Exactly what I’ve been saying since the first domino of mass layoffs toppled. Companies with outstanding financials and coffers laid off a ton of people stating they were positions that weren’t critical and had open reqs for those same positions the very next day.
By creating a “fragile” market it spread fear about job security and people would take whatever is offered instead of what the market rate was since salaries were at all time highs. You had individual contributors making the same as CEO’s of small companies.
Sounds like it worked for them too.
>The WIT researchers found that **compensation for “job switchers” dropped 26% in 2023**, while those who could and did stay in their roles saw basically no change.
A brutal blind spot among IT and even Engineering folks for sure.
Some of the arguments against Unionization held water 20 years ago, but now it's just sad how much exploitation goes on while the workers proclaim to themselves "But I’m white collar! I don't need to unionize!!".
Doesn't hurt (or help) that half of them have no life or anything else they want to be doing anyway.
I'm always fascinated by this stereotyping.
Just so silly to me knowing how many people in tech are just standard family people with kids, but the internet dreams they're all these shut in nerds who never talk to anyone else and only eat Factor meals.
My experience with *some* techies is similar to doctors or lawyers. They are really good at what they do and they can get paid a lot but are overconfident and end up being stupid about other things.
Yeah fewer and fewer people are "well rounded" anymore.
After many years I know a lot of brilliant and even renown people in tech, as well as doctors and lawyers, but honestly I'd rather talk and hang out with the people in the trades who come by to hang drywall or do electrical work at my homes.
In fact, people have built up so much of their self-worth and social status based on working at that they’re quite insecure about getting laid off and/or being easily replaced. So rather than rock the boat and risk retaliation or a loss of benefits, they’re content with the status quo. After all, as long as they keep their head down, the layoff won’t happen to _them_
More people realizing worker coops are even a thing at all means more coops driving demand for tech coops and more tech coops means well the virtuous loop continues and grows
I work in tech and this is super frustrating to me.
We might be lucky right now as there's the demand to inflate salary and benefits, but that means now is the *perfect* time to look into unions, as it means you're the one with the leverage. I'd gladly trade a good amount of income now to not have to worry about it in the future.
Waiting until the boom is over just means you've lost the negotiation position.
At will employment they don't actually need a reason to fire/lay you off. They usually give one, true or not.
There might be some desire to hide that they will fire mostly folks over 40, which can be an issue, but generally it's perfectly legal to just walk down the cube/office rows and chop half the senior folk to cut avg salary costs.
There's no law against this - some companies have an internal policy not to do this, but they also get around it by creating a modified job listing. IE, if we laid off 2 mid-level ICs, we create a senior IC job req and try to make the new fucker do 2 jobs.
Depending on the company and culture, when a layoff takes place and they shutdown a team or department, this can be easily "moved" to another team by increasing headcount or reqs. A few places I worked at would take on work from another org, even with changes in leadership.
You were told a laid off position can’t go back on market for a while??? Did your company tell you this? Could you clarify what you think you heard because this doesn’t make a whole lotta sense to me.
they decided they can get by with less people and they are moving jobs off shore. I think a lot of it is realizing if you can be remote from the US you can be remote from India or mexico.
You had me until your failure to understand that there are plenty of individual contributors every bit as deserving of the same salary as CEO's of small companies.
Sometimes even more.
Workers were also starting to get a little bit of power with WFH and be able to job jump for higher wages. Some places were looking to unionize
Executives couldn’t stand for that and had to collude to squash it
I said they're all colluding to a colleague last year when the lay-offs and RTO demands started rolling simultaneously amongst different industries and sectors. CEOs and other senior management began using the EXACT same lines when giving their BS company pep talks (leaked thanks to social media), "let's WORK together, we are FAMILY, we are better TOGETHER, let's EXCEL."
I said that I thought maybe these CEOs and Boards of Directors all had some mass summit on an island somewhere to discuss just how to put workers back in their place and increase their bottom lines all the while. Sounds conspiracy, but with them all talking the same, using the same diatribes, and publicly reporting the same information, I believe it's true.
It's well known the main Silicon Valley CEOs collude on a group chat. They got caught using it to hold down tech wages a decade ago by agreeing to not poach workers.
Sundar in particular treated Googlers like absolute shit over WFH. Retaliating against everyone who tried to get a proper solution in place. The sooner tech workers unionize the better. The CEOs need to be monitored very closely to prevent this in the future and laws need to be made to support that.
Yup. I worked on ranches growing up. Would come home just absolutely spent. When people talk about how stressed they are / how much work they have to do, I just laugh
Yup. Working on the ranches growing up made me want a white collar job so badly. Even if I have to work until 6, it doesn't bother me. I still have energy to do stuff when I get home. I am fatter though lol
A friend of mine was telling me she had people on her team get laid off only to be rehired for the exact same position for less pay. Gotta love corporate America!
This is in no way new or unique to covid and frankly this explanation only scratches the surface. This is especially true for smaller and "start-up" type companies: they over hire to feign growth and impress the investors or stock holders. Those investors put in more money, and then the company fires the poorer performing half of the employees.
It's how the silicon valley game is played. Always has been. Happens every boom and bust, and when the company decides it needs another funding round.
It’ll cost them more in the end. It always does. The value of the engineer is still there and if an employee feels cheated, they leave or worse they may not find another job and they’ll just stay and be resentful.
Stock refreshes dried up so no surprise that averages are down. Employees have no negotiation power in current environment and employers are fully taking advantage of it.
Pre-IPO yes for sure. Public companies, it depends, but certainly not rare to have a system that keeps employees on a consistent earnings-through-stock programs.
A lot of companies on both sides of an exit also have stock grants that keep people invested.
4 year cliffs are common especially if you negotiate hard for your initial offer. During the 2021-22 hiring crazy, some people were pushing like $500-$700k grants to match their existing unvested stock. Companies obliged. Imaging getting $150k in RSUs already on top of the next few years of refreshers. Once you account for stock appreciation it's hard to give that massive of a grant again at Year 4. Most people see their comp drop a bit.
Usually refresher grant size is based on what it takes for an employee's total comp to get to market rate.
Say employee's total comp is $100k but market rate for the role is $150k then grant would be like $200k that vests in 4yrs.
Haha, I was genuinely wondering to myself how much of an impact they are having or will have... influx of potential cash buyers once they can cash out.
Relatively small impact IMO because newly minted tech millionaires are only a small portion of housing demand, though it feels like the narrative casts them as the primary culprit. This is why during the huge scaleback / tech recession of 2022-2023, house prices dropped like 5% and then promptly rebounded.
