[HN Gopher] An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software En...
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An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
Author : chobeat
Score : 183 points
Date : 2023-02-07 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| tonfreed wrote:
| I mean, yes offense, but this guy is a literally who trying to
| call people to radical action. And let's face it, large companies
| often hire dead weight to beef up their stock prices, it was
| inevitable they were going to shave headcount when the purse
| strings needed to tighten.
|
| While I'm not wholly unsympathetic to those laid off, I've
| personally found that people that post this kind of thing are the
| first to try and guilt you into free labor themselves.
| drewcon wrote:
| This has to be satire.
| 60secs wrote:
| Fire all zero sum thinkers
| jpollock wrote:
| My job as an engineer has been to make my current position
| unnecessary.
|
| That's how I justify my pay increases, by becoming more efficient
| and making the organisation more efficient.
|
| I look at where the organisation is going and solve problems.
| wufufufu wrote:
| Had me in the first half, lost me in the second. Why not try to
| create unions instead of "don't document anything because you're
| making yourself replaceable"?
| xupybd wrote:
| I work hard to become replaceable. I want to move up, I can't
| be too important at my current level. If that means automating
| things, documentation and training juniors then I'm all for it.
| chobeat wrote:
| why not both?
| striking wrote:
| Because, as they state under another heading,
|
| > It's not in your interest as a worker to let capital think
| that its workers are saboteurs.
|
| And although documentation can make you somewhat replaceable,
| it is a joyless and tiring experience to work on something
| that is quickly evolving yet completely undocumented. I'd
| rather be made slightly more replaceable if it meant my job
| wouldn't be a tiring, joyless grind.
| lmz wrote:
| The part about code reviews and meetings is about working
| to rule, to further delay progress. Don't take risks with
| bugs, review thoroughly. Don't ask for forgiveness, ask dor
| permission and escalate it in meetings.
| fluoridation wrote:
| The trick is to have documentation but keep it a secret.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| it's not nice to the other workers -- that's not very good
| class solidarity.
| keskival wrote:
| The article was missing the words "together" and
| "solidarity". It seemed to be a product of a culture of
| extreme individualism.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah. "I, the individual, am going to do my best to make
| sure that I get mine, even if it harms the company _and
| my coworkers_ ". That's not "class warfare". That's
| narcissism.
| dljsjr wrote:
| This is exactly what the article says to do. I also paused at
| that section that listed all those crazy things, if you power
| through and get to the end you'll find this:
|
| >If you're a conscientious engineer, you are probably going to
| find the above suggestions somewhere between counterintuitive
| and horrifying. You should! They are horrifying! This is how
| deeply capital's war on workers is scarring our profession.
|
| >These people are actively trying to take your wealth away from
| you and keep it for themselves. You need to protect yourself.
|
| >Oh, yeah, we should also have a union. Sure. Let's get on that
| one of these days.
| justizin wrote:
| This is called, "The Tyranny of Competence", and is hostile to
| other workers.
|
| Companies also don't have a way to quantify this, and sometimes
| will hesitate to term someone, until they are fed up and will
| just decide it is worthwhile at all costs.
|
| I have worked with or been the successor to folks who did this
| and it made me absolutely furious, and reflected poorly on my
| performance.
| uoaei wrote:
| Yeah, leaving your fellow employees out to dry is absolutely
| not class warfare, except insofar as it is friendly fire.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > hostile to other workers
|
| It's also hostile to the practitioner if they last long
| enough at the same company.
|
| I end up reinventing my "clever" (until I forget the context
| at least) hacks more often than I care to admit and I'm _not_
| actively trying to sabotage my company.
| pdonis wrote:
| Lost me in the first half. The whole capital vs. labor thing is
| a false dichotomy, particularly here where we're talking about
| highly skilled tech workers. Your skills are _capital_ , and
| your pay for using those skills is mostly return on capital,
| not "labor cost".
|
| The real dichotomy here is simple: it's between people who
| understand that they own capital and work to maximize their
| return on that capital, and people who don't.
| uoaei wrote:
| Capitalist vs laborer is a true dichotomy, in that one cannot
| be both simultaneously within one context. But it is
| important to remember these are _embodied roles_ and not
| _character traits_. I.e., a laborer becomes a consumer when
| they leave their place of employment to drive to the grocery
| store.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| What about owner-operators? Truckers who own their own
| trucks are both laborers and capitalists.
| uoaei wrote:
| A truck is useless without a route. In the case of
| trucking, "the means of production" includes customer
| lead generation, driver dispatch, etc. Owning their truck
| only gives them the flexibility to switch employers more
| easily.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Capitalist vs laborer is a true dichotomy, in that one
| cannot be both simultaneously within one context._
|
| Sure one can. One can be a "laborer" in the sense of
| spending one's working hours doing work for an employer
| instead of starting a startup or owning your own company,
| and _also_ be a capitalist in that same context in the
| sense of using your skills as bargaining power with your
| employer to get the best return on the capital you own (in
| terms of your pay and benefits), and judging your employer
| 's treatment of you on that basis.
|
| The inconvenient part is that, in the context of working
| for an employer instead of starting a startup or owning
| your own company, you are almost guaranteed to _not_ be
| getting the best return on the capital you own; you have
| given up some return on capital (often a significant
| amount) in exchange for not having to manage business risks
| by yourself. Which in turn means you are exposing yourself
| to the risk of your employer deciding to manage _their_
| business risks by laying you off. But that 's not because
| you're "labor" instead of "capital"; it's because you made
| a risk tradeoff that came back and bit you.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| > and also be a capitalist in that same context in the
| sense of using your skills as bargaining power with your
| employer to get the best return on the capital you own
|
| This is not what being a capitalist is, in the context
| you're using it. Capitalist vs laborer is basically
| someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone
| who has to work. That's it.
