The past four years have really been an astonishing example of the executive class being hit over the head with a good idea, picking themselves back up, and carrying on as if nothing ever happened based purely on their own prejudices and egoes.
It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.
I agree that seems like the next step, but how will that help push salaries down? I thought remote work would do that much more, coz many employees would move to less expensive areas in the same country and new hiring would focus on lower-income countries.
This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.
Because people find out that remote work makes it hard to exercise power and control, and some people get off on exercising power and control, empirical data and fiduciary responsibility be damned.
I went through a round of layoffs last year from a company doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local" teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two metro areas.
I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.
> It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed.
It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
>every single team is distributed.
Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.
Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to an Amazon office, just not the same one.
This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.
From first principles, it is the only way for these workers to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock, and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the choice is theirs).
"A union of Software Engineers lets us collectively bargain for better working conditions, such as flexible working locations, reducing PTO request denials, and work-life balance conditions."
Look at how well you're being treated now without a union. Look at how well union workers are treated versus their no union worker equivalents. Imagine how much better you'd be treated if there was a union versus your current no union status.
I'm pretty confident that the vast majority of union workers are expected to work from their employer's business premises. Workers should unionize if they're being mistreated, but it's not a magic wand that means I can get whatever working conditions I'd like.
US government agencies still have some of the lowest RTO rates in the country (compared to other employers) precisely because of federal employee unions.
I don't understand why this has been so downvoted – although it might be true for now, there's a deeper truth that it's true that any union benefit has to be fought for and constantly defended between negotiations. (Which is why unions usually have legislative and political advocacy arms to codify these benefits – so they don't have to waste barganing power on them.)
Allowing people to work from home, and then yanking that back even after studies prove happier workers and better productivity is mistreatment in my opinion. Especially when it's malicious and arbitrary when they do it in hopes that you will quit. Our quality of life plummets when we're dragged away from our families and forced into long shitty commutes to sit on zoom in a cubicle all day.
No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
Lina Khan is like 90% of the reason I'm enthused by Biden (now Harris) and it would be an even bigger tragedy than when Google kicked her out of New America. I sincerely hope they don't do that, given I'm far from alone in admiration of Lina
The FTC decision has already been halted by a Texas court nationwide. It's probably going to make it's way to the Supreme Court eventually, but given the courts recent rulings I suspect the FTC rule won't survive.
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
i'm a visa worker and i've seen people in my country say that visa workers are prejudicial to the country's work environment.
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
1) we get higher salaries to compensate, that's in fact why SWE's are often "exempt" (as well as most jobs making over $80k iirc. We should probably raise that ceiling)
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
They correlate somewhat. The more money and demand you have, the less you need to collectively bargain with businesses for basic survival. Unions tend to form out of desperation, rather than some long form insurance plan.
> No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
I know personally companies that laid off a major percentage (50% in one case) of their software engineers to replace them with cheaper foreign and visa workers. I don't know if you've tried to find a job recently, but it's as bad as it's ever been regardless of level of experience.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
> working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that table."
Your peers aren't the ones making nine figures and buying yachts and vacation homes off the results of the work you're doing. Look up, not sideways, to find the mis-allocated resources that you're after.
I see no misallocated resources. I enjoy exploiting the system that enables the yacht-havers, because then I too can have a yacht.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
Incorrect, as you have no leverage as an individual employee. The less resources you pool together, the less negotiation power you have.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
Unfortunately, your "real life" experience is worthless because it's at odds with reality.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
I feel I may be wasting my time by pointing out that “real life” == “reality”.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
It's an interesting follow-up, though I will say that addressing this or pretty much any other counterpoint pushes me over the three sentence limit that was requested :)
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
> I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions.
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
> How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
By setting minimum work conditions, rather than exact or maximum work conditions? Every SAG actor from George Clooney to video game VAs benefits from residuals, for example.
So you think unions are greedy, but want to abolish the professional management class...with nothing? Have you considered that, without some sort of organization, you are powerless and have no ability to effect change?
Also, have you considered that unions aren't greedy, but simply negotiating a fair value for their labor, and your mental model reacts negatively for some reason due?
I don't think they can objectively measure the fair value for their labour. I think I trust the Biden administration way more on this, and they have made it clear that the economic situation of every single American is better today than it has ever been in the past for any country in the world. That to me seems significantly more objective.
> striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world
Isn't this the best time to do it? It seems like if workers did the opposite you'd be complaining that they were striking when conditions were bad and hurting the company!
