Programming Jobs are Changing Forever: Say Bye to Stock, Hello to Contracting

 OpenAI (a Peter Thiel/a16z company), has been going around bragging that it’s doing all of this big serious AI stuff with such a lean staff — boy, they have just the best of the best!! Lots of bang for your buck. Sam Altman says: “talent density”. Just 375 people. Wow!!! 

This is just part of the new industry propaganda, the professional reason given for the hundreds of thousands of layoffs: that we are entering a new age of efficiency and quality and most people… just aren’t gonna make it.

This “375” bullshit is misleading on the very surface: OpenAI represents a large number of interested parties and brings to bear on the issue, a massive coordination of those interests and technologies; this has been a vehicle to share knowledge and data sets between Thiel’s other companies, Stanford, a16z, Github/Microsoft, intelligence agencies, and so on. Yes, it is certainly impressive that they are running a high performance team that is synthesizing existing research and coming up with an agreeable configuration, creating widely available, commoditized primitives that can implemented by teams of technologists around the world and used to bootstrap the new AI infrastructure. But that is a much better description of OpenAI’s function than viewing them as a startup doing all this work from scratch rather than essentially being a technical trust and negotiating body between, basically the worst actors in tech. You should think of the “employees” as rather ambassadors. To the Evil Empire. 

Yet, the 375 employee line is going through the industry like wildfire. ChatGPT *the app* isn’t the only thing on display here, but rather, ChatGPT the COMPANY, as a model of what startups will look like going forward. “We have only 375 employees” is part of ongoing market fixing, coordination of messages, depression of labor, obfuscation. And claiming this tiny footprint is particularly egregious, because while ChatGPT has become the fastest growing consumer tech in all of internet history, a bigger story has been hidden: the 1,000 person contracted workforce, including workers making as low as $2/hour out of Kenya, who have gotten OpenAI to this point, yet are profoundly disenfranchised from it. 400 of these workers were software engineers, providing training data about how they solve coding problems. Which, by the way, automating programming is absolutely a part of (Open)AI’s core business; see: Codex which powers Github/Microsoft’s CoPilot; a revolution in computer programming is one of the core venture capitalist promises about AI. So, you can’t claim that these workers were working on some kind of side or fringe element of the business — no, this was core. This was table stakes. 

Contractors are ever the dirty secret of the industry. In fact, that this was picked as a development model for OpenAI reads to me that they were fine with having this fact be “discovered”. And indeed, it only took a tiny portion of a news cycle otherwise dominated by ecstatic, mindless celebration before being already forgotten. OpenAI has plenty of money to hire full-time staff, pay competitive salaries and benefits, AND give the stock traditionally granted to early employees, according to Silicon Valley-competitive standards, to do this work. But they decided not to. Even though they are valued somewhere around $29 billion and recently raised another 10 billion from Microsoft. Choosing this model for the venture capitalist’s pride pet project — OpenAI — is significant, and it points to the direction that the industry will be taking in general. 

We talked more about contract workers in the *last* bubble than today, because there was constant confrontation between their interests and those of management, which resulted in union-busting by tech companies of all varieties (from WeWork to Tesla to Buzzfeed), in high-profile protests of tech shuttles, and in a number of labor rights lawsuits (like the Steve Jobs wage fixing conspiracy and the Bauer Transportation suits) and various collectives for representing the class (like Silicon Valley Rising and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project). Additionally, the use of contracted, out-of-country moderators for explicit, violent, dangerous content, particularly by Meta, drew mainstream interest because of the heinous nature of the job and the extremes of the WORKPLACE INJURIES that were incurred from viewing such horrifying content continously: PTSD, depression, anxiety, problems in interpersonal relationships and with childcare/families, and on on. Of course, this is not divorced from the fact that even full time, highly paid tech workers in the United States suffer workplace injuries like burnout, addiction, depression, RSI, chronic back pain, the dissolution of their families, and so on; or that factory/warehouse workers at I.e. Amazon and Tesla also suffer serious labor abuses like being forced to work under COVID conditions and being locked in factories. ELON.

