I know multiple people who did 15+ years at Google or other big tech cos, and got let go despite having consistently good performance reviews. Those companies figured they could be replaced with younger and much cheaper people (or not replaced at all since the companies overhired during the pandemic).
Fortunately, most of these people managed to find new jobs relatively quickly, albeit with somewhat lower comp packages.
Those jobs have always had inflated salaries anyway imo. I've worked with brilliant people at small companies and complete idiots at global behemoths (contracting). Working at a famous company just means you passed some litmus tests and the correlation to brilliance or a 10x type of person is weak at best. Paying someone 5-10x industry standard isn't going to get you 5-10x output. 2 people at 2x the standard is generally going to be a better bang for your buck than 1 person at 5x. Unless it's some super specialized field like genetically evolving PHP code or some shit.
Ive thought about this a bunch, and I design the comp plan for the company I am at, and I haven't seen any specific research on this but my conjecture is this: The comp plans at places like google are designed not to stack superstars, but rather to make it so that everyone at the company is at least 1x productive and not being constantly poached. Its attractive enough that the interview pool is filled with plenty of 1x+ engineers, people who are median or above in performance. Its enough so that they're not really worried about you jumping to the next highest payer.
Isn't it just that when borrowed cash is free the real risk to your oligopoly is startups doing something dramatically better and stealing your lunch? In that environment the strategy is not about limiting the pay rung jump among the established players, it's about keeping the people talented enough to successfully do a startup from actively looking at that much harder path because buying successful startups is way more expensive than moderately overpaying a few tens of thousands of people.
In a higher interest environment the startup money dries up a lot so the risk to your oligopoly is much lower and the demand for yield on your stock increases dramatically so you worry less about a startup and more about maximizing value from your work force (which leads to lower pay on average and layoffs to rightsize), plus the cost of buying a successful startup will be lower because the discount factor from the higher interest rate caps price expansion.
And a $100,000/year MBA with a basic grasp of reality and the willingness to listen to people smarter than him could run Twitter better than Elon Musk.
In backpacking when we're trying to lighten our packs, we have a saying, "don't cut ounces when you can cut pounds." Yet the highest-paid people involved in a company always look at the lowest paid workers to see where they can cut costs, because after all, they can't possibly pay themselves less.
How has Musk owning twitter changed it in a bad way? And cutting 80% of your ounces in backpacking makes a difference.
If cutting 80% of your ounces changes so little about your backpacking trip that you don't notice a decline in enjoyment you didn't need that 80%.
> How has Musk owning twitter changed it in a bad way?
Troll elsewhere.
> And cutting 80% of your ounces in backpacking makes a difference. If cutting 80% of your ounces changes so little about your backpacking trip that you don't notice a decline in enjoyment you didn't need that 80%.
>And a $100,000/year MBA with a basic grasp of reality and the willingness to listen to people smarter than him could run Twitter better than Elon Musk.
This is certainly true, but that $100k MBA doesn't have enough money to buy the company, so he can't run it as a private company like Elon does. A Twitter owned by someone far less narcissistic (or publicly owned) could hire the MBA to run it, but that won't happen because that's not how companies choose their CEOs: the $100k MBA doesn't have the social connections and resume to get the job in the first place.
It's almost as if we need to make changes to the system so that the best and brightest bubble to the top instead of whatever idiot inherits their dad's slave-operated emerald mine money.
I'm a software engineer and you don't speak for me.
There are plenty of software engineers who would unionize, given the chance. It's not easy to do. And sure, with enough effort we could, but that's a pretty big difference from "refusing to".
Software engineers and other white collar professionals want to believe we have more in common with our CEO than we do with a plumber because we work in offices, but I'd bet most of the executive class, ownership class, boards of directors and such see us the same as plumbers: we're a necessary expense
What you’re pointing out applied last year when salaries were higher too though, thats an overarching theme for decades
I’m not furious about what this article is saying, this article is about doing economically viable thing with workers - inside this country - in lower cost of living areas with salaries relevant there instead of higher cost of living areas
I agree that employees could collectively extract more of the value they help create, I don't think every article ok the topic is the right place for that discussion
> I agree that employees could collectively extract more of the value they help create, I don't think every article ok the topic is the right place for that discussion
You don't agree with anything reasonable at all. The way you just said that blames workers, as if it's workers' fault.
Frankly, until people like you stop refusing to listen, every article on the topic is the right place for this discussion, because it's arguably the largest problem facing most people today and people who don't think it's important are a big part of the problem. Whatever ivory tower economics you want to talk about instead just isn't as important.