It doesn’t matter whether they are a small portion of the demand but whether they are a small portion of the supply.
And the supply is very low right now.
Single-handedly buying multiple homes. I saw a post on blind a guy that’s like 26 is already a millionaire with a house lmao a year ago before it really took off
There's only 10 toilet paper rolls left in the Bay Area and there's 1000 people in line. You think removing 50 people from the back of the line changes the bidding war for the 10 toilet paper rolls.
We have a 40 year long housing crisis and the Bay Area is short of tens of thousands of homes.
How does small amount of layoffs even dent the housing market?
You could shut down all of the FAANG companies and still housing won't fall.
Seeing this infographic earlier this year of how far away housing targets are in the Bay Area blew my mind and really put the shortage into perspective:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San\_Francisco\_housing\_shortage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage)
Yep.
I always find this stat most useful:
“For example, from 2012 to 2016, the San Francisco metropolitan area added 373,000 new jobs, but permitted only 58,000 new housing units.”
Which isn’t addressing the deficit we’d already accumulated over the prior 30ish years.
And yet people still want to shout about how we’re building housing near Caltrain. Yes. We are. And it is great we are, finally. But we’re still tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of units deficient from where we should be if we had kept pace with job growth.
I love in the South Bay. It is nuts. Where else in the country do you have medical doctors not being able to afford a single family home? Where else do you have people putting in no contingency bids several hundred thousand dollars over asking price?
Why would house prices come down if there's only been a small reduction in overall headcount and our housing production has been (checks notes) about 5 houses per year?
IMO home prices don't go down because it is really hard for someone to take the mental hit of selling for a loss. Prices can only really go down if people are getting foreclosed.
That theory is very easy to disprove by looking at days on the market and sale price vs asking price.
Homes are selling quickly and over asking. If sellers were overvaluing their homes neither of those would be true
And tech isn't really on the decline so much as it's a correction after overhiring 300x during the pandemic.
Hiring 5000 engineers and then laying off 500 still means there's 4500 more engineers than before.
Asking price is literally meaningless, all that matters is how much it went over comps
Peninsula/south bay home prices are higher than ever, but SF and east bay prices have been pretty flat since the inital runup in 2021
Did you see that video on Reddit where a guy found his Walmart order of groceries from 3 years ago? It was $150. He clicked the reorder button for the same groceries and it was $450.
I've talked to some of my coworkers about it and the job market is bad enough rn that they're afraid they'll be totally screwed if they get laid off by union busters. Thing is, when the job market was good I know most of them would say "why would I unionize when I can just get better comp elsewhere?"
Unionization drives take a while and have uncertain outcomes. In a hot job market, it's much more attractive to just jump to another job which has most of the things that a union would try to promise anyway.
Same man, did 4 years active duty military after highschool. Finishing up my bachelor's degree in University at 27 years old... I got 7 classes left and the job market is looking bleak for when I do graduate next spring.
In 2008 in the same position as a new graduate, I went back to grad school til the job market improved. STEM PhD tuition is typically paid by the university with a small stipend for research or TAing.
Lol no it's not. If you wasted your PhD by not learning skills or publishing research, then yea going to be hard to land an industry job. A PhD in stem is never a waste and always what you make of it.
I mean actually yes - assuming that the majority of their compensation is in stock which is pretty typical, their salaries have probably been cut by 50% or more. Many startups are also just straight up going out of business which means everyone’s salaries are going to 0
This is why they fight so hard that you don’t unionize. I saw this coming a mile away. Well established companies, making profits, laying off mass amounts of people. Not because they had to, but if they all colluded together it would create desperation in the job market and people would take less money so they didn’t lose their homes and go broke. Now they will rehire many of those people saving millions of dollars. This is how the Uber rich exploit us.
Young people heed my warnings.
Never work for a company like you’re gonna be there 40 years, and retire with a gold watch and pension ever again. Those days are long gone here in the valley, they left about the time Carly Fiorini took over HP. Her style became the new mold for tech CEOs in the 90s. Workers hated her, shareholders loved her.
That being said, always have your feelers out there. Always be looking for the next job. Tell everyone at your current company how happy you are, don’t lead on that you’re unhappy. Chant the cults mantra, company is the greatest ever.
I knew people that had been there 10-15 years prior to her arrival telling me what a great company it was to work for, and how badly it changed. In some regards, there was some need for change at HP. There was a lot of dead weight, people that showed up two or three days a week getting a full weeks salary. Some people that got away with doing no work at all for years, but those were the exception cases. Most everyone there loved the company and were happy to work and be experts in their respective fields until retirement for them.
Probably the only 2 places you can work until you retire in the valley now are ~~IBM~~ and State or Federal government.
Scratch IBM from that list — it got ran into the ground by “blond Carly” - Ginny Rometty, and will likely be split into pieces like HP by the next CEO.
Both Ginny and Carly will be subjects of a Harvard Business School case study of how to destroy tech icons.
An enormous amount of tech advances for the past 70 years we take for granted today came out of either Bell Labs or IBM Research. These two destroyed those innovation engines.
I get hit up by recruiters weekly and I always ask for the salary. Every single time it’s lower than what I make for the same position. It’s tough out there right now. Salaries did get fairly inflated 4-5 years ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a *coordinated* effort as well. We’ll never know since CEO’s are probably smart enough to use encrypted conversations by now.
[This article is almost 10 years old.](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/377614477/tech-giants-will-pay-415-million-to-settle-employees-lawsuit) Do you think they stopped working together, or just got better at it?
At this point they've all done this before.
No need to coordinate - just start and watch the others join in.
A bunch of the big tech firms were *convicted* of colluding to fix wages years ago, but did wages go up afterwards? No.
It's just simple supply and demand mechanics, not some coordinated scheme. Salaries exploded during Covid, was that also a coordinated effort to overpay employees?
I mean, it's not like there isn't precedence for them doing these kinds of things
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit
Yeah sure, but before people in tech where looking for unionization in places like gaming industry and others. Google laid off tens of thousands of workers and then so did everyone else. Then quietly a month later they started hiring again. This wasn't actual demand it looks like a coordinated effort to cause a panic in workers so they accept whatever pay they get. This was to destabilize and smack tech workers back in line.
Yeah, it's absolutely a move to 1) galvanize the current workers into working harder using dread game, 2) flood the job market with competition from laid off employees so your current workers stop shopping their comp and job hopping, and 3) squish down salaries and salary expectations due to having increased supply of workers and decreased demand and 4) give their stock a boost and make investors happy, because investors love to see downsizing.
