I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN and I honestly don’t get it. If you truly care about workers, focus your energy on the corporations and politicians that are producing the system you are unhappy with. Belittling other, higher paid workers doesn’t advance anyone’s cause.
And FWIW, the jobless rate in tech is higher than most blue collar jobs and the national average. This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Losing a job is hard for everyone, regardless of the type of job it was. Jobs are where most of our social interactions happen, and where many people’s goals and aspirations are kept. Having that ripped away hurts, regardless of the salary the job paid. Hopefully he was good at managing his money (I’ve known high paid workers that weren’t) and will land on his feet, but you don’t know his circumstances and calling him names is just being a dick.
> This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Maybe this is true, I don't actually know. But I'm quite skeptical that someone who worked at Google for a long time, and has work with their name on it they can point to, who can work remotely, will have a harder time finding gainful employment than a physical laborer.
I'm not trying to pile on the "screw this guy for whining" train, but I think it is important to recognize the privilege of working in tech.
I mean, actually, we're in this world now (for now, esp in the US) where if you work in trades and lose your job you could turn around and get another job pretty easily. It might suck just as much as your previous job, and the pay won't be anywhere close to a SWE salary, but there's just so much work...
But if you're a tech worker, it's really not a gravy train anymore. The number of open positions has dropped, the compensation ranges perhaps as well, and the interview process is more grueling and involved.
People who worked as salaried employees at BigCorps for years making big $$ definitely should have more savings, but they're still on the whole just the same as any other worker: they pay taxes, they don't own enough capital to make them independent of the market, and they are likely some number of months/years away from not being able to pay mortgage/rent/bills/groceries. Just like any other worker.
There are no "jobs" even in tech that give any kind of permanent escape from the need to beg for employment to make ends meet.
As far as classism goes, this person is closer to a tradesman than they are to a billionaire or the executive class. People really have no sense of scale here and they just end up promoting infighting. It’s not just plumbers/electricians/Amazon warehouse workers and everyone else.
> I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN
It has always been there. It usually gets downvoted away but it takes time. Inflammatory takes like this one are usually more popular when stories are fresh and then get downvoted as the story ages on. My theory is that these shallow, ragebait-ey takes appeal to people who are skimming stories for a chance to rage a bit, but then they get bored and move on to the next thing. It takes a while for people to read the story and come up with good discussion, which gets upvoted later.
It was at the top of the comments when I saw this hit HN, and it pissed me off to see a trollish shitpost in that position, especially when the post is about the community losing an awesome contributor (and a friend).
The difficult irony here is that you think your attitude is progressive, but it is regressive because it makes solidarity (and therefore the benefits of solidarity: unions, worker power, compression of the income distribution) impossible.
You're not wrong but suffering isn't comparative. Because it's easier for someone to bounce back or have support in the transition doesn't mean it still doesn't suck.
This would be a shocking opinion, if we weren't in unprecedented times.
I wish we had more empathy and be kinder to people going through rough times, regardless of their wealth or position, or the duopoly they work for even, but it's also hard to completely ignore when the effect and impact is so huge.
Now, if you it makes you physically ill, I also wish you either find help or can get out of the situation you're in. Sincerely.
I agree that it's a little hard to care about this author's situation as much as other stories I've heard in the past couple of years. But that said, losing a job like this is never a nice place to be, and I don't hate this person for having those emotions. People are allowed to feel things, shaming them for that is not nice.
But I would caution people against writing public statements like this when they are still in shock, you might regret them later, better to try and regain some balance first.
Hard to tell if you’re a GPT account. Obviously you can care about all people; it’s not a zero-sum emotion. Your time is zero sum though, and you seem to be spending a lot of it just hating on people. And there’s many other loser accounts like you on here, moreso than I remember.
It was written on his personal blog, announcing to the community of people who look up to him (and yes, there's a community) why he won't be in the places they expect.
