this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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- Better and fewer working hours.
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That's quite sweeping.
People like Brin may be engineers - or have roots as engineers - but the heads of these tech companies are first and foremost entitled 1%-ers, who function as businessmen more than anything else.
The problem really is not that he's an engineer - the problem is that he's an asshole.
The Venn diagram of engineers and entitled equity-seeking assholes has been becoming more and more of a circle since the mid 90s (or earlier, I would have been too young to notice )
Funny because I've worked on and off in Tech Startups since the 90s and what I've seen is the very opposite of your statement: post year 2000 Crash Tech has become more the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance (i.e. no-rules hyperspeculative) and that has been reflected on how most of the Founders and Investors are people with backgrounds in areas heavy towards Sales practices (i.e. Finance, Marketing, actual Sales people and, more in general Grifters) and very few have backgrounds in actually making things.
The Techie with an Engineering background coming up with a new Technology or twist on Technology and making a successful company out of it that was common in Tech boom of the 90s has been replaced by money-men and those whose main skillset is to find and keep investors (so, those good in spinning a good tale, not making something that actually works).
If engineers have become more equity seeking, that's because of the truly insane amount of situations over the last decade or two of people working their asses of to make a company big expecting to win big via options they got and when the company does get big the founders and investors do some kind of financial swindling to make those options worthless and the more those founders and investors are grifters and similar, the more it happens.
People demand equity because the rules around it are a lot more tight than the rules around options which are a total joke and hence those who get options as motivation often end up with nothing when the company does make it big.
I really think you fail to understand how many engineers there are out there. Or how many disciplines of them there are. Let alone that many come across stand-offish in the fields of say, Civil Engineering because they are ultimately responsible for human life, yet people want to argue with them about "overbuilding" things.