ford car sitting on their driveway built of asphalt made by Koch Industrial, then drive to work, stopping for gas at an ExxonMobil gas station, pulling in to their job as shift manager at a TGI Friday's, where they spend their day serving food made from ingredients bought from Sysco, the national distributor, ultimately bought from a few large processed food companies like whoever owns Kraft / Philip Morris these days.... finally after a long day they drive home, stopping at Wal*Mart for some essentials, finishing off the day with the refreshing taste of a Bud Lite.
It's frankly amazing small business still managed to produce 40% of our GDP, but make no mistake, it has been and is being driven to the least profitable margins and corners of every industry. Small business gets to operate the restaurant while big business owns the real estate. Small business gets to owner-operate tractor trailers while big business gets the lions' share of the actual retail profits. Etc, etc -- small business is increasingly stuck with the left over pieces that are too unprofitable for big business.
Unintentional or not, squeezing out small business owners from their share of the pie has been the process for big capital for decades. We talk a lot about how big capital has been trying to squeeze down the piece of the pie labor gets since the 70s, but we forget that small capital has also been the victim of this.
I live next to a Target. It's run by a handful of minimum wage high school kids and a couple of managers who probably earn $40k and have no standing in the community, no share in the success of the business, no way to grow along with it, and no discretion to change their store's behavior to accomodate any local community interest other than distant, distant shareholders getting more profits.
A few decades ago instead there would have been multiple stores, each with an OWNER who had all those things -- standing in the community, ownership over the profits, and the discretion to make decisions not purely on profit but also caring about the community they're indelibly tied up with. And this owner could pass the business to their kids, which the Target manager can't do either.
That's overstating it. Making money is certainly a very important purpose in business, but it's not usually the only purpose.
Reality is that neither has to be loyal. Employees leave all the time for better pay/perks etc. You are judging employers too harshly in this respect.
But I know of examples where a manager has said things like "you need to decide if you are loyal to the company" etc. I really dislike this.
I.e. if your resume shows too much job hopping then that can hurt your ability to get a new job. However, a corporation is not nearly a badly hurt by repeatedly overhiring and laying off employees.
Which only unions have the power to equalize.
It's only about shareholder value, thus about growing growth. Which is so stupidly unsustainable, the inevitable crash always happens.
And it's normal people who will foot the bill for this system.
That argument falls flat on its face as soon as you look at the balance sheet of these companies. They are exceeding expectations and still laying people off.
But then again, I never expected the ruling class to be empathetic.
E.g. here’s what it looks like in my locale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_funds_in_Sweden
The upside of having a system like that is that the burden to ”care for” the employee’s economical safety is not put solely on their current employer, but not solely on the employee either. In order to be eligible for payouts the employee has to pay in to the fund every month (something like ~14 USD) – and all companies are mandated to contribute pay in to this system.
Personally, I see few downsides with this system.
It’s important for the general economy that companies can be flexible and change direction, e.g. when the economy cools off or in the face of competition. Therefore I believe layoffs are sometimes necessary for the company to survive. But it’s also important – both for ethical and economical reasons – that layoffs doesn’t wreak havoc with the personal finances of the people being let go.
Regarding healthcare: To me it does not seem like a good idea to tie a person’s health insurance to their current employer. AFAICT this is a remnant of the US war economy during WW2. But that doesn’t mean that a system like UK’s NIH is superior. To me, the German model looks very reasonable where citizens are required to sign up for insurance but the benefits are not tied to the person’s employment. One can read more about it here: https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/health-in-germany-h... I think Singapore has a similar system.
Once you are not under them you are completely on your own, at least here in Eastern Europe.
That's more or less how it's best described. Once you are not an employee you need an accountant, or you need to be very well versed in the laws and the monthly payments to the country's budget yourself. If neither, some 6-12 months later you get persecuted and called in court, with the possibility to have some of your property confiscated.
They don't like small businesses very much.
