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The capital class thinks that the serfs are getting too "uppity" with all this "pay me a living wage to help deal with insane inflation" and WFH. All the layoff
by apercu 3y ago
The capital class thinks that the serfs are getting too "uppity" with all this "pay me a living wage to help deal with insane inflation" and WFH. All the layoffs send signals so the working class has an existential dread.
Also, there are very few exceptional leaders and there's some degree of copycatting here.
But what do I know.
- monero-xmr 3y agoOr there are business lines that have no hope of ever being sustainable, and as a private business that has to earn a profit to survive, it makes sense to stop throwing money away.
- contravariant 3y agoIt probably doesn't help that the bar for sustainability was raised from 'generates any profit, ever' to 'generates a few % profit per USD invested each year, eventually'.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> the bar for sustainability was raised from 'generates any profit, ever' to 'generates a few % profit per USD invested each year, eventually Those sound as though they overlap
- contravariant 3y agoWell it's not as if it's changed massively, but it turns out quite a lot of stuff fit in the small gap between both definitions.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoHow much do you need your 401k/IRA to go up each year? How much does your city/state need its pension investments to go up each year? The productivity of the future (or now) has already been borrowed from, and it has to be delivered on, even if only nominally.
- pydry 3y agoSpeaking of business lines that have no hope of ever being profitable, I'm still waiting them to cancel the metaverse project, but it still looks like Zuck's ego >>> the appearance of future profitability >>> the people who actually make facebook's core competences function. The more people they lay off while keeping that dumpster fire going the more alarm bells go off in my head around the long term viability of their stock. It definitely doesn't belong in a pension. Its fashionable among herd mentality investors now to do noisy lay-offs, but the smart money is probably quietly hiring these days.
- re-thc 3y agoThe Metaverse isn’t going anywhere, like it or not.
- kibwen 3y agoAmusingly, there are two ways to read this comment.
- andsoitis 3y agoThere's also a third interpretation.
- confidantlake 3y agoexplain?
- andsoitis 3y ago"isn’t going anywhere" can mean: a) it isn't making progress b) it isn't going away c) you can count on it
- rightbyte 3y agoHah, ye. I think the "it is not here and will not move" interpretation is the most valid one.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoIt's not a higher monetary cost to have WFH employees. Businesses can shut down and get rid of office leases which save significant money. They can hire people in lower cost of living areas which don't demand as high of salaries vs. hot areas too. WFH is nothing but a cost savings for companies.
- hindsightbias 3y agoAs evidenced here by the vast increases in productivity provided by WFH, it is only natural companies need fewer workers. I'm perplexed by postings like this, HN should be rejoicing in these right-sizings and the maximization of opportunities for those no longer bound to such inefficiencies.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoWhat maximization of opportunities? Layoffs seem like a minimization of opportunities if anything else.
- andsoitis 3y agoFor workers, WFH gives immense flexibility and opportunity. You are no longer tethered to work in the same vicinity where you live. This gives you both personal (e.g. be close to family, be close to a beach, etc.) and professional (e.g. work for company in another city, on the other side of the country, etc.) opportunity.
- smiley1437 3y agoRemember too that WFH opens one to increased competition from others who could do one's job who live in a much lower COL area
- andsoitis 3y agoRight, so it is a tradeoff that a worker can choose to make: work for a company that doesn't have WFH/remote work or one that does. Each has their benefits and drawbacks.
- amelius 3y agoTime for developers to start unionizing.
- Kye 3y agoThe best time to unionize is when you're in a strong bargaining position to set a sustainable baseline in your first contract and build the infrastructure to make a strike credible. Unions are strongest when they have a huge fund to support their members through a strike. Tech workers have been warned about this all through the latest tech boom. It might be too late. Any union formed now will be broke and desperate at any negotiation. It's like trying to buy flood insurance while you're on the roof waiting for rescue.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoI think tech workers are currently in a weaker position but still a fairly strong position to unionize. There are plenty of people still employed enough to be able to support those laid off, and tech workers as a whole earn enough that many should hav a significant savings for emergencies like strikes. I think we should be organizing to have similar protections like a guild, where we guarantee minimum quality of treatment for us workers but no maximum on perks and wages, not even pegged to tenure.