|
| Gets fuzzy when you start adding a 3rd group of people in
| there, the people who have to work (i.e. they don't have
| enough capital to generate the kind of income that puts
| them in the don't have to work crowd) but identity with
| the capitalists. They see themselves as removed from
| "laborers" and strive to be in the capitalist class,
| dress like them, act like them, talk like them. Marx
| would call them the petite bourgeoisie.
|
| I understand what you're trying to explain, thinking
| about individual capital ownership or even using your
| skills as capital... but that just isn't what it is. Your
| skills only have value if you're using them. To labor and
| create things of value.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Your skills only have value if you 're using them. _
|
| Yes. That's true of everyone, including those that you
| are calling "capitalists". But that being true, and a
| person _knowing_ that it 's true and acting accordingly,
| are two very different things.
|
| _> Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn
| 't work, but their money does vs someone who has to
| work._
|
| If you think that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar
| Pichai, etc., don't work, you are egregiously mistaken.
| They work very, very hard. They just don't work at the
| same things that low level tech workers do. That's
| because they understand, as many, if not most, low level
| tech workers apparently do not, that the best use of
| their work--their labor, the hours they put in doing
| whatever it is they do--is to maximize the return on
| their capital. So they optimize their work towards that
| goal. Whereas most low level tech workers don't even
| think in those terms--and that is why they are at the
| mercy of the "capitalists" who do.
|
| (The usual economist's term for a person who doesn't
| work, but "lets their money work", is "rentier", and the
| associated behavior--getting into a position where one
| can have a steady reliable income without having to work
| --is called "rent seeking". There is certainly an element
| of that in the way many rich people act, but I don't
| think it's the primary issue in the context of this
| discussion.)
|
| The real argument for those "capitalists" being overpaid
| is not that they don't work, but that most of the work
| they are doing is not actually creating wealth; it's just
| transferring wealth from others to themselves. But that
| has nothing whatever to do with them being "capitalists"
| instead of "laborers" and "laborers" being underpaid. It
| has to do with our entire system of social incentives
| being screwed up because for decades now we have
| increasingly allowed short-term viewpoints to undermine
| the long-term stability of our social institutions.
| "Class warfare" rhetoric, in fact, is one of the ways
| that has been done.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| I believe the usual usage is:
|
| capitalist (noun): filthy rich monopoly man
|
| capitalist (adj.): pro capitalism
| p0pcult wrote:
| You really don't understand what a capitalist is, do you?
| Fortunately, I have enlisted ChatGPT to help you!
|
| p0pcult: Explain what Karl Marx would tell a five year
| old a capitalist is
|
| ChatGPT: Karl Marx would tell a five year old that a
| capitalist is someone who owns a business and makes money
| by hiring people to work for them and selling the things
| they make for a profit. The capitalist gets rich, while
| the workers who make the things only get paid for their
| time and effort. This is what Karl Marx calls
| "exploitation."
|
| p0pcult: What is a capitalist?
|
| ChatGPT: Capitalism is an economic system in which the
| means of production, such as factories and businesses,
| are owned and controlled by private individuals for the
| purpose of generating profits. In a capitalist system,
| goods and services are produced and distributed in a
| market economy, and prices are determined by supply and
| demand. _The goal of a capitalist is to accumulate wealth
| and capital through ownership and investment in
| businesses._ [Emphasis mine]
|
| Capitalists acquire wealth, passively, by owning things.
| uoaei wrote:
| This reads as someone who gets most of their left theory from
| Instagram.
|
| I agree class warfare is real and is being waged, but based on
| even the author's description of the term "capital" I don't think
| they have a good grasp on what class war looks like. Everything
| they advocate runs counter to any and all notions of worker
| solidarity.
|
| Instead this article seems to be an instruction manual for how to
| be an unwitting saboteur to your fellow employees' quality of
| life to no real benefit of your own. It's not like you are going
| to ingratiate yourself to the company acting this way, nor that
| earning accolades will make them more likely to promote you to
| the ownership class.
| nemo44x wrote:
| My favorite part was the section that was bullet point after
| bullet point of horrible advice.
|
| The 19th and early/mid 20th century lenses used in this blog post
| are just not relevant to todays tech worker. The labor theory of
| value simply doesn't apply in the world of power law
| distributions we are now in.
| trieste92 wrote:
| Something that I've noticed in these anti work types is they
| assume work has negative value, that by working for someone you
| are "losing"
|
| While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate, I think
| that this kind of work has inherent value. It has plenty of
| learning opportunities which lead to income increases (edit:
| through promotion or going to a different employer, whichever is
| more optimal) because you become more productive and
| knowledgeable over time
|
| As far as engineering culture is concerned, you're worse off
| working with anti work types like op because you don't learn as
| much and piss away more time, providing fewer learning
| opportunities in the long run
| WalterBright wrote:
| > While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate
|
| If you did, why would a company hire you? The idea is the
| employee must create more value than he costs. And the employee
| gets more pay than his labor is worth to himself.
|
| That's why it's a win-win relationship.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| Except the company cut has been getting bigger and bigger for
| the last 40 years.
|
| Productivity has increased and wages have not.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| That's indeed true for the average worker, but are you sure
| it is the case for software engineer? How high were the
| salaries in the 80s?
| voldacar wrote:
| When you look at wages + benefits, the increase is more or
| less proportional.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Can you point to something that convinced you of this?