I thought it was a discussion about generic companies, but it seems to be a discussion about specific ones?
I had a coworker who was actively hostile to the practice of writing documentation, for instance. He wasn't up front about it but he was plainly doing it to reduce his disposability. I think it probably worked because they kept him around longer than they clearly wanted to in spite of his very prickly personality.
As a strategy I thought it actually made a decent amount of sense given his circumstances - lots of debt/outgoings, he couldn't hop jobs easily and the company treated employees as extra disposable.
As the developer who came after him I was perplexed at the cries online people would make that "this practice only hurts the developer who comes after you" or "if the company does well you'll do well" (which I think is bullshit).
It definitely made me a LOT slower, but I still got paid the same.
Starting any topic with kind/evil dichotomy is never a way to bring a rational perspective on the table, indeed.
Over-hiring can happen through different situation. One is bad luck: market evolution removed the the ground under the feet of a sound projection assuming a reasonably stable context.
An other possibility is incompetence: acting in reckless attitude with the business strategy as if it was a past time board game without considering it will have concrete impact on real people that will engage in its progression.
Yet an other one is draining all skills in the market to gain dominance on its segment. Thus endowed, it will be easy to kill any possibility of fair concurrence. Then later, drop the monopolized workforce out of the train, that was known to be superfluous to achieve production goals. Of course, this drop should occur only once there is no credible chance these employees could find a decent job in this sector anymore. That is after they contributed to the hegemonic position of the organization.
In short, over-hiring is not necessarily an error.
Same as when you are taking your vows, if you later come across a hotter, younger chick with your exact set if kinks, you do not just drop your wife and go looking for a new gimp suit.
Seen from this perspective, it is clear that businesses tend to have very little loyalty. The ethos of most of the business world at the moment is short term bean-counting optimization. If employees can be fired and replaced by cheaper foreign workers, they will be. The only rationale allowable is one that balances costs and benefits, in the bean-counting sense, and it is not an accounting that includes any weight for loyalty. You could imagine a spreadsheet where the company said "hey I'm gonna put a hurdle of $100k per employee on the 'stay in America' side, and I'll only move the factory if it's still in favor of moving abroad". But when has this ever happened?
On the other hand, employees probably have more loyalty than zero. Almost everyone has a story about they were approached by a recruiter offering a higher salary, but they didn't take it. Part of this is explicable by risk, offsetting the higher salary with a chance of not settling at the new work, that kind of thing. But if you were to count the bean again, almost every knows a bunch of people who could have jumped ship for a higher salary but didn't, even when you count that risk.
As someone who works at a 2 person company (my boss and me), it's the good relationship with him along with the relaxed work environment. Sure, we have to be profitable, but not exceedingly so.
> I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
> The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Those are mostly a problem at larger companies, IME.
I was exceedingly lucky with most of my jobs so far, in the sense that I mostly got good work environments where employees are actually valued beyond mere numbers. I wish others would be as lucky as I was.
Isn’t this the point of the article? That even when you feel this way that you are still disposable?
They really tried hard to find a way to keep me on, so while I was disposable in the end, they truly did try to keep me on, and to me, that indicates them valuing me beyond the mere numbers.
My understanding of your messages indicates to me that you think I was saying that the company doesn't care about numbers. While I was meaning that the company treated me as an actual valued human and did well to me.
This is an underappreciated aspect of psychopathic corporate life and "Human resource" thinking, I think. It's hard to avoid the feeling that companies -- particularly big tech -- feel empowered to hire lots of people quickly precisely because firing people has become so easy.
Such that when one big company has a round of layoffs, competitors genuinely feel some pressure to follow suit almost arbitrarily, because it's an expected part of a cycle; a numbers game, a way to appear "lean", etc.
The difference is the amount of time each side has, to develop an understanding of what that means.
As much of a tool as this guy seems to be, it's hard to say he's wrong here. I've also been noticing a surge of tech people treating companies as some kind of social service / adult daycare where it's the company's responsibility to make sure the employee and their family are living a good life. It's really bizarre.
