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Why Tech Employees Are Ready to Revolt
- sinoue 2y agoArticle starts: "This has been an unprecedented period of unprovoked kicks and unkept promises for workers in the tech industry."
- cratermoon 2y agoCompanies slashing jobs so the CEOs can get hundred million dollar payoffs.
- Animats 2y agoWorked for Boeing.
- BMc2020 2y ago[flagged]
- adastra22 2y agoTwitter share value has also dropped by 80% since the acquisition.
- BMc2020 2y agoThe russians and arabs don't care about shareholder value. They want a platform to end american democracy. Their soverign wealth funds won't be affected. TL:DR; Mohammed bin Salman paid $300 million for one (1) house in France.
- seattleeng 2y agoCut 80% of jobs and 80% of revenue That is not what shareholders want, hence why no one is copying it
- BMc2020 2y agoThe russians and the arabs (who financed it) have different goals. They wanted a platform to help end America democracy and Elon fired all the gatekeepers. The shareholders aren't invited to their party. But corporate America did notice what he got away with and continues to get away with.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Cyph0n 2y agoI think the fact that Twitter is still running is nothing but a testament to the brilliant work done by the engineers who built and documented these systems. I would guess that, going forward, companies should expect less of this kind of quality - especially when combined with the overall push towards LLMs.
- acdha 2y agoIt’s still operating but so many of those people were things like support for advertisers and safety that ad revenue is down so much that he’s trying lawsuits to force former advertisers back and by all accounts usage is down, too. Most boards and C suites don’t want that.
- pessimizer 2y agoThere are constant political attacks on their advertisers. This is like calling the Cuba embargo proof that socialism doesn't work.
- acdha 2y agoAdvertisers left because they didn’t want their ads showing up next to extremist content. There have always been political criticisms about ads but they rarely get traction, but no ad exec wants to see their ad next to some guy talking about the need to provide a safe place for white children. Getting rid of the people who used to keep that from happening was a very shortsighted cost savings. Then Musk decided to sue companies who stopped advertising. That might indulge his sense of entitlement but it also sent a message that the safest move is not to do business with X because you can no longer predict what they’ll do if he thinks you should be giving him more money. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/musk-sues-advertisers-over-alleged-boycott-after-twitter-takeover https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/musk-sues-advertisers-ov...
- itchyouch 2y agoThe site might be up, but my twitter app, even though updated, has been busted for months. Though that could be that I’m on the iOS beta. I can’t even engage when I click on Twitter links cuz the whole link to app hijacking mechanism won’t even let me go to the website. Sure I can delete the app or copy/paste the url, but the fact that I have to do insane workarounds means, there’s whole sections of users that can’t use twitter even if they wanted to. Abs I don’t care enough to actually fix this particular problem so, it stays broken.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>Yes, I could blame AI for 99 percent of the problems in the tech industry right now. Tech is one of the less relevant industries being truly affected by AI in a negative light. >And twitter is still operating. A chicken with its head cut off can run around for a surprising amount of time before it falls limp. Maybe you should check the working conditions of twitter rather than its heartbeat. If you remove 80% of staff and make the rest work 3 times harder you can do hide a lot of disfuntion. Until you can't.
- Groxx 2y agoParticularly if that chicken has billions of dollars backing it. That'll buy a lot of zombie-like robotic jerking around that occasionally moves in a direction.
- tuatoru 2y agoElon Musk isn't playing "capitalism". I don't know the name of the game he's playing, but that isn't it.
- nitwit005 2y agoThere are websites that have run for years without being touched by an engineer. Why should they go down? Those people were working on new features for the most part. The investors wanted Twitter to grow, so they could get a return on their investment. Twitter has been shrinking.
- damascus 2y agoIt takes a lot more tech staff to build a tech company than it does to run a tech company.
- anonfordays 2y ago[flagged]
- xcrunner529 2y agoWhat about spending all day tweeting conspiracies instead of working?
- profmarshmellow 2y ago[dead]
- Rodeoclash 2y agoExactly, or spending all day arguing why master shouldn't be renamed to main so they can pay themselves on the back for fighting against "Woko Haram"!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anonfordays 2y agoThose people were quickly shouted down by activists and warned by HR for being disruptive. Then, no one dared openly argued against the move to main. They actually went back to, you know, work.
- anonfordays 2y agoSame people.
- xcrunner529 2y agoSo, Elon?
- anonfordays 2y agoNo, Elon wasn't the one crying about "guys", " blacklist ", etc.
- probablybetter 2y agoI would say that bad ideas are having a heyday across all economic sectors, not only tech. You could call it the epoch of bad ideas having a heyday, if you want. One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.
- heroprotagonist 2y agoBusiness as a whole is becoming much more unfriendly to labor. They're realizing that perceived external threats like temporary recessions, AI labor, a threatened US dollar, etc, can give them continuous leverage in any labor discussions and they're pressing the advantage for all that they can. If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- pylua 2y agoI’m okay with the value of the dollar drastically decreasing. In fact, I think it will naturally do so due to the high debt and labor becoming more expensive in other countries. I think it would be good for U.S. workers as it will help make them more competitive in a global labor market.
- heroprotagonist 2y agoANY call to set a debt ceiling needs to be directly tied to converting all for-profit corporations into public-benefit corporations. That doesn't restrict corporations from generating profit. It just balances how they use said profits. "Fixing" the national debt problem by putting a ceiling on it without addressing one of the main contributors to the current state of government spending and quality of life in America is a recipe for disaster. It's okay to rip the band-aid off, but only if you're ready to deal with what may be a mortal wound.
