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Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any o

• carapace 4y ago
  This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation#Civil_class_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
  • idlewords 4y ago
    Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.
    • SoftAnnaLee 4y ago
      Because since the 1980's, the US government (as well as other western governments) have been dismantling the ability and protections for worker unionization. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were all notable for being anti-labor.
      • idlewords 4y ago
        Any excuse about anti-labor policies has to account for why cafeteria workers at Facebook managed to unionize in 2017 while tech workers there just sat on their ass. The Wagner Act is still law and is remains a powerful tool for those who can be bothered to use it.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • 2setIntrsction 4y ago
      “If working in the warehouse is really that bad, why don’t the warehouse workers unionize?” I wouldn’t really say it’s a cloak of victimhood as much as a disillusionment of those that aren’t acknowledging they’re labor is being exploited combined with the fact that attempting to organize can be met with a loss of work.
      • idlewords 4y ago
        But warehouse workers did unionize. It was the programmers, who back then could get a new job whenever they wanted, who lacked the foresight and self-discipline to exercise their latent power while it was at its peak.
        • 2setIntrsction 4y ago
          Some of the warehouses have organized, is there a union that represents all of these workers as a whole against leadership? Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by attempting to organize.
          • idlewords 4y ago
            Yes, and some of the Facebook cafeteria workers were getting up before 3 AM to make the commute in to Palo Alto, which meant that they had much more time in the mornings to think about organizing than the unfortunate techies who slept in. The excuses really are endless in this business.
            • 2setIntrsction 4y ago
              I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here, I’m simply trying to understand what has previously stopped tech laborers from organizing. As a relatively new tech laborer, I would like to learn from these mistakes in order to actually organize and get our rights recognized. Sounds like they had a great need to organize, and they were able to— I’m trying to extract patterns that could be applied to other organizations. Do you have any insights on that, or would you simply like to dunk on the out of touch techies that have it oh-so-good?
    • carapace 4y ago
      They did. That's what the WP article section I linked to was about: > In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer ... I used to think we (high tech labor) didn't need unions (you can actually find comments of mine here on HN several years ago arguing that.) Then this crazy and illegal scheme came to light. Now I think that we need something, maybe not a union per se, but something, to "flex [our] considerable latent power", eh? The thing that really grosses me out about the "no-poaching" collusion is that Apple, at least, famously has more money than Scrooge MacDuck yet still actively and stridently worked to rip off their own people.
  • medvezhenok 4y ago
    Abuse is an unnecessarily strong word there. It is true they colluded to keep salaries down, but I don't think that compares with actual abuse. Software Developers make several times the median salary in the U.S. The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay-disparities-000557/ https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal... (not to mention how much U.S. software developers benefit from an overly restrictive immigration policy which limits programmer supply)
    • 2setIntrsction 4y ago
      Tech Leaders / Managers are the ones that hold the power; they are not given a free-pass to lead because they pay living wages for Engineers (that speaks to the fact that other careers should be paying better wages, not that tech workers should accept their position and not argue for better treatment). Expressing for 2.5 years that we’re able to work from anywhere, then immediately saying “well actually come back in for a day… or 2… now come back in everyday” is a misuse of power because the workers have no say in the conversation, the only option is to express your discontent and leave. Abuse doesn’t have to mean they’re hitting us, but it can mean a misuse of power which is one of the main points of the article.
  • treis 4y ago
    And Subway made their wage slaves sign non-competes for $8 an hour to stand and make sandwiches all day. The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations
    • carapace 4y ago
      Fair enough.
  • drewrv 4y ago
    Also worth noting that once this collusion was stopped and exposed, salaries went up across the industry. If you work in tech, even if you never worked for one of these companies, this collusion made you poorer.
• eganist 4y ago
  It has less to do with being treated better and much more to do with imposing an accountability structure that is divorced from shareholder value and returns. When that's all you've got, arbitrary layoffs to boost market cap are the side effects.
• guhidalg 4y ago
  The company does treat the employees well, the article specifically calls out VCs and executives as the principal actors: > The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the already-wealthy ghouls who cry about how workers don’t do enough for their paychecks.
  • treis 4y ago
    But that's not the truth. You can see it anytime this sort of thread comes up. People think they should be able to work very little and get paid a lot of money as long as they "meet expectation". That's entitlement.
