The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.
> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.
I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.
Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.
> Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.
I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.
It feels like the output you’d get from an LLM if you had asked it to write in a literary style. It’s not well-written, and reads more pretentious than capable.
9front is a legitimately cool software project and from what I can tell a cool set of people. I find it bizarre how many people have a negative reaction to a community that doesn't dress itself up in Corporate Memphis and idolize startup-world demigods.
We need more of this type of project today. It is the old Internet, still alive.
> but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand
This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.
The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.
There's no unions for H1B workers. If there's any union stepping up for their interest, it would find mass enrollment tomorrow. Unfortunately, there isn't support by non-h1b engineers, let alone unions.
I am a non-h1b engineer and I declare it is in my best interest to advocate for h1-b engineers. Otherwise management would simply calculate why would they hire me and treat me well when they can hire a more desperate h1b holder and treat them like trash.
Rocking the boat so much as to get fired, fail to find another employer before the visa expires, and be sent back home? A terrifying perspective for many.
Just to clarify that the parent may have edited, but wrote "non-H1B" workers, so they would be speaking about domestic / citizen employees, not ones on visa.
I feel like a lot of people that are looking for a nostalgic device can get the experience they need by uninstalling most applications and then turning off all notifications first. In doing so, you don't end up with a device that is much different than an old Treo 650 - PIM functionality, messaging, and no growth-hacking loops.
> Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.
It has nothing to do with the state and has to do with getting the RSUs to pay the down payment for a house in a HCOL area in order to maybe have children before 40 and make the KPIs so you don't get stack-ranked into the bottom 30% and fired at big tech, or grinding 996 to make your investors richest and you rich-ish in the process if you're unlikely enough to exit in the upper decile with your idea. This doesn't include the contingent of people who fundamentally believe in the state, too.
Most people are activists only to the point of where it begins to impede on their comfort.
AI middle managers are coming. The highest-level corporate authority can and will continue to exist as a person that makes sure the AI systems are running correctly and skim profits off the top of the AI substructure, with the lowest stratum being an underclass precariat doing the hands-on tickets from an AI agent at a continuously adjusted market price for the task.
https://cif.uiowa.edu/sites/cif.uiowa.edu/files/2026-03/syll...
https://cif.uiowa.edu/sites/cif.uiowa.edu/files/2026-03/syll...
reply