Silicon Valley’s Dream Tech Job Is Disappearing
“We’re seeing right now why tech needs unions.”
[Kate Conger at the New York Times]
Tech companies are cutting down on some of the things that made them interesting places to work, including stronger parental benefits, intentional inclusion initiatives, and a more experimental attitude towards building better work cultures:
“Gone are the days when Google, Apple, Meta and Netflix were the dream destinations for tech workers, offering fat salaries, lush corporate campuses and say-anything, do-anything cultures. Now the behemoth firms have aged into large bureaucracies. While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate.”
What really strikes me as sad is not the loss of things like Nerf guns at desks — that story, embedded in this piece, is more anti-pattern — but the sense of bottom-up, collaborative community that many of these companies once had. The sense of building the future was real, not just in terms of the products, but in terms up reinventing what a workplace was. Many of them have fallen back on more traditional models.
It’s not clear that those models failed; it seems like what’s actually happened is that some shareholders and board members have demanded a return to more traditional norms because it’s seen as getting down to business and improves top line numbers, even if the knock-on systemic effects are detrimental. The best example of this is return to office mandates, which cut costs because some people quit rather than having to be laid off, but lead to a reduction in productivity and morale over time.
But everything can be disrupted. There’s a lot of room for a new generation of tech startups that can offer a better place to work, free from these influences — at least, until they get too big and the cycle begins anew.
How to break the cycle more completely? A central claim in the piece is that this is why tech needs unions. That seems right, for this and many other reasons.
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