> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
You realize as a worker you're allowed to demand better working conditions right?
Sure, I'll get right on that.
You’re being sarcastic, but I think you’d be surprised at how often you can say no to managers or even VPs and the c-suite and … have nothing happen to you.
I didn’t realize this until I was 32.
Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.
But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.
And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.
If workers making far less than you, with far more to lose, can organize in their workplace, then you can too. Open up signal, talk to your coworkers, and find some solidarity. Now is far better than never, and you might feel less alienated at the end of it.
which is why unionization and labor groups exist... because a worker demanding things does jack shit by itself.