Adam was a UX Engineer who saw a job that needed doing, but didn't exist, so he willed it into existence. He found a way to use his talents to literally make the world a better place. (I don't care if you think there are more important jobs - the truth is that the internet mediates most of our societal interactions, and he was making it better for everyone.)
He was doing a kickass job at it too. He should be hurt and angry to have that rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him.
He doesn't need to pay lip service to starving kids in $REMOTE_AND_DESTITUTE_PLACE or self-flagellatingly privilege check. His blog isn't here for your entertainment, and he doesn't need your approval.
There aren't many companies that have such a symbiotic relationship with the web platform to be willing to fund people to make the web a better place. For a while, Google was the foremost place that did.
Adam is immensely talented and a wonderful person on top of it. Hopefully a great opportunity will snatch him up quickly. But there aren't many places to do the work he was doing. He deserves to be mad to see the job he worked so hard to build swept away by some antisocial business school bullshit. And as the people who will miss out when he's not there to make the web a better place, we do too.
You are using people from a marginalized group (the poor), of which I am assuming you are not a part, as a bad faith shield to justify your anti-worker viewpoint.
You're not even rallying against petit bourg, let alone the bourg. You're literally complaining about the lumpenproles complaining of their suffering. Unfortunate news: "Well paid" proles are still proles.
If your intent is to further Marxist thought amongst the people on this site, you're missing the mark greatly. Perhaps more study is required.
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
I agree that his situation doesn't meaningfully threaten his actual personal security. But this isn't the point of his post and like, shit dude, have a heart. It's not the misery olympics.
He has clearly invested a lot of his identity in his work at Google on Chrome etc - essentially his life's work. To have it flushed down the toilet via some opaque corporate process, cost-saving a company that basically prints its own profit has a terrible psychological impact... irrespective of whether investing one's personal dreams in a faceless multinational corporation was a rational idea in the first place.
Honestly, it's not as if the PMC classes have truly transcended the confines of generating someone else's profit, pushing them offside is probably quite unhelpful for solidarity in the labor movement, but whatever.
I think the more salient observation is that the author is completely detached from reality. Him writing:
"shoulder to shoulder with incredible engineers, planning ways to make web developers life's easier while raising the quality level of the web."
when Google is primarily responsible for flooding us with ad capitalism and ruining the web, portrays not only a profound ignorance of how corporations work, but a total dissociation from the -very damaging- effects of his work-seen-holistically on the real world. You don't get a free pass working for Google just because you can rationalize your particular niche as "educating users" and "raising the quality level of the web".
Towards the end, it seems to dawn on him that yeah, he "was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp". Let's hope he carries that understanding forward and distills it into a moral and ethical framework that can make the world better.
You are probably gonna get downvoted for lack of empathy but I completely agree. I feel bad for OP, but simultaneously if you are a technocrat who thinks they are somehow insulated or not part of the larger system, you need a reality check.
> I was supposed to help with the developer keynote, ensuring things matched reality and were beautiful. Gone.
Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
> Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
This is clearly a person who loved their job, and took it seriously. They had worked hard on something and were looking forward to sharing it. That, frankly, seems healthy. It's the only way to give your everyday life worth and meaning as an employee. It's certainly something that Google cultivated and encouraged. And it's shocking to have it vanish so abruptly.
If you take a more cynical, realistic view, you could never seriously engage with your work. You realize the company doesn't care about you, and you return the sentiment. That might be a more realistic way of viewing your situation, but it's empty of meaning or satisfaction. You'd be correct but unhappy all day every day.
I was always kinda jealous of people who could drink the kool-ade. And even if there's a certain satisfaction in seeing them get a reality check, it's also a shame that somebody who thought they had found meaning and purpose in a community suddenly realize they were just a tool the whole time.
I think its possible to hold 2 conflicting views simultaneously. I put on my profit optimization hat and take it off when I leave work.
