A Guide to Surviving Techbro Capitalism, Part 2/3
You Are Being Manipulated
In Part 1 of this series, I described Techbro Capitalism and the causes and symptoms of what I called “Welchian enshittification,” the constant grind towards the dehumanization of the technical worker, their worsening work conditions, pay, and their eventual firing. In this article I’ll be describing the lies and manipulation companies use to extract maximum value from technical workers- at the expense of those workers and their families.
“Company culture” is manipulation. It is an attempt to force you into emotional engagement with the company, so that instead of asking to be paid a larger fraction of what you are worth- being paid $1.10 instead of $1 for every $3 the company makes off of your work- you will take less money and put in more work.
Unpaid overtime. Sacrificing your evenings or weekends, time with your family, time to rest, on the altar of “productivity” so that the company can get 5 people’s work out of 4 people’s salaries. Pizza parties, weekend retreats, a flat hierarchy, not firing good bosses, benefits, work-life balance, all the things that make a company “a good place to work,” are done because it produces emotional engagement and a willingness to produce more value for less pay.
If you’re in a startup with bosses that treat you like a human it is because the owners are decent and investors are waiting for the company to build the long-term value before they start burning it for short-term profits. If you’re in a large company with bosses that treat you like a human, it is because a financial analyst has provided a report demonstrating the company will get more work out of you, valued at some multiple of the cost to buy you pizza, by manipulating your natural, healthy, human desire to reciprocate gifts.
You can trust your boss to be a good person, but for your survival you need to trust the market more, and the market will rip out your company’s heart and eat it unless your company grinds you down and then fires you for Line Go Up.
Employee stock options are manipulation to get you emotionally invested in the company’s success, even though you’ll still make pennies when the investors make millions. Workplace awards are manipulation. “Like a family” is manipulation. Trying to invoke guilt on behalf of other employees is manipulation. Pay greater than minimum wage is not manipulation, but it is less than you deserve.
Let me emphasize that; the company pays you more than minimum wage not because the company believes you deserve it but because your skill set or willingness to endure the work environment is rare enough that the company is forced by the labour market to offer more money to secure your services. If the company could pay you less, it would. Bonuses? Raises? Everything that the company does is an effort to get the highest possible value out of you while paying you as little as possible.
I have held jobs with both startups and international corporations where my pay was consistently increased by 10–30% in a year not because my bosses offered it to me, but because in my yearly review I mentioned I was being invited to interview for companies paying 30% more.
Coworkers who were less essential were not given those raises. Coworkers who were more essential but did not approach salary negotiation as a knife fight were not given those raises. Coworkers who were irreplaceably essential were fired the instant they took a stand between Welchian enshittifiers and the live humans they would crush for Line Go Up.
My experience of getting raises is rare, and requires negotiating with a mercenary disconnection from normal human emotion. If my employers ever thought they could replace me for cheaper than they could retain me, they would have done it instantly. Because of my skills and position I had a profound level of safety when I negotiated for a slightly larger piece of the pie- and I still risked losing my job in those negotiations.
I am not telling you that your company doesn’t care. Right now, dear readers, some of you, I hope many of you, are at companies you enjoy working at because leadership is being permitted to care about humans instead of investment. What I am telling you is that, inevitably, your companies will care about one thing. The companies will not care about that thing merely more than anything else. The companies will, in pursuit of investment, care about that one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
Is there a bright side? A silver lining? Light at the end of the tunnel?
No.
This concentration of power and wealth, destruction of people’s lives, and manipulation of finances on a national or global scale will continue, as it has throughout history, until war, revolution, or strikes bring the robber barons, or the bourgoise, or the nobility, to their knees. Unions have been the only historical option short of guillotines that have solved economic problems of this scale. Unions have been excised from the vocabulary of workers in neo-liberal nations. The Welchian enshittifiers have the economy and your job in a death grip and you have no leverage to stop them.
Part 3 of this series will conclude with specific and practical advice on how to survive.