I know a former Amazon tech worker and can confirm this is BS. Amazon don't treat their tech employees like royalty, and while they're not being treated with the same level of disdain as warehouse...
Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.
I know a former Amazon tech worker and can confirm this is BS. Amazon don't treat their tech employees like royalty, and while they're not being treated with the same level of disdain as warehouse and delivery workers, it's a very cutthroat position with high workloads, long hours, having to frequently be on call, and the danger that failing to meet a deadline could get you placed on a PIP.
Amazon also have a tendency to dangle relocation opportunities over their tech workforce like a carrot on a stick.
I'll also go ahead and confirm this from the perspective of someone that spent a decent chunk of his career as an SDE at Amazon. The office amenities are so completely a lie that they often get...
I'll also go ahead and confirm this from the perspective of someone that spent a decent chunk of his career as an SDE at Amazon. The office amenities are so completely a lie that they often get joked about. Some of the other tech companies will offer free snacks and sometimes even full hot meals, but at Amazon you can normally expect no more than a kitchenette coffee machine. I've worked in smaller offices for much worse paying companies that offered far better office experiences.
The office experience at Amazon is actually pretty much garbage. Open floor plans, few isolated offices which are simultaneously always reserved and always empty, some floors don't have enough meeting rooms at peak meeting time, and people taking video calls at their desks. It's a noisy, distracting, unproductive environment that offers effectively no benefits in return because you can't even have productive hallway chats because you risk isolating the members of your team that are assigned to different locations.
The actual culture issues, like workload and on-call, are extremely team and manager dependent. I'd heard horror stories about some other teams, so after I started reporting to a manager that I meshed well with I basically just stayed put.
Pro tip for getting in with the strong majority of managers I ever worked with at Amazon: they love to drink. For the events that they fly in to one location, such as annual reviews, they'll go out multiple nights and be hung over through the next day meetings. The thing is though that these events are exceptionally easy to show up to. Want to hear juicy stuff, get some face time with the people responsible for your advancement, and drink on an open tab the company will pay for? Find a way to be there. The easiest is just to ask someone from out of town about their dinner plans and they'll respond, "a bunch of us are going to ___," and you can just follow along. I almost never did any kind of real overtime or off-the-clock company stuff, except this really. It's a lot easier to be willing to see coworkers after hours at restaurants and bars that are being expensed.
The thing that made it stand out a little to me at Amazon was how the company is stingy in so many ways, but there seems to be a bottomless budget for drinking. My other experiences have a similar...
The thing that made it stand out a little to me at Amazon was how the company is stingy in so many ways, but there seems to be a bottomless budget for drinking. My other experiences have a similar "go drink with the people above you if you want visibility" thing, but had to be much more frugal (usually needing to pay for myself). I haven't worked at other "big tech" though so maybe it's just a standard thing that depends on size of company.
<this comment is mostly meant for humor despite being accurate to my experiences interacting with Amazon employees, predominantly engineers and sales reps> I've found there are two very easy ways...
<this comment is mostly meant for humor despite being accurate to my experiences interacting with Amazon employees, predominantly engineers and sales reps>
Pro tip for getting in with the strong majority of managers I ever worked with at Amazon: they love to drink.
I've found there are two very easy ways to start a relationship with Amazon employees: alcohol and cocaine. Obviously not everyone and not everywhere, but I have never seen people so shamelessly doing cocaine in the bathroom at a company-hosted event. They would go W I L D.
I know someone who worked at both Amazon and Microsoft in software development. He said that the defining characteristic of both was extreme workplace politics by the managers and people who had...
I know someone who worked at both Amazon and Microsoft in software development. He said that the defining characteristic of both was extreme workplace politics by the managers and people who had no work-life balance. It sounded like Game of Thrones.
I decided that I wanted to stay away from those culty big tech companies once I heard about their weird hiring puzzles and read How Would You Move Mount Fuji
There was actually an informal policy at my last place of work to more carefully evaluate any candidate that came from Amazon (especially if it was their first job) because the environment was so...
