"It's a good time to unionize tech workers right now..."
Best time to form a union was yesterday. Next best is today.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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I remember seeing articles on habr about unionization and that it is better done now when it is eazy.
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(4 replies)
We need a tech workers union.
I understand other workforces have it worse. however we could get there if we don't push back now.
There's always been the FSF.
There is one, Boeing engineers have a union. Also we have ASME and IEEE which are kinda like unions.
I work at a large tech company, and the feeling here is unlike anything I've ever felt before. There are a few camps:
- Workers on visas that are utterly petrified of losing their jobs, and are struggling to plan for anything long-term, since companies that lay people off can't file green cards for employees.
- Workers that are just numb to everything. They don't give a fuck, they are jaded with the bullshit their employer pulls, and work is just work.
- People that would happily take a voluntary layoff to GTFO, spend some time with family, and potentially move to something better.
What seems to be the dominating feeling that everyone has, is that they no longer support their leaders. They feel there are too many middle-managers, they realise that their C-Suite staff are fucking useless, and the CEO's are almost universally awful as leaders. Sundar has caused Google to nose-dive in popularity, Jassy is so ineffective that no one even knows he is CEO, Musk is a known sociopath going through a mental breakdown, Zuck bet everything on VR to mask huge privacy/product failings, and alongside all of this are dozens of CEO's that forced employees back to the office or laid people off for bullshit reasons.
My hope from this dark time is that companies arise that focus on the employee first, learn from the mistakes made by big tech, and purposefully manoeuvre around FAANG until they are relegated to boomer tech. Until then, like most SWE's, I'm just hoping things get better soon...
Are you referring specifically to the big, popular tech companies everyone knows about or to the whole industry? Because there are a lot of smaller companies who aren't yet run by psychopaths, at least not any more than usual.
I trust my boss but his boss is the CEO and I think the CEO is a piece of garbage.
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(3 replies)
So you are telling me that there is now 300,000 tech workers now able to focus on open source projects to keep their foot in the coding door while they drive forklifts or serve McDonald while waiting on the AI hiring bots to read their resumes?
Problem being, because big tech money has so distorted the economies of the cities it's clustered in, many of these people can only choose between finding another tech job ASAP, moving away from their industry to a lower cost metro with limited job opportunities, or imminent homelessness. Driving a forklift won't pay the rent, and commercial real estate is so absurdly priced that there may not even be a restaurant to wait tables at.
So they’re juicing their profit margins for a couple years. Let’s see what happens in another couple years when they failed to invest in the next things because they laid everyone off.