Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

mercurynews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 237 posts

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

#101

Post by adamch »

hiram112 wrote: post #43
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…

> 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. While you'll no doubt continue telling the deplorables that they're racist and xenophobic for failing to welcome their currency and cost-of-living arbitraging foreign-replacements with open arms, could you at least refrain from pretending that the…

Presumably those immigrants also increase demand for food, housing, services, transport, etc. Whether the increased demand outdoes the increased supply or vice-versa is going to vary situation by situation.

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

#102

Post by malandrew »

Scipio_Afri wrote: post #7

Boost the wage floor. High skilled workers have more force to push against the wage supply price that employers set; they have a lot of power to set wages, including an entire department called HR dedicated to ensuring they get the best deal as they can. Low wage employees do not have that power.

Raising the wage floor just puts more upward pressure on housing.

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

#103

Post by rrcaptain »

mlindner wrote: post #64
Scipio_Afri wrote: post #7

Boost the wage floor. High skilled workers have more force to push against the wage supply price that employers set; they have a lot of power to set wages, including an entire department called HR dedicated to ensuring they get the best deal as they can. Low wage employees do not have that power.

The wage floor has been continuously getting raised. Many areas of California have the highest minimum wage laws in the country. That isn't going to solve the problem.

Only very recently and many haven't even raised all the way. But I agree that it's not going to solve the problem, only a maximum income can solve that.

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

#104

Post by sk5t »

jimmy1 wrote: post #87
whb07 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mike Rowe isn’t talking about unskilled labor. He’s talking about skilled labor like plumbing, carpentry, welding, electricians, etc. Not a stock boy and the like.

Might be anecdotal, but hooo weee, if you are a good electrician right now, you can essentially name your price. Companies will pay it because they aren't willing to take the risk of having it done wrong. Family knows a couple career electricians -- company is paying for them to come out of retirement, paying $50-55 an hour, AND letting them keep their retirement benefits.

I would have expected "name your price" electrician work to be more in the $100-120/hr range in a high-CoL area.

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

#105

Post by yjhoney »

mynameishere wrote: post #96
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…

Thanks for the healthy dose of skepticism. We moved away from Github (their closed source policy always seemed fishy to me) and started hosting our own gitlab instance instead. Some products our students are building: llip.io and c0d3.com.

The students working on llip.io built an android/ios react-native app as well as a webapp. Everyone working on that project got a job, so there is no development on that anymore.

The remaining group of students is working on c0d3.com and running beta on it. Currently they volunteer at the library with FCC on Saturdays to get more people using it to improve it. If you want to meet them, show up for the Saturday meetups! https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/events/qzddrmyxpbgc...

I do empathize with your concern though.

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

#106

Post by tomjakubowski »

mlindner wrote: post #59
jchrisa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent. Are the landlords local?

All apartment complexes around here are owned by Californian corporations. So yes, they're local. For example, Essex: https://www.essexapartmenthomes.com/about They're even publicly listed: NYSE:ESS Or the Irvine company, after which Irvine, California is named after because they designed the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company

Irvine and the Irvine Company are both named for the Irvine Ranch and James Irvine who developed the property after donating a chunk to the University of California.

A fun fact is that the University of California, Irvine, was named that six years before the city was incorporated.

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

#107

Post by orangecat »

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…

Employees are left with an equation that looks basically like: enormous salary - obscene rent = just a bit more cash flow than you’d earn in software anywhere else.

It's probably true that the cost of minimally acceptable housing drives entry level tech salaries, but they go way up from there. A senior SWE at Google with salary+bonus+stock of $300k/year has a whole lot of disposable income even after the ridiculous housing expenses.

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

#108

Post by Silfen »

rrcaptain wrote: post #100
woah wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, Manhattan's vacancy rate is quite low[0][1].

[0] https://www.nakedapartments.com/blog/nyc-vacancy-rate/ [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/18HSR.pd...

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

#109

Post by Scipio_Afri »

space_fountain wrote: post #58
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…

First thanks for what you're doing. I think it's definitely part of the solution. My worry though is that I don't think everyone is equipped to be a programer. The thing I keep coming back to is my younger brother. He's got mental disabilities which mean he can't read or do math at more than a very basic level (first grade maybe) and for what ever it's worth he also scored pretty low on IQ tests. Despite a bit of a f…

Replying so that the other person pleading for skepticism in this thread, and myself, can be seen near the top. This non-profit is not vetted, has a very basic website, has no proof of the students, this persons account is 24 days old.

Please be mindful that while this all sounds like a great idea and I hope it really exists, this also could be a scam as there is no evidence or any 3rd party that this is a real nonprofit which has been paying 20 people 2k a month to learn to code.

Please don't donate until you're sure this person is using the money as they claim. Attempting to verify their website and facebook leads to some red flags - no pictures of events, just events on facebook with 1 or 2 people attending, no documented proof of the 16 people who are full stack developers. If the non-profit is successful as they've said it is, then if he doesn't want to burn through his own savings (again supposedly) then he needs to seriously do better marketing and proof. Even with those things, I'd be skeptical unless it was independently verified.

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

#110

Post by gpm »

Barrin92 wrote: post #21
lupire wrote: post #6

The author almost noticed Simpson's paradox: > Surprisingly, the UC Santa Cruz study suggests that employment in low wage industries is growing. The share of worker in jobs considered low-wage in 1997 grew 25 percent over the next 20 years, while the percent working in middle- and high-wage jobs declined. The problem isn't that wages are dropping for certain work; the problem is that middle-wage jobs are being automa…

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…

Firefighters - fire retardant buildings, sprinklers? Anecdotally I've heard that we need a lot less fire fighting these days because fires don't spread the same way anymore. I would be interested in seeing real data though.

Caretakers - all those robotic vacuums that are starting to become ubiquitous. Certainly not a total replacement but it lowers demand for humans.

But you don't need to automate a job to depress it's wages, just increase the supply of potential workers by automating many of the other jobs.

Post reply on HN