[Rezwoodly]

Elon musk set a precedent - you can treat your employees (serfs) like shit and get away with it. Layoffs, perks being removed, the tone has generally shifted to "look we have free coffee" to "we own you, be glad to have a job, oh and you might not actually have a job after all".

This is a change of winds, instead of pandering to engineers companies are trying to debase us and remind us where we are in the totem pole.its not about revenues, its about power.

[ipython]

Oh, please. Elon has nothing to do with this. Workers have had the shaft for centuries. Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.

[itsoktocry]

>Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.

This is my reaction reading this thread. It's astonishing.

This same crowd is typically anti-union, cheers on coal mine closures (learn to code!), want to throw finance people in jail, wants all car dealerships to disappear..the list goes on and on. They never seem to realize these business consist of normal people, most making salaries significantly lower than SV.

But high paid software engineers lose their jobs and the same people want a revolution? I'm sorry to say, but the tech crowd doesn't have many labour allies in the "real" world anymore.

[cmrdporcupine]

Careful, I appreciate your sentiment, but it's quite likely the set of people making the anti-Google comments are not the same set of people making the other comments you find distasteful. Or at least, the intersection of those two sets is small.

[microtonal]

Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.

Depends on where you live. In many European countries you cannot just fire someone, e.g. you have to show that the company is in a financially difficult situation or a structural decline in revenue. If your revenue growth looks like this:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...

You need other reasons (e.g. wrong behavior). Otherwise, you just find another position in the same company.

[newshorts]

To some extent I agree with the sentiment.

COVID seemed to create an awareness amongst employees that they could have better living conditions. There was a capitulation on the part of employers (especially in the tech industry).

Now it seems employers are firing a warning shot across the bow, reminding employees where the power truly lies.

Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function probably begs questions at other companies about how many folks are “essential”.

The macroeconomic situation is probably a factor but one could make the argument that it’s only creating a window of convenience for a little house cleaning.

[arnvald]

> Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function

It continues to function as an app, but does it really continue to function as a company?

It lost enormous amount of trust on all sides: advertisers, users, developers. My Twitter feed is way more quiet than it was a few months ago. Advertisers are leaving[0]. Some developers just lost access to API (3rd party clients) with no warning.

They also kill/abandon products - Twitter Spaces (their answer to Clubhouse) looks abandoned, and still doesn't work (or at least is not visible) on the web. Revue (Substack competitor) was killed in December. No idea what happened to communities, but I think they're abandoned as well. From creator's perspective, Twitter is very unreliable.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/18/twitter-r...

[toyg]

> Elon musk set a precedent - you can treat your employees (serfs) like shit and get away with it.

Really? That habit is older than Henry Ford.

[prepend]

> Elon musk set a precedent

No. This is giving him an absurd amount of credit. Organizations have treated their employees like this for decades (perhaps centuries). I remember the 90s were rife with profitable companies laying off employees to boost profit.