The company does treat the employees well, the article specifically calls out VCs and executives as the principal actors:

> The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the already-wealthy ghouls who cry about how workers don’t do enough for their paychecks.

But that's not the truth. You can see it anytime this sort of thread comes up. People think they should be able to work very little and get paid a lot of money as long as they "meet expectation". That's entitlement.

Sure, some people act and think like that. But at the end of the day executives and the C level have no obligation other than returning as large a profit as possible to investors.

Additionally, it’s a straw man argument to say that everyone who is being let go currently at a time of record profits is just being a lay about. It’s easy to say until it happens to you, and it shouldn’t. People—our neighbors and fellow humans—deserve better treatment than to be cast aside to make the stock price rise again.

Some people have been hard at work on products that were never great, but the direction they took came from leadership. That’s as much a strawman argument, but it belabors the point that making broad judgements on a group is the wrong way to go about taking a position.

I read the article differently than you. The article isn’t saying those workers have bad treatment. It’s saying that much of tech’s elite sees that good treatment as a problem.

It has less to do with being treated better and much more to do with imposing an accountability structure that is divorced from shareholder value and returns.

When that's all you've got, arbitrary layoffs to boost market cap are the side effects.

This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...

Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.

Because since the 1980's, the US government (as well as other western governments) have been dismantling the ability and protections for worker unionization. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were all notable for being anti-labor.

Any excuse about anti-labor policies has to account for why cafeteria workers at Facebook managed to unionize in 2017 while tech workers there just sat on their ass. The Wagner Act is still law and is remains a powerful tool for those who can be bothered to use it.

“If working in the warehouse is really that bad, why don’t the warehouse workers unionize?”

I wouldn’t really say it’s a cloak of victimhood as much as a disillusionment of those that aren’t acknowledging they’re labor is being exploited combined with the fact that attempting to organize can be met with a loss of work.

But warehouse workers did unionize. It was the programmers, who back then could get a new job whenever they wanted, who lacked the foresight and self-discipline to exercise their latent power while it was at its peak.

Some of the warehouses have organized, is there a union that represents all of these workers as a whole against leadership?

Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by attempting to organize.

Yes, and some of the Facebook cafeteria workers were getting up before 3 AM to make the commute in to Palo Alto, which meant that they had much more time in the mornings to think about organizing than the unfortunate techies who slept in.

The excuses really are endless in this business.

They did. That's what the WP article section I linked to was about:

> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer ...

I used to think we (high tech labor) didn't need unions (you can actually find comments of mine here on HN several years ago arguing that.) Then this crazy and illegal scheme came to light. Now I think that we need something, maybe not a union per se, but something, to "flex [our] considerable latent power", eh?

The thing that really grosses me out about the "no-poaching" collusion is that Apple, at least, famously has more money than Scrooge MacDuck yet still actively and stridently worked to rip off their own people.

Abuse is an unnecessarily strong word there. It is true they colluded to keep salaries down, but I don't think that compares with actual abuse. Software Developers make several times the median salary in the U.S.

The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...

(not to mention how much U.S. software developers benefit from an overly restrictive immigration policy which limits programmer supply)

Tech Leaders / Managers are the ones that hold the power; they are not given a free-pass to lead because they pay living wages for Engineers (that speaks to the fact that other careers should be paying better wages, not that tech workers should accept their position and not argue for better treatment).

Expressing for 2.5 years that we’re able to work from anywhere, then immediately saying “well actually come back in for a day… or 2… now come back in everyday” is a misuse of power because the workers have no say in the conversation, the only option is to express your discontent and leave.

Abuse doesn’t have to mean they’re hitting us, but it can mean a misuse of power which is one of the main points of the article.

Also worth noting that once this collusion was stopped and exposed, salaries went up across the industry. If you work in tech, even if you never worked for one of these companies, this collusion made you poorer.

And Subway made their wage slaves sign non-competes for $8 an hour to stand and make sandwiches all day.

The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations

Fair enough.

This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.

You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company.

You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company".

Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay.

In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.

>>This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.

But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.

I thought the goal was for people to make a good living and have good working conditions - most SV/hi-tech types have those things already, so why should they care that the union doesn't exist or doesn't have power?

>>But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.

The end goal is to balance the power dynamic between capital owners and the labor. As of today especially in US, the labor has little to none bargaining power and capital owners have infinite power to even influence govt.

The only reason we had relatively higher salaries than other fields "till now" is because of lower supply/demand ratio and it's still a relatively new profession than others. This ratio will eventually balance out and when it happens we will be left with no bargaining power.

>> I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.

We're definitely not getting our fair share of the value we produce and that's just theft to me.

> You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees.

This is a reasonable ask. It's easily addressable - build a notice period into the offers (for example, if you've been with the company more than a year, you get at least 4 weeks notice).

The problem with any sort of exclusive guild is that it becomes more difficult to break into, which is bad for a growing industry.

Who will enforce that? The policies are made by companies themselves and they can change them whenever/however they want with no employee welfare in mind. We as individual employees don't have any power influencing or enforcing those policies.

The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce than individual employees.

The employer can't unilaterally change the terms written in the offer letter. That would be clear breach of contract. Any state or federal court in the US can enforce this. I'm not sure how it works in other countries.

Again, which entity forces the employer to write these terms in the offer letter in the first place? Govt or courts can't. If you as the person interviewing asks for these terms, employer can just say no and move on to next person in queue.

