I quit mid june after I realized they weren't hiring/scheduling more staff for the summer even though every day was very busy, constantly running between helping customers and taking care of other things.

There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees.

Sure, but this is in line with every major (European) tech company I ever worked at. Pay employees peanuts and pay senior mangers amazing, therefore you were incentivized not to do well as an IC, but to put up with bullshit and fight your way to climb the corporate ladder to management, and then exploit the other poor schmucks who come below you with the same perverse incentive structure.

Yes this leads to a huge turnover, unhappy workers, and to a lot of arguments, back-stabbings and fights. But their stocks were always rock solid and managers were always wealthy so I guess they saw that culture as a net win. It seems to be the M.O. with ever major company everywhere, I think it's called the "GE model".

Paying ICs at the bottom great wages and incentivizing them with stock, is mostly unique to US/SV and new-age software start-ups from the Google/Facebook era, but rare everywhere else.

I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.

It works because it exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it.

This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.

Because it's cheaper to compensate one manager 10x average (and get the best candidate) than pay more to hire an entire team of more skilled ICs.

FAANG gets away with it because they amortize their engineering costs over an extremely customer base. Which also multiplies the value in output quality difference.

Most companies are not building EC2 or BigTable.

And so... it makes more sense to hire minimal cost engineers, then corral them with a single high-cost manager.

I don't think you get better managers by paying them more though, over some threshold. You'd probably just get more "competetive" managers in the meta game of becoming a manager. Like engineers at Google are not some elite just becouse they are paid more. Only athletics actually can be evaluated in an accurate enough manner I believe.

But it's likely a direct transfer from sales or retail orgs, where it's very much measurable and true.

Only for those at the lower end, usually at the expense of growth and opportunities for those at the higher end, but since those are fewer in number their votes are less important.

>How is it that European tech workers can't bargain for higher wages?

Because investors there don't have as much money, and those who do don't risk it starting tech companies. And also because Europe is not a single country with one law and one language, but 27+ with different laws and different languages, means scaling a business beyond the original country is difficult and expensive.

It's the US who's the exception in tech success, not EU for failing to match it.

The leverage a company has and the leverage a union has both come from the same place: A lack of alternatives. But then that's the problem.

If you have a competitive industry, the union can't demand much because the company's margins will be slim and they won't be able to give the union much without raising prices, losing customers to competitors and going out of business. This is actually fine because in that case workers still get the money in the form of lower consumer prices, but then it's not the union which is getting you the benefit.

Conversely, if the industry isn't competitive then the company will be a huge conglomerate with a lot of leverage against workers/consumers. They'll be big enough to exert political influence in the government and also big enough for the company's union to become infested with politics. In particular, the union knows where its leverage comes from, and it's workers with skills in high demand, so any union that doesn't keep them happy and keep them from moving to another company/industry is going to have to contend with a pissed off conglomerate with a lot of political influence. So the money goes to the people with high demand skills (or political connections) and the rank and file still get the scraps, but now it's even worse because lack of competition and high levels of organizational inefficiency means high prices when they go to buy things.

It sounds like you have never worked busy retail, more than anything else. You wouldn't accept your own job being that level of busy dealing with unserved and frustrated customers at that pace.

For whom?

If the pie was shared more fairly, then yes they would be better off and I daresay that their incentives would be better aligned with getting those numbers up. And yes, that would mean managers not pulling down millions.

Perhaps it can work situationally, but I've not seen it anywhere I or any of my friends have worked.

If your goal is long-term success, those incentives might be misaligned.