Good point, I think we need more unions for child labourers, we need to stop child labour in Asia, Africa and South America. If you start that union I will be the first to sign up, I will gladly not go to work for that cause.
My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.
The union could flip hiring by making finding good candidates easy for a company by having their members pre-vetted, eliminating the need for vetting interviews completely. Hiring is a huge pain point and addressing it would, IMO, go a long way. And they wouldn't necessarily need to focus on employer negotiations as their members would find job hoping easy due to skipping all the vetting interviewing giving them leverage as individuals.
I feel like union would be much more symphathetic if they do this, and they can coexist with capitalism instead of being hostile activism. But this way they'll just be another corporation, with its pros and cons. Also programmers seems to be uncomfortable with the concept of formal vetting.
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
> For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
> Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
Sure. The motivation of forming a firm over a collection of contractors “is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism” of the market [1]. Put another way, it’s the power of intra-firm communication and trust. That’s what you’re getting at in celebrating camaraderie and flexibility at start-ups.
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
> Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
> ...I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
> I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
Would also note that sports' (and Hollywood's, to a lesser degree) models rely on tightly controlling distribution to a near-monopoly degree. Which, as it happens, describes big tech to a tee.
> Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
How about I look at actual unions in software, like the NYT tech union that immediately started undermining merit, making illegal demands, and discouraging high performance.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A ...
I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
I mean, I know some 10x-ers. They are super super rare, yes. Becuase you don't just take a 3 month bootcamp and start working in fields like graphics, compilers, HPC, etc. Jobs that require very strong math fundamentsl and an ability to not just reason with software but understand the limits of hardware as well.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
Right and I think people believe this myth that unions flatten everyone down to a seniority level and there's no room for the rare, brilliant 10xer or genius. In reality, in any unionized industry there are still the Brad Pitts and John DeLorean's who break the mold.
It's certainly possible, especially for an empathetic or simply very long game individual. But I do feel that the short term incentive isn't there because those people can do all the union stuff without paying union dues.
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
> it existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
Eventually, the goal is to have everyone live in an apartment building in the city and walk to work. That is far less CO2 than people living far away from infrastructure and services in detached single family homes and driving everywhere in their unnecessarily large vehicles.
I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week.
As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
Actually I heard from a friend that worked there that eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US who haven’t previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes warehouse workers.
Look at their H1B visa data and hiring in India (at least with regards to corp jobs, not US warehouse workers). They absolutely could find these folks in the US who don't need sponsorship.
> 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less than $100k
Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a known quantity at this point.
If they hire from india on h1b they are almost guaranteed that person wouldn't be able to leave for amazon for a very long time if they apply for a perm process.
They are getting that retention premium that won't be possible if they hire locally.
Apparently Amazon agrees with your friend, at least as far as warehouse workers go.
> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
> In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled...
They will automate their way out of the warehouse worker problem. The only reason they still employ human workers is that they are still cheaper than robots for some tasks.
Amazon steadily promotes packaging standards that create standard boxes/packs amenable to fast robo read/sort/grip/handle, so they are looking to this.
> There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
Apologies for the side question here, but what is an "on-trend" resume? This is the first time (in general, on/off HN) I've seen that particular phrase.
Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.
Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.
+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
> ...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached...
I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"
I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.
I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
warehouse is very different than corporate. also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
> also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
The worker, who previously was asking for help and was refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally dies.
While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.
Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.
Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.
But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
I'm not them but I suspect they mean a kind of "above my paygrade/not my problem" tendency. You can defer almost indefinitely (or make other people do it for you) a lot complicated work with phrases like "we need senior/staff buy-in on the design", "I think we need XYZ team on board/cross-team management approval", "maybe the cloud platform team should be building this, not us?", "I told the architect our requirements and they'll get back to us once they makes a design".
i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
If you're married/kids it usually happens by 35. If you reach 'enlightenment' after that you can't cut back easily (wife and kids accustomed,even maybe feel entitled to expensive private school etc etc), and if you do your family will often simply divorce you then the judge will impute your income for CS and alimony at the high amount you made before. If you scale back, they put you in a jail cell, take away your licenses, your property, and revoke your passport.
Not to judge too much, but that sounds more like the outcome of a crappy relationship rather than a universal experience.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
Child support is nearly universally enforced at least on paper. The incentive is to divorce quickly after a high earner scales back to lock in the high imputed income. You see sky high divorces in recently unemployed persons as spouses scramble to lock in CS and alimony against their recent earnings.
