Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of […]
Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.
I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.
I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I’d been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn’t want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There’s nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)
It’s 9 years on and I’m working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don’t make what I was making then (and I’ve been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I’m at is a good fit, they’re accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn’t the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.
Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don’t care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I’m a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I’d reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that’s not happening and when I think too hard about that it’s not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)
Looking back, I recall being abruptly ‘let go’ from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.
No matter how much you make, if you don’t actually own capital, and you must work for a living to survive, you’re part of the proletariat. It’s just a matter of everyone else who thinks they’re part of the petit bourgeois finally waking up to that fact.
Except for cops and pinkertons but I repeat myself
If you rely on your paycheck, you are working class.
imagine getting first replaced by some kid out of a garage, then by indian code farms and now by ai developed by the grown up kids from said garage and trained by indian code farms.
So tired of this rhetoric. AI isn’t replacing any software engineering jobs, nor could it. It’s a joke, quite frankly.
I was listening to a podcast about AI. I think it was one of Ezra Kleins. And he was telling a story that he heard, bout those weird virtual reality games from the 90s or early Aughts. And people shat on those games because they were awful and clunky and not very good so that shitting was well deserved. But one guy was like “yeah, that’s all true. But this is the worst it’s going to be. The next iteration isn’t going to be worse than this.”
And that’s where AI is now. Like, it’s powerful and already a threat to certain jobs. GPT 3/4 may be useless to software engineering jobs now (I’d argue that it’s not - I work in a related field and I use it about daily) but what about GPT 5? 6? 10?
Im not as doom and gloom on AI as I was six months ago, but I think it’s a bit silly to think that AI isn’t going to cause massive upheaval across all industries in the medium to long term.
But also, for the record, I’m less worried about AI than I am about AI in the hands of Capitalism.
But also, for the record, I’m less worried about AI than I am about AI in the hands of Capitalism.
Let’s just say it, AI in the hands of the 1% who use it to become the 0.001%.
Not yet, but would you agree that businesses desire the ability to automate software engineering and reduce developer headcount by demanding an AI supplemented development work flow?
Sure, just like businesses have always wanted “no-code” solutions to their problems to cut out the need for software engineers. We all know how that turned out. There was no threat then, and there’s no threat now.
AI coding is just another tool developers have at their disposal now. It will just raise the bar for expected output. I expect within a few years it will be popular to describe a process, have an AI tool spit out some intern-grade hot mess that maybe compiles, then have a junior developer fix it, and a senior developer write the custom/complex parts. If the AI is good enough, it’ll be a significant time saver for it to get you more than half way to done.
It could even be tamed with a test-driven development approach. Write a bunch of good tests and have the AI generate code that passes the tests. What could possibly go wrong… lol
I find it highly overrated in terms of productivity in general, particularly when writing anything remotely non-trivial/company-specific.
There’s also the absolutely massive issue of licensing/IP/etc. Any company that’s not full of dumbasses should recognize the massive risk and liability involved and stay the fuck away.
I wish I could read the entire article without an account.
Eric Flint is one of my favorite authors.
Wow. Americans were huge back then. Or could only afford clown cars.
That’s a normal size for a compact car. American car sizes have inflated to ridiculous proportions.
I wish we could have a union at my job. I do data science stuff and I’m borderline incompetent at it, I think a union would really help me out and protect me. I want what the police have where they can be terrible but still have nice jobs. And I don’t want to get laid off. And it would be nice if there was some guarantee that I could work from home forever. And I want a raise. And if I have to go into the office for big meetings, I want the rest of the day off. And I already don’t work Thursday or Friday but I want that to be official. And it would be nice if nobody could send me slack messages until noon because sometimes they wake me up.
Shitpost better pls
I was not shit posting
Calling google workers proletariat is out of touch and borderline insulting to real working class.
3-month salary for a junior at google is what a “real” proletarian do in a full year, with addition of pension, stock options, benefits and bonuses
The line dividing working class from owning class is not their monthly salary. It’s their relationship to capital. Do they work for their living, or do they own for their living?
same reason why being an athlete sucks – even though you’re making insane sums, the guys at the top are making far more than that, without putting their body on the line in any way whatsoever, indefinitely [whereas most players retire in their 30s, if they’re lucky enough to have that long of a career]
The ones who do make insane sums can pretty easily pivot to being an owner of stuff, if they so choose. We’re starting to see more of that now. A-Rod seems to be investing in businesses now, and was on Shark Tank as a Shark. More generally in entertainment, Ryan Reynolds has been cleaning up, and Kevin Hart is also starting a bunch of businesses. Ashton Kutcher is/was an pretty big in startup investing for a while. The you have Dr Dre with Beats (acquired by Apple), and Jay-Z with all kinds of stuff.
