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Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

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Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#91

Post by yjhoney »

refurb wrote: post #83
yjhoney wrote: post #34

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…

Congrats on an original model and impressive results. I love how donors know exactly where the money goes - to support themselves while training. Do you think it's scaleable?

I don't think a donation model is scalable if it came from corporations. In my group of friends of high income earners (> 200k), most of them donate less than 5% of their income.

Our students are grouped into teams to launch real products so they can list work experience on their resumes. When they start their interview process, they train new students on their codebase.

I think if some of our students launch profitable products that are sustainable, we could show corporations that it might make sense to invest and train their community and hire from there rather than constantly 'look for the best' around the world.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#92

Post by refurb »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #17
rayvy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you'll get downvoted to kingdom come, but I actually checked out the included links - interesting stuff

> I'm sure you'll get downvoted to kingdom come, but I actually checked out the included links - interesting stuff Oh, indeed I shall. Still, we're sold a bundle of goods by the capitalists that "unions are evil" and et cetera, yet when when it is advantageous to the very capitalists, they form unions of their own to hold down the very workers' wages. Now, some unions do indeed suck. They were ineffective and only la…

It's less about capitalism and more about people just lining their own pockets. It's human nature.

It's not like unions aren't susceptible to the same thing. [1]

[1]http://nlpc.org/2018/01/18/top-ten-union-corruption-stories-...

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#93

Post by dublidu »

CydeWeys wrote: post #46

I have when the news writes an entire article around a single report, but then fails to link to that report. You had one job ... Anyway, here's the report in question: http://www.everettprogram.org/main/wp-content/uploads/TIGHTR... Reading the fine details of the report, you see that the top-line metric is real income, adjusted for inflation and local cost of living. And the #1 factor that's proved ruinous to local c…

If only we could aloe property assessments to increase with a local cost of living index, we would at least have enough property tax revenue to pay teachers.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#94

Post by yjhoney »

0xffff2 wrote: post #90
yjhoney wrote: post #34

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…

That's great, but isn't it orthogonal to the topic at hand? We need non-tech jobs in Silicon Valley as much as anywhere else. Even if we could get every single person in the bay area a job as a software developer of some kind, we would be left in a barren wasteland of office buildings with no services. The solution clearly has to be to somehow make living here viable regardless of how you're employed.

If there were fewer people interesting in taking up non-tech jobs, then supply/demand would drive up wages for non-tech jobs. So before we get to "barren wasteland of office buildings with no services", there would be a happy medium where service industries would be high paying.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#95

Post by [deleted] »

yjhoney wrote: post #91
refurb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on an original model and impressive results. I love how donors know exactly where the money goes - to support themselves while training. Do you think it's scaleable?

I don't think a donation model is scalable if it came from corporations. In my group of friends of high income earners (> 200k), most of them donate less than 5% of their income. Our students are grouped into teams to launch real products so they can list work experience on their resumes. When they start their interview process, they train new students on their codebase. I think if some of our students launch profita…

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#96

Post by mynameishere »

yjhoney wrote: post #34

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…

Everything about this post is highly dubious, especially all the numbers involved. And then this:

We do not teach for loops and while loops. (Recursion is the only loop we use)


...okay. Maybe that's a joke, but look at that Github account! Your typical 18 year old CS freshman could throw together a more impressive set of code than this "charity" that has the wherewithal to pay out 25,000 (or 24,000) times 20 dollars and landed 14 of said students "full stack" positions. My shit company would drop all 14 of their resumes right in the garbage. Where are they getting hired?

And who in hell would spend their 401k on something like that? No one. Not the greatest fool in the world. Especially not a fool who managed to gain all of 41 Twitter follows in the process.

...just a plea for a minimum of skepticism. Hate to see a rather obvious swindle fool people.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#97

Post by woah »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #74

How about: 1) Introducing a much higher tax rate for rental property income. 2) Making property taxes be reassessed every single year unless your AGI is lower than average and you are a resident. 3) Introducing a much (much!) higher tax for non-residents/foreign investors who buy a house purely for investment, and sometimes they don't even rent it out (I know a few rich folks from FAANG who bought a handful of houses…

My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don’t rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices. The real fix is to build enough housing for everyone. Eliminating prop 13 could help with this, since it would cause homeowners to be penalized for high home values, building political will to build more housing and bring down the prices.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#98

Post by rrcaptain »

pkaye wrote: post #89
Barrin92 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the jobs that are mentioned in the article that are being hit the hardest are teachers, firefighters, caretakers and so forth. How many of those have been automated away? It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots. No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx…

If you look up Transparent California, some public employees make pretty good income. In San Jose, there are quite a few of them making >$500k. Similar with other cities. And that doesn't count the lifetime pension, health, early retirement some of them get. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2017/san-jose/

>And that doesn't count the lifetime pension, health, early retirement some of them get.

That website explicitly includes benefits, what are you talking about?

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#99

Post by rrcaptain »

burlesona wrote: post #51
empath75 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s a step missing in the analysis there. If tech workers are spending all this money — what are they spending it _on_? If they’re spending it locally shouldn’t that increase wages locally?

No. They’re spending it all on housing. To be clear the flow is: tech companies make enormous revenue but require high skill workers. To make this work they pay whatever it costs to get workers and no more - in this case that means just enough to offset the enormous cost of housing. Since the baby boomers practically banned all housing development in the bay once their little burns were built, this result in a little…

Or until landlords are abolished like they should be.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#100

Post by rrcaptain »

woah wrote: post #97
deanmoriarty wrote: post #74

How about: 1) Introducing a much higher tax rate for rental property income. 2) Making property taxes be reassessed every single year unless your AGI is lower than average and you are a resident. 3) Introducing a much (much!) higher tax for non-residents/foreign investors who buy a house purely for investment, and sometimes they don't even rent it out (I know a few rich folks from FAANG who bought a handful of houses…

My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don’t rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices. The real fix is to build enough housing for everyone. Eliminating prop 13 could help with this, since it would cause homeowners to be penalized for high home values, building political will to build more housing and bring down the prices.

>My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don’t rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices.

No that's actually a large part of housing problems. Like a third of Manhattan real estate is empty. And Manhattan is already super dense but still has homeless people.

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