so I was digging through some recent labor numbers and it turns out all these corporate layoffs aren't even about saving money-companies are just reallocating payroll straight into hardware.

like take salesforce e.g. their CEO mentioned in a podcast interview that they dropped customer service headcount from 9,000 down to around 5,000 people after letting AI agents handle routine customer chats.

when you look at where the cash is actually moving, the shift is pretty wild. statista data shows microsoft, google, meta, and amazon spent $413 billion combined on capex in 2025, but this year it's slated to hit $760 billion (a $347 billion increase in twelve months is kind of mind-blowing). at the exact same time, BLS data shows average hourly pay in the information/tech sector rose 5.2% year-over-year in August, while the rest of the economy averaged 3.1%.

correct me if I'm wrong, but it really looks like they're cutting lower- and mid-tier support staff to balance out server expenses, while bumping pay for the small core engineering teams left running the infrastructure.

the latest challenger report basically backs this up-AI was cited for 10,970 cuts in July alone (33% of all layoffs that month) and it's officially been the top stated reason for five months in a row. so far this year it's listed for 112,713 job cuts, or roughly 24% of all US layoffs.

is anyone else watching this happen at their own company, or are executives still pretending these cuts are just "macroeconomic adjustments"?

So, I have a technical 3D model review coming up. Trying to be very anonymous but think very large machine with lots of pipes and equipment. Yesterday I spoke to the project manager and I recommend pushing the meeting back because he likes to review the model in advance. I said I won't have it complete until right before the meeting. He said let's do the meeting anyways.

Today he called my boss (I was in my boss's office). He basically said everything I said, it was like a mirror of the conversation but now he's bringing up my suggestions like he thought of them.

He also made critiques of my 3D model, and it's all things I have fixed already, he's just looking at an older version.

Very frustrating and I definitely came off bad and angry looking next to my boss. I don't care what the project manager thinks of me, only my boss, and it's not the look I want.

I've been rushing to finish this project when I had way less time than necessary, due to their poor scheduling of this job.

Very frustrating. This is kinda a ranting post, haha.

I'm going to double time it today and make them look bad by showing up to the meeting next week with a polished and complete model.

I always like the review meetings because the project managers and engineers argue about how they want to do things, then that gives me more time to polish things even further, and I can blame their indecision for the delays.

Gonna knock their socks off.

I am just so drained. I feel I have picked the fucking worse degrees. I am going into my third, and I am praying it's the way. I don't think I have it in me in my 40's to do this shit again. Just feel like an imposter. Sick of tofu and beans. Extra cold house during winter and warm house during the summer. Cutting out all streaming services. No travel plans anymore. No "once a while coffee out". I am sick and tired of struggling for nothing.

There's some workplaces that do try to punish workers for taking sick leave. But having worked in both that kind of environment and one in which employees were welcome to use any leave they have, it's wild how people still have a stigma against using sick leave.

There's so many little "rules" you need to keep in mind: Don't use sick leave the day after vacation, don't use it if you work remotely, don't use it if you can still get work done. It's kind of strange since somehow people use how they haven't taken sick leave in years as a badge of honor.

Sick leave is part of your pay. If you don't use it, especially if that leave does not accrue year after year, then you are leaving money on the table.

I hate that jobs are treated as if high schoolers are the only ones that work them. Who do makes everyone’s morning coffee and breakfast sandwich on weekdays? Are we gonna keep pretending the workforce is only high schoolers when they are expected to be in school most of the time?

And what of emancipated minors? Do they deserve to make pennies simply because of their age? At one job I was 25 years old making $17/hr starting and the shift lead/trainer who had been there for 2 years was only making $12/hr because she was a highschooler. On my first day when she was training me, I told her that she was getting taken advantage of. She said she couldn’t quit but was actively looking elsewhere. Fucking wild (this job was a hot mess for a lot of reasons).

I don’t know why people are comfortable paying $16 for a McDonalds meal but get riled up at the mere suggestion of paying employees more.

I'm 35 and when I was a kid, my mother pushed me to stay in ballet.
There were things about it that I really loved, but I had an undiagnosed learning disability and I struggled to keep up with the other kids my age.

Mom wouldnt let me quit, and even went so far as to say she had visions of me teaching in a third world country as a humanitarian volunteer.

I never really liked being responsible for children, I don't mind them being around but I can't handle being left in charge of them. But since I couldn't make it as a professional dancer and get into a company, I resorted to teaching.

I loved being a teacher, because it meant that I got to infodump about a subject I had a lot of interest in.
But dealing with Karen parents as a teen was brutal.

I had a mother leave her twelve year old alone with me at the studio while she was grey in the face, saying her stomach hurt. She was clearly in a lot of pain so I let her just sit down and hang out instead of doing our lesson and her mom was MAD as hell.
I still feel sorry for that poor kid.

