I don't live in NY or Seattle. The tech sector is much smaller where I am. I've never seen it be advantageous to treat other people as someone I'm in competition with. I've been laid off. Yeah it sucks, but no job is forever, and being nice to people means I get to sleep at night. I've also never seen anyone who can't be replaced. Time and time again something wasn't documented, and other devs/dbas/admins stepped in and figured it out. I'd rather be the guy people say, "I help out when there is a problem" instead of, "I hate working with him, because I never know what he's doing." It's nicer, and makes it easier to work with someone you did before. That's just me though.
Edit: I've also been on the hiring side and passed on people I know like that. My job is to mitigate risk, and those people are a liability.
"In competition" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the interests at play.
It's adversarial whether you integrate that understanding into your actions or not. And acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners doesn't mean you have to be nasty to anyone on an interpersonal level.
Some aspects are adversarial, some aspects aren't.
How much compensation I get is adversarial.
How much documentation I write or how many internal tools I develop isn't adversarial, not even if you put la liberté guidant le peuple above the fold.
It's not adversarial, it's set by market conditions. Only collusion can turn it into an adversarial matter, as seen e.g. when Big Tech CEO's were shown to have entered into a secret agreement not to poach each other's employees.
Exactly. The company (owners plus workers) getting a big pot of money is not adversarial, it's cooperative. Dividing the pot of money is where it gets adversarial. But spend all your time focusing on how to divide the pot always (at least in the long run) means the whole group loses out on the big pot of money.
Management decides what portion of the pot gets to be divided by the workers, and much of that pot you might get. You're not even a part of that discussion. You are an individual, management is not. They have negotiating power because they see what everyone else gets paid, you don't. Your only viable threat is walking away, and for most people that is not a credible threat.
Your perception of your negotiation skills is likely very biased by the Dunning-Kruger effect: you rarely use negotiation skills in adversarial settings, so your perception of how good you are at it compared to professional negotiators is likely highly inflated.
Even accepting everything you say, you have still missed my point. Company A has employees who are working as a team, working for the good of the company. Company B has employees that are doing as the article says, sabotaging actual work. Which company is going to do better, A or B? Even if management decides that workers only get X%, and workers can't negotiate that, in which company is there a bigger pot available to pay workers?
It’s a trick question. Neither company will want to pay employees anywhere near market rates if they can avoid it. The smaller the pot for employees the larger the profits & management pools
How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor?
The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked.
Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor?
Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits.
> Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.
When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers?
(those are the conditions that the article describes, not me)
Should there be?
Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
> When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers?
Yes, the laws don't magically vanish. Also, you seem to be neglecting inflation in those numbers, which is the main reason things have gone out of whack economically.
The fact is you can have bigger numbers and less real wealth. There is greed causing that, but mostly from the political class who printed a ton of paper even though there isn't more stuff to actually buy with that paper.
It's ironic that the stock buybacks work like the inverse of this, showing that they understand the effect of printing too much, even if they're dick moves by people who are compensated mostly in stock.
But you can't really call this out without calling out our government robbing us by printing more paper in a regressive stealth tax, which is what started this whole mess. No, Putin didn't do us any favors with his bloodthirsty war, but he poured gas on a fire that was already burning strongly well before then.
> Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
All of them? No. But the ones keeping me from being stuck working for company scrip are pretty good.
> Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
You have to become more valuable for that, then you have more options. You know, invest into your own human capital. If you don't produce things that other people actually want, why should you be entitled to the things that they produce?
The thinking in this article just leads you down a downward spiral where everybody loses, when the economy is a positive sum game where we're constantly making new things that people want. If you want more of the pie, you have to start baking.
I say this as someone who has worked a crappy ass factory job. I can see why the lower end of jobs makes people feel this way, since I spent years in an awful factory working myself half to death, not feeling like I could even get vacation and not having any kind of stable schedule at all, given that I'd drive for two hours to work for 1d20 hours, not even knowing how many ahead of time.
Now I work at a place where my whole job is helping people, we work a stable schedule, and things are good. When I just naively asked for a "market" salary, they quoted a figure that was $20k higher than I expected.
And I did it by making myself more valuable, spending all the time I could get making some projects to show what I knew and finding places that valued that.
But if you follow this advice, you'll find yourself in a race to the bottom.
I was a marine. I got paid 1000$ a month to be shot at, by people who know how to hit a target. I know what a bad job for low pay is. I also know what solidarity is.
You gave a bunch of examples for why people don’t need unions, because laws will protect them, then undercut your examples with your personal anecdotes about making yourself valuable. You don’t need laws to protect if you’re “valuable.”
… but you’re only valuable until you aren’t. That was the whole point of the original article. Some of the most valuable workers in the world are currently getting kicked out on their asses by the bosses who’d been getting them massages and laundry services, free food and free transportation.
No question, that's a bad job for low pay. But based on the experience of friends, I can also guess that your solidarity did nothing to fix that, and GTFO from the military did.
And no, becoming valuable doesn't undercut anything I said. It means you have other people willing to hire you. This is an economic problem, with real profits going down even as numbers go up thanks to inflation that got boosted by energy supply issues.
There are issues from technical disruptions, e.g. the proverbial buggy whip makers. But these are more reason to understand what you do that gives value, not less. For example, if I were an artist, I'd be learning how to use Stable Diffusion, not hoping that I can continue to live on simple image commissions.
The laws against collusion aren't going anywhere, but if you expect to do things that no longer have value for money, you're living on borrowed time even if the government mandates purchasing of your work.
It's squared by the employees wanting the maximum pay for the least amount of work. It's call "Supply & Demand". It's the Law.
> impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested
Not impossible at all. I've done it many times. The power the employee has is to say "No" and go work for someone else, or start their own company.