So anyhow, while some contract work got some attention in web 2.0, very little was paid to the technical contracted workforce. Within Silicon Valley, we pretend that it isn’t even, like, a THING that we have all had a team or two of people in Romania, in India, in Brazil, Mexico, often fully embedded or significantly augmenting engineering teams, or sometimes only brought in for launches and release dates, or certain projects or websites. They help startups keep a longer run-way, get talent on-demand, deliver where delivery wouldn’t be possible under budgetary requirements. The argument for these being somehow subordinate parts of the workforce — paid like shit, treated like shit, enjoying none of the security of tech workers — becomes hard to justify when you look at how these teams are constantly involved in mission-critical projects; we all know this from being bleary-eyed on the phone together, nights, weekends, trying to coordinate timezones, working through language differences, addressing system-wide outages… We often work with these contractors for months or longer on key parts of our business. They have a comparable skill set to ours, they have skills we don’t have in our companies. So that makes it really really awkward when… 

 They are paid wayyyyyy less that a US programmer. By a lot. In India, average salary for a software developer is $6835. In Vietnam? Can go as low as $10/hr. Brazil? $25-$80/hour. Great! And they also don’t get to be full-time employees. And they also don’t get any of the benefits that white and Asian American programmers enjoy. And usually the working conditions are much more strenuous and stressful and require even longer hours than we work. Wow. Not to mention often dealing with verbal abuse from racist, classist, nationalist tech employees and managers; facing constant fear of unemployment, perhaps competing to the hilt for the chance to be brought in as a FT hire. 

AWKWRDDDDDDD because we all knew that we were in way better shape than they were. Some poor ass kid in a country we can barely place on a map abandoning his wife and brand new kid to work on your fucking corporate webpage or whatever for 1/100th of the pay. One time a bunch of my teammates in India all ended up in the ER for overwork. What? 

And that was the original sin that created two kinds of tech workers. There was a line drawn in the sand… between you and them. But look at how shit catches up with you! With massive layoffs, the advent of coding AI and other automations, VC demands for a “leaner” more “efficient” workforce, and a venture capitalist-friendly market, that line is… moving. A lot. It is beginning to swallow a category of worker that was previously untouched: full-time technical staff in America. And that downward pressure is going to affect every other class too: the jobs at the bottom, the criminally cheap contractors in other countries AND the criminally underpaid workers at tech factories, warehouses, on tech campuses, etc. 

See, tech has shown us over and over again that it loves to take established labor and disrupt and demean it and make it cheaper and more exploited and less secure. That is the business model. See: Uber, in which the taxi unions were replaced by the unstable gig economy, or the other new groups of gig economy workers like those for delivery services and on-demand housework. See AirBnB, in which a new landlord class was able to get a larger ownership footprint on land and property, destabilizing the housing market and ultimately taking homes away from residents and causing displacement via gentrification. See tech’s giant pools of contracted staff that SHOULD be full time WITH stock, spanning everything from content moderation to professional cleaning. See the new wave of robots and warehouse automation being developed by Amazon to squeeze those workers even further. Hell, look at how sex work has skyrocketed fucktons of internet development without compensation from tech companies, and yet they are constantly destabilized by new bans on adult content from the very companies they made rich. 

So what did you think was going to happen to ALL of software engineering? Why would YOU be untouched? Are YOU so special, so important, so much more deserving? 

No. Most software engineering will become contracted, gig-economy, non-unionized, non-benefited, low-paid work. Just like everyone else has been the whole time. And the same conditions are preceding it as for the others: an increase in automation, a concentration of wealth and power in venture capital and tech elite hands, artificial manipulation of the market, suppression of unionization and worker’s organization, blunt force economic attack by venture capital.

In some recent articles, I’ve talked about how automation and artificial layoffs are creating a new model of how venture capitalists and large tech companies divide wealth and operate technical staff. And what’s the prettiest egg in that nest? 

