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?