- pydry 3y agoStrikes are probably the least effective tactic for a tech union. Software isn't a coal mine or a railway. Plenty of products have glided along for a while with very few people maintaining them. Sometimes even zero. I imagine if we do see tech collective action it'll probably be done quietly in the form of silently exploding technical debt, with documentation that misleads more than it informs and products that collapse under the weight of their own unmaintainability.
- mrguyorama 3y agoMost companies don't have twitter levels of overengineering. Work to rule would kill any tech company. Imagine your biggest contract having to wait 2 weeks before you can fix the bug that is crashing their business. Imagine zero tech support because unpaid after hours tech support is horse shit.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoAny HNers gotten more interested in organizing tech since this experience?
- kibwen 3y agoTechies still see themselves as temporarily embarrassed owners rather than laborers. I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon.
- capitalsigma 3y agoTechies (at least at meta) are owners in the sense that a large % of their comp is in the form of equity, so it is in their interest for the company to maximize stock price.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gfdsgfsdgfs 3y agoIt's ironic how you replaced "millionaires" in that quote since many engineers are now millionaires.
- mrguyorama 3y agoYour class is not based on the number in your bank account, but on how you make that money. If you are dependent on an Owner to pay you for your time and labor, you are a worker, regardless of what token "riches" you are paid to believe otherwise. You don't go from worker to owner until you buy three properties to rent out or start your own business.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe quote contrasted “millionaire” with “proletariat” and was clearly a reference to status at least well into the petit bourgeoisie if not the haut bourgeoisie. A mere millionaire is a lot less rich today b/c inflation (though probably still at least petit bourgeois.)
- newbie578 3y agoYou are absolutely correct in that way of thinking. What astounds me the number of people on HN who are saying that we are lazy and anti-capitalist with that way of thinking. The system is broken. The rich are getting richer and the average workers are getting screwed big time. Privatized profits, but socialized losses. As George Carlin said: "They are getting fcked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fcking years ago."
- humanrebar 3y agoPro-capitalist proposals exist, like YIMBY movements, pushback against regulatory capture, pushback against market breaking practices like locked down devices, and so on.
- zpeti 3y ago> Privatized profits, but socialized losses. 100% agree when it comes to the 2008 crisis, and the bailouts, and the zero percent interest rates for 20 years. But what has this got to do with layoffs at meta? Did they get a government bailout?
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Privatized profits, but socialized losses Can we stop saying this? Many taxes are paid before profits exist. Taxes are the sure thing; profits might happen, or you might go bust and investors lose all the money. That's not socialised losses. That's privatised risk, losses, then socialised taxes, then whatever's left is "privatised profits" - i.e. people actually getting a return on a risky investment.
- andsoitis 3y ago> the serfs While you're arguing class warfare, I think it is worth asking whether the "serfs" (dictionary: "an agricultural laborer bound under the feudal system to work on their lord's estate") at Meta are working on things that improve society... Isn't the typical developer at Meta making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year making systems that are destructive to the social fabric and cohesion of society?
- dnadler 3y agoOn the other hand, the open source work done by meta has been instrumental in advancing many technologies and techniques. Machine learning via PyTorch being a prime example.
- ricardobeat 3y agoThe jury is still out on that one…
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agoOn whether they’ve been instrumental on advancing machine learning, or on whether that’s a good thing?
- strivax 3y agoThey have definitely contributed a lot to advancing machine learning. I believe the above comment means we don't know whether advancing AI will have sour consequences for society down the line
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agoI mean maybe, but it’s already having positive effects today. It’s advanced the state of the art for cancer diagnostics and is advancing novel treatments, for example. So far, the arguments against that I’ve seen have been hypotheticals and boogeymen.
- leetharris 3y ago[flagged]
- golergka 3y agoThe "capital class" in US is mostly people who invest in their 401k and just get pensions from pension funds, whereas the "serfs" in context of meta are engineers who earn what, $400k per year? How come serfs are richer than the capital class?
- loeg 3y agoMost Meta employees do not earn $400k and the layoffs today are concentrated among non-developers.
- jonathankoren 3y agoYou don’t understand the the vast difference, not just in wealth, but power, in the United States, and silicon valley in particular. This is a place where 400k/year won’t buy you a nice house. Chris Rock explained the difference well when he said, “Shaq is rich, but the white man that signs his check is wealthy.”
- KingOfCoders 3y agoThe people working at Meta are mostly the 0.01% upper class of the world.
