I've worked for top... 10? Silicon Valley companies that you most definitely know. Two major ones. I would sometimes do napkin math, like once a year, to see if I was actually worth my salary. I usually was way ahead but when I wasnt sure I pivoted, just out of pride really. I always had this image of me working for startups where every dollar mattered even though I wasn't.
Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?
31–34 of 34 posts
Re: Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?
#32Dividing profits by employee count and calling this "fair share" is ludicrous. It exhibits a childish understanding of the world and the economy. If you believe that you're cheated, and you are creating significantly more value than you're paid, start your own single-person company and sell your services to others. The truth is that by working for a company, you get access to environment that makes you much more prod…
Which risks?
Mega corps have access to guaranteed bailout by governments as they're considered National Security concern, plus massive lobbying departments to buy all the laws they need to favor themselves over most potential competitors both external and internal, plus massive legal departments with experts at twisting the laws they didn't manage to buy yet into meaning whatever they want them to mean.
And after all that socialism-for-the-rich, any remaining risk is transferred directly to their employees in the form of lay offs, coupled with non-compete clauses that forbid the most competent, for months to years, from working at their core area of expertize, plus arbitration clauses that forbid them from seeking relief at the actual courts. Clauses that are enforced by the courts due to the aforementioned lobbying and purchased laws.
Re: Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other side: without the workers, those large capital investments are useless lumps of metal. Both Capital and Labour invest in the company, in different ways. It's not at all clear to me that the optimal arrangement is that Capital reaps the bulk of the return from those investments.
This is literally opposite of the truth. In almost all businesses, the wages constitutes higher share of revenues than profits.
The value of a business isn't its wages or its immediate profits: it (over-simplified) represents a claim on the future profits.
Equity grants (and especially options) aren't particularly controversial in tech, and I'm not saying they're the answer to the problem at hand. But they're a mechanism for allowing workers to share in the gain from their investment. All the problems (especially with US tax treatment of options) notwithstanding.
Re: Show HN: How much profit does your employer make per employee?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Implying people are cheated is a nice way to increase dissatisfaction, if the goal is to produce resentment. I'm all for unions and collective bargaining but I'm not a fan of manipulated dissatisfaction. Access to many of the companies I worked for allowed me to support their monopolies just like desktop bundling (MS), pay store fees(AAPL), search advertising (GOOG), and so on. I guess you could call that "more produ…
It's probably easier to understand this concept if you forget about tech, and think about something like steel mill, or a mine. If you want to make money as a worker making steel, if you just start doing it in your backyard by yourself, you'll produce very little steel in an hour of your labor. If, instead, you obtain access to enormous, capital-intensive machinery, by joining a pre-established company that owns a bl…
OK so you avoid my answer and resort to "teaching me the concept" as if disagreement means misunderstanding.
The concept here is that you are cherry picking non-average companies.
And you are straw manning alternatives.
So, I disagree.