cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34411807
While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”
Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.
Time to unionize.
When’s the second best time to plant a tree
I’m kind of LMAO because of course those places have turned into that. Look who runs them and look at the execs running it. These are not college grads literally living there and need to unwind while at work.
A lot of software companies especially the new ones who want young talent are running exactly the same as startups were 20 years ago just a lot more flashy and newer toys.
I worked for one of those 20 year startups. It was awful. Basically there was no drive, no vision. The entire place was a lot of faff and only existed to give bonuses to leadership. All of the interesting and motivated employees moved on long ago leaving only the mediocre types who play political games and favorites. I needed A job and took it when offered, but took the next job as soon as I could get out. I watched many others cycle through, some a lot faster than I did (I was waiting for a specific position to open).
I wonder if it’s inevitable that anywhere with enough humans working together will reach this point eventually?
When money and power are funneled to the few then yes. Something more cooperative or democratic probably wouldn’t have the same intensity of the problem.
I think it’s only inevitable because of how our society is structured.
No, not really. Where I work now is fantastic and we have great leadership. The moment your original visionary leader leaves and someone with an MBA gets in their place, it all goes to shit. This is LITERALLY what happened to Google and to Apple. Both super dynamic companies with great culture who were then gutted to generate shareholder value.
From what I’ve seen it starts with a few people who abuse the niceties, or the first downturn, or both, and suddenly they’ve got an excuse to strip it all back.
It’s always one or the other that starts it. You have an office game console and someone brings their kids who spill pop on it or they take the games home. You get that guy who takes a box of snacks home and the CEO complains for like 2 years about it. You get someone who orders pay per view on a business trip. Etc.
Once you get to like 300 employees this threshold starts getting reliably exceeded.
Since when is a 300 person company a startup? I feel like you lose any claim to that long before you hit 100.
Yeah, but that’s the size where things definitely start dying.
50 is probably my ideal company size.
Google today is what IBM was to the early 2000s.
10,000 Shakespeares with typewriters doing the work of one monkey.
Nobody competent who’s early in their career would go into one of those bloated rent-seeking firms. They’d be looking for an interesting startup.
It’s funny that not too long ago getting a FAANG job right out of college was a recipe for success. Now many grads would prefer to avoid them because they’re so toxic, but can’t find a job and have to apply anyhow.
What?
This has always been the case for decades and not even close to a new thing.
Rat race culture.
Idk why people think this is news. It’s been an open thing for years now
I posted a similar comment in another post of this article.
The elite 1% students who spent their lives pursuing this are getting exactly what they asked for. They sold their souls for a big paycheck and assumed that it was everyone else’s careers that were volatile. They’d have done better to work for a non-profit where at least they could say that they are making the world a better place.
It must be nice living in your imaginary world where everything is black and white.
Every year I tell my CS/CE/Info students that the market is saturated and that jobs are hard to find. I then tell them that they have to figure what motivates them: a paycheck or service. I then suggest that public service is generally stable while private enterprise can be volatile. I finish by telling them that they have to decide what among this fits them best.
The elite 1% students are going to be the ones fixing shit when AI breaks everything, because they’re the ones who spent countless hours learning math and algorithms and shit.
Meh I was a B student and run circles around my coworkers. Lots of people in this industry that aren’t actual nerds.
