It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by construction unions due to its disastrous policy.

This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable.

“Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon, both would be a disaster for Seattle, and proponents try to focus on Amazon to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is.

In 2010, the Seattle budget was 3.8B; in 2020, it’s 6.5B. An increase of 2.7B and growth of 71% in a decade. (Per capita, the Seattle budget is 37% more now than in 2010.)

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-constructio...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-c...

Just ballparking it:

Seattle population has grown by around 23% [1] and inflation means $1 in 2010 has the spending power of $1.18 today [2], you'd expect a 45% increase (1.18*1.23) just accounting for population change. According to seattle's open government website, their budget was $6.24Bn in 2020, and $4.13Bn in 2010, a 51% increase. So just ball park spending has grown probably less than 0.5% per annum over inflation in the last decade.

[1]: Acutally 2010-2018 - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=seattle+p...

[2]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2010?amount=1

[3]: https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2020/operating/0/serv...

As someone not from Seattle, the drama around that tax was quite ridiculous. The idea of a "head tax" is utterly nonsensical in that it's an incentive to NOT hire people, which is the entire point that companies are pulled into cities. Jobs. Jobs are one of the things cities care most about more than anything. A head tax actively disincentives hiring of new workers. A head tax can maybe make sense if you have permanently low unemployment and companies can't hire enough people, but that's not Seattle's problem.

Given how many people are moving to Seattle every year, far faster than new housing can be built, I'd say that an effectively negative unemployment rate has, in fact, been one of Seattle's problems, and that slowing hiring down would, in fact, help things.

> The idea of a "head tax" is utterly nonsensical in that it's an incentive to NOT hire people

If your goal is to reduce rents by reducing the number of people living nearby, then it can meet the goal.

> Jobs are one of the things cities care most about more than anything.

And look where that got cities.

One school of thought is "just keep importing jobs AND add a ton of new housing" but there's a sort of capitalistic dystopian feeling to that, like that's the path to Blade Runner. Just need to start shipping out the people without high-enough paying jobs (again, actually - Europeans moving to the Americas doesn't seem that dissimilar) and we're there!

Another source for anyone not in Seattle who wants to learn more about it: https://sccinsight.com/2017/10/30/close-look-proposed-head-t...

That's from 2017 when it was introduced but it's a good non-partisan explanation, including the many problems with the proposal. https://sccinsight.com/tag/head-tax/ has newer posts.

> because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores

> This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable.

Citations needed. Citing a few articles quoting a few politicians does not count.

Creating an alt account to make this one comment not really trust-inspiring either.

Must be why all those small businesses that got affected (like the long-running local Bartell Drugs chain [0]) were protesting on the streets against this tax once it was implemented (shortly before it was repealed).

Writing off the opposition as solely "pro-amazon shills" is exactly what gets those bs laws passed in the first place. I wonder how much money was wasted on all of this, given that it was repealed shortly after. Seems to be very in-line with how wastefully Seattle City Council has been running things.

0. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/enough-is-e...

> to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is.

That's a bold assertion without any citation.

The numbers were listed in the next sentence.

They edited their post. Also, numbers don't mean anything without context. Why is that out of control spending?

IMO increased spending that requires a state that has no income tax to add one.

Your comment has nothing to do with spending. So what makes the Seattle budget out of control? That was the original assertion that I took issue with.

The rate of budget increase increased dramatically without an increase in revenue.

They increased about .5% inflation adjust per year from 2010-2020. That again does not mean that spending is out of control especially when you consider that 2010 was still in the depths of the great recession.

Thats a good point thanks

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies?

The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do.

I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that.

I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I just need to switch to my remote desktop.

I have colleagues and friends who will log in on weekends or evenings out of boredom to do work. No pressure to do it, but they just want something to do.

I fill my time with internet commenting and various online contests, but if they need help at 9PM, I am fine with jumping on the VPN to help and have done that a few times myself.

Amazon still has problems beyond the long hours and the 3AM calls, but there are people ok with those things or at least ok enough with them to not put up a fuss.

Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that.

The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5. Those different expectations is what caused him to have a very bad experience.

