Xbox controversially raised the base price of its mainline games to $80 in an announcement a few weeks ago. Now, it seems to be backtracking. Good, I say.
Microsoft fired 15,000 people in the last year, and applied for 14,000 H1-B visa.
They are cutting costs and improving productivity by taking advantage of people from other countries who have the threat of deportation hanging over their heads to keep them compliant.
Good thing programmers were smart and organized into unions inspired by other industries instead of naively thinking they were too valuable to the ruling class in the US to be betrayed.
If CS tried to unionize, they would get replaced with AI and H1-Bs so fast at this point. They should have tried that like 20 years ago when they were in hot demand.
Yes because this is why there is a massive body of leftist academic, philosophical and political writing on the topic… yes because this is why organizing is a skill and unions can be good or bad. It is hard and you are gonna need all the help and tactics you can get.
No because there is or at least was a prevalent belief in US tech culture circles that being an expert in programming by extension made you an expert or a soon to be expert on everthing else. An expert on education, an expert on health care… just the damage from those two categories alone to the wellbeing of US citizens…
Far from me to say there isn’t a basic beauty to aspects to programming that speak to logic and math… but no… the world is full of a million different kinds of craftspeople because every form of genius has its own peculiarities. Unfortunately however this delusion reached a degree of popularity that I think undermined the ability of tech work culture in the US to establish a fertile substrate for effective organizing and unionizing to grow from.
I am not saying that this is unique to tech workers, simply that the demographic reached a critical point of naivety that corporations were able to solidfy their power.
It could have happened to Plumbers or Electricians (I mean they tend to be decent jobs in the US I think), the only thing unique to US programmers/tech workers is that for a brief moment they were existentially valuable to the empire and thus it had to suffer decent working conditions for programmers/tech workers. Though, in this respect programmers/tech workers aren’t that unique in the story of the US empire, the obvious reference here being New Bedford and the way the whaling industry briefly centered the nexus of power there to abandon it just as abruptly for another city… Silicon Valley for awhile but how much longer?.
Many tenants in New Bedford have been forced to spend more of their income on housing, Census data shows. In 2021, nearly half of New Bedford’s renter households were considered “cost-burdened,” which means they spent more than 30% of their income on rent.
The amazing scifi TV show Severance can be seen as a sort of Tech Culture Gothic that attempts to reconcile with the futility of experiencing late stage capitalism as a tech worker in 2020s US. Severance can be seen as a gothic work that is grappling with the growing realization that the fall of tech workers from the bourgeoise petit class or whatever you want to call it has been cemented by the torpor of US tech culture towards organizing to protect the future of their careers from the ruling class. Scifi and fiction like Severance will be interpreted by future academic analysis as a touchstone to begin an analysis of why US culture in general was so blind to the obvious systematic violence of tech corporations that reached an unsustainable peak in the 2020s.
An echo of a decrepit shuttered massive brick mill building in New Bedford Massachusetts, a strange monolithic monument to a power long gone. Towering mill window aclove after alcove filled with cinderblocks for want of unshattered glass echoed by empty floors of office cubicles and an insect like ghostly parking lot extending radially around The Holmdel Complex like a carapace.
The H1-B visa is fundamentally broken (or working exactly as intended, depending on how you look at it) though, so you apply for just under 10x as many as you need and end up with the number you want.
It’s not Microsoft’s fault the US Government is actively encouraging importing cheaper, average employees by using a lottery rather than filtering based on “you must earn n% more than the median income in that sector” or a similar metric to avoid reducing wages for Americans and companies using them to cut costs…
Adding mandated wage requirements would undermine the whole H1-B program, which is great. I don’t think we should allow H1-Bs for jobs that we have adequate domestic supply for and it should be a pain in the dick to get.
If the requirement is “worth paying 50% more for than the average worker” then instead of picking someone worse for cheaper at random then you’re making sure that only jobs where there likely isn’t an adequate supply for due to how bell curves work,
They are generally paid well over a living wage for a position that a citizen could occupy at a market wage that is even higher. Median tech job income is over $100k, twice the national average.
Hiring a citizen costs more, so profit chasing dictates hiring an immigrant that can be paid less than market rate. Hiring an immigrant under an H1-B not only is cheaper in wages, but also gives the company more power over the employee because they can fire that person and then they get deported for not being sponsored.
Hiring an H1-B at a cheaper rate also suppresses wages for citizens.
Unemployment in tech is like 3%, we don’t need H1-B visa for tech jobs. We don’t even need H1-Bs for the industries with the highest unemployment, they need to increase wages to attract the nearly 7 million unemployed in the US, and there are even more people that are underemployed or have given up because wages are too low across the board.