‘the peasants should know their place’
I am not clear on this whole ‘employees want too much’ issue - we are still talking about companies like FANG that have giant profits and insane capitalisation? Why is having employees claim larger share of the pie a bad thing?
The money they pay in salaries actually gets taxes and enters the real economy. The money they stash in tax heavens does not
Ultimately that's why the person is going to work, no?
Everything seems bizarre before it becomes the new standard.
Aren’t they? I feel like that’s a healthy way of looking at it. Goes both ways though.
> “We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
What does this even mean? Remind how? And why isn’t mentioned that it’s supposed to be a mutually beneficial exchange?
A company has to shut down pretty much entirely if all the workers walk out.
As both a worker and a business owner (and formerly an employer) I can tell you that this will always hold true. Sure, in most companies the business owner will also be the general manager or CEO of the company and actively steer the long-term trajectory and development of the company as well as manage day-to-day regulatory compliance and other concerns of "business as usual" but all of this is literally just work and owning the company is neither necessary nor sufficient for doing this work (except when it comes to legally representing the company but that too can be delegated to a person who doesn't have to be the owner).
What a business owner brings to the table, like a landlord, is capital. It doesn't matter if this capital was accumulated through hard work, exploitative business practices, bank loans, inheritance or anything else. At the end of the day the difference is a business owner has capital, a worker only has their own labor to sell.
I'm not sure why you're blaming employees for treating companies like "adult daycare" when you're even saying it's something you observed the development of. If you did, you surely know the origins, most prominently Google and all of its cultural copycats. Startups having foosball tables was a cliché over the past decades for a good reason. In a market where experienced and skilled developers were rare and job openings for them were plenty, companies tried to attract and retain them at any cost.
Laundry services, on-site gyms and three warm meals at work meant less private life and more reliance on the company for everyday necessities, it also meant overtime was less visible because you're "living in the office" anyway. The "adult daycare" phenomenon existed as much to pamper high-value employees as to lock them in (psychologically at least) and to trick them into fully identifying with the company they work for (and give up their private life for it). It's functionally equivalent to any run of the mill cult. The crux here is that the companies didn't want to make sure the employee's family was living a good life, they wanted to make sure the employee didn't get distracted. Heck, companies like Google have sponsored freezing their employees' eggs to incentivize them delaying their family planning. There's a reason former Google employees still call themselves "Xooglers" because having worked at Google is still ingrained into their identity.
Also, conveniently, all these benefits and affordances ensure employees don't think they need a union or can be told that unions would actually get in the way by asking inconvient questions or demanding separation of work time and private time or fair treatment of individuals who don't want to or can't participate in "the lifestyle".
But you're free to purchase it privately. I've bought health insurance privately when unemployed easy peasy.
That hardly disconnects it from being employed, unless you are fortunate enough to have savings/inheritance/etc to fall back on.
Obviously I am not going to advocate for violence.
One may be that in their particular case they can get away with it, it works, and they can blame the victim as not having a right to keep what they took in the first place.
The part that I find most galling about managers with this attitude is that they still expect loyalty, unpaid overtime etc. from their employees.
I wonder how many slave owners said "look, I can't leave this plantation either"?
As a manager I've personally saved a few folks over the years from a very arbitrary sacking, and it often comes down to a few VPs scheming in some back room with little or no context on what they're planning, and pure luck that you can get to them before they make any announcements.
If employers believe you are not a mark - you are unemployable.
I'm tired...
What? You want your salary to match inflation? On the list you go.
We dont have the money for that; we just hired a junior for your team that interned at a FAANG and had to pay them 2x your salary.
So yet again, I feel the pressure to look for a new company. I am so so tired.