"Pager duty" is an abusive practice anyway.

If the company thinks its applications are important enough that it needs people around 24/7 to work on them then the company should hire enough people to have 3 shifts a day.

Is it abusive if you willingly sign up for it? Doctors are on-call for emergencies. We compensate for this so I'm not clear on why its abusive if employees willingly sign up. If you don't want to be on-call, find another job.

I think if you are compensated for it, and allowed to recuperate from middle-of-the-night working, it's ok. If the employee knew this was part of the job though, and not something that was thrust upon them after they were hired.

One thing seems to have changed since the OP wrote their post -- managers at AWS are open about the on-call requirement. At least the ones in Portland. They were proud that they owned the product all the way from the code on the back to the customer at the front. So if you didn't want to be responsible for some level of ops, you knew that going in.

I didn't move forward to an interview, this was just from a meet-and-greet they did a few months ago (they do it every month IIRC). I have other reasons for not being at all interested in working for Amazon, but I figured it would be interesting to meet with them informally anyway.

> They were proud that they owned the product all the way from the code on the back to the customer at the front. So if you didn't want to be responsible for some level of ops, you knew that going in.

There's a huge difference between being responsible for (some level of) ops and literally climbing out of bed when the pager rings. At work, I'm responsible for the operations of the services I develop, which means that I'm doing third level support during normal business hours and I write the playbooks that first/second level support executes. You certainly won't catch me working after 5 PM.

I've always wondered how these sort of pager-duty notifications worked for heavy sleepers.

I worked for a company where developers could opt in to on-call cover. Doing so meant you got some extra cash, and if you were called then you got so much for the first hour, then a different amount for each hour after that. Not being coy, I can’t remember the details.

I'm a pretty heavy sleeper, and would go to bed with my phone on silent, set to ring a long time before going to answerphone, and with my Apple Watch on my wrist. If my phone rang then my watch would buzz me awake, eventually. The only snag was if, in my sleep, I knocked the watch out of contact enough that it locked and wouldn’t buzz on calls, but in practice I was lucky enough that I never got a call when that happened.

Not that I was called often. The company had developers around the world so it was only if they needed some specific knowledge or skills. That meant that being on-call was mostly a fee to compensate for being available at short notice and not drinking, etc.

Ultimately they decided they weren’t getting enough calls to justify the cost of paying the on-call fees and scrapped the system, just relying upon whichever developers around the world were working.

They didn't for me - it meant my SO would wake me up after they'd been woken up.

I then started wearing headphones to bed so that I would hear the phone ring and not disturb them, but when you're rolling out of bed and hopping on a call at 3AM it's difficult.

What I seriously underestimated was the strain that being on-call can put on a relationship, it's a massive regret.

> never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5.

Yes, these expectations should be made clear from the beginning.

I suspect they don't as they would be even more desperate to hire.

Amazon is open about engineers owning their on-call duty. This should not be a surprise to a new hire.

Personal attacks and name-calling are bannable offenses here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting to HN? We'd be grateful.

I’m not sure what in my comment offended you. Sorry.

yeah no. as someone who has worked at Amazon for 7 years I can tell you that it’s not true across the board and there are good “pockets” where there is respect for people’s boundaries.

To add to this, in my time there I worked during the weekend 3 times (i don’t count oncall here). My work day included 8 hours at most. I would get in at around 8AM and leave at 4PM. (optimizing the commute)

I started as an SDE 2 by the time I left I was a Principal SDE.

Do good work, be in a good org.

Amazon is not a huge, homogeneous entity. It’s more like hundreds of small companies that are forced to work together, bound together by senior leadership.

"in my time there I worked during the weekend 3 times (i don’t count oncall here)"

Why wouldn't you count it? Do those days not-count somehow?

i don’t count it as in: i worked more than 3 weekends, but not because i had a choice )

I'm trying to interpret your words as something other than "well, yeah, my weekends were interrupted, but it wasn't my choice so it's not worth mentioning." I can't come up with another way to read it, though.

