Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

Wasn&#x27;t too surprised to see that Bloomberg neglected to mention a pretty self evident reason why tech workers might want that <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...</a><p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn&#x27;t battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the competition.

This is only surprising if you subscribe strictly to Sinclair&#x27;s quote:<p>&quot;It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.&quot;<p>In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don&#x27;t believe in. I personally haven&#x27;t been able to hack it - I&#x27;m too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times.<p>But ultimately, people can and will vote against &quot;their own self interest&quot;. I vote for and fund environmental parties, despite that meaning I will personally lose out in a lot of ways, because it&#x27;s the right thing to do.<p>That&#x27;s part of what being a mature adult is. Recognizing that it&#x27;s not all about your personal status and&#x2F;or livelihood.

Maybe they are donating to candidates who they believe are good for everyone ( including themselves ) and not just good for their employers who could care less about them in most cases. Voting on one issue is a sure way to get a candidate who is against you when they ignore that issue.

Pretty telling that the idea of voting against one&#x27;s own financial self-interest, even as a single part of a large platform, is a wild idea to these business journalists.

One thing I&#x27;ve definitely noticed is the culture of fear in tech about not appearing &quot;progressive enough&quot;. Given that tech workers, especially in the bay area tend to come from fairly privileged backgrounds with relative financial stability and also live in safer areas they tend to underestimate the importance of reducing crime and maintaining a strong economy.<p>This definitely provides a &quot;psychological safety net&quot; that tends to push a lot of these people to vote for more radical leftist candidates that may be directly against their self (and future children&#x27;s) interests.

I don&#x27;t get why this is so shocking. The future of the company I work at is not the most important political issue to me. I don&#x27;t want to have a good job in a bad country.<p>I&#x27;ll happily vote for Elizabeth Warren and if she does break up the company I work at I&#x27;ll deal with that when it happens.

Breaking up big tech companies is undoubtedly good for the workers, create more competition in hiring. It would probably send money downwards and be a huge boon to innovation tbh.

A decade of working in Bay Area tech meant watching kids of rich parents get rich off dubious business plans by creating a startup in San Francisco while their parents buy them a house, pay their expenses and tap into their networks for seed funding all the while the company loses money for over a decade while they become millionaires from selling shares during rounds of fundraising. Then I go for the big guy where they are profitable, but then we are chasing the quarterly earning report because we are scared of what Jim Cramer will say about us instead of the everyday impact on the people who use our products. Yeah, I&#x27;m disillusioned with it all. I just want to practice my craft to build useful software for people and live a nice life.

I&#x27;m not entirely convinced breaking up Big Tech will be a net benefit, in fact that position weakened my support for Warren.<p>But then again, I also don&#x27;t work for a FAANG (I do work for a big corporation, and they don&#x27;t need broken up, they&#x27;re imploding just fine on their own), so I wouldn&#x27;t be included in that statistic anyway.

Are &quot;we&quot; backing these candidates because of their social policies, or because they&#x27;re going to be the best leaders at this critical point in the fight against the climate collapse?<p>As a group tech workers are highly educated in the STEM fields. We understand the science and accept the conclusions. So we know what we need to do.<p>That and Warren in particular is positioned as being so fantastically competent that it&#x27;s very easy to see our group getting behind her.

To some degree I agree that some of these companies have too much control over users and collect too much information and give users too little control in that.<p>With that said, I feel there’s some irony in this. These companies essentially have encouraged and enabled these attitudes in their workforce thinking this would make the employers look like they shared the same goals and had to good of workers in mind. Essentially they thought coöpting the workforce was possible without negative outcomes. History shows this doesn’t work, unless you are a tyrant and have absolute control and have real ways to control them outside of work.<p>For example Mao could have his PLA and could have his Red Guards and use them to achieve whatever policy he wanted, no matter how ill advised.

I’m not very surprised. I’m a big fan of Warren but not a big fan of her break-up-tech policy.<p>But I realize that her heart is in the right place and I think what she says will benefit the country.<p>So I’m willing to accept what might be a bad idea (breaking up tech) for the good ideas that come with it.

I&#x27;m a tech worker and I&#x27;ll be voting Warren.<p>Technology really does have the power to change the world and the lives of the people in it profoundly. It is important to recognize that some of those changes are areas of public interest, public concern, and even public policy. The government will-- and rightly should-- demand that such changes be shaped not to cause unnecessary harm.

Keep in mind that the top 1% pay 37% of the Federal income tax receipts. If their wealth was removed, who else would pay that amount?

There’s nothing wrong with voting against your own (direct) interest. In fact what goes against your direct interest can be more than made up for indirectly by making a fairer or generally better society.<p>Obvious example: green energy, generally speaking, is less economically efficient than fossil fuels (yes, it’s getting better everyday, that’s not the point). We are probably all going to be slightly worse off economically while we transition to green energy. But that doesn’t mean the transition is not worth doing to avoid all the long lasting, externalized negative side effects of fossil fuels.

