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The proletarianization of tech workers (doctorow.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by erlend_sh@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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https://archive.ph/hMZPi

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

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[–] gayhitler420@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Hey I got a temp ban for my post and username (typical lemmy homophobia) but I wanted to come back and seriously recommend with nothing but civility that you engage with some of the ideas of people who’ve pushed back against you in this comment thread.

When everyone from conservatives to communists are frothing at the mouth it doesn’t mean you’re doing something right, it doesn’t mean the answer is somewhere in the middle and you found it, it means you overlooked a lot of ideas.

For my part, your claim that tech workers aren’t proletarian is absurd on the face of it because that claim denies the nature of tech work and proletarianization. An alarmingly small number of tech workers hail from the places they’re working in, almost all have moved there for the work. Unless everyone moved away from their families and homes because they just love the idea, they were pushed to move by the lack of work. And while you’re happy to put senior engineers in the tech worker category, call center tech support is notably absent in your analysis. Heck, entry level programmers are absent!

Your claims can only be put together as some form of gatekeeping based on aesthetics: they don’t look poor to you so they can’t be proletarian.

If I’m off base I look forward to your response!