It really feels like the COVID bubble briefly leveled the playing field a bit, and the CEO class has been foaming at the mouth rabidly mad about it ever since. "I can't believe we hired so many of you / had to pay you more / let you WFH.. ".
At least in the US, we had some of the greatest strides in terms of increases in relative wages for the middle class as we've had in a generation. And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up so we need to vote the bums out and take a turn towards the party of the CEO class.
Not a lot of great lessons to take from that politically or economically in terms of giving people what they ask for end being punished for it.
Leveled the playing field? Strides in relative wages? See the chart here under the section labeled "Inflation Adjusted Reality" and you'll see how incorrect your statements are:
We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades. You should also research the concept of subminimum wages and I think you'll be shocked.
If you already knew about all of the above and still think there was anything close to a leveling of the playing field, you're choosing to ignore facts.
> We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades.
Very few people make minimum wage. It’s basically impossible to find a minimum wage job in my city because even the post office and fast food restaurants are paying $19/hr or more, and they advertise it on signs out front. I don’t even live in a HCOL city.
The focus on federal minimum wage has become a red herring.
The vast majority of US workers are employed in jurisdictions with minimum wages much higher than the federal limit. It's true the national law is inadequate, and there are a handful of genuinely impoverished places where that matters. But almost every metro area is at $15/hr or higher now.
Also your article is about long term trends, and has data that ends in 2022 it looks like. In point of fact real wages since the pandemic have gone up, and by a historically notable amount.
I work for a mid-sized, publicly-traded tech company that has been inching towards profitability but the last couple quarterly earnings results have been disappointing (and rank-and-file bonuses were slashed to 25% of target) and the company had its first-ever round of layoffs last October. The CEO's last two years of comp were $20M and $10M which is obviously completely incongruous with the size, profitability, and stock performance of the company. It seems that there is a distortion in the market forces around executive compensation that functions in a similar way to venture capital -- investors are willing to pump outsized cash amounts into either funding rounds or executive comp since the occasional home run can result in stock returns that cover losses in other companies. It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
I ask this as a person who takes market forces very seriously: why?
I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population (even if they are on paper efficient in the market-efficiency sense), or at least, that the public doesn't feel like they are. That's causing massive social instability that is threatening nearly the entire developed world. That instability poses a pretty high threat to the approach you're arguing for. Neither protectionist reactionaries, nor leftists, are very well aligned with free-market philosophy, and those ideologies are ascendant nearly everywhere right now. Isn't that a greater threat to free-market economics than relatively mild welfare-state and workers-rights stuff?
(Full disclosure: I am very much pro-labor and pro-regulation, so this is arguing for things I support, but even with your views it seems pretty clear to me that the status quo is dead no matter what you do. Wouldn't you rather have reforms that make the existing system work for the public than a revolution that destroys it entirely?)
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
At this rate it's likely those "market forces" will come from the pitchfork, torch, etc markets.
You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people. But in terms of purchasing power, I think you’re wrong about working people making appreciable financial progress. Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class; our only choice is between covert and overt subservience. Finally, you should be aware that flippantly dismissing egg prices - or really any humans’ food security - makes you come across as privileged and out of touch.
The statistics about real wage growth are likely enough to be true.
That doesn't mean you don't have lots of people in high cost of living areas that lost purchasing power due to cost of housing or whatever. It just means that the aggregate effect is likely enough to have been an increase.
> You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people.
CEOs weren’t furious about “social progress”. That’s a projection of class warfare mentality.
It was, however, frustrating to see a blatantly obvious economic bubble driven by out of control government spending, which unsurprisingly has now popped. There were points in 2021 when we had junior applicants who could barely talk through the simplest interview questions but demanded senior/staff level comp because that was the going rate in the temporarily distorted market.
Many companies hired at those exaggerated rates anyway, then started cutting deeply when the market changed and they realized they were holding the bag on a lot of overpaid, under qualified hires. Other companies just sat on the sidelines and waited it out. It was the only time I remember having multiple candidates turn us down for better offers, only to message me months later begging for a job because their company overhired followed by layoffs.
>Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class;
Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same” a hungry child gets called a parasite and kicked out of a free and/or reduced price school lunch program.