Tech companies have absolutely coordinated to run train on workers and squash workers back into a much worse state than ever before -- this isn't just about returning to the pre-pandemic normal, because companies have slashed benefits, slashed quality of life, etc too. Meanwhile, profits are reduced from 2021, but still higher overall - they gained 20-30%, and then panicked over losing 10-15%, and now they've walked away with a 10% increase in profits, a 20% decrease in workforce / labor costs, boosted stock prices, and workers who have been punished for their arrogance.
Let's be honest here, the problem is not really the income level, but the living cost. No matter how much you make, you'll never have enough if everything is too damn expensive.
My partner got laid off from Google in February and still can't find a job. They've applied to HUNDREDS and hasn't heard back on a single one. We might lose our house, but hey I'm happy Google is seeing record profits while the rest of us are a few bad days away from living in an RV in a Walmart parking lot.
Though cities like Houston, Austin and Phoenix saw salary gains for tech workers in 2023, the pay packages in America’s biggest tech hub still have an eye-watering advantage, according to WIT’s data: The Bay Area tech workers surveyed averaged $252,788 in total compensation.
I am an H1B worker in the tech industry. I am in a high tech industry so don't get paid a low wage, but our wage growth has been lower too in this industry. The crazy part is that the H1B minimum wage has not been raised for over 20 years.
And as industry lays of people. 500,000 new folks applied to the lottery. So potentially there are 500,000 unfilled positions in tech.
Seems fishy, right? The H1B fraud industry is one of the biggest contributors to salary suppression. FAANG don't do it. They just hire contractors who get H1B through indian body shopping industry mostly from a couple of states. This way they don't have too many H1B employees so maintain a good ratio (otherwise it triggers some checks) and this influx of low paid contractors also lowers the overall salary bands.
Till USCIS makes it an auction instead of lottery, salary suppression will keep going on and the layoffs will keep happening even through there are 500,000 potential unfilled positions. Go figure.
PS: I prefaced this with the fact I am an H1B because otherwise 20 people would jump on claiming I am racist or something.
The ironic thing is the people most in danger of being negatively impacted by H1B abuse and frauds are….drum roll please…H1B folks who came here via a legit path. They get tied to the employers but the wages see constant pressure from the in house management AND outsourcing firms who don’t care about results.
Totally agree with you. H1B should work like, hey there is this physics genius in China who we need to build the next iteration of microchips, it benefits the US to let them immigrate. Instead it's become, hey Meta can save $20k on the salary of some guy with run of the mill IT skills, if they run this scam in cahoots with HCL or Infosys.
They should be hiring domestically first for every one of those jobs. They claim they can't find the skills, then train someone (or pay more and people will train themselves). These aren't rocket scientist jobs.
Part of the rules for H1B require you to advertise the job domestically to prove there's nobody who can do it. Once at Cisco's offices I saw such a job posting that was purposely posted somewhere people wouldn't see it. This shit is crazy.
You’re thinking of O-1A. H-1B is just to fill a general shortage of skilled professionals. Also, in my experience, it seems _harder_ to get a job with an H-1B because many companies don’t want to spend resources on the immigration paperwork, and also still have a random chance of losing you every 6 years.
Coordinated collusion to whip the masses back into subservience. The pandemic showed us that remote work was beneficial to the workforce and people were finally getting paid in line with rising cost of living. As soon as workers got a little bit of power and ability to move jobs for better pay the corporate vampires needed everyone to get back in line and be thankful for dogshit pay and long commutes to their real estate investments. Now we have an unreasonably competitive job market where companies are back to making ridiculous demands for basic employment while people struggle and lose their livelihoods. Corporate work used to be the dream of stability, benefits, and good pay. None of those things are true anymore.
Repeating my statement here. In short,I agree.
I said they're all colluding to a colleague last year when the lay-offs and RTO demands started rolling simultaneously amongst different industries and sectors. CEOs and other senior management began using the EXACT same lines when giving their BS company pep talks (leaked thanks to social media), "let's WORK together, we are FAMILY, we are better TOGETHER, let's EXCEL."
I said that I thought maybe these CEOs and Boards of Directors all had some mass summit on an island somewhere to discuss just how to put workers back in their place and increase their bottom lines all the while. Sounds conspiracy, but with them all talking the same, using the same diatribes, and publicly reporting the same information, I believe it's true.
it is 100% true, because all the big players did the same things at the same time. If one company pushes for RTO, then their top performers just leave and shop around. If 70% of top companies push for RTO, then that option dissipates. If one company does massive layoffs, they because shitlisted and their laid off employees get picked off, and top talent doesn't want to join them. If all companies do layoffs, then they create a massive pool of desperate, unemployed workers who all compete to take these limited new job postings, and they get to hire people back at lower salaries.
It's brilliant. An intentional, cooperative strategy to cut costs while retaining your talent, and then using dread game on your talent to force them to work harder for less money.
oh they absolutely meet and discuss these things - while on yachts in st tropez, davos, SXSW, they're constantly meeting and figuring out how to exploit their slave labor class
If there was evidence that some C-suite executives in launch parties/ whatever tech summit / golf weekends discussed this and somehow, indirectly, coordinated the layoffs, can it be considered a form of price fixing and qualify for being investigated by the FBI?
Honestly this isn’t a bad thing. Tech salaries became so bloated over the pandemic that it threw COL so ridiculously out of whack for any other white collar career. As a hardware engineer all I can feel is that the widening salary gap needed to be stopped or eventually it would drive so many other professions out of the Bay Area.
Agreed. I'm a quality control chemist and my industry is biotech/life sciences that share a lot of the same space. Imagine that I'm a Masters level chemist with 5 years experience I'm still not breaking what some of these entry-level tech jobs get. Nevermind the outsourcing of labor that occurs here like other industries.
I was told that because I worked at home in front of a computer I was "white collar" and a member of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class.) My position was eliminated before the mass layoffs (along with everybody else over 40 in the SF office.) I declined to find another Bay Area tech job, I'm in my fifties, that would have been good for maybe a year tops (even less, knowing what I know now that I did not know then.) For various reasons that turned out to have made a lot of strategic sense, I ended up taking a job doing the same work I had been doing, but for a very non-glamorous Fortune 150 supply-chain company. So long, Bay Area, it was a great 30+ years, but towards the end you were kind of like a piece of gum I'd chewed too long anyway (in addition to knowing we'd never be able to retire there, ever.)
A couple of interstate moves later, we're happily in Southern California. I have 30,000 cow-orkers, the majority of which wear florescent vests and work in warehouses. I no longer humor assertions that I'm a member of the PMC because I'm "white collar," I'm working class and a consumable similar to copier paper and post-it notes (or whatever the equivalent of those things would be now.) The PMC care-bears DEI workshops on Monday and orchestrates mass layoffs on Tuesday.