I was referring to unions as a level of agency employees could unilaterally employ
If you call blame or refusing to listen, I’m not sure which talking point you are referring to. I’m not familiar with any concept or movement beyond that.
Employers are not going to operate outside of market conditions, am I understanding that you wanted me to acknowledge their capability of paying more? Ok. There. I have now. The union can be a market condition.
There actually is - see the various revolutions over the past few hundred years. But, as always, there’s a “but”: things would need to get much worse for that to be possible, and they would deteriorate by another order of magnitude after it happens. I’m not aware of any exceptions.
I find it fascinating and deeply sad how the fundamental position on capital markets seemingly shifts depending on how we feel about our current treatment (as if there were not always people who took a hit)
World Economic Forum [1]
"Between 1948-1979, the percent growth in productivity and wages were relatively similar, with an increase of 108 percent and 93 percent, respectively. The growth from 1979-2018, however, has been drastically different. While net productivity has continued to increase by an expected 70 percent, hourly compensation in the country is less than a fifth of that at just 12 percent."
Since 1979, foreign manufacturing has grown massively at the expense of domestic, second, enormous advances in technology. Are you, presumably a software programmer, more productive because you're inherently smarter, or a harder worker, than a colleague from the 60s-70s? Or do you have much, much, much better tools, languages, frameworks, graphics, etc to do your job?
(You might even ask if you are, actually, more productive. Engineers in the 1960s created the 747 and put men on the moon. Not entirely sure either could be done today. GDP is not really the best way to measure "productivity.")
Hourly compensation has increased significantly more than that when you account for employer contributions to employee health insurance. We should have never allowed health insurance coverage to be tied to employment; that was a terrible public policy error but it's so entrenched now that it has become politically impossible to unwind.
> I find it fascinating and deeply sad how the fundamental position on capital markets seemingly shifts depending on how we feel about our current treatment (as if there were not always people who took a hit)
That's not reality. Just because you base your fundamental position on capital markets on how you feel about your current treatment, doesn't mean everyone else does.
What's deeply sad about this situation is that you don't even consider the possibility of empathy and concern for people less fortunate than ourselves.
The question is: who holds power in the relationship? If workers join together (unionize) they can demand a greater share of business' profits which are generated by those workers.
I find myself thinking of a certain kind of economic hypocrisy that I think floats around in the background, and I'm not sure how to label it:
A: "The new economic system will be based on markets which price items based on their marginal cost over basically anything else, so no more of that tricky old philosophical talk of 'true value' or 'what someone deserves.' Nope, it'll all be based on whatever lands between the two parties' negotiating positions. Totally fair."
B: "Okay then, all of us individual workers will group together to improve our weak negotiating position."
A: "No! You're doing it wrong! You don't deserve to be paid that much, your labor isn't truly that valuable!"
> wages for new hires in construction, manufacturing, food and other blue-collar sectors appear to be ebbing too, according to an analysis of millions of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter.com. Job seekers report seeing roles that once offered salaries between $175,000 and $200,000 a year ago now being advertised for tens of thousands of dollars less
You mean, I can quit software engineering and install flooring for $150,000/year!? Count me in
"Salaries for tech jobs working with back-office and core operations business software that paid between $110,000 and $130,000 a year ago now go to less experienced hires for $85,000 to $100,000, he said. Some companies are laying off entire service areas, renaming the division and populating it with new hires at much lower compensation levels."
Remember when we said that tech workers should be careful what you wish for with regard to work from home? Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will go off in their head that someone from a much poorer country with an internet line can do the same work as their engineers making six figures and working in their home.
If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation. "Yep boss, those face-to-face meetings and talks around the coffee pot are VITAL to this company's success." You have to choose your battles.
Offshoring has always been an option and blaming it on WFH is pointless. Every company goes through the cycle of offshoring, doing it too much, regretting the decision and bringing back some of the jobs eventually. We are in the “doing it too much” phase.
If they don’t realize their mistakes, they eventually end up being like Boeing. Cheaper coders are cheaper for a reason.
> If they don’t realize their mistakes, they eventually end up being like Boeing
Very few of Boeing's myriads of problems are related to offshoring (basically only on the 787 program, and it was mostly its initial delays - the recent manufacturing issues are due to low quality work in South Carolina).
737 Max MCAS? Layers upon layers of incompetent people / deadline chasers. It wasn't s software issue, it was a software design issue that should have been caught by the designers, engineers, quality assurance, inspectors. Nobody did their job properly there.