> Like 80 hour work weeks / children working / unsafe working conditions
were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. It's no surprise that those went away when productivity increased. I can't even think of a job a 10 year old could be useful at in a modern company.
Do you know that it wasn't until 1800 or so, and only in the US, where the ever-present spectre of famine was eliminated? Economies simply were unable to produce enough food. It wasn't that the rich were eating it all. There just wasn't enough food.
Which means it's all hands on deck to work. Other problems were it was very expensive to produce cloth, so for people to get clothing, lots and lots and LOTS of people were needed in the textile industry.
> Do you know that it wasn't until 1800 or so, and only in the US, where the ever-present spectre of famine was eliminated? Economies simply were unable to produce enough food. It wasn't that the rich were eating it all. There just wasn't enough food.
There's no way to sugarcoat it - this is completely false. There were many regions around the world that were prosperous, many for far longer than the United States has been around. Humans have been smart for a long time, far longer than our current global technological civilization... [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
Sarcasm: until we had publicly funded schools, what else was the urban working class going to do with their children all day long? Putting them to work made sense in a "making the ends meet" sort of way.
I think you’re fine with letting 8 year olds die in a mill, letting normal people have their meaningless lives of working 80 hours a week for little to no money, just to survive, while robber barons live in gilded mansions and build a new solid house out of marble every year to impress their rich friends.
The inequality you’re pitching only ends in one place.
And kids had summers off from school not for "vacation", but to work the farms.
Something like 97% of the population worked on the farms in those days trying to raise enough food.
Do you know that women in America use to spend all day in the kitchen managing the wood stove, which was very labor intensive? Any free time they had was spent spinning, weaving, sewing, and mending.
Gas/electric stoves are modern miracles, as are sewing machines, electric refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, all sorts of liberating machinery. And most especially, indoor plumbing! Who do you think ran out to the town well constantly to pump a pail of water?
Have you ever wondered why, as productivity increased, the number of children per family decreased? This happens consistently in country after country.
Absurdly farcical take. They went away because government regulations were slowly built up to guard against this kind of thing from occurring in the future. See Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s.
Creator of the D language if that's the same person. Talented programmer, I guess some interesting ideas about class divisions and how the lower classes should be treated by the upper classes.
> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor?
The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as much compensation as possible for the least effort possible. In other words: The market of labour.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
You win by taking your business elsewhere and start working for another employer, or start your own business. Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit that situation while we can.
A problem with the argument of IT being such a free market right now is the pattern of labor markets. Look at the AI leaps and you have yourself a foreseeable "streamlining" that every other profession of the past has gone through. Miners, mechanics, longshoreman, factory workers, truck drivers, printers, brick layers, glass makers, textile workers, typists, computing specialists, librarians. The pattern is always the same. It's a hot and competitive market until it is captured by automation. Google announced going public with the project to automate programming yesterday! You seriously think the job that is coincidentally useful now will exist forever?
Software Engineers are falling prey to what every other person on this planet save a very rich few live with. Welcome to reality. "The free market" always becomes a cartel. When the government stops the cartels, the cartels take over the government in the form of lobbying, campaign contributions, government employee hiring/revolving door.
And yet developed nations where unions are a facet of the labor market have fewer of these issues, and on a less grand scale.
That's what's called a deal, a negotiation, business. Two parties come to an agreement that they both accept. You can see it as win-win or lose-lose. People who complain for long time about the company they are working for have something in common with other abuse victims: They never leave.
I'm much more concerned about the deals I'm forced into without having ever accepted, such as paying tribute to the rulers.
Of course it is adversarial (in a game theoretical sense). You are not doing any favours to the company and the company is not doing any favours to you; both are trying to extract as much value from the other as possible.
Now if we were talking about a worker's co-operative (or any company where a significant portion of ownership laid with the workers), now that's a different story...
Smart businesses know that in order to prosper, you have to make win-win deals. Free market economies grow and prosper because people are making win-win deals.
Win-lose deals are the path to poverty and misery.
Economies can prosper while workers within them are crushed and immiserated. That's the exact nature of the relationship here: owners and workers have different interests and what's good for one is not always good for the other.
That's precisely the point of the article. Tech companies are setting up a win-lose situation right now. They're pressing to control more capital at the expense of employees. Why would the employee maintain a win-win attitude, when the employer has switched to win-lose?
> treat other people as someone I'm in competition with
Your coworkers are not your adversaries, your employer is. When the going's good, each side is generous. When your employer withdraws their generosity, it pays to think twice whether your continued generosity works in your interest, and more broadly in the interest of the industry, and society. The limit being a grueling, subpar environment where underpaid and overworked employees find solace in comradery.
I mean... at the end of the day there is no union, and the rest is up to supply and demand. If there is too much supply then it doesn't matter how much knowledge we withdraw or how little we work.
One of the things that the colonial powers did, in Africa and South America, was to pit the various tribes and factions against each other. The British even moved northern tribes and Indian workers into their southern colonies.
It was pretty damn effective. The damage still resonates to this day, long after the colonial powers left.
No one paid any attention to the man behind the curtain; they were too busy killing each other.
Fine, I'll play the political officer here and try to help you understand the error of your position. /g
Your post is entirely singular and individualistic in perspective. We could look at the situation differently, from the perspective of OP. In this case, it would be you and your politically aware colleagues who understand the necessities of the situation. To put it boldly, it is a revolutionary movement that seeks to introduce a much needed balance into the equation of capital and labor in the age of thinking machines. You and your colleagues will get along just fine, if you are clear eyed comrades.
And you will sleep even more soundly, knowing that you are not only helping your contemporaries, but also laying the foundation for a more equitable society for your progeny.
Edit: I've also been on the hiring side and passed on people I know like that. My job is to mitigate risk, and those people are a liability.