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > Especially if the company you're working for is not actually
| struggling economically right now. If you work for Google, say,
| you must be thinking, "What is it about the coming recession that
| makes a company that's doing just fine institute broad layoffs
| for the first time in its 23-year history?"
|
| People commenting about the layoffs keep citing the financial
| health of the companies that are doing the layoffs as evidence
| that there is some ulterior motive, but this misses why companies
| perform layoffs.
|
| Companies don't choose to hire when they are profitable and
| layoff when they are losing money. As an example, most tech
| companies spend their early years losing money while growing
| hiring and no one assumes they have an ulterior motive.
|
| The reason companies perform layoffs is that they believe the
| labor they are buying is more expensive than the profits from the
| products they were planning to build with those employees. If
| they think consumer demand is going to drop, then new investment
| opportunities won't be as lucrative and they thought they were.
|
| Yes, it sucks for the employees and yes we want corporate leaders
| to have better economic foresight so this doesn't happen. But you
| don't need some elaborate Marxist theory of class warfare to
| explain why this is happening, and it does not represent
| monopsony collusion.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > the labor they are buying is more expensive than the profits
| from the products they were planning to build with those
| employees
|
| Thats it. Thats where the Marxism enters. Most of these
| companies (or the bigger ones) aren't _losing money_ with these
| new products, they were just _losing profit margin_ because its
| _profitable_ but not _as profitable_. They chose to have fatter
| profits over your employment and wellbeing.
|
| WRT your employment, you're not their top priority, so they
| shouldn't be yours.
|
| Also, FWIW big companies lobby to keep healthcare employment
| tied, not because they love paying for healthcare, but because
| they love the forced loyalty - it makes quitting/being fired
| way more risky. Companies expect 2 weeks notice on quitting,
| but will lay you off overnight via email. Companies will ask
| you your salary expectation to underpay you, but won't tell you
| their salary range up front (except in California where it is
| now law to do so). The imbalance is crazy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > See, for instance, K. Marx
|
| Yeah, I figured it was yet another attempt to sell Marxism.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, the title was "introduction to class warfare".
|
| I was hoping it might be a funny discussion about object
| oriented design, but it wasn't.
| lampshades wrote:
| Yes, I agree 100%. Do not help those who seek to devalue you.
| Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The people
| who run these companies are not your friends and they're not your
| family, take advantage of them at every opportunity you can.
| Don't care if the company fails, don't pay any mind to burning
| bridges, don't bother giving two weeks, and certainly don't do
| anything more than the bare minimum.
|
| All true thought work should be done on your own time for your
| own projects. CEOs don't deserve your mind, so don't give it to
| them.
| teucris wrote:
| > Do not help those who seek to devalue you
|
| Excellent statement. The rest only applies if you can confirm
| that your company is seeking to devalue you. That is becoming
| more common but I don't think it's universally true.
| brightstep wrote:
| All companies seek to devalue their workers. It is the nature
| of the profit motive. The less a company can pay for labor,
| the more it reaps as profit.
| Natsu wrote:
| Man, you must have worked for some terrible companies. I
| have friends at everywhere I ever worked and we always
| tried to cooperate.
| [deleted]
| dllthomas wrote:
| Some companies are worker-owned cooperatives.
| ravenstine wrote:
| My takeaway from what you said is that the employee-company
| relationship is inherently adversarial to a degree and to not
| forget that. In general, I wholeheartedly agree.
|
| However,
|
| > don't pay any mind to burning bridges
|
| not all bridges should be burned. If you mean the bridge
| between you and a company, yes, said bridges should not be
| treated as anything more than a rope bridge over a canyon. I
| would limit burning bridges between individuals because the
| relationships you create are more important than just about
| everything else you will do on the job. Unless I really hated
| my boss or supervisor, I would not be so quick to burn that
| level of bridges.
| jojobas wrote:
| >is inherently adversarial
|
| Until they invented stock options and started handing them
| out left right and centre.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Burning those bridges carries a cost to your career.
|
| If you think about your retirement prospects as amassing wealth
| by optimizing the "Area under the graph", it's really important
| to build a professional network so if one job opportunity ends,
| you can quickly work your network to find another similarly
| paying job.
|
| Failing that, you take a big pay cut, and impact your salary
| history. I can't imagine an employer making an offer to you
| which is competitive with your job from 5 years ago, instead of
| your job right now.
|
| Also in some cases (maybe less engineering, but sometimes even
| then), your professional network is part of what your employer
| is buying when they hire you. This is true especially of ex-
| govvy security engineers.
|
| TL;DR don't be a dick to your coworkers, even on your way out
| the door. It's in everyone's best interest.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Burning those bridges carries a cost to your career.
|
| I don't think this is borne out in practice. I've done very
| well and very poorly over the decades. It would have to be a
| very specific situation (lot of events unluckily coinciding)
| where coworkers/previous position could influence an
| interview process today.
| primeblue wrote:
| [dead]
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Wait what? You did mean to add the /s at the end right?
| lampshades wrote:
| /s for serious
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Extract as much value for as little work as possible. The
| people who run these companies are not your friends and they're
| not your family, take advantage of them at every opportunity
| you can.
|
| And the opposite is true: if you are running a company, make it
| your employees priority that the company grows and incentivize
| them to achieve more!
| trieste92 wrote:
| > Extract as much value for as little work as possible.
|
| This only makes sense if you assume that work has negative
| value
|
| Imo it's the other way around: more work has more value (up to
| a certain point) because you acquire new skills and grow, and
| have the satisfaction of solving interesting problems
| lampshades wrote:
| [flagged]
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| I don't live in NY or Seattle. The tech sector is much smaller
| where I am. I've never seen it be advantageous to treat other
| people as someone I'm in competition with. I've been laid off.
| Yeah it sucks, but no job is forever, and being nice to people
| means I get to sleep at night. I've also never seen anyone who
| can't be replaced. Time and time again something wasn't
| documented, and other devs/dbas/admins stepped in and figured it
| out. I'd rather be the guy people say, "I help out when there is
| a problem" instead of, "I hate working with him, because I never
| know what he's doing." It's nicer, and makes it easier to work
| with someone you did before. That's just me though.
