The proletarianization of tech workers
The proletarianization of tech workers
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of [...]
Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.
I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.
I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I'd been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn't want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There's nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)
It's 9 years on and I'm working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don't make what I was making then (and I've been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I'm at is a good fit, they're accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn't the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.
Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don't care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I'm a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I'd reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that's not happening and when I think too hard about that it's not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)
Looking back, I recall being abruptly 'let go' from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.
No matter how much you make, if you don't actually own capital, and you must work for a living to survive, you're part of the proletariat. It's just a matter of everyone else who thinks they're part of the petit bourgeois finally waking up to that fact.
Except for cops and pinkertons but I repeat myself
imagine getting first replaced by some kid out of a garage, then by indian code farms and now by ai developed by the grown up kids from said garage and trained by indian code farms.
So tired of this rhetoric. AI isn't replacing any software engineering jobs, nor could it. It's a joke, quite frankly.
I was listening to a podcast about AI. I think it was one of Ezra Kleins. And he was telling a story that he heard, bout those weird virtual reality games from the 90s or early Aughts. And people shat on those games because they were awful and clunky and not very good so that shitting was well deserved. But one guy was like "yeah, that's all true. But this is the worst it's going to be. The next iteration isn't going to be worse than this."
And that's where AI is now. Like, it's powerful and already a threat to certain jobs. GPT 3/4 may be useless to software engineering jobs now (I'd argue that it's not - I work in a related field and I use it about daily) but what about GPT 5? 6? 10?
Im not as doom and gloom on AI as I was six months ago, but I think it's a bit silly to think that AI isn't going to cause massive upheaval across all industries in the medium to long term.
But also, for the record, I'm less worried about AI than I am about AI in the hands of Capitalism.
It was impossible for a computer to be smart enough to beat grandmasters at chess, until it wasn't. It was impossible to beat Go Masters at Go, until it wasn't.
No software engineering jobs are getting replaced this year or next year. But considering the rapid pace of AI development, and considering how much code development is just straight up redundant... looking at 20 years from now, it's not so bright.
It would be way better to start putting AI legislation in place this year. That or it's time to start transitioning to UBI.
As someone who started his tech career in the mid '90s, this kind of hurts to see put into words so well.
I started my tech career in 2003 and back then I thought I'd work for a startup, get some options, go public, and retire at 35.
That did not happen, and while I'm making more than most I don't have fancy vacations or a brand new Tesla.
Oh, thanks! I must have followed a gift link via Doctorow’s social because I didn’t encounter the paywall.
Maybe now we'll finally unionize
I think the number of places for an IT engineer to work is going to reduce to just SaaS companies and cloud providers. The guys working at the fortune 500s will be clicking radio buttons in an app and not know how any of it really works.
As someone who deals with this and helps make decisions for a large enterprise, SaaS and cloud service providers already have a really bad rep. SaaS especially. Not only is it all fragmented, as soon as you ever so slightly deviate from out of the box, it's fucked. You may have well just custom developed it.
Not to mention the costs and lock-in. I think you'll see a swing back towards custom software (using open standards and owned data centers and equipment soon. It's already happening. The value proposition of the cloud is dwindling (and honestly never existed for 70% of use cases).
There are plenty of tools now that let you do a hybrid where you can use the cloud as minimally as possible but do everything else "in house".
Id love to see a shift from "new, novel, innovation > *" to a, if we just properly supported and maintained the stuff we have it would be much cheaper and more effective.
eh, I think on prem will have a resurgence when cloud goes the way of streaming, and becomes so fragmented and expensive it becomes cheaper and safer to build your own.
I hope youre right. I see companies going from having mature change control processes to outsourcing to a saas or cloud provider who operates like the wild west behind the curtains.
Any way to read the article without the paywall?
Yes. But it would be wrong for you to use a site like archive.is to circumvent a paywall.
Absolutely. I certainly wouldn't click this link
I wish I could read the entire article without an account.
Eric Flint is one of my favorite authors.
There are others above who provide instructions warnings against bypassing paywalls (⌐■_■)
Wow. Americans were huge back then. Or could only afford clown cars.
That's a normal size for a compact car. American car sizes have inflated to ridiculous proportions.
It is also a drawing that exaggerated how happy the people inside where. (To encourage the viewer to buy one as well.)
I wish we could have a union at my job. I do data science stuff and I’m borderline incompetent at it, I think a union would really help me out and protect me. I want what the police have where they can be terrible but still have nice jobs. And I don’t want to get laid off. And it would be nice if there was some guarantee that I could work from home forever. And I want a raise. And if I have to go into the office for big meetings, I want the rest of the day off. And I already don’t work Thursday or Friday but I want that to be official. And it would be nice if nobody could send me slack messages until noon because sometimes they wake me up.
Calling google workers proletariat is out of touch and borderline insulting to real working class.
3-month salary for a junior at google is what a "real" proletarian do in a full year, with addition of pension, stock options, benefits and bonuses
The line dividing working class from owning class is not their monthly salary. It's their relationship to capital. Do they work for their living, or do they own for their living?
same reason why being an athlete sucks -- even though you're making insane sums, the guys at the top are making far more than that, without putting their body on the line in any way whatsoever, indefinitely [whereas most players retire in their 30s, if they're lucky enough to have that long of a career]
Ah yes, just what the working class desperately needs, a gatekeeper.
I am not a gate keeper. I work in an unionized company in fintech. But I also recognize that calling me "proletarian" is detrimental for battles of real proletariat. Because I have a better salary than a medical doctor with a 5th of the stress. And I don't make near google salary. I have former colleagues who went to google... They are not absolutely struggling. They need to unionize? Surely. But let's keep it real, use words properly, because there are people in the current economy who are struggling. Proletariat means that the only "capital" owned by someone is their children. It evolved to mean working class, where only capital is ability to do a work.
Google engineers have real capital invested in stock market and pension funds, a great salary and benefits, transferable skills, and their biggest asset is their knowledge. They need to unionize only to fight back to mass lay offs, and have more saying on the company direction. Other than that they are doing pretty fine.
Ah, the "true Scotchman" fallacy.
I guess it's your gut deciding who's a "real" worker?
The whole piece that we are commenting is a guy who said that some people were not proletariat and now they are. It is a gut piece. He's the one deciding that some people are now randomly proletariat
Dog the shadeholders who let google pay you that high wage to convince people to join this profession also own the fucking overpriced housing and grocery stores that take it riiiight back.