Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff.

Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.

I feel like you're underestimating how terrible Google's stack ranking system. It basically exploits you into doing more work than you should with the prospect of making more money, only to smack you back down and ask you to do 6 more month of back breaking work. More than you were hired to, mind you.

If you are comparing it to slavery I think you are vastly overestimating how bad the promo process is.

Or vastly underestimating how terrible slavery is.

This is my reaction when I see people complaining about tech jobs.

Especially when they use phrases like "back breaking work".

It mainly indicates a severe lack of perspective.

This statement is worded to lead a reader to believe you’ve never actually experienced “back breaking work”. It reads as incredibly privileged and insulated

Google hasn't done stack ranking for perf in years.

“back breaking work”

Mercy.

Without sounding judgy, this is something that I joke with my fellow Gen-x'rs and Boomers with. Millenials expect prepayment for what they're about to do, in hopes they can actually do it.

I was raised in a generation that you had to prove you could in fact, do the work.

I appreciate and enjoy their confidence, and don't much care for what you might call "being entitled", though I can see this will become a protected phrase in the near future.

You’re not wrong, but we have those expectations because we often have to go deep into educational debt to get the job in the first place. The costs always get passed along.

This reflects more on our generation’s distrust of the systems that we work in than any kind of entitlement or misplaced confidence. As well as our general economic adversity/anxiety, debt, lack of future prospects, exploitation, etc.

This comment amuses me because the same people seem to have a high level of trust in the government as a general rule. Or at least in candidates on the left who advocate for a government that is more involved in day-to-day life.

Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you.

You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".

No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal. And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. In a job market as good as the one in the US at the moment, that mobility is irrespective of skill level.

And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.

""" No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal """ yes, which is to make profit and keep shareholders & investors happy. Companies like Facebook might have started with a simple goal of connecting family & friends. But, now its an entirely different beast, making money by selling you and with way too many security holes that it hopes it can fix.

""" And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. """ You are joining another one that has the same common goal.

""" And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce. """ Please tell that to the Amazon's warehouse workers who had to piss in a bottle, because they don't want a slippage in their quota.

There are vast swaths of the US that are in economic decline, and they most certainly do not allow for mobility irrespective of skill level. They don't even have sufficient economic activity to support a Walmart.

You seem to define mobility different from me. The people in those areas have the legal and opportunistic means of going elsewhere.

I have a hard time imaging the people are willingly sacrificing theirs and their kids' futures for no reason. It's hard to up and move somewhere without adequate savings, a family or friends network. What kind of landlord is going to rent to someone with no job? Will someone in that situation be able to get a job that even allows them to save up for a home purchase in an economically burgeoning area? Or will they always be treading water?

people have always had that mobility though; there's nothing special about the current US job market. want to become the king in a feudal society? just raise an army and take over

I'd like to agree with you, because the narrative that employees corral and motivate their employers is an attractive one, and to be encouraged.

Within tech specifically: I do think it's true that software employers shift and change their rhetoric and/or practices to meet the (sometimes entitled) demands of developers.

But some of the issues silicon valley tech firms are relentlessly unwilling to move on are ones around unionization and collective bargaining.

If employees are truly creating the market, and it's the companies that have to work to attract and retain them, then why are employers so fearful of anything except individual bargaining?

For people who are all of: confident, socially mobile (few family/social ties to bind them) and physically in good health you are probably absolutely correct. But I would wager that setting those expectations across entire populations doesn't scale.

I hate these flippant comparisons of unhealthy workplaces to slavery. People are paid and can go home to their families at night. Nobody is being whipped or sold or forced to have sex. Comparing a Google software developer to a slave is nonsense and undermines the horrors that real slaves went/go through.

> forced to have sex

The word you're looking for is rape.

For me you’re demeaning the word “slavery” by suggesting that anything in this discussion is even close to that level of horrific, evil brutality.

> it is just slavery

If working a cushy tech job is slavery then what would be working at a sand mine in cameroon called ?

Much of the workforce

1. cannot take a couple of days off, without informing their boss much in advance

2. cannot work on something in their off time, on their own computers without employer claiming ownership of it (I am talking specifically about software here)

3. cannot take a unpaid month off, to travel or just rest, for example without losing their jobs

4. have no hope of receiving pension, decent medical benefits etc

5. have no good way of progressing in their career, without having to play bullshit office politics

6. have no concept of maternal, paternal leave, beyond the token few days which is a joke

and so on...

Yes, it is slavery. Compared to Cameroon, this is much better, cushier, comfortable slavery, but it is still slavery, aka wage slavery. We have been brainwashed so much about work, being a good citizen etc etc, that most of us can't even recognize that we give away the best years of our lives in return for a car, a small house and some money - and this is just the lucky ones, most of us don't get even that.

Both are slavery, just different forms of it. Yes, one of them is much better than the other, but they are both slavery.

But the thread is about Google.

Google offers unpaid time off, 12 weeks of maternal and paternal leave (more if you are a birth parent), is generally on the more flexible side of IP rights for a US company, provides decent medical benefits, and has a promo system through committees explicitly to minimize the amount of politicking one needs to do.

A wage slave is a person who is tied to the system of making a wage. It's not literal slavery. Ever.

I am a white, upper/middle class Texan with family who are borderline racists, and you are FLAT WRONG my friend.

I suggest some travel in your near future.

You're extremely misinformed on what constitutes actual slavery (especially plantation 18th/19th century slavery), up to the point of being disrespectful of their descendants (not forgetting the victims of current forms of slavery).

So almost everyone on the planet is a slave ? makes it kind of a meaningless word.

It is just that your dad had different expectations.

Had your dad expected to be promoted every 2 years like this guy, after 33 years he would have been CEO of the company. It is real that a lot of people today expect to get promoted fast for only doing their job.

Ask your dad what would he think if his job had all the perks that Google and FB give, including relative salary. You will see that it will sound like heaven for him. Why not just stay working there?

I think you have a personal grudge against something.

Working is not slavery, you work for money to do what you want.

You have a bad boss, can happen. Change jobs and it's done