Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech's Elite Hates Labor

ez.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 434 posts

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#151

Post by Hermitian909 »

freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #38

I 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…

Lowend or midlevel whitecollar work sure, I'm skeptical about highend.

AI is still quite far off from a notion of "common sense", if we _did_ have that it would actually solve a very large host of open problems in robotics that prevent it from being taking lots of blue collar jobs (at least my former coworkers at a Toyota's robotics R&D lab thought so).

As automation improves the leverage on top talent increases and the premium for incrementally better skills improves. I'm arguably a worse programmer than my uncle was 30 years ago but earn far more (inflation adjusted) because I can leverage things like AWS, open source libraries, and various SAAS offerings.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#152

Post by yamtaddle »

toss1 wrote: post #123
habosa wrote: post #65

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…

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…

> Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees?

Moreover, we're not even "supposed" to look at value-created, aside from setting a maximum feasible pay level. At least, that's what we're always told when looking at employees farther down the org chart—"deserve has nothing to do with it".

I, for one, am deeply skeptical that the set of people who could run companies well is anywhere near as small as the comp suggests. I just think those at the top aren't interested in seeing that comp reduced. Sure, there's the board—but so-and-so on this board is a top officer with another company and wants to see top management pay rates stay high and need sky-high examples to compare themselves to when negotiating pay, and besides, they want their kids and nephews and so on to be able to pull those fat paychecks, too. And anyway, you want the CEO to appreciate you so that they use company resources (Other People's Money) to "appreciate" the other companies you have stakes in....

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#153

Post by welshwelsh »

habosa wrote: post #65

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…

I don't see the problem here.

A burger flipper makes $10 in an hour. An engineer designing a burger flipping robot makes $100. Their department's engineering manager makes $1,000. The CTO makes $10,000.

The hardest worker here is the burger flipper. They work 16 hour days just to afford rent, and it's hard manual labor.

The engineer makes 10 times as much because each line of code they write produces more value than an entire day of manual burger flipping.

Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems.

The CTO makes 10 times that because their policies affect many engineering departments throughout a large organization and have multibillion-dollar consequences. It doesn't matter if they work 1000 times harder than a burger flipper, they probably work less than the burger flipper. But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#154

Post by carapace »

treis wrote: post #69
carapace wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And Subway made their wage slaves sign non-competes for $8 an hour to stand and make sandwiches all day. The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations

Fair enough.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#155

Post by 2setIntrsction »

idlewords wrote: post #102
2setIntrsction wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If working in the warehouse is really that bad, why don’t the warehouse workers unionize?” 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.

But warehouse workers did unionize. It was the programmers, who back then could get a new job whenever they wanted, who lacked the foresight and self-discipline to exercise their latent power while it was at its peak.

Some of the warehouses have organized, is there a union that represents all of these workers as a whole against leadership?

Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by attempting to organize.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#156

Post by chongli »

coding123 wrote: post #131
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #112

Earlier 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?

That one is obvious. The decision was made long before that. Apple’s A-series of chips were clearly on that trajectory for years prior.

The bigger decision was deciding to buy NEXT instead of Be Inc. That decision brought Steve Jobs back to the company and acquired a modern operating system to replace Mac OS Classic.

Amelio was fired for his decision even though it was the right one to save the company. That’s the truly hard part about being a CEO.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#157

Post by MockObject »

I find this tone annoying. Let's discuss systems and incentives, not personalities. The decision makers aren't all nasty people, they're maximizing their profits, just as most people would do in their shoes. (Or if they're all mean people, why do the mean rise to the top?)

> Illustrating this grotesque point further, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft saw their collective valuations rise by $800bn after announcing steep job cuts

So the market felt very strongly that the layoffs were a good business decision. Is that because Wall Street is mean, too? Or isn't that somewhat objective evidence that the layoffs were good for the companies?

A very interesting article could have been written in its place.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#158

Post by zeroonetwothree »

I can only speak for my own Big N but I would say we certainly did overhire. I was pleased that we had a layoff and would have even doubled it. Processes have become very slow with so many unnecessary people involved in everything.

You might argue that I would be speaking differently if I were the one laid off, but I actually would have welcomed it, since it would be nice to take a break for a few months. I am certainly privileged to be able to do that (although it comes from working very hard for 10+ years and saving >50% of my income so I do take some credit).

I feel worst for people on visas that might get kicked out of the US because of this. But I don't think it's the job of corporations to atone for the sins of the government. We should make immigration easier and not tied to your employer (and health insurance as well).

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#159

Post by par »

treis wrote: post #15

Sometimes 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.

newsflash: people can be treated well comparatively, and still be in incredibly daunting and humiliating situations that is completely out of their control.
Post reply on HN