|
| Edit: I've also been on the hiring side and passed on people I
| know like that. My job is to mitigate risk, and those people are
| a liability.
| eternalban wrote:
| Fine, I'll play the political officer here and try to help you
| understand the error of your position. /g
|
| Your post is entirely singular and individualistic in
| perspective. We could look at the situation differently, from
| the perspective of OP. In this case, it would be you _and_ your
| politically aware colleagues who understand the necessities of
| the situation. To put it boldly, it is a revolutionary movement
| that seeks to introduce a much needed balance into the equation
| of capital and labor in the age of thinking machines. You _and_
| your colleagues will get along just fine, if you are clear eyed
| comrades.
|
| And you will sleep even more soundly, knowing that you are not
| only helping your contemporaries, but also laying the
| foundation for a more equitable society for your progeny.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| One of the things that the colonial powers did, in Africa and
| South America, was to pit the various tribes and factions
| against each other.
|
| It was pretty damn effective. The damage still resonates to
| this day, long after the colonial powers left.
|
| No one paid any attention to the man behind the curtain; they
| were too busy killing each other.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| "In competition" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the
| interests at play.
|
| It's adversarial whether you integrate that understanding into
| your actions or not. And acknowledging the adversarial nature
| of workers and owners doesn't mean you have to be nasty to
| anyone on an interpersonal level.
| qsort wrote:
| Some aspects are adversarial, some aspects aren't.
|
| How much compensation I get is adversarial.
|
| How much documentation I write or how many internal tools I
| develop isn't adversarial, not even if you put _la liberte
| guidant le peuple_ above the fold.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Exactly. The company (owners plus workers) getting a big
| pot of money is not adversarial, it's cooperative. Dividing
| the pot of money is where it gets adversarial. But spend
| all your time focusing on how to divide the pot always (at
| least in the long run) means the whole group loses out on
| the big pot of money.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > How much compensation I get is adversarial.
|
| It's not adversarial, it's set by market conditions. Only
| collusion can turn it into an adversarial matter, as seen
| e.g. when Big Tech CEO's were shown to have entered into a
| secret agreement not to poach each other's employees.
| qsort wrote:
| A specific instance of a salary negotiation can be
| reasonably modeled as a zero-sum game.
|
| My broader point is that zero-sum sub-games don't make
| the entire game zero-sum.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners
|
| It is not adversarial. It is a mutually beneficial, win-win
| relationship.
|
| It's the unions who (mistakenly) frame it as a win-lose
| relationship, which is why businesses don't like dealing with
| them.
| andrepd wrote:
| Of course it is adversarial (in a game theoretical sense).
| You are not doing any favours to the company and the
| company is not doing any favours to you; both are trying to
| extract as much value from the other as possible.
|
| Now if we were talking about a worker's co-operative (or
| any company where a significant portion of ownership laid
| with the workers), now that's a different story...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Smart businesses know that in order to prosper, you have
| to make win-win deals. Free market economies grow and
| prosper because people are making win-win deals.
|
| Win-lose deals are the path to poverty and misery.
| tpxl wrote:
| The largest 'smart businesses' on the planet colluded to
| suppress wages.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Smart businesses know that in order to prosper, you
| have to make win-win deals.
|
| If this were true, Asset Stripping and corporate raiders
| wouldn't exist
| shrimpx wrote:
| That's precisely the point of the article. Tech companies
| are setting up a win-lose situation right now. They're
| pressing to control more capital at the expense of
| employees. Why would the employee maintain a win-win
| attitude, when the employer has switched to win-lose?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| _Economies_ can prosper while workers within them are
| crushed and immiserated. That 's the exact nature of the
| relationship here: owners and workers have different
| interests and what's good for one is not always good for
| the other.
| guelo wrote:
| The point is that capital is currently trying to change
| the deal to win-lose and it's stupid to carry on as if
| we're still in the win-win glory days.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay
| employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of
| their employees labor?
|
| The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and
| resources that are impossible for an individual to push
| against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour
| work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe
| working conditions with fire exits blocked.
|
| Which are all things that companies were doing before
| unions pushed against it.
| Natsu wrote:
| > How do you square the circle of management wanting to
| pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount
| of their employees labor?
|
| Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder,
| or start their own business if they know they can do
| better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to
| go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and
| the article cite.
|
| > The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and
| resources that are impossible for an individual to push
| against and win anything that is contested.
|
| People can and have prevailed against companies in all
| sorts of lawsuits.
|
| > Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in
| manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire
| exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were
| doing before unions pushed against it.
|
| And made them illegal, ending those as major problems,
| and the desire of most people to go into a union now that
| the most exploitative practices have been eliminated,
| like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional
| idiot employer will do something like this and get sued
| into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who
| locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight
| a few years back, for example.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > How do you square the circle
|
| It's squared by the employees wanting the maximum pay for
| the least amount of work. It's call "Supply & Demand".
| It's the Law.
|
| > impossible for an individual to push against and win
| anything that is contested
|
| Not impossible at all. I've done it many times. The power
| the employee has is to say "No" and go work for someone
| else, or start their own company.
|
| > Like 80 hour work weeks / children working / unsafe
| working conditions
|
| were necessary when productivity was much lower than
| today. It's no surprise that those went away when
| productivity increased. I can't even think of a job a 10
| year old could be useful at in a modern company.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > How do you square the circle of management wanting to
| pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount
| of their employees labor?
|
| The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as
| much compensation as possible for the least effort
| possible. In other words: The market of labour.
|
| > The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and
| resources that are impossible for an individual to push
| against and win anything that is contested.
|
| You win by taking your business elsewhere and start
| working for another employer, or start your own business.
| Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market
| humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit
| that situation while we can.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| It is absolutely adversarial. One side wants one thing, the
| other side wants the opposite. That's what an adversarial
| situation is.
| m463 wrote:
| One time I was at a company that had layoffs.
|
| The effect on the culture was pronounced and teamwork went out
| the window.
|
| Everyone was worried they were next, so they put their head
| down, concentrated on their own tasks and didn't help each
| other.
|
| Layoffs can really destroy a company's culture, especially
| multiple rounds.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > treat other people as someone I'm in competition with
|
| Your coworkers are not your adversaries, your employer is. When
| the going's good, each side is generous. When your employer
| withdraws their generosity, it pays to think twice whether your
| continued generosity works in your interest, and more broadly
| in the interest of the industry, and society. The limit being a
| grueling, subpar environment where underpaid and overworked
| employees find solace in comradery.
| foobarian wrote:
| I mean... at the end of the day there is no union, and the
| rest is up to supply and demand. If there is too much supply
| then it doesn't matter how much knowledge we withdraw or how
| little we work.
| jojobas wrote:
| Not that I'd expect something clever from someone calling for
| "class warfare", but this is a load of bollocks even by Marxist
| standards.
|
| 21st century IT work is Marx's wet dream come true and an
| occasional layoff doesn't change that, it's not that those laid
| off are doomed to experience any hardship. There are (still)
| plenty of offers with stock options and it still pays at least
| top quarter.
|
| There is an important caveat however - you have to be _good_.
| Marx couldn 't imagine only 5% or so of those willing being good
| at working the lathe. You'll only need class warfare if you're no
| good.
| ravivooda wrote:
| I resonate with this sentiment very well. I was deeply disturbed
| when a Venture Fund publicly stated that engineers are making too
| much money in a statement
| (https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...)
| qualudeheart wrote:
| How wonderful that we can name and shame that fund. More people
| should do this.
| swamp40 wrote:
| Well, in case you were wondering what a communist was, here is a
| perfect example.
|
| As an engineer, I'm not falling for his sad attempt to drive a
| wedge between tech workers, engineers and management. I have more
| in common with tech company lofty goals than I do with his.
|
| _> Google, Amazon, IBM, Spotify, PayPal, Salesforce, 3M,
| Coinbase, and more are all conducting mass layoffs at the same
| time._
|
| Yes, it's a conspiracy just to lower tech wages, not a recession.
| dvt wrote:
| I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and
| generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely
| agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing
| down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the
| author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a
| profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be
| kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like
| being a plumber.
|
| I haven't researched it, but I imagine railroad engineers
| probably went through a similar economic reality in the early
| 20th century. What the author doesn't really get, is that there's
| no putting the genie back in the bottle. The party is over.
| Salaries will _never_ be as comparatively high as they were in
| the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to
| sabotage (weird "advice," by the way).
|
| In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a
| way to garner any real amount of wealth, so expecting to be a
| 1%'er while working for BigCo as engineer #23435 is an
| unrealistic expectation to have.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's
| becoming more like being a plumber.
|
| People keep saying this, and people who own software companies
| _REALLY_ seem to want it to be true, but as far as I can tell,
| it 's the opposite. I occasionally work with kids fresh out of
| college and they find themselves completely lost in the maze of
| modern software stacks that abstract distributed file systems
| and dependency management and security that fail for what seem
| like incredibly arcane reasons ("what the heck is a trusted
| certificate authority and why doesn't it like mine?").
| Developing software today requires fairly deep knowledge (or
| access to somebody with deep knowledge) of nearly the entire
| history of software development.
| Animats wrote:
| > railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic
| reality in the early 20th century.
|
| Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status
| job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of
| Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US.
|
| The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920),
| radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers
| (peaked around 1970).
|
| Being a printer was once a good unionized job. I've seen
| homeless printers talking about the good old days at the Burger
| King near the Civic Center cable car turntable in SF.
|
| Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Eagerly the awaiting the age of the homeless current googler.
| I would let them stay on my couch.
| rexpop wrote:
| > Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?
|
| There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.
| ggm wrote:
| See! They pre optimised.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > class warfare nonsense
|
| Its only nonsense in the mind of plebs. For the class that's
| waging that war, its quite real. They are aware of what they
| are doing.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| So if we disagree with you, we're a "pleb". Nice.
|
| Personal attacks are against the site rules, by the way.
| unity1001 wrote:
| You absolutely have not understood the comment that you
| replied to.
| jojobas wrote:
| They would want it to be like a plumber but it turned out 95%
| of people just cant hold a wrench and no amount of boot camps
| can change that.
| jjav wrote:
| > Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in
| the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to
| sabotage
|
| In the 80s and 90s programming salaries were not very high, it
| was a decent middle-class job. Sure, there were outliers if you
| hit a big IPO as always (e.g. Sun in the 80s, Netscape in the
| 90s, among others). But salaries? No, they were generally in
| line with other white-collar middle-class jobs like accounting
| or such.
|
| It's only in the later 00s and particularly the 2010s that mean
| programmer salaries exploded to the point that now entry level
| jobs in SV can be 180K+. It has never been as good as the last
| 10 years to enter the programming workforce.
| dvt wrote:
| > It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the
| programming workforce.
|
| The last 10 years of ballooning salaries are a mirage
| perpetuated by the FED's irresponsible quantitative easing.
| Who cares if you're making $180k when an entry-level house in
| your area costs $2 million. Not to mention that the people
| making that much in the first job is a fraction of a fraction
| of the workforce.
| etothepii wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the
| 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep
| salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45
| year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the
| pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able
| to provide today.
| dvt wrote:
| There's plenty of evidence[1]; but more importantly, when
| putting stagnating salaries in the context of housing prices,
| CPI, and inflation, it becomes even more jarring. Today, as
| an engineer making 125-175k in LA, for example, you will
| literally never be able to purchase a home near to where you
| work.