There was actually an informal policy at my last place of work to more carefully evaluate any candidate that came from Amazon (especially if it was their first job) because the environment was so toxic. The hiring managers were afraid of bringing that cutthroat atmosphere into the company.
The worst manager I ever had knew nothing about programming, was incompetent as a manager, and played politics viciously. He ended up at Amazon, which tells me all I need to know about what it...
The worst manager I ever had knew nothing about programming, was incompetent as a manager, and played politics viciously. He ended up at Amazon, which tells me all I need to know about what it must be like to work there.
Lots of dynamite, and water, right? Blow up the underside, pump water under it then float it away. Didnt say where to move it too I suppose. Edit: wait no would have to be molten lead, cause it...
Lots of dynamite, and water, right?
Blow up the underside, pump water under it then float it away.
Didnt say where to move it too I suppose.
Edit: wait no would have to be molten lead, cause it needs to be something more dense than the mountain.
A former coworker at Google said that when they went into Covid lockdown he and his wife at Amazon both asked for some flexibility so they could handle their kids without their previous childcare...
A former coworker at Google said that when they went into Covid lockdown he and his wife at Amazon both asked for some flexibility so they could handle their kids without their previous childcare provider.
Google said sure no problem. Go part time even with no change in pay for a few months. Amazon told his wife to get fucked.
I can see it being true. I think the eras in tech come every 5 years, so that sounds like "peak" Amazon, in the 2010-2015 era. But yes, Amazon was by far the fastest to enshittify its tech workers.
I can see it being true. I think the eras in tech come every 5 years, so that sounds like "peak" Amazon, in the 2010-2015 era.
But yes, Amazon was by far the fastest to enshittify its tech workers.
For what it's worth, I generally find Cory Doctorow more annoying than useful, but this article seems particularly egregious. Firstly, I think it's absurd to talk about AI-based layoffs without...
Exemplary
For what it's worth, I generally find Cory Doctorow more annoying than useful, but this article seems particularly egregious.
Firstly, I think it's absurd to talk about AI-based layoffs without talking about all the other layoffs that have happened in tech as new ways of doing more for less have been found. Outsourcing, low/no-code, the magic of the H-1B visa (in the US) — there has been no shortage of ways for companies to find cheaper labour. But tech workers are still commanding staggering incomes when compared to the lowest-paid workers (again, particularly in the US). So forgive me (as a tech worker myself) for the small size of my violin.
Secondly, the use of vocational awe to describe tech workers feels almost obscene, given that the professions to whom it applies are deeply underpaid and overworked, and often don't have better choices without switching to completely different professions. Tech workers have always had better choices — there have always been companies that have perhaps not paid as well, but have had healthier work-life balances. This is particularly true in, say, the EU, where 9-5 tech workers are the norm, but teachers, nurses, librarians, and other professions that genuinely do have vocational awe are still typically heavily overworked and overburdened.
I think Doctorow would do better to give tech workers credit for our own actions: we weren't tricked into working excessive amounts of overtime by sneaky machinations of the evil "bosses" behind the scenes; we chose to take that bargain and could have easily backed out of it at any time (and many of us have done). But instead, it turns out people really like having a lot of money, and if working a lot of hours is more likely to get your more money, people will happily do it.
Thirdly, and somewhat relatedly, I dislike Doctorow's sycophantic attempts to butter up his readers. In this one, we get a brief, oddly aborted argument that tech workers are the people standing up against a world of enshittification. Except it's often business pressures preventing enshittification. Take user tracking. In most of the projects I've worked with, it's been the devs who've wanted to get it properly implemented, because they've been the ones who've most been able to profit from it. It's only been legislation like GDPR, and business mandates then pushing back on excessive, uninformed tracking, that has slowed that down somewhat. Yes, some tech workers value user privacy, but they typically have other blind spots. I once worked on a team that were quite hot on privacy issues, but couldn't understand why I wanted to translate the entire UI into a language other than English — despite the majority of users of our tool not speaking English.
This idea of enshittification being the result of nefarious commands from on high is really common in Doctorow's writings, and it really ruins a lot of the more useful parts of enshittification. Rather than being a tool to describe how different pressures affect a product over its lifetime, or how consumer choices have changed over the years, or even the dangers of captive markets, it becomes a thought-terminating cliché. "This thing I used to like is worse now, and they're to blame."
