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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#181

Post by zozbot234 »

goodpoint wrote: post #143
throwaway23597 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#182

Post by strawpeople »

welshwelsh wrote: post #153
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…

There is no evidence that management problems are harder to solve than coding problems. Not only that, but when coders make mistakes the impact can be large and the responsibility clearly falls on the coder, whereas when managers make mistakes, the responsibility is diffused to their subordinates. Managers should either be paid a lot less, or be fireable by their reports when they make mistakes.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#183

Post by Manuel_D »

thebradbain wrote: post #9

For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood. 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…

These are guilds in a very traditional, medieval, sense: they have very exclusive membership, and drive up the cost of labor by deliberately causing shortages. This is great for the people lucky enough to be members. But it sucks both for the consumers that pay inflated prices, and for the workers who don't have the connections to get into the guild.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#184

Post by etherael »

The purchasing power of the average labourer in the US has not much changed since 1971 when gold convertibility was ended and the monetary system moved to a pure fiat one. At the time, a food service worker could have bought about an ounce of gold a day with their labour. Now even mid to mid upper tech salaries are not enough for such a feat, to say nothing of what a food service worker salary could do.

It stands to reason if the financing method of a nation moves from a hard money system where you either turn a profit in a hard asset by increasing efficiency, to one where politically connected parties benefit and are first in line at the spigot of federal reserve funding which they then employ however they see fit mostly freed from the rigor of market discipline, the people in the game that will succeed will be those closest to the feeding trough and those at the back will eat the inevitable inflation that occurs. It doesn't matter if you're a moron and your competition is a genius when you are gulping down first, second and third order fresh fiat from the fed firehose constantly, while they're stuck with getting it from you or your peers.

All that said, enterprises aren't charities and of course they're going to see a limited supply pool of talented labour with actual leverage and bargaining power as "entitled", but they're still going to have to compete for them because that's one of the few remaining market forces still on the side of that quite rare labour pool. The vast majority of labour get no such choice and just have to suck it up. In light of all that people in this industry should keep in mind that between a tech worker of today and a food service worker of just over fifty years ago, the tech worker has less purchasing power. They're not nearly as coddled and overpaid as the parties in front of them filtering newly created money down the chain would have us believe.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#185

Post by ryandrake »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #79
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #43

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…

>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. The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.

No way it's grown faster. A "spoiled" tech worker who makes even as much as $300K has a lot more in common with a blue collar worker making $30K than he has with an executive making $300M. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude vs. 1. That executive has accumulated generational wealth after working one month. Their lifestyle is outrageously bananas-different than even the highest-paid software developer. We're talking dozens of homes