|
| [1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-
| exceptional
| jltsiren wrote:
| There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world
| where people making a third of that have no trouble buying
| homes. California is expensive, because people oppose
| building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may
| support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in
| practice.
|
| Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has
| developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by
| car and too sparsely populated to support good public
| transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the
| traffic it generates.
| etothepii wrote:
| I thought this might be the trick that would get pulled.
| House price inflation is a completely inappropriate
| measure. House prices are not kept stupidly high by the 1%
| or capital class but by the 50.1% that vote against
| allowing any kind of building anywhere near an existing
| house, not near an existing house or that, heav'n forfend,
| might endanger the habitat of the lesser spotted newt.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Offshoring and H1-Bs have definitely kept programmer wages
| lower than they would have been otherwise.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I make better than 3x times my wife's teacher salary. If I
| really pushed hard career wise I could probably get to 6x.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I'm not sure how this is relevant to the market distortion
| caused by offshoring and H1-B. Could you explain further?
| georgeoliver wrote:
| > Programming, as a profession, has simply become more
| commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon,
| and it's becoming more like being a plumber.
|
| Did it start that way though? I feel like from the 50s-70s,
| outside of a narrow slice of academia, companies were mass
| hiring (and training!) people to program.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. Companies used to send people to "IBM School", to learn
| COBOL or Job Control Language.
|
| If you have to pay to train people, the technology tends to
| be kept simple and understandable.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If I parsed that correctly, you're using JCL as an example
| of a technology that was kept simple and understandable.
| That, um, is not the way I think about JCL...
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| You might get away with this if you work for the DMV or something
| but behaving like this to any meaningful extent in a workplace
| where everyone else isn't already is a great way to be shown the
| door first.
| kachurovskiy wrote:
| This is plain bad advice that sounds smart because it comes from
| the "ultra-practical" but short-term corner of thinking.
|
| In reality being a good person is what pays off long-term. If I'm
| laid off, I will continue my professional journey elsewhere -
| perhaps on my own, maybe even with more satisfaction?
| neilv wrote:
| > _Engineering culture encourages workers to collectively improve
| the company's effectiveness. It encourages them to share
| knowledge with one another. To train each other. To build tools
| for one another. To bring new workers up to speed, and review
| each other's work. To speed the company up. To seek out
| weaknesses in the company and fix them. / Engineers do this while
| they're doing their actual job, the one the company thinks it's
| paying them for: tending the machine that makes money._
|
| No, I think most of these are usually part of the job of a
| software engineer, and it's part of developing solutions that
| work, rather than just gaming individual metrics. (And, at
| Staff+, all of these are.)
|
| > _There is no reason at all for engineers to continue performing
| this kind of free labor for entities that are trying to cut their
| wages. It is in their interest to do the exact opposite._
|
| It's not free labor. It's part of the job for which we're paid.
|
| Seems like anyone on a project team who doesn't share knowledge,
| help other team members, document, etc., would soon be disliked
| by team members who _are_ focused on the project and team.
| xg15 wrote:
| Found that part odd as well. I think this would be the first
| labor movement I ever heard about that argues for _less_
| solidarity with your fellow workers.
|
| Protip: Organising collective action will become impossible if
| everyone hates each other and keeps information from each other
| for fear of their own job security. _That_ will help capital in
| the end.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Sure it's part of the description. But it is also free labor
| when you're automatically expected to do the work of two people
| for the price of one. Or when you're expected to do more for
| less pay.
|
| Like the "job description" is often pretty vague which makes
| wage theft easy. If you're working 996 without extra pay or
| less pay because everything that your "job description" has
| cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour work week, then it is
| by all means, free labor.
| nickff wrote:
| If you're getting paid to work on something, it's not 'free
| labor', unless you're unable to leave. By behaving as if
| you've agreed to this undocumented arrangement, you've formed
| a 'constructive contract'.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| No matter how you sugarcoat it, the extra hours you make
| people work for no extra increase in wages, is free labor.
|
| Just because you're getting paid doesn't mean the company
| doesn't get free labor. The company paid for the regular
| hours and the rest was free labor.
| nickff wrote:
| What if you get a pay bump for no increase in hours? Is
| that free money?
| andrekandre wrote:
| its an interesting question, but im not sure what it has
| to do with the comment your replying to?
|
| they are just saying, if you are contracted to be payed x
| per hour at 8hrs a day, unless you work 8 + n hours,
| wherein n gives you no additional hourly pay, then its
| free labor to the company (above and beyond contracted
| work hours), not sure what is controversial about that?
| RangerScience wrote:
| That sounds to me like it's just accounting spin.
|
| If I sell something with a 2-for-1 deal, what are the ways
| that's different from selling two for 50% off?
|
| If I am paid to work 40 hours a week, and I work 80, are
| the second 40 free, or are all 80 %50 my expected wage?
|
| > free to leave
|
| <spicy> Ah! I see we agree on the need for such a robust
| social safety net that employment isn't any degree of
| necessary! </spicy>
| nickff wrote:
| If your employer knowingly and willfully doubles your pay
| without changing the contract, are you stealing from
| them? I think not, and it's just the other side of the
| coin.
| nbk_2000 wrote:
| Please note the topic is "Class _Warfare_ for the Software
| Engineer" and NOT "Fulfilling Your Expected Role as a Software
| Engineer"
|
| This is the author's opinion of how Software's Labor can "fight
| back"
|
| If you're not in an adversarial relationship with your employer
| then this advice will not be particularly useful/advantageous.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > No, I think most of these are usually part of the job of a
| software engineer, and it's part of developing solutions that
| work, rather than just gaming individual metrics.