Finally (if only because this comment is getting too long), I think the conclusion isn't even a good solution to the problem Doctorow sets up. To a certain extent I agree with him that, particularly in the US, conditions of employment are poor and need fixing, and that there is a massive (and growing) power imbalance between the people who hold capital, and the people who perform labour. But (a) this isn't in any way unique to tech workers, although Doctorow knows his audience likes being buttered up so he'll pretend it is, and (b) this can only really be solved by legislation. Unions work well if they can effectively limit the supply of labour, but if you were just going to lay everyone off anyway, then they're basically doing your job for you. If you add to that the possibility of outsourcing, the huge numbers of entrants into the work force, and the incredible threat that losing your job is to someone on a work permit visa, it's basically way too late for unions now.
I particularly dislike the attempt to couch his conclusion in a kind of rah-rah pseudo-Marxist language. One of the few places where tech workers really are unique is that our means of production — our computers and our tooling — are so cheap that seizing them is just a matter of downloading something off the internet. Trying to sell a class war to the most bourgeoisie of the petite-bourgeoisie is utterly absurd.
I agree with some of what you say, but in particular regarding a here: I didn't feel like that was what he was saying. I interpreted this essay as him saying the inverse: That Tech workers sort of...
To a certain extent I agree with him that, particularly in the US, conditions of employment are poor and need fixing, and that there is a massive (and growing) power imbalance between the people who hold capital, and the people who perform labour. But (a) this isn't in any way unique to tech workers, although Doctorow knows his audience likes being buttered up so he'll pretend it is, and (b) this can only really be solved by legislation.
I agree with some of what you say, but in particular regarding a here:
I didn't feel like that was what he was saying.
I interpreted this essay as him saying the inverse: That Tech workers sort of uniquely acted as though they were above that concern but that now the chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak, and they are now entirely un-uniquely experiencing some of the same effects.
Not really IMHO, since a good portion of the post is focused on unionization, and showing the commonality of the unionization of tech workers as a similar goal to that of the needs of...
Exemplary
Not really IMHO, since a good portion of the post is focused on unionization, and showing the commonality of the unionization of tech workers as a similar goal to that of the needs of factory/industrial workers, he's making a point about the supposed desire from the administration for re-shoring of industrial jobs being devoid of that important aspect: unions. The desire to bring bad jobs back to America being very parallel to the desire for tech bosses to make the tech jobs awful, and how lack of unions further contributes to that.
In fact, the administration (as we all would expect) of course is being actively opposed to them and taking anti-union actions and hiring awful anti-union people in the cabinet. It's less a rant about Trump and more about filling out the rest of his point by contrasting the success/need/history of unions in industrial jobs with the lack of them historically in tech and the way tech jobs have headed over time without them
Doesn't feel like a pivot to me at all, just Doctorow assembling his full point from two angles. None of it feels out of place or unrelated to the rest to me. Felt like he pretty clearly tied them together. The things he starts talking about in the first half very much intersect with his discussion of Trump and political happenings and their effects on unions, and he's certainly no stranger to writing about the intersection of tech and politics
There's two things about Trump that cause him to be inserted into almost every conversation now: It's an unfortunate fact that he's extremely powerful and he wields the power in a way that has...
There's two things about Trump that cause him to be inserted into almost every conversation now:
It's an unfortunate fact that he's extremely powerful and he wields the power in a way that has wide ranging negative effects.
He's a placeholder for all the corrupt and evil people and institutions that support him and control him. When someone says "Trump did something", they mean (or should mean): Trump did something, or Trump's admin did something, or project 2025 did something, or the republican party did something, or fox news did something, etc.
When he's gone people will have a different word for "evil negative force that is destroying the planet".
The thing about the Koch brothers is that you could figure out that they had a philosophy. They were doing things that they thought were making the world a better place - regardless of if it...
The thing about the Koch brothers is that you could figure out that they had a philosophy. They were doing things that they thought were making the world a better place - regardless of if it actually was or not. They figured their political spending was akin to philanthropy. Heck, one of them was a major supporter of public media.
