https://medium.com/@lloyd-f-hough/an-introduction-to-class-warfare-for-the-software-engineer-1810833055d7 What's your opinions on this? "What is it about the coming recession that makes a company that’s doing just fine institute broad layoffs for the first time in its 23-year history? The answer, my friend, is class warfare." #google #meta #amazon
Fine example of the Western overproduction of academics with impressing sounding but absolutely hollow rhetoric.
I don’t think he is an academic?
That’s a pretty good writeup!
People should stop hating each other and create their own companies where everyone has an equal share. That is the only way to get rid of top leeches.
The CEO should have equal share as the intern?
It has hardly anything to do with class warfare and everything to do with hiring (and firing) practices in the US. Try attempting to layoff people in Europe and Japan. The company has to show that it’s under a substantial financial stress before they can fire someone. In the US, the company may decide to let go off a bunch of people with no legal recourse. This has pros because in times of growth, companies compete for talent and are happy to shell out ridiculously high tech worker salaries to get you in the door (these salaries are substantially lower in EU and JPN) and start working on borderline frivolous concepts because they can try a bunch of these ideas out and strike gold. During a relative downturn when capital investors demand that their profit margins be maintained, the same companies get rid of their biggest operational cost and buyback stock to maintain a certain price point. The laws in US are designed to make us dispensable assets. Combined with scapegoating unions as being anti meritorious, the perfect balance of favorable laws and gas lighting has been achieved where they will throw you a bone when the company wishes to place bets in a growing market and throw us out during a mild to severe downturn. It’s a brilliant setup!
The author might respond, “yes, and class warfare is what created the laws in the US designed to allow all this”
The laws were created by the government to make it easier for businesses to grow. We are just seeing the effects of these laws because for the most part, we were not impacted at this scale before
This article is what a chat bot would respond with given the prompt: Write an egregiously inflammatory Blind shitpost railing against capitalism while promoting engineering bad practices and actively behaving in unprofessional and counterproductive ways, formatted as a Medium article. Make sure to include examples of straw man arguments and internal contradictions.
Nah, a human wrote this. People actually think this way
People should know better
Big Tech SWE’s have been riding a long bubble of exceptional treatment and now must face the fall back to the world faced by others with the same educational levels, talent, and contribution levels. Having a tantrum and stomping your feet will not save one from the competition of peers.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Speaking of myself, I wouldn't keep doing my job for money comparable to carpentry/mechanic. I find the latter much more enjoyable. Also, with lower salaries the SWE talent pipe would also dry up. The only benefit of SWE is salary, for example the tenure doesn't compound like in other professions beyond 5 years
It does compound if you keep getting promoted. How many carpenters making $1M?
The article’s advice are equivalent of shooting urself in same foot. Immature and shallow thinking.
This is the way - to never get promoted
I think it is a fine article, I don’t think he’s really expecting anyone to take his advice, he is making a rhetorical point aimed at the leadership making these decisions, and reminding engineers that we don’t necessarily get rewarded for good engineering practices – business (“capital”) has other priorities oftentimes and we might have to align ourselves somewhat with those priorities since they are paying our salaries. The advice is extreme, but to a certain measure it is valid - “don’t do work that will go unappreciated”. The Marxist terminology like “class warfare” is a bit ridiculous sounding at this point, but maybe that is the clickbait that brought us here.
I can’t think of a faster way to lower TC than to follow this advice. “Training: Sharing your knowledge with a colleague is just making yourself replaceable. If you train an engineer junior to you, then you are leveling up someone who costs the company less than you do. Don’t.” I also can’t think of a worse place to work than a company where my peers all thought like this.