It's not a higher monetary cost to have WFH employees. Businesses can shut down and get rid of office leases which save significant money. They can hire people in lower cost of living areas which don't demand as high of salaries vs. hot areas too. WFH is nothing but a cost savings for companies.

> WFH is nothing but a cost savings for companies.

WFH is a loss of control. For some leaders, being a "boss" is more important than what's good for the business.

WFH also requires the right culture. I've seen it abused when I worked at Intel, and when Yahoo cracked down on it, the abuses were similar.

I should point out that I've predominately WFH for almost a decade; but it works because I'm trustworthy and I work for people who are managers instead of "bosses." In an environment where the workers aren't trustworthy, or the management structure is more about being a "boss," it won't work.

Not if they own the buildings and a WFH culture is massively devaluing them. Their balance sheets will start to look terrible then.

So un-own the buildings?

Unfortunately, some of them are buying even more. I know Google spent at least 4B on purchasing office real estate in 2022, probably more

Sell at a loss, you mean? Why do that when you can just force employees to come back into the office?

Corporate buildings are usually leased, even if it is just one occupant. These lease terms are also usually 10 years.

Seems like a sunk cost fallacy to keep these buildings at this point. For those buildings their heating/cooling/upkeep costs have to be huge. Honestly we should probably have government intervention at this point. Government buys the houses at market values and turns them into affordable housing to counter the housing crisis.

That also doesn't work. It costs more to convert an office building to housing than it does to tear it down and build new condos in its place, which in turn costs more than just building new condos in a different location. All the plumbing/HVAC/electrical systems need to be redone, you need ventilation isolation, there are different load capacities, etc.

Plus if remote work really takes off, there's no need to crowd all those people into the downtown cores of a few cities anyway. It'd shift housing demand to cheaper, more naturally desirable locations.

What'll happen is that a few firms with ineffective cost structures will go bankrupt, a few major cities will become hollowed-out wastelands the way NYC was in the 1970s or Boston was in the 1950s, and economic growth will pick up in other areas, with new startups and new desirable hubs.

> It costs more to convert an office building to housing than it does to tear it down and build new condos in its place, which in turn costs more than just building new condos in a different location.

Except in SF or NYC, there aren't that many desirable "different locations" left. Which is why freeing up the poorly used space in city centers can be a net positive for society rather than keeping to maintain these white elephants.

How does that improve anyone's financial position?

Have you heard of sunk cost fallacy?

I'm suggesting that the execs in charge of these decisions are perhaps not approaching the issue rationally.

Yes, but the existence of a fallacy doesn't mean it applies here. If people can be convinced to go back to the office the company won't lose millions of dollars. Is that a sunk cost then?

Is this true when we include tax cuts given to companies in exchange for having offices / operate in the city?

As evidenced here by the vast increases in productivity provided by WFH, it is only natural companies need fewer workers.

I'm perplexed by postings like this, HN should be rejoicing in these right-sizings and the maximization of opportunities for those no longer bound to such inefficiencies.

What maximization of opportunities? Layoffs seem like a minimization of opportunities if anything else.

For workers, WFH gives immense flexibility and opportunity. You are no longer tethered to work in the same vicinity where you live. This gives you both personal (e.g. be close to family, be close to a beach, etc.) and professional (e.g. work for company in another city, on the other side of the country, etc.) opportunity.

Remember too that WFH opens one to increased competition from others who could do one's job who live in a much lower COL area

Right, so it is a tradeoff that a worker can choose to make: work for a company that doesn't have WFH/remote work or one that does. Each has their benefits and drawbacks.

PG has all the answers:

http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html

I see your argument that it can result in LONG TERM gains from which everyone will benefit but there are short term losers and the people on this sub are more than likely the short term losers from these layoffs.

These companies have boards, and these boards are incredibly "inbred" so that the vested interests coincide and reinforce. You'd be surprised how many of your C-suite sit on boards of REITs or have invested huge amounts of company "cash" into them.

