> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.

No, it's because we know how good we have it. Yes tech layoffs can be brutal but we all signed up for that. I knew even back in college that tech jobs can be flaky and I was likely to be out on my ass a few times in career. But I took the deal anyways because I can make six figures wearing pajamas in my basement.

Would you rather have layoffs at your company or have your company go out of business due to excessive labor costs?

Should poor performers be immune from layoffs? When is a layoff justifiable?

I'm free to leave my job at any time, so why shouldn't my employer be free to leave me?

> Would you rather have layoffs at your company or have your company go out of business due to excessive labor costs?

I invite you to read earnings reports from any of the FAANG companies in the last 5 years. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Most people actually don't work at immensely profitable FAANG companies.

And yet they're so massive that them all doing layoffs at the same time despite that profitability has a huge impact on the labor market of the while industry.

If someone produces less effort than they cost, it's reasonable to fire them even if the organization as a whole is profitable. That's probably not what the FAANG companies did, but layoffs are not unjustifiable for profitable companies.

We're not talking about performance terminations here.

Your employer doesn’t need you to buy food or pay for a roof over their head.

You need your employer to stay fed and housed.

There is a lot more downside for you than your employer, thus a massive power asymmetry. The only way to restore the balance is solidarity between workers and it’s usually a union (or a guild)

I don't need my employer for that either, because they're competing for my labor in a market with many other employers. It would be extremely costly to replace me because of the critical role I have on a highly profitable product. If anything, I'm the one with leverage, which I use every year to request more pay, fancier titles, and larger responsibilities.

Realistically, if I were laid off today I'd likely land a better paying job than this one. I choose to stay because I like my boss, my work, and my coworkers.

If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off then I should be laid off. Why should anyone be obligated to pay my salary if I'm not offering commensurate value?

Good for you. You’d still have all that and even more leverage with a union. And so would all your fellow SEs instead of only you.

> It would be extremely costly to replace me because of the critical role I have on a highly profitable product.

> If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off

Companies don't always do things that make sense.

Get some financial discipline and arrange an emergency fund covering at least 6 months of expenses. It's amazing how much less leverage your employer is able to exert if you can make good on a threat of leaving.

Or you could have leverage from a union and not have to seriously consider quitting every time you need something from your employer.

> It's amazing how much less leverage your employer is able to exert if you can make good on a threat of leaving.

Look how well it worked for the mass layoffs.

Should the most profitable companies on the planet be free to lay off good performers in a country where healthcare is tied to employment?

You can invent strawmen like poor performers and failing companies all day long but the facts differ quite a lot from your perception.

What motivation would a company have to lay off a good performer? Seems counter-productive, but I'm not a CEO

> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.

I think that comes from seeing our field filled with people only in it for the money, doing the bare minimum that’ll keep them employed.

Why does that bother you though? I couldn't care less about how others work as long as they're not actively detrimental to everyone else. Hell, the managerial and C-suites are the ones that impact people the most negatively most of the time, yet we're complaining about someone who's got actual bills to pay for doing their job and not killing themselves over it.

The bare minimum is what everyone should be doing, because nobody owes their employers more than that

> Why does that bother you though?

It leads to scrum culture, because you need accountability for the people that aren’t self-motivated enough to proceed with work without extrinsic motivation (their ideal situation is nothing to do but still get paid).

That’s my theory anyway. Previously the assumption seems to have been that the nerd was gonna nerd, and the only thing you sometimes needed to do was reign them in.

i sympathize but this is a myopic view. zoom out 5, 10, 20 years. It’s pretty clear the parent is correct. Historically anyway.

But what’s happening post covid is a mess and we’ll see how the future looks for us in tech.

> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.

It's not just devs, but the crowd in here.