|
| If you speak to people who work in trading or finance, they do
| none of those things. They view each other as conpetitors and
| don't help each other. They aim to outgame and outdo each-
| other.
|
| The culture in software is very different to most other
| industries. But if you look at other fields of engineering, you
| don't see people stepping outside their roles as much.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| >> Engineering culture encourages workers to collectively
| improve the company's effectiveness. It encourages them to
| share knowledge with one another. To train each other. To build
| tools for one another. To bring new workers up to speed, and
| review each other's work. To speed the company up. To seek out
| weaknesses in the company and fix them. / Engineers do this
| while they're doing their actual job, the one the company
| thinks it's paying them for: tending the machine that makes
| money.
|
| Isn't it why any serious engineering job will have stocks as
| part of the comp package? That's pretty much the whole point:
| if the company does better, your stock does better...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The company does better when they pay you less.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That depends. If they lose you to a competitor that pays
| more, then the company loses.
|
| It's that old Supply & Demand thing again.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| BlackBerry figured it out the hard way; Apple and Google
| won the talent war. The rest is history.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Well if everyone decides to pay less, like it's being
| argued here, then there is no supply demand, that's just
| the cost of your labor.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > if everyone decides to pay less
|
| That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with
| cartels is the members cheat on them under the table.
| They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using
| the law to punish members who cheat).
|
| I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said
| X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially
| allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth
| shut. Deal!
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > They're unstable, unless maintained by force
|
| What is the basis for this assertion? Is this why OPEC
| exists?
|
| Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in
| to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe,
| Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and
| eBay
|
| If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily
| cooperate to drive you into poverty.
| ergonaught wrote:
| > Process improvement: Is this your job? Then no.
|
| This remark from TFA at least implies when it "is" part of your
| job, go for it.
|
| Perhaps you have rejected, or simply not engaged with, the
| "call" to recognize class warfare, however, or if I can be
| silly I'll call you a "capital sympathizer". From the frame of
| recognizing workers vs capitalists, you can't just say write
| off being exploited as "well you were paid to be exploited"
| without coming down hard on the "sympathizer" side.
|
| One of the points I assume the author was making is that much
| of this isn't your actual job, and voluntarily performing work
| that ultimately costs you is exploitative and adversarial and,
| well, stupid. Even if you're paid to do it.
|
| About 20 years ago my employer informed the entire company that
| we would be working December and January without pay and if we
| didn't like it we would be "laid off" (much of that work would
| be spent training team members of an offshore/outsourcing
| firm). State labor law disagreed with them regarding work
| without compensation so they were forced to pay "minimum wage"
| (for software developers and DBAs!). You can "well that's your
| job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're
| ...wrong.
| tines wrote:
| I think his point was that it's the job that you signed up
| for, so either do the job, or don't work there.
|
| > You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're
| technically correct, but you're ...wrong.
|
| Working for minimum wage wasn't part of the contract you
| signed ("your job"), so your example isn't valid.
| ergonaught wrote:
| > I think his point was that it's the job that you signed
| up for, so either do the job, or don't work there.
|
| The article is, ostensibly, a call to recognize class
| warfare, and certain elements of "engineering culture" as
| aspects of same. Did you sign up for class warfare?
|
| If you simply refuse to participate in the notion of seeing
| this as class warfare, super!, but that's actively
| disengaging from the substance of the article.
| neilv wrote:
| (Process improvement is often part of the official job of
| Staff+.)
|
| There seems to be lots of nasty class stuff going on,
| throughout society.
|
| But TFA just seems to hurt legitimate discussion of class
| issues.
|
| Imagine you're skeptical of the suggestion of class problems,
| but since a post about that was upvoted on HN, and you're
| open to being convinced, you took a look. Unfortunately,
| after reading it, you have to chalk it up as a data point: of
| someone who thinks there's class warfare on tech jobs also
| having very unfortunate idea of what the nature of that job
| is.
| count wrote:
| The history of humanity is nasty class stuff going on. It's
| kind of amazing the 'pax capitalista' we've had for the
| last few decades, honestly.
| recycledfood wrote:
| To the owner class and their handmaidens, all workers are just
| expenses to be minimized in a spreadsheet. A tech worker is the
| same to them as the plumber who fixed their toilet last week. The
| plumber doesn't imagine himself to be the next Elon Musk (if not
| for a sufficiently lucky break), though.
|
| Tech workers are prone to giving away free labor and the author's
| "advice" illustrates one example (things which are "part of the
| job" but really separate from the core of The Machine).
| Continuing the analogy: when you hire a plumber to fix your
| toilet, he doesn't repipe the rest of your house or do your
| laundry _unless you pay him specifically to do those things_.
| Your relationship is transactional and without loyalty on either
| side. Just like how most employers view their relationship with
| employees.
|
| Many if not most tech workers suffer from misplaced loyalty
| towards their employers, whose owners will continue coordinating
| as a class, taking all they can, while workers remain distracted
| and divided.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > If you build a tool, you're making it possible for capital to
| get more productivity out of its workers at the same time that it
| is reducing workers' wages.
|
| This is actually our central business model. We sell B2B
| automation/workflow software so that other companies can retain
| much cheaper talent. Most of the people involved would define our
| product as "progress", but I can understand how others would
| perceive it as a form of warfare.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is terrible advice: Don't write documentation, don't pay
| down technical debt, sabotage interviews, don't share tools with
| colleagues? Go pound sand.
|
| This has all the practicality of college freshman Marxism
| combined with the slapdash rhetoric of a Medium post.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Is this satire?
| valcron1000 wrote:
| Is this some kind of twisted joke? If not, the author is mentally
| ill.
| etothepii wrote:
| The problem with this article is that one does not need capital
| to start a tech company. This very website, sneered at in the
| article, is littered with examples of people who have built
| something at the side. I'm not sure knowledge workers can make
| the same complaints about class struggle that mechanical
| labourers can. We tend to get more valuable with age and
| experience.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The problem with this article is that one does not need
| capital to start a tech company_
|
| Yes, one does. One needs tech skills. Those are capital. (You
| agree with this since you say tech workers get more valuable
| with age and experience.) They're just not capital in the form
| of a large pot of cash that can be used to throw money at
| problems.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Skills are not capital assets.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Okay, so what are skills if not capital assets?
