Why Tech Employees Are Ready to Revolt
inc.comI would say that bad ideas are having a heyday across all economic sectors, not only tech. You could call it the epoch of bad ideas having a heyday, if you want.
One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.
Business as a whole is becoming much more unfriendly to labor. They're realizing that perceived external threats like temporary recessions, AI labor, a threatened US dollar, etc, can give them continuous leverage in any labor discussions and they're pressing the advantage for all that they can.
If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
Yup, that's part of the supposed "Gen Z is lazy" mentality they try to spread. While making them jump more hoops than ever for "entry level" jobs that has less buying power that may not even pay rent. And no pension/social secutity to even try to reel the few in that do that.
People may not all be financial experts, but they can do basic math and realize none of this makes sense.
>If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
2 years ago we were starting to properly talk about 32 hour workweeks. Sad how quickly things can go backwards. Really hope America isn't stupid and tries to go the Greece route with this inevitable crisis.
Gen Z support of unions is highest of all generational strata. They know what’s up.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-closing-gender-...
Business has been hostile to labor for quite some time.
What's changed in the last few years is a new focus on bringing white collar labor to heel.
So it's new for businesses to be expected to try to make their deals turn out well primarily for themselves?
No, it's 'much more unfriendly', if you would read again.
Then you tell someone to start their own business so they can treat their workers the way they deserve to be treated, then you get a bunch of excuses about why that is impossible! I guess there is just a conspiracy from every business to prevent honest people from being in charge
I work for a company which treats workers very well and the company is doing very well themselves. Of course it's possible; don't let anyone tell you it isn't.
Assuming you do that you'll still get vc forcing a different treatment.
No one is required to take VC.
They are if they don't have capital.
Many bootstrap business owners did it somehow without a VC...
How can I do it without capital, straight out of college, with only around 2 years of real-world experience and no network? Honest question.
The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.
From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
Find a good local problem that you have connections with people who'd buy it. Doesn't need to be a software, many small businesses start as sole proprietor working for himself and slowly growing the company by hiring help.
No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.
Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.
Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.
Local services are not tech jobs. The second you decide to go tech, you have to be prepared to complete globally.
There are many local problems that require local knowledge and serving local customers. I have a friend with a business for California vehicle compliance reports. Some stupid paperwork that needs to be updated yearly when the rules change. It's super local and he has 10 employees supporting clients remote and on site. It grew very slowly but it's in 11th year now and revenue is not bad at all. Nothing to compete globally, knowledge is local, clients need local services.
Figure out what you want to build. Figure out how much you will need to build it. Now cut that in half and only build the most important parts.
-Dropped out, no connections, still built stuff.
What all indie hackers are doing is getting support and resources from an equivalent of venture capital investment. Which is Cathedral approved education that effectively reduces to attaching an epistemology onto yourself that limits you and prevents you from functioning outside the cramped divisions of civilization-approved entrepreneurship.
The education offered by civilization includes logic that's crafted by a pedagogy that's biased toward vulgarity and social skills that don't perform well when it comes to building anything that would help a man get away from a forced commitment to anything more than maximizing viewer impressions on provocative Internet-uploaded content. The average tech entrepreneur isn't any better than a McDonald's hamburger grill operator or a female OnlyFans model or a delivery app driver, once you remove your civilly trained bias toward low resolution videos on socioeconomic dynamics.
To use a great illustration, even a billionaire techno-commercialist like Elon Musk can never hope to achieve independent wealth acquisition. Because his education, personal origin, and development are not really deviant and an instance of someone that can perform beyond the abstract black box that is knowledge given by civilization's life experiences which the life offers to every man. He will always come up short, whenever it's a question of exiting from the liberal-democratic regime and its permanent ironic anti-libertarianism stance. The question is: How to build a business that's not required to conform with all expectations, social and physical/ontological? Leading up to aerospace technology and acquiring science for Earth-to-Mars orbit transfers ain't it. Even having a business starting capital of one hundred dollars in the style of the $100 Startup comes with a history whose financial system component is tied to having a certain social obligation. A certain physical requirement commonly called life.
I’m okay with the value of the dollar drastically decreasing. In fact, I think it will naturally do so due to the high debt and labor becoming more expensive in other countries.
I think it would be good for U.S. workers as it will help make them more competitive in a global labor market.
ANY call to set a debt ceiling needs to be directly tied to converting all for-profit corporations into public-benefit corporations.
That doesn't restrict corporations from generating profit. It just balances how they use said profits.
"Fixing" the national debt problem by putting a ceiling on it without addressing one of the main contributors to the current state of government spending and quality of life in America is a recipe for disaster.
It's okay to rip the band-aid off, but only if you're ready to deal with what may be a mortal wound.
