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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
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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 won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers 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 further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
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.
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.
"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)."
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
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.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
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, but then there’s not real point in debating the role of the union in that completely different context.
There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
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
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t 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 to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. 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.
It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be
Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution
Hey bud, if you cant imagine a world without [oppression] please step aside. The rest of us have work to do to end the violence. We know it’s time.
The rest of us have work to do to end the violence.
I cannot imagine a world without oppression, this is true. However, I grew up long ago in a world where oppression came from those who said they’d overthrow it last time. They were using the same ideas you flaunt around and much like you (or whomever the person I was talking to before was), they had superficial understanding of what they were advocating for.
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.
Yes, Google is to blame for low salaries in India.
The latest cuts come as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.
Repulsive.
So they ditch the people who helped make them successful? What kind of ass-backwards strategy is this?
“Juice the next 3 months.”
Thats it. Thats the whole strategy each exec uses until they leave.
How can I get one of these jobs? Important detail I’m not rich.
Seems like a low skill job.
It’s called
Late Stage Capitalism
I already made this comment on a completely different post, but it’s funny to see it’s fruition. McDonald’s executives bitching that fast food price increases have priced a lot of their low income customers off their menu… like they had no hand in it
Just got laid off 2 days ago. They laid off the entire marketing team leaving only the head developer and the web manager.
They then had the galls to ask us if we wanted to stay for 6 months so we can train OUR FUCKING POSITIONS TO INDIA FOR THEM. We could take that or just leave and take a 2 month severance.
1/2 of me wanted to take the opportunity so I can sabotage the company by making it worse for them, but my dignity wouldn’t let me do it.
Back to job boards again…
Also, while I’m on this soapbox, wtf is up with these fucking companies asking people to do FREE work just to be considered for an opportunity. Wait, this is a LIVE campaign? My work might be used for things other than to show my abilities.
arg~!
Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
That is the double edge sword of remote work: if your job can be done from anywhere, it can be done by someone else in another country where wages are lower.
This always comes down to the fact that labor is competitive. Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year? Competition drives the prices of labor down. Maybe there needs to be better regulation for labor competition like corporations enjoy.
What I don’t understand is why does competition matter for workers but somehow not for CEOs? I kind of understand and agree in the free market to an extent - if you’re fine with hiring a dev for $100 instead of another dev for $1000, and you’re okay with the difference in quality / time / etc. then go for it. But where is all this competition happening for CEOs?
Surely someone must be as qualified as Bitchai and willing to do the same job for a measly 100 million a year instead of his 200 million.
but somehow not for CEOs?
Workers do the actual work. CEOs just make decisions that anyone can make and they have a board of people usually backing them up.
What I’m perplexed at is - what if I went to the board and said “I have a guaranteed way to increase profit by 150 million - just pay me 50 million a year and fire Bitchai”. I would legit do my best to make great decisions for 50 million.
Why doesn’t the board care about cutting costs by cutting CEO pay? I can’t imagine any difference that would really justify Bitchai 's pay difference.
I also cannot imagine they are all part of some secret conspiracy where they all know each other and like each other so much that they just want to pay him that money because they’re buddies.
Wouldn’t $150 million be more than enough justification to hire someone else?
This assumes that they aren’t hiring the CEO to be the fall guy. Someone who’s job is largely (as things stand now) meant to take on the risk that if the company does not increase profits or make shareholders happy, they will blame and fire that person and hire someone else.
Since a lot of CEOs kind of bet on this they take ridiculous chances (like getting paid in stock options that only mature at a certain point with the knowledge that they need to make stock options valuable so they can cash out).
Valuable doesn’t have to be long term. It just has to last long enough for the person in question to cash out.
Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year?
Assuming the same job’s quality, a possible answer is “because to live where your company is you need to be paid $200K/year”
“because to live where your company is you need to be paid $200K/year”
How do people live in these areas without making $200k/year?
They cannot, that is the reason you need to pay that much to work for you.
So nobody lives in these areas that makes under $200k/year?
Even the janitors?
I can work for 20 dollars a year
Spez you just got a $193 million dollar compensation go buy TikTok or something.
Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a ‘reason’ that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, “If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there’s nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines.”
Outsourcing was a thing way before the pandemic, but it was always a failure for, they never dared replace us when they noticed the bad results.
If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there’s nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."
That’s one of the reasons I went into a field of technology where the work is mostly hands-on.
Hardware maintenence, troubleshooting, installation and repair isn’t something that can effectively be done remotely.
Clever human!
Standard capitalist playbook. Been that way since the 80s
I don’t understand why the US keeps allowing that. They should have learned that moving the production facilities to othercountries to reduce costs just lead to a massive job loss and brain drain in the manufacturing sector, now they allow the same to happen in the tech sector. It won’t be long until the US is a dried out husk of a country
Greed rules every sector of business Overarchingly so. No concern for anything except monetary profit.
India, the nation everybody hires to when they need something hacked?
This seems really bad.
It’s like when we sent all our manufacturing to China.
Your comment is kinda racist.
You think about India as a call center scam country because that’s mostly the only personal experience you have with Indians.
Also, Indians are more commonly known for social engineering scams than anything. (which is also a pretty racist stereotype).
I think it’s bad form to call everyone who disagrees with offshored work a racist. Moving the entry level jobs away from the US has created this situation and that stereotype. You are denying the very real problem by saying it’s a racist/xenophobic stereotype. Like all stereotypes, there’s roots in reality.
The technology industry there has been growing since the US started giving away it’s entry level tech jobs and the training that comes with it. The enormous scamming industry is a direct result of the rejects from the call centers. Those call center rejects see their friends and neighbors succeed but can’t hack it in that environment but they too want their pieces of pie. They are useless to M$ (and the like) but even though they failed there, they picked up skills that make them valuable to criminals.
Same shit happens in the US, it’s how people who suck at their jobs generally continue to get hired. Nothing wrong with discussion about it just because it’s happening to another country.
Maybe we should stop letting companies become oligopolies through antitrust allowing them to dictate whole global markets and have more money than the governments of many entire nations.
I would say it is fine. It would increase the wages in India and at some point the pay would equal to the person who lives in the USA.
Location based pay shouldn’t be there, as I have seen the differences in real life.
A bunch of people works on a ship, all part of same team does same job. But their pay is based on their home location.
People who came from Nordic region earn more and people from east Asia earns way less, though the job is exactly same.
It would increase the wages in India and at some point the pay would equal to the person who lives in the USA.
You would make a fantastic fantasy writer. 🥲
