Tech Workers: They Are Exploiting You Too, Wake Up 10x Moron
“‘Strong men create good times’ … but as they scale… they also start attracting lazy parasites to the wealth they’ve created, people who want to join something great rather than build something great… no one wants to work as hard or be as ruthless as that early Spartan band, given the easy wealth available, so they enjoy themselves and busy themselves by fighting each other over trifles.”
“Once the founder reaches the seemingly inevitable point where they need a bureaucracy… the parasites start entering. They don’t want the risk of a small or even mezzanine-size business. They want lots of perks, high salaries, low workload, and the minimum work for the maximum return… they know they don’t need to pull their weight…”
These are direct quotes from Balaji Srinivasan, a long-term a16z executive/thug (CTO, Coinbase, General Partner, a16z), in a recent book about the future of technology, and guess what isn’t: you, the “parasite”. You, the day-to-day programmers and line engineers, the ones who are getting RSI to meet launch dates and ruining your fucking families for this bullshit, who are stuck in this insane hamster/bingo wheel, and they are calling you parasites. And btw, Balaji and his book, have been promoted with the highest praise by the Boss himself, one Marc Andreessen, and express the explicit views of a16z, who btw, was one of the firms who bought Twitter.
This is coming straight from the top. There are now two kinds of engineers: 10x engineers and the parasites.
You’ll notice how Musk has similarly described laid-off Twitter engineers with the utmost disdain, he ALSO talks about you like parasites, a man who has been known to literally trap people in factories and make them sleep there in COVID conditions (during which he didn’t even pay workers) while busting unions ever since he got a factory, probably before; he is now doing the same to Twitter engineers as they gut the office and move in mattresses: only the “hardcore” survive, where “hardcore” becomes anyone willing or having no other option than to “happily” subject themselves to severe labor abuses with no hope of worker organization: tech is EXPERT union busters.
As far as Zuckerberg, he explained in a conference call preceding the layoffs:
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here, and part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”
They want you to be more “hungry” they want you to be “more committed” they want you to “be willing to sacrifice” and to love and identify with your tech job more than with your coworkers, with whom you are ongoingly locked in a competition to see who will fall through the cracks and who gets to cling on, “grateful” to FAANG. These layoffs are just industry-wide stack ranking, and be ready to bleed if you want to stay in the game. They want you fighting like an animal to be even a mid-level engineer of an established company with almost zero chance of ascending to the actual top of the industry and increasingly less chance of even getting a share of the profits.
Tech workers are so fucking high on their own gas and so fucking high on being better than everyone else in their generation, who have never had a shot at anything besides borderline poverty, shit jobs and the unending downward push of capitalism, had everything from student debt relief to universal health care gutted by greed, just went through a motherfucking pandemic where 1 million of them died, have no or fading job prospects that YOU PERSONALLY are rapidly destabilizing on orders from your bosses, and for years or decades you looked at them and were like: lmfao, morons, I’m a COMPUTER SCIENTIST.
So you look at the poor fucks you went to high school with and you are like: these fucking idiots. Me, I, *I* am so smart that while my entire generation succumbs to meth addiction, lack of health care, everyone’s teeth are falling out, while they work dead-end jobs forever, *I* am better than them. I am an L5, a L4, and L3.23, Google engineer, and I’m better than everyone. In fact, *i* am the exploiter: I ruin neighborhoods with my fancy apartments, I automate away other people’s jobs, I am served by an entire underpaid workforce my bosses created, I have job stability because my job is just so important.
It is what Rust describes in True Detective, Season One: “Me, me, me, I, I, I, I’m so important, I’m so fucking important right?”
You’re fucking delusional wake the fuck up. You are getting fleeced by these fucks and you have been for a long time. In 2021, Netflix made 2.6 million off each employee, Apple, 2.3 million; Google, 1.6 million, Meta has the same numbers. Microsoft makes 928k per head and PayPal makes 821k per head. This is an absolutely phenomenal amount of money that they are taking from you to build their empire and now they are firing you because it wasn’t fucking enough for them to make 1.6 million off of you and destroy your youth, your family, your mental health and your body. You are just the foot soldiers of psychopathic empire builders. Even if you made half a million that year or whatever the fuck, they are making that kind of money off of you every fucking year but it’s not good enough for them, they need more.
You think you have such great jobs and are so blessed and so cherished by your employers, I hope these layoffs are at least a clue that have had zero fucking care for you. Your salaries have been so high and “given” so freely (seemingly, it was a lot of money to you and a bargain for them), that you thought it was because you were valuable — no, it’s because they were making so much damn fucking money on you that they threw you a pittance and you, a computer programmer, were so much of a dumb fuck that you couldn’t put together some very basic math equations that a high schooler could do, to determine what the actual economic picture was. You being richer than the rest of the generation meant you identified with your bosses, which is idiotic, because while you might see yourself as one of them, they certainly do not see themselves as one of you, and they certainly won’t be welcoming you among them.
