Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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In that case, the whole tech industry should, in solidarity, refuse to look for work and let the tech companies that just launched major layoffs feel the foolishness of their actions. Those tech workers need to wait long enough to allow Google, MSFT, Meta, Apple, etc. suffer the consequences of automation. If they managed this, when they finally do come crawling back, tech workers can get fat raises using this solidarity and collective action.
Pro tip: you can actually get organized in a union and strike just to get more money, no need for AI or getting fired. CEOs hate this trick!
tip: you can actually get organized in a union and strike just to get more money, no need for AI or getting fired. CEOs hate this trick!
✊🏼
They’d need to unionize first.
It’s expensive to live in tech communities. All the workers would need to move their families to somewhere more affordable and demand to work from home, on top of everything else, and they’d need to have enough savings to afford that. Right now, tech workers tend to carry debt, which is the bane of collective action.
Sort of. But people in society CAN act in solidarity. It's obviously unlikely (something tech CEO's calculated in these layoffs).
Obviously, capitalist exceptionalism is going to cause them not to do this. No one wants to loan their neighbor some money to weather a strike that WILL eventually lift ALL BOATS because of the whole "fuck you, got mine" vibe of EVERYONE in cutthroat capitalist societies. If I had the money, I'd certainly take part in this kind of collective action...and I'd also argue that many tech workers can because they were paid INCREDIBLY well in comparison to most trades....but you and I know they won't.
I'm a member of a stagehand union that will NEED to strike during the summer (our busiest season) in order to gain some ground back from what price gouging, austerity, and inflation has taken from us. I can easily guess how likely the membership will be to endorse a strike when we will have been out of work for more than a year when negotiations start. That doesn't make what I said less true; just about as unlikely as a third power coming to power in the United States two party electoral system.
Can't wait for a story from a developer or sysadmin that knows how all the duct tape is held together, gets laid off and refuses to come back to fix everything. Then the former employer doubles doubt and threatens to sue them for loss of revenue. It would be absurd but I expect the absurd now.
Management greed, stupidity, and self serving is perennial. Nothing new there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb said in "The Black Swan" that he thought one of the unrecognized strengths of stock-market-based economies was that as publicly traded companies grow and get older, they tend to become bloated and incapable, and lose money and eventually die; and this represents a mechanism for redistributing wealth away from the investing classes ("the rich") with some of the money making its way back into society as a whole.
IDK if that's still true or ever was, but he was extremely successful working in finance; he wasn't just some idiot saying his opinions.
The investment class realized it's way more profitable to cellar box a struggling company and that you can short sell the stock and never have to pay up when the company goes bankrupt. Free money!
Pah! I can fail at my job much faster than any goshdarn AI!
I can improvise new ways to fail at my job, and do so without prompting! I am truly Generally Unintelligent.