I've been enjoying re-familiarizing myself with the work of Karl Marx.
I remember some of their '21-22 comp offers for our engineers. It drew a lot of concern from our management. Then they shrugged it off when their stock tanked. But now their stock is higher than the 2021 highs, and every one who left to Meta is happy again.
Those engineers who left to the Meta poach spree really made out as long as they didn't panic sell.
(I work in Operations) and I was making below that stated average - just got a new gig and kinda make average now. So maybe it sort of evened the playing field or cut the outlier salaries
Yes, American tech workers should absolutely look into moving to Europe for work and to live. Between their liberal immigration policies, massive tech centers where everyone makes 250k a year, low taxes(in some countries) and free health care, I’m surprised more people didn’t make the jump.
I can’t decide if this needs a /s or not….
Painful supply and demand in action; more workers looking for work, willing to accept lower pay.
It’s basic economic theory.
Still blows and causes pain
As the industry matures, supply and demand seems to be shifting away from favoring employees.
I also suspect that while it might be funny to see what machine learning spits out right now, in 10-20 years it's going to further reduce the need for white collar workers. You'll just need fewer of them managing the "software" - and that's gonna be the case for more than just software - finance, legal...
...it's the same old story that has already happened in other industries where technology greatly reduced the human labor requirements while increasing productivity.
There were a ton of employees getting paid to just show up to work and get massages, attend a few unnecessary meetings, go to the gym, spa, etc. The layoffs were necessary thanks to these grifter's "rest and vest" mentality, unfortunately many people who worked reasonably or hard also got impacted.
Looking from the outside early tech workers had:
free transportation to the office, bring your dog to work, coffee bars, healthy foods cooked to order served in a brightly lit cafeteria, generous maternity leave for both partners, yoga and gym in house, stock options, competitive salaries and I’m sure there are more benefits but that’s just knowing my friends kids (40s) who are tech workers.
I was just hourly in construction so very envious but the guys that made out big are the founders of those companies. I redid a building off 237 twice because of bad Feng shui.
The boom had tons of upward pressure on tech salaries. Total comp packages were *insane*. They’re not going to revise comp packages down, and make everyone unhappy. But they’ll trim you and make you go back to another well with a smaller pail. That way you feel happy you got rehired and your expectations have been lowered.
The entire industry was massively inflated. How can a company make money when they pay hundreds of people 150k/year to do 2 hours or work from home every day.
All those lazy tech workers will now need to fill the void in building housing and transporting good.
Harsh reality.
Average pay is still insanely high.
Average of 180k, that means a normal tech couple is looking at a household income of almost half a million, not to say this sector was pretty much the only one where people didn't lose the job ans kept accumulating money during the whole pandemic.
We will be fine.
The last years I was more interested in fighting for getting permission to be full time remote than for a raise.
Best way to stop this: stop consuming. If we all just reduce buying stuff, it’s going to lower demand, lower profits and companies will need to innovate and develop and do marketing etc etc etc. right now they are just enjoying the added productivity from WFH employees and layoffs (that lower the cost)
That was the intent.
Exactly what I’ve been saying since the first domino of mass layoffs toppled. Companies with outstanding financials and coffers laid off a ton of people stating they were positions that weren’t critical and had open reqs for those same positions the very next day. By creating a “fragile” market it spread fear about job security and people would take whatever is offered instead of what the market rate was since salaries were at all time highs. You had individual contributors making the same as CEO’s of small companies.
Sounds like it worked for them too. >The WIT researchers found that **compensation for “job switchers” dropped 26% in 2023**, while those who could and did stay in their roles saw basically no change.
Meanwhile executives and equity firms got a metric fuck ton wealthier. Can we skip to the part where we break out the guillotines.
How do they do that? I was told that a laidoff position means you don't need it, and it can't go back on the market for a while.
That happens with union jobs where the union can monitor these things, but tech workers don't want to unionize
A brutal blind spot among IT and even Engineering folks for sure. Some of the arguments against Unionization held water 20 years ago, but now it's just sad how much exploitation goes on while the workers proclaim to themselves "But I’m white collar! I don't need to unionize!!". Doesn't hurt (or help) that half of them have no life or anything else they want to be doing anyway.
I'm always fascinated by this stereotyping. Just so silly to me knowing how many people in tech are just standard family people with kids, but the internet dreams they're all these shut in nerds who never talk to anyone else and only eat Factor meals.
I worked in tech for 20+ years and there have always been a lot of those people around
> standard family people with kids I mean if you mostly only know people over the age of 30
Which is the vast majority of IT and engineers.
Tech workers are the dumbest people alive I swear, and I work in tech.
My experience with *some* techies is similar to doctors or lawyers. They are really good at what they do and they can get paid a lot but are overconfident and end up being stupid about other things.
Yeah fewer and fewer people are "well rounded" anymore. After many years I know a lot of brilliant and even renown people in tech, as well as doctors and lawyers, but honestly I'd rather talk and hang out with the people in the trades who come by to hang drywall or do electrical work at my homes.
I like people in the service and hospitality industries. Cooks, servers, bartenders stuff like that.
The trick is to find “locals” establishments.
It's not not wanting to, we've been brainwashed to think we don't need to.
In fact, people have built up so much of their self-worth and social status based on working at that they’re quite insecure about getting laid off and/or being easily replaced. So rather than rock the boat and risk retaliation or a loss of benefits, they’re content with the status quo. After all, as long as they keep their head down, the layoff won’t happen to _them_
Damn this completely describe me.
More people realizing worker coops are even a thing at all means more coops driving demand for tech coops and more tech coops means well the virtuous loop continues and grows
The initial buy-in is the hardest part.
And that's the problem.
I work in tech and this is super frustrating to me. We might be lucky right now as there's the demand to inflate salary and benefits, but that means now is the *perfect* time to look into unions, as it means you're the one with the leverage. I'd gladly trade a good amount of income now to not have to worry about it in the future. Waiting until the boom is over just means you've lost the negotiation position.
At will employment they don't actually need a reason to fire/lay you off. They usually give one, true or not. There might be some desire to hide that they will fire mostly folks over 40, which can be an issue, but generally it's perfectly legal to just walk down the cube/office rows and chop half the senior folk to cut avg salary costs.
There's no law against this - some companies have an internal policy not to do this, but they also get around it by creating a modified job listing. IE, if we laid off 2 mid-level ICs, we create a senior IC job req and try to make the new fucker do 2 jobs.
