Star Trek: The Original Series S2E8 “I, Mudd”
I’ve been in tech for 25 years and we’ve never organized to fight back because for the most part we’ve had great jobs with great benefits. More to lose than gain, so to speak. But the center of gravity hs really shifted now and companies seem to regard staff as a bothersome cost center that’s sometimes necessary, but ideally replaced by AI. I hope that this will increase the participation in unionization, which as far as I’ve ever seen, is mostly limited to low-level roles like moderator, customer service, and data analysts, etc. who have been treated like replaceable drones for a long time. Management would love to have the same leverage over core R&D / engineering functions. They managed it with QA. They are halfway there with UX. They’ve trimmed engineering a bit. They haven’t figured out how to eliminate Product yet. Plan A seems to be for product managers to operate LLMs instead of leading a team. I’ve heard people beam about how the days of 9 engineers to 1 product manager are over, and how it will be more like 1:1 going forward. I know that staff generally hate product managers and consider them useless, but leadership consider them their agents in the field, which is why they are still around. Also explains why teams hate them: their job is not what their teammates think it should be.
i’ve been advocating for tech unions for decades, and invariably shouted down for it.
Tech - especially dev - are pretty full on with the koolaid. No unions! My moneys! unions are for peasants!!
They’re unfortunately about join the peasantry and to discover why unions are a thing.
Some have figured out how to eliminate Product. It’s called rent-seeking behavior or more recently neo-feudalism. The short version is you organize society such that everyone is required to give you all their money all the time or die. See for example the health insurance industry.
I’m aware of what rent-seeking is. How does that relate to Product and how are companies eliminating it?
Well, the goal of rent seeking is to collect money, without giving any products or services in return. And without a product, you don’t need a Product team.
Yeah, companies here make sure to kick you out after you’ve worked your shift, and force you to go on vacations because they want to avoid problems.
On a related note, the police actively stops suspects from talking to them without their lawyers, because they don’t want to lose their case.
It’s incredible how impactful a well designed rule can be.
You mean you’re not even profiting from people’s naivety? That makes no sense. How can your society even exist without exploiting someone??
You mean you’re not even profiting from people’s naivety?
Oh, you are taking things a little too far. People are naive in infinitely diverse ways, those are just a couple of them.
You can tell the android is american because he’s wearing athletic wear in the middle of the day.