I caught a bit of the Netflix series Beast Games (gameshow hosted by Mr. Beast) and there was one segment where 10 contestants took turns taking "their share" from a $1,000,000 pile. The "fair" thing to do is to take $100,000 each. 1 player ended up taking $600k, but many players that came after continued to do the "fair" thing and split what was left evenly. One even took $0.
I was thinking today about Conservative fascination with trans folks. They certainly aren't segregating their bathrooms at home, but have some weird hangup with doing so in public.
I think some % of the population are "low trust" (most people won't do the right thing, therefore it's OK if I do not do the right thing/I need to protect myself) and some are "high trust" (most people will do the right thing, so I should do the right thing/I'm safe).
The US has been teetering towards a "low trust" cultural and political landscape and the way to drive this even further is to take away safety nets and create general economic chaos, effectively destroying social trust. Even the whole RTO debate is really a question of high/low trust; executives have low trust in the workers they hire so they want them in office, even if it's less productive, yields higher turnover, and leads to lower morale.
The reason Taiwan and New Zealand did so well during the pandemic is perhaps partially because they are both "high trust" societies; your fellow citizens generally did the right thing and followed the rules.
Sorry who crushed the railroad strike? Do you see the campaign contributions for every candidate and politician in the DNC? You think they don’t represent Wall Street? This characterization has been dead at least since Bill Clinton.
I don't think you can simply hand-wave the differences between your two parties. There do seem to be substantially different outcomes for the people affected by these issues.
> And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up
This comment seems very out of touch. Grocery prices don't affect Meta engineers much, but they affect ordinary people a lot. I wouldn't even call Meta engineers "middle class". They're typically in the upper class.
I'm not saying the new administration is the solution, but it's perfectly understandable why people are hurt by inflation, unhappy about it, and wanted a change.
Real wages (inflation adjusted) for the lower 50% went up faster than they have since pre-Reagan era.
So while inflation hurts the bottom more than the top, because they spend a higher % of income, they were compensated for it.
The problem is that across the spectrum, when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart" and when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
Sort of like all the stimulus, payroll protection, unemployment benefit increases/extensions, rent/mortgage/student loan moratoriums during COVID that went on well past the point where economy was at risk, and people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC.
The amounts of money and different ways money was thrown at people by the government 2020-2021 was historically abnormal and we got more mass unrest than when huge swathes of country were losing their homes and out of a job for years during GFC.
It makes me wonder what a government can actually do that doesn't lead to backlash.
I think it reminded CEOs and middle management that most of their work is not integral to the products and you could weekend at bernies most of them with few low level employees affected. Their only value tends to be self referential via class integretation (eg, they get contracts by golfing with other managers, which if there was just some contract directory they are left with little value)
However, anecdotes are how the keep justifying their salaries
Oh please. No one got hired during Covid out of the sheer goodness of anyone's heart.
CEOs are sheep. They all do the same thing and run in the same direction.
Your competitors are hiring, you're hiring. You can't be left behind.
Your competitors are firing, you're firing. You won't be the odd man out who has to explain to the board and shareholders why you're not cleaning house when others do.
I'm not saying they hired because they were nice, and became not nice. They over-hired and now they are going to over-fire, and they pay themselves well the whole way thru.
I am saying they are rabidly resentful of the hiring they did. You can see it in leaked comments like JPM's Dimon at a local town hall where he said something to the effect of "we hired 50k people during COVID because people aren't doing their jobs and what's why none of you can WFH anymore" lol.
The way CEOs talk about now vs then is like some Old Testament fire & brimstone stuff. Like its everyones fault that he over-hired and now they should all get back to the office or face eternal damnation.
Unfortunately American white collar workers responded to the brief period of relative power increase by pushing for remote work rather than consolidating that power or asking for better pay.
We are seeing the results now with white collar work being outsourced to countries in LATAM. If people aren’t gonna be physically collocated why pay more for someone to work from the U.S. when you can pay a fraction for someone to work in the same time zone in central and South America.
I strongly suspect we will
Look back at this period similarly to how we look back at the 80s when blue collar workers voted to have their jobs outsource to China, except this time it’s white collar workers pushing to essentially make their jobs easier to outsource to the rest of the world.
Employers could always have outsourced white collar work. I remember in 2002 when "all the programmer jobs were going to India". Coming together to push for better working conditions you care about is exactly what building power looks like for any group of workers. The problem is not pushing for remote work, it's that most people do it individually so they aren't creating any kind of social structure that helps them keep some of that power when the pendulum swings back.