It's most definitely about money, all the way.

You have eloquently summarized what I have been trying to say about the "return to the office" battle that is currently underway.

The "executive class" stand to lose a lot more than the "laptop class" if staff don't return to the office.

I remember finding out about this early in my career. The office building that my company used was own by the company director but under a different company.

He tied the company into a 3 year lease and then sold our company to a multi-national company. Not the company that owned the office just the company using it nice extra little earner for him considering he also set the rent amount as well.

I 100% agree w/ this and have been making that argument in the anti return to work subreddits. People on the board may also be heavily invested in the auto or gas industry who also strongly wish to see a return to the office.

> People on the board may also be heavily invested in the auto or gas industry who also strongly wish to see a return to the office.

Musk has be expressing concern even though it reduces emission, nominally his primary goal, far more than eletric commuting, and he himself heads so many companies that he mostly works remotely at all of them.

> You'd be surprised how many of your C-suite sit on boards of REITs or have invested huge amounts of company "cash" into them.

Do you have stats? Or do you even have one good and compelling example?

This feels like a startup idea.

Unless you can prove it with specifics for each company, this is patently false and a sweeping generalization.

Companies like Meta were all gung ho about remote work in 2021, when they hadn't seen the long term impact of it. The push inside Meta for WFH not being as effective for new employees started coming up in 2023 after the performance evaluations were done and they noticed a trend. You might argue that the data analysis might have been incorrect, but that's another question. The same company is also heavily cutting on office space.

I know people in tech are pro remote but let us not come up with these wild unsubstantiated theories to support what we like.

Remote work might not be as effective for every company on the same level, maybe it is the culture, maybe it is role dependent, but it is simplistically not just about some shadowy real estate moguls.

Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity.

Or there are business lines that have no hope of ever being sustainable, and as a private business that has to earn a profit to survive, it makes sense to stop throwing money away.

It probably doesn't help that the bar for sustainability was raised from 'generates any profit, ever' to 'generates a few % profit per USD invested each year, eventually'.

> the bar for sustainability was raised from 'generates any profit, ever' to 'generates a few % profit per USD invested each year, eventually

Those sound as though they overlap

Well it's not as if it's changed massively, but it turns out quite a lot of stuff fit in the small gap between both definitions.

How much do you need your 401k/IRA to go up each year? How much does your city/state need its pension investments to go up each year?

The productivity of the future (or now) has already been borrowed from, and it has to be delivered on, even if only nominally.

Speaking of business lines that have no hope of ever being profitable, I'm still waiting them to cancel the metaverse project, but it still looks like Zuck's ego >>> the appearance of future profitability >>> the people who actually make facebook's core competences function.

The more people they lay off while keeping that project going the more alarm bells go off in my head around the long term viability of their stock. It definitely doesn't belong in a pension.

Its fashionable among herd mentality investors now to do noisy lay-offs, but the smart money is probably quietly hiring these days.

The metaverse efforts at Meta isn’t just one project. It’s a massive org with multiple VPs driving many many different product lines. It’s not going anywhere.

They're laying off many, many people in several waves and if you are correct the fact that they've hired a lot of people is still an obstacle, or justification to do something that does not make sense. That's funny. And sounds like them.

> It's not going anywhere.

Including towards a potential revenue stream?

The Metaverse isn’t going anywhere, like it or not.

Amusingly, there are two ways to read this comment.

Hah, ye. I think the "it is not here and will not move" interpretation is the most valid one.

There's also a third interpretation.

explain?

"isn’t going anywhere" can mean:

a) it isn't making progress

b) it isn't going away

c) you can count on something (similar to <b>, but subtly different)

Time for developers to start unionizing.

Good luck...the "scabs" crossing your picket line all WFH and you'll never even know who they are.

WFH means work-from-anywhere, which dooms the leverage of a union

While I don’t agree with your hot take, it would be amazing if all the C-suite hand wringing about RTO being the best thing ever resulted in strong unions as a result.

