While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”
Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.
These companies make it about politics themselves when they insist on getting involved in politics…you cant have your cake and eat it too…
Well, you can for a while, but eventually you get a reputation and nobody wants to work for you. Fuck I hate living on this rock some days.
Eventually few if any good engineers will be willing to work for these companies because of the black mark it places on their resume and their name.
Already, many hiring managers outside a few giant corps will never be willing to hire an engineer who worked at Facebook for any length of time after 2016, for instance, simply because it’s irrefutably strong evidence against either their character or the trustworthiness of their judgement.
I expect that trend will deepen as society becomes more aware of the countless ways these engineers betrayed them just for a few more dollars and an on-campus chef.
Even the “facilities” they offered before were meant for achieving one objective whilst claiming to have a different purpose, like Google’s “relax areas” which the techies never had time to use and whose purpose was actually to attract candidates by projecting the idea that Google was a relaxed work environment (rather than the neverending death march it has been for more than a decade) or their free shuttles to work so that people actually worked during their commute without that being counted as work time which were sold as being to help Google employees with their commute.
I was in Tech back in the 90s bubble and already back then things like the Aeron chairs, office get togethers and pizza parties were just hypocrite ploys to get people to work long hours for free and to make their office the center of their social life so that they would be less likely to move jobs.
Companies expecting you to put in 50, 60, 80+ hours a week, don’t actually care about you or your well being and all their non-monetary “benefits” should be examined with a skeptical eye and the assumption that they’ll gain from it in some way until proven otherwise: it’s not always selfish and sometimes one’s direct manager genuinelly wants people on the team to feel good: a good way to spot it is how reacted if you say “not interested, I’ll just take that as time off instead” - if they’re ok with it, then it’s genuine good will, if they try and pressure you or refuse the time off part the whole thing was meant to serve objectives other than what’s good for team members - but anything coming down from HR or upper management is certain to be some kind of ploy to directly or indirectly benefit the company.
This is the exact same way at the Big 4 accounting firms.
Gym in the building. Daycare. Restaurants. Spa.
Never exactly free, and there’s never any time or energy to make use of it.
Not sure why Apples being grouped in here. Since 2020 their layoffs are rounding errors, 0.5% while Google and Meta are 7% and 26% respectively.
Apple has been beaucratic since before Google and Meta existed and never had the perks that Google and Meta offered.
If anything these companies are becoming more like Apple and Microsoft. Which was inevitable.
Those elite 1% students who pursued this life got precisely what they went after. It’s too late to cry, you sold your soul for that giant paycheck and now you have to suffer it. You’d have done better working for a non-profit and at least believed that you were making the world a better place.
Based on what I’ve seen, that seems to be how it’s always gone within an individual business (and also not exclusive to tech). Maybe right now we’re calling it an era within tech because it’s happening simultaneously to some big players, and that’s the difference?
For a lot of businesses, things start out small, stressful, and maybe a bit grindy while folks are trying to get things off the ground. If that works out, then there’s usually a huge push to grow. Business moves into the “great places to work” phase, basically dream job, though depending on the business and industry this can sometimes also be the “we don’t pay the best but we’ve got an onsite arcade and mini-bar” phase. It’s usually an economic boom time, best numbers ever type situation. And then the tiniest little bump, and that all comes crashing down. Cut backs, more stringent rules, everything has to be measured, lay-offs or mass exodus, place becomes a low morale corporate hellscape and suddenly every thing is “we’re a family”.
Been around the block more than once, I’ve seen the process and know the signs.
I was at Google for the end of the good times. I end of life so many failed projects there. It’s astonishing they are still afloat but AdWords really does make them a lot of money.
Hope so see more syndicalists and guilds as giants bleed expertise.
All those fun little cultural benefits were only meant to keep people at the office for longer spans of time, away from their families, and always ready for work. These bureaucratic structures are just the natural state of any public company that has to answer to feduciary duty.
Tech isn’t dead, nor is it done. It is just going to not be very profitable for a while, which will likely mean that a lot of us won’t be working on it for a while.
What I’m seeing is that these trends are also hitting smaller companies whose leadership follows the cues. Now even at smaller companies folks are afraid to speak up and there is no more fun. I saw a huge shift in that direction during the layoffs in 2023.
If you’re part of a team that actually enjoys work and has fun while doing it, cherish that every day.
I worked for Unity until recently. They have spent the last four years shifting from what they used to be into a beurocratic stress factory. I started at the tail end of them clinging to what they used to be and I was sold on that kind of work culture. Half dozen mass layoffs, two new CEOs, and most the old guard deciding to retire or find greener pasture, the place is a shell now.
Everyone left was scared and depressed or thinking they’d be the chosen few by sucking up. The team I was in was one of the last holdouts but hiring freezes and budget cuts meant every one of us that left was a lost headcount. When I left we were nearly 1/3 smaller and everyone remaining had to pick up all that slack plus new work.
Working there used to be vibrant and fun. Creatives and tech coming together to make a tool we were proud of. It rotted from the top down.
