It's hard to see what's happening as anything other than a capital strike.
Tech's Elite Hates Labor
141–150 of 434 posts
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#142I find it ironic that for a long time people have been predicting the demise of low skilled and blue collar work to AI and robots. But as I see it at present, it's the high end white collar work that is the most at risk being made redundant to AI since robots and mobile power solutions aren't robust enough to eliminate blue collar work quite yet. I know someone will say why this isn't going to happen but for many in…
More and more I think this will be the future. I was watching an episode of "Dirty Jobs" yesterday and all I could think was "I guess this is what I'll be doing in 10 years".
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#143I 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…
> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry. I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. Thes…
> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin
Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#144I 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…
In finance, law, and medicine, the workers are the product roughly.
Anyway this debate about being 1000x more valuable is pointless. It does not matter what any individual thinks about their worth. We've all agreed(#) on this system(the worst, except for all others) ostensibly because of the benefits to the rest of society. The internal allocation of profits within a company is irrelevant.
# The old Marxist limitations about lacking capital or means of production don't count in tech/software. It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#145I 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…
Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees? Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees). In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ra…
It's even more doubtful when we see historically the multiplier was more like 20x than the numbers now.
Have they got that much better, while everyone else hasn't ?
The extra value we all add is being skimmed off the top, and worse we are being treated with contempt.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh I agree! I think the guilds are great to its membership in general, but breaking in is itself a battle. Tech doesn’t need to copy Hollywood exactly (nor should it), but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.
Unions aren't a hack that let you subvert supply and demand. The "bad" parts of unions are what give it power. Without excluding an out-group, you're left with a useless bureaucracy. For Hollywood, I think this is a necessary "evil" because the market rate for creative jobs is likely close to working making $0 for 80 hour work weeks. However, this isn't the same for tech.
Well, an important distinction in Hollywood versus my understanding of most other unions is that being a part of a guild does not guarantee you a job (though it is a prerequisite for many of them):
You still need to be hired by a production, who chooses to work with you and sets your rate.
The guild just provides a guarantee of pay floor, hours, conditions, healthcare, etc across and transcending individual companies.
So the guilds could theoretically let in as many people as they wanted without diluting supply and demand, because membership does not mean actively working.
The Guild system is unique because its as much as a credentialing system as a union, which is why I think it works.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow it took only one comment to make the article right, and it's not only the elite, it's even the "little people" doing a lot of the hating.
Taking feedback is a sign of maturity and adaptability. Genuinely, what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen, because people are going to use these new technologies? Thinking about these scenarios is the POINT of a union, making sure writers stay relevant for the long-term future. Failing to address them makes for a lot of broken dreams and missed opportunities.
> what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen
Being nowhere close to this, it’s difficult to say. Maybe the creative field gets reduced to the guy who can put the right prompt into a script, voice-acting and moving-image combined model?
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#148It 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…
> As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who wants that either?
well, that's the only way to deliver the message, so yeah, I want that.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
But CEOs don't actually have that much impact... So whatever decisions - in this example - Sundar makes, it only carries so much weight. And, you also get fired if you're a $500k engineer and you suck at your job. So I'm not sure what's so much different about Sundar - except that if he sucks at his job he has a way better golden parachute.
You're Apple's CEO, its 2018 and you are about to bet 80% of the current profit stream on M1 platform or stick with Intel. What do you do?
You're Apple's CEO in 2018 and due to a decade of skillful engineering you own a proven platform that's already shipped in 2 billion devices, and is now objectively fast enough to run a PC, the demands of which are not all that different from the 12.9" iPad that already exists. Do you respect the work of this talented semiconductor organization by refactoring the Mac to use the same CPU?
In what way is this a tricky decision?
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#150Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
> The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous The heirs who own the majority of most of the FAANG stock created none of the wealth, did none of the work. These rich kids of Instagram never worked, never will - nor did their parents, nor did their parents. So your argument is the workers creating the wealth should fork over the amount of surplus labor value to these heirs, that is bein…
I work specifically to give things to my children. They are not parasites, they are the motivating force which keeps me productive.