| ▲ | pyrale 12 hours ago |
| > I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned. A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it [1]. And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the issue with working on saturdays is daily standup? What happened in these years for such a change to happen?! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620 |
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| ▲ | exabrial 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Former Alibaba employee for a season of my life. I have to be careful with my next sentences because on the internet because it's easy for people to read things in a vacuum and interpret in the worse possible way, so don't do that because thats not how I mean it. The 996 hours are not useful work. It's appearance over productivity. |
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| ▲ | numpy-thagoras 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep, if you were to watch what happens at a 996 shop, it's people literally living their at-home life with their fellow employees for most of the time. |
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| ▲ | Herring 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s better to look at what didn’t happen: unionization. Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you just don’t like them. |
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| ▲ | bob001 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat. | | |
| ▲ | al_borland 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around. How hard is the 10x engineer on the team going to work when the compensation is the same regardless? This is where people end up working multiple jobs, if they can keep up with their peers only working one day per week. | | |
| ▲ | theshrike79 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing? Over here the purpose of unions is to: Provide a strong enough legal response and guidance to deter companies from trying shady shit, pay better unemployment fees than the government and provide training/networking. They also negotiate collectively with the employers on behalf of everyone for things like paid sick leave, paid vacations etc. I pay a flat fee every month because the union I'm in has always had relatively low unemployment, for others it's usually a percentage of their monthly gross salary (usually around 10-50€). In what scenario would capping people's salary be good for the workers? | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | >Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing? No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All trades there have publicly documented salary bands based on education and YoE per job, where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you might be exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such. And they cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wage increases is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the increases to the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all their workers X% wage increases? This is how it works in Austria. | |
| ▲ | Muromec 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing? Huh? If you have a collective agreement, all the compensation ranges are written down there. You get level 11 comp contract and your manager puts you at 85% of the scale, then the union decides the scale goes from say 85k to 95k. The next time the agreement is renegotiated, the scale gets bumped to 90k to 100k and you can't get past 100k until you promoted to the next function with a different comp level in a contract. That's excluding pager duty hazard pay, may the God allmerciful steer your path away from it. Unions are more about making the job conditions better than about maximizing the comp. Want to grind, go full 996 and sleep at work to afford that fancy house in Las Vegas. |
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| ▲ | array_key_first 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the truth is that there really isn't 10xers, and that's more or less a propaganda technique to get people to crab bucket each other. Of course everyone likes to think they're santa's special engineer, so they don't need hurdles like protections and a level playing field. But, simultaneously, the industry has been doing everything in its power to make engineers as fungible as possible. The "wet dream" is to make engineers practically assembly line workers - you can just plop some rando in at any time, and it'll probably be fine. You can see this with the extreme turnover in a lot of the industry. These concepts are in almost perfection contradiction, but they both have the same goal: to convince you and me that the status quo is desirable for each of us personally. | |
| ▲ | Buttons840 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary. I'd love a tech union that simply says: Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate. This ensures everyone shares in the burden of off-hours work. If off-hours work is happening often, then engineers are going to be spending a lot of time away on PTO, and if the company pressures them to not take the PTO, then the company is going to be paying them a lot. Let's align incentives, I don't want to work on off-hours emergencies, and the company doesn't want me to either. No mention of pay anywhere. Unions can do a lot of good without ever touching pay. | |
| ▲ | denkmoon 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's right, no more "10xers" working 80 hr weeks making those who can't or won't look unproductive. | |
| ▲ | KittenInABox 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Couldn't unions just follow actors' guilds and the like where there are no salary caps? | | |
| ▲ | karaterobot 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | When we're looking to the actors guilds for direction, you know the future of our industry might be in trouble. |
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| ▲ | data-ottawa 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I find it hard to believe workers would vote for a union to lower or cap their wages. That feels like a total straw man. In my experience unions suck when they overemphasize fairness over real world practicalities (see almost anything seniority based). They don't have to be that way. |
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| ▲ | Herring 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Again see Steve. Something can look like a good position and still rapidly deteriorate. This one wasn’t that rapid either, you had plenty of warning. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier. | | |
| ▲ | bob001 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Engineers were the privileged class. They were part of the group occupy wall street wanted to bring down. Not hard to guess why they didn't want that. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Privileged is too generic of a word that does not accurately describe the cohorts. There is the capital class. Occupy was after the Capital class but im not sure if they accurately zeroed in on that. Its been too long since then. Engineers were never part of that class. They work for a living while capital owns assets that work for them. Engineers were part of the "Intellectual Elite" class that made good money but were super socially progressive. (Think putting BLM signs in their yards while at the same time pricing out the people they claim to help). They ended up becoming a lot of the Elizabeth Warren cohort after being the Hillary and Obama cohorts(before it fractured into part Bernie part MAGA with the rest going to Hillary). Extremely socially progressive but don't you dare touch economics. | | |
| ▲ | bob001 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Having talked to Occupy Wall Street people at the time I don't think many on the ground differentiated as much as you think they did. I used a generic word because from my experience that is how they saw the world. I got told I deserved to have everything I own set on fire for saying I spent $100 on a nice dinner once. That was on the more extreme side but the sentiment seemed to not differentiate. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They basically hated on anyone making more than a livable wage at the time ($60k). | | |
| ▲ | mcny 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is possible they were mistaken.