I had an idea regarding this. What if a new CC license was developed for open source projects where that code could only be used by union-participant companies/individuals?

They would develop a tool based on ChatGPT/Copilot to automatically transform FOSS software into an obfuscated form such that they could invoke plausible deniability in court cases.

That would be interesting, but it would probably only pressure small to midsize businesses without resources to just develop everything in-house anyway, and even then, only if it starts to comprise the majority of open source software

A competitor would just recreate it without union requirements.

This was thought to be the solution in the 90's en early 00's, offshore everything (basically wfh but wf-lower-income-country). Turns out it works sometimes but is hardly a panacea.

Digital work leaves lots of traces. Unions, at least where I live, will kick you out for strike breaking.

kick who out of what? foreign workers wouldn't be in, or care about, your union

If a foreign worker could do what most of us do, they would already have your job, because they are infinitely cheaper.

30 years after first trying to replace all of us, they have still been unable to do so because it just doesn't work that well, even with a hybrid WHF company.

The union would kick out members who are strike breaking. It isn't possible to break the strike if you're not part of it. It wouldn't be effective to hold a strike in the first place if it was only a small minority of employees.

that's such a good point. hell they could just have them create a new app.

The best time to unionize is when you're in a strong bargaining position to set a sustainable baseline in your first contract and build the infrastructure to make a strike credible. Unions are strongest when they have a huge fund to support their members through a strike.

Tech workers have been warned about this all through the latest tech boom. It might be too late. Any union formed now will be broke and desperate at any negotiation. It's like trying to buy flood insurance while you're on the roof waiting for rescue.

I think tech workers are currently in a weaker position but still a fairly strong position to unionize. There are plenty of people still employed enough to be able to support those laid off, and tech workers as a whole earn enough that many should hav a significant savings for emergencies like strikes. I think we should be organizing to have similar protections like a guild, where we guarantee minimum quality of treatment for us workers but no maximum on perks and wages, not even pegged to tenure.

Strikes are probably the least effective tactic for a tech union. Software isn't a coal mine or a railway. Plenty of products have glided along for a while with very few people maintaining them. Sometimes even zero.

I imagine if we do see tech collective action it'll probably be done quietly in the form of silently exploding technical debt, with documentation that misleads more than it informs and products that collapse under the weight of their own unmaintainability.

Most companies don't have twitter levels of overengineering.

Work to rule would kill any tech company. Imagine your biggest contract having to wait 2 weeks before you can fix the bug that is crashing their business.

Imagine zero tech support because unpaid after hours tech support is horse shit.

This has me wondering, how might a union be formed so as to avoid common misbehaviors of unions? I’m aware of many examples of unions behaving pathologically, but well-run unions hardly make headlines. Are there any noteworthy examples of the latter?

Off the top of my head, paths to explore would include:

- no full-time/paid positions as union officials

- term limits on union officials

- limited budget

Perhaps I’m naive, but the last item seems especially appealing. I don’t quite see why unions need big budgets, as it seems to me their activities should more or less revolve around the kind of collective discussions that can take place on Zoom or a forum. As such, expenses would be more or less limited to operational expenses for these tools.

I’d actually consider joining a union that was sufficiently restricted in scope, and narrow in its focus.

The trickier question is how to avoid the failure mode of unions defending known-bad employees. Having worked a few union jobs in the past, there were more than a handful of colleagues I sincerely wished would get fired, but for whom the union afforded undue protection.

> The best time to unionize is when you're in a strong bargaining position to set a sustainable baseline in your first contract and build the infrastructure to make a strike credible. Unions are strongest when they have a huge fund to support their members through a strike.

I might be wrong, but I don't think the average employee salary would be nearly as high as they are, given unionisation costs quite a lot of money, that drives up the cost per-employee massively. You might say now is the best moment ever to do this, but I don't see why that would be true.

>given unionisation costs quite a lot of money

In what made up reality is that even remotely true?

