<story><title>What the IBM Layoffs Look Like</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parfe</author><text>&amp;gt;Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor&lt;p&gt;Never going to happen.  The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they&amp;#x27;re above the simple garbage man or postal worker.  After all they create such &lt;i&gt;value&lt;/i&gt;.  Admitting a union would help acknowledges they&amp;#x27;re not special.</text></item><item><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren&amp;#x27;t enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don&amp;#x27;t think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oldmanjay</author><text>When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.</text></comment>
<story><title>What the IBM Layoffs Look Like</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parfe</author><text>&amp;gt;Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor&lt;p&gt;Never going to happen.  The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they&amp;#x27;re above the simple garbage man or postal worker.  After all they create such &lt;i&gt;value&lt;/i&gt;.  Admitting a union would help acknowledges they&amp;#x27;re not special.</text></item><item><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren&amp;#x27;t enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don&amp;#x27;t think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>levemi</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never met anyone nor worked with anyone who thought they were better than someone else because of their job. Maybe that&amp;#x27;s something you want to believe, but it isn&amp;#x27;t true. A great deal of the engineers I work with in the bay area are socially conscious to the tech sector&amp;#x27;s impact on the community. And really they&amp;#x27;re harmed by it too, a software engineer can&amp;#x27;t afford to buy a house either.&lt;p&gt;If what you really believed was true there&amp;#x27;s no way that someone like Barbara Lee could be in office with such huge wins every two years when so many of her constituents are the same people that work in the area you think is so terrible. Why are you even posting on HN? This is a technical news site.</text></comment>