The extreme voices get magnified at these things, I'd guess. Maybe it is an attempt to slow the shift in the Overton window? |
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| ▲ | nebula8804 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You missed what I said in my first paragraph. Occupy was after the capital class but they did not express it well. Looking back, a common criticism was that the movement was leaderless and thus unorganized. It was the early days of a new generation (Millennials) getting a first taste of the coming disaster their lives were going to be. The last time there was really a movement like that was the 1999 WTO protests...more than a decade separated from Occupy and it being a pivotal moment for Gen X to realize the same lessons millennials learned in Occupy. Since Occupy, a movement consisting of many of the same people who were disorganized in 2011 started to learn the ropes and become organized, first in the realignment of Labor (SEIU starting a "Fight for 15$" in 2012/2013), then the emergence of BLM in 2013(Yes they started back in 2013) as a result of death of Eric Garner and the Ferguson rallies among other events, to finally Sanders running in 2015 and the emergence of a semi organized movement combining various progressives groups (economic & social progressives). This led to the whole saga in 2016 which there is plenty of youtube documentaries about to the wave election in 2018 (of which there is an amazing netflix movie about) to the showdown in 2020 between Bernie and Biden, to winding up wandering the political woods for years after Biden managed to hold on to now finally electing Mamdani as a Democratic Socialist in the largest city and the financial capital where Occupy started. From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years. Amazing! |
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| ▲ | mothballed 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would say more precisely, engineers are closer to the managerial or capital wielding class; usually the adversary of the union. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They are closer but they are not part of the class so does it really matter how close they are? Engineer still has to trade their time for wealth in the form of work. Capital class has assets that work for them. | | |
| ▲ | bob001 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To me the only question is if there's a hypothetical revolution who will end up swinging in the wind by their neck and I have no doubt many engineers working for big tech would have been in that group. There's always nice rhetoric and focused rhetoric to not make too many enemies but the people on the ground differentiate a lot less and have in every revolution. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of. Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being. This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them. Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class. | | |
| ▲ | ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Again, they are not part of the capital class. I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class. | |
| ▲ | lqstuart 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s so depressing how right you are | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Will coders be a part of that or will that skill set go the way of carpenter? Remains to be seen. But there is still other roles in tech that could take the place of coders (infrastructure, security etc.). Also remains to be seen how long this process will take. Could take a decade or two but hopefully it will happen. Its just so nice to see little wins like a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani getting elected in the finance capital of America. It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs. | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Good luck fighting offshoring. > It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs. That means nothing.