So, don't you think that, in the context of having to give up nights and weekends, you should mention on-call? Your choice or not, the weekends and nights are affected, in fact isn't it kind of worse when it's not your choice?

i agree with you that the oncall is not ideal. it is also widespread in the industry. so what’s the point to complain about something that is an essential part of the job? (advertised or not, if you don’t want to do it you will have to look for another job)

i also think there is a huge difference between being oncall and having to respond in case something breaks vs mandatory death marches all day, every day.

I guess it depends on your definition of widespread. It is relatively common, but it's also far from universal, and there are companies that use on call which have a vastly different experience that what many people at Amazon report. In fact it seems like even different teams inside of Amazon have drastically different experience of on call. Treating it like a fact of life, like the weather, leaves you in a frame of mind that makes it impossible to advocate for change. Your own phrasing "be the change you want to see in the world" could as easily apply to on call as much as it does anything else -- but you won't take that stance if you think it's inescapable.

hmm. no. you do have agency. you have agency during writing the code. you have agency during the code review. you have agency during wiring of alerts (if you do stupid shit you will receive a lot of pages. don’t so stupid shit). you have agency during the events. you also have agency after the events when you do a coe/post mortem. you can defined prioritize things to improve the life quality of other developers.

to give you an example. the team i was in at amazon had 3000 tickets in the queue when i started. anything except sev2s were basically ignored. lower severity tickets would escalate when shit hit the fan. i advocated for fixing classes of issues instead of myopically focusing on one-offs. by the time i left the queue was tens tickets and mostly feature request or higher level investigations.

to give you another example: i would basically remove all alerting that was not actionable. the worst possible thing that you can do is wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to do anything. i would ask for runbooks and the test was “if i take a developer from another team and put them oncall can they function independently 95% of the time”. i would think about what the experience of being oncall was (ie you don’t take people and throw them in the deep end of the pool and wonder why they drown)

so i guess what i’m saying is that oncall for me wasn’t that bad or stressful. it sucks having to be near a computer but I was rarely paged for stuff that broke or needed to be fixed right NOW. (once stabilized our team had 1 sev2 every other week)

Okay, at the risk of putting way too much effort into this, I'm going to assume you have 5 people on your team, therefore you're on call 10 times a year roughly. 5 weeks out of the year then you'd be oncall during a sev2. Assuming sev2's are uniformly distributed you are probably interrupted outside normal working hours ~80% of the time, so call it 4 times a year you have your work-life balance negatively affected by on-call.

you need to generate some 3d graphs and after that write a paper about using gradient descent to improve the WLB of SW developers :)

our team had 7 people and at some point we started sharing the oncall load with a sister team (ie you were oncall for the services on both teams), meaning that you would be oncall roughly once every 3 months. not ideal - but not the worst thing in the world.

I am sure it is not all of Amazon, but that is where the horror stories are coming from. So Amazon as a whole may not have this culture, but the teams with this culture seem to disproportionately be at Amazon.

so, the bigger an org, the higher the likelihood of stories like this popping up.

also, the incentives and their structure play a part in how this unfolds.

It’s also very curious to me that only a certain type of person runs into situations like these: either they don’t know better or they have accepted the conditioning that work is more important than themselves. it’s sad really.

i think it’s really really important to have a good mentor with a strong set of values to help you navigate the corporate landscape.

i also think it’s important to pull a Ghandi (ie be the change you want to see) as often as possible. for example: one think i would inoculate in young devs is that it’s not acceptable to set meetings earlier than 9am or later than 4pm. meetings during lunch were not accepted. i would be pretty vocal about morons that worked over the weekend because they had some free time. i would also push really hard against management that had their sick little practices to extract more work out of the drones. this mostly worked because i got the job done - but again: you have a voice. you are NOT a machine

law of numbers; Amazon Seattle headcount alone is 50K+ people. also, amazon has a service-oriented management model to match the general SoA architecture, where small teams are given massive leeway as to how exactly they run their services. managers and your leadership are thus very make or break.

> I started as an SDE 2 by the time I left I was a Principal SDE.

How many promotions was that? 4? How did you manage to do that in 7 years? That doesn’t sound easy at all.