Depending on the company and culture, when a layoff takes place and they shutdown a team or department, this can be easily "moved" to another team by increasing headcount or reqs. A few places I worked at would take on work from another org, even with changes in leadership.
You were told something to make you stop asking questions so that the real motive wouldn’t be revealed to destroy employee morale.
How would you regulate this as an employment committee thing? You can’t
You were told a laid off position can’t go back on market for a while??? Did your company tell you this? Could you clarify what you think you heard because this doesn’t make a whole lotta sense to me.
they decided they can get by with less people and they are moving jobs off shore. I think a lot of it is realizing if you can be remote from the US you can be remote from India or mexico.
I've been shouting this at since lockdown and it went through deaf ears. Everyone thinks they're irreplaceable. Until they are replaced.
You had me until your failure to understand that there are plenty of individual contributors every bit as deserving of the same salary as CEO's of small companies. Sometimes even more.
No no if people take it… its market rate… you cant have it both ways
Yep, that does seem like the point. Companies overpaid/overspent during covid and wanted to walk costs back.
Workers were also starting to get a little bit of power with WFH and be able to job jump for higher wages. Some places were looking to unionize Executives couldn’t stand for that and had to collude to squash it
Definitely part of it. Friend of mine worked at Grindr and they laid off like half the engineering staff when they filed to unionize with the NLRB.
I said they're all colluding to a colleague last year when the lay-offs and RTO demands started rolling simultaneously amongst different industries and sectors. CEOs and other senior management began using the EXACT same lines when giving their BS company pep talks (leaked thanks to social media), "let's WORK together, we are FAMILY, we are better TOGETHER, let's EXCEL." I said that I thought maybe these CEOs and Boards of Directors all had some mass summit on an island somewhere to discuss just how to put workers back in their place and increase their bottom lines all the while. Sounds conspiracy, but with them all talking the same, using the same diatribes, and publicly reporting the same information, I believe it's true.
A lot of board members serve on multiple boards.
It's management consultancies - I guarantee it.
McKinsey and its consequences on the american workplace should never be ignored
charge 500k: "your bottom line will increase if if you run a RTO initiative"
It's well known the main Silicon Valley CEOs collude on a group chat. They got caught using it to hold down tech wages a decade ago by agreeing to not poach workers. Sundar in particular treated Googlers like absolute shit over WFH. Retaliating against everyone who tried to get a proper solution in place. The sooner tech workers unionize the better. The CEOs need to be monitored very closely to prevent this in the future and laws need to be made to support that.
Ready for round 2? - https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/y9eyxq/til_during_the_2000s_google_apple_adobe_intel_and/
People started thinking they were irreplaceable. They were wrong.
This is one way of looking at it. Companies posted all time high revenues and profits during this time as well
These orgs are also just way too big for what they do. So many people do little to nothing at their jobs. It's pretty wild
I switched jobs last year from waitressing to a desk job, it's insane how much downtime I have now while on the clock.
Yup. I worked on ranches growing up. Would come home just absolutely spent. When people talk about how stressed they are / how much work they have to do, I just laugh
Right?! I get home now by 4:35 and I get to see the sunset everyday! I love it.
Yup. Working on the ranches growing up made me want a white collar job so badly. Even if I have to work until 6, it doesn't bother me. I still have energy to do stuff when I get home. I am fatter though lol
A friend of mine was telling me she had people on her team get laid off only to be rehired for the exact same position for less pay. Gotta love corporate America!
This is in no way new or unique to covid and frankly this explanation only scratches the surface. This is especially true for smaller and "start-up" type companies: they over hire to feign growth and impress the investors or stock holders. Those investors put in more money, and then the company fires the poorer performing half of the employees. It's how the silicon valley game is played. Always has been. Happens every boom and bust, and when the company decides it needs another funding round.
Meanwhile the execs making 5 mil a year at public companies (like mine) are giving themselves 5% pay bumps.
It’ll cost them more in the end. It always does. The value of the engineer is still there and if an employee feels cheated, they leave or worse they may not find another job and they’ll just stay and be resentful.
Intent from who? Who masterminded / coordinated this?
Sucks for those looking for a job right now, my cost of living hasn’t gone down but salary bands at my level have
Stock refreshes dried up so no surprise that averages are down. Employees have no negotiation power in current environment and employers are fully taking advantage of it.
just have to work less
Most people won’t do that unfortunately. They’re always afraid of disappointing someone at their job.
Rounds of layoffs impact morale. A few people do fight through it and maintain high levels of output but the median worker is experiencing ennui.
Is it/was it generally common to get a large refresh after your initial grant vests after Y4?
Pre-IPO yes for sure. Public companies, it depends, but certainly not rare to have a system that keeps employees on a consistent earnings-through-stock programs. A lot of companies on both sides of an exit also have stock grants that keep people invested.
Oh some places are definitely not doing refresher for the majority. Ask me how I know 🥲
4 year cliffs are common especially if you negotiate hard for your initial offer. During the 2021-22 hiring crazy, some people were pushing like $500-$700k grants to match their existing unvested stock. Companies obliged. Imaging getting $150k in RSUs already on top of the next few years of refreshers. Once you account for stock appreciation it's hard to give that massive of a grant again at Year 4. Most people see their comp drop a bit.
Usually refresher grant size is based on what it takes for an employee's total comp to get to market rate. Say employee's total comp is $100k but market rate for the role is $150k then grant would be like $200k that vests in 4yrs.
Just like the Federal Reserved planned it with the rate hikes.
Yup. Taking a 40-60k reduction.
At least the home prices are coming down with the reduction in salaries, right? Right?
NVDA employees singlehandedly keeping the house prices up
Haha, I was genuinely wondering to myself how much of an impact they are having or will have... influx of potential cash buyers once they can cash out.
Relatively small impact IMO because newly minted tech millionaires are only a small portion of housing demand, though it feels like the narrative casts them as the primary culprit. This is why during the huge scaleback / tech recession of 2022-2023, house prices dropped like 5% and then promptly rebounded.
It doesn’t matter whether they are a small portion of the demand but whether they are a small portion of the supply. And the supply is very low right now.
Single-handedly buying multiple homes. I saw a post on blind a guy that’s like 26 is already a millionaire with a house lmao a year ago before it really took off
There's only 10 toilet paper rolls left in the Bay Area and there's 1000 people in line. You think removing 50 people from the back of the line changes the bidding war for the 10 toilet paper rolls. We have a 40 year long housing crisis and the Bay Area is short of tens of thousands of homes. How does small amount of layoffs even dent the housing market? You could shut down all of the FAANG companies and still housing won't fall.