I think contextually what one has to remember when analysing behaviours during this time of power shift to the employee due to a global pandemic, is that while that was happening there was also a global pandemic taking place...
And thus, Big Tech becomes no better than the non-tech companies whose bad, failed business practices they’ve been emulating since COVID. From stack ranking, to arbitrary mandates and ultimatums, to corporate relocations to “business friendly” (but worker unfriendly) states, to outsourcing and offshoring and contracting out every possible role they can, they’ve copied and pasted the same, tired, corporately debilitating decisions of old into their structures.
Can we finally stop humoring their BS about becoming “more agile” or “behaving like a startup”, now? They’re just another GE in practice.
I know this is gonna trigger some people, but I don't get the outrage here. Does everyone here work at Meta or feel bad that those at Meta are getting treated unfairly? If not, why get angry at what another company rightfully chooses to do? Instead of complaining, we could all start our own multi billion dollar businesses...but that would require more risk which most rightfully don't want to take on. Both are choices made by those responsible for the outcomes of those choices. No need to get upset.
I've worked at Meta. It sucks they laid off people (I have a friend who was impacted), but that's the companies job - make hiring/firing decisions. And I couldn't care less what they pay the exec team - what are they paying employees relative to other companies? Is it good? Ok, maybe I'll choose to go there for a little bit.
Meta lies at the intersection of a lot of hot button topics: Social media, collecting “your data”, ads, FAANG, LeetCode interviews, high compensation, celebrity CEO, and now layoffs. It checks nearly every box on the list of topics that provoke anger on this website, so it’s hard to have any honest conversations about Meta or any other FAANG here.
Thanks for the honest response. I still find myself pulled into some topics (e.g. this thread), but I've largely tried to avoid the comments lately. Honest conversations are hard to have without getting flagged for disagreeing with people.
You’re thinking about this narrowly. The broader implication is rising income inequality. It’s not sustainable. If GINI gets too high it can only end in reform, revolution, or anarchy.
Who gets to decide what the gap can be? Employees? I don't believe there are ever "unbiased, third parties" in these situations. You want to pre-emptively prevent one outcome by controlling the company - but this level of power also comes with side effects. Why take the risk of starting a company when you don't control income? Who's to say people won't want to continually lower that income gap until countries stop innovating? You have to consider the negative side effects of your own solution...else risk thinking about the problem "too narrowly".
For us ordinary people, I wish you be financially free ASAP so that you can give middle fingers to the companies you worked in. I'll surely do that and tag names when I retire.
The recent layoffs at Meta were really brutal, even more so than the previous ones because they unfairly put the blame on the employees. Several people in my (extended) team were fired. None deserved to be in my opinion. They were all very capable. They got "meet most" rating mostly due to external circumstances which weren't their fault.
As a consequence, we need to backfill these roles, it'll take months to find replacements and ramp up the new persons. This is without a doubt a net negative for our team. Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
All of this happened when the company makes huge profit and is hiring a lot. I'm still not able to make sense of this. And it's not only the layoffs, there's more and more hostility towards employees.
I don't know if Zuck is forced to appear tough to please Trump and Musk and perhaps save his company, or if he drank the kool aid, or if he's just trying to save cost to build new AI infrastructure, or taking advantage from bad market conditions for SWE. Probably a bit of everything...
> Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
Being too heavy handed with this ends up with employees acting greedy to protect themselves, creating more friction and reducing cooperation. If you depend on another team you have to spend your time and political capital escalating and fighting to get your requirements onto their roadmap.
You end up needing to have the skillset to play politics and get senior leadership on your side, which is very different than the skills needed to complete good work (they aren't exclusive, but you'll lose good people who have one and not the other). There are situations where adversarial processes are good, but too much kills progress.
I think about Office Space a lot lately (specifically Peter having tons of bosses and the whole TPS report cover bit).
I think the pendulum has swung too far into low trust management.
The real expropriation are the dividends sent out to stockholders, they don't even have to show up to the office. C-suite bonuses are peanuts compared to this (and one reason they're high is the board wants mercenary executives).
Some aspects of management are actually incredibly AI replaceable, but they are the ones buying the AI so...