2 promotions. SDE2 -> SDE3 -> Principal First one was in 2 years. 2nd one took 3.5 years.

this is very informative. I wouldn't have believed it, without the first person perspective. Before i read this, it was simply unbelievable to me that people could be that bored without any life outside work. Speaking as someone who really values free time and has tons of hobbies and things to do outside of work, it's just unbelievable.

Most of the people I know are fairly new graduates, so that would skew things.

My friends and I spent most of our lives since grade 9 doing school stuff or stuff to get into school stuff. In my case, couple that with introversion and an aversion to most normal activities and the easiest thing to do is be good at the get into school stuff.

In university, most of my social activities revolved around the startup world, hackathons, or other competition-oriented activities as that is what I was good at. I went to one hackathon a weekend in my final academic year.

So I became good at a lot of these types of things which all revolved around the academic world.

I am not in university anymore, but I can still fill my time with the kinds of competitions and challenges in that world. If I couldn't, I doubt that I would know how to use my time. Even with those, I spend a ton of time commenting online.

Most of the people I know are in the same kind of boat. They were good at one or two things (might be science fair, research, conference organizing, etc) back in university which consumed their time. Then they left and are now left wondering, "now what?"

Thank you for sharing. I can hear a shy cry for help. I think it's fine to spend a lot of time with computer, in general, I do it myself. There is so much to do, learn and help others. On the other hand, I think it is good to realize when it eventually becomes a replacement activity for lack of motivation/opportunities to do something harder. Then try to break that, take a challenge, do something new, either with computer (a personal project to make something cool?) or better, without it - for example, try some manual work with wood, do some science project with a friend, or get a pet and teach him tricks or something. Just don't spend yourself fully on the online/academic life, that sounds too ephemeral and can be a bit disappointing later on. I for sure regret spending so much time in academia.

Any ideas for a guy who lives in a downtown condo? Im that guy who logs in at 3AM to distract from the boredom of life.

If you can't sleep at 3AM and would like to, plan to do anything else afternoon than staring at the screen - like, try to walk and find a path to a moderately distant place in your city you know/like but have no idea how to get there on feet, without using a phone unless you really get lost. This can be fun and long walk and navigation will tire you down. You can think about what you're gonna do next time too.

Like taking up some challenges in life. Besides maintaining physical fitness and getting tired in the process, one thing I like is to create contraptions (does not have to be a "product") that could be useful to you or people you know. An air purifier, a charging station for a phone, a piece of wooden furniture, or anything else. Get some tools and get working.

If you prefer social activity, plan to do the above with a friend.

4 years out of school and yeah, I never managed to find anything to replace the profession and academic milestones.

You move across the country to a city you don’t know, you end up there with no social skills and no real entry point it the social scene so you binge watch Netflix enroll in a masters degree and stare out of your condo window.

Then you ssh in and work to fill the hole. Now I don’t even get to see my co-workers.

>The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do.

Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential.

> Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential.

Eh, you leave the university environment of all its clubs, hackathons, etc, likely to another city where you know far fewer people. You need to wake up the next morning, so gaming until 5AM with your friends no longer works. Someone is also on on-call, so they can't join, so you postpose it further.

The end result is a lot more free time.

Maybe they need hobbies that are actually relaxing and not side projects.

I do believe there are people out there for whom "living their best life" truly does entail spending almost all their time in front of a computer.

Nobody shamed Chopin for spending his life in front of the piano. Some people choose to dedicate their lives to one single thing, and often those are the people who end up contributing the most.

Maybe Chopin took long walks in the garden every once in an while.

And maybe, just maybe, universally acclaimed musical geniuses are not a good point of comparison for common folk.

Hell, he ran off to Mallorca with George Sand. My impression is that composers work intensely, but manage to find time to do other things.

That's not the comparison as far as I understand it. The analogy is of someone that dedicates all their time to becoming the best at their craft, like Chopin. It's not about being a genius.

They can't because of hustle culture.

Every company is full of nightmares, especially anyone doing something big enough to be interesting. For instance that guy who started blogging about how janky Tesla's software was, most of us who have been around a while read all that and shrugged. Not that bad. It is easy to imagine perfection or competence but very hard to actually achieve it at large scales with humans.