    • mrzimmerman 4y ago
      Sure, some people act and think like that. But at the end of the day executives and the C level have no obligation other than returning as large a profit as possible to investors. Additionally, it’s a straw man argument to say that everyone who is being let go currently at a time of record profits is just being a lay about. It’s easy to say until it happens to you, and it shouldn’t. People—our neighbors and fellow humans—deserve better treatment than to be cast aside to make the stock price rise again. Some people have been hard at work on products that were never great, but the direction they took came from leadership. That’s as much a strawman argument, but it belabors the point that making broad judgements on a group is the wrong way to go about taking a position.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  I read the article differently than you. The article isn’t saying those workers have bad treatment. It’s saying that much of tech’s elite sees that good treatment as a problem.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• throw93 4y ago
  This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power. You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company. You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company". Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay. In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.
  • diebeforei485 4y ago
    > You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. This is a reasonable ask. It's easily addressable - build a notice period into the offers (for example, if you've been with the company more than a year, you get at least 4 weeks notice). The problem with any sort of exclusive guild is that it becomes more difficult to break into, which is bad for a growing industry.
    • throw93 4y ago
      Who will enforce that? The policies are made by companies themselves and they can change them whenever/however they want with no employee welfare in mind. We as individual employees don't have any power influencing or enforcing those policies. The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce than individual employees.
• croes 4y ago
  Just because they treat better doesn't mean they treat good, just because it could be worse doesn't mean it's good either.
• GAN_Game 4y ago
  > The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous The heirs who own the majority of most of the FAANG stock created none of the wealth, did none of the work. These rich kids of Instagram never worked, never will - nor did their parents, nor did their parents. So your argument is the workers creating the wealth should fork over the amount of surplus labor value to these heirs, that is being expropriated. What about these parasitical heirs you are arguing for? The ones who live off the dividend check wealth created by those who work? "I can't even begin to comprehend your POV". If the worker creating wealth keeping it is an entitled attitude, what is the attitude of these parasitical heirs who do not work?
  • blhack 4y ago
    I work specifically to give things to my children. They are not parasites, they are the motivating force which keeps me productive.
• baron816 4y ago
  A lot of Leftist tech workers like to think they’re working in a coop. They think the company should exist to serve their needs, rather than the needs of investors and customers. It’s a recipe for catastrophe.
  • VFIT7CTO77TOC 4y ago
    I saw a discussion about tech layoffs few weeks ago. Someone had noted that layoffs should have come as no surprise when you had employees bragging about how little work they were doing. This comment stirred up a lot of people calling the poster heartless and saying things like "these people have families". That is such a naive perspective of the world. These are businesses and their goal is to make as much money as possible. That means they strive to be as efficient as possible. I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.
    • ejb999 4y ago
      >>I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from. Personally I think it comes from many of these people being young (under about 33-35), and having worked almost their entire careers in a booming economy where things always went up in a straight line; you would need to have about 15 years working as an adult to have lived thru the last big down cycle in 2008.
  • mrzimmerman 4y ago
    This is such a naive perspective of the world. The company should care equal parts about the the needs of the people who consume the product and those who produce it doing actual work. The idea that a company can produce a product without caring about the quality of how the product is produced is laughable in any Econ 101 classroom. Additionally there are plenty of models of businesses in the US and Europe where the labor force is included in business decisions. Your idea that the people making a living from building a product want to destroy it and their own livings, are some how not aligned with the customers—who want a good product and will return if it is good—is completely without logic or knowledge of market economics.
• par 4y ago
  newsflash: people can be treated well comparatively, and still be in incredibly daunting and humiliating situations that is completely out of their control.
• pdntspa 4y ago
  That's why they call them "golden handcuffs" and "gilded cages"
• hef19898 4y ago
  It is telling when priviledged white collar tech employees consider themselves to be the same group as classical blue collar workers. At FAANG, only Amazon has what is traditionally regarded as blue collar worlers, and those aren't treated any better or worse than the same roles elsewhere. With the exception, that Amazon is in a position to actually treat those folks better.
• UncleEntity 4y ago
  Think about how it looks to all the people who have never lived through a recession before. The only valid reason to layoff workers is if you, as a caring founder, have no other choice. Then they see these tech giant laying off people, and not because it’s that or bankruptcy, and start calling bullshit. Oh, and start making up conspiracy theories about how it isn’t really an over hiring correction like TFA. Look here, kids, go ask those graybeards you laugh at behind their backs what it was like during the dotcom bust.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• odiroot 4y ago
  Apparently Google has fired all the massage therapists. The working conditions are getting abysmal!
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    For those massage therapists who are now jobless, surely.