Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.
(I’m not sure where any of these ideas come from)
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell. If it's not sarcasm, here's some articles about the Teamsters union.
- https://allthatsinteresting.com/jimmy-hoffa
- https://themobmuseum.org/blog/feds-agree-to-reduce-oversight...
- https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-10-28-850313...
Honestly? Because 1) you are very replaceable and 2) you have a very low chance in succeeding at organizing any kind of group/union action. If either of those two facts were different, you would have more leverage. But they aren't so you don't.
A hiring freeze and marking obsolete positions as obsolete (meaning if someone switches teams or quits that specific position will not be replaced) should be a workable model for all profitable companies with some cash reserves. Sure, it takes a bit longer and probably costs a bit more (though probably not tons and lay offs also have other traumatic effects concerning knowledge loss, morale and motivation that can negatively affect the business) but it's a workable model.
Embed that into overall more cautious hiring in good times (yeah, we can't time travel, so that's not an option - but to me that's the thing that should be learned from this) and you should never have to do any layoffs if your business is basically sound. I would be shocked, for example, if Apple were to do any lay offs. They seem to follow that approach (well, probably not in the retail context which I also think is unfortunate).
To me it seems like those lay offs are primarily a tool to communicate and that just sucks. It sucks that something that should clearly be seen as a management failure (if you need to do lay offs it seems to me obvious that management is to blame, not those laid off) can in this weird upside down world be used as a communication tool towards the wider world that they are doing something useful. Even if it wouldn't be needed.
Also, I just don't think people should be treated like that, especially if it's not needed. It seems so pointlessly cruel and inhuman. This is not the world I want to live in.
And I know that's hard to pull off in capitalism. Maybe that's the issue. Though it's not as if you cannot modify capitalism to at least not allow for stuff like this.
That's not the relevant question. The relevant questions are: were the layoffs illegal, and if they weren't, then why is it any of your business? If you don't want to live in that world, start your own startup, hire people, and never fire them. Nobody is stopping you.
Also, in general I don’t live in that world. It‘s much harder for sound companies to just lay off people in Germany (though not impossible).
Free association in labour is not possible when there's so much leverage from one of the sides of the negotiation. In a perfect idealised model, labour will increase in price due to people not accepting jobs they would, ideally, not think it's worth it, companies will then raise salaries, market equilibrium! In reality people are mothers, fathers, or just basically anyone who needs something to eat, and for food they'll accept any trade to keep some part of their dignity.
A fucking spherical cow-ish principle doesn't take into account human dignity into their pricing models... And so these people work backwards by adapting that if it's not accounted for it's irrelevant, rather than the opposite reality that we experience.
I was really fascinated to learn that most North Americans never even encounter the concept of ordocapitalism/ordoliberalism in their basic economics courses. Somehow, a concept of capitalist economic organization that has been the recipe for success for the creation of most successful economic turnaround in modern times is just...ignored?
The beauty of America is you can do my suggestion (make your own startup, run it without firing people), but in other places where layoffs are illegal, you can't do the opposite suggestion (make your own startup, fire people). Let the best idea win! But you seem to be endorsing a world where you don't want the best idea to win, you want the state to enforce a particular idea that makes you feel good.
If you are free to run a company however you want within the bounds of the law, but only one type of company emerges, maybe there is a reason for that.
I think a more relevant question is: should the layoffs be illegal?
Just because todays law says “tough luck” doesn’t mean it has always been, or will always be, that way, or that we can’t argue for something better.
If the layoffs were uneccesary you know to treat the company and its executives as worse to work for than they would be if they did necessary layoffs only.
I.e. increase the cost of hiring you.
The "none of your business" trope is silly. Why not warm each other of shitty things, be it a bad restaurant or MS as an employer.
Originally corporate charters were hard to get because they were only issued by the Crown. Nowadays you can get one for a few dollars. We need to ask ourselves if they are still serving the public purpose we intend, and if not how we need to adjust things.
And why is that?
I'd like to offer a different explanation: Entrenched in-groups and institutions control access to the highest paid jobs. You need to become a part of those to be allowed to participate.