What % of management is just asking your reports the same 5 questions over and over in different ways and tracking the results?
And then theres the cargo cult of senior management doing whatever they think competitors are doing and/or what consultants say..
I've worked at shops with all the agile, scrum, OKRs, OGSMs, metrics metrics metrics at the IC level where there were no clear OKRs at the org level. Accountability sometimes only goes one way.
Zuck is single handedly responsible for the exponential decline in sex in society and exponential increases in depression/loneliness among younger people.
Fuck him, and fuck anyone who made their money at this dogshit 21st century nicotine dealership
Costs more to incentivize people who are already flush with cash to work harder and keep working for you. It’s the prize waiting for anyone here later in life if you kill it and earn the right to join those ranks. Keep your head down and bust your butt at work and it’ll come. No one ever bitched and moaned their way there.
It really feels like the COVID bubble briefly leveled the playing field a bit, and the CEO class has been foaming at the mouth rabidly mad about it ever since. "I can't believe we hired so many of you / had to pay you more / let you WFH.. ".
At least in the US, we had some of the greatest strides in terms of increases in relative wages for the middle class as we've had in a generation. And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up so we need to vote the bums out and take a turn towards the party of the CEO class.
Not a lot of great lessons to take from that politically or economically in terms of giving people what they ask for end being punished for it.
Leveled the playing field? Strides in relative wages? See the chart here under the section labeled "Inflation Adjusted Reality" and you'll see how incorrect your statements are:
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/01/0...
We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades. You should also research the concept of subminimum wages and I think you'll be shocked.
If you already knew about all of the above and still think there was anything close to a leveling of the playing field, you're choosing to ignore facts.
> We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades.
Very few people make minimum wage. It’s basically impossible to find a minimum wage job in my city because even the post office and fast food restaurants are paying $19/hr or more, and they advertise it on signs out front. I don’t even live in a HCOL city.
The focus on federal minimum wage has become a red herring.
5 replies →
The vast majority of US workers are employed in jurisdictions with minimum wages much higher than the federal limit. It's true the national law is inadequate, and there are a handful of genuinely impoverished places where that matters. But almost every metro area is at $15/hr or higher now.
Also your article is about long term trends, and has data that ends in 2022 it looks like. In point of fact real wages since the pandemic have gone up, and by a historically notable amount.
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> subminimum
What a word! That’s so Newspeak-y.
I work for a mid-sized, publicly-traded tech company that has been inching towards profitability but the last couple quarterly earnings results have been disappointing (and rank-and-file bonuses were slashed to 25% of target) and the company had its first-ever round of layoffs last October. The CEO's last two years of comp were $20M and $10M which is obviously completely incongruous with the size, profitability, and stock performance of the company. It seems that there is a distortion in the market forces around executive compensation that functions in a similar way to venture capital -- investors are willing to pump outsized cash amounts into either funding rounds or executive comp since the occasional home run can result in stock returns that cover losses in other companies. It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
I ask this as a person who takes market forces very seriously: why?
I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population (even if they are on paper efficient in the market-efficiency sense), or at least, that the public doesn't feel like they are. That's causing massive social instability that is threatening nearly the entire developed world. That instability poses a pretty high threat to the approach you're arguing for. Neither protectionist reactionaries, nor leftists, are very well aligned with free-market philosophy, and those ideologies are ascendant nearly everywhere right now. Isn't that a greater threat to free-market economics than relatively mild welfare-state and workers-rights stuff?
(Full disclosure: I am very much pro-labor and pro-regulation, so this is arguing for things I support, but even with your views it seems pretty clear to me that the status quo is dead no matter what you do. Wouldn't you rather have reforms that make the existing system work for the public than a revolution that destroys it entirely?)
4 replies →
A company doesn't exist without employees. Their considerations should probably at some point come in to play.
Despite wide-hard capitalist beliefs, executive pay is influenced by many factors, including social perception.
So the fact that CEOs think it’s acceptable to make their salary $20M is a big factor in why their salary is $20M
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
At this rate it's likely those "market forces" will come from the pitchfork, torch, etc markets.
You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people. But in terms of purchasing power, I think you’re wrong about working people making appreciable financial progress. Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class; our only choice is between covert and overt subservience. Finally, you should be aware that flippantly dismissing egg prices - or really any humans’ food security - makes you come across as privileged and out of touch.
