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Working for these companies lost any charm, when it stopped being about innovation, and working on cool things, and started being about min-maxing profits, at the cost abusing workers until they are suicidal
Wasn’t it always like that?
Especially considering most fun innovations get scrapped either way.
Most of the “fun innovations” are awesome ideas that would get a small startup a ton of business and make them widely successful. But the problem is that these companies are so large, that even those successful innovations barely make an impact on the company. So many initiatives at these companies have to be pitched as huge and game-changing in order to be funded in the first place. Which means they need to hire huge staffs, to justify their importance.
The managers make extremely optimistic forecasts: they have to, to get the project funded at all. Then, when the project is successful (but not as successful as promised) the bean counters scale it back to the size it should have been in the first place. So the headline is all these layoffs, when the real problem is that these companies are too darn big to operate efficiently.
I believe it also is for creating hype among investors. “Look at this new amazing product lineup we got! Self driving cars! Invest in us before those huge things turn into reality!”
And to get on the more conspiratorial side, it might also be to dry up the market of talent. It’s hard for competitors to make a product if all talent is already doing cool stuff elsewhere.
I, too, am a, very big, fan, of commas
That’s what happens, when the two grading choices in your language class are either 0%, or 100%
This. It used to be the dream because we believed in what technofuturism had to offer. We believed in instant access to knowledge and we thought we could all make it cheap enough that it would be an uplift across humanity.
We came up with so many cool things in the process. Little did we know we were simply building the foundations of our dystopian cyberpunk corpo future.
“We just wanted ice cream cones and fast cars” (South park).
These companies can’t help but shoot themselves in the foot grubbing for ever more money.
Remember that it was Musky that did the first tech layoff that started this whole thing
Family pushed college as the only possible way for me to lead a happy life and make money.
The kids from my high school who went into the oil fields are making double my salary.
I don’t think there’s ever going to be a case for “less education is better,” but I also don’t think more education necessarily leads to higher salaries. It often does, but those are two different conversations in by book.
Yep… And they don’t have the crippling student debt.
I’ve always worked for small companies and moved to a big company a year ago, and I feel like I AM living the dream. Hard capped 40 hour weeks, 35 days vacation, plenty of perks like an on-site gym and free car charging. I didn’t think that things like this could exist in the IT world. Unions really make a huge difference.
I think Big Tech is still pretty much a dream job for most people. High pay. Perks. Work/life flexibility. It’s certainly not as dreamy as it was 5 years ago perhaps, but realistically I’d take it over pretty much anything else.
Each year this trend will accelerate. My dream job will not inevitably lay me off in 3 years…
I would too, but it really depends on the company. If I can do it, I’m WFH for the rest of my career for companies < 1000 people.
FAANG (or whatever it is these days) are awful fucking people to work for. One of the developers I respect most in my career walked out on .5M in bonuses on Amazon because of their ranking system for his employees. I was shocked.
But depending on the employer it’s still a very good gig. But if you’re at the wrong place, it’s like the upper circles of hell.
One of the developers I respect most in my career walked out on .5M in bonuses on Amazon because of their ranking system for his employees. I was shocked.
This also shows what an incredibly privileged position techies have in the job market. I totally understand quitting Amazon. Really, I wouldn’t want to work there either. But ask one of their warehouse workers if they’d ever quit and forfeit a 0.5M bonus…
Companies like Amazon can pull this off because of stock grants. (And I don’t think they give out stock grants to warehouse workers, but I could be wrong.)
When they hire a developer, especially one who already has the relevant experience they for, they will say “On top of the salary and bonus, we will also give you $200k worth of stock”. But that stock can’t be sold right away; it goes into an account where it vests over some number of years, every 6 months. Your only condition for vesting the stock is being employed. If you leave for any reason, or even get laid off, you give up the rest.