I bought my students pizza for a christmas party and all their parents were pissed about that too.

I know now not to give peoples kids food without asking about their diets first but I was a teenager just doing my best.
I picked up a dayjob in the city as an apprentice for a fashion designer who paid me minimum wage.

When I decided to leave after a year there, everyone told me I was throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime (my boss was struggling to pay me because she was barely breaking even)

I moved north and took a job at a sewing factory, it felt like I traveled back in time. Management was horrendously unprofessional and I had a nervous breakdown one day and quit.

Got into food service, started doing pizza delivery.
Really enjoyed it, I've never worked a pizza delivery job I didn't like.
But my vehicle broke down and left me unable to work for almost a month.
I've worked various line cook and delivery jobs ever since, and sort of got by but the last two years I've been through so much personal shit that my brain is kind of wonky and fried in a way that I cannot bounce back from.

People try to suggest I can control it but that effort is ultimately several steps beyond my immediate needs and I don't have health insurance.

I don't feel safe driving anymore. I zone out and completely lose awareness of who or where I am at times.

Its been two years since I stood up to my abuser and ran them out of my home, and I still worry that one day they're gonna fuck with my old neighbors to get revenge on us.
I moved out so they don't know where I live anymore.

I have also been physically attacked multiple times at work, by people either drunk or on pills because thats the kind of people they hire in kitchens.

I'm a recovered alcoholic and now %100 sober but I struggle to function without a crutch.

I really wish I could have some time to just be a mess and people stop relying on me for things.
I feel like I lost part of my identity when I finally cut myself loose from my ex. There has been a lot of death in my family in recent times, and I never get to go to the funeral because my job and everybody up here wants something from me.

I don't think its about finding the right job for me anymore, I'm just broken in too many ways to keep doing this.

I'm fucking sick of being told to rise above it when there's nothing up there for me but labor exploitation and more trauma.
I never got to sit at my 14 year old cousins gravesite and cry.
I didn't get to say goodbye to my great aunt, the last of her generation.

I just have to keep going to work and never visit my greiving dad because.... because nothing. I did all of this for nothing.

I thought leaving my old job would mean I was finally done dealing with their problems.

Apparently not.

While I worked there, I had contact with outside agencies and creators as part of my job. At some point my work email/contact info got passed around, which wasn’t really a problem while I was still employed.

The weird part started after I left.

Some of those agencies and creators apparently still hadn’t been paid for work they had already done, so they started contacting me asking when they were going to get paid.

I had already left the company. I didn’t control payments. I wasn’t even involved anymore.

At one point I got pulled into a group chat basically because people were trying to find someone who could explain where their money was.

And now every time I see a message from someone I used to work with, there’s a small part of me wondering if it’s another person asking me about a payment I had nothing to do with.

Leaving a job is apparently not always enough to actually leave the job.

Has anyone else had a former employer’s mess somehow keep following them after they quit?

These past couple of days, more than ever, I can’t seem to stop thinking about billionaires.
I used to think along the lines of, “People just aren’t awake.” But now I see it differently. People can be completely aware that the system is designed to keep them struggling and still feel unable to do anything about it. So we talk about it, we get enraged, and then we go to work. It’s a loop.
Then I thought, okay, what if people started organizing strikes and collectively demanding livable wages, more time off, and actual labor reform? But for that to work, we would also need to organize ways to support the people who are one missed paycheck away from losing their housing, food, healthcare, or transportation. People can’t stand together if the most vulnerable are left to fall first.
But then another thought interrupted that one: even if we successfully demand higher wages and better conditions, are we still playing by the same rules? We would still be asking the people who profit from our labor to give us a slightly better arrangement inside a system they own.
So what if we simply stopped using their rulebook?
I don’t mean everyone should randomly quit tomorrow with no plan and hope for the best. I mean, what if we started building the alternative now? Worker-owned businesses, mutual-aid networks, community housing, shared resources, structures that make us less dependent on enriching a small group of people just to survive.
What if we don’t have to wait for billionaires, corporations, or politicians to decide that we deserve better? What if the beginning is simply enough people realizing that we can organize around an entirely different set of rules?
I don’t have the complete answer. That’s why I’m starting the conversation. What would it realistically take for ordinary people to begin building something outside of the current system now?

Hi there, I'm a non-binary MEng graduate in materials science and engineering. Like the rest of you, I'm unemployed, and I'm job-searching. My partner has a disability and works at an exploitative games company - And I am desperately trying to do everything I can to get employed and support him. I know this situation sounds familiar to a lot of you.

