Sadly, labor is not that powerful anymore... especially when the company has the capital to replace you with 5 people tomorrow.

I think the political power can only be regained by pooling your labor with your peers.

Like an union, it has been brought up in tech from time to time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1172279395035...

Yup, but one brought together by morals and ethics for the sake of morals and ethics. As Jeff points out, tech is not known for poor compensation or working environments. Tech is pervasive because convenience is a hot commodity. Technology disrupts, tech can make or break monopolies / monopsonies by changing the status quo. Having the ability to get another job on a whim doesn't matter much if you one day unintentionally end up serving the parent company that you resigned from; as big fish swallow small fish through acquisition etc.

I wish there was another way, but I can't really think of one that's within our control... Unions are certainly not above corruption either. I see Republicans / Democrats as two opposing unions; instead of making rational decisions on each issue independently everything gets encoded into a binary choice. Red or blue and all the good / bad that comes with either choice.

The real solution is smaller companies. Local businesses that you can simply stop using / move away from. That seems like a pipe dream though; it's more convenient to buy your internet from Comcast and support a monopoly than start your own ISP - even if you do and it gains traction, Comcast will come knocking and you'll take the money and retire.

And that's what distinguishes a Googler walking out from most walkouts: Google still struggles to hire fast enough to fill open roles.

Because of the nature of the roles or because they are selective to a fault? It's my experience that most people at a company of that size are "just there". If you have 2 employees, both of them have to be excellent. If you have 200 employees, 2 of them have to be excellent.

The nature of the software Google rights still requires quite a bit of specialization or quite a bit of adaptability, in general.

I agree, but I hear more stories from / about ex-googlers along the lines of: I have 20 years experience and 2 PhDs and they have me writing unit tests.

I think its likely hard to hire smart people who don't rock the boat; and thus it takes a long time to hire. It's of course possible (and reasonably likely) that there are only a handful of people that can do the work, but I dunno... with the kind of money that Google has you just open a school and start grooming people specifically for the roles that you have open. Build a pipeline of qualified workers, don't wait for them to come to you.

They've setup shop in Waterloo (ON, Canada) specifically to influence the University and scoop kids up as they graduate.