Everyone I know in a union pays a couple hundred bucks tops. Is it really not worth an xbox to help your fellow worker be happy, healthy, and sustainable?

That's not the cost I mean. Why would union fees drive up the cost of an employee?

Any HNers gotten more interested in organizing tech since this experience?

Techies still see themselves as temporarily embarrassed owners rather than laborers. I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon.

Techies (at least at meta) are owners in the sense that a large % of their comp is in the form of equity, so it is in their interest for the company to maximize stock price.

It's ironic how you replaced "millionaires" in that quote since many engineers are now millionaires.

Your class is not based on the number in your bank account, but on how you make that money. If you are dependent on an Owner to pay you for your time and labor, you are a worker, regardless of what token "riches" you are paid to believe otherwise.

You don't go from worker to owner until you buy three properties to rent out or start your own business.

The quote contrasted “millionaire” with “proletariat” and was clearly a reference to status at least well into the petit bourgeoisie if not the haut bourgeoisie.

A mere millionaire is a lot less rich today b/c inflation (though probably still at least petit bourgeois.)

A low millionaire today can't even retire - IOW can't even stop working, lol.

The petit bourgeois as classically defined are dependent on applying their labor to their own capital (though other patterns of mixed capital/labor dependence fit the class, and are perhaps more common now), unlike the haut borgeois who rent labor to apply to their capital and the proletariat who must rent out labor to owners of capital, so not being able to stop working without a significant lifestyle compromise isn’t inconsistent with being petit bourgeois.

yup, agreed. I'm just highlighting the absurdity of how millionaire status today can sound like safe living or big winners of early employee startup lottery yet still end up as precarious as the rest of us in terms of relying on work day to day.

understood the theory isn't all about that. I reflect on work because I think so much of liberation can begin with freeing peoples time/regaining 'real' control of their time

Why would a union boss be more supportive of WFH and paying for value worked instead of hours worked? I see the incentives plausibly running in the other direction.

Not to mention the fact that unions often support politicians I would never vote for, let alone donate to or organize for.

not necessarily unions. i didn't specify that. wildcat movements are also valuable.

You are absolutely correct in that way of thinking. What astounds me the number of people on HN who are saying that we are lazy and anti-capitalist with that way of thinking. The system is broken. The rich are getting richer and the average workers are getting screwed big time. Privatized profits, but socialized losses.

As George Carlin said: "They are getting fcked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fcking years ago."

> Privatized profits, but socialized losses.

100% agree when it comes to the 2008 crisis, and the bailouts, and the zero percent interest rates for 20 years.

But what has this got to do with layoffs at meta? Did they get a government bailout?

> Privatized profits, but socialized losses

Can we stop saying this? Many taxes are paid before profits exist. Taxes are the sure thing; profits might happen, or you might go bust and investors lose all the money. That's not socialised losses. That's privatised risk, losses, then socialised taxes, then whatever's left is "privatised profits" - i.e. people actually getting a return on a risky investment.

Pro-capitalist proposals exist, like YIMBY movements, pushback against regulatory capture, pushback against market breaking practices like locked down devices, and so on.

> the serfs

While you're arguing class warfare, I think it is worth asking whether the "serfs" (dictionary: "an agricultural laborer bound under the feudal system to work on their lord's estate") at Meta are working on things that improve society... Isn't the typical developer at Meta making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year making systems that are destructive to the social fabric and cohesion of society?

> Isn't the typical developer at Meta making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year making systems that are destructive to the social fabric and cohesion of society?

Tons of farmers supplied the compost that Haber-Bosch used to perfect their way of making amonia, later used to make hydrogen cyanide (a pesticide later used in late 30s germany for non farming purposes)

You can be a serf and be a necesary cog in a machine for destructive purposes.

The hundreds of thousands of dollars a year still keeps those devs much closer to a homeless person than to any single Billionaire. A rich serf, is still a serf.

> A rich serf, is still a serf.

