Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, Amazon tends to be the "Employee Relations Bad Ideas Incubator" for the rest of the tech industry, at least BigTech. Fully expect other companies to copycat this.

View on HN

If workers don't organize [1], they will always be beholden to whomever was lucky enough to make it to the top and uses their emotions to drive organizational decisions. It's not just about comp, it is about not having agency. I totally get that this is frowned upon by a lot of folks who surf HN (call this whatever mix of bias you want, survivorship, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, etc), but the stats tell a different story [2] [3]. People under 30 are very pro union (obviously! the US labor force dumpster fire need not be enumerated as a wall of text here), and older leadership or "thought leaders" [4] [5] will age out eventually (average CEO age is 59) [6].

Note no emotion or politics in this comment, because it is unnecessary but also unproductive. These are facts derived from first principles. If you as a worker wish to continue to suffer, status quo. If you want to not be treated like a disposable cog to be extracted from until tossed (whether out of the need to meet the quarter's earnings target or what feelings someone in leadership has), see above. My position is that the current deal is a raw deal, that it could be a bit more fair, and there are levers to pull to enable that. This isn't Marxism, this is "could we be a bit more kind to the people generating the value?" Life is short, and your exposure to the work/labor market during that lifetime should not be brutal.

[1] https://code-cwa.org/

[2] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230831-the-gen-zers-l...

[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-gen-z-is-the-...

[4] https://fortune.com/2023/04/23/remote-work-bullshit-real-est...

[5] https://apnews.com/article/sam-zell-real-estate-billionaire-...

[6] https://www.kornferry.com/about-us/press/age-and-tenure-in-t...

If you want, you're welcome to go work at Boeing where there is a union software engineers can join.

Or you could get paid 3x as much working for Amazon.

Only takes a majority to unionize. The minority can do what they want. You think you can find 51% in an org who still want to get ground down? I suppose we will find out what the self awareness and logic situation looks like on the ground.

My hot take: this is actually really good (and would be fantastic if all the big tech followed suit).

Why? Imagine a world where big tech was cool with remote workers. They would be able to out-pay and acquire all the best talent, everywhere.

With this self-imposed restriction, this leaves a big pool of high end talent able to be recruited by smaller start-ups who ordinarily wouldn't be able to compete on comp, benefits, and stability.

> Why? Imagine a world where big tech was cool with remote workers. They would be able to out-pay and acquire all the best talent, everywhere.

Assuming this is true (which I think is very much in doubt), then it indicates there is a much bigger systemic problem that needs to be dealt with: namely, big tech functioning as essentially the landlords of the Internet and skimming profit off of everything that happens there.

No one sector of the economy should have this much influence. Certainly no group this small of companies this large should have this much power over anything.

Any time you find yourself saying, "Well, yes; this change should make life better for tens (or hundreds) of millions of people, but if we make it, this group of people over here will be able to take advantage of it to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense," I strongly recommend taking a look at that group of people over there and considering whether they should have that ability, and if not, how you might be able to change that. (And if so, why, exactly, you think anyone should have that ability.)

> indicates there is a much bigger systemic problem that needs to be dealt with: namely, big tech functioning as essentially the landlords of the Internet and skimming profit off of everything that happens there.

Seems like you haven’t been paying attention as this is precisely what has happened. Or are you being ironic?

Neither: I'm pointing out that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with, rather than simply a fact of the world. We shouldn't be giving up on improving people's lives just because Big Tech would take advantage of it; we should be changing the system so Big Tech can't leverage those improvements to screw everyone else over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com