- Animats 2y agoIs there any good reason why about 90% of web dev, both client and server side, can't be standardized and automated? At least WYSIWYG.
- herdcall 2y agoWhat is server side WYSIWYG? Genuine question.
- srmatto 2y agoI think it could be something like https://juju.is/ https://juju.is/ or https://www.systeminit.com/ https://www.systeminit.com/ but maybe I am not understanding what you mean.
- malfist 2y agoStandardized and automated is another word for stagnate.
- Animats 2y agoWe're already there. Web sites today do about the same things they did a decade ago.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThey just use much more network bandwidth, memory, screen real estate and CPU power and time to do it.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThe web platform itself isn't too hard in the grand scheme of things. But even then, I'm not sure if I'd trust true automation of thousands, maybe even a million different web clusters all working seamlessly with the management of a few developers. A lot of what Musk cut out was support. the ones answering tickets or talking with adverts/big users to keep them happy. You can't solve that with a chatbot. The corrosion there is exactly why Twitter stock tanked.
- tbrownaw 2y agoSo... free VC money is drying up (probably for some larger economic reasons?), and it's a lot harder to get paid to do things that don't make money? And this is a "shitshow" and means people are going to "revolt" (and do what instead?). And somehow the latest improvement to low-code/no-code tooling (LLMs / AI) are making it all worse, maybe because they'll really for real this time finally let business-side people not need programmers.
- ausbah 2y agogood start would be to unionize
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- freefaler 2y agoCheck how US steel and auto industry prospered in a connected world with unionized workforce competing with Mexico labour. You can't legislate your way to profitability... Global competition will eat the profit margin and companies won't have enough money to honour their contracts and will go bust (as history shows). No written law can compete with the invisible hand of the market.
- stogot 2y agoUnionize at an unprofitable business with no realistic model in a post-ZIRP reality? That would drive a 6 month runway to zero immediately
- geodel 2y agoWhile as much I empathize with tech workers (being one of them) at this point I feel automation and efficiencies they have developed in last 3-4 decades that displaced middle class jobs and skills are now good enough to displace large chunk of tech workers themselves. Elite tech workers at top cloud/ software based companies can vehemently disagree but for mid level IT folks at typical enterprise shops situation is far more gloomier than it was even 10 years back. Now if these employees are ready to revolt I suspect it will most fine by employers.
- pessimizer 2y agoThe ones doing covert layoffs through revoking WFH are praying for mass walkouts that they can turn into lockouts.
- SauciestGNU 2y agoThis is an interesting theory. To what end? To replace the entire American workforce with cheaper offshore labor?
- gitt67887yt7bg 2y agoIt's to weed out the types of ego-driven employees who like to threaten lawsuits and publicly complain about the companies they work for. They'll lose some productive individuals.. but companies need their full teams to build success together, not just a series of individuals working for their own personal success at the expense of the team. If any individual could complete the product on their own, then the company itself would be pointless. Individual success is not mutually exclusive to team success, but the people who do not work well on teams are unlikely to return to office (or tolerate similar actions). Companies know this, and they've learned they can't find toxic employees by looking at individual success alone. There's other ways to find this dysfunction, but looking at team metrics instead of individual means you have to cut an entire team to try and force out maybe a few employees who actively hate the company. RTO is a unique opportunity to try a different, and perhaps more targeted approach. There will still be an some great team members lost for purely physical reasons, but perhaps fewer than firing entire teams.
- tuatoru 2y agoI wish corporations much joy of their AI employee replacement efforts. Much, much joy. ( /sarcasm, if it's needed.)
- pessimizer 2y agoDon't you have to have leverage to revolt? How do you revolt after you've been laid off? I don't understand this column. They're laying off because they've vastly overhired, and if they laid off too much (while everyone else was also laying off), they'll be able to pick people back up at a huge discount. If programmers wanted to force companies to maintain wildly irrational staffing levels, they should have unionized a decade and a half ago when they had the leverage. There are too many programmers, now. Current innovation is high-level and academic, and maybe 2% of the people posting on HN are educated enough to ride the bleeding edge of that.
- Otterknow 2y agoThis is just comments by engineers having a pity party, clicked on an article. Lesson for a retired 40 something VC, minus high functioning aspergers, you will be employees. Be happy with your 250k+ per year and realise you only see the business world from a small wedge that is your department and rarely understand scope unless it's drilled into you.
- gitt67887yt7bg 2y agoIf these companies don't want to respect and retain engineers, they don't have to. Boeing tried this strategy, and its definitely having noticable results.
- zorkomatic 2y agoThis whole thread is pathetic. Gen-Zs threatening to "revolt" because they get fired soon after being hired for being lazy and not even having the skills to use Excel? Sure, children. You go and revolt. Fling your Legos. Stomp your feet. Flail your hands. Take some selfies at the unemployment office and post them on TikTok, the social network for tiktards. Then go back to your room at your parents house. They are the ones to blame for raising losers.
- penguin_booze 2y agoNo-one is going to revolt. Everyone's laden with debt of various kinds, children, spouse, and familial and social obligations--a burden we'll bear for the rest of our lives. One can't simply wash them off and start again. And our masters know that.