So at the same time it can be true that company X is a great place and also true that company X is a nightmare.

This. Amazon maybe has thousands of developers working in various departments. The departments can be totally different from each other, have different culture, values whatever. Even in very small companies I have seen this effect.

This guy didn't work in/for/on AWS:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4eu909/i...

The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read.

This was also four years ago; the gist is a copy of a post from 2015, by the above reddit poster.

> The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read.

This is not true. Amazon and AWS are exactly the same organizationally speaking. You could hardly tell who works in an Amazon team and who works in an AWS team. Maybe if they tell you their building.

The cultural drift happens in the teams and orgs, not the parent "company". Everyone at Amazon knows this and that’s why many people know changing teams is a gamble and prefer staying at the same team doing the same menial tasks, than venturing into finding another team.

Amazon and AWS have both great teams and shitty teams. There’s just not an easy way to tell, except for one internal tool that allows you to see how people are rating their managers but this is all bs because some teams don’t have enough data or any data at all. Also the data itself is probably skewed, since people are afraid of giving poor rates to their managers (this is a general problem in the modern workplace dynamics, not at an Amazon problem)

The other way is asking a friend but I don’t know how people do that since I only knew people from my team and teams that sat nearby. Maybe I’m too socially incompetent.

> The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read.

This is incredibly offensive. I work in CDO and have friends in retail and AWS and the biggest difference day-to-day is that we have different systems to manage our AWS accounts.

Equivocating me to a Wipro employee is honestly really disgusting. These sorts of microaggressions are the worst part of working at Amazon, the WLB is fine.

I have a suspicion.

If psychologists surveyed one of these companies, like Amazon, to look at the sorts of attachements the employees have now, and had as a child, I think you will find distinct deficit of people who had a happy childhoods with secure attachments sticking around at these companies.

The bravado and masochism so common in such places, in my opinion, is a form of self-bullying. You don't have to look hard to find managers exploiting this characteristic, and I suspect the most of the ones who thrive in such an environment do it. I worked a brief contract there and it was clear that the manager was used to making statements designed to trigger his subordinates' insecurities.

When your self worth is tied to the quality of your work, but your ability to self-evaluate is not solid. you are vulnerable to manipulation. I have that trigger too, it's just harder to hit, especially by some punk who is used to saying 'frog' and having people jump. I felt sometimes like he was waiting for me to react to some subtly passive-aggressive statement he just made and I just shrugged it off and stopped talking or kept going.

A master can be very tied to the quality of their work, and hand you your ass if you try to disagree with them. This doesn't develop overnight, and it's a winding road, but it's very undeveloped in a bunch of 25 year olds with a toxic cocktail of Impostor and Dunning-Kruger, and any 28 year old who spent more time honing their interpersonal skills in college has some ideas how to get what they want out of such people.

And those people think this is okay. Normal. That it's only what they deserve. And then we have a culture of avoiding psychotherapists, who would tell you two sessions in that this is bullshit and you shouldn't have to live this way.

^^^^ This guy right here, just cracked the code. Agree 110%

amznymous here

you're 100% right

I worked at AWS. Your experience may vary significantly depending on which team you are in, either at AWS or plain-Amazon. Some people are having the time of their lives there. Some are working horrible hours, maintaining crap old code that they hate, and struggling with performance reviews that saps their morale and prevents them from seeking a better team or leaving the company. Some people genuinely like the competitiveness, the politics, and know the Leadership Principles like it's the law.

Amazon is a fascinating company, it's Big Capitalism in a way no other company is today, and as such it's writing History, for better or worse. For the average developer it's not great, though.

Tbray is going to have a different experience at any org he joins.

He's not coming in as a no name peon. He's financially well off, internet famous and would (and could) probably leave at the first sign of mistreatment.

He's in Canada, do health insurance isn't tied to job.

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

>Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos?

I think this might be a big part of it. The idea that "I'm college educated and don't perform physical labor means I'm not like them" seems to be a pervasive societal thought not even strictly related to tech.