I hate to be argumentative, but you really need to educate yourself on serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

I think you're missing the point bad analogy aside

I think the point is wrong and hilariously melodramatic.

> I hate to be argumentative

You aren't, thats a nitpick not an argument

> you really need to educate yourself on serfdom

Sure, I could make a long explanation about middle engalnd feudal titles and how despite our modern conception of most poor people as serfs, a middle class of Franklin existed, that comprised the kind of freemason associations that now still exist in the City of London as Guilds, although most are currently NGOs and charities some still work on their original mission.

Or I could use serf as "non ruling class" following the comment I replied to, because that is how OP used it. Although technically he probably meant peasant as that was the class which no land whether serf or just labourers, I understood what he meant and replied tongue in cheekly about how some farming chemist aided the nazis, I say tongue in cheek because I made the farming connection to serfs

Hopefully the analogy works for you now that is being laid out.

On the other hand, the open source work done by meta has been instrumental in advancing many technologies and techniques. Machine learning via PyTorch being a prime example.

The jury is still out on that one…

On whether they’ve been instrumental on advancing machine learning, or on whether that’s a good thing?

They have definitely contributed a lot to advancing machine learning. I believe the above comment means we don't know whether advancing AI will have sour consequences for society down the line

I mean maybe, but it’s already having positive effects today. It’s advanced the state of the art for cancer diagnostics and is advancing novel treatments, for example.

So far, the arguments against that I’ve seen have been hypotheticals and boogeymen.

Its not open source. Its source available.

PyTorch has a BSD license, so should be genuine OSI Open Source.

And zstandard, io_uring are from Facebook too, right?

Worth pointing out there are a lot of predatory practices around contract workers holding visas. I don't work at Meta so I have no idea if that's happening there but I have seen it at others places.

I guess I could have been more clear that I wasn't talking specifically about Meta.

But, looking at this another way, when you make an example of a highly compensated, in demand worker (like a senior SW engineer), what message does that send to everyone else without the same qualifications?

The "capital class" in US is mostly people who invest in their 401k and just get pensions from pension funds, whereas the "serfs" in context of meta are engineers who earn what, $400k per year?

How come serfs are richer than the capital class?

Most Meta employees do not earn $400k and the layoffs today are concentrated among non-developers.

You don’t understand the the vast difference, not just in wealth, but power, in the United States, and silicon valley in particular. This is a place where 400k/year won’t buy you a nice house.

Chris Rock explained the difference well when he said, “Shaq is rich, but the white man that signs his check is wealthy.”

The people working at Meta are mostly the 0.01% upper class of the world.

Found this income percentile calculator:

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

300K puts someone at 97 percentile (top 3%). Nice, but nowhere near top 0.01%

It doesn't have the resolution to go into fractions of percent. Found this older (2018) article which says that 0.01% top income would be an income of $35 million a year. But that's 2018, so should be quite a bit more today.

So, it's safe to say that there are a hanful few people at Meta in the top 0.01%, but not many.

Getting older makes my reading ability worse, but I can't find "world calculator" on that page, only the US?

For future people who mind find this in Google:

I have been searching for some time now without success, even ChatGPT tells me there is no such number, because many countries don't have the statistics, different taxation systems exist etc.

Some numbers I have found are around the 0.1% percentile for $300k yearly income compared to the world.

With both members of the household working at Meta/in the valley and and household income of 600k/y we get below 0.1%, because in many countries even households with high income do not have double-earners with that kind of income.

If everyone demanded more money simultaneously they would be forced to pay more.

The upper class has no skills other than dealing with money. Their power is the value we assign to money.

If we all decided tomorrow to use another currency and exclude the upper class from using it, in 1 week they would be starving.

Instead of a grand conspiracy and malicious intent I believe the layoffs are more likely a result of bad decision making, over-hiring and waking up to the reality that perhaps they don’t need a staff of 100k to run a website and a few mobile apps (a vast understatement of course but still).