Tech, in the ever-progression of capitalism, needs more and more money, more and more extraction, so it is now going for the honey pot of pay for technical labor and they are putting on the squeeze to workers; and they have for fucking years been “augmenting” you with legions of contract workers in other countries who are paid a fraction of what you get paid, treated like dirt, and get no stock, and get no benefits, and compete for the chance to be brought in as a full time employees. You never stood up for those workers, not a single time. And you’re about to be one. You never stood up for the people who drove you from the dorms of your company town to the company headquarters over the beaten mash that used to be San Francisco. Not once. And now you are in line to be just like them. Software engineering is a factory job, even if your factory had a coffee bar in it. And they would like to replace you with CodeAI just as much as they are replacing Amazon factory workers with robots and delivery drivers with autonomous vehicles.
There is no economic imperative for them to do all of this shit, they don’t need to lay you off, there is no reason why there isn’t an industry-wide safety net for engineers: this is being done to send a fucking message and to restructure all of you and to introduce artificial precarity into the job market to drop salaries and drop stock options and change the working conditions — permanently. These changes will not be rolled back. They aren’t preparing for a downswing, they are preparing for an upswing. Tech is doing fucking great. But the class line, the delineation of who is on top and who is in the precarious middle mass, has shifted again or at least, you are now aware of it.
In books like “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, venture capitalists from a16z are describing the “late comers” i.e. everyone except the very first employees, as “parasites” on the system; they are moving the goal post of what is a technical employee; they are in the process of splitting you up into a small group of “elite” engineers, “10x engineers”, and then a vast commoditized workforce of programmers orchestrating AI to fill out the architectures and dreams of better guys.
By the way, I wrote about this more than a decade ago, but 10x engineer was never any kind of scientific thing; they tried to make you think it was real, but it wasn’t. It was just the latest in a set of brainwashing techniques to make you think that having your labor exploited was some kind of badge of honor. They wanted 10x the profit out of you, 10x more from you. It wasn’t about you being a better engineer than everyone else; it was about how much they could extract from you. It was just one in a never ending series of constructs they come up with to “separate the wheat from the chafe”, the “groundbreaking” engineers who can contribute disproportionately to the line engineers who just slog it out in the git repos all day. The full stack developer, the “hacker”, the complementary growth hackers, the 10x engineer, the rockstar, the ninja, they have a new one every cycle. You eat up whatever the fuck they say like nothing, even though all of this is fake bullshit, THIS is the BS identity politics. They tell you that your life being wasted by venture capitalists is actually a medal and that it makes you superior to everyone else, and that was the main thing you wanted out of all of this: being superior. And you will see yourself brought low, you lubed the downward spiral.
Listen to yourselves. They’ve had you working 60-80 hour weeks for years. Everyone has “burnout” — as I have written about, burnout is a complex workplace injury that comes from worker exploitation:
“Consider the possibility that burnout is NOT natural, it does NOT just happen because you’re “working hard”, it does not just occur because you at the “wrong company” in the sense of your personal passions not making a connect with your employer. This thing they tell you is natural, that is normal, to the point of “everyone gets burned out” — this thing that is treated as almost an unavoidable reality —- is actually happening because tech corporations are creating dangerous working conditions and its effects have a very profound, negative impact on lives. “
But you used burnout as a validation of your superiority and went right back to work. The fact that people who work in parts of the tech supply chain like the warehouses, get injured from the work, is not divorced from the fact that half of you have fucking RSI, that many of you have to seek medical treatment for the toll of being on a computer 10+ hours a day. Vision problems, tension headaches and migraines, chronic neck and back pain, carpel tunnel, cognitive decline, and those are just the permanent ones.
Yet they have managed to distort your thinking to the point that you believe that working 60-80 hours a week while your entire youth is swallowed up into a giant machine and every single year they’re generating millions of dollars off of you and they have you locked in this insane game, this convoluted game of L5 engineers and distinguished engineers and engineers in residence and CTO and all of this bullshit, you aren’t striving towards innovation, you aren’t contributing to innovation, all you are doing, is being one of 4.4 million programmers on a hamster wheel, with a circus leader venture capitalist cracking the whip over your heads: onward hamster, onward. Would you like to be a 10x hamster? You would, very much. There’s a better cage for the 10x hamsters. Why in the FUCK are we still in this startup lotto bullshit when we could all just split the winnings? This is a fucking maze for rats built by the same ones who made the traps.
They literally took all of your open source code, that you put on Github, and they turned it into a fucking coding AI, without asking you for permission, without any kind of community conversation, that is going to help them automate you and push down your salaries and benefits. In fact, you have never, not once, as a body of workers, been consulted about anything that affects how you work, how the industry runs, what the industry builds, how any of this is monetized, nothing. This is a top-down industry with no unions and no worker organization because you’re all just lone wolves right, 10x hackers, ice cold. You are just the labor. And capitalism squeezes labor and pushes it down. Welcome to it.