Sometimes you also get smaller awards with your yearly review, subject to the same terms. They do this so that if you are a key developer, leaving would mean you forfeit this large account you have accumulated on paper. But in the back of your mind, you know that if your project gets canceled and you don’t find a new one in the company, that money goes poof also. So it’s play money until it vests, anyway. And there is always another vesting event coming sometime in the next few months.
And I don’t think they give out stock grants to warehouse workers, but I could be wrong.
Yeah. That’s my point. And still people take these jobs and work very hard indeed. Try explaining “limited bathroom break time” to your average tech worker.
Average Amazon .com Warehouse Worker hourly pay in the United States is approximately $16.96, which is 7% above the national average.
People don’t seem to understand the average worker would kill to make $80/hour and $200k in RSUs. Not a dream job, right.
My point is that while it seems insane to leave half a million in RSUs to leave a company, if the person thinks their job is in a precarious position, it’s extremely unlikely they would ever have vested them all anyway. So the money was never really theirs to begin with.
Now, is that DevOps engineer worth that much more than the warehouse guy who picks the item to send to you? I doubt it. But it seems like that’s the going rate for a competent DevOps engineer with the relevant experience. While the qualifications to be in the warehouse are not quite so stringent.
leave half a million in RSUs
I’m not sure if it’s intentionally being left out here, but if you have half a million in unvested stock, any competing offer from another FAANG company is likely giving you a stock match, or at least somewhere close to match.
The golden handcuffs aren’t as tight as people make them seem.
That’s no guarantee, though, it would have to be negotiated. And let’s face it, most devs aren’t the best at negotiating…
I work in medium tech. Since they have to compete for talent. We get the high pay and work life flexibility. It’s much better than large tech. I would never go work for a Microsoft , Amazon or Google. Not worth it.
Not anymore. Middling pay, constant threat of fire, constant degradation, most perks went away a loooong time ago, zero work/life balance. You can get that same bullshit working for Company X.
Eh. I work in tech. I have friends who work or worked at almost every big tech company you’d recognize. These are still jobs, dealing with layoffs, annoying bosses, etc. has always been a fact of life. But from what I can see the average techie still has it very good compared to most other jobs. My friend who is a nurse would certainly to earn a tech salary, not have to deal with hospital politics, and not work night shifts all the damn time, and take time off whenever they want to not whenever there’s availability…
I work these same companies. It’s not about bad bosses, it’s the C-Level people in your news feed degrading their entire workforce via the press. It’s hearing your job is going to be “phased out” if you don’t start reporting to an office hours away after being hired for remote work. It’s having your pay slashed and being told to “deal with it, or find a new job” via email on Monday, then hearing about it all over the news on Tuesday to really hammer it home that you have to fear for your job, and they’ll absolutely replace your ass if you say anything about it.
This was all done by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the past year at various different times as if it work from a guidebook on demoralizing your workforce.
Yeah. Tech has gotten worse. But you really think it’s better in any other sector? I’m sure there are a few highly-compensated lap-dance-inspectors out there but the vast majority of workers deal with the same shit techies are dealing with, for significantly less pay and respect, if you can believe that.
as if it work from a guidebook on demoralizing your workforce.
Probably not a guidebook, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the hired consultants specializing in exactly that.
Lol shouda unionized
Middling pay? At FAANG-tier companies?
These are some extraordinary claims in need of some extraordinary proof.
Not a claim, just a fact. Everyone walking around thinking we’re making an easy $300k, and taking vacations all the time, and have the best of everything. Absolutely nothing resembling that type of compensation exists anymore. Easy to Google, but just read this headline from today:
Well according to Glassdoor the median total salary for a software engineer at google is 249k.
That is a lot of words to say “they found out that the big tech executives had been lying to them about being family, changing the world. etc” just as much as their last employer was.
News flash, working in big tech is every bit as soul sucking for the rank and file as it is working in big healthcare, or big law firm, or <insert large industry here>. Nothing special about it, they are large publicly traded companies that have shareholders and investors to answer to as the number 1 priority.