That's the same thing as being difficult to replace. You gain "access" by being perceived as difficult to replace. The more difficult you are to replace, the higher your access.
> That's the same thing as being difficult to replace
I‘d appreciate if you didn‘t respond in a passive-aggressive manner.
1) An inflated view of the impact of execs compared to other employees. This is a well studied psychological phenomena. People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. (There was a study which gave some subjects a head start in monopoly, i.e. more money, the subjects tended to talk significantly more about the advantages of "their" strategy in the game, then the subjects that we not given the head start).
2) It's in the interest of execs to keep C-suite salaries high, because it increases their own salary.
So it's not surprising that we have seen a dramatic increase in ratio of exec to average employee compensation, and why execs are typically isolated from economic downturns.
I don't personally understand this one, although I don't doubt its veracity. I am an engineer with years of experience in the industry, but I don't think my contribution is high or important; I could be fired at any moment and would anyone notice? Maybe in the short term yes, but mostly no. I am easily replaceable, my boss is easily replaceable... Society will continue on without me because like most of us I work a B.S. job. So I really struggle to empathize with the viewpoint of a self-perceived 'Hero IC', is it just narcissism?
We couldn’t have the workers collectively realizing their worth now, could we? The inmates would be running the asylum.
Supply and demand works in a world with no information/power assymmetry in Econ 101, a.k.a. freshman's dream. Even in the most basic case, when a sack of flour is being bought and sold, the buyer wants to buy a sack of flour, the seller wants to sell a sack of flour + a variable number of bugs in it, and the seller's profit margin goes up with the number of bugs. That's why there is a third party necessary which fixes the maximum number of bugs to be included with a sack of flour: otherwise this whole "free market" falls apart or starts killing people.
You can make a good argument that protections need to be made to protect income workers and that we wouldn't lose much economic efficiency from these changes. On the other hand, most people in this thread are intentionally ignorant of the market landscape that gave their their cushy mid-six figure compensation. Instead they would rather make the same tired memes about "short term profits" and whatnot.
> This narrative is counterfactual to how capitalism actually works. Your worth is determined by supply and demand. Investors would never agree to paying American developers twice as much as European developers if they knew they would be on the hook for them until their cash reserves bled dry.
Supply and demand works best when the data about the market is symmetric. In the job market it is not. Firms know that they are willing to pay, and what they have paid, for work. Workers do not. If a worker takes a penny less than what the firm can bare, that is slippage that is being arbitraged into profit by the firm. Workers are goaded into a cheaper price for their work by firms through the threat of "We will go with another candidate" even if there are no other candidates. Again, asymmetric data.
> On the other hand, most people in this thread are intentionally ignorant of the market landscape that gave their their cushy mid-six figure compensation. Instead they would rather make the same tired memes about "short term profits" and whatnot.
Comparatively (amongst workers) well paid workers does not mean that those same workers are compensated fairly by the firm. Workers do work, managers manage. The core question posed by the thread OP was around the value of the work (and the protections afforded to) workers do as opposed to that of management.
It works efficiently despite information asymmetry.
It's called "risk". Risk always factors into prices. You pay more at a dealership because your risk is less. You pay less for a used car because your risk is more. A job that is more secure pays less. A job that is less secure pays more.
The market efficiently prices in information asymmetry.
But this is not true. An economically efficient market is one where goods and services produced are delivered at their most valuable. The job market is the antithesis of that.
If there is asymmetric information (and asymmetric risk) AND that asymmetry is known by the side with most information (like it my job example), then the side with more data can price more optimally than the side with less. If we extend that into the tenure of the job, you can be pressured to work longer and harder than you are actually paid for if the risk of losing your job is greater than the risk of you company having to replace you. Just look to Japanese salarymen or Chinese 996 workers. Those are not efficient markets. They are markets skewed towards the owners of capital.
Your example of used vs new cars is an example of a risk discount, but it really doesn't fit here, imo.
