this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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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.
They'll say the work is not needed. That's because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. "Industry hasn't innovated in x years" okay that's on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that's left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
Knowing Amazon quite well, there definitely are sectors that are seriously deficient even new emerging ones within Amazon seem deficient.
I agree it wasn't painless in fact there is a high suicide rate within the computer sciences field. In fact it probably still isn't painless. I also agree unions are useless but some government regulation wouldn't be.
Yea everything is. Until it isn't.
"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
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.
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.
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.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
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.
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
Thank you!
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.
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.
What a boring, tired attempt.
Sarcasm: Oh well, better just throw our hands up and allow right wing authoritarians to pursue their narrow minded cycles of exploitation and heirarchal domination. /s
In fact, organizing non-heirarchal is quite proven. Doing so on a scale we're discussing, and Truly Breaking the Cycle of the Planetary Work Machine well, see for yourself, there's more imagining to do.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Truly Breaking the Cycle of the Planetary Work Machine
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
am attempt at what? not everyone has a hidden agenda, who are you talking to?
Noone is accusing you of the very obvious, beligerent actions of the right wing authoritarians who ceaselessly perpetrate moral panics using fear based propaganda to consolidate their power.
Anyway, Andrewism's latest video directly addresses your originally expressed concern:
https://youtu.be/lrTzjaXskUU?t=2634
It is not the single, momentous tsunami that shapes the coast, but rather the many small waves that erode the land with time.
Not some tsunami to be scaremongered, but the regrowing of dormant ability to self-govern, which requires us to heal and educate from so many woundings and ills, misinformation and disinformation 🫶
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/lrTzjaXskUU?t=2634
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Oh yes, somebody without any formal education on the subject and no credentials whatsoever except the fact that they have a face to put on a vide is the perfect person to quote here. Well done.
It seems you have a vested interest in discrediting and disencouraging anyone from imagining or exploring all the ways in which a better world is possible. How peculiar.
You can imagine whatever you wish, but quoting random people is just stupid when you have access to actual research (incidentally the same material used by those nobodies in a twisted way to manipulate you). Get out of the youtube rabbit hole, there are no rabbits at the end of it.
The many cited publications and texts found within say otherwise =)
Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it's not something they negotiate and protect. "No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote." Break the terms... instant strike.
Sure, it can, because I'm going to blow your mind: businesses aren't about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company's best long term asset--they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs--yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it's still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn't going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn't really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it's not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla's ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn't look like it's going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn't make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
Wealth (whether it be "money", resources, or anything else) and power are one and the same. Two sides of the same coin. Either one provides access to the other. I don't think of them as separate or distinct at all... which is why it's problematic for the aristocratic hoarders when plebes start to pool either and work collectively.
Oh, no, they're not exactly the same. They wouldn't come into conflict if they were the same.
As another example, unions. Employees often see issues early on; perhaps a machine needing maintenance. A union can bring this up to management and put the pressure on to get it done. The business will save money in the long run with machines in proper maintenance.
If it doesn't get done, best case scenario is that it fails and the whole production line is shot until it's fixed. Worst case, it fails more catastrophically and damages other equipment, or injures workers.
Despite plenty of stories like this, companies will fight unionization efforts every time. Why? Because money doesn't always align with power.
Maybe something is getting lost in translation, but none of the things you mentioned seem to have anything to do with the point I'm making... so your ending claim that "money doesn't always align with power" doesn't seem related to anything I said or the scenario you posed...?
"Wealth and power are exactly the same". This is the claim I'm disputing. If there are places where money and power are in conflict, then they can't be the same. Your analysis of a situation will be have holes in it if this is not considered.
If you’d care to dive deeper I’d like to be challenged on this; but your previous example of “maintaining things can avoid unnecessary costs later” (as I understand it) doesn’t have anything to do with “money and power can be in conflict”.
Shortsightedness driven by greed does not, in any way, negate money equaling power.
Then let me attack it from a different direction: can you have power in a society that does not have money?
Within that isolated society? Sure.