I am not disputing the details of anything you are necessarily saying, what I am saying is that you are even still leaning into the lie that there isn’t enough decent work to gone around for all of us.
You need to get that out of your head, fundamentally, before we can begin to envision a humane path forward for tech work in the US, either for immigrants or people born and raised in the US.
We need wage increases across the board, not importing new workers to fill roles at lower wages because we have plenty of workers that only need higher wages to fill those vacant roles.
You aren’t understanding me, you keep trying to debate from the axiom that this is a zero sum game.
In otherwords when I say
“We need to increase wages and employment opportunities across the board for immigrants including tech worker immigrants”
You hear
"We need to hurt tech workers born and raised in the US who are already hurting.
My point of issue is that I did not say that, rather you are applying an axiom that those two MUST be inextricably linked and if there is even a remote chance we can improve the wages and general quality of life of tech workers born and raised in the US AND tech workers that want to immigrate to the US than the logic of applying that axiom becomes fundamentally questionable.
The US is the richest country on earth, or was… it is a lie the oligarchs and ruling class tell us that we cannot afford to pay US workers a living wage, tech workers or otherwise and it is a further lie that hopeful immigrants (tech workers or not) are a threat to the wellbeing of the US, far from it, immigrants are certainly the lifeblood of this country if there is anything still yet redeemable to it.
That is what you don’t realize or refuse to realize.
This is NOT a zero sum game between tech workers who want to immigrate to the US and tech workers who were born and raised in the US.
The future is a shared solidarity not an increasing division, don’t take my word for it, notice rather that large corporations favor this kind of atomization of workers into nationalisms, it makes the job of people oppressing workers in the US and abroad far easier when we take your perspective.
us tech workers paid well though, just not the visa holders, thats why these tech companies are mostly hiring them now or in the future. my bros both earn 100k+, the older one earn 300k+ which is why they laid of the highest paying ones in 2023.
biotech abuses the heck out of to, when i was searching like in the mid 2010s, yup you can guaranteed 1/4, would be asking for VISA help, if you need it. i feel like bio research is only kept alive because of the visas, or the current scientists they are holding onto, while refusing to hire more BS/MS holders so they can get into a proper career track and grad school.
Oh do these high prices mean they will hire more developers back after all of Xbox and Microsoft’s cuts?
Microsoft fired 15,000 people in the last year, and applied for 14,000 H1-B visa.
They are cutting costs and improving productivity by taking advantage of people from other countries who have the threat of deportation hanging over their heads to keep them compliant.
Good thing programmers were smart and organized into unions inspired by other industries instead of naively thinking they were too valuable to the ruling class in the US to be betrayed.
…
If CS tried to unionize, they would get replaced with AI and H1-Bs so fast at this point. They should have tried that like 20 years ago when they were in hot demand.
Yes and no.
Yes because this is why there is a massive body of leftist academic, philosophical and political writing on the topic… yes because this is why organizing is a skill and unions can be good or bad. It is hard and you are gonna need all the help and tactics you can get.
No because there is or at least was a prevalent belief in US tech culture circles that being an expert in programming by extension made you an expert or a soon to be expert on everthing else. An expert on education, an expert on health care… just the damage from those two categories alone to the wellbeing of US citizens…
Far from me to say there isn’t a basic beauty to aspects to programming that speak to logic and math… but no… the world is full of a million different kinds of craftspeople because every form of genius has its own peculiarities. Unfortunately however this delusion reached a degree of popularity that I think undermined the ability of tech work culture in the US to establish a fertile substrate for effective organizing and unionizing to grow from.
I am not saying that this is unique to tech workers, simply that the demographic reached a critical point of naivety that corporations were able to solidfy their power.
It could have happened to Plumbers or Electricians (I mean they tend to be decent jobs in the US I think), the only thing unique to US programmers/tech workers is that for a brief moment they were existentially valuable to the empire and thus it had to suffer decent working conditions for programmers/tech workers. Though, in this respect programmers/tech workers aren’t that unique in the story of the US empire, the obvious reference here being New Bedford and the way the whaling industry briefly centered the nexus of power there to abandon it just as abruptly for another city… Silicon Valley for awhile but how much longer?.
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalingheritage.htm
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2022/03/huge-architecture-mills-of-new-bedford.html?m=1
https://newbedfordlight.org/barely-making-it-in-new-bedford/
The amazing scifi TV show Severance can be seen as a sort of Tech Culture Gothic that attempts to reconcile with the futility of experiencing late stage capitalism as a tech worker in 2020s US. Severance can be seen as a gothic work that is grappling with the growing realization that the fall of tech workers from the bourgeoise petit class or whatever you want to call it has been cemented by the torpor of US tech culture towards organizing to protect the future of their careers from the ruling class. Scifi and fiction like Severance will be interpreted by future academic analysis as a touchstone to begin an analysis of why US culture in general was so blind to the obvious systematic violence of tech corporations that reached an unsustainable peak in the 2020s.
