I get your point, but that was 30 years ago. When I played basketball, we used to say "two buckets is luck, three is a streak" - we've been in favorable markets, with a few temporary dips, for 20 years. I'd call that a streak, more so than magical thinking.
Do you have an example of industry-wide, pervasive structural shift? Sincere question, as Blockbuster is a good example, but relatively isolated. By the time Blockbuster was done, viable replacements had already arisen.
I think that's the point. Something will come along to replace it, and that thing does not historically pay better. "Your margin is my opportunity," as Lord Bezos said. It's already kind of happening. I could get $25 per extremely plain HTML page when I was a kid because that was a rare, in-demand skill. Now $20 buys 10 fancy Carrds. Every new framework or language or platform is chasing an efficiency or simplicity that opens it up to people who'll work for less or lets one person do the job of 10. There's always an initiating event, and then the prophecy of the tech adoption curve takes over.
Someone is gunning for the margins behind those salaries, but the people making those sums don't know it yet. If I knew where it was coming from, I would email them about a collaboration, not post it here.
edit to add: It can be a slow boil or a rapid shift. Google swept the search engine space in a few years, but Netflix and Blockbuster traded places over decades. Now Netflix is struggling as third-party content retreats into publisher silos.
Sure. The easy money growth phase of cloud will slow or stop. People laugh at my mainframe example upthread, but no Data Processing Executive saw 1992 coming in 1988.
Most of the people making $500k comp at AWS, MS, GCP will all get nuked once the growth and investment phase slows down. You’re already seeing it happen at the margins - you don’t see “Uber for Litter Box” startups in 2022.
I’ve seen this happen with internal enterprise services as well. When you’re growing 50-500% a year, all of your sins and fuckups are hidden in the growth. Once dust settles and you shift to steady state, you suddenly care about cost accounting vs growth.
I'm sure people at all levels except executive got the short end during the collapse of Blockbuster. A union would have represented employee interests every time the C-suite issued an execution order down the chain. They could very well have stopped the decline if there had been anyone to protect the retail employees who used to be able to recommend movies. That could have held the line against Netflix and its algorithm the way it has for electronics stores that have survived.
Every story I heard about a closing store, from Sears to Best Buy, began with "first, they fired everyone who knew anything and hired a bunch of people who were completely out of their depth to save money." Best Buy in particular saved itself by remembering the value of competence. Their stock is at record highs.
Now imagine if there'd been a union to bring that to the people in charge before the business penny pinched itself to near death. Unions also help with getting people into new jobs when the company really can't keep them.
So a union would have stopped Carl Icahn from killing Blockbuster? It would have stopped Viacom from spinning off Blockbuster and saddling it with debt?
How much negotiation does a union have in a company that is bankrupt?
Unions make the slow demise of companies bearable for workers. Think of any big company it has a 50-100 year life cycle with the first 10-20 years being up and the rest being middling or decay. During the first 10-20 unions aren’t common or needed much but eventually management rot sets in and you start getting some crazy policies.
Take Amazon for example, if they had a Union a lot of the crazy stacked ranking insane ot oddities would be resolved by Union contact. Salary would probably go down because you don’t need to pay insane wages if your work/life environment is good. The company Might be a bit less productive but the effect would be pretty negligible
I happen to work at AWS (ProServe). You know what people did when they saw the wages weren’t competitive? They started leaving in droves forcing Amazon to be competitive.
There's probably actual research on this, but I can't come up with the right search terms. It could be one of those situations where it's impossible to say for sure. You can't exactly design an experiment around it: the decline already happened. So you'd have to do some kind of comparative analysis to figure out how outcomes would have changed without a union. Unions were never a 100% thing, so it might be enough to look at how non-union shops in the same markets fared.
Yes and no you have to be better than the median in all categories some of which you have no control over. For example you need to work in a better than median group for a better than median boss in a better than median division with better than median experience.
In tech the workers have a lot more negotiating power because you aren’t trapped by heavy capital equipment costs. Still unions help with some of the shitty practices you see like the pip shenanigans at Amazon.
There is a cost but if you need or want a stable place to work for more than a few years without burnout they help with work life Protections
I mentioned I work in ProServe specifically to imply that I don’t have those issues. “I control my calendar”. I make sure the scope of work is well defined before I take on any work if I’m not involved in the pre sales part and I am responsible for setting reasonable expectations with my customers.
In my org, it’s a sign of poor project management and customer management skills if you are constantly overbooked and it’s considered a negative.
Of course all that went out of the window during the first three months after Covid.