Previously I'd tell them I need to raise my rate for one reason or another but I'd also temporarily reduce it when they were struggling with the market during COVID or suspend raising it. When I finally told them I needed to raise it because of inflation and nothing else, they kept hiding behind their own bureaucracy and eventually insisted on finalizing the adjusted contract as part of a round of "pay raises" in the company. I wasn't "asking for a raise", I was informing them of a change in my rate. And it wouldn't have been a raise anyway as it literally barely covered the rise in inflation. When HR eventually sent me the updated contract it felt like they expected me to make a happy dance or something.
Working with a lawyer for your contract negotiations can ensure that your interests are well-protected. They can help include provisions such as inflation-adjusted rate increases and other legal protections to safeguard your position.
Ultimately, the outcome of such negotiations hinges on the power dynamics and mutual dependence between you and your client and your leverage is never higher than at the start of your employment/contract.
High five for all the other recently made redundant peeps.
I think, according to the comments I see on HN, it is a bit too much, on both sides. Employees get laid off for no good reason, we already know that part, but many employees don't hesitate to quit when the company needs them the most.
I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides. You don't have to get married to your employer, but I have the feeling that with a bit more loyalty, both employees and employers could make more beneficial long term plans.
Noone claims otherwise, but the difference is power dynamics and economic output of the state - if the unemployment is super low (like 1-2%) then it's super easy to jump jobs. But in regular, healthy market (3-5% unemployment) employer always have upper hand...
Boss drove to his house in a Bentley and gave him the keys.
Of course the dude was making far more than a Bentley for the company, in a role where your value is pretty much visible on the screen at any time.
These days I run a solo business. I do not want to have any employees. I've been burned too many times in the past — and my experience (generalizing horribly) is that most programmers think they are the cream of the crop, superstars that deserve salary, benefits, perks, bonuses, vacations, and fantastic treatment. But then it turns out that a) they don't perform as superstars, and b) the company deserves absolutely nothing in return, so people leave suddenly and without warning.
In the businesses I've seen, the relationship was very asymmetric, heavily biased towards the comfort of employees.
But you are being too weird in your generalization that usually the table is tilted in favor of the employees. For 22 years of career I've never once seen it.
If you make yourself a niche consultant and can command insane fees then nice, but for everybody else they are just cogs that can and are replaced on a whim.
I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go. Meanwhile many of them have gone through 4 or 5 employers in the past 15 years.
In the last 27 years, I've worked for more than 20 companies. Maybe 5 as a contractor that didn't go FT. Many startups, some name brands. I have been let go (or ongoing contract not renewed) ~6 times - hard to know with contracting when it's sometimes a factor of budgeting. Suffice to say, I have quit far more positions than removed by the actions of my employers. I have been at my current position ~7 years with 1 promotion. I fully expect that I will be let go out of the blue one day.
To prepare for this, I save aggressively. I do interviews with other companies from time to time for practice. Meta, Indeed, Nintendo, whatever. I work on the weekends from time to time, trying new technologies and picking at the low-hanging fruit that might make me more robust in the job market.
This is the state of the industry and will be for the foreseeable future. Losing a job involuntarily sucks. Interviewing sucks. Looking for jobs sucks. All that being said, it's still the best way to get a better job (whatever that means to you). I'm an old man and I'm at the peak of my ability. I do wonder when it will go upside down for me.
That's very generously assuming somebody above you actually has a clue who's valuable and who is not, which I have to tell you that I have witnessed, yes, but rarely.
But yes, technically correct.
EDIT: It is also true that too frequent switching jobs will have negative consequences for your employability; and high attrition, even if it becomes a public fact, would have little consequences for desirability of the job.
Most people view this sort of employment pattern as being risky. It certainly has it's ups and downs but it does also mean you are never tied to an employer or really that vulnerable to layoffs or similar. I have had contracts cut short because of organisational crisis but moving on is usually trivial.
People make choices and trade-offs when they choose their employer/how they are employed.
I don't understand why people think a large or even middling organisation is going to consider individual employees over other likely more pressing factors like short and long term survival. I do understand why it would be painful and stressful.