The best part is both the malicious intent and the utter stupidity and fecklessness options mean we probably shouldn't be paying these chucklefucks millions a year to cargo cult manage. The ownership class hasn't had to show performance for their payment in decades.

These serfs being laid off are likely richer than most of the Wall Street folks who lost their jobs in 2008.

Who in their right mind would consider business analysts at a social media company in silicone valley "uppity"? Has anyone started a kick starter to help collectivize their loss of earnings through to january?

I just can’t get over this kind of language coming from people who earn 300k/y.

The idea that facebook developers are “the working class” engaged in a class struggle to overcome oppression is just.. wow way out there! The struggle exists but it’s not at Meta engineering.

EDIT: I’m not saying layoffs aren’t mean/stupid/preventable. I’m only saying that it’s not oppression or class struggle. I can’t understand that people can write this stuff on HN while living in a country where it’s legal to pay restaurant staff below minimum wage cause hey tips amirite. There’s plenty class struggle in America, let alone the world, but not a whole lot of it at Meta.

I mean, people don't like thinking they are part of the problem: Most of tech thinks wealth inequality is not about them while being in the 1%.

Tbf I disagree that being rich automatically makes you part of the problem. I merely think it disqualifies you from playing the victim card.

Sure. I think that's right - you can be rich and helpful, and rich and unhelpful.

What is happening now seems to be a claim of not being rich at all, which is honestly just weird.

Yep! :-)

300k/year is only 1/3 of the way towards being in the to top 1% for the Bay Area -- https://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/26/13062348/top-one-percent-bay...

>the average one percent household in the larger San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City region makes a whopping $3.5 million plus.

Sure, you can always find a subgroup you are not part of the 1% in, i'm not sure what your point is?

You can also use the average instead of the median, and get a much higher required income for the top 1% :)

The median household (ie entire family) income in the US is 70k. Even in california it's ~100k.

The point was clear - Tech is very wealthy, and believes they are just the random common person.

even if the CEO makes 10,000x more? if you annualize zucks net worth that's where he's sitting, and that ratio actually is pretty comparable to what it was during the lord/serf days.

Their neighbors whose median per-capita income is 5 figures seem more relevant of an analogy

The serf analogy makes sense for low-income Americans who essentially have to pay more to the capital class: payday loans, cannot afford bulk discounts due to low cash reserves, rent vs buy, crippling debt, etc

FB white collar workers are literally the capital class, eg, paid in RSUs and LI profiles advertising as angel investors

The only reason I am writing this is it's super disheartening to start the day with seeing engineers not understanding how historically lucky they are, and much more importantly, how rotten the situation is for their neighbors. "Tell me you and your family have never struggled without.."

As a historical note, most Americans are taught enough empathy to not joke about slavery. But guess what: serfdom was happening around the same time, has a lot of violent similarities, and also has descendants who are not thrilled by it. But don't let this distract from my primary point about misunderstanding that technologists are the gentry here, not the serfs, in this terrible analogy.

Eh even those Americans are doing pretty well in the grand scheme. We know that we are importing a bunch of illegal immigrants and using them as manual labor in our disgusting factories and brutal fields. We are not paying them the minimum wage nor giving them any kind of retirement benefits or even the basic human decency of being able to visit their loved ones in the hospital without severe risk. And yet we allow this situation to persist with minimal hand waving dedicated to the issue. If we are going to assign serfdom to anyone surely it would be this invisible class of Americans. Then again, they are here by choice, risking much in the process, because ultimately its a better option for them then they had elsewhere so does it really make sense to even compare these people to the brutality of histories serfdom? Doesn't seem so.

Yes it does. Especially when the class of people you are referring to are fleeing their countries as a result of imperialsm, state led terrorism and ridiculous policies the US itself has instituted throughout the americas. The US is responsible, in many cases, for destabilizing these countries, creating the war on drugs and using adversarial and predatory economics to destabilize these countries for the private ends of capital. Just because you can “choose” to flee does not preclude you from being a victim. Your reading of being a the equivalent of a forced laborer essentially disregards the entirety of history surrounding war, conflict, instability and being a refugee in that context. If the question is about being “forced into working” you’ve already over looked the entire forced labor market that exists at the border and fits your definition of “brutality” quite well.

