Tech worker movements grow as threats of RTO, AI loom
Advocates say tech workers movements got too big to ignore in 2024.
I had a shower thought the other day that if more CEOs were shot dead, there'd probably be less Return to Office.
People are sometimes like "oh but violence is bad!" but ignore all the casual harms inflicted on people by capitalism and friends.
They also ignore all the freedom of the lower classes which was won through violence against the upper class.
They also ignore literally all of human history when they say shit like that. Hell even the civil rights movement only worked because of Malcolm X's threat of violence.
They weren't just threats, there where riots all over the country.
Malcolm X was a fringe figure: the NOI got lots of press but didn't really do all that much besides indulging in infighting and encouraging local Black businesses. Their approach to politics was separatism. H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, the Panthers, and many others were more closely involved in direct action.
Nah CEOs will mandate RTO for workers while they themselves stay remote.
They can be killed in their homes, too.
So no change?
The (attitude) Adjuster goes blam.
You had me until you distilled everything into "capitalism"... Life isn't black and white.
Inb4 the intellectually dishonest response of "but I said 'and friends!'".
I’m in management now but I say go get ‘em please.
most management I would assume would be with the workers. If your not c suite your nothing.
You'd think that, but a depressingly large percent of middle managers identify more with the bosses than with the people doing real work. They believe that if they toe the line and work hard at enabling the sociopaths, they might eventually get the promised invisible handjob.
Interestingly, I've known more senior managers than middle managers who are radical. I'm one, and I've known many others. I think that those who really understand how the system works end up advancing, but they're also the ones with no illusions about how the sausage is made.
Capitalism has made me moderately rich (and I started from near-destitution), but that doesn't mean I am unaware of its many toxic side effects. You have to live within the system that exists. People who don't know how to do anything make shitty revolutionaries and incompetent reformers.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Why do you think the mega rich are so keen to invest in robotics? With AI and robotics, there is no palace guard that’ll turn sides when everyone’s had enough.
Nothing will change until the rich take a big haircut.
Fingers and toes crossed, get'em for every last penny!
luck is not gonna help. Only action and organizing can save us. Join a union too.
True, but for those of us laid off in the past couple years and spent months looking for a new job, I'm not really super eager to stick my head out and rock the boat.
This was the hardest job search I've had to do, even as far as multiple rounds of leetcode, and kind of reminds me of how annoying finding my first dev job as a recent grad. Not really looking to do that again any time soon lol
Though if my company tries to RTO us, it'll be a constructive dismissal for me (I spoke with a lawyer already before) and then I'll have to job search again anyway.
We probably won't get RTO'd though, we've been doing WFH for years here thankfully.
Meanwhile Accenture has 1400:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio.
Yeah, then they lose all their best and brightest who are disappearing off to work on their own things.
All these idiot C-suite trash will wind up holding is a bag of yesterday's technology, a mass of obsolete infrastructure and a bunch of brands they've helped destroy.
It is by design. Pool a bunch of money, buy companies to bleed them dry. Wait for new companies to take their place, rinse and repeat.
H1Bs are fine with coming into the office and won’t put up a fight with any corporate policy….
Yup every time I see H1B I replace it in my head with tech slave. They're paid, but the deck is so stacked against them they effectively cannot refuse anything. ANYTHING. A well informed H1B worker might score a chance at permanent residency for some of the abuse they suffer. But mostly it's just years of abuse with very strict rules to get their residency.
That’s just market forces, then. I suggest domestic workers adapt or retrain in a new industry.
Look, I'm kind of an outsider on this conversation because until we get a DaVinci for mechanical work, I'm never going to be WFH, but there's something interesting I've noted with all my programmer friends.
The industrial world, that's where unions are, they're getting pulled out but that's the places unions live. The people working in stores are starting to push hard on unions. My industry, biomed, hasn't really gotten unions off the ground, but it's rumbling. We're a small industry that's so short on people it's just easier to move jobs than start a union, but we're a mix of tech and industrial backgrounds. But the programming tech backgrounds, at least here in the midwest, is apparently so anti-union I don't know how it'd get off the ground from what I'm hearing from my friends. Their coworkers who are mad about RTO will immediately turn around and say the corporate lines about unions. I'm honestly kinda baffled and hope your industry gets it figured out.
They're just trying to scare the Americans out of the office so they can replace them with cheaper H1Bs who won't talk back.
Software Engineers should get royalties for their code like actors do. I'd be retired already.