Contractors get paid a lot more than FTEs in the same position, employers save on lots of overhead for healthcare and stuff. At least for younger people without chronic illness, this is often a way better deal. Employers can not only have the truly elastic work force that they seem want, but they can also actually remove staff where it's not working out without facing some kind of lawsuit. And without waiting for huge rounds of general layoffs while they keep useless/ignorant folks for years and task more productive people with trying to minimize the damage they cause. And yet.. if you want part-time or contract work, it's crickets when it comes to find/filter. The increasingly monolithic staffing empires at big websites like Indeed apparently have so few of these jobs listed that they just ignore the filter and show all the full-time positions anyway.
I don't have a great theory about why. Could be the economy in general, could be AI removing the 1% of actually thoughtful recruiters from the loop recently, or changing tax laws, or employers just enjoying leverage while they use the classic healthcare/employment situation in the US as a cudgel in negotiations, or it could be the perverse incentives to engage in arbitrary hiring/firing to manipulate hype and stock-prices. If anyone can speak to this from the perspective of an employer (or better yet an economist..) it's probably an interesting story.
Whatever the reason, this is all so stupid. Why vacuum up huge numbers of people who are actually looking for stability and disappoint them, and refuse to engage with people who are looking for more casual employment? I will probably live to regret this, but I have wished there was a actually functioning market for gig-work in tech. More and more small/boutique consultancies are shutting down, staffing agencies still barely understand the domain they try to serve, companies usually don't want to talk to people angling for contracts showing up to FTE positions, and the scammy little ecosystem for temp-work in tech is probably little better than hustling on craigslist in the early 2000's. What's up with that?
For large scale organisations or government organisations navigating these sort policies just isn't worth it so they simplify it and apply the same policy to everyone, which means the risk/reward isn't quite as balanced as it used to be.
Ironically, for me at least this has increased what I make as I have years of navigating the landscape, but for others it's definitely less attractive.
The more insidious side of contracting is that there has been an enormous expansion in "outsourcing" contracts that are entirely about lowering organisational costs and employer responsibilities and are exploitative without any real benefits to those employed. The majority of those contracted in these cases are almost certainly made up of outsourced ex-employees or those that would in the past have been recruited directly by organisations. In the UK and local government departments are one of the worst, having been forced to make cuts to cope with diminishing budgets.
To be fair, the pre IR35 situation was super dodgy.
To counterpoint that, I live in Ireland where there's absolutely no tax advantage to being a contractor (slightly less NI equivalent, way less benefits and a special dividend tax to prevent those kinds of shenanigans) and yet there appears to be a thriving contractor market, so it feels like there's more going on here.
Now a bunch of those contract positions are far too low in terms of day rate, so maybe it's just an attempt to cut costs while giving naive people what looks like a good deal, because they don't account for all the costs.
> I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides
Prisoner's dilemma, innit. The win condition is more loyalty from both sides, but each individual side benefits more from defecting.
When an employer lays off an employee, the result is immediate financial distress and the urgent need to secure new employment.
The power differential is substantial and cannot be overlooked.
- A literal supermajority of software developers
People who own companies are not known for being nice but the best way to get the full force and fury of a billion dollars arrayed against you is to suggest unionization.
Even if you didn’t personally think it’d be useful for you, that should make you reconsider?
But titles aside - only some software developers are highly paid; some aren't. And we are not "special people" - that's just company propaganda. There are millions and millions of us around the world. And in most of our companies, there are a lot. And our employment conditions are not "special", they are like the other SW developers, and - guess what? Pretty much like those of most of the other non-manual-labor workers, even if the salaries differ by profession.
Most employers, and the media, do a lot to inculcate us with this belief in distancing ourselves from each other, emphasizing differences and supposed uniqueness, so that our interactions go through them; and that we not think of doing things - professionally and otherwise - by direct coordination and collaboration, but rather through the mediation of management.