- jjav 3y agoFound this income percentile calculator: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ 300K puts someone at 97 percentile (top 3%). Nice, but nowhere near top 0.01% It doesn't have the resolution to go into fractions of percent. Found this older (2018) article which says that 0.01% top income would be an income of $35 million a year. But that's 2018, so should be quite a bit more today. So, it's safe to say that there are a hanful few people at Meta in the top 0.01%, but not many.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoGetting older makes my reading ability worse, but I can't find "world calculator" on that page, only the US? So I would assume your quoted numbers means top 3% of the US, whereas I've argued world?
- KingOfCoders 3y agoFor future people who mind find this in Google: I have been searching for some time now without success, even ChatGPT tells me there is no such number, because many countries don't have the statistics, different taxation systems exist etc. Some numbers I have found are around the 0.1% percentile for $300k yearly income compared to the world. With both members of the household working at Meta/in the valley and and household income of 600k/y we get below 0.1%, because in many countries even households with high income do not have double-earners with that kind of income.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIf everyone demanded more money simultaneously they would be forced to pay more. The upper class has no skills other than dealing with money. Their power is the value we assign to money. If we all decided tomorrow to use another currency and exclude the upper class from using it, in 1 week they would be starving.
- laurels-marts 3y agoInstead of a grand conspiracy and malicious intent I believe the layoffs are more likely a result of bad decision making, over-hiring and waking up to the reality that perhaps they don’t need a staff of 100k to run a website and a few mobile apps (a vast understatement of course but still).
- mrguyorama 3y agoThe best part is both the malicious intent and the utter stupidity and fecklessness options mean we probably shouldn't be paying these chucklefucks millions a year to cargo cult manage. The ownership class hasn't had to show performance for their payment in decades.
- BeetleB 3y agoThese serfs being laid off are likely richer than most of the Wall Street folks who lost their jobs in 2008.
- boredumb 3y agoWho in their right mind would consider business analysts at a social media company in silicone valley "uppity"? Has anyone started a kick starter to help collectivize their loss of earnings through to january?
- skrebbel 3y agoI just can’t get over this kind of language coming from people who earn 300k/y. The idea that facebook developers are “the working class” engaged in a class struggle to overcome oppression is just.. wow way out there! The struggle exists but it’s not at Meta engineering. EDIT: I’m not saying layoffs aren’t mean/stupid/preventable. I’m only saying that it’s not oppression or class struggle. I can’t understand that people can write this stuff on HN while living in a country where it’s legal to pay restaurant staff below minimum wage cause hey tips amirite. There’s plenty class struggle in America, let alone the world, but not a whole lot of it at Meta.
- somsak2 3y agoeven if the CEO makes 10,000x more? if you annualize zucks net worth that's where he's sitting, and that ratio actually is pretty comparable to what it was during the lord/serf days.
- skrebbel 3y agoWait, if the CEO is rich, 300k/y isn't a living wage? I fail to see the connection. Context: I live in $NOT_BAY_AREA and the amount of money you folks make while complaining as if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker really rubs me the wrong way. It seems to me that Bay Area tech people (or at least the ones in this thread) lost all sense of reality. I get that getting fired is stressful but if your skillset is in such high demand as tech skills are in SFBA, it’s not class struggle. I don’t disagree that layoffs like these are stupid, preventable and maybe even mean, I merely disagree that it’s oppression. It hurts the people who do get oppressed and not paid a living wage.
- mrguyorama 3y agoJust because someone isn't literally starving doesn't mean they aren't being oppressed by the ruling class. How much money do Google and Facebook bring in per employee, and how much of that only goes to the top level people? All people who sell their labor are in the worker class, period. Pretending that being paid a token amount to feel special and make them see fellow workers as not in the same boat is unhelpful.
- MontyCarloHall 3y agoOr perhaps, Meta is so poorly managed that they had employees paid $200k/year to do little-to-no work [0], and they are only just realizing that this is unsustainable, again due to incredible ineptitude. [0] https://news.yahoo.com/former-meta-recruiter-paid-200-144500635.html https://news.yahoo.com/former-meta-recruiter-paid-200-144500...
- dahwolf 3y agoThe capital class isn't a single conspiring entity. When you get fired from Facebook and then try to save money by canceling Netflix, then Netflix isn't going to be very happy about that, whilst they very much are capitalist. Most companies depend on customers having disposable income.