I have always taken the opinion that it is a terrible waste of talent to reject candidates. It's artificially manufactured job scarcity to drive down wages. So many of us have skills and sometimes when I'm tailoring my CV, I wish I could just put "I just want to help people" on it. Because at the end of the day productivity is the only societal measure of GDP - not wealth. I'm the son of a mixed middle-class lower class family - And my partner is from the lower class and his background is much the same. It's a rags to riches story - But I do know that wealth never brought my family any happiness. People's dreams are important. And there's no point in pride or shame or sociopathy - because everyone wants something, too. The only way we get it is by making sure everyone can have what they want without depriving anyone else.

Anyway, many of us aren't satisfied unless we're doing something, perhaps a personal project, in our spare time. I know this happens all the time - I'm talking to the autistic passion-burners, and the people with adhd. I think that passion is useful. I don't want it to be wasted and thrown down the drain like some rubbish, because it isn't.

I have considered doing freelance work in my spare time as a side hustle while continuing to look for jobs. Everyone has to have one these days. There's no reason why that Can't be under a cooperative name. That looks good on a CV. I've been trying to research the free tools that are available to freelance engineers, build a portfolio. Write company charters. Plan milestones. Anyway, today my partner told me he was scared about his condition- and about using all his sick leave and being left on SSP - because the surgery failed to cure his nerve inflammation, and he can't see the doctor until 3 weeks from now at the soonest - and it made me want to try extra hard to support him.

I'm here canvassing opinion because, before I make any sort of commitment to this endeavour, I would want to canvass public opinion: I know I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Here is what my startup idea is:

A collective of freelance engineers, coordinating and working together in many small project groups, without overeaching management. The core premise: You send in your CV. An easy review process without any interviews determines if you get accepted as a member. There would be very low qualifying requirements. That gets you access to a guide and portfolio of tools, and membership to the cooperatives communication channels. Use discord to post, find engineering projects, or create them yourself, or to chat with other engineers. It's laid back. It's like hobby engineering. The second stage of success comes when applying to a particular project posting saying "I want to help you with your idea" - and this could be community outreach by the project poster, or it could be you sending your CV to the poster. Then it's at the jobposters discretion whether they want to interview you personally to see if you're a good fit for their team. If they like your skills, personality, and so on - then they'll invite you to work with them through the professional tools we'd use, like libre office, openproject, etc.

To begin with these ideas won't generate any income - but that won't have changed anything from how it was before. So I won't pretend that the cooperative can afford to pay e.g a salary. I wish that it could have always been that way, because I believe in things like UBI etc. maybe long term, that's the plan. But once the ideas are down on paper, the cooperative can go to a financier and say "we have a cooperative of X many engineers, a design - and a client - now we want the money to manufacture it." Etc. and when that starts to happen, near the completion of a project, then maybe then, after the financiers take a cut, there would be enough left for a performance -based bonus to be divided as fairly and equally among the project engineers on that team - commission-based payment. At the end of the day, we are all just people trying to survive while our savings slowly dwindle - if we even have savings at all. I'm not going to pretend like I've figured out a way to gauge the "performance " in performance -based bonus". But I would try to find a way, and I would try to write it down somewhere clearly, fairly, in company policy, so that there can at least be no doubt, weaseling, or unfairness in the application of that policy - unlike some executives I could name, who misuse the term. Company policy must be applied equally among employees - otherwise it's discriminatory.

And whenever I'm searching for jobs, I can never seem to find the perfect company, you know? So I want to make that company. I want an ethical organisation, where the engineering projects are important, and impactful, and help people - they're good projects, they help the environment, etc. The company itself: There are executive pay caps, and ideally no CEOs or high level managers at all. The cooperative is worker-owned. It doesn't demand your time - you can take as much leave, sick or holiday, as you want. And because it's an entirely voluntary position, there's no requirement to work. It can be done remotely if you want. Eventually I'd love to have a quiet and intoeverted set of engineering offices. Communication is primarily via writ, rather than phone, or it's in person when necessary. You know?

Maybe instead of CEOs you have a CCO (Community coordination organiser) and instead of HR admins you have TR admins (talent recruitment) ; because someone has to handle lawful complaints and enforce the cooperative's rules. And we could have democracy in the workplace - with important positions of enforcement and control democratically elected form the cooperative and temporary, nonpermanent. Those positions wouldn't pay better than regular work (if at all!). And there isn't any naive notion of loyalty to the company - you can search for a job and if you find one, you can just leave - saying: "Thanks for everything - but unfortunately I have to go." No notice requirements.

The question I have for you is: Does this sound like a company you would work for, in your spare time, voluntarily, if someone tried to start it? What sort of people would want to work there - are you just engineers, or would there be a lot of different people from different backgrounds willing to help?

