Will Big Tech Layoffs Bring a Culture Shift to Anxiety and Job Insecurity? (seattletimes.com)
- Reference: 0183383336
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/25/0042201/will-big-tech-layoffs-bring-a-culture-shift-to-anxiety-and-job-insecurity
- Source link: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-morale-of-tech-workers-is-plunging-as-layoffs-mount/
"Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..."
> Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success...
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> The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.
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> Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said.
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> Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/23/064223/us-layoffs-havent-increased-and-new-tech-industry-hiring-balances-firings
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-morale-of-tech-workers-is-plunging-as-layoffs-mount/
Betteridge's Law Is Finally Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
I usually see someone post about Betteridge's Law to say that if the headline asks a question the answer is no. This headline question is clearly a yes. If you weren't already constantly worried about your job, AI is definitely going to push you to worry. In theory, there will be a lot more work for everyone to do. In practice, the cost of AI will force businesses to choose AI over human employees.
Re:Betteridge's Law Is Still Right (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is no, because anxiety and job insecurity is not a Culture Shift, it's already our culture.
Re: (Score:3)
Correct. The rest of the economy has been in this state for decades.
Choose (Score:2)
Decide:
1) Use new product/service to replace in-house labor because of the promise of gains from a more optimized alternative with a possible economy of scale that would be difficult or too time consuming to do. Pretend it's long term and predictably stable.
2) Augment existing labor with new product/service to amplify and increase productivity... lower prices, increase output, or at least keep up with the competition with the promise of survival or growth.
Those who pick #2 end up with more gains than those
UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score:5, Interesting)
Alan Watts thinking outside the box:
> If, if we get our heads straight about money, I predict that by ad 2000, or sooner, no one will pay taxes, no one will carry cash, utilities will be free, and everyone will carry a general credit card. This card will be valid up to each individual’s share in a guaranteed basic income or national dividend, issued free, beyond which he may still earn anything more that he desires by an art or craft, profession or trade that has not been displaced by automation. (For detailed information on the mechanics of such an economy, the reader should refer to Robert Theobald’s Challenge of Abundance and Free Men and Free Markets, and also to a series of essays that he has edited, The Guaranteed Income. Theobald is an avant–garde economist on the faculty of Columbia University.)
read the whole thing here in Playboy of all places: [1]https://galacticjourney.org/st... [galacticjourney.org]
[1] https://galacticjourney.org/stories/PB_1968-12_Watts-Wealth.pdf
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, Playboy seems appropriate here, since that magazine deals in fantasy.
The first fantasy of the fantasy is that computers / AI will put humans out of work. We've been automating human jobs for centuries, and we've put whole industries out of business in the process. And yet, unemployment remains as low as it's ever been. Yes, AI will put certain categories of people "out of work." But new categories of work will emerge, just as has happened in every past wave of automation. Some people will struggle
Re: (Score:1)
Playboy had some amazing journalism. Read a few and you'll realize "read it for the articles" was a perfectly valid excuse.
Yes but they shouldn't (Score:3)
This same shit has been going on all along and some people are just now discovering it. Even the scale isn't really different. We're in a very specific tech bubble, so very specific sectors are hiring, and the others are firing as the air is sucked out of the room. When the bubble collapses, the sector which has done the crazy hiring will have mass layoffs, and the other sectors will hire again.
The truth is that no one in tech should ever feel secure, because some new development which can just be highly marketable bullshit can come along and fuck up all of the markets because nobody has to come up with a sustainable good idea to get rich any more because of the nature of the stock market. It's a game for rich people played with our money as the counters and they give zero fucks about the impact to anyone but themselves. That was always true, but as the stock market has become ever more divorced from reality, it does more damage to people who still have to live there, i.e. those of us who work for a living.
No field is "recession proof" (Score:2)
and radio ads that claim such should be sued to Pluto.