I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | OhMeadhbh 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i disagree. i also disagree that most people developing tech solutions for startups are engineers or are applying an engineering discipline. but i would agree that the majority of people in valley tech firms are closer to the rentier class than they are to working engineers. |
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| ▲ | mji 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Until recently? Now it's 20x at the AI labs instead of 5x at FAANG. | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Still do |
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| ▲ | thedevilslawyer 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Unionization does not happen because it's typically anti-immigrants. It's an unworkable solution, and liking it will magically make it work. | | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are unionized engineer jobs in the United States. Every time this conversation comes up people act like we don’t have any unions, but that’s not true. There are unionized engineering jobs. One of them even tried striking a couple years ago, quite publicly. They ended the strike a couple days later without gaining anything. I think American engineers know their situation and options better than you think. | |
| ▲ | Onavo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Steve Jobs was also an expert at suppressing software engineering wages. Karma has a funny way of coming around. |
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| ▲ | tyre 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would tell a recruiter directly that 996 is a red flag. Prior to that it was cracked (née 10x (née ninja)) engineers or sigma grindset or whatever. It's performative. If you bring people together to build something that they actually give a shit about, you'll out-perform a group of people who are grinding out of fear. And you'll _definitely_ out-perform the kinds of people who are buzzword heavy. |
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| ▲ | OhMeadhbh 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | i agree. but. there's something in the behaviour of these unicorns that should be examined. the idea that an engineer can be a ninja, 10x or unicorn independent of the processes of their environment and working group is laughable. i have known several people who were identified as "highly productive" and they all had some individual traits like a) they were very good with individual time management, b) were not afraid to say when they didn't understand something and c) were all pretty smart. (and d, knew how to give good code review comments without pissing people off.) but... they also needed an environment where they could push back and say things like "i do not feel participating in today's 1-on-1 meeting (or meeting with product management) is a good use of my time", where task design gave them chunks of work that were appropriate and they were given the freedom to identify (and avoid) "wicked" problems. which is to say... i don't think the story of the ninja/unicorn is complete fantasy, but management has to understand how it's real and craft an environment where an engineer's inner-unicorn can emerge. | | |
| ▲ | tyre 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've been an early employee (sub 10 and 20) in two unicorns and another (a presidential campaign) that didn't have a valuation but did the equivalent. People did not work 40 hours per week, and I feel comfortable saying that the companies could not have been as successful if people had. The common threads were: - incredible ICs - founders who spiked in the most important areas for that market - a mission that everyone truly believed in - a culture of people who deeply cared about one another but were comfortable pushing back (as you said!) It's incredibly rare to find all of these together. I agree that management is responsible for helping others thrive, but not necessarily that they should shape the environment to fit any engineer. Some people want things (projects, challenges, roles) that don't make sense in that company's context. It's okay, especially when it's hard, to agree that this isn't the place for someone. | | |
| ▲ | appellations 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you saying people worked less than 40 hours a week or more than 40 hours a week in those organizations? I’m assuming over, but it’s unclear to me from the tone of your post. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? The statement was specifically about top 1% engineers in Silicon Valley. That’s a very, very small subset of all engineers in the US. The pointy end of the talent spectrum in SV is a very weird place because it has had a lot of engineers for whom work is life. Living at the office and having coworkers working 24/7 might be something they like. I’m not condoning this or saying it’s common. It’s not common. However, once you narrow down to the extreme outliers in the long tail of talent distribution you will find a lot of people who are downright obsessive about their work. Their jobs also pay north of $1mm including equity, so spending a few years of their life 996ing on a topic they love with energized people isn’t exactly a bad deal for them. In general, if a recruiter told an average engineer that 996 was expected that would be the end of that conversation. Average US engineers are not signing up for 996 for average compensation. |
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| ▲ | the_mar 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am this person (not a genius or whatever) but work is absolutely life for me.
I still absolutely resent the 996 culture and would never do that. I'd like to have agency when I want to abuse myself |
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| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What happened? Started with Musk purging half his staff ... I've been around long enough in this industry to see the pendulum swing back and forth a few times. The peak of 2020/2021 was the epitome of "spoiled tech worker" but now we're well on our way the other side, I'd say. |
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| ▲ | huflungdung 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Sentiment is changing If you had enough time to look back through my post history, you’ll find back in 2021 2022 I was loud as hell Screaming from as high as I could on this board primarily that we need to be doing everything we possibly could do to unionize, build labor cooperatives etc. and absolutely nobody gave a shit. I would get roasted every time and that’s fine I know what I’m doing. but the attitudes are changing and while it’s frustrating to have to deal with that I feel like being a Hector on this topic is just the entry fee. I’m extremely dissatisfied at the pace and scale and lack of leaders and organization and push back and etc… so I expect the next two years to be really really really bad and the hope is that people wake up at a large enough scale that they actually are able to affect something but I don’t have a lot of hope for that. What I describe is not real activism imo but at least I can tell you from first hand documentation that sentiment is changing. |