These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
I've been reading books about the history of computing, stuff like "The Soul of a New Machine", "Showstopper!" and "Revolution in the Valley" -- all these people working massive unpaid overtime. I guess some of them got stock options. Part of me wishes that I could care as much.
I think it might be a bit of a post-scarcity thing. A bit like how we don't cope well with the easy availability of lots of macronutrient-dense foods that exists in many developing nations, and our physical health may be suffering for it.
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
It depends on how many years you do it, and how early. It's quite the trade in your 20s: Think of the freedom and peace of mine an extra couple of million in the stock market can give you. Then you slow down, celebrate, and know that you can let that money make more money on interest than you do from work. Reach the mid 40s? The pile has grown than enough to retire very comfortably.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
That's why you barista FIRE. Build up that nest egg of $3m then quit to take a part time job at REI or the Amazon warehouse, working 20 hrs/week, and spend the rest of your time mountain biking, skiing.
Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.
I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent from remote work.
Why would they unionize when most of their comp is stock? The fear mongering, uncertainty and doubt stoked by their CEO's fully-owned press[1] would tank their stock value.
So they can fight back against before forced into the office 3 days per week?
People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they can collectively make demands of the business owners. They can also demand a greater share of profits.
i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder
they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
> i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather they just don't care. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day, who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.
Exactly. Whether you can figure out your daycare situation with 5 day RTO is at the bottom of the long list of things Andy Jassy cares about. Even if you are an L6 -- a senior position that takes years to achieve within Amazon -- that means nothing to the CEO. Probably the same if an L8 decides to leave. So what? There are so many L8s in the company, let's just hire someone else. See this at Apple -- https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/17/ian-goodfellow-joins-de... -- even if you are a DIRECTOR.
Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones, don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view of how the world actually works, and what you might want to do with your life.
And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager. There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs. You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only things senior management cares about are product, revenue and efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about individual employees.
> i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)
"So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.." .. manager layoffs coming too.
A large pharma company which I worked for until quitting in July went through a similar process this year. The goal was also to reduce the manager / IC ratio - organizational efficiency and span of control, they called it - but in most instances it were ICs who were laid off while their managers were simply relegated to ICs.
Surely you mean "agile desk arrangements"! (What a euphemism)
That would actually put me off working for Amazon (though, I mean, there's a lot that would). I like working from an office, but I did _not_ like the hot-desking that I had to do post-pandemic because our office wasn't big enough (my employer eventually let people who come in frequently get assigned desks, and it's been a huge quality of life improvement).
They say the policy goes into effect January 2025, but I'd expect some managers will try to get their teams in sooner for appearances since in the same post he mentions reducing bureaucracy and in turn the number of managers.
Given that finding a job takes time in the current market, January 2025 essentially mean that people who don't like the policy should start looking right now.
Especially as Q4 is a slow time for hiring from seasonal factors alone. Companies doing layoffs in Q4/Q1 to boost numbers for whatever the end of their financial year is, holidays and stuff slowing down hiring pipelines.
> Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.
The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their demise will be slow and measured in literal generations.
The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell).
Maybe but they’re facing political pressure from the left, like Elizabeth Warren, to basically make the economy at least look good artificially. And they may do that. Will it be a sustainably better economy? I doubt it given federal debt and what feels like shaky employment levels.
Cutting 75 basis points instead of 25 or 50 (as Warren is and others are advocating for in the letter they sent Chair Powell) isn't attempting to make the economy "look good artificially." I strongly believe it is important to demonstrate this signaling is not about optics. It is to put more effort into preserving the health of the labor market by pulling forward rate cuts the Fed will be performing regardless (with some amount of risk of inflation being a bit sticky). If you are familiar with her background, this should come as no surprise (labor > capital and other econ metrics). She's doing her job by advocating for an aggressive monetary policy stance (imho). This also aligns with Fed statements recently indicating they are willing to act to protect the labor market.
> “We’re not just an inflation-targeting central bank,’’ Powell told the House Financial Services Committee on the second of two days of semi-annual testimony to Congress. “We also have an employment mandate.”
> Powell told the House panel on Wednesday that to avoid damaging the economy, the Fed likely wouldn’t wait until inflation reached its 2% target before it would start cutting rates.
75 would shock the market & probably hurt Warren's party. 50 has been stated as something that may scare the market into thinking the Fed is worried more than letting on. They could maybe do 50 if they give a lot of context & forward guidance & take the next meeting off of rate cuts instead of the expected 25, 25, 25. Many are also very concerned we could make inflation sky rocket by cutting to fast, especially if the next president were to increase tariffs on a lot of goods.