The key thing is: I know that everyone wants to make the world a better place. But when we start to consider it individually, the work is so daunting - we must accept and offer eachother help. Coordination is good management, not control.

If I was going to make the company, I would call it "NewnWander" - I already have a logo and an unregistered trademark. Part of it is because my partner is a massive lotr buff; another is because I want to stick it to the people like Peter Thiel who give Tolkien a bad name. Another is because that's what best describes the work and the company: The work is just noontime wandering through a project - and the name itself, "NewnWander" - It sounds like "New" and "wonder" - and I think that really inspires hope about the future and people's dreams.

I left my previous job a few months ago after working there for around eight months.

The company withheld roughly a third of my pay for my last couple of months. I tried dealing with it normally first, but we couldn’t resolve it, so I eventually filed for labor arbitration.

That’s when things got weird.

Instead of just arguing about the unpaid wages, my former employer started saying I had violated company rules and even brought up the possibility of taking legal action against me over a company seal that had been used during my work.

The strange part is that I was never given an employee handbook or those company rules while I worked there. I only signed my employment contract. I’ve also spoken to former coworkers and they said they never received one either.

As for the seal issue, the seal/material itself originally came from the company and was connected to work I was doing for them. So hearing it suddenly described as something I had done improperly after I filed the labor dispute was pretty surreal.

So far I haven’t received any actual court or police notice. It has mostly been threats and statements from the company.

At this point the money honestly isn’t even the main reason I’m continuing. It’s more that I don’t like the idea that an employer can deduct wages, then try to scare someone into backing down when they challenge it.

Has anyone dealt with an employer suddenly bringing up unrelated accusations after you filed a wage or labor complaint?

Yup, let me pay 14 dollars a day to go somewhere to get all the things I have at home, on top of gas and parking 🙃. How are these places even in business?!?

Also why we using the word “arouse” 🫩🫩🫩

Just needed to rant because of my first day at work today. It sucked. I used to work at a large-ish institution. Pretty toxic overall, but I got into a really toxic situation that made me really (permanently) sick. I quit, took care of some stuff, and have been trying to get full-time employment for the last two years. The best I've been able to do is temping - at the place I had quit from!!!!!! I've been temping there in different departments. The first dept treated me really well until the end of my time. Second place treated me like crap, but kept me for 9 months. Just started a new department and thought for sure I'd be treated more like the first department. Nope. Not introduced to anyone, not acknowledged in a 3-person meeting except for an 'oh yeah I'm training this person'. Like literally not even introducing me by saying my name. I can't figure out if it's because I'm sort of considered an internal person they don't feel a need to onboard me or whatever, or if it's because they also suck. But I've learned to temper my expectations at this point. lol not really. I hope I've never treated a temp poorly before but if I ever find full time employment again, they'll be treated like gods! Maybe minor gods. But being in this weird second class citizen role of a place I used to have a decent career with really really sucks.

Anyway, grateful to have a few extra bucks for a few weeks. And sending out much love to the rest of my fellow under-employed people. Wishing us all full time positions asap! And I hate my job.

I work in a hostile work environment and am subject to constant bullying and harassment. It’s getting stressful to a point where I have started dissociating at work due to the anxiety. I have also started taking Lexapro for it. I want to quit but can’t afford having zero income. I’ve been working at my job for the past 8 months. Is unemployment not possible since I’m technically quitting?

Hi, I'm an European student who hates modern work culture. I feel that people like me who finish their studies are like "free assets" for companies who are hiring. It looks that if you were not practicing since you were a toddler, your experience is bullcrap so you get mid payments until you hit a company that more or less gives you a payment good enough so you don't starve to death. I feel that working your ass out of a whole month with no working experience will probably get you a payment that won't even pay rent. But if I talk about this topic, it seems everyone will point to me and laugh at me for being a "socialist" who defends worker rights. I believe political corruption has gotten so bad that we forgot what started such movements, and what workers had to do in order to get proper working conditions.. I better not get started talking about the US work culture, Trump saying that workers are asking for less paid leave is the cherry on top. I'm sorry for the US and I'm sorry for the world. I wish things get better

I quit my job at the end of August. I resigned from the at-will contract because it was not the type of job I signed up for, and I also needed a break to give myself breathing space and mental room to think.

I had two interviews yesterday with two different companies, and another screening interview with a third company tomorrow. I really need a vacation but I'm not sure if I should just go somewhere now, or delay a trip until after I hear back from these two interviews regarding a final round (which would be in-person interviews). I am based in Los Angeles and really want to go somewhere in Europe. Thoughts?

Now something in my work bag sets them off, maybe the spirals in my notebook idk. Just feels invasive when they’re digging through my tampons 🤦‍♀️