There was a tech slump around 1983 due to the video game crash, and again in 1992 due to mass "Glasnost" aerospace layoffs. There probably would have been one around 2009, but mobile devices were booming, taking up the slack.
Save up, the "business cycle" ain't going away.
programmers are funny (Score:2)
I don't think I have seen a field that basically destroyed itself, except this time it's swallowing other fields with it
Re: (Score:2)
Programmers have been automating their own work since...programming began. Each new generation of programming languages has cut the amount of time required to build software, by orders of magnitude. First there was raw machine code, then assembly languages, then 3rd generation languages like C and C++, then development frameworks, and now AI. Each past automation cycle has increased, not decreased, the need for programmers. AI, like VB, will enable a lot of people who don't know what they're doing, to creat
Slashdot: "Panic !" Also Slashdot: "Don't Panic !" (Score:2)
"US Layoffs Haven't Increased, and New Tech Industry Hiring Balances Firings"
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/23/064223/us-layoffs-havent-increased-and-new-tech-industry-hiring-balances-firings
It was two days ago, I guess.
Re:Slashdot: "Panic !" Also Slashdot: "Don't Panic (Score:4, Informative)
The referenced Washington Post article is based on US government statistics, and if you believe those statistics, I have a bridge to sell you. The
Civil servants have been fired for delivering "bad" numbers. You think the remaining staffers are going to look for things that might make the numbers look bad?
One more thing this administration has corrupted: economic statistics.
Re: Slashdot: "Panic !" Also Slashdot: "Don't Pani (Score:2)
Also, is no one questioning how much this reads like a promo for blind? I never heard of it before. This makes me want to go see if my company has presence there. . . . But I think I'll resist.
Pariah (Score:2)
So now the narrative is blame immigrants for taking your jobs, while the AI takes it.
Anxiety and job insecurity are already here (Score:2)
It's not easy right now for tech workers trying to find work.
Alternative tech support (Score:2)
I'm fine. I plan to switch to self-employment and provide artisinal technical support, perhaps via OnlyFans.
Sure, maybe I'll have to prominently display my bare feet or hawk used headsets to my clients, but it's a small inconvenience.
Time to revive fuckedcompany.com? (Score:2)
Remember the good old days, when the Internet hype was suddenly over, and self-proclaimed "world market leaders" collapsed left and right... usually because they never had a profitable business model? Back then, reading [1]http://fuckedcompany.com/ [fuckedcompany.com] was really good daily entertainment. Someone should revive that web site, I guess the owner of that domain would be willing to sell it :-)
[1] http://fuckedcompany.com/
perceived (Score:2)
> unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability.
"Perceived" being the key word there. It's not as much of a shock to those of us who've been around longer, seeing various upturns and downturns.
And yes, the tools are changing. Learn to use the new tools, alongside your old ones.
Re:perceived (Score:5, Insightful)
A "tool" that lets one programmer do the work of 20 means that 19 will be laid off, regardless of how well they learn the tools. To say nothing of people working in other industries "disrupted" by those tools who will be laid off no matter what they do.
Re: perceived (Score:4)
Until it's discovered that the tool becomes stale and obsolete in a few years because ir can't fulfill new requirements.
Welcome to the rest of the world, AmeriKKKa. (Score:1)
Now you get to experience how the rest of the world gets through life, without the stolen financial cushion you people enjoyed for the first two centuries.
Re: (Score:2)
That ratio is *way* more optimistic than anything I've seen demonstrated. Sure, AI can generate code 20 times faster than a human. But then when you have to undo or redo 80% of what it does because it got it wrong, or produced inefficient or insecure code, that 1:20 ratio starts to shrink. At best, what I've seen despite desperate attempts to make AI do everything at my company, is a 10-20% increase in productivity.
Re: perceived (Score:2)
I think a tool that lets one person do the work of 20 will result in 17 people being laid off, as the company triples its rate of work. (I can see triple being feasible and achievable in the software industry, but maybe not more)