I sometimes wonder if Warren is playing 3D chess. I assume she is far smarter than me on these topics but her proposals often make no sense to me. She also never gives good logic to the public behind them, even on long form one on one interviews with someone sympathetic to her cause interviewing her.
Fed also really did not want to cut rates this close to the election. They want to be neutral but they've done a great job of forward guidance & reacting to the data.
You can hold that opinion, and there may be some merit to it (I’m not sure), but in doing so you also have to accept that the Federal Reserve faces pressure from the right to make the economy look artificially better under any given administration as well. Personally, I think we need to strengthen and trust, and fix our institutions versus casting doubt on them. Once they are too politicized or otherwise destroyed, we don’t get them back and that seems to cause preventable problems.
With respect to the national debt, neither party really has a great track record over recent years, in my opinion. It ballooned under Donald Trump as well. Neither party is particularly inclined to reduce it since it has yet to cause any real problems. To “fix” it you’d have to cut spending and also raise taxes. Nobody seems to want to undertake those actions.
Big tech companies have been making record profits year after year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.
A lot of well funded VC startups poached liberally from big tech. A lot of VC money dried up (and some is now dry powder) because of higher interest rates.
If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter at all is silly.
Not to mention the IRS section 174 changes to the deductibility of software engineer salaries. It was a gift to huge tech employers in that it provided head winds against hiring in SME tech companies.
> it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount.
Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn’t some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates. With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
You think they all magically figured out they were overstaffed at the same time? It's 100% herd mentality. They're cutting because everyone else is cutting, just like they went on hiring sprees because everyone else was doing the same.
It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.
Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.
It's unreal how people think tech leaders are geniuses when they keep doing this stuff. Oops we overhired but I take "100% responsibility" however the staff will take 100% of the punishment by being laid off. All while spending $32 billion on legless VR worlds that nobody wants or driving social media giants into the ground. It's Gell-Mann amnesia. Remember how dumb their last decisions were, by their own admission.
I mean, it was clearly panic-driven. This isn't particularly unusual; economic upsets tend to cause transitory layoffs. Note that many of them are now hiring again.
If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022 days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we are in for some hard times ahead.
Unemployment rate doesn't give you the full story. It's always been a suspect metric in my opinion, kind of like how people use Kelly Blue Book values for cars. It's not a good reflection of the real world complexities. I'm not unemployed, but I'm also stuck in my current position because of the 100 applications I may have applied for, I get a response from 1 and I may not even make it to the interview phase. Pre-2020 that would've been 1 in 10 applications. Unemployment rate doesn't capture that. It doesn't capture stress levels due to lack of mobility between employers, nor people that have given up, nor part time workers, etc
Unrate is an indicator more than anything else. The BLS has detailed data on dozens of dimensions including rates of underemployment. Unrate is convenient because it's apples to apples.
General employment includes working in pizza shops, factory floor sweepers, car salesmen, janitors, deboning chicken, making Happy Meal boxes, and of course tech jobs that pay low six figures.
To me it seems we have alot of the former (several food places that specialize in lunch are closed monday and tuesday due to not enough employees) but the latter is tough right now.
But the general unemployment metric is solidly good.
Honestly do not get this perception at all. Have you ever live through an actual recession? Did it feel like this at all? I see some significant secular changes. Some industries are just changing and leaving some people in the cold and they'll be forced to adapt. Media in particular is just not the same kind of business it used to be and never will be again. I do not see any cyclical downturn. Just amongst my network, everyone is working, hiring is a bit slower but it's happening.
Plus there is latency on the supply side. A lot of people were drawn by the crazy compensation starting about 10 years ago and accelerating during Covid, so that there is a huge amount of new developers out there. Plus due to the internet and mobile devices we're all more connected so the existing pipelines in developing countries are all also pointed at developed countries, bringing in even more supply.
I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not 3x.
Not so fast. "Strangely, America’s companies will soon face higher interest rates" by The Economist [1] explains why Fed cutting rates will not translate into easier money for US companies.
It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It might improve... but those days are over forever. They were hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.
Tough job market or tough market? Seems a lot of companies are struggling right now, so attracting top talent on its own terms seems like the only chance for survival (or in Amazon's case, treading water).
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 444 ms ] threadin other words business as usual
This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.
Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built
It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
Not true. I work at amazon.
It's the worst of all possible choices.
I don't think teachers, cops, sanitation workers, or iron workers can realistically do their jobs at home
I would never want their jobs over mine.