I take no satisfaction in seeing someone who has drank the kool-ade getting a wakeup call, it's just a shocking realization that there are people out there who still dont get it.
Well as long as they're not a white man, the only 2 privileges that I was afforded on the way up, then they're welcome to try absolutely any punishment they see fit. They're surely welcome to hate me. It is their right.
Therapy isn't so much telling you that your feelings are wrong. Feelings arise from many factors that are beyond your immediate control.
Therapy helps provide better context for, introspection into, and understanding of those feelings, and more importantly, alternative ways of responding to, expressing and acting upon them.
At the very least, expressing them less aggressively while still getting across your point.
Not trying to invalidate your feelings, but stewing in resentment is like drinking poison daily. Therapy can help you acquire the psychological tools and habits needed to help you and those around you live happier lives
Just like you're assuming the OPs feelings are wrong. They are not.
I remember my dad lamenting the bourgeoisie to a family friend who recently immigrated to the US. His answer was, "To us, you are the bourgeoisie"
There's always someone richer than you, you can hate it, but what's the point? You just make yourself miserable and don't enjoy whatever you can carve out of life for yourself
I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN and I honestly don’t get it. If you truly care about workers, focus your energy on the corporations and politicians that are producing the system you are unhappy with. Belittling other, higher paid workers doesn’t advance anyone’s cause.
And FWIW, the jobless rate in tech is higher than most blue collar jobs and the national average. This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Losing a job is hard for everyone, regardless of the type of job it was. Jobs are where most of our social interactions happen, and where many people’s goals and aspirations are kept. Having that ripped away hurts, regardless of the salary the job paid. Hopefully he was good at managing his money (I’ve known high paid workers that weren’t) and will land on his feet, but you don’t know his circumstances and calling him names is just being a dick.
> This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Maybe this is true, I don't actually know. But I'm quite skeptical that someone who worked at Google for a long time, and has work with their name on it they can point to, who can work remotely, will have a harder time finding gainful employment than a physical laborer.
I'm not trying to pile on the "screw this guy for whining" train, but I think it is important to recognize the privilege of working in tech.
I mean, actually, we're in this world now (for now, esp in the US) where if you work in trades and lose your job you could turn around and get another job pretty easily. It might suck just as much as your previous job, and the pay won't be anywhere close to a SWE salary, but there's just so much work...
But if you're a tech worker, it's really not a gravy train anymore. The number of open positions has dropped, the compensation ranges perhaps as well, and the interview process is more grueling and involved.
People who worked as salaried employees at BigCorps for years making big $$ definitely should have more savings, but they're still on the whole just the same as any other worker: they pay taxes, they don't own enough capital to make them independent of the market, and they are likely some number of months/years away from not being able to pay mortgage/rent/bills/groceries. Just like any other worker.
There are no "jobs" even in tech that give any kind of permanent escape from the need to beg for employment to make ends meet.
As far as classism goes, this person is closer to a tradesman than they are to a billionaire or the executive class. People really have no sense of scale here and they just end up promoting infighting. It’s not just plumbers/electricians/Amazon warehouse workers and everyone else.
> I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN
It has always been there. It usually gets downvoted away but it takes time. Inflammatory takes like this one are usually more popular when stories are fresh and then get downvoted as the story ages on. My theory is that these shallow, ragebait-ey takes appeal to people who are skimming stories for a chance to rage a bit, but then they get bored and move on to the next thing. It takes a while for people to read the story and come up with good discussion, which gets upvoted later.
I'm glad it's been deservingly downvoted.
It was at the top of the comments when I saw this hit HN, and it pissed me off to see a trollish shitpost in that position, especially when the post is about the community losing an awesome contributor (and a friend).
The difficult irony here is that you think your attitude is progressive, but it is regressive because it makes solidarity (and therefore the benefits of solidarity: unions, worker power, compression of the income distribution) impossible.
