An article in the WSJ…Tech Workers Are Just Like the Rest of Us: Miserable at Work…reminded me of my 2016 post TechnoProletarians?
(I thought the ‘just like the rest of us’ part of the article’s title was a little odd. Is the headline writer miserable at work? Are his fellow WSJ writers and editors miserable? Does he believe that the majority of WSJ subscribers are miserable in their jobs?)
The article talks about the decline in perks at companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce; most importantly, increased work pressures and reduced compensation and upside.
Observations:
The article is focused on prominent ‘tech’ companies that are very large and mostly SF-area based. It doesn’t discuss the environment at smaller early-stage companies and startups, or for tech people working in banks, manufacturing companies, retailers, etc.
Most of the phenomena discussed in the article are probably common to people in ‘symbolic-analyst’ type jobs of any kind, not just so-called tech jobs, and especially in large companies and other organizations.
Offshoring has to be playing a role in the reduced relative power of workers in these jobs; see my post Telemigration. As another example, there was a recent WSJ article on the offshoring to India of engineering and geologist jobs in the oil and gas industry.
I’m not fond of the ‘tech’ term (short for ‘technology’, of course) the way it is usually employed. It seems silly that writing scripts to perform some function for a consumer-facing web site is considered a technology job but being a metallurgist working on jet engines is not.
Your thoughts?
It seems to me that somewhere around 1990 you started to hear about these startups where, without appreciable income, the money and perks flowed like water during a hundred year flood. People paid stupid money to just wander around because somebody, since moved on, thought they would do something. It was all VC money and when it started to run low, there’d be another round with an even higher fantasy “valuation” just because the “tech” was so awesome and that’s the only way to last until you can unload it on the suckers. If they could ever get it to work. If they could find customers willing to pay. If, if, if, and then a whole lot of them just evaporated on the .com bust.
We see it with “AI” where each dollar of revenue costs at least two dollars, but they’ll make it up on volume. So that Middle School kids can cheat on essays.
How many people did Musk fire when he cleaned house at Twitter? Funny how it still seems to run.
It used to be you could tell when a company was on its way out when the directors and CEO started building the perfect company HQ. Now they seem to reach that stage during the first five years.
“It seems silly that writing scripts to perform some function for a consumer-facing web site is considered a technology job but being a metallurgist working on jet engines is not.”
Many, many years ago I worked for a company that made specialty metal products for government and industry. I was what was then called a “computer programmer”, but I did manage to design and program a data collection application (in DIBOL on a VAX/VMS mini computer) for an eighteen step process for making armor-piercing penetrators for the military. It was a simple app, but it gave the metallurgists and engineers a data warehouse to analyze each and every penetrator produced for possible defects or anomalies. I’m sure that data collection is now done automatically by the machine tools used in the process and my code is no longer used.
That company also manufactured jet engine turbine blades using powdered metal (titanium I believe) flash heated in a form. The powdered metal produced a more uniform blade than traditional molten metal.
So I hit a trifecta: a lowly programmer, metallurgists and jet engines!
Love this site; always interesting. Please keep up the good work.
Lovernios, I hear you talkin’.
It’s really astonishing / sadly amusing to see all the people, who when presented with the idea of “using a computer at work” envision somebody pecking away at a laptop in a blank white office.
Former G-code / CadCam / solid modeling guy here. Whenever I got an office, I always ended up dragging the desk and workstation out into the shop, because while pretty on the screen is nice, I needed to see what happened on the line for it to count. That’s where the money is made.
“Tech” like so much in the media is a completely meaningless term. It means exactly what they want it to mean, no more, no less. In this context, somebody scripting a stupid browser time waster is “tech” while John Deere is not.
I think a lot of this comes from the glorification of financial manipulation as positive over the grubby business of building things you can eat, ride on or in, shelter from the rain, etc. The romance of the lone “visionary” pounding out code in his parents basement and becoming a billionaire.
I have trouble with how the stock markets have become so un-tethered from concepts like revenue, profit and production. Especially in the “tech” sector. Very many of these stocks have all the value and solidity of a non fungible token. No profit, opaque management, often enough, no real product but buzz.
Decades of zero interest rates have distorted markets in ways that can only be guessed at. To borrow a phrase, winter is coming.
ed “I needed to see what happened on the line for it to count. That’s where the money is made.”
That brought back a thought about Woodstock days, when our current masters were young bucks instead of doddering old men & women. Those Ivy League students had a real contempt for the people who worked outdoors, growing their food and building their air-conditioned offices — “red-necks”, they called them. That same contempt for anyone who might break a fingernail at work has only got worse since then — especially with the promotion of sweat-averse women into senior positions. No wonder Our Rulers were happy to offshore production of real goods (along with the jobs involved in that production) — they neither understood nor appreciated real productive work.
Most of the phenomena discussed in the article are probably common to people in ‘symbolic-analyst’ type jobs of any kind, not just so-called tech jobs, and especially in large companies and other organizations.
I remember a lot speculation back in the day that the US would essentially become the design, engineering, and marketing departments for the entire world, with the messier (and more declassee) functions outsourced to be done by those ‘other people’. I don’t know if anybody quite put it in these words but it should have been obvious that the folks who were getting the information needed to build the stuff were likely going to be able to figure out how to make copies of it with or without industrial espionage. Also, nobody seems to have thought how the US was going to become of society of people with those ‘symbolic-analyst’ jobs and everybody else trying to scratch out a living catering to their whims.
I don’t know if anybody quite put it in these words but it should have been obvious that the folks who were getting the information needed to build the stuff were likely going to be able to figure out how to make copies of it with or without industrial espionage.
I quite distinctly remember being told that it didn’t matter if Logitech made all its products in China because all the higher paying marketing jobs were still in America.
I was also amazed to discover that there were people who were quite unable to process measuring industrial production in any way other than dollar value.
Many people at that site including the moderators were quite upset about Trump and I’m sure they’re still quite upset.
Meh.
Xennady: “… quite unable to process measuring industrial production in any way other than dollar value.”
Not just “dollar value” — “TODAY’S dollar value”. It seems the Best & Brightest never thought through the implications for tomorrow of depending on some foreign country as the only supplier of some essential part. Even if they will sell it to you today for a price lower than you can make it yourself, what happens when you can no longer make it for yourself at any price? What happens to that “dollar value” when a monopolist gains a monopoly?
Short-term thinking has brought us to where we are today — and there unfortunately is no sign that kind of thinking is now being ditched.
“That same contempt for anyone who might break a fingernail at work has only got worse since then — especially with the promotion of sweat-averse women into senior positions.”
This drove a lot of the “equal pay for equal work” idiocy. After all, surely an important executive assistant in an air-conditioned office should make more than a garbage man. If the market had to pay a lot more to incentivize a man to take an unpleasant job in all kinds of weather that often takes quire a toll on the body, that was why capitalism was bad. Women have feelings and feelings are real, and feelings matter, and feelings are why the market is a big meany and should be overruled.