Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that *replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers” doesn’t need to actually work longterm to accomplish the primary goal of permanently devaluing and eroding the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming.
^ Programmer make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it’s not really that bad. It’s not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it’s way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.
But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do
___ Image ---- "We Are Pipes. " Image ----- ----- “Our Voice Is The Expression Of The Pipe.” Image ----- “The First Technology was The Pipe.” Image ----- “The Last Technology will be The Pipe.” Image ----- “Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Computer Pipes.” Image Image “Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Shit Pipes” Image “We Are One” “We Are The Pipe.” Image
10/10 write up
I’m an infrastructure engineer working at a government contractor and I’m in a union with OPEIU 1010, the tech workers’ local. Others are unionizing independently, with CWA, etc… It’s still early days for the tech industry but there are examples. We’re really not that different from other industries with a larger union presence.
Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it’s hard to envision what I could actually do.
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as outsourcing.
Not even outsourcing, they are internal hires, just elsewhere.
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as *outsourcing
*Class Warfare
FTFY
I’m sure the software engineers in India and Mexico see it differently.
Companies like google pressuring governments in India and Mexico to crack down on unions and work protections there is what it looks like for them and limitations on immigration (and the freedoms of those do immigrate).
Free market of labor is never the real source of downward market pressure, IMHO. Its the veryil intentional policies ment to keep labor desperate.
You know how most of the software engineers in India feel? Like they are even more micromanaged, overworked and deprived of agency in the work place than US tech workers.
I want software engineers and India and Mexico to earn a living wage just as much as I want software engineers living in my city to earn a living wage and have a workplace that treats them with decency (and doesn’t try to treat humans like robots).
I am sure most Indians and Mexican software engineers feel that way about software engineers from other countries too.
The only zero sum games here is between all of us and the ruling class and if you don’t see that now I hope one day in the future that thought will find you with an open mind.
Outsourcing is the problem and you are called racist or xenophobic if you even mention it. Unions have nothing to do with it they would only exasperate the speed of the transfer of knowledge and jobs to lesser developed countries with higher cost labor.
The government needs to break up these oligopolies who have more money than the government itself. That money is spent on people who have no idea what is going on in the tech world, they just listen to the lobbyists, accept their checks and investment returns. They couldn’t care less about the long term effects.
RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 6 months ago
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
MentalGymnastics@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
They’ll say the work is not needed. That’s because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 6 months ago
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
MentalGymnastics@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Knowing Amazon quite well, there definitely are sectors that are seriously deficient even new emerging ones within Amazon seem deficient.
I agree it wasn’t painless in fact there is a high suicide rate within the computer sciences field. In fact it probably still isn’t painless. I also agree unions are useless but some government regulation wouldn’t be.
Yea everything is. Until it isn’t.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave).”
www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
files.epi.org/page/-/old/…/bp143.pdf
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 6 months ago
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, by then there’s not really a point in debating the role of the union in that case.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you are an asshole
Veraxus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it’s not something they negotiate and protect. “No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote.”
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
Sure, it can, because I’m going to blow your mind: businesses aren’t about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company’s best long term asset–they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs–yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it’s still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn’t going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn’t really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it’s not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla’s ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn’t look like it’s going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn’t make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
Veraxus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wealth (whether it be “money”, resources, or anything else) and power are one and the same. Two sides of the same coin. Either one provides access to the other. I don’t think of them as separate or distinct at all… which is why it’s problematic for the aristocratic hoarders when plebes start to pool either and work collectively.
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
Oh, no, they’re not exactly the same. They wouldn’t come into conflict if they were the same.
As another example, unions. Employees often see issues early on; perhaps a machine needing maintenance. A union can bring this up to management and put the pressure on to get it done. The business will save money in the long run with machines in proper maintenance.
If it doesn’t get done, best case scenario is that it fails and the whole production line is shot until it’s fixed. Worst case, it fails more catastrophically and damages other equipment, or injures workers.
Despite plenty of stories like this, companies will fight unionization efforts every time. Why? Because money doesn’t always align with power.