91–100 of 434 posts
I think because individual tech workers are so highly paid relative to other industries, we fail to see how low our pay is relative to what the people at the top are making. A high performing Google engineer may make 500k+ in total comp, Sundar Pichai makes $100M+ in many years. That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high. You see startup founders who exit with generational wealth (tens or hundreds…
It's easy for laid off tech workers to start their own companies. Lots of my friends and colleagues have over the years. The fun thing about starting your own company, is you find out how much you're really worth!
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This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.
I wouldn’t really say it’s a cloak of victimhood as much as a disillusionment of those that aren’t acknowledging they’re labor is being exploited combined with the fact that attempting to organize can be met with a loss of work.
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> ..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. ... There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable ind…
Also looking at the trajectory of Hollywood its all down, down, down. Award show ratings have been plummeting faster than a meteorite[1]. Box Office sales have been dropping for years and this was before covid, after covid sales are back but are at a level last seen since 2000! [1]. The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there…
Hollywood puts out maybe 2-4 "blockbuster" high-marketing-budget movies that are decent or better per year, sure, but the US film industry overall, and the smaller-splash side of Hollywood, produces probably 3-4x that many (and that's just the US—there are usually a bunch of decent-or-better foreign productions per year, too)
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WGA is just one of many unions, but you’re right— getting into the “best” guilds is itself a process; but ostensibly, it’s to ensure that the guild keeps its prestige as a genuine body of talent. It’s a balancing act for sure, and I don’t know if tech wants to emulate everything exactly with the Hollywood guild system, but it’s worth taking inspiration from.
Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?
Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill I don’t think it’s far fetched to imagine that a guild system could be better.
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Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.
Because since the 1980's, the US government (as well as other western governments) have been dismantling the ability and protections for worker unionization. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were all notable for being anti-labor.
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> ..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. ... There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable ind…
Also looking at the trajectory of Hollywood its all down, down, down. Award show ratings have been plummeting faster than a meteorite[1]. Box Office sales have been dropping for years and this was before covid, after covid sales are back but are at a level last seen since 2000! [1]. The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there…
Nonetheless, Netflix is as much claimed by Hollywood as it is Tech. Apple too is thought as Hollywood-adjacent, as aside from Apple TV they’re also historically responsible for Pixar. Important to realize that working in tech does not mean every successful company is purely a tech company.
One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically . In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst…
We get paid extremely well! FFS have any of you guys taken a moment to talk to folks outside the industry?
It feels like we’re due for a “big reset”, but I doubt it’ll be aligned with VC interests. They need labor more than we need those companies. Americans should pick up a French history book.
I'm not sure I see anything in French history I'd particularly want to emulate. The story of the French Revolution which I assume you're referring to is one of senseless barbarism and the old elites ending up back on top at the end anyway. The drownings at Nantes are among the most awful things to happen in Europe prior to WWII. As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who want…