cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34411807
While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”
Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.
Having spent much of my career working alongside H1-B holders, an employer would have to be delusional to think that the quality of education of the average H1-B holder is comparable to that of someone from a good US or European university. There’s not even much assurance that the H1-B holder actually took the exams for the degree they purport to hold. And many of the universities are little better than trade schools.
Also, disempowered workers temporarily enslaved to their employers are never going to innovate like free people. They’re forced to be yes-(wo)men in order to survive and pay off the corrupt middlemen who got them their jobs. Megalomaniac CEOs might be OK with that, but that’s not how you get the Next Big Thing. That’s how you milk the idea your founders had two decades ago.