231–240 of 469 posts
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Nothing to do with cheap money, tech companies are some of the most profitable and revenue efficient companies in history.
And software engineers, even entry level, are some of the most highly paid workers on the planet.
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This is a YC owned site and it is against the interests of YC and all it's incubated startups. A lot of founders come here, so yes that group is likely mostly made up of founders.
If more than 0.01% of this site's userbase were founders, I'd be shocked. This is largely a place where tech workers pretend to be in the know.
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It's not very surprising though. Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian. VCs doing zero labour and getting rich off the backs of workers is a phenomena that cant easily be defended unless you buy into this ideology.
> Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian. Unions are a libertarian concept. Freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Those at the other end of the spectrum stand for supply management instead.
If so, unions and the very opposite of unions are “libertarian concepts” and we’ve reached a point where we’re just talking about how words are meaningless and are entirely off-topic.
I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing. Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strateg…
So I'll give an addendum to Occam's. Godelski's Razor? Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily attributed to emergence.
I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing. Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strateg…
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In the last decade or so, there were several times I brought this up on HN (anonymously), and each time my opinion was attacked as not making any sense. Times change.
I've been making pithy comments about tech bro unionization on the orange site for years now and I know exactly what you're talking about. Anything that even smelled like worker solidarity was shot down with vacuous logic about how the 10x engineers in big tech can't possibly be asked to associate with a lowly web master in a fly-over state. Then suddenly today I said something and instantly got 100 upvotes...
They're more likely to empathize with the CEO who's complaining how hard it is to fire people in Europe than with the average even 10x tech worker.
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> Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian. Unions are a libertarian concept. Freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Those at the other end of the spectrum stand for supply management instead.
Would you say that right-to-work is also a libertarian concept? In the context of the United States, right-to-work employers are under less government scrutiny as they don’t have to interact with e.g. the NLRB. If so, unions and the very opposite of unions are “libertarian concepts” and we’ve reached a point where we’re just talking about how words are meaningless and are entirely off-topic.
This isn't a common term where I'm from, so I am admittedly not intimately familiar with it, but as I understand its meaning, as defined by Wikipedia, it removes some degree of freedom of association. So, no, it is in stark contrast to libertarianism.
Right before COVID-19 stay at home order in Chicago, a bunch of improvisers who preformed at the popular i.o theater put together a list of demands which basically asked for a bunch of changes to make the lives of performers better. They were not going to perform until those changes were made. The owner didnt respond for a few days and then said, "Hey! Heard you. Great valid concerns. But I'm actually shutting the th…
>Sometimes companies can/will just say no or worse find some reason to let the person go.
This just seems like a story of good/bad timing, not a story of the theater owner taking a hit just to make the performers suffer. A "never let a tragedy go to waste" story if you will. Plenty of theaters, and other businesses (a lot of entertainment), shut down for long periods during the pandemic.
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> Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian. Unions are a libertarian concept. Freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Those at the other end of the spectrum stand for supply management instead.
I've been very libertarian (increasingly so over the decades) for a while and pretty pro union. My issues come from govt forced union jobs in some places, and likewise when govt interferes with planned strikes etc... as much as a railway strike would literally hurt for most of the country, as an example.
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I have a recent counter razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by self-interest" Many of these orgs laying off thousands have fallen into the depths of a moral maze -- where rational thinking is just impossible and all that's left is self-preservation.
I'm not sure that there's a pragmatic difference between harming people out of malice and harming people out of self-interest. If someone causes harm out of ignorance (a better word than stupidity, in my opinion), then they can be educated and they'll likely stop causing harm. If someone causes harm out of self-interest or malice, it can be assumed that they'll continue causing that harm and there's no simple remedy.…
If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)