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Knowledge.
| etothepii wrote:
| And knowledge is power, comrades!
| pdonis wrote:
| Yes, they are. The people who own and run Google and
| Facebook and Amazon didn't magically get "capital" from
| nowhere. They used their skills, and turned those skills
| into huge amounts of money. In other words, they understood
| what capital they owned, and acted to maximize their return
| on that capital.
|
| If you insist on refusing to view your own skills as
| capital, you're just giving up the chance to maximize (or
| at least improve) your return on that capital.
| dudzik wrote:
| Following that, capital is potential energy.
|
| Skills are the ability to meet spec quicker than someone
| who has to learn as they go. Sounds like potential energy
| to me. Since capital acts like potential energy, it
| follows that skills are capital.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Skills are not capital in the communist vocabulary. Skills
| have an unlimited supply that can not be limited.
|
| If you want to mind-bend people into believing skills are
| capital, then all the workers in the world are bona-fide
| capitalists, since they are using their skills to get paid.
| brightstep wrote:
| The only difference is our capital is digital, not physical.
| Binaries, not machines. As such we can build it without
| expensive raw materials and components, as those which form an
| assembly robot for example. Once one owns those binaries and
| other non-physical capital, one takes on the economic interests
| and incentives of that capitalist class, including the
| reduction of labor costs.
| navane wrote:
| One doesn't need capital to win the lottery either, but it sure
| helps.
| teucris wrote:
| Sure, there exists a path towards success in tech without
| significant capital. That doesn't mean it's easy, or that it
| will be that way forever. At some point in the past a car
| mechanic could build a new engine from stock parts and make
| improvements they could monetize.
| etothepii wrote:
| This is a new argument I have not heard before I am deeply
| curious about it but don't know how to interrogate it
| further. Is this original thinking or something you found in
| a book?
| [deleted]
| foverzar wrote:
| Well that is definitely not true.
|
| Even if you have a team of various skill that is ready to work
| for free (including finance, legal and design), you still need
| funds for marketing, hosting, etc.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Documentation: The entire point of documentation is to make it
| easier for the people who come behind you to work. You should
| write as little documentation as you possibly can.
|
| Ah, so no change then?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Actually what I see is people producing reams of documentation
| because they're required to, but it's all completely useless.
| /** * This is the constructor */
|
| type stuff is plentiful.
| labrador wrote:
| I agree with the capital class vs. the worker class, but I don't
| think it's at play here as much as the author writes. The future
| looks very unpredictable right now, so you do what any good
| captain would do and tighten ship to get ready for the storm.
|
| AI could eliminate the need for some of your services. It will
| likely eliminate the need for some of your employees. What would
| WW3 do to our business? How about another pandemic. Only the
| companies who are flexible and adaptable will make it.
| Animats wrote:
| Earlier today I wrote on HN: "We can see it coming now - the
| Final Solution to high tech salaries. Expect to see a huge
| downward salary trend in the web front end/back end sector. That
| stuff is a solved problem. Expect salaries for new hires to drop
| below $100K and old hires being gradually pushed out."
|
| This new post says that's already happening.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| That's easily viewed as a pricing in of automation. Amjad Masad
| of Replit is predicting fully automatic software engineer bot
| by end of year. Me and my girlfriend were ahead of the curve
| and are high enough up the ladder that we won't be effected.
| Others will have a harder time.
| BenGosub wrote:
| Earnings fail, valuations go down and layoffs happen. This cycle
| of layoffs has been one of the most expected since I remember.
| And people in the software space still have so many options.
| There could be an event that will lead to a situation that won't
| be as good as we have it right now and I am fully aware of this.
| But, I don't see a reason to view the layoffs through the lens of
| this author.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Ah, Marxism: that 19th century idea that refuses to die no matter
| how often it fails.
|
| You would think, wouldn't you, that the several dozen countries
| over the last 100 years that became avowedly Marxist, and turned
| into prison farms that citizens couldn't wait to leave, would
| have convinced everyone that it doesn't work?
|
| But no. The college freshman mentality keeps vomiting it up
| again.
| qez2 wrote:
| [dead]
| benreesman wrote:
| I'll pass on all the class warfare melodrama, but it _does_ seem
| a bit strange to be blasting tens of thousands of employees you
| paid through the nose to identify, recruit, and retain during a
| period of time when the biggest actors in tech are facing a level
| of competitive pressure that they haven 't in a long time.
|
| Maybe some cuts were needed to reassure the Street and support
| the stock price, and maybe that's easier to do with some air
| cover about interest rates and shit, but everyone remembers what
| happened the last time _even one_ of the big actors broke ranks
| and started doubling people 's salaries: Google has had a little
| problem called "Facebook" ever since. I'm not sure I'd be keen to
| repeat the experiment with OpenAI/ChatGPT and ByteDance/TikTok
| running around. FANG has had a good run but they're not
| invincible.
|
| So I don't think they're going to be able to meaningfully depress
| big tech compensation for very long. But who knows, I've been
| wrong before.
| Reasonin wrote:
| 150+ years and how many failed revolutions and people are still
| preaching the labor theory of value like it's gospel...
| lumb63 wrote:
| I'm exhausted of hearing the "class warfare" battle cry from the
| upper 2%, against the 1%.
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