I’m not following. What does setting a debt ceiling have to do with making for profit corporations public benefit ?
What’s the main contributor to the current government spending ?
Look at all of the major government spending and determine who benefits most and where funds are sent. If the recipient of funds is a corporation, also review how their profits are spent and which humans eventually profit from that.
> I would say that bad ideas are having a heyday across all economic sectors, not only tech.
At least there probably won't be another eMeringue this time?
1. As things get more technologically advanced/complex, the number of people who can tell you that a bad idea is bad keeps diminishing. Crypto and blockchain are classic examples. Financial experts told you crypto is going nowhere. Database experts told you blockchain is a nothingburger. But they were drowned out by the sea of laypeople (or experts in other things) telling you how crypto and blockchain would become the bedrock of tomorrow's society.
2. It is now common knowledge that one can become adequately rich from working on or investing in bad ideas, to the point where an idea isn't even considered bad if you can grift investor money from it. In other terms, it's no longer taboo to scam people richer or stupider than you; it's just "hustling".
We all lost our minds during COVID. That's just what happens when you don't have people around who can can check your ideas.
Don't you have to have leverage to revolt? How do you revolt after you've been laid off? I don't understand this column. They're laying off because they've vastly overhired, and if they laid off too much (while everyone else was also laying off), they'll be able to pick people back up at a huge discount.
If programmers wanted to force companies to maintain wildly irrational staffing levels, they should have unionized a decade and a half ago when they had the leverage. There are too many programmers, now. Current innovation is high-level and academic, and maybe 2% of the people posting on HN are educated enough to ride the bleeding edge of that.
While as much I empathize with tech workers (being one of them) at this point I feel automation and efficiencies they have developed in last 3-4 decades that displaced middle class jobs and skills are now good enough to displace large chunk of tech workers themselves.
Elite tech workers at top cloud/ software based companies can vehemently disagree but for mid level IT folks at typical enterprise shops situation is far more gloomier than it was even 10 years back.
Now if these employees are ready to revolt I suspect it will most fine by employers.
Blaming this on the tech workers, or the automation technologies themselves, misses the true source of the problem: the business owners who take the profit all for themselves, rather than allowing it to be enjoyed by all.
The promise of automation is that people should be able to work less and still be paid enough to live comfortably.
> the business owners who take the profit all for themselves
When has this ever not been true? And how would it be fixed?
"it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"
When the incentives aligned. Pretty sure during the 90+% tax rate era offered insane incentives to reinvest into the business and employees.
I don't think we need to get rid of capitalism. The controls around capitalism like taxes, social safety nets, could use a little fine tuning.
Capitalism at its core is still pretty efficient compared to everything else. The hyper efficiency needs to not throw the baby (regular folks) out with the bath water(cutting expenses), that’s all.
While there have certainly always been greedy people, and greedy owners, there has been a very visible shift within my lifetime (~40 years).
Previously, the general rule was that a business was there to produce a good or provide a service, and the profit they made (if any) was the reward for that. There were some businesses that acted much more greedy, but overall it was clear that this was how business worked.
Now, the rule is much more that a business is there to make as much profit as possible, and the good they produce or service they provide is purely a means to that end—and, in many cases, largely an undesirable one. Again, there are still some businesses that operate based on the older philosophy, but overall this is the prevailing atmosphere.
This is what I would describe as the dividing line between "capitalism" and "late-stage capitalism".
As for an end to capitalism:
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
― Ursula K. Le Guin
And even more so profit from the operating company is not a goal. It is profit from market valuation of the company. Which when you really think about obviously only can lead to some sort of failure or catastrophe.
Ofc, HN with VC funded companies love this model. Generate "wealth" from essentially imagination. Throw more money in and number goes up, end goal find someone to dump whole thing on. Be it public or some established company that found extractive niche.
I find lot less wrong in traditional capitalism. Start making something, sell it for profit, build a factory to sell more. Then use proceeds and possibly loans to build bigger factory. Rinse and repeat. At least you are generating possibly something useful for eveyone and getting money as part of process is not unreasonable.
The ones doing covert layoffs through revoking WFH are praying for mass walkouts that they can turn into lockouts.
If you are fired you get unemployment (which the company has to pay). If you walk out you get no unemployment benefits. A better strategy to use if WFH is enforced with the goal of getting workers to quit is to just keep working from home and let them fire you, at least in terms of your income. You'll have to convince your next employer that you weren't fired for performance reasons. In any case companies that are trying to force workers to quit may be doing it to save money on unemployment benefits. If you already have another job lined up then quitting is the right thing to do, but otherwise think about the consequences to your income.
This is an interesting theory. To what end? To replace the entire American workforce with cheaper offshore labor?
