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Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

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Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#21

Post by glenjamin »

Spivak wrote: post #16
bitwize wrote: post #5

It reminds me of a song I sang to myself to the tune of the Lego Movie theme, surveying the tech job market at the time: Everything is adtech, Everything is marketing, surveillance, and spam...

If that's your view of the world you gotta stop working on B2C products and take some B2B jobs. You might start singing "Everything is enterprise sales" but at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same.

> at least you'll be working in an environment where the people using your software and the people paying you are the same.

Close, but not quite - because you end up selling to management or executives when it's the rank-and-file who actually use the software and don't get much purchasing power.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#22

Post by bri3d »

frankbreetz wrote: post #19
superb-owl wrote: post #7

There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…

Aren't Amazon Truck Drivers hourly employees? What risk and liability do they have? I am not sure how this an MLM like your other examples

Amazon have a gig delivery program called Amazon Flex. Additionally, in many markets Amazon truck drivers aren't Amazon employees, they work for DSPs (Delivery Service Partners), although I think Amazon do require that individual drivers be full-time hourly employees with benefits, it's still a liability fan-out mechanism. Founding a DSP is marketed heavily at "entrepreneurial spirits" in various markets who aren't as likely to be skilled or experienced negotiators.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#23

Post by Zigurd »

The analogy doesn't work. MLMs are outright fraud. Even worse than "gig economy" "jobs" that are really just stealing your car's value to pay a large fraction of your supposed income. They exploit people who are not intelligent enough to escape their come ons. in both these cases you end up with nothing.

Outside of for-profit and lower-tier schools that really have no business issuing postgraduate degrees, the worst that happens to postgraduate degree holders is that their income model takes a ding for not having been in industry since getting their undergraduate degree. but they still mostly have a prosperous future.

Grad students get exploited as cheap labor when they could have been making more, and advancing industry careers, for sure. But that's not nearly as sad as turning people of low education and low attainment into pyramid scheme victims. That's outright evil.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#24

Post by paxys »

gruez wrote: post #8
msla wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the politically-correct term for pyramid scheme these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing > MLM salespeople are, therefore, expected to sell products directly to end-user retail consumers by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing, but more importantly they are incentivized to recruit others to join the company's distribution chain as fellow salespeople so that these can…

>politically-correct term I don't get it. Were people getting canceled for saying "pyramid scheme" or something?

No, the previous commenter is incorrect. Pyramid scheme is a well defined category of fraud. A MLM/affiliate marketing company may be a pyramid scheme, or it may not. Courts have routinely ruled that the business category is perfectly legal.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#25

Post by parineum »

msla wrote: post #6
_aleph2c_ wrote: post #4

MLM: Multilevel Marketing scheme

It's the politically-correct term for pyramid scheme these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing > MLM salespeople are, therefore, expected to sell products directly to end-user retail consumers by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing, but more importantly they are incentivized to recruit others to join the company's distribution chain as fellow salespeople so that these can…

> It's the politically-correct term for pyramid scheme these days.

It's actually different though the business model is the same.

Pyramid schemes actually frequently ran without an actual product. Those were made illegal (in the US). MLM's have a product but selling the product is secondary to recruiting underlings. The way to make money in an MLM is to never buy the product and recruit people who buy and you get a cut.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#27

Post by RicoElectrico »

superb-owl wrote: post #7

There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…

Yeah, I just don't understand how franchises are able to get away with their shitty tactics, at least in the EU.

They do not provide any net value to the society, all they do is shift the risk onto the franchisee with a pretty much unilateral contract. You have to engage in whatever shit they come up with, like buying expensive equipment. (McDonald's pizza anyone?)

The only instances where a franchise makes sense is when a franchisee could realistically walk away from the contract and stay in the business somehow.

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#29

Post by toiletfuneral »

superb-owl wrote: post #7

There's definitely a trend where large corporations/institutions push risk and liability down onto individuals, who have a hard time quantifying it properly. They make promises about "independence" and "entrepreneurship" and "building wealth", but they're really just taking advantage of an information asymmetry, tricking uninformed individuals into accepting a deal that is much worse than they think. See: Uber, Subwa…

[dead]

Re: Is Everything an MLM? (2019)

#30

Post by mandevil »

My wife is a pharmacist. Over the past two decades the number of pharmacy schools has increased and some schools have gotten bigger classes, such that now every year there are about 25% more Pharm.D's made than in 2005. The result has been a predictable decrease in pharmacist quality of life- the pay is basically the same number of dollars today that you would get in 2005 so inflation has made them poorer, the hours are worse, the tech hours are worse, etc.- because pharmacy school is selling the same dream of respectable, well paying work. Law school has already done one cycle of boom, massive overproduction, bust, and is starting to boom again. I know a couple of airline pilots who face similar problems- very slippery rungs at the lowest ends of the ladder, with a lot of the feel of a pyramid scheme (generally to get enough hours to get to the higher rungs you need to be an instructor teaching other people to fly) and for the few who can grab one of the highest rungs (senior pilot at a major) quite a bit of job security and well-paid respect.

If she hadn't become a pharmacist, my wife's back-up plan was to be a chemical engineer, which generally means she would be working for an oil company baby-sitting a machine in a refinery. Over the same period that pharmacists job quality declined, ExxonMobil went from the largest company in the US by market capitalization to the 12th biggest in the US, and from what I've read the quality of life of ChemE's has declined a lot in step with that. So this clearly isn't something where "STEM jobs will save you."

I remain puzzled as to why software engineering seems to be immune to this overproduction problem. Is it just that since software is still eating the world, we haven't found a natural limit to the demand for our kind of engineers yet? Is it that we are so unproductive and failure-prone that we guarantee ourselves full employment?

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