The statistics about real wage growth are likely enough to be true.
That doesn't mean you don't have lots of people in high cost of living areas that lost purchasing power due to cost of housing or whatever. It just means that the aggregate effect is likely enough to have been an increase.
> You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people.
CEOs weren’t furious about “social progress”. That’s a projection of class warfare mentality.
It was, however, frustrating to see a blatantly obvious economic bubble driven by out of control government spending, which unsurprisingly has now popped. There were points in 2021 when we had junior applicants who could barely talk through the simplest interview questions but demanded senior/staff level comp because that was the going rate in the temporarily distorted market.
Many companies hired at those exaggerated rates anyway, then started cutting deeply when the market changed and they realized they were holding the bag on a lot of overpaid, under qualified hires. Other companies just sat on the sidelines and waited it out. It was the only time I remember having multiple candidates turn us down for better offers, only to message me months later begging for a job because their company overhired followed by layoffs.
1 reply →
>Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class;
Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same” a hungry child gets called a parasite and kicked out of a free and/or reduced price school lunch program.
2 replies →
Saw someone recently post, "Greatest regret: not committing PPP fraud."
Lest we forget that little giveaway to the boss-class.
I caught a bit of the Netflix series Beast Games (gameshow hosted by Mr. Beast) and there was one segment where 10 contestants took turns taking "their share" from a $1,000,000 pile. The "fair" thing to do is to take $100,000 each. 1 player ended up taking $600k, but many players that came after continued to do the "fair" thing and split what was left evenly. One even took $0.
I was thinking today about Conservative fascination with trans folks. They certainly aren't segregating their bathrooms at home, but have some weird hangup with doing so in public.
I think some % of the population are "low trust" (most people won't do the right thing, therefore it's OK if I do not do the right thing/I need to protect myself) and some are "high trust" (most people will do the right thing, so I should do the right thing/I'm safe).
The US has been teetering towards a "low trust" cultural and political landscape and the way to drive this even further is to take away safety nets and create general economic chaos, effectively destroying social trust. Even the whole RTO debate is really a question of high/low trust; executives have low trust in the workers they hire so they want them in office, even if it's less productive, yields higher turnover, and leads to lower morale.
The reason Taiwan and New Zealand did so well during the pandemic is perhaps partially because they are both "high trust" societies; your fellow citizens generally did the right thing and followed the rules.
3 replies →
Yes it was a program designed to to be defrauded while backstopping wages
PPP funds had to be used on employee salaries, and not just highly paid employees.
6 replies →
They probably only said that after they realised exactly what the boss-class got away with.
1 reply →
> Party of the CEO class
Sorry who crushed the railroad strike? Do you see the campaign contributions for every candidate and politician in the DNC? You think they don’t represent Wall Street? This characterization has been dead at least since Bill Clinton.
Compare the average republican sentiment to this regarding the railway strike / paid sick days: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/2306...
I don't think you can simply hand-wave the differences between your two parties. There do seem to be substantially different outcomes for the people affected by these issues.
Now instead of campaign contributions, we have the government run by actual billionaires.
1 reply →
A useful term here is "labor share" and the included chart of the last ~80y: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_share
And this is why you enshrine worker rights in law, and don't leave in the hands of a "benevolent" C-Suite ...
> And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up
This comment seems very out of touch. Grocery prices don't affect Meta engineers much, but they affect ordinary people a lot. I wouldn't even call Meta engineers "middle class". They're typically in the upper class.
I'm not saying the new administration is the solution, but it's perfectly understandable why people are hurt by inflation, unhappy about it, and wanted a change.
Real wages (inflation adjusted) for the lower 50% went up faster than they have since pre-Reagan era.
So while inflation hurts the bottom more than the top, because they spend a higher % of income, they were compensated for it.
The problem is that across the spectrum, when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart" and when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
Sort of like all the stimulus, payroll protection, unemployment benefit increases/extensions, rent/mortgage/student loan moratoriums during COVID that went on well past the point where economy was at risk, and people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC.
The amounts of money and different ways money was thrown at people by the government 2020-2021 was historically abnormal and we got more mass unrest than when huge swathes of country were losing their homes and out of a job for years during GFC.
It makes me wonder what a government can actually do that doesn't lead to backlash.
