Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
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.
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 6 months ago
Repulsive.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 6 months ago
So they ditch the people who helped make them successful? What kind of ass-backwards strategy is this?
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 6 months ago
“juice the next 3 months.”
Thats it. Thats the whole strategy each exec uses until they leave.
Dinsmore@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
There’s a recent podcast talking about this if you’re interested - omny.fm/…/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
TLDR; they fired the guy largely responsible for building google search and replaced him with the guy running google ads.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It’s called
Late State Capitalism
IllNess@infosec.pub 6 months ago
Yes. They have let go people that worked there for over 15 years.
I believe what Mark Zuckerberg said about the tech layoffs, streamlining by getting rid of more management roles.
Wrench@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“Do no evil” was abandoned long ago.