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
FWIW those were recently completely outlawed: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/.... In theory you can happily sign a noncompete and promptly ignore it. Unlawful contracts are unenforceable.
That does not diminish the value of unions, though.
Also some of Harris's donors are pushing her to get rid of Lina Khan. Even if she wins, the rule might not stay around
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/05/ftc-noncompete-ru...
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VYKxGglmnA
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
You can replace code monkeys, but you can’t replace people who can use code to solve real business problems on time and under budget.
or else, at this point there would be no domestic jobs period
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
I’ve done quite a bit of negotiation in my career and ended up with many perks and pay bumps that weren’t schedule or written down.
What I’m describing is my actual real life experience.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...
Whats next? You're going to be telling me Patrick Mahomes is in a union too!
This is not how management sees software devs.
Devs are fungible resources that can be allocated where the urgency/importance is and regardless of individual attributes.
Also, have you considered that unions aren't greedy, but simply negotiating a fair value for their labor, and your mental model reacts negatively for some reason due?
Isn't this the best time to do it? It seems like if workers did the opposite you'd be complaining that they were striking when conditions were bad and hurting the company!
The children working in gilded age coal mines were working in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world up to that point.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
https://nbpa.com/
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
https://www.wga.org/
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
> https://nbpa.com/
> Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
> Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
> https://www.wga.org/
> Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A ...
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I think I have a few colleagues to notify.
Naturally the execs will live far away, next door to the urban planners.
As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon
> Amazon H1B Salary 2024
> 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less than $100k
Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a known quantity at this point.
https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
They are getting that retention premium that won't be possible if they hire locally.
> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
> In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled...
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
Just whatever is considered hot.
Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.
Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.
+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844
The employee can do something about it by leaving.
The worker, who previously was asking for help and was refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally dies.
While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.
Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.
Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.
But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.
This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
People prioritize weird shit.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood#United_State...
These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-020-09506-x
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
I have fond memories around all the the childish politics, favoritism, and fights caused by desk assignments.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-bezos...
People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they can collectively make demands of the business owners. They can also demand a greater share of profits.
this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder
they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather they just don't care. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day, who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.
Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones, don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view of how the world actually works, and what you might want to do with your life.
And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager. There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs. You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only things senior management cares about are product, revenue and efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about individual employees.
You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)
Not getting to the point promptly enough and painting the message to look better only makes it much worse.
> the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy
More quiet firing?
> also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,”
Combined with not so quiet firing?
> Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company.
Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock go through the roof.
A large pharma company which I worked for until quitting in July went through a similar process this year. The goal was also to reduce the manager / IC ratio - organizational efficiency and span of control, they called it - but in most instances it were ICs who were laid off while their managers were simply relegated to ICs.
That would actually put me off working for Amazon (though, I mean, there's a lot that would). I like working from an office, but I did _not_ like the hot-desking that I had to do post-pandemic because our office wasn't big enough (my employer eventually let people who come in frequently get assigned desks, and it's been a huge quality of life improvement).
The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their demise will be slow and measured in literal generations.
2nd Prediction: the rest of industry will not quick follow, unless they are in the same pay-range
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk
https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-inflation-powell-... ("Powell stresses message that US job market is cooling, a possible signal of coming rate cut")
> “We’re not just an inflation-targeting central bank,’’ Powell told the House Financial Services Committee on the second of two days of semi-annual testimony to Congress. “We also have an employment mandate.”
> Powell told the House panel on Wednesday that to avoid damaging the economy, the Fed likely wouldn’t wait until inflation reached its 2% target before it would start cutting rates.
I sometimes wonder if Warren is playing 3D chess. I assume she is far smarter than me on these topics but her proposals often make no sense to me. She also never gives good logic to the public behind them, even on long form one on one interviews with someone sympathetic to her cause interviewing her.
Fed also really did not want to cut rates this close to the election. They want to be neutral but they've done a great job of forward guidance & reacting to the data.
With respect to the national debt, neither party really has a great track record over recent years, in my opinion. It ballooned under Donald Trump as well. Neither party is particularly inclined to reduce it since it has yet to cause any real problems. To “fix” it you’d have to cut spending and also raise taxes. Nobody seems to want to undertake those actions.
If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter at all is silly.
Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn’t some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates. With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.
Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.
To me it seems we have alot of the former (several food places that specialize in lunch are closed monday and tuesday due to not enough employees) but the latter is tough right now.
But the general unemployment metric is solidly good.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove....
I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not 3x.
[1] https://archive.today/fvRnt
under what pretense can you assert that it'll drop another 200-250bps by the end of 2025?
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421