It's to weed out the types of ego-driven employees who like to threaten lawsuits and publicly complain about the companies they work for. They'll lose some productive individuals.. but companies need their full teams to build success together, not just a series of individuals working for their own personal success at the expense of the team.
If any individual could complete the product on their own, then the company itself would be pointless. Individual success is not mutually exclusive to team success, but the people who do not work well on teams are unlikely to return to office (or tolerate similar actions). Companies know this, and they've learned they can't find toxic employees by looking at individual success alone.
There's other ways to find this dysfunction, but looking at team metrics instead of individual means you have to cut an entire team to try and force out maybe a few employees who actively hate the company. RTO is a unique opportunity to try a different, and perhaps more targeted approach. There will still be an some great team members lost for purely physical reasons, but perhaps fewer than firing entire teams.
Is there any good reason why about 90% of web dev, both client and server side, can't be standardized and automated? At least WYSIWYG.
90% of web dev probably is automated.
A big portion of the web is WordPress sites, created by some site builder, etc.
The web platform itself isn't too hard in the grand scheme of things. But even then, I'm not sure if I'd trust true automation of thousands, maybe even a million different web clusters all working seamlessly with the management of a few developers.
A lot of what Musk cut out was support. the ones answering tickets or talking with adverts/big users to keep them happy. You can't solve that with a chatbot. The corrosion there is exactly why Twitter stock tanked.
Twitter stock tanked after Elon bought the company and took it private? Are you sure you have your facts?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/02/x-twitter...
I apologize for the loose language, but yes. It's pretty clear that people smarter than me value Twitter much less for a variety of reasons.
Yes. Once someone automates their webdev with WordPress or Wix or whatever, it no longer counts as webdev.
What is server side WYSIWYG? Genuine question.
I think it could be something like https://juju.is/ or https://www.systeminit.com/ but maybe I am not understanding what you mean.
Because web developers like to create monstrous "frameworks" and other tooling that provide no value other than in generating more work for web developers.
90% of web dev is CRUD and landing pages, so yeah. But this kind of development starts with non-technical product people and designers crafting "unique" requirements and only including engineers at the implementation phase, so "everything is customized". Even within a single product you won't see standardization and automation, just a massive amount of redundancy due to a very fragmented and non-engineering-centric development cycles. The limitations of things like Wix or Wordpress works in their favor.
But the sibling reply makes an important point: most of the tech from Twitter is there because of scale. That's perhaps part of the 10%.
Standardized and automated is another word for stagnate.
We're already there. Web sites today do about the same things they did a decade ago.
They just use much more network bandwidth, memory, screen real estate and CPU power and time to do it.
This is just comments by engineers having a pity party, clicked on an article. Lesson for a retired 40 something VC, minus high functioning aspergers, you will be employees. Be happy with your 250k+ per year and realise you only see the business world from a small wedge that is your department and rarely understand scope unless it's drilled into you.
No-one is going to revolt. Everyone's laden with debt of various kinds, children, spouse, and familial and social obligations--a burden we'll bear for the rest of our lives. One can't simply wash them off and start again. And our masters know that.
So... free VC money is drying up (probably for some larger economic reasons?), and it's a lot harder to get paid to do things that don't make money? And this is a "shitshow" and means people are going to "revolt" (and do what instead?).
And somehow the latest improvement to low-code/no-code tooling (LLMs / AI) are making it all worse, maybe because they'll really for real this time finally let business-side people not need programmers.
good start would be to unionize
Check how US steel and auto industry prospered in a connected world with unionized workforce competing with Mexico labour.
You can't legislate your way to profitability... Global competition will eat the profit margin and companies won't have enough money to honour their contracts and will go bust (as history shows).
No written law can compete with the invisible hand of the market.
Unionize at an unprofitable business with no realistic model in a post-ZIRP reality? That would drive a 6 month runway to zero immediately
Companies slashing jobs so the CEOs can get hundred million dollar payoffs.
Worked for Boeing.
If these companies don't want to respect and retain engineers, they don't have to.
Boeing tried this strategy, and its definitely having noticable results.
Article starts: "This has been an unprecedented period of unprovoked kicks and unkept promises for workers in the tech industry."
I wish corporations much joy of their AI employee replacement efforts. Much, much joy.
( /sarcasm, if it's needed.)
It takes a lot more tech staff to build a tech company than it does to run a tech company.
This whole thread is pathetic. Gen-Zs threatening to "revolt" because they get fired soon after being hired for being lazy and not even having the skills to use Excel? Sure, children. You go and revolt. Fling your Legos. Stomp your feet. Flail your hands. Take some selfies at the unemployment office and post them on TikTok, the social network for tiktards. Then go back to your room at your parents house. They are the ones to blame for raising losers.