Tech's Elite Hates Labor

Tech's Elite Hates Labor
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They just don't want to see, pay or think about the little people - my jet is 2 years old, thats like keeping the same phone for 3 months, I am busy speccing out the gold toilet seat on my new one, please don't bother me.

Amazon warehouse workers of today have it nearly just as bad as workers a decade ago.

It reminds me of that scene from Mike Judge's Silicon Valley satire where Gavin Belson, the big-tech CEO, sees protestors out the office window and says he misses the days when big business owners like him could have those protestors shot on sight[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtpibIF4MY

For over a decade it was an absolute survival related imperative for these companies to hire as many people as possible, and to keep them from going to their competition. Google was so afraid of competition in the ads space that they bought entire companies for hundreds millions, and paid the former employees of these companies huge salaries for years ... just for the purposes of shutting them down -- including my former employer (see Page #39 of https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/downl...)

They were willing to let compensation rates skyrocket. To hire like crazy with very little in the way of concrete performance results in terms of shipping more product or increasing revenues. Because they were mortally afraid that someone would compete with them and their ad revenue firehose would stop increasing in pressure each quarter.

So what's changed? Why are they suddenly willing to unleash talent into the market where it can be eaten up by competition?

Isn't Google worried that among the people it lays off (or fails to hire) there's someone who will finally conjure up a company that finally effectively takes marketshare from AdWords or Ad Exchange or whatever?

I don't know the final piece to this puzzle is. Maybe people here have some ideas. (In particular anybody who is still in the ad-tech space who can speak to current trends)

The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from.

The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families. And it likely comes as no surprise that very successful workers (celebrities, but also writers and directors that you may not have even heard of) can easily make 10-100x that— it clearly hasn’t affected the top of the ladder’s pay. It’s not unheard of for 20 year olds to make millions right out of college on their first movie, either— https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2022/01/28/apple-tv-plus...

There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year. The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.

Imagine the boon to taking risks on smaller companies and projects if software engineers could easily transfer from large companies to smaller projects and teams they were interested in, without worrying about who was processing payroll or transferring retirement benefits or healthcare?