I&#x27;m sorry but this article is beyond stupid. It is a narrative in search of data.<p>Opening line:<p>&gt;Silicon Valley software engineers seem more loyal to the left wing of the Democratic Party than to their own employers.<p>Then proceeds to include no data that any donations are actually from software engineers.<p>Then the actual amounts:<p>&gt;Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has called for breaking up Facebook, Amazon and Google, raised more than $173,000 from tech industry employees in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg News’s analysis of public data on political contributions from employees at 10 large tech companies.<p>$173,000? Candidates raising money is usually discussed in terms of millions raised. so 173k? how is that newsworthy? that could be 173 ppl giving 1k.

I wonder what the support is after Warren revealed her tax plans?<p>I would think that increasing the capital gains taxes and requiring taxes on stock appreciation regardless of they are sold would affect Silicon Valley workers who often have a large part of their competition as stocks&#x2F;equity.

It is odd that so many otherwise tech savvy people are supportive of 20th century solutions to 21st century problems (to borrow Andrew Yang&#x27;s phrase).<p>People don&#x27;t want to use the 4th best search engine or twitter or airbnb. We all know this. These kind of things are naturally winner take all and will pop up elsewhere on the global stage if we push them down here.<p>Instead, apply a VAT. This would be a productive and holistic solution to a 21st century problem.

I work at Google and I’m voting for Bernie Sanders

Smaller tech companies will almost certainly be better for workers.<p>More competitive companies mean more demand for workers and higher salaries for workers.<p>More competition also likely means more innovation and better prices and more choices for customers.<p>The only people possibly losing out even slightly are the preexisting owners.

I prefer Andrew Yang&#x27;s method of adding on a general value added tax in addition to providing a basic income. This ensures a distribution of wealth that guarantees a minimum base while not discouraging people from aiming higher by forcing a cap on income.

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

I work at Google and I&#x27;ll be voting for Elizabeth Warren.

Standard Oil, Bell, etc. Anti-trust breakups have a history of being good for employees and share holders. I&#x27;m fairly confident the same would happen here.

Monopolies are also bad for labor, last time I&#x27;ve checked.

What a surprise. I&#x27;d love to be a billionaire, but I like Sanders opinions about whether they should exist. I&#x27;d love to be worth enough for it to hurt me, but I like Warren&#x27;s wealth tax idea. I&#x27;d love to pay lower taxes, or less progressive taxes, but I&#x27;m happy to support those less fortunate. As a matter of fact, I&#x27;m not even a single-issue voter! Perhaps most controversially, I think altruism is good for society. Shocking, I know.<p>What a crazy idea, voting against your own interest. <i>gasp!</i>

In re: &quot;Silicon Valley software engineers seem more loyal to the left wing of the Democratic Party than to their own employers.&quot; Specifically, <i>loyalty</i> to my &quot;own employers.&quot;<p>These are the folks (&quot;dozens&quot; of companies) who colluded to cheat their own developers of est. $8 <i>billion</i> dollars:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...</a><p>- - - -<p>FWIW, &quot;anecdata&quot;: I worked at one of the FAANG companies for about two years, and, yeah, hell yeah, the one I worked at should be broken up IMO.<p>An &quot;exploded view&quot; form would introduce buffers and breaks in very (IMO) appropriate places while still permitting the innovation and economic growth.<p>Put another way, I don&#x27;t think the economics of scale apply as cleanly to tech industry as they do to mass production. You want more communication rather than less, and that takes time&#x2F;energy&#x2F;attention.

The only reason anyone in the US supports these people is because they have never lived in the socialist big government utopia these politicians champion. In fact, not even the politicians themselves have lived in the society they propose! How is that for a brilliant starting point.<p>Ask anyone who has experienced these ideas in the flesh and you’ll find someone absolutely perplexed that US voters don’t laugh these people out of office.<p>As the saying goes: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.<p>All US voters really know about these ideas are the promises and a distorted theory and history that conveniently leaves out the horror, the reality, of these ideas. They have been implemented time and time again in various forms across continents and time. And they have laid to waste everything they touch.<p>You’d think people would have learned better by now. Sadly, that required an educational system rooted in fair historical exposure rather than one that pushes a single ideology at every level. This ignorance of history leads to repeating mistakes.<p>Here is the other fact that absolutely floors me: Nobody can name a single nation —not one— which, after adopting these policies, has elevated itself to a level even remotely resembling the success and accomplishments that can be attributed to free market capitalism.<p>Sure, capitalism isn’t perfect, nothing ever will be, yet it has elevated more people out of poverty, cured more disease and improved the lives of more people than anything else in recorded history.<p>The allure of these twisted ideas comes at the intersection of a badly educated public and the promise of solving all problems by taking from those who have more. Easy proposition.<p>Reality is that it never solves anything and often creates more problems. The $15&#x2F;hr minimum wage “solution” is one of the best modern examples of this effects.<p>The other element naive supporters miss is that the politicians proposing these ideas never live the reality they want you to live. They never live it before or after they are elected. See if you can name even a single politician who has, anywhere in the world and across modern history. That should tell you something.

Turkeys voting for Christmas. If you break up the large companies, this system will collapse. The reason why Facebook and Google are allowed to light massive stacks of shareholder cash on fire (in pay and acquisitions) is because they have a monopoly which churns off cash, and are protected by supervoting shares.<p>Very good for investors though. They can buy the monopoly and sell all the OSS&#x2F;moonshot bullshit.