I cannot say the same about Musk or Trump. They are pandering to people who have those deplorable ideals, but I cannot in good faith say that they actually believe it.
Yeah and to me, in this case Doctorow is specifically referencing actions and rhetoric coming from the administration so the invocation of Trump's (and Elon's) name is appropriate rather than out...
Yeah and to me, in this case Doctorow is specifically referencing actions and rhetoric coming from the administration so the invocation of Trump's (and Elon's) name is appropriate rather than out of place or "shoehorned in" for a cheap shot.
None of this would be useful to someone thinking about working for a tech company and wanting to know what it’s like. You need specific and fairly up-to-date info for that. For example, a quote...
None of this would be useful to someone thinking about working for a tech company and wanting to know what it’s like. You need specific and fairly up-to-date info for that.
For example, a quote from Sergey Brin isn’t going to tell you what working for a specific team at Google is like. It’s a company with 180k employees with offices all over the world. There is some uniformity, but things like whether you are on-call or not and whether or not there are crunch periods will be team and location-specific.
These articles about tech companies in general (not even a specific company) are too zoomed-out to be practically useful.
It's useful to show an industry and societal trend. People who are thinking about getting into tech should make sure that they vote for their own best interests, or maybe enter a different field.
It's useful to show an industry and societal trend. People who are thinking about getting into tech should make sure that they vote for their own best interests, or maybe enter a different field.
I don't think the intent of the article is to tell you exactly what your own experience will be other than to just show how the industry is headed in general. It feels zoomed out on purpose, it's...
I don't think the intent of the article is to tell you exactly what your own experience will be other than to just show how the industry is headed in general. It feels zoomed out on purpose, it's commentary, not personal advice. And the takeaway is the same: unionize (and big tech sucks ass which is true). The quotes and particular instances mentioned just belie a particular culture/environment and thought process of execs that paints a picture of the industry.
But admittedly I am heavily biased and harbor an extreme level of distaste, hell you could call it hatred if you want idc, for billionaires and their techbro companies.
Regardless, personally I feel like I am done with tech and tech related jobs at this point. Given the way things are going my next job will probably be in an entirely different industry if I had to guess, though that's not to say it will be any better. Hopefully unionized at least, or even at some middling-wage thing like coffee roasting or something else. I'm hoping for a 180 life change in that regard and will be happier doing something simple
Well, he's rooting for unions in general, and I think he always has? There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but I think whether it's necessary will also depend on the specific circumstances.
Well, he's rooting for unions in general, and I think he always has? There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but I think whether it's necessary will also depend on the specific circumstances.
That mindset is exactly why I'm not too confident it will form soon. Not in Big tech, at lest. Micro circumstances are still "good" overall. People may be overworked but those workers get to...
but I think whether it's necessary will also depend on the specific circumstances.
That mindset is exactly why I'm not too confident it will form soon. Not in Big tech, at lest.
Micro circumstances are still "good" overall. People may be overworked but those workers get to maintain very high standards of living and may even consider retirement as early as their 40's from how much cash they accumulate. It is (or, was) the modern finance industry, veiliig itself as a meritocracy as all you felt you needed to do to get your foot in was study a bunch of algorithm trivia.
That kind of lifestyle, even if you slash it in half, won't make people consider unions. They need to get as bad as the game industry where job security is as precarious as a polished floor before real action starts. And even then, those moves in games are in its infancy.
That statement is kind of mind-boggling to me. You may be tired and miserable and have no spare time, but you'll have lots of options during your spare time!
People may be overworked but those workers get to maintain very high standards of living
That statement is kind of mind-boggling to me. You may be tired and miserable and have no spare time, but you'll have lots of options during your spare time!
haha, yup. There's a reason I compared it to the finance industry. Some people really don't mind burning their best years early on grinding their minds and bodies away, if it gets them to the top...
haha, yup. There's a reason I compared it to the finance industry. Some people really don't mind burning their best years early on grinding their minds and bodies away, if it gets them to the top or out of the workforce early.