Stock. Which currently, up to 20% of the company is owned as stock by employees. Wow. That is a fuck ton of money that should be going to… venture capitalists and the rest of these rich fucks. Indeed, venture capitalists are bringing all of your little stock grants to a whimpering end. 

They.

Need.

More.

In a recent email to an Alphabet employee, a hedge fund manager noted “Competition for talent in the technology industry has fallen significantly allowing Alphabet to materially reduce compensation per employee. In particular, Alphabet should limit stock-based compensation given the depressed share price”. 

In a recent interview, Marc Andreessen, the crime boss of the a16z + PayPal Mafia conspiracy, which funded OpenAI, talks about how we need to return to full ownership by tech founders (in the tradition of Ford and Tesla, of course), who “started out owning 100%”. This is a man who is at the very center of determining the economics of the industry, and he is saying he wants almost no stock to leave the elite core. 

A recent a16z book called “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan openly describes the “latecomers” to startups and tech companies as lazy parasites, who shouldn’t share the “spoils” of the tech funder because they don’t work as hard or matter as much… and what are those spoils? Stock. 

In fact, Amazon even used to have an albiet tiny stock grant program for its warehouse workers… but they ended that in 2018. A ring of things to come! 

 One of the chief economic distinctions that have previously separated the “important” from the “disposable” workers in tech is stock. That was my first question when I encountered worker organization in tech’s “invisible workforce”: why aren’t you getting any fucking stock? Stock stock stock. 

And here’s the critical thing about the reimagined, web 3.0 startup/company job— no more fucking stock.

The question of what the “classes” are in Silicon Valley has always mapped extremely neatly onto the issue of stock. It goes like this: Venture capitalists get the most stock. The CEO and early technical employees, they get a lot of stock. The rest of the full-time workers for the company get some degree of stock that also rates in order of importance: the rest of the technical staff does pretty good until we get late-stage, and the marketing girl gets the least, if any at all. The marketing girls are WIDELY hated in the industry and the disdain for them is very neatly reflected in their salaries and stock allocations. You see? It’s all about economics. Wealth distribution. 

What makes a “real” startup employee, is the stock. When it comes down to which kind of worker does “essential” or “core” work vs which worker does “unskilled” labor? It’s in the stock. Stock has always been a major issue and its always been sketchy as fuck that SOME people who work *full time* for the companies get stock and a number of the people who work *full time* for the company do NOT. Why? Because this is a very clear disenfranchisement; at least in the situation of getting stock you are getting a stake in the company for all the bullshit that comes with this work.

 That is about to change for, I would guess 80% of the programming workforce. Being an early hire in OpenAI is obviously an extremely lucrative position; but that 1000 person contract staff? Some of the first AI technicians? They’re getting none of it. 

With recent efforts around coding automation, artificially created layoffs, and new capitalist propaganda about how only the “hardcore” programmers will survive, this points to a future of startups where the startup itself is much “smaller” and much more of it is outsourced to a global operation. Tech, again, does not see itself as an American industry, it has no particularly American allegiances or patriotism, but as its own nation. Its number one purpose and number one achievement is in establishing the highest point of concentration of wealth and power period; this is obviously the form of the sovereign nation/state with the few colonizers and the many colonized. No mistake that many of these contractors have been from the global south. 

This follows the scientific description of capitalism created by Marx; the arch of capitalism produces never-ending revolutions in the instruments of production (I.e., artificial intelligence) that continually push down, economically and in all other ways, the worker. So it should come to no surprise to find that within the formations at the center of this (startups, VC firms), we are seeing the line of the stock-having class (bourgeois) move; and what we are looking at, across the industry, is how that is going to play out in the new “web 3.0” economy. 

The American full-time programming workforce, 80% White and Asian men, has been living on an island surrounded by a vast sea of contract workers all over the world, often in the global south, or the workers of color that tech has maltreated and gentrified ever since it took up place in the Bay Area, or the many factory, manufacturing and warehouse workers at FAANG and other tech titans. But now they are themselves being dug into by automation, by layoffs, by the supposed “crypto winter” and “funding slump” (all invented). Salaries will be depressed, full-time positions will be cut, and startups will be using more cheap contract work (you), and giving out less stock. The good days are over for you. 

