The top 1% is very different from the top 0.1%. You are still likely a W2 earner earning < 1M and paying 40%-50% tax rates if you are in this range; lawyers, doctors, well paid engineers, etc.
I don't know why the article mentions "billionaires", who are in the top 0.1% and are the ones paying almost zero tax because they just borrow against their investments.
Having control of your own destiny (whether in a 401k or an equivalent handled by the government on your behalf) is much better. With a pension, you may have to stick with the same company, or the company could mismanage the pension and go backrupt and try to dump the pension on the federal government, which may not pay out at 100% (especially if too many companies try to discharge their pension obligations this way).
I actually think a government run program that taxes employees and puts it in the S&P 500 would be a better system. No need for these pension-runners to be earning fees.
Yeah this person is just making things up, the majority are not H1Bs. Also, there's this popular idea (usually on places like reddit) that H1Bs at big tech are paid "slave labor wages" because "They can't leave". This is just not true, they get the same salary and stock ranges as everyone else.
Source: was H1B (worked at a couple of big N, but not Amazon) until I got my green card (and then citizenship).
Everyone in the industry knows Amazon has very poor work life balance (and a brutal on call load). It's even in that letter you get from Jeff Bezos when you apply: "You can work smart, hard, or long. At Amazon you don't get to pick just two."
If you are fresh out of college, get a couple years in to get it on your resume.
For anyone else, if you are in the Seattle area I don't see why you wouldn't just work for Microsoft. Microsoft does pay the worst out of all the big tech companies (until you get to L67+), but the work life balance is so much better, and allows fully remote.
Given these were from 1996 and 2002, I think this is the tip of the iceberg and we're going to start to see AI/LLMs discover a lot more plagiarism. Back in the day people could get away with plagiarism by obscurity. Not any more.
It's amazing to me that a website that publishes articles (real articles, not AI slop) about games can't even support the livelihood of 3 people, and yet mobile game companies shovel out godawful games and continue to exist. It blew my mind when I saw how there were several games which were some combination of match-3 + PvP (so that you can whale your way to victory).
It does poison the article, when someone is talking about subject X, and then they feel the need to insert their political opinion about person Y and that dont' like that Z is left-wing/right-wing. It makes them seem not at all objective, and calls into doubt what else they are not being objective about in their article.
What did you expect, the only thing missing are "EXTREME far right" (as opposed to far right, and right, because EXTREME).
Also conspicuously missing from this one is a taking a problem that everyone experiences (inflation, healthcare, unable to afford a house) and then making sure to state that while it's a problem for everyone, it's especially bad for maarginalized communities, people of color, women, etc. That one is more of a Washington Post speciality though.
Same, bought 2 Hyper X Cloud Orbit-S Gaming (one for me and my partner), and they both broke within 2 years. If you look on the Amazon reviews and sort by date you will see everyone is having this problem, they break in the exact same place after about 2 years.
On the internal memegen site, where people post and vote on memes, the AWU folks (they have a red logo around their profile picture, so easy to identify) are basically Debbie Downers. Constantly posting comments or memes shitting on the company. Whatever it is, see red logo around profile picture, you know it's going to be a "this company sucks" comment.
They very much give me the vibe of the "late stage capitalism" 23 year old reddit type. I remember one post from a guy complaining about how the company abuses its employees because in the EU everyone gets so much more vacation. I guess he didn't compare his US salary to EU salaries. Checked profile, tenure: been at company 6 months, and already complaining.
Union's power is in the enforcement of employers to accept collective bargaining (that's why the misnamed US "right to work" laws are so effective at disenfranchising workers). AUW, as it currently organized, lacks that power, so yes, all that remains is bitching.
Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees. Had they didn't had memegen to post on, the higher probability more would tunnel their disappointments into organizing.
Those disappointments were created by Google: they (used to) market themselves as a benevolent employer. People get on board, and realize that the truth is far from that. Of course, they wouldn't be able to hire some people they wanted to if they had told them the truth. Should those employees know better? Maybe. But any relationship, including labor, is built on trust.
Holy molly, this explains 99% of management behavior out there. Basically this explains why every single manager I have had has the exact same narrative, something along the lines of:
"I hear you because we care about you, your concerns are noted, but please stop thinking for yourself and stay in your lane, because we are a family"
> Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees.
Are you in PeopleOps and trying to do the reverse-psychology trick with this?
I am only halfway joking. It seems rather strange to me that if memegen is such a helpful tool for Google higher-ups to suppress the employee discontent, given the string of recent memegen changes that caused large uproars from those same employees (removal of downvotes/overall score display specifically).
If anything, those recent memegen changes (along with plenty others) do the opposite of attracting people to memegen. If PeopleOps/higher-ups wanted to incentivize people to use memegen (so that they would waste time on that instead of unionizing), why would they make those massively unpopular changes to it?
Personally, I think Google higher-ups/PeopleOps are, at best, neutral on memegen or, at worst, negative on it. I am almost certain if memegen didn’t exist already since the olden Google days, it wouldn’t have been allowed to get created at the present-day Google.
I don't know why the article mentions "billionaires", who are in the top 0.1% and are the ones paying almost zero tax because they just borrow against their investments.