Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
Even the CEO is working class by that definition.
They are petit bourgeoisie, they work for a living but their interests are aligned with capital as they’re hired by the owners to extract as much surplus labor as they can and will often get bonuses tied to how well they do that, they’re the overseer.
Software developers work and contribute to the company, they are the ones whose surplus labor is being extracted. They may get a larger chunk of the value they create but they don’t get all of it. They are still in class conflict with the owners to get all the value they create. They’re house slaves, treated better but still fundamentally against the owner.
Would you say that the only people who are not proletariat are those who are “financially independent” in the sense that they don’t need to work for an income?
No, I’d say that “financially independent” really means your dependent on capitalism, and that dependency will lead you to defend capitalism from any challenges. That is the bourgeois position and puts you against the proletariat. Their are other classes though besides proletariat and bourgeoisie with different relations to capital. Petite bourgeoisie are neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat but there interests align with the bourgeoisie/capital and against the proletariat, but they are not completely dependent on capitalism so they won’t defend it as zealously. There is also the independent worker class who work for themselves outside a corporate structure, eg. An independent farmer, whose interests don’t align with either the bourgeoisie or proletariat.
Difference in stock options as compensation for executives vs managers or the entire middle management layer is beyond insane. Like exponentially more.
Some. But at firms of even modest size, though, a CEO receives ownership of capital, not just salary, as compensation.
So do plenty of mid level engineers at Google.