If your goal was to argue semantics then I don't know why I'm entertaining this. Yes, in an imaginary society that is 1) somehow not influenced by modern society and 2) somehow also avoids currency - power dynamics will obviously take different shapes.
Do you realize how meaningless that example is?
I'm working outword to find a path in.
If a society can have power without money, then can the two overlap perfectly in any society?
To use a more concrete example, how do unions ever have power in our society? They tend not to have money, or at least very little in proportion to the business owners.
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it's not really that bad. It's not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it's way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the "professionals" are able to handle the complex tasks that others can't/don't want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.
Ask a professional plumber which they find more taxing: being bent into awkward spaces on their hands and knees all day, or sitting at a desk thinking hard about a problem someone has likely already solved.
Borg Voice
"We Are Pipes. "
"Our Voice Is The Expression Of The Pipe."
"The First Technology was The Pipe."
"The Last Technology will be The Pipe."
"Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Computer Pipes."
"Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Shit Pipes"
"We Are One"
"We Are The Pipe."
10/10 write up
I'm an infrastructure engineer working at a government contractor and I'm in a union with OPEIU 1010, the tech workers' local. Others are unionizing independently, with CWA, etc.. It's still early days for the tech industry but there are examples. We're really not that different from other industries with a larger union presence.
Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it's hard to envision what I could actually do.
I'm very pro-union btw, it just seems like there are certain things that can sometimes make it more difficult to make happen
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as outsourcing.
Not even outsourcing, they are internal hires, just elsewhere.
*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.
You know how most of the software engineers in India feel? Like they are even more micromanaged, overworked and deprived of agency in the work place than US tech workers.
I want software engineers and India and Mexico to earn a living wage just as much as I want software engineers living in my city to earn a living wage and have a workplace that treats them with decency (and doesn’t try to treat humans like robots).
I am sure most Indians and Mexican software engineers feel that way about software engineers from other countries too.
The only zero sum game here is between all of us and the ruling class and if you don’t see that now I hope one day in the future that thought will find you with an open mind.
I know how they feel because I work with them daily. They feel blessed because they earn sometimes 10 times more than their parents for work much less hard, in particular those coming from farming families. They are not earning a "living wage", they are earning a "live almost in luxury" wage, 20 to 30 lakh a year, which is still 10 times less than silicon valley. They work in a nice office with Air Conditioning, or directly from home if they want.
That being said, software engineers EVERYWHERE are earning "a living wage" at least. We are way overpaid, in fact, compared to social workers or teachers. A company with hundreds of thousands of employees relocating some positions to other countries is just mundane.
Who said violence and class warfare can’t be mundane in practice?
No y’all aren’t, the problem is rather that everybody else is way underpaid
That's the same thing, I explicitly compared it to other people. It's relative.
Please please please open your heart and listen to me a second.
It is not the same thing. There is a lot of research on this and it turns out it is not as simple as one person winning means another person losing (or 5…). The reason the world is currently set up this way is a choice made by an economic class of people to mortgage the entire future of another economic class of people, into a doomed construction of decay that can only ever collapse in flames.
That is the crux of literally this whole miserable slush of suffering we are in.
The only truly zero sum game here is between the ruling class getting to own everything and the rest of us getting to live a decent quality of life.
If you don’t listen to anything else I say, fine, I mean I can be insufferable as fuck, but consider the truths in that point alone outside the context of my nonsense.
I hear you (well, read you), I just disagree.
thank you for opening your heart for me and giving it a go!
take a pizza for your travels 🍕
waait fuck there is a rat down over there in the corner by the barrels quick GET THE PIZZA BEFORE THE RAT GETS IT.
Outsourcing is the problem and you are called racist or xenophobic if you even mention it. Unions have nothing to do with it, they would only exasperate the speed of the transfer of knowledge and jobs to lesser developed countries with lower cost labor.
The government needs to break up these oligopolies who have more money than the government itself. That money is spent on people who have no idea what is going on in the tech world, they just listen to the lobbyists, accept their checks and investment returns. They couldn't care less about the long term effects.