The quote you mentioned was a sarcastic comment on the US-specific layoffs, presumably.
> as do I, in .nl
everyone who works in FAANG, if you are drawing an enormous salary and bonus, compared to the average guy, i hope you realize the how fortunate you are. i hope you are putting away, saving, investing, at least 1/3 or 1/2 of it. when and if this happens after a few years, unlike the average guy, you can simply choose to retire or take some time off and travel rather than the normal option of loosing your home and being completely ruined.
Isn't that what so many people do in their own country in order to come to the US on a work visa to begin with?
to be clear - what i was reacting to was the author's idea that he should reject capitalism and/or start a trade union, after having been a very, very, lucky player of the capitalism game indeed. it pisses me off when people making N multiples of 6 figure incomes start forgetting how lucky they are and how much they personally benefited from that exact system. a laid off googler's worst day is many, many times better than the average guys daily life. in this country, let alone somewhere else.
"Oh you should be happy you had a good thing going" is not something I'd find especially comforting if I was told I needed to rapidly uproot my entire life and leave a country I've spent decades in.
If you're physically within the U.S. (just a location, not a citizenship/green card restriction) feel free to reach out, contact info is in my profile.
I lived in the US on a temporary visa and it's wild to me that people would put down roots in any country without a clear path to permanent residency.
When you read the conditions attached to your employer-sponsored non-immigrant visa it makes it pretty clear that you're not in the country to settle permanently, you're there to work for the duration of your visa and that's all.
Some people seem to ignore that and just trust that neither their employer nor the US government will screw them over.
There are lots of countries in the world that welcome gay people and have simpler, saner, and more predictable pathways to permanent residency than the USA.
This person moved to the US for undergrad, attended grad school, and has been working in the US for like a decade. That's 20 years here. Even if they were only here on H1b for two years, simply moving somewhere else would still be leaving the country they lived in for 12 years. You can surely understand why somebody would be motivated not to do this.
However, Google employees only capture a fraction of Google's profits. Google made twenty five billion dollars in profit in Q1. Annualized that is 100b. Google has 180,000 employees. That is 555,555 in profit per employee. If Google was really existing in service of its employees rather than its investors, as it would be in a socialist system, then I'd expect my pay to rise dramatically.
But then it wouldn't make that kind of profit.
What socialist system is that where a company is run from the benefit of its employees?
And that hypo... what exactly is the fear bringing all this on so viscerally... is a long defunct soviet union still the starring Freddy of folk's dreams?
Disclaimer: I grew up in the USSR, it stank big ups. I live in the USA, it also stinks big ups. Sometimes for similar and sometimes for different reasons. Let's hope Fukuyama was wrong and we'll eventually come up with something better.
Soviet Union long defunct? Oh no, comrade, it's still lives strong in the head of many. It still kills people on industrial scale and it still threatens the whole world. It's nowhere near being defunct, there still a lot to do to help it rest in pieces for good.
Strong words from a FAANG employee. Does he think there's another economic system which would give him the same extraordinary compensation package?