Or they may simply be raised on that "live to work" mindset. They spend those same kinds of 80-100 hours studying to get into a top school. Then in school to get top grades and graduate top of their class. They know nothing other than the grind. I definitely know a few coulleages that felt a bit listless post college, with savings in the 6 figures as they have insane compensation but live the lifestyle of that same college minimalism. They never got to ask themselves "what do I want to do with all this?"
I have had some really strange interactions with people over this. In either 2018 or 2019, a friend of a friend from college reached out to me because he heard I had moved to the same city as him....
I have had some really strange interactions with people over this. In either 2018 or 2019, a friend of a friend from college reached out to me because he heard I had moved to the same city as him. He was in finance, and was trying to move into FinTech. He would constantly try and recruit me to come work for his team, saying my starting pay would be $300,000-400,000/yr, and all it would take would be working 70-80hrs/wk in a pressure-cooker of stress and anxiety because no one had any semblance of job security. Low performers were cut immediately and aggressively. I was already making pretty decent money (slightly below average for where I lived), but I loved the company, loved my coworkers, and had great work-life balance. Dude could not understand why I kept turning him down. In the end he gave up and I later found out he was trying to recruit me because he knew he was going to be on the chopping block soon and was desperate to hire anyone to either dig him out of the hole he made, or to blame to save his own ass.
keep in mind the audience. The various tech communities Doctrow writes for are much too large for any significant portion to get any value out of the micro situations. It doesn't do much for the...
keep in mind the audience. The various tech communities Doctrow writes for are much too large for any significant portion to get any value out of the micro situations. It doesn't do much for the overall argument here to dissect how Google tended to be more generous of work life balance than Amazon. That's not the thesis he wanted to portray.
I'm not sure how or why this would target future tech workers and where to work or not. It's an overall scope saying that tech working is getting more exploited by the day.
I know a former Amazon tech worker and can confirm this is BS. Amazon don't treat their tech employees like royalty, and while they're not being treated with the same level of disdain as warehouse and delivery workers, it's a very cutthroat position with high workloads, long hours, having to frequently be on call, and the danger that failing to meet a deadline could get you placed on a PIP.
Amazon also have a tendency to dangle relocation opportunities over their tech workforce like a carrot on a stick.
I'll also go ahead and confirm this from the perspective of someone that spent a decent chunk of his career as an SDE at Amazon. The office amenities are so completely a lie that they often get joked about. Some of the other tech companies will offer free snacks and sometimes even full hot meals, but at Amazon you can normally expect no more than a kitchenette coffee machine. I've worked in smaller offices for much worse paying companies that offered far better office experiences.
The office experience at Amazon is actually pretty much garbage. Open floor plans, few isolated offices which are simultaneously always reserved and always empty, some floors don't have enough meeting rooms at peak meeting time, and people taking video calls at their desks. It's a noisy, distracting, unproductive environment that offers effectively no benefits in return because you can't even have productive hallway chats because you risk isolating the members of your team that are assigned to different locations.
The actual culture issues, like workload and on-call, are extremely team and manager dependent. I'd heard horror stories about some other teams, so after I started reporting to a manager that I meshed well with I basically just stayed put.
Pro tip for getting in with the strong majority of managers I ever worked with at Amazon: they love to drink. For the events that they fly in to one location, such as annual reviews, they'll go out multiple nights and be hung over through the next day meetings. The thing is though that these events are exceptionally easy to show up to. Want to hear juicy stuff, get some face time with the people responsible for your advancement, and drink on an open tab the company will pay for? Find a way to be there. The easiest is just to ask someone from out of town about their dinner plans and they'll respond, "a bunch of us are going to ___," and you can just follow along. I almost never did any kind of real overtime or off-the-clock company stuff, except this really. It's a lot easier to be willing to see coworkers after hours at restaurants and bars that are being expensed.
IMHO the whole drinking stuff is common in most tech companies. Going to offsites and parties is pretty much the best way to place yourself.