The risk element goes both ways. An employee factors risk into what salary he'll demand. For example, people going to work for startups are going to demand lots of stock options to compensate for the risk that the startup fails. People accept lower salaries at established companies for the lower risk of the company failing. An employee will demand a higher salary to cover the risk of having to relocate. An employee will demand a higher salary for jobs that entail more personal risk.
It goes on and on. Risk is most definitely a factor in all negotiations, and risk is exactly another word for information asymmetry.
Sure, I agree that corporations should be more transparent but this isn't the messaging that I'm getting from these comments. Maybe I'm completely misinterpreting, but this is what it looks like people are trying to say: "These corpos are too damn greedy! If only we pressured these corpos for being greedy, we wouldn't be in this position." My point is that this sentiment completely ignores that this "greed" is what created such a large class of relatively wealthy tech workers in the first place. If companies weren't allowed to lay people off, they would be less willing to hire them in the first place.
What is stopping them? If this were really true wouldn't we see at least a few examples of large worker collectives succeeding by now?
On HN coding is more respected than social skills. A software engineer is likely to crumble in 30 seconds when they are interviewed on CNBC.
No it isn't, you see people saying "social skills are more important than technical skills" everywhere people discuss such things, and they get upvoted a lot. People saying the opposite tend to get heavily downvoted.
So to me it looks like even on HN social skills are more respected than technical skills, at least in threads where we discuss what skills are important.
This can’t possibly extend to computer engineers right?
Of course impact is related, but only as a qualifier. If your impact doesn't justify the salary then that is a problem. But as long as you do enough to justify your salary than other factors tend to dominate.
Wrong: salary is determined by your ability to negotiate, and your ability is higher when you could be doing the same satisfying activity for someone else.
On my own time, I only work on stuff I personally care about, only for as long as I want and I usually don't even publish the resulting code because of the implicit responsibility associated with that. They'd have to pay me to work continuously on code I don't care about or even own. Why solve other people's problems for free?
I haven't been paid since 2017. I was laid off, after 27 years. It was totally expected, and I was prepared.
What I wasn't prepared for, was the rejection from the industry.
Once I got over that, I was fine. I found some 501(c)(3) work that interested me, and I've been doing that. I did some writing, started trying to implement many of the ideas I had, while being paid (but were ignored), and found out that I had been absolutely right, the entire time (It is not hubris to postulate that, if I had been allowed to implement my ideas, the layoffs would not have been necessary, but that's all water under the bridge).
I used to say that "My dream is to work for free."
Livin' the dream...
Unionize baby!
Because their decisions make or break the company, and your's do not.
For a well known example, Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. With the same group of workers, he took it to the biggest company in the world. Just by making different leadership decisions. That's why he made the big bucks.
For a more recent example, see how James Daunt turned around Barnes&Noble:
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barne...
> some pie that was rightfully mine
Found your own company, and the pie will be rightfully yours.
There are many more Ginni Romettys than Steve Jobs, how does one successfully apply this analysis in less obvious scenarios?
Apple churned through several CEOs who did not make a difference.
How does one make an analysis? That's the game, indeed.
How many businesses have we seen slowly fade away as the tech team ebbs one by one leaving only a remnant core of mostly non tech roles?
this complaint is almost as tone deaf as the satire. poor you. i was laid off, and only got a month's severance.
They tried this at twitter. But twitter survived. Turned out for KTLO not many people are actually required.
Also, when you are over staffed, employees have enough free time to get political, run slack channels, do activism and in general reduce the entire org's productivity. Most companies were stuck in this phase the last few years, with Coinbase and a couple of other companies being brave enough to say they don't want their employees engaging in workplace activism.
This whole macro-economic change and the twitter success after getting rid of 30% of its employees, has now given these companies an opportunity to follow without getting singled out. If they don't do it now, and do it 6 months later they will get called out as demons. Now since everyone is doing it, it is not that bad a PR hit.
Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free, giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software.
Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. But also I have to then see that I’m getting a big share of the pie too, because otherwise someone else will be eating some pie that was rightfully mine, and that feels wrong.
Would my C-level pals get their $15m exit without my work? Maybe, but it’s less likely. Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary?
Waterfall edge marble kitchen island indeed.