In other countries the notice periods are written in law. But then again, do we really want to wait(& trust) for the govt which is heavily lobbied by FAANG to legislate this? Isn't it more efficient to organize and demand your terms from the employer.

No entity forces startups to convert ISO's to NSO's when early employees leave the company, but they did it because it made their offers more competitive. The legal default was ISO's that expire quickly.

It's the same. If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.

Heck, any smart company might do it voluntarily to make it harder for their employees to be poached by other companies that only offer a fire-at-will employment (the legal default).

A few posts on Medium/Substack might catalyze this change.

>> If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.

Yes definitely they will.."today". Companies don't need to do anything special if supply overtakes demand. We feel we are special today only because IT is still relatively a new field and the demand still outweighs supply.

But the rate at which universities across the world are churning out CS grads and the increasing focus on automation, supply will definitely overtake demand. And when that happens we will end up in the same predicament as other professions. At that point, companies don't have to cave in to the demands from their employees or the people they want to hire.

Having a union isn't going to change this. If most of the voting members are "new CS grads bring churned out", you'll have the same dynamics inside the union.

I will rather trust the democratically elected union leaders who are also my co-workers than the management. I don't really know what else to say at this point. It's just weird taking side of the management.

Couldn’t agree more. Our interests as employees is far different from management and the C-suite. Don’t forget that board members currently have a legal obligation to provide value to investors and no obligation to do the same for their employees.

It’s one of the reasons we see layoffs during a time of record profits. It’s easy to turn humans out to boost the profit margin and the stock value.

In fact, the legal default is that ISOs convert to NSOs, but the vast majority of startups force-expire them. Indeed we have seen that if no entity forces a startup to allow an employee-friendly policy to go forward, the company would rather fuck the employee and blame it on "it's the law," even if it isn't.

> You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job.

The words "middle class" use this slight of hand. Anyone who is not literally burger flipping can be called "middle class" simply by pointing at the people below them. Politicians regularly use it [1]. The proportion doesn't matter if people don't ask. If people knew the proportions, that'd be bad. So please also never talk about your salary with anyone but your closest partner, and never ask how much your executive makes.

The two classes that are important are capital-owning and worker. Even the best paid workers are disposable (see this thread, or Google layoffs) and will never be close to accumulating the wealth someone with generational wealth has. The difference is simply too big. No laying off the avocado toast will fix this. The mobility between those two classes is non-existent, aside from freak accidents.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd7cohTdRAo

A lot of Leftist tech workers like to think they’re working in a coop. They think the company should exist to serve their needs, rather than the needs of investors and customers. It’s a recipe for catastrophe.

I saw a discussion about tech layoffs few weeks ago. Someone had noted that layoffs should have come as no surprise when you had employees bragging about how little work they were doing. This comment stirred up a lot of people calling the poster heartless and saying things like "these people have families".

That is such a naive perspective of the world. These are businesses and their goal is to make as much money as possible. That means they strive to be as efficient as possible. I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.

>>I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.

Personally I think it comes from many of these people being young (under about 33-35), and having worked almost their entire careers in a booming economy where things always went up in a straight line; you would need to have about 15 years working as an adult to have lived thru the last big down cycle in 2008.

This is such a naive perspective of the world. The company should care equal parts about the the needs of the people who consume the product and those who produce it doing actual work.

The idea that a company can produce a product without caring about the quality of how the product is produced is laughable in any Econ 101 classroom. Additionally there are plenty of models of businesses in the US and Europe where the labor force is included in business decisions.

Your idea that the people making a living from building a product want to destroy it and their own livings, are some how not aligned with the customers—who want a good product and will return if it is good—is completely without logic or knowledge of market economics.

Just because they treat better doesn't mean they treat good, just because it could be worse doesn't mean it's good either.

> The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous

The heirs who own the majority of most of the FAANG stock created none of the wealth, did none of the work. These rich kids of Instagram never worked, never will - nor did their parents, nor did their parents.

So your argument is the workers creating the wealth should fork over the amount of surplus labor value to these heirs, that is being expropriated.

What about these parasitical heirs you are arguing for? The ones who live off the dividend check wealth created by those who work? "I can't even begin to comprehend your POV". If the worker creating wealth keeping it is an entitled attitude, what is the attitude of these parasitical heirs who do not work?

I work specifically to give things to my children. They are not parasites, they are the motivating force which keeps me productive.

newsflash: people can be treated well comparatively, and still be in incredibly daunting and humiliating situations that is completely out of their control.

That's why they call them "golden handcuffs" and "gilded cages"

It is telling when priviledged white collar tech employees consider themselves to be the same group as classical blue collar workers. At FAANG, only Amazon has what is traditionally regarded as blue collar worlers, and those aren't treated any better or worse than the same roles elsewhere. With the exception, that Amazon is in a position to actually treat those folks better.

Think about how it looks to all the people who have never lived through a recession before. The only valid reason to layoff workers is if you, as a caring founder, have no other choice. Then they see these tech giant laying off people, and not because it’s that or bankruptcy, and start calling bullshit. Oh, and start making up conspiracy theories about how it isn’t really an over hiring correction like TFA.

Look here, kids, go ask those graybeards you laugh at behind their backs what it was like during the dotcom bust.

Apparently Google has fired all the massage therapists. The working conditions are getting abysmal!

For those massage therapists who are now jobless, surely.