The thing that made it stand out a little to me at Amazon was how the company is stingy in so many ways, but there seems to be a bottomless budget for drinking. My other experiences have a similar "go drink with the people above you if you want visibility" thing, but had to be much more frugal (usually needing to pay for myself). I haven't worked at other "big tech" though so maybe it's just a standard thing that depends on size of company.
<this comment is mostly meant for humor despite being accurate to my experiences interacting with Amazon employees, predominantly engineers and sales reps>
I've found there are two very easy ways to start a relationship with Amazon employees: alcohol and cocaine. Obviously not everyone and not everywhere, but I have never seen people so shamelessly doing cocaine in the bathroom at a company-hosted event. They would go W I L D.
I know someone who worked at both Amazon and Microsoft in software development. He said that the defining characteristic of both was extreme workplace politics by the managers and people who had no work-life balance. It sounded like Game of Thrones.
I decided that I wanted to stay away from those culty big tech companies once I heard about their weird hiring puzzles and read How Would You Move Mount Fuji
There was actually an informal policy at my last place of work to more carefully evaluate any candidate that came from Amazon (especially if it was their first job) because the environment was so toxic. The hiring managers were afraid of bringing that cutthroat atmosphere into the company.
The worst manager I ever had knew nothing about programming, was incompetent as a manager, and played politics viciously. He ended up at Amazon, which tells me all I need to know about what it must be like to work there.
Lots of dynamite, and water, right?
Blow up the underside, pump water under it then float it away.
Didnt say where to move it too I suppose.
Edit: wait no would have to be molten lead, cause it needs to be something more dense than the mountain.
I'd say it depends on the reason for moving it. You may get away with renaming some other peak to Fuji
Haha thats slick, and eco friendly!
A former coworker at Google said that when they went into Covid lockdown he and his wife at Amazon both asked for some flexibility so they could handle their kids without their previous childcare provider.
Google said sure no problem. Go part time even with no change in pay for a few months. Amazon told his wife to get fucked.
I can see it being true. I think the eras in tech come every 5 years, so that sounds like "peak" Amazon, in the 2010-2015 era.
But yes, Amazon was by far the fastest to enshittify its tech workers.
For what it's worth, I generally find Cory Doctorow more annoying than useful, but this article seems particularly egregious.
Firstly, I think it's absurd to talk about AI-based layoffs without talking about all the other layoffs that have happened in tech as new ways of doing more for less have been found. Outsourcing, low/no-code, the magic of the H-1B visa (in the US) — there has been no shortage of ways for companies to find cheaper labour. But tech workers are still commanding staggering incomes when compared to the lowest-paid workers (again, particularly in the US). So forgive me (as a tech worker myself) for the small size of my violin.
Secondly, the use of vocational awe to describe tech workers feels almost obscene, given that the professions to whom it applies are deeply underpaid and overworked, and often don't have better choices without switching to completely different professions. Tech workers have always had better choices — there have always been companies that have perhaps not paid as well, but have had healthier work-life balances. This is particularly true in, say, the EU, where 9-5 tech workers are the norm, but teachers, nurses, librarians, and other professions that genuinely do have vocational awe are still typically heavily overworked and overburdened.
I think Doctorow would do better to give tech workers credit for our own actions: we weren't tricked into working excessive amounts of overtime by sneaky machinations of the evil "bosses" behind the scenes; we chose to take that bargain and could have easily backed out of it at any time (and many of us have done). But instead, it turns out people really like having a lot of money, and if working a lot of hours is more likely to get your more money, people will happily do it.
Thirdly, and somewhat relatedly, I dislike Doctorow's sycophantic attempts to butter up his readers. In this one, we get a brief, oddly aborted argument that tech workers are the people standing up against a world of enshittification. Except it's often business pressures preventing enshittification. Take user tracking. In most of the projects I've worked with, it's been the devs who've wanted to get it properly implemented, because they've been the ones who've most been able to profit from it. It's only been legislation like GDPR, and business mandates then pushing back on excessive, uninformed tracking, that has slowed that down somewhat. Yes, some tech workers value user privacy, but they typically have other blind spots. I once worked on a team that were quite hot on privacy issues, but couldn't understand why I wanted to translate the entire UI into a language other than English — despite the majority of users of our tool not speaking English.
