Comment by rusticrover
6 months ago
The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it.
You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.
Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.
The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.
I've been in a union before. The benefits were bad, the pay was bad, after negotiations they were still bad. The union said "we tried." So I have trouble seeing them as the panacea that is marketed.
Are you trying to extrapolate from a single data point? Yes, some unions are bad. Obviously. In no way does this invalidate the benefits of unions in general, especially when compared to the tyranny of unrestrained corporatism.
I think we need more cooperatives not unions
Sounds good, doesn't work. Source: ask rail workers in the U.S. under Biden.