But if there's anyone who has the capacity to imagine things operating differently than they do today, surely it must be us SW devs - if we don't limit our critical scrutiny to just the computers we work on but direct it also towards surrounding social structures.
Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.
The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.
(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.
You reached reductio ad absurdum in two tiny steps. So unions are seeking rent by virtue of legal ownership of the motion physical bodies, just as property owners seek rent by virtue of ownership of real estate.
That calculus might change if demand for developers cools down as a long term trend but it's not going to be anytime soon.
So workers are prosecuted for withholding labor in negotiations with management, these are moderately union-hostile laws. I'm told Henry Clay Frick was somewhat disinclined in his opinion of unions as well.
_American_ software developers. Many in Europe don't fall for this way of thinking.
I'm not even kidding, this is almost verbatim the attitude of plenty of (white, male, able-bodied tho at times mildly autistic) developers I've talked to throughout my career and at meetups and conferences, though few would be bold enough to spell it out this explicitly. Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability. If anything, developers working at smaller tech companies or in technical roles at non-technical companies were worse because they'd often see unions as only relevant for jobs that were "beneath them".
Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
> Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur if you have any idea of how the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence treated unions. Just look at modern China if you need a refresher on what authoritrian states think about workers unionizing.
Also unions are not communism and neither did any of those countries ever experience "communism". The USSR never claimed to have "achieved communism", in fact the expression "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") was coined by these governments to denounce critics who demanded steps towards communism as "utopian" idealists. China today even has a full roadmap towards communism with different labeled steps to justify why it hasn't achieved communism yet and needs to be authoritarian for just a little while longer because the state will wither away eventually really soon trust me bro.
> If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
Not with that attitude they won't. Do you think we got legally mandated 40 hour work weeks, paid sick leave and mandatory rest periods out of the goodness of the hearts of business owners?
Many in Europe leave for the US because EU salaries are ridiculously lower.
This is just a survey but it's in line with my perception, salaries on avg are 2-3 times lower in rich EU countries than in the US (after taxes).
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/demographics/
I'll take higher taxes, healthcare through general taxation and relatively strong job security over a fixed dollar amount any day. Everyone is different though.
That combined doesn't even remotely cost that gap of 60k per year (plus strictly speaking this is not true since many employers would provide IT people with insurance).
> I'll take higher taxes,
It's not higher taxes. It's much lower salaries + much higher taxes combined. 60k a year in savings will provide you far more security and bargaining power than any strictest EU trade code would (and this is IMO one of the reasons for higher salaries in the US).
Specifically on insurance: how much is that worth if it’s bound to your employer? What if you get laid off and don’t find a job in time, then get sick? What if your father is laid off at 55, nobody wants to hire him anymore due to his age and he develops cancer? I can tell you what happens in Germany: nothing. Both of you go to the MD and get treated as appropriate.
You’ll never get me to trade all of this for a bit more money that I need to spend on health care, ridiculous tips, and overpriced apartments anyway.
One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.
I also have nationally strong’ish labor laws.
Because they’ve given me reason to believe they will? But mostly because the law makes it really hard to let go of employees when your company is doing well enough to keep them.
The battle is never over. In the US labor unions reached a zenith and have been undercut and dismantled as a multi-decade project.
The incentives are clear. Our systems drives ever onward toward slavery, the only remedy is pushing back through the generations.
I've worked at both, and the efficiency, friendliness, experience were all absurdly better without unions. With unions, everyone was trying to get each other written up, seniority mattered more than performance, politics were half the conversations at work.
Engineering would be miserable with a union, you'd be basically locked into an employer climbing the totem pole.
I don't want to work for a union not because I'm a rising star. It's because I know I'm on the right of a normal distribution. I don't want to revert to median pay. No thanks.
If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
I live in NY, and I can tell you that unions are very much a “thing,” hereabouts.
The unions in NYC protect the union. They care about little else.
That's their fiat. They're supposed to be like that.
I'm really hoping that unions are learning a bit of humility from the last few years. We'll see.