This idea of enshittification being the result of nefarious commands from on high is really common in Doctorow's writings, and it really ruins a lot of the more useful parts of enshittification. Rather than being a tool to describe how different pressures affect a product over its lifetime, or how consumer choices have changed over the years, or even the dangers of captive markets, it becomes a thought-terminating cliché. "This thing I used to like is worse now, and they're to blame."
Finally (if only because this comment is getting too long), I think the conclusion isn't even a good solution to the problem Doctorow sets up. To a certain extent I agree with him that, particularly in the US, conditions of employment are poor and need fixing, and that there is a massive (and growing) power imbalance between the people who hold capital, and the people who perform labour. But (a) this isn't in any way unique to tech workers, although Doctorow knows his audience likes being buttered up so he'll pretend it is, and (b) this can only really be solved by legislation. Unions work well if they can effectively limit the supply of labour, but if you were just going to lay everyone off anyway, then they're basically doing your job for you. If you add to that the possibility of outsourcing, the huge numbers of entrants into the work force, and the incredible threat that losing your job is to someone on a work permit visa, it's basically way too late for unions now.
I particularly dislike the attempt to couch his conclusion in a kind of rah-rah pseudo-Marxist language. One of the few places where tech workers really are unique is that our means of production — our computers and our tooling — are so cheap that seizing them is just a matter of downloading something off the internet. Trying to sell a class war to the most bourgeoisie of the petite-bourgeoisie is utterly absurd.
I agree with some of what you say, but in particular regarding a here:
I didn't feel like that was what he was saying.
I interpreted this essay as him saying the inverse: That Tech workers sort of uniquely acted as though they were above that concern but that now the chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak, and they are now entirely un-uniquely experiencing some of the same effects.
True, that's also a fair interpretation.
Seems a bit weird to suddenly pivot to a rant about Trump
Not really IMHO, since a good portion of the post is focused on unionization, and showing the commonality of the unionization of tech workers as a similar goal to that of the needs of factory/industrial workers, he's making a point about the supposed desire from the administration for re-shoring of industrial jobs being devoid of that important aspect: unions. The desire to bring bad jobs back to America being very parallel to the desire for tech bosses to make the tech jobs awful, and how lack of unions further contributes to that.
In fact, the administration (as we all would expect) of course is being actively opposed to them and taking anti-union actions and hiring awful anti-union people in the cabinet. It's less a rant about Trump and more about filling out the rest of his point by contrasting the success/need/history of unions in industrial jobs with the lack of them historically in tech and the way tech jobs have headed over time without them
Doesn't feel like a pivot to me at all, just Doctorow assembling his full point from two angles. None of it feels out of place or unrelated to the rest to me. Felt like he pretty clearly tied them together. The things he starts talking about in the first half very much intersect with his discussion of Trump and political happenings and their effects on unions, and he's certainly no stranger to writing about the intersection of tech and politics
There's two things about Trump that cause him to be inserted into almost every conversation now:
It's an unfortunate fact that he's extremely powerful and he wields the power in a way that has wide ranging negative effects.
He's a placeholder for all the corrupt and evil people and institutions that support him and control him. When someone says "Trump did something", they mean (or should mean): Trump did something, or Trump's admin did something, or project 2025 did something, or the republican party did something, or fox news did something, etc.
When he's gone people will have a different word for "evil negative force that is destroying the planet".
Place your bets, but my money is on Musk. I miss the good ol' days when it was the Koch brothers.
The thing about the Koch brothers is that you could figure out that they had a philosophy. They were doing things that they thought were making the world a better place - regardless of if it actually was or not. They figured their political spending was akin to philanthropy. Heck, one of them was a major supporter of public media.
I cannot say the same about Musk or Trump. They are pandering to people who have those deplorable ideals, but I cannot in good faith say that they actually believe it.
The smart money is on Peter Thiel. Musk is obviously reserved for desperate and pathetic, rather than evil per se.
Yeah and to me, in this case Doctorow is specifically referencing actions and rhetoric coming from the administration so the invocation of Trump's (and Elon's) name is appropriate rather than out of place or "shoehorned in" for a cheap shot.