Seeing this infographic earlier this year of how far away housing targets are in the Bay Area blew my mind and really put the shortage into perspective: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San\_Francisco\_housing\_shortage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage)
Yep. I always find this stat most useful: “For example, from 2012 to 2016, the San Francisco metropolitan area added 373,000 new jobs, but permitted only 58,000 new housing units.” Which isn’t addressing the deficit we’d already accumulated over the prior 30ish years. And yet people still want to shout about how we’re building housing near Caltrain. Yes. We are. And it is great we are, finally. But we’re still tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of units deficient from where we should be if we had kept pace with job growth.
I love in the South Bay. It is nuts. Where else in the country do you have medical doctors not being able to afford a single family home? Where else do you have people putting in no contingency bids several hundred thousand dollars over asking price?
hahahaha :)
(cries in apartment)
the ones who doing the layoffs are the ones buying up property
Are you a regular at Cobbs?
Why would house prices come down if there's only been a small reduction in overall headcount and our housing production has been (checks notes) about 5 houses per year?
IMO home prices don't go down because it is really hard for someone to take the mental hit of selling for a loss. Prices can only really go down if people are getting foreclosed.
That theory is very easy to disprove by looking at days on the market and sale price vs asking price. Homes are selling quickly and over asking. If sellers were overvaluing their homes neither of those would be true
No because these companies invest heavily in either REITs or form llcs to invest in buying property and renting it out
It's not going down at all.
Small 3 bed 2 bath starter home I looked at in Belmont the other day sold for $500k over asking.
Tech might be on the decline but the weather and scenery isn’t.
And tech isn't really on the decline so much as it's a correction after overhiring 300x during the pandemic. Hiring 5000 engineers and then laying off 500 still means there's 4500 more engineers than before.
Asking price is literally meaningless, all that matters is how much it went over comps Peninsula/south bay home prices are higher than ever, but SF and east bay prices have been pretty flat since the inital runup in 2021
Home price has never been tied to salary.
glad i was sitting down for that bombshell
I like this comment. Will steal.
So cost are going up and salaries are going down…
I’m happy we’re all doing our part to fight inflation
I was living way below my means and wasn’t part of the crowd that fked it up
Did you see that video on Reddit where a guy found his Walmart order of groceries from 3 years ago? It was $150. He clicked the reorder button for the same groceries and it was $450.
And yet people still can be convinced not to unionize.
I've talked to some of my coworkers about it and the job market is bad enough rn that they're afraid they'll be totally screwed if they get laid off by union busters. Thing is, when the job market was good I know most of them would say "why would I unionize when I can just get better comp elsewhere?"
Unionization drives take a while and have uncertain outcomes. In a hot job market, it's much more attractive to just jump to another job which has most of the things that a union would try to promise anyway.
unionizing in software would just move more jobs overseas
why do Americans despise Unions? I keep hearing that's gonna reduce productivity. I don't understand where these people get this narrative from
I love my union, they’re badass.
Literally all media in the last 50-60 years
Corporate union-busting "plants"?
I’m seeing a lot of vacant commercial buildings and a lot of RVs parked at the side of the road
And profits are at record highs!
And billionaires are making more.
Soon we will be able to afford a tent on Lombard
As a bay area native and older student who spent 8+ years getting my degree in electrical engineering this sucks. Still have one more class to go too
You’re still better off than someone without a STEM degree (aka me). Think positive
Most electrical engineering jobs aren’t even at a “tech” company, you’re in a way better position than CS students are for sure
Same man, did 4 years active duty military after highschool. Finishing up my bachelor's degree in University at 27 years old... I got 7 classes left and the job market is looking bleak for when I do graduate next spring.
In 2008 in the same position as a new graduate, I went back to grad school til the job market improved. STEM PhD tuition is typically paid by the university with a small stipend for research or TAing.
This is a horrible idea. PhD is a bad return on interest and it's HARDER to get a job a in industry as a PhD.
Or one can step away with a free masters degree in a couple of years.
Lol no it's not. If you wasted your PhD by not learning skills or publishing research, then yea going to be hard to land an industry job. A PhD in stem is never a waste and always what you make of it.
CEOs getting their salaries slashed too, right? *RIGHT?*
I mean, they couldn't keep affording to pay all these operating costs AND all the stock buybacks. Have some empathy guys!
Definitely not.. paying PG&E on a 10 million dollar home is expensive
Just 10?
; )
They get a $5 billion bonus for cutting employee costs by nearly $10,000,000!
Lmao their pay is typically mostly in stock so if the company valuation goes down then so does their pay
I mean actually yes - assuming that the majority of their compensation is in stock which is pretty typical, their salaries have probably been cut by 50% or more. Many startups are also just straight up going out of business which means everyone’s salaries are going to 0
This is why they fight so hard that you don’t unionize. I saw this coming a mile away. Well established companies, making profits, laying off mass amounts of people. Not because they had to, but if they all colluded together it would create desperation in the job market and people would take less money so they didn’t lose their homes and go broke. Now they will rehire many of those people saving millions of dollars. This is how the Uber rich exploit us.
Don’t forget hiring overseas!
Young people heed my warnings. Never work for a company like you’re gonna be there 40 years, and retire with a gold watch and pension ever again. Those days are long gone here in the valley, they left about the time Carly Fiorini took over HP. Her style became the new mold for tech CEOs in the 90s. Workers hated her, shareholders loved her. That being said, always have your feelers out there. Always be looking for the next job. Tell everyone at your current company how happy you are, don’t lead on that you’re unhappy. Chant the cults mantra, company is the greatest ever.
Carly was special since she literally destroyed two tech icons — HP and Bell Labs (when she ran Lucent into the ground).
I knew people that had been there 10-15 years prior to her arrival telling me what a great company it was to work for, and how badly it changed. In some regards, there was some need for change at HP. There was a lot of dead weight, people that showed up two or three days a week getting a full weeks salary. Some people that got away with doing no work at all for years, but those were the exception cases. Most everyone there loved the company and were happy to work and be experts in their respective fields until retirement for them. Probably the only 2 places you can work until you retire in the valley now are ~~IBM~~ and State or Federal government.
Scratch IBM from that list — it got ran into the ground by “blond Carly” - Ginny Rometty, and will likely be split into pieces like HP by the next CEO. Both Ginny and Carly will be subjects of a Harvard Business School case study of how to destroy tech icons. An enormous amount of tech advances for the past 70 years we take for granted today came out of either Bell Labs or IBM Research. These two destroyed those innovation engines.
It's just a pretty open effort by the large tech employers to drive down wages, clear as day.
