My company had an onshore hiring freeze, while still hiring offshore. C-suite had the nerve in an all hands to say they were expanding offshore because there was a "local talent shortage", all while an onshore hiring freeze was still in effect.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
They can. What are you going to do? Quit? That's exactly what they would want. Much cheaper to increase the squeeze than pay redundancies.
By the way, it's very similar here in Australia. I don't think there's anything an individual can do in this case. This needs regulation. Even with better workplace protections, the forums are full of people describing what you described and worse.
It doesn't need regulation, it needs taxation. No more billionaires. The endgame is that there's simply not going to be nearly enough jobs. There already aren't, as described in the article, hence why there's all the artificial jobs.
Same thing at my co! The kicker is that our team is down two people with the expectation of increased productivity because of AI. But no filling in those spots, because only offshore, and offshore can't even join our team because of colocation policies.
> C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.
Hate to say that they're probably right? At least for the moment, tech workers have almost none of the organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this.
If they can get away with it, it’s because they have a product where quality doesn’t matter. If you want to see everything outsourced, “ organization or radicalization that would be required to push back against this” seems like the way to go.
An effective and sufficient level of organization would allow workers to tilt the balance of costs definitively against outsourcing. Employers are also only able to get away with it because the ones who are not laid off are willing to play along (understandably, since they are each individually in a similarly precarious position, but this creates a tragedy of the commons when everyone applies the same calculus of risks).
The MBA pyschopaths have always had it in for the far more intelligent and ethics driven CS types. It's always been an envy situation where people lacking talent are envious of those with real talents and real brain power. CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people, much like how physicians used to operate.
Everyone thinks socialism or communism is going to fix things, but those were already tried and failed with horrifying consequences. I think maybe instead what we need to do is sort out the management and who is in it.
Eng is no more intelligent or ethics driven. It's really easy to say you would be different when you aren't the one who has to manage the budget. Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.
> Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers.
Look at companies where engineer CEOs are replaced by MBA CEOs vs companies where the oppposite happens.
Pretty sure that when saying founders you're selecting for unicorn founders as well, sample bias going through the roof. Huge majority of engineer founders never seriously aims to reach that level, they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
> Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering.
Another baseless assumption.
> they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company.
Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
As a general rule Eng/technical field have to be more transparent, because of the inherent nature of the field. It's another question if they are 'ethical', but I'd say on an average more transparent=more ethical. Exceptions will exist of course.
> CS people should not allow themselves to be managed by non-CS people
It's no guarantee, I've had a few terrible managers that I assumed were non-technical but was shocked to learn they actually had IT degrees from decades ago.
They just checked out for some reason and would jump from meetings the minute they got even vaguely technical.
"I'll leave that to the engineers as we're self organising, I've got to head off" which left us to run by consensus which slowed everything down.
As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.
This wasn't even a secret; in our stand ups our immediate manager said that they were blocked from hiring onshore and only had offshore quota available if they wanted any more team members.
C-suite seem to think they can lie straight to our faces and know they'll get away it.