None of this would be useful to someone thinking about working for a tech company and wanting to know what it’s like. You need specific and fairly up-to-date info for that.
For example, a quote from Sergey Brin isn’t going to tell you what working for a specific team at Google is like. It’s a company with 180k employees with offices all over the world. There is some uniformity, but things like whether you are on-call or not and whether or not there are crunch periods will be team and location-specific.
These articles about tech companies in general (not even a specific company) are too zoomed-out to be practically useful.
It's useful to show an industry and societal trend. People who are thinking about getting into tech should make sure that they vote for their own best interests, or maybe enter a different field.
I don't think the intent of the article is to tell you exactly what your own experience will be other than to just show how the industry is headed in general. It feels zoomed out on purpose, it's commentary, not personal advice. And the takeaway is the same: unionize (and big tech sucks ass which is true). The quotes and particular instances mentioned just belie a particular culture/environment and thought process of execs that paints a picture of the industry.
But admittedly I am heavily biased and harbor an extreme level of distaste, hell you could call it hatred if you want idc, for billionaires and their techbro companies.
Regardless, personally I feel like I am done with tech and tech related jobs at this point. Given the way things are going my next job will probably be in an entirely different industry if I had to guess, though that's not to say it will be any better. Hopefully unionized at least, or even at some middling-wage thing like coffee roasting or something else. I'm hoping for a 180 life change in that regard and will be happier doing something simple
Well, he's rooting for unions in general, and I think he always has? There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but I think whether it's necessary will also depend on the specific circumstances.
That mindset is exactly why I'm not too confident it will form soon. Not in Big tech, at lest.
Micro circumstances are still "good" overall. People may be overworked but those workers get to maintain very high standards of living and may even consider retirement as early as their 40's from how much cash they accumulate. It is (or, was) the modern finance industry, veiliig itself as a meritocracy as all you felt you needed to do to get your foot in was study a bunch of algorithm trivia.
That kind of lifestyle, even if you slash it in half, won't make people consider unions. They need to get as bad as the game industry where job security is as precarious as a polished floor before real action starts. And even then, those moves in games are in its infancy.
That statement is kind of mind-boggling to me. You may be tired and miserable and have no spare time, but you'll have lots of options during your spare time!
haha, yup. There's a reason I compared it to the finance industry. Some people really don't mind burning their best years early on grinding their minds and bodies away, if it gets them to the top or out of the workforce early.
Or they may simply be raised on that "live to work" mindset. They spend those same kinds of 80-100 hours studying to get into a top school. Then in school to get top grades and graduate top of their class. They know nothing other than the grind. I definitely know a few coulleages that felt a bit listless post college, with savings in the 6 figures as they have insane compensation but live the lifestyle of that same college minimalism. They never got to ask themselves "what do I want to do with all this?"
I have had some really strange interactions with people over this. In either 2018 or 2019, a friend of a friend from college reached out to me because he heard I had moved to the same city as him. He was in finance, and was trying to move into FinTech. He would constantly try and recruit me to come work for his team, saying my starting pay would be $300,000-400,000/yr, and all it would take would be working 70-80hrs/wk in a pressure-cooker of stress and anxiety because no one had any semblance of job security. Low performers were cut immediately and aggressively. I was already making pretty decent money (slightly below average for where I lived), but I loved the company, loved my coworkers, and had great work-life balance. Dude could not understand why I kept turning him down. In the end he gave up and I later found out he was trying to recruit me because he knew he was going to be on the chopping block soon and was desperate to hire anyone to either dig him out of the hole he made, or to blame to save his own ass.
keep in mind the audience. The various tech communities Doctrow writes for are much too large for any significant portion to get any value out of the micro situations. It doesn't do much for the overall argument here to dissect how Google tended to be more generous of work life balance than Amazon. That's not the thesis he wanted to portray.
I'm not sure how or why this would target future tech workers and where to work or not. It's an overall scope saying that tech working is getting more exploited by the day.
I think that the stories that people tell (like in this very topic) are more useful if you want to know what's going on.