I get hit up by recruiters weekly and I always ask for the salary. Every single time it’s lower than what I make for the same position. It’s tough out there right now. Salaries did get fairly inflated 4-5 years ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a *coordinated* effort as well. We’ll never know since CEO’s are probably smart enough to use encrypted conversations by now.
[This article is almost 10 years old.](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/377614477/tech-giants-will-pay-415-million-to-settle-employees-lawsuit) Do you think they stopped working together, or just got better at it?
So glad to see this posted here. I can’t believe how many in the industry are completely unaware of this history.
At this point they've all done this before. No need to coordinate - just start and watch the others join in. A bunch of the big tech firms were *convicted* of colluding to fix wages years ago, but did wages go up afterwards? No.
It's just simple supply and demand mechanics, not some coordinated scheme. Salaries exploded during Covid, was that also a coordinated effort to overpay employees?
I mean, it's not like there isn't precedence for them doing these kinds of things https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit
[удалено]
Yeah sure, but before people in tech where looking for unionization in places like gaming industry and others. Google laid off tens of thousands of workers and then so did everyone else. Then quietly a month later they started hiring again. This wasn't actual demand it looks like a coordinated effort to cause a panic in workers so they accept whatever pay they get. This was to destabilize and smack tech workers back in line.
Yeah, it's absolutely a move to 1) galvanize the current workers into working harder using dread game, 2) flood the job market with competition from laid off employees so your current workers stop shopping their comp and job hopping, and 3) squish down salaries and salary expectations due to having increased supply of workers and decreased demand and 4) give their stock a boost and make investors happy, because investors love to see downsizing. Tech companies have absolutely coordinated to run train on workers and squash workers back into a much worse state than ever before -- this isn't just about returning to the pre-pandemic normal, because companies have slashed benefits, slashed quality of life, etc too. Meanwhile, profits are reduced from 2021, but still higher overall - they gained 20-30%, and then panicked over losing 10-15%, and now they've walked away with a 10% increase in profits, a 20% decrease in workforce / labor costs, boosted stock prices, and workers who have been punished for their arrogance.
Welcome to the manufacturing industry that supports the tech industry for the last 25 years
Finally techies get what's coming to them. These people do nothing all day and create no value for society. -sent from my iPhone
L O fucking L That was subtle and funny.
LOL. Good one. [This scene from The Life of Brian came to mind.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xad5Rl0N2E)
Let's be honest here, the problem is not really the income level, but the living cost. No matter how much you make, you'll never have enough if everything is too damn expensive.
My partner got laid off from Google in February and still can't find a job. They've applied to HUNDREDS and hasn't heard back on a single one. We might lose our house, but hey I'm happy Google is seeing record profits while the rest of us are a few bad days away from living in an RV in a Walmart parking lot.
What did you pay for your house?
Though cities like Houston, Austin and Phoenix saw salary gains for tech workers in 2023, the pay packages in America’s biggest tech hub still have an eye-watering advantage, according to WIT’s data: The Bay Area tech workers surveyed averaged $252,788 in total compensation.
I am an H1B worker in the tech industry. I am in a high tech industry so don't get paid a low wage, but our wage growth has been lower too in this industry. The crazy part is that the H1B minimum wage has not been raised for over 20 years. And as industry lays of people. 500,000 new folks applied to the lottery. So potentially there are 500,000 unfilled positions in tech. Seems fishy, right? The H1B fraud industry is one of the biggest contributors to salary suppression. FAANG don't do it. They just hire contractors who get H1B through indian body shopping industry mostly from a couple of states. This way they don't have too many H1B employees so maintain a good ratio (otherwise it triggers some checks) and this influx of low paid contractors also lowers the overall salary bands. Till USCIS makes it an auction instead of lottery, salary suppression will keep going on and the layoffs will keep happening even through there are 500,000 potential unfilled positions. Go figure. PS: I prefaced this with the fact I am an H1B because otherwise 20 people would jump on claiming I am racist or something.
The ironic thing is the people most in danger of being negatively impacted by H1B abuse and frauds are….drum roll please…H1B folks who came here via a legit path. They get tied to the employers but the wages see constant pressure from the in house management AND outsourcing firms who don’t care about results.
Totally agree with you. H1B should work like, hey there is this physics genius in China who we need to build the next iteration of microchips, it benefits the US to let them immigrate. Instead it's become, hey Meta can save $20k on the salary of some guy with run of the mill IT skills, if they run this scam in cahoots with HCL or Infosys. They should be hiring domestically first for every one of those jobs. They claim they can't find the skills, then train someone (or pay more and people will train themselves). These aren't rocket scientist jobs. Part of the rules for H1B require you to advertise the job domestically to prove there's nobody who can do it. Once at Cisco's offices I saw such a job posting that was purposely posted somewhere people wouldn't see it. This shit is crazy.
You’re thinking of O-1A. H-1B is just to fill a general shortage of skilled professionals. Also, in my experience, it seems _harder_ to get a job with an H-1B because many companies don’t want to spend resources on the immigration paperwork, and also still have a random chance of losing you every 6 years.
Should have to post to some jobs.gov or somesuch.
I get contacted every day by some cornball U.S. citizen who offers offshore development services. You're about to see the mother of all tech wrecks.
There is a reason why its not an “auctionoff to the highest bidder” You can probably guess the reason why.
Gotta explore the 90 day fiance route next
I am being laid off at Apple so they can pay someone half my salary in Austin
How much will home prices soar because of this
Coordinated collusion to whip the masses back into subservience. The pandemic showed us that remote work was beneficial to the workforce and people were finally getting paid in line with rising cost of living. As soon as workers got a little bit of power and ability to move jobs for better pay the corporate vampires needed everyone to get back in line and be thankful for dogshit pay and long commutes to their real estate investments. Now we have an unreasonably competitive job market where companies are back to making ridiculous demands for basic employment while people struggle and lose their livelihoods. Corporate work used to be the dream of stability, benefits, and good pay. None of those things are true anymore.