Your comparison of modern day tech workers to gentry is, in my opinion, surface-level at best. The landed gentry controlled far more of the political processes than your average tech worker does which allowed them to capture leverage, capital and influence at a level we could only dream of. A much more apt comparison would be to todays billionaires who actually control the levers of legislative power and use those levers to make themselves practically untouchable. Just because you feel that people are being spoiled relative to their counterparts doesn’t actually give them real power like the landed gentry had. Just because someone has 200k in a bank account does not immunize them from losing their job, getting sick and losing all of that in medical bills. I’m sorry you’re sad that people feel oppressed but it doesn’t change the fact that people are entitled to feel burned by the wheels of unfettered capitalism. Yesterday it was the car factory workers that were told they were spoiled for advocating for themselves and now we rally behind those causes today so your line in the sand drawing around who is entitled to complain about inequality wreaks of a lack of historical context for how these struggles play out longitudinally.

I'd rather be a tech worker than the landed gentry you mentioned. Would you not?

I’d rather be landed gentry since I think not having to work for a living would be pretty sweet. I’d also have to be cold heartless classist which I don’t think I could do. I’d probably die from dysentery though but I’m considering that outside of the question of “which occupation would you rather”

Where did “which occupation would you rather” make it in? I was comparing the overall lifestyle and life outcomes.

Well your question was vague and not actually what you are referring to: it was a simple “would you rather.” I think the comparison is useless given that comparing the entirety of the life experience of people in two different eras does not actually contribute to a conversation around the core point being made here: having ridiculous levels of wealth is not the same as having a decent paying job in which you are still reliant on the income to survive and therefore are essentially tied to that opportunity of labor. A more valid comparison would be, as I pointed out earlier, between billionaires and any class of people who “have to work for a living”

Wait, if the CEO is rich, 300k/y isn't a living wage? I fail to see the connection.

Context: I live in $NOT_BAY_AREA and the amount of money you folks make while complaining as if you’re an Amazon warehouse worker really rubs me the wrong way. It seems to me that Bay Area tech people (or at least the ones in this thread) lost all sense of reality.

I get that getting fired is stressful but if your skillset is in such high demand as tech skills are in SFBA, it’s not class struggle.

I don’t disagree that layoffs like these are stupid, preventable and maybe even mean, I merely disagree that it’s oppression. It hurts the people who do get oppressed and not paid a living wage.

Just because someone isn't literally starving doesn't mean they aren't being oppressed by the ruling class. How much money do Google and Facebook bring in per employee, and how much of that only goes to the top level people?

All people who sell their labor are in the worker class, period. Pretending that being paid a token amount to feel special and make them see fellow workers as not in the same boat is unhelpful.

Maybe try broadening your perception? The idea that more people are aware of inequality and feel it’s sting doesn’t seem like a clear through line to “hurting people who do get oppressed” if anything my anecdata has found that because of increased feeling of inequality more people I know are supporting strikes of people across pay lines. Maybe the issue here is your judgement not other people’s feelings?

If you’re able to live in luxury, why does it matter that a small number of people live in much greater luxury?

If you need a paycheck to live then you’re working class. People making 300k/yr have an easier time converting to the capitalist class but they aren’t there by default.

No one making $300,000 a year "needs" a paycheck to "live." This language is so hyperbolic that it limits one's ability to persuade even those audiences that might be sympathetic.

Unless you're claiming that everyone making $300,000 a year could retire immediately, then of course they need a paycheck to live. Maybe you're thinking about the phrase "living paycheck-to-paycheck" which has a different connotation.

Contrast this with a person with many millions or billions in wealth. That person literally does not ever need another paycheck to live. In other words, they do not need to work to live, unlike a typical worker making wages.