As long as they don’t blow all their money on drugs, women, jewelry, and cars, they don’t have to work for someone else for very long.
Of course, once you start a business you effectively work for the customers, or the board of directors. Everyone has a boss somewhere, unless their just living off dividends or royalties.
Even the CEO is working class by that definition.
Difference in stock options as compensation for executives vs managers or the entire middle management layer is beyond insane. Like exponentially more.
Some. But at firms of even modest size, though, a CEO receives ownership of capital, not just salary, as compensation.
So do plenty of mid level engineers at Google.
They are petit bourgeoisie, they work for a living but their interests are aligned with capital as they’re hired by the owners to extract as much surplus labor as they can and will often get bonuses tied to how well they do that, they’re the overseer.
Software developers work and contribute to the company, they are the ones whose surplus labor is being extracted. They may get a larger chunk of the value they create but they don’t get all of it. They are still in class conflict with the owners to get all the value they create. They’re house slaves, treated better but still fundamentally against the owner.
Would you say that the only people who are not proletariat are those who are “financially independent” in the sense that they don’t need to work for an income?
No, I’d say that “financially independent” really means your dependent on capitalism, and that dependency will lead you to defend capitalism from any challenges. That is the bourgeois position and puts you against the proletariat. Their are other classes though besides proletariat and bourgeoisie with different relations to capital. Petite bourgeoisie are neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat but there interests align with the bourgeoisie/capital and against the proletariat, but they are not completely dependent on capitalism so they won’t defend it as zealously. There is also the independent worker class who work for themselves outside a corporate structure, eg. An independent farmer, whose interests don’t align with either the bourgeoisie or proletariat.
Google engineers have capital, both invested and cash. Enough to start their own company if they wanted. They simply decide that living as googler is easier and more convenient
As long as their livelihood is dependent on labouring, they’re working class. You should show some solidarity, rather than trying to divide the working class.
Even bourgeois class works. Even aristocrats… CEOs work.
Working is not what identifies proletariat.
I show solidarity, I have former colleagues working at google. They have all my solidarity, but they are not proletariat.
An average google engineer have more capital than most CEOs around the world.
They need to unionize, but they are not proletariat. My company is unionized, and we are not proletariat. There are unionized people owning multiple porsches. They are not proletariat. They simply find easier to live out of a good salary instead of the stress of having their own company
I didn’t say they didn’t work. I said that their livelihood isn’t dependant on labouring.
I don’t know what you gain out of gatekeeping the working class. The whole invention of the middle class has been a tool by the owning class to separate the working class.
I gain nothing other than I prefer politics to be well directed. Unions for tech jobs is clearly needed, and it is fine. As said I work for an unionized company.
Problem of putting together real working class and people like me, or Google engineers that are even in a better position, it’s bad to orient policies that helps the real working class. I want everybody to enjoy the privileges of mine and google engineers. Putting as in the same bucket as deliveroo drivers is not good for society. As society, we need to really works on the struggle of real proletariat. As tech workers we are far from the priority. Tech workers need to unionize, yes, but they are not proletariat.
You keep saying that it’s bad, but you haven’t actually said why. Just this nebulous idea that standing together is somehow bad. Worker’s rights benefit all workers. And the more people demanding them, the better. Even more so if the people demanding them have greater access to the resources needed to actually make a difference.
Never once has “divided we conquer” been true.
Tell me you know fuck all about unionization without telling me. Its all the same. We all, the working class, are advocating for the same fucking rights, boundaries, and protections. Deliveroo driver and tech employee both wanna go home at a reasonable time of night and sleep well knowing they can pay their bills.
Ah yes, just what the working class desperately needs, a gatekeeper.
I am not a gate keeper. I work in an unionized company in fintech. But I also recognize that calling me “proletarian” is detrimental for battles of real proletariat. Because I have a better salary than a medical doctor with a 5th of the stress. And I don’t make near google salary. I have former colleagues who went to google… They are not absolutely struggling. They need to unionize? Surely. But let’s keep it real, use words properly, because there are people in the current economy who are struggling. Proletariat means that the only “capital” owned by someone is their children. It evolved to mean working class, where only capital is ability to do a work.
Google engineers have real capital invested in stock market and pension funds, a great salary and benefits, transferable skills, and their biggest asset is their knowledge. They need to unionize only to fight back to mass lay offs, and have more saying on the company direction. Other than that they are doing pretty fine.
Dog the shadeholders who let google pay you that high wage to convince people to join this profession also own the fucking overpriced housing and grocery stores that take it riiiight back.