Perhaps the first thing they should arrange is to have lunch breaks together with the low-wage work-force, i.e. in the same physical space. Or perhaps a company outing. That could result in some awareness and perhaps solidarity.

If these developers don't ever see or talk to the people who are suffering from the company strategy, then the problem may remain to appear imaginary or abstract.

It's good to be on top. The reason AWS is so great for those with voices whom we pay attention to, is because of the misery of a whole lot of people below them.

It's not even programmers like OP but also all the servicepeople and staff at datacenters, and the rest of the crew which makes up the infrastructure that makes it work.

Payroll tax? The website should be taxamazonworkers.net

Payroll taxes may or may not be borne by the worker. Oversimplifying tax burden is a dishonest argument that is consistently perpetuated.

Payroll taxes are always borne by the worker. They may not make the payments, but when I hire people, I set aside an all-in budget, and their salary is whatever is left after benefits and taxes. If the payroll tax goes up, it means their raise is smaller.

That's how every business works. All per employee costs are borne by the employee one way or another.

Exactly. There's no such thing as totally "free shipping" or "free returns" either. One way or another, the customer is paying for it.

This is only true in the sense that there is a cost to move goods, but it is not true in the sense that retailers charge more to move the good to you. If it were, I wouldn't be able to reliably purchase goods shipped to my door for equal or less than what I pay in physical stores. When shipping is included in the price, that means that the shipper bears the cost of shipping by taking a smaller margin. If I were to bear the cost, it would appear as an explicit cost or higher prices, neither of which are happening.

Higher cost than what?

By the same argument, customers are paying the costs for Best Buy's internal logistics and retail floor operations to enable “free browse and instant pickup”. If those costs are higher than Amazon/NewEgg's costs for "free shipping", I'd expect to see exactly the relative prices that you're seeing.

I'm sorry, but I can't track the point you are trying to make.

I'll reiterate my point that shipping is a cost that has to be paid, but who bears that cost is not necessarily the customer. If it was the case that the customer was the one bearing that cost, there would be a difference in the price you pay for goods at a physical store vs. goods shipped to your home, implicitly or explicitly. There is generally no difference, and in many cases, ship to home is cheaper because you can select from more retailers.

I think you're confusing who writes the check vs who bears the cost. The person writing the check isn't always the one bearing the cost.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. --Henry Ford

This is not evidence that payroll taxes are borne solely by the worker. I'm not claiming that workers don't bear any of the burden. Just that they don't bear all of the burden. this would be especially true in an asymmetrical payroll tax system in competitive labor markets like the Seattle Software Developer market.

I'm not sure how a competitive labor market makes any difference. They all have to pay the same payroll taxes. If anything it's a great equalizer -- all companies must bear that employee cost. So they will all take it out of their employee's earnings equally.

In this context, we are talking about the Seattle Head tax, which is NOT applied equally.

In the larger discussion of payroll taxes, to disprove that workers bear the entire burden of payroll taxes, just go through the thought experiment where we eliminate the employer side of the SS tax and whether wages would rise 6.2%. They wouldn't. Workers were willing to work for $N previously, there is no reason that they would stop working/change jobs unless they were paid $N + 6.2%.

Of course salaries wouldn't go up. Because you removed the cost from the equation.

But now do the thought experiment where the employee must explicitly pay the extra 6.2%. Now of course you have to give them a 6.2% raise, because they would demand it to cover their increased costs.

In your thought experiment the cost isn't being borne by the worker, it's being borne by the business.

No it isn't.

Numbers: I pay the worker $10000 a month. Let's say my tax cost is $500 a month, and their tax cost is $500/mo. So they get a check for $9500, they see a $500 tax deduction, and they net $9000.

My all in cost is $10000.

Now the city says "you don't have to pay your part of the tax anymore, the worker does!"

So now I pay them $10000, they see a deduction of $1000 on their paycheck, and net $9000. My all in cost is still $10000, their net is still $9000. Nothing has changed.

I'm still paying $10000 to have that worker. And if my budget is 100000, I can still only afford 10 workers.

Or the revenue?