And now that want more out of you and goddamn they are going to do it and you aren’t even going to fight it. You bought into this crap hook line and sinker. You’ve disparaged “rest and vest” workers — these are simply tech workers who came into their job, did their work without killing themselves, and went home. But no, you personally invested in this idea of everyone dashing their brains on the rocks like this was a fucking sigma movie, you are not John Wick, you are not Neo, you are not Lou Bloom, you are just some asshole. But you’ve bought into the fucking bullshit to the point that all they have to do is come up with some new buzzword — once it was “ninja”, “rockstar”, in the heady days of the early 2010s — and you will leap into worse and worse conditions, your head lifted like a prize poodle as you go over the edge. And if that wasn’t enough, they use techniques like stack ranking to terrorize you and make you compete to the hilt with the asshole next to you, severing you from your fellow factory workers.
Think about it. Tech elite and VCs — are, in a vacuum, are thinking only for themselves and only for their own profits and their own power, a very small group of them, deciding the direction of the industry; and that even the most 10x engineers are simply following orders. Did it ever make you curious why they are running you so much like soldiers?
They weren’t giving you nice offices and shit because they cared about you. They have been trying to figure out how to squeeze the most out of you possible, through elaborate psychological games and threats and economic insecurity and turning the offices into a dwelling kept you there and kept you obsessed, absolutely obsessed, with this work: the production of work obsession through insane, brutish work hours, endless competition, non-stop propaganda about “changing the world” and the “startup lotto” also known as “variable ratio intermittent reinforcement schedule” not to mention the emotional abuse that structures every part of the technology workforce.
These latest round of layoffs represent only .3% of the entire industry and yet are causing a cascading effect outside of the industry as well as publicly resetting the notions of what tech workers can expect going forward: more job precarity, less respect, less money, longer hours. The reasons both Zuckerberg and Musk gave for reducing headcount had to do with terrorizing, insulting, destabilizing and exploiting workers: they wanted people to put even more work and to lose themselves fully into the machine.
In tech, worker exploitation is transformed into being “hungry” and a “hustler”. It’s fucking dumb, but it sure works.
As they move into the next stages of the industry — crypto, weapons building, the metaverse, and AI — they are done with you being high cost employees that must be catered to; they figured out that you are spineless boot-worshippers and they have arrived at a position in the industry where they are able to undermine the salaries and the stock and the security and the dignity of their workforce and that that will be of benefit to them.
In an 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”.
Yeah. They don’t just want your salary they want your stock too. Employee stock grants are too much of a burden as they try to enter hyper growth, they need those returns for venture capital and hedge funds and shit like that. They’re pulling the rug out from under you and telling you it’s because you are too lazy and if you just work harder… but really its because they want more, more, more.
They will take everything they can get from you. I know you think you are being treated well but are you? I know you think they care about you but do they?
THEY FUCKING HATE YOU THEY ARE OPENLY CALLING RANK AND FILE ENGINEERS — THE BASIS OF THE INDUSTRY’S PRODUCTION — PARASITES.
When I worked in tech people were stressed out of their minds, they were working themselves to the bone, around me people developed serious addictions to alcohol and serious addictions to things like Adderral, they ABANDONED their obligations outside of work. People never saw their families and friends and partners and children; when they did, they were inanimate zombies. I dated a “tech success story” and he was so wrapped up in that bullshit that he ignored a deadly health condition I was developing. I almost died from his neglect. Anyone who had an addiction, who had a mental illness, they were getting worse, sometimes exponentially. It sucked. It absolutely sucked and I saw way too many people lose their minds, friends, families, values, ethics, and ultimately souls to it. There is no forgiveness or grace for those so lost in this fuck ass race that they rescinded their obligations to others and to their generation, let the social contract burn up with greed.
In that essay I wrote, about 10x engineers years ago; in fact, it was about 10 years ago, I opened it up with a quote from one of the best engineers and technical minds I ever had the opportunity to work with, Andy Gross, who wrote Riak. He was my best friend. He didn’t want me to attribute his quote in the essay, because even though he was the founder and chief architect of a well respected startup, with a wonderful pedigree, he was worried that saying it could affect his career and his job. He said:
“I was a 10x engineer for 7 months and then I was a 0x engineer for a year and a half. You burn the candle at both ends. You end up with alcoholism and depression. You’re talking about a very small subset of people. And they might end up in divorce and financial ruin. When people think you’re a 10x engineer, they think you have skills that you don’t. You invariably let people down.”
5 years later, he was dead. And only one of the executives that had pushed him so hard, even when it was obvious that he was sick, even when it was obvious he was losing his life and his mind, pushed and pushed and pushed him… only one even came to the funeral. Nor did many of his friends, who had drifted apart because tech severs close relationships among anyone who isn’t working in tandem towards a VC payout; it wages war on empathy and human connection, it turns people into mindless greedy drones like you. The people who extracted from him unto death, they didn’t show up. Nor did any of the venture capitalists who had put all that on his back so that *they* could profit.
They don’t even care about their 10x engineers. They will push them until they die. So they definitely don’t care about you. Wake up.