737 Max door blowout? Halfwits forgetting to put bolts back in after sidestepping procedures to save time. Total lack of security culture, missing records, high level pressure to fulfil impossible timelines, and enormous quality issues out of their supplier out of Kansas.
777X delays? Lots of issues, mostly around the engines which isn't Boeing's fault directly.
> 737 Max MCAS? Layers upon layers of incompetent people / deadline chasers. It wasn't s software issue, it was a software design issue that should have been caught by the designers, engineers, quality assurance, inspectors. Nobody did their job properly there.
Back when this scandal broke it came out that Boeing had outsourced MCAS software to offshore contractors making $13/hr. From what I understand software development at Boeing Commercial Aviation has been offshored for many years.
Boeing only uses US nationals for software development in their military division because they're required to do so by law.
Now the cheaper coders have AI. Even if you dont think AI is a panacea (which I don't), it levels the field - especially when people brag about how much they "prompt," as opposed to code. And there are a lot more foreign options than the traditional bottom of the barrel coding farms.
Keep thinking that work from home has no negative consequences domestically, and you'll eventually end up like a Boeing castoff.
Already been happening. This is exactly what's been going on for over a year now at the company I was most recently working for.
When I check in with folks still there, they mainly talk about how the time difference and distance has done nothing but add churn to the entire process both between devs but also between devs and management. Hopefully higher ups will recognize these inefficiences too, but that's wishful thinking.
> When I check in with folks still there, they mainly talk about how the time difference and distance has done nothing but add churn to the entire process
I don't buy that. Saudi Arabia and the United States, via Saudi Aramco, have figured out a solution to that long ago. Business "flows" unimpededly between the two for decades.
> Remember when we said that tech workers should be careful what you wish for with regard to work from home? Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will go off in their head that someone from a much poorer country with an internet line can do the same work as their engineers making six figures and working in their home.
It's odd that you're pretending executives didn't already know this, and in fact havnt either already tried it, or have not already been engaging in such practices for a very long time. It's called outsourcing and tech companies have been doing it for literally decades. I didn't see "being in the office" saving any of those people.
Outsourcing is one of the first things i've heard out of the mouth of more mediocre mid level managers than I can count at this point in my career.
> If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation.
Outsourcing was already a thing more than ten years ago though. It may be easier to achieve thanks to all the freelancers available, but bosses still want to hire people to control them, while outsourcing prevents that in some ways.
Eh, maybe. There's Indian devs from Noida are up to snuff; skilled, fluent in English and hard working, and mesh well with western team members.
But they're not cheap from what I've heard, especially with overhead setting up shop in a foreign country. Similar story for devs from São Paulo as well.
> If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation. "Yep boss, those face-to-face meetings and talks around the coffee pot are VITAL to this company's success." You have to choose your battles.
It's not as if you have any influence on that. It all comes down to dollars. Faking a need for office collaboration will only postpone matters a short while.
To be honest I'd love to get my redundancy package now, I've worked at a major enterprise for 15 years and would get more than a year's wage.
I hate working there since the pandemic. Our IT top leaders are complete idiots. And the flex desk office is a nightmare to work in, always running around with your bag of stuff trying to find a desk because nobody obeys the booking system (planon, which is admittedly a total piece of shit)
I'd love to go and work for a startup again but I need the redundancy money to make it through.
Offshoring is not new and I’m not sure work from home has any influence. They certainly had these ideas years ago.
I can say from my experience the output and productivity of offshore devs hasn’t matched local. Not necessarily because of capabilities, but communication and culture.
> Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will go off in their head that someone from a much poorer country with an internet line can do the same work as their engineers making six figures and working in their home.
This is called offshoring, and has been done for decades, to varying degrees of success.
Companies are always trying to undermine label. This is a tale as old as time. WFH changes nothing in that regard.
Anecdotally, my first job in tech was as a cheap developer from a poor country, more than 2 decades ago.
Thomas Friedman published a New York Times best seller in 2005 — the
World is Flat.
A major premise of the book was that post-dot com boom, software engineering in the US had already gone the way of manufacturing — and was never coming back - because executives had figured out that people in much poorer countries with internet connections could do the work for much cheaper.
People have been trying to make outsource only models work for a lot longer than the pandemic.
Return to office mandates don't solve this problem, they will still fire you and replace you with someone cheaper and more desperate to move to work. I've seen folks move to work in office only to be immediately laid off.
Frankly, businesses are due for a reckoning because they're coasting on skeleton crews barely managing to survive critical incidents. More businesses than you think are ran like Boeing under the hood.
Fortunately, most of these people managed to find new jobs relatively quickly, albeit with somewhat lower comp packages.