They’re fat and lazy enough already. Last thing we need is an SE thinking they sit on IP and the rest of us can fuck off. You write code that others defined and you work WITHIN a system. You are the equivalent of a translator who speaks Spanish. You don’t work magic. Everyone else works in systems we are all asked to consider the business logic beyond simple tasks so fuck off with your snowflakes. I work with so many engineering VPs that you just come off as “special”. You are white gloves special people who demand handling that no one else requests, and for why? Why do you deserve special IP concerns?
Seriously I am tired of engineers being gate keepers while the other two legs of the stool keep this shit together.
Seriously engineers get your shit together as we are all making a product together and you don’t own any more shit then a pm and that’s saying something.
Seriously I am tired of engineers being gate keepers while the other two legs of the stool keep this shit together.
Seriously engineers get your shit together as we are all making a product together
Half my job as a programmer is chasing down the non-devs asking them to explain how they imagined the thing they asked for working, and then trying to find the politest words to say their idea is really bad, all the while trying not to insult their intelligence. The other half is putting out fires that come up all the time because the people who "made the product together" made horrendous decisions about the product design without consulting the devs, or even getting their input. So now we're saddled with mounting technical debt because of a bunch of morons who were convinced they knew more than the people who teach computers to think.
Seriously, half the things I hear non-devs say make me actually wonder about the "average" level of intelligence of our species.
You don’t work magic.
If it wasn't, then you'd be able to do the job.
To you, it IS magic.
Unions will not increase the average wage. They will only even-out wages across the economy. Which means they will increase the lowest wage.
Unions will not solve the social problems in the US. UBI (Universal Basic Income) will solve them.
You need to advocate for UBI. There is no good reason not to have it.
UBI doesn't cost the economy anything. That's no "donating money to poor people". Poor people will immediately spend it on food and housing/apartmenting, which means the money stays (better yet, flows) within the local economy.
The reason the US doesn't have UBI yet isn't because it isn't affordable. It is. The reason UBI wasn't introduced so far yet is because they wanted to scare the people into working harder. It's for psychological reasons, not for real (financial/technical) reasons.
If there is 1 homeless person sitting by the street, people will say "they're lazy and deserve this because they didn't work hard. So i need to work harder". If there's 100 homeless people sitting by the street, people start to realize it's not their fault and the system is at fault; and will demand drastic dramatic changes. UBI is an effective way to prevent that. UBI isn't a choice - it's a necessity for a stable society.
UBI without worker's power and strong unions will just become a leash in the hands of the state to enforce social compliance. Unions and UBIs are not mutually exclusive. Also without strong unions, who do you think will advocate for UBIs? Neo-nazi, billionaires, and other people that want to give the bare minimum to defend the status quo from its collapse. The first to talk about UBI in the USA was Nixon, and it's not by chance. The élites see the UBI as yet another tool to maintain the status quo and their privilege, giving scraps to the rest and subduing the state to make their own interest. UBI is a technical tool and therefore, by itself, it doesn't solve social problems or shifts power. The shift of power should happen contextually to the introduction of the UBI, otherwise, it will just turn into yet another way to oppress the working class.
I see your point. I think i understand the individual arguments and just for the sake of clarity i would like to list them again:
I think this depends on whether it's properly implemented. If it's properly implemented, it's Universal and does therefore not depend on social compliance.
I disagree. Giving resources to people solves problems, including housing, education, and medical care. Maybe the details of where and how to allocate the resources need more elaboration.
Maybe this is a misunderstanding because what i mean by UBI is "give resources to the people that they can use for everyday life without expecting something in return". In so far, public schooling or public healthcare are also a form of UBI for me.
Actually, I would like to keep the system from collapsing. If it does collapse, it will cause devastating harm on not only you, but all of society, probably turning it into ruins and a state-beyond-return.
Realistically, that's not gonna happen. There's not gonna be a "worker's revolution" in the US. The rich take it all, leaving nothing for the poor. Dreams of a "revolution" are fairytales people tell themselves at night to sleep easier. If you really want change and to improve lifes, advocate for UBI. It really helps.
"The hand that lifts you up holds you down." Yeah, that's a risk.
But if it's unconditional, it can be beneficial for many people, especially those in music and the arts, caregivers, and others who contribute to the economy now without receiving much in the way of compensation.
Unions will not increase the average wage.
Unions (and redistributive policies) can increase median, not just mean wages. That's the figure that matters to the "average" (50th-percentile) worker. The trillions of dollars hoarded by billionaires do nobody any good but the billionaires themselves.
I thought they did not need a union because daddy google was a GOAT
Maybe up until they stopped having "don't be evil" as their company motto?