Japan (and Germany, I hear), has unions that are stakeholders (and, often board members) of corporations. They seem to work quite well, and are very powerful.
This doesn’t automatically mean you have a mandatory tariff for everyone, just that there is an organisation in your workplace that you can turn to, which will have your interests in mind, without you having to be a member. They can protect you from overreaching managers, baseless accusations, or unwarranted layoffs. And of course, they usually negotiate on behalf of the entire staff, especially on HR topics.
While this isn’t always working perfectly, it’s still a big achievement in terms of equality and worker rights.
It’s unfortunate, I think, that the US has such an awful history in terms of unions. There are far more nuances than discussions on HN make it seem, and virtually nobody looses if employees have strong protections against their employers.
True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.
Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.
If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?
This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.
Consumer software doesn't run the world. I think your negative examples of software scams and hucksters are consumer based.
> just to skirt the laws and scam VCs
VCs are not generally seen as victims!
> you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix
And that plumber depends directly or indirectly on plenty of software to get their job done, from the basics of getting paid to the more complex of sourcing parts. And they use a mobile phone, which is 99.9% software with a little bit of hardware.
I never said they were.
If everyone is paid the same, who sets these salaries, unions? Then who sets the non union pay? Or does everyone work for the union or government?
Yeah, what I said is not a solution to such problems, just an observation to the Original grandparent comment who tried to point out a few cities that have the best SW compensation as if that should be the end goal for every country.
You already are - by your employer. Mostly equalized at the absolute bottom of every situation where you disagree with your superiors or need to rely on the company for something.
> I'm happy to negotiate my own terms.
And your employer is even happier for you to believe you are actually negotiating your own terms.
> In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent.
That is certainly a potential problem. But think about the distribution of status, benefits and compensation of owners, managers, and employees - that's even more extreme, and prevalent, than misdeeds by union leaders.
This sounds like a bit of a "democracy can have corruption so let's support the monarchy" kind of an argument.
> The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.
What companies prefer is to shepherd the flock themselves. Failing that, getting a collaborative shepherd. The challenge in unionization is disrupting the shepherding and allowing for conscious collective reflection and action.
> in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
The US is the center of the major world empire right now, and is not really comparable with most other places. However, even if you took the US - it's pretty much a hellscape, socially. Large tech companies are swimming in their ill-gotten gains while a huge number of people are homeless, many can only access contaminated water, students are in massive debt, infrastructure is in poor repair, public facilities and systems are under-developed...
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At my dad job their leaders of unions are literally paid as "leaders" xd No conflict of interest and the fact they always get so well with CEO and never with workers is not suspicious.
- My code is disposable, and I should not become overly attached to it
- Loyalty should be mutual and based on a healthy relationship where both parties are willing to invest
But more directly, I think "if you think employees are disposable, why are you still an employee" is a very naive - if obvious - question. Even as a contractor I'm functionally treated like an employee by many companies and if anything I'm more disposable this way than I would be with a salaried position and career. The question is "what else" and if there is a dichotomy, the answer is "be the employer" but that is simply not an option for most and if you find yourself being an employee you likely aren't in the position to become an employer because you don't have the funds to start a business without a significant existential risk.
The truth is not just that most business founders fail. The truth is also that most founders of the largest businesses that exist today either started when there was no competition nor regulation or they were already filthy (generationally) rich to begin with - or both. So what else is there? Not participate in the economy? You might as well insist people refuse to breathe.
If you can be disposed of, why haven't you yet? The answer is that the employer is making money off of you. If that stops happening, you're out.
This is job security: make money for your employer.
My employer wanted to do layoffs. They had to come up with an offer that's so good that some employees accepted it (everyone who wanted to remain in the company did).
If there's a single point of failure like that, the company is being mismanaged. NOBODY leaving, getting sick, taking a holiday or even dying, should leave the rest of the company at risk.
Companies should most certainly value employees and treat us with respect, but they should also be setup to allow for employees not being around forever.