14 replies →
Egg prices went up because of the bird flu causing a supply chain disruption.
6 replies →
Comment though was about people choosing the fire to the frying pan. That kind of change.
1 reply →
It seems like everyone always underestimates stupidity and just apathy.
I think it reminded CEOs and middle management that most of their work is not integral to the products and you could weekend at bernies most of them with few low level employees affected. Their only value tends to be self referential via class integretation (eg, they get contracts by golfing with other managers, which if there was just some contract directory they are left with little value)
However, anecdotes are how the keep justifying their salaries
Oh please. No one got hired during Covid out of the sheer goodness of anyone's heart.
CEOs are sheep. They all do the same thing and run in the same direction. Your competitors are hiring, you're hiring. You can't be left behind. Your competitors are firing, you're firing. You won't be the odd man out who has to explain to the board and shareholders why you're not cleaning house when others do.
Rinse and repeat
I'm not saying they hired because they were nice, and became not nice. They over-hired and now they are going to over-fire, and they pay themselves well the whole way thru.
I am saying they are rabidly resentful of the hiring they did. You can see it in leaked comments like JPM's Dimon at a local town hall where he said something to the effect of "we hired 50k people during COVID because people aren't doing their jobs and what's why none of you can WFH anymore" lol.
The way CEOs talk about now vs then is like some Old Testament fire & brimstone stuff. Like its everyones fault that he over-hired and now they should all get back to the office or face eternal damnation.
Unfortunately American white collar workers responded to the brief period of relative power increase by pushing for remote work rather than consolidating that power or asking for better pay.
We are seeing the results now with white collar work being outsourced to countries in LATAM. If people aren’t gonna be physically collocated why pay more for someone to work from the U.S. when you can pay a fraction for someone to work in the same time zone in central and South America.
I strongly suspect we will Look back at this period similarly to how we look back at the 80s when blue collar workers voted to have their jobs outsource to China, except this time it’s white collar workers pushing to essentially make their jobs easier to outsource to the rest of the world.
Employers could always have outsourced white collar work. I remember in 2002 when "all the programmer jobs were going to India". Coming together to push for better working conditions you care about is exactly what building power looks like for any group of workers. The problem is not pushing for remote work, it's that most people do it individually so they aren't creating any kind of social structure that helps them keep some of that power when the pendulum swings back.
I think contextually what one has to remember when analysing behaviours during this time of power shift to the employee due to a global pandemic, is that while that was happening there was also a global pandemic taking place...
And thus, Big Tech becomes no better than the non-tech companies whose bad, failed business practices they’ve been emulating since COVID. From stack ranking, to arbitrary mandates and ultimatums, to corporate relocations to “business friendly” (but worker unfriendly) states, to outsourcing and offshoring and contracting out every possible role they can, they’ve copied and pasted the same, tired, corporately debilitating decisions of old into their structures.
Can we finally stop humoring their BS about becoming “more agile” or “behaving like a startup”, now? They’re just another GE in practice.
I’ve just seen the Margin Call movie and the headline transported me right back to the middle of it. Highly recommended.
I know this is gonna trigger some people, but I don't get the outrage here. Does everyone here work at Meta or feel bad that those at Meta are getting treated unfairly? If not, why get angry at what another company rightfully chooses to do? Instead of complaining, we could all start our own multi billion dollar businesses...but that would require more risk which most rightfully don't want to take on. Both are choices made by those responsible for the outcomes of those choices. No need to get upset.
I've worked at Meta. It sucks they laid off people (I have a friend who was impacted), but that's the companies job - make hiring/firing decisions. And I couldn't care less what they pay the exec team - what are they paying employees relative to other companies? Is it good? Ok, maybe I'll choose to go there for a little bit.
Meta lies at the intersection of a lot of hot button topics: Social media, collecting “your data”, ads, FAANG, LeetCode interviews, high compensation, celebrity CEO, and now layoffs. It checks nearly every box on the list of topics that provoke anger on this website, so it’s hard to have any honest conversations about Meta or any other FAANG here.
Thanks for the honest response. I still find myself pulled into some topics (e.g. this thread), but I've largely tried to avoid the comments lately. Honest conversations are hard to have without getting flagged for disagreeing with people.