An echo of a decrepit shuttered massive brick mill building in New Bedford Massachusetts, a strange monolithic monument to a power long gone. Towering mill window aclove after alcove filled with cinderblocks for want of unshattered glass echoed by empty floors of office cubicles and an insect like ghostly parking lot extending radially around The Holmdel Complex like a carapace.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series)
The H1-B visa is fundamentally broken (or working exactly as intended, depending on how you look at it) though, so you apply for just under 10x as many as you need and end up with the number you want.
It’s not Microsoft’s fault the US Government is actively encouraging importing cheaper, average employees by using a lottery rather than filtering based on “you must earn n% more than the median income in that sector” or a similar metric to avoid reducing wages for Americans and companies using them to cut costs…
Adding mandated wage requirements would undermine the whole H1-B program, which is great. I don’t think we should allow H1-Bs for jobs that we have adequate domestic supply for and it should be a pain in the dick to get.
Would it though?
If the requirement is “worth paying 50% more for than the average worker” then instead of picking someone worse for cheaper at random then you’re making sure that only jobs where there likely isn’t an adequate supply for due to how bell curves work,
Ok I have an idea, why don’t we just pay a living wage to US tech workers whether they are immigrants or they were born and raised in the US?
They are generally paid well over a living wage for a position that a citizen could occupy at a market wage that is even higher. Median tech job income is over $100k, twice the national average.
Hiring a citizen costs more, so profit chasing dictates hiring an immigrant that can be paid less than market rate. Hiring an immigrant under an H1-B not only is cheaper in wages, but also gives the company more power over the employee because they can fire that person and then they get deported for not being sponsored.
Hiring an H1-B at a cheaper rate also suppresses wages for citizens.
Unemployment in tech is like 3%, we don’t need H1-B visa for tech jobs. We don’t even need H1-Bs for the industries with the highest unemployment, they need to increase wages to attract the nearly 7 million unemployed in the US, and there are even more people that are underemployed or have given up because wages are too low across the board.
I am not disputing the details of anything you are necessarily saying, what I am saying is that you are even still leaning into the lie that there isn’t enough decent work to gone around for all of us.
You need to get that out of your head, fundamentally, before we can begin to envision a humane path forward for tech work in the US, either for immigrants or people born and raised in the US.
Last part of the last paragraph, we agree.
We need wage increases across the board, not importing new workers to fill roles at lower wages because we have plenty of workers that only need higher wages to fill those vacant roles.
You aren’t understanding me, you keep trying to debate from the axiom that this is a zero sum game.
In otherwords when I say
You hear
My point of issue is that I did not say that, rather you are applying an axiom that those two MUST be inextricably linked and if there is even a remote chance we can improve the wages and general quality of life of tech workers born and raised in the US AND tech workers that want to immigrate to the US than the logic of applying that axiom becomes fundamentally questionable.
The US is the richest country on earth, or was… it is a lie the oligarchs and ruling class tell us that we cannot afford to pay US workers a living wage, tech workers or otherwise and it is a further lie that hopeful immigrants (tech workers or not) are a threat to the wellbeing of the US, far from it, immigrants are certainly the lifeblood of this country if there is anything still yet redeemable to it.
That is what you don’t realize or refuse to realize.
This is NOT a zero sum game between tech workers who want to immigrate to the US and tech workers who were born and raised in the US.
The future is a shared solidarity not an increasing division, don’t take my word for it, notice rather that large corporations favor this kind of atomization of workers into nationalisms, it makes the job of people oppressing workers in the US and abroad far easier when we take your perspective.
us tech workers paid well though, just not the visa holders, thats why these tech companies are mostly hiring them now or in the future. my bros both earn 100k+, the older one earn 300k+ which is why they laid of the highest paying ones in 2023.
biotech abuses the heck out of to, when i was searching like in the mid 2010s, yup you can guaranteed 1/4, would be asking for VISA help, if you need it. i feel like bio research is only kept alive because of the visas, or the current scientists they are holding onto, while refusing to hire more BS/MS holders so they can get into a proper career track and grad school.
They lowered the price from $80 to $70, but I’m sure they’ll fire more developers regardless
Just as a little treat for themselves
Any misstep, setback, or failure -> mass layoffs.
If they have record breaking success and profits though, I think we’d see mass layoffs instead. v.v
Damn, what a thin knife edge to walk, business majors are so smart!
Buzz Ness Majors, Lee Majors’s shitty cousin