> No one making $300,000 a year "needs" a paycheck to "live."

What does that mean?

The 300K is the paycheck (annualized). It's what they use to pay expenses to live. If the paycheck goes away you no longer can pay those expenses.

i.e. of course they need the paycheck to live.

Are you suggesting someone who made 300K once can now retire instantly and never again need a paycheck? It doesn't feel like the above quote is fully thought through.

Now, sure, if they've been making 300K for a couple decades, hopefully they've stashed away enough to eventually retire. But that's a very different statement.

This attitude hurts poorer working class people because it causes high-payed workers to identify themselves with the capitalist class rather than workers.

Are you sure about that? I think recognizing that you’re in the top 1% (and probably top 0.01% globally) is a much healthier way to help underpaid people. It lets you eg advocate for higher minimum wages, social safety nets, higher taxes (that you’re happy to pay, cause hey, lots of money), etc. Earning that much money while pretending to be oppressed seems borderline offensive to me.

This is the narrative that the elite use to divide the working classes. "The people making $300K/yr are not like you!" says the person making $30M/yr to the person making $30K/yr.

The senior software engineer at Meta has far more in common with a blue collar guy living paycheck to paycheck than he has with a CEO whose wealth grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.

I've said this before but the way I see it, almost all of us are N missed paychecks away from bankruptcy. For a lot of people, that N is 1, for some, it's 2 or 3, or even higher if you managed to save wisely. But we all have some number N. And the fact that we have that number should unite us against the few people on the far side of the derivative curve whose N is infinite. Tech workers had their relatively brief moment in the sun where their N was maybe 10-20, it got to our heads a little, and we started thinking we were "very different than a blue-collar worker".

Nobody is getting divided. It’s perfectly possible to be actively in favour of higher minimal wages, social safety nets, universal health care, employment protection rules etc while acknowledging that as a senior software engineer at Meta, you have it very good and are not suffering under any oppression.

The nice explanation is that if you’re doing well, you may be happy to pay lots of taxes so others can do well too.

The selfish explanation is that you want to live in a community with low crime and high trust, which requires a certain baseline living standard for everybody.

Only with the, in my experience uniquely American, idea that people can’t possibly be in against a policy or situation if they’re not immediately short-term personally hurt by it do you need this doublethink that tech staff at Meta are being oppressed.

Just because someone suffers more than someone else does not mean that person suffering less is still not suffering. 300k yr in Silicon Valley with a family and with only one income is peanuts if you want to afford say, childcare that is good and reputable. In relative terms we are all the equivalents of servants to capital and can therefor be considered oppressed. Also your comment wreaks of solipsism: just because you think someone making 300k is in a good placed doesn’t mean they aren’t oppressed in some way by their employer: look at caste issue in the US.

> The senior software engineer at Meta has far more in common with a blue collar guy living paycheck to paycheck than he has with a CEO whose wealth grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.

No. The senior software engineer at Meta and the CEO can both afford a comfortable lifestyle. Yes the CEO can afford a more comfortable lifestyle, but they're still limited by things like health. The blue collar worker earning $30k a year is in a different position entirely.

I know both people who are very rich and people who are poor. The very rich and the senior-engineer types both live comfortable lives. Yes the very rich can have more luxuries if they so desire, but who cares? Not even they do...

The poor live a different life: Freezing winters without heating, 8°C inside their home. No access to warm water. Calculating cost vs calories for food they buy so they get the calories while spending as little as possible.

Or perhaps, Meta is so poorly managed that they had employees paid $200k/year to do little-to-no work [0], and they are only just realizing that this is unsustainable, again due to incredible ineptitude.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/former-meta-recruiter-paid-200-144500...

The capital class isn't a single conspiring entity.

When you get fired from Facebook and then try to save money by canceling Netflix, then Netflix isn't going to be very happy about that, whilst they very much are capitalist. Most companies depend on customers having disposable income.