Tech is changing the financial picture once again and the vast majority of programming jobs will be low-paid contracting positions without stock and without benefits; that is key to the tech economic model, is destabilizing labor through automation, market manipulation, industry-wide union busting, wealth hoarding, and so on. The large groups of technical employees that currently enjoy franchise in the company through stock options, is about to have all of that turned on its head as we enter another “revolution” from tech, and the economic relationships of the industry and indeed the globe being rearranged accordingly, as Marx states, this is the natural result of the revolution in the instruments of production of which tech is the animus of in these times. Thus, it should be absolutely no surprise to workers in tech when the economic realities of their lives are constantly shifting downward. And yet, they have no fucking idea what is going on, drunk on superiority complexes, superiority that ironically is drawn from the same contract workers they now become. 

I love this song! I tried to organize you fucks against VC for 10 years eat fucking dirt bitch. 

OpenAI is a view of what the future of venture capital and startups will be or can be: a very small team made up of “choice” hires from major universities, blue-chip startups, and VC cronies, conspirators, a mix of psychopathics and global scale financial criminals and people who like to do unethical human experimentation — such as unleashing artificial intelligence built on generations of human output without consent onto the world and directly into the labor mechanisms of the world, with a guaranteed and promised result of labor destabilization. Them… and then the low-paid, global, distributed, contracting workforce running the whole gambit from marketing to software development to facilities to transportation. The number of employees “chosen” to work at startups will diminish proportionally as the de-stabilized programming workforce is forced to accept less and less pay, swallow cuts to their stake in companies, and take more and more the path of precarity as they increasingly COMPETE with the outsourced labor that they once dominated; particularly as advances on technical and organizational levels have made it easier than ever to use global contracted workforces.  

The way VCs are justifying this, is that the tech ecosystem has grown to the point where “risk” isn’t required anymore for most roles; it was “risk” that has provided the economic justification for tech wealth. I.e., the venture capitalist takes a huge risk by investing in the company, thus it is the richest. The earliest employees take the most risks, therefore they get more stock than latter employees.

And now they are telling you: hey, not only is there less competition for jobs, but programmer salaries are way lower now, and not only that, the modern startup doesn’t need nearly as many positions, because there’s contracting and AI, and thus, we’re not hiring or passing out shares.

This “risk”. What risk are the richest men in the world taking by *checks notes* doing even more wealth-hoarding and getting consistently and predictably richer? 

They aren’t taking any fucking risk this is just how they attempt to justify what is not justifiable. Hopefully you will recognize this as total fucking bullshit because the people who are actually making the company on a molecular level — the workers — should be the ones getting the lion’s share, instead of fighting over the scraps. But, salaries and stock, that’s a lot of money and a big stake in the company to be handing out to… checks notes… parasites, “late-comers”, “vest and rest”, low performers, bottom 10% … whatever they need to call you to make it seem reasonable.

So we have a new world: contracted technical workers and then what some are calling "elite" programmers; such as a recent tweet from a Microsoft AI boss saying that “elite” software jobs “are locked behind two great gates: a.) competitive programming and b.) the math track trio (calc, lingual, stat). Those who have the temerity to pass through the gates shall have the spoils. The rest will forever feed on the industry’s scraps.” 

Uhhhhhh…… 

This is yet more of this upgraded super hyped up masculine warrior speak that is rolling around the industry. They’re talking in terms like titans and spartans and conquerers and elite programmers but all of this just comes down to:

Do you get stock or not? 

Are you a contractor or not? 

So expect the shape of the startup and what the entire economic picture of the field looks like for workers, yes, technical ones — in fact, this one is ALL about y’all — to change and change dramatically. Word on the street is the FAANG companies are already out there re-staffing talent with greatly reduced comp. 

Maybe you should think about downsizing.