You’re thinking about this narrowly. The broader implication is rising income inequality. It’s not sustainable. If GINI gets too high it can only end in reform, revolution, or anarchy.
Who gets to decide what the gap can be? Employees? I don't believe there are ever "unbiased, third parties" in these situations. You want to pre-emptively prevent one outcome by controlling the company - but this level of power also comes with side effects. Why take the risk of starting a company when you don't control income? Who's to say people won't want to continually lower that income gap until countries stop innovating? You have to consider the negative side effects of your own solution...else risk thinking about the problem "too narrowly".
What a surprise!
For us ordinary people, I wish you be financially free ASAP so that you can give middle fingers to the companies you worked in. I'll surely do that and tag names when I retire.
The recent layoffs at Meta were really brutal, even more so than the previous ones because they unfairly put the blame on the employees. Several people in my (extended) team were fired. None deserved to be in my opinion. They were all very capable. They got "meet most" rating mostly due to external circumstances which weren't their fault.
As a consequence, we need to backfill these roles, it'll take months to find replacements and ramp up the new persons. This is without a doubt a net negative for our team. Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
All of this happened when the company makes huge profit and is hiring a lot. I'm still not able to make sense of this. And it's not only the layoffs, there's more and more hostility towards employees.
I don't know if Zuck is forced to appear tough to please Trump and Musk and perhaps save his company, or if he drank the kool aid, or if he's just trying to save cost to build new AI infrastructure, or taking advantage from bad market conditions for SWE. Probably a bit of everything...
> Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
Being too heavy handed with this ends up with employees acting greedy to protect themselves, creating more friction and reducing cooperation. If you depend on another team you have to spend your time and political capital escalating and fighting to get your requirements onto their roadmap.
You end up needing to have the skillset to play politics and get senior leadership on your side, which is very different than the skills needed to complete good work (they aren't exclusive, but you'll lose good people who have one and not the other). There are situations where adversarial processes are good, but too much kills progress.
I think about Office Space a lot lately (specifically Peter having tons of bosses and the whole TPS report cover bit).
I think the pendulum has swung too far into low trust management.
And now those people are labeled "poor performers" in the worst job market since GFC.
Won't be long until working for Meta will have the same bad rep as Amazon.
The real expropriation are the dividends sent out to stockholders, they don't even have to show up to the office. C-suite bonuses are peanuts compared to this (and one reason they're high is the board wants mercenary executives).
The major shareholder is Mark so doing double dirty
I hope you've voted with your feet and moved to a country that has no dividends.
Stockholders own the company, where else would dividends go?
I know what the 'C' in "C-suite" stands for, especially in the UK.
It's the same around the world, e.g. in Australia. In Eastern Europe, e.g. in Poland, that often starts with K instead.
Kurwa?
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I think he's comparing the C-suite to a particular popular British word beginning with the letter a C.
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The Golden Rule: He who owns the gold, makes the rules.
We need to train a LLM model on McKinsey, Bain , BCG etc.'s case studies and start replacing C-Suite executives.
Some aspects of management are actually incredibly AI replaceable, but they are the ones buying the AI so...
What % of management is just asking your reports the same 5 questions over and over in different ways and tracking the results?
And then theres the cargo cult of senior management doing whatever they think competitors are doing and/or what consultants say..
I've worked at shops with all the agile, scrum, OKRs, OGSMs, metrics metrics metrics at the IC level where there were no clear OKRs at the org level. Accountability sometimes only goes one way.
Pretty sure if you trained on those consultants the AI would recommend firing top performers to send a message then cut pay of everyone else.
Rinse and repeat every couple of years.
why do we need the model? the agencies are simply a pretext for wealth transfer to elites (i.e. white supremacy).
All the best to the ICs impacted by this. Good luck.
Does anyone have a rough country-breakdown of the numbers they can share? Any particular business areas?
This, and the comments below make very depressing reading.
You have always been the "cost".
Zuck is single handedly responsible for the exponential decline in sex in society and exponential increases in depression/loneliness among younger people.
Fuck him, and fuck anyone who made their money at this dogshit 21st century nicotine dealership
Costs more to incentivize people who are already flush with cash to work harder and keep working for you. It’s the prize waiting for anyone here later in life if you kill it and earn the right to join those ranks. Keep your head down and bust your butt at work and it’ll come. No one ever bitched and moaned their way there.