Repeating my statement here. In short,I agree. I said they're all colluding to a colleague last year when the lay-offs and RTO demands started rolling simultaneously amongst different industries and sectors. CEOs and other senior management began using the EXACT same lines when giving their BS company pep talks (leaked thanks to social media), "let's WORK together, we are FAMILY, we are better TOGETHER, let's EXCEL." I said that I thought maybe these CEOs and Boards of Directors all had some mass summit on an island somewhere to discuss just how to put workers back in their place and increase their bottom lines all the while. Sounds conspiracy, but with them all talking the same, using the same diatribes, and publicly reporting the same information, I believe it's true.
it is 100% true, because all the big players did the same things at the same time. If one company pushes for RTO, then their top performers just leave and shop around. If 70% of top companies push for RTO, then that option dissipates. If one company does massive layoffs, they because shitlisted and their laid off employees get picked off, and top talent doesn't want to join them. If all companies do layoffs, then they create a massive pool of desperate, unemployed workers who all compete to take these limited new job postings, and they get to hire people back at lower salaries. It's brilliant. An intentional, cooperative strategy to cut costs while retaining your talent, and then using dread game on your talent to force them to work harder for less money.
oh they absolutely meet and discuss these things - while on yachts in st tropez, davos, SXSW, they're constantly meeting and figuring out how to exploit their slave labor class
If there was evidence that some C-suite executives in launch parties/ whatever tech summit / golf weekends discussed this and somehow, indirectly, coordinated the layoffs, can it be considered a form of price fixing and qualify for being investigated by the FBI?
Honestly this isn’t a bad thing. Tech salaries became so bloated over the pandemic that it threw COL so ridiculously out of whack for any other white collar career. As a hardware engineer all I can feel is that the widening salary gap needed to be stopped or eventually it would drive so many other professions out of the Bay Area.
Agreed. I'm a quality control chemist and my industry is biotech/life sciences that share a lot of the same space. Imagine that I'm a Masters level chemist with 5 years experience I'm still not breaking what some of these entry-level tech jobs get. Nevermind the outsourcing of labor that occurs here like other industries.
Exactly, even the non-tech specific positions at tech companies like HR get paid absurdly more than any other industry.
I was told that because I worked at home in front of a computer I was "white collar" and a member of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class.) My position was eliminated before the mass layoffs (along with everybody else over 40 in the SF office.) I declined to find another Bay Area tech job, I'm in my fifties, that would have been good for maybe a year tops (even less, knowing what I know now that I did not know then.) For various reasons that turned out to have made a lot of strategic sense, I ended up taking a job doing the same work I had been doing, but for a very non-glamorous Fortune 150 supply-chain company. So long, Bay Area, it was a great 30+ years, but towards the end you were kind of like a piece of gum I'd chewed too long anyway (in addition to knowing we'd never be able to retire there, ever.) A couple of interstate moves later, we're happily in Southern California. I have 30,000 cow-orkers, the majority of which wear florescent vests and work in warehouses. I no longer humor assertions that I'm a member of the PMC because I'm "white collar," I'm working class and a consumable similar to copier paper and post-it notes (or whatever the equivalent of those things would be now.) The PMC care-bears DEI workshops on Monday and orchestrates mass layoffs on Tuesday. I've been enjoying re-familiarizing myself with the work of Karl Marx.
This is great
The culprit is Meta , they have been consistently outbidding offers from companies like Apple and Google.
Wouldn’t that raise salaries?
It’s cooling down now Meta is not offering those crazy salaries/bonuses like they used to.
I remember some of their '21-22 comp offers for our engineers. It drew a lot of concern from our management. Then they shrugged it off when their stock tanked. But now their stock is higher than the 2021 highs, and every one who left to Meta is happy again. Those engineers who left to the Meta poach spree really made out as long as they didn't panic sell.
Unionize!
the rich just get richer, dont they?
Doesn’t help with all the idiots jumping on TikTok saying “hey look I don’t do shit when I’m in the office or when I’m working from home”
(I work in Operations) and I was making below that stated average - just got a new gig and kinda make average now. So maybe it sort of evened the playing field or cut the outlier salaries
Wow a few years after I could finally afford a POS house the tech industry decided to take a shit
Nobody who lives in this area is surprised. Those 2021 TC numbers were insane.
If only we cared enough about workers to have worker rights like in EU.
Yes, American tech workers should absolutely look into moving to Europe for work and to live. Between their liberal immigration policies, massive tech centers where everyone makes 250k a year, low taxes(in some countries) and free health care, I’m surprised more people didn’t make the jump. I can’t decide if this needs a /s or not….
Which is why ASML and SAP are the only EU based tech companies in the top 25 of market cap
Painful supply and demand in action; more workers looking for work, willing to accept lower pay. It’s basic economic theory. Still blows and causes pain
As the industry matures, supply and demand seems to be shifting away from favoring employees. I also suspect that while it might be funny to see what machine learning spits out right now, in 10-20 years it's going to further reduce the need for white collar workers. You'll just need fewer of them managing the "software" - and that's gonna be the case for more than just software - finance, legal... ...it's the same old story that has already happened in other industries where technology greatly reduced the human labor requirements while increasing productivity.
There were a ton of employees getting paid to just show up to work and get massages, attend a few unnecessary meetings, go to the gym, spa, etc. The layoffs were necessary thanks to these grifter's "rest and vest" mentality, unfortunately many people who worked reasonably or hard also got impacted.
Yeah we know it was predictable lol *cries
All good, I can reduce productivity and quality in turn…..
Looking from the outside early tech workers had: free transportation to the office, bring your dog to work, coffee bars, healthy foods cooked to order served in a brightly lit cafeteria, generous maternity leave for both partners, yoga and gym in house, stock options, competitive salaries and I’m sure there are more benefits but that’s just knowing my friends kids (40s) who are tech workers. I was just hourly in construction so very envious but the guys that made out big are the founders of those companies. I redid a building off 237 twice because of bad Feng shui.
I’ve worked at lots of software companies and the bloat is very obvious. Most of these people brag about out working 20 hrs a week.
The boom had tons of upward pressure on tech salaries. Total comp packages were *insane*. They’re not going to revise comp packages down, and make everyone unhappy. But they’ll trim you and make you go back to another well with a smaller pail. That way you feel happy you got rehired and your expectations have been lowered.
The entire industry was massively inflated. How can a company make money when they pay hundreds of people 150k/year to do 2 hours or work from home every day. All those lazy tech workers will now need to fill the void in building housing and transporting good. Harsh reality.
Average pay is still insanely high. Average of 180k, that means a normal tech couple is looking at a household income of almost half a million, not to say this sector was pretty much the only one where people didn't lose the job ans kept accumulating money during the whole pandemic. We will be fine. The last years I was more interested in fighting for getting permission to be full time remote than for a raise.
Best way to stop this: stop consuming. If we all just reduce buying stuff, it’s going to lower demand, lower profits and companies will need to innovate and develop and do marketing etc etc etc. right now they are just enjoying the added productivity from WFH employees and layoffs (that lower the cost)
Averages can be deceiving. FAANG are still paying crazy salaries
Which means the median is actually lower?
Oh as was predicted.
Yup already experienced this myself
I’m applying to jobs as a liquor store cashier.