Apparently TeamSystem here in Europe is citing AI among the reasons for reducing its weekly working hours from 36 to 32, without change to the employees salary.
So you get Friday off and get paid the same. That’s how technological progress is supposed to work.
ITT ‘get hired back for more’.
That wasn’t the goal, it was always hire someone else for less later while making this quarters financials look good and workers more desperate and fungible. Sucks for long term viability and institutional knowledge, but shareholders are happy now, C-suite gets bonuses, AI is just this years excuse. Just late stage capitalism working as expected.
Insert world smallest violin
🎻
E: also happy cake day!
Yeah, I’m sure the customers weren’t happy either when their friendly, helpful PoC was suddenly replaced with a clanker that has the intellect of a rotten potato, likely at a time when everyone was still struggling to hold shit together as it was.
If a company lays someone off in favor of AI, employees should ask for at LEAST a 20% bump to come back… make it fucking painful for them.
Instead they will be offered the same role with a 20-50% pay cut due to market conditions, and it will be 100% in person instead of fully remote or hybrid as it was just five years ago.
If I were offered that deal I’d politely tell them to go fuck themselves with a cactus.
I haven’t had to report to an office for more than a pizza party since 2011, I have no intention of starting now.
20 is nothing for that. I’d ask for 50, especially if it was going from former FTE to contract.
Oh I wouldn’t even entertain a contract position…
I had this while back…I was working for company doing DR/Replication scripting…I was about 2/3 way through the job and they decided that “they could finish the job themselves” and graciously released me from my contract…
They called me back about 2 weeks later, at which point I quoted them 400% of my original rate, payable in advance, to finish the work. ;-) They were fucking LIVID…
Of course, they didn’t re-book me, but the rumor mill told me that they brought it in about a year behind schedule and at about 2x the budget they had allocated…
Helpful hint - do documentation LAST. If they fire you before it’s done, they get SQUAT. I didn’t even have passwords written down for them.
Generally consultants on short-medium length contracts cost 3-5x hourly rate of FTEs, for long-term contracts it’s usually around 2x, at least in the industries I’ve worked in. You’d be low balling yourself by only asking for a 50% increase for contract work.
This is not new. Went through the same thing when employers were offshoring development to low wage countries. Some people in the management chain were so up on that, they joked we were all going to get fired. But I had seen the code. It wasn’t long before they were coming to me to get it fixed because it was their ass if they couldn’t get it sorted. My superpower was untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code.
We bought the hype machine and got giant boners for ruining our employees lives by suddenly laying them off, but now we’re starting to see maybe that wasn’t as super smart as we told ourselves it was.
So long, meat bags!
…
Hello, meat bags!
Fuck 'em. I hope all the people they fired got pay raises elsewhere and will never come back.
