I vaguely remember reading about something like this on the Kiwi Fediverse node. I'll try my best to recap, but do keep in mind that I am no authority on the reality of programming as a field of employment. Everything I say should be assumed to be prefaced by "If I'm not mistaken," and if I'm wrong on any count, please let me know.
Google, and other Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Twitter by extension, have been dealing with a
lot of negative press over the last half a decade or so. Basically, the Trump administration exposed a
lot of serious holes in their business model and Silicon Valley's trying their damndest to memoryhole all their issues and put on a facade of stability for their shareholders so that they could still maintain the status quo.
Throughout the twilight years of the Bush administration and the entirety of the Obama administration, Silicon Valley executives like Zuckerberg have been championing the H1-B visa as a source of skilled migration into the USA to plug up a glaring labour shortage. This in turn, had the side-effect of inspiring a generation of autistic teenagers who spent too much time on the internet to work toward programming degrees so that they could learn to code.
What Zuckerberg et al neglected to mention is that the USA already
did have a thriving workforce of programmers dating all the way back to the 1960s. These people were
extremely well-educated and they were getting paid anywhere between $100k on the lowest end annually to upwards of $500k annually with benefit packages and pensions on top of that, even if they were rank-and-file programmers. Other industries have benefitted heavily from NAFTA and other such free trade agreements, but Silicon Valley still had too many people who knew their value which was ultimately affecting their bottom line.
Then enters South Asia. The Indian subcontinent as a whole actually has an extensive history of mathematical innovation, so they took to programming quite quickly as soon as major population centres like Lahore, Karachi, Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka, and so on achieved widespread internet access. Suddenly, you had a bunch of people who aren't necessarily coding prodigies but still understood the basics who were looking to get the fuck out of the third world, and to them, a significantly lower wage with reduced benefits would be like finding the golden goose. This led to a steady stream of H1-B visa immigrants coming into Silicon Valley who were getting paid like $50k annually with next-to-nothing for benefits,
replacing the well-trained, well-educated, but but highly-paid American workforce. The cherry on top? H1-B visa workers are functionally identical to indentured servants. They won't question anything because they fear that even the slightest outburst would mean that their visa gets revoked and they have to go back to their third world hellhole.
One of Trump's first executive orders when he took office in 2017 was actually
raising the minimum required salary of an H1-B visa worker from $50k to something more "reasonable," like $80-90k annually. This pissed off a
lot of Silicon Valley executives, because their huge pool of labour suddenly became much more expensive to maintain. They alienated a whole bunch of their pre-existing American workforce, so the older people who knew exactly what they were doing weren't an option. Their South Asian H1-B visa workforce just got WAY more expensive to hold onto and yet they can't let go of yes-men who actually know what they're doing, so they needed something to fill in the gap: that entire generation of autistic people who just graduated college and are now looking for gainful employment while showing up to their job interviews in programming socks.
It's not like these people didn't already have experience either. The funny thing about open-source software is that anyone with the resolve and the know-how can become a maintainer, a bug tester, or what have you. This placed Silicon Valley at a
really interesting fork in the road. They could just hire these people outright and that would be the end of the matter,
but these people already had their feet in the doors of a lot of valuable open source projects that these companies make use of today (i.e. the Linux kernel which is the backbone of countless other open source projects, most notably Google's own Android and ChromeOS platforms).
Their new workers granted Silicon Valley an unprecedented amount of soft power in the world of open source software. Don't believe me? Look at Linus Torvalds and how he actually
apologised for the first time over being the same uncooperative git he always was. Look at Richard fucking Stallman, the goddamn pioneer of open source software as a movement: he's now more or less completely blacklisted because he just acting like the eccentric contrarian he's been ever since the days of the MIT AI Laboratory in the 1970s. IBM bought out Red Hat in ~2019, and their first decision was to nix CentOS altogether and place more emphasis on paid versions of RHEL. This is
despite the fact that CentOS was actually extremely popular among the community as a "vanilla" implementation of RHEL that was valuable for diagnosing problems with existing paid RHEL installations and offered a paid upgrade path to RHEL to begin with.
What makes all of this even
more beneficial for Silicon Valley is the fact that their workforce will
gladly acquiesce to draconian policies if it means that their sensibilities aren't offended
and if they have someone else that they can subjugate. It doesn't matter if Facebook's community guidelines make no fucking sense, that Facebook moderator's gonna be fucking happy when he slaps the banhammer on some autistic retard who's just trying to have a good time shitposting. It doesn't matter if community charters and guidelines are often used to stifle legitimate criticism of the direction that a particular project is going, if you say the "F" word or if you're misogynistic in any way I see fit, you're going down!
So to recap:
- They championed H1-B visas as a means of attracting skilled labour into the USA, when in reality, they just needed indentured servants who get paid a pittance and won't question their decisions.
- Trump decided to attack Silicon Valley's collective wallet by making them pay their indentured servants more. This led to them hiring a bunch of autistic trannies who also have fixations on open source software
- The autistic trannies provided a gateway for Silicon Valley to penetrate the otherwise insular open source ecosystem, which led to pillars of the community like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds getting either disgraced or forced to play along.
- The autistic trannies literally don't give a shit about their bullshit work policies as long as they get to enforce their world view onto other people.
