It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

Technology@lemmy.world – 358 points – 9 months ago

finance.yahoo.com

It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now::Nearly 300,000 tech employees have been laid off since last year, data shows.

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Interesting trend in the comments - technology veterans who went through the dotCom crash have quietly moved to union jobs, and aren't sweating this iteration.

Worth keeping in mind.

I've never met a dev in a union. What companies have a union?

Google has one, but it's still very small at the moment.

I think NASA does

Technology unions are common in public sector roles.

Probably because the culture is different in a few key ways:

Government workers rarely even get a cost of living adjustment, without a union, even when they're critical. Politicians often have the final say, and often don't care about retaining key staff. (Or actively try to lose key staff...) This leads to a situation where the Union has strong public support, because the Union's motives are aligned with allowing basic government services to continue during political wind changes.
A government doing Union busting gets immediately called out as Fascism. The government telling you you can't get together to talk about how the government should change - is not a good look.

This sounds like more wishful thinking than reality. Like what SWE roles are there that are union? I graduated right after the dotcom burst, with a Computer Engineering degree, I now work as a SWE, and I don't know a single one of my peers that has entered a union.

wishful thinking

It's an observation about what other SWEs are reporting elsewhere in this thread.

I'd be extremely careful about believing what you read in the comment sections of lemmy.

Unions aren’t exactly a saving grace

I would argue they are. My reasoning for this argument would be pointing at the history of the working class.

What is your reasoning for saying they are not?

Corporations wouldn't fight unions so hard (historically trying to kill their members) if unions weren't both effective and a threat to their power and wealth. They really, REALLY do not want us to unionize.

I read an article this week about how the Kinks were black listed from playing in the US in the mid to late 1960s because they pissed off someone involved with the stage/theater workers union. It was wild to me that a union could hold so much sway over commercial operations in the US.

Low pay for one. They start you low even if you have experience. You lose the ability to negotiate your pay or promotions.

This kind of bullshit generalization leads me to believe this conversation wouldn't go very far. I'll stop here. Cheers.

lol. Sounds like a cop out because you have no counter argument. Not a surprise

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