You're not wrong but suffering isn't comparative. Because it's easier for someone to bounce back or have support in the transition doesn't mean it still doesn't suck.
[flagged]
This would be a shocking opinion, if we weren't in unprecedented times.
I wish we had more empathy and be kinder to people going through rough times, regardless of their wealth or position, or the duopoly they work for even, but it's also hard to completely ignore when the effect and impact is so huge.
Now, if you it makes you physically ill, I also wish you either find help or can get out of the situation you're in. Sincerely.
Well fear not for me. It is just hyperbole. Now it's a haiku.
I agree that it's a little hard to care about this author's situation as much as other stories I've heard in the past couple of years. But that said, losing a job like this is never a nice place to be, and I don't hate this person for having those emotions. People are allowed to feel things, shaming them for that is not nice.
But I would caution people against writing public statements like this when they are still in shock, you might regret them later, better to try and regain some balance first.
You let us know when somebody has the right to be sad or angry about loss, thanks
I would love to read some compelling analysis of why online public spaces are increasingly filled by cynical losers with crabs in a bucket mentality.
Caring about spoiled rich people = Intelligent Discourse
Caring about marginalized and needy people = Cynical Loser.
Hard to tell if you’re a GPT account. Obviously you can care about all people; it’s not a zero-sum emotion. Your time is zero sum though, and you seem to be spending a lot of it just hating on people. And there’s many other loser accounts like you on here, moreso than I remember.
Is this the new form of opinion erasure? If you disagree it must be AI?
Actually I’m skeptical because the level of argument you’re producing is comparable to some of the worst Reddit slop. Endless bad faith strawmans.
It’s like you’re mad at the house slaves because they have it so good.
That person is basically you under less dire circumstances.
It is insanely disgusting and tone deaf to equate any of this to slavery.
His post isn't for you.
It was written on his personal blog, announcing to the community of people who look up to him (and yes, there's a community) why he won't be in the places they expect.
Adam was a UX Engineer who saw a job that needed doing, but didn't exist, so he willed it into existence. He found a way to use his talents to literally make the world a better place. (I don't care if you think there are more important jobs - the truth is that the internet mediates most of our societal interactions, and he was making it better for everyone.)
He was doing a kickass job at it too. He should be hurt and angry to have that rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him.
He doesn't need to pay lip service to starving kids in $REMOTE_AND_DESTITUTE_PLACE or self-flagellatingly privilege check. His blog isn't here for your entertainment, and he doesn't need your approval.
There aren't many companies that have such a symbiotic relationship with the web platform to be willing to fund people to make the web a better place. For a while, Google was the foremost place that did.
Adam is immensely talented and a wonderful person on top of it. Hopefully a great opportunity will snatch him up quickly. But there aren't many places to do the work he was doing. He deserves to be mad to see the job he worked so hard to build swept away by some antisocial business school bullshit. And as the people who will miss out when he's not there to make the web a better place, we do too.
You are using people from a marginalized group (the poor), of which I am assuming you are not a part, as a bad faith shield to justify your anti-worker viewpoint.
> bad faith shield to justify your anti-worker viewpoint
you gotta do more to make your point here, because that's not an obvious inference from what they wrote
>anti-worker
Missed that by a mile.
You're not even rallying against petit bourg, let alone the bourg. You're literally complaining about the lumpenproles complaining of their suffering. Unfortunate news: "Well paid" proles are still proles.
If your intent is to further Marxist thought amongst the people on this site, you're missing the mark greatly. Perhaps more study is required.
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
No one complains when paid 500k+
Only when laid off.
I agree that his situation doesn't meaningfully threaten his actual personal security. But this isn't the point of his post and like, shit dude, have a heart. It's not the misery olympics.
He has clearly invested a lot of his identity in his work at Google on Chrome etc - essentially his life's work. To have it flushed down the toilet via some opaque corporate process, cost-saving a company that basically prints its own profit has a terrible psychological impact... irrespective of whether investing one's personal dreams in a faceless multinational corporation was a rational idea in the first place.
Honestly, it's not as if the PMC classes have truly transcended the confines of generating someone else's profit, pushing them offside is probably quite unhelpful for solidarity in the labor movement, but whatever.
> Pure, unadulterated, revolting whining from a spoiled tech child.
As opposed to you, the perfect human?
> blue collar jobs would take much longer to recover
So what are you saying? We should treat everyone like shit so everyone is equal? Or that only blue collar people have the right to complain?
How about we focus on raising the quality of living for everyone.
[flagged]
I think the more salient observation is that the author is completely detached from reality. Him writing:
"shoulder to shoulder with incredible engineers, planning ways to make web developers life's easier while raising the quality level of the web."
when Google is primarily responsible for flooding us with ad capitalism and ruining the web, portrays not only a profound ignorance of how corporations work, but a total dissociation from the -very damaging- effects of his work-seen-holistically on the real world. You don't get a free pass working for Google just because you can rationalize your particular niche as "educating users" and "raising the quality level of the web".
Towards the end, it seems to dawn on him that yeah, he "was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp". Let's hope he carries that understanding forward and distills it into a moral and ethical framework that can make the world better.
I mean, I definitely expected this from someone calling himself "ex-Googler". Just big egos and nothing else.
You are probably gonna get downvoted for lack of empathy but I completely agree. I feel bad for OP, but simultaneously if you are a technocrat who thinks they are somehow insulated or not part of the larger system, you need a reality check.
> I was supposed to help with the developer keynote, ensuring things matched reality and were beautiful. Gone.
Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
> Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
This is clearly a person who loved their job, and took it seriously. They had worked hard on something and were looking forward to sharing it. That, frankly, seems healthy. It's the only way to give your everyday life worth and meaning as an employee. It's certainly something that Google cultivated and encouraged. And it's shocking to have it vanish so abruptly.
If you take a more cynical, realistic view, you could never seriously engage with your work. You realize the company doesn't care about you, and you return the sentiment. That might be a more realistic way of viewing your situation, but it's empty of meaning or satisfaction. You'd be correct but unhappy all day every day.
I was always kinda jealous of people who could drink the kool-ade. And even if there's a certain satisfaction in seeing them get a reality check, it's also a shame that somebody who thought they had found meaning and purpose in a community suddenly realize they were just a tool the whole time.
I think its possible to hold 2 conflicting views simultaneously. I put on my profit optimization hat and take it off when I leave work.
I take no satisfaction in seeing someone who has drank the kool-ade getting a wakeup call, it's just a shocking realization that there are people out there who still dont get it.
[flagged]
Out of curiosity, what happens to you when a less privileged person thinks the same thing about you?
Well as long as they're not a white man, the only 2 privileges that I was afforded on the way up, then they're welcome to try absolutely any punishment they see fit. They're surely welcome to hate me. It is their right.
Since when is racism okay on HN?
Consider therapy
On what basis? You're assuming that this feeling is wrong. It is not. There is no need for correction.
Therapy isn't so much telling you that your feelings are wrong. Feelings arise from many factors that are beyond your immediate control.
Therapy helps provide better context for, introspection into, and understanding of those feelings, and more importantly, alternative ways of responding to, expressing and acting upon them.
At the very least, expressing them less aggressively while still getting across your point.
Not trying to invalidate your feelings, but stewing in resentment is like drinking poison daily. Therapy can help you acquire the psychological tools and habits needed to help you and those around you live happier lives
Just like you're assuming the OPs feelings are wrong. They are not.
I remember my dad lamenting the bourgeoisie to a family friend who recently immigrated to the US. His answer was, "To us, you are the bourgeoisie"
There's always someone richer than you, you can hate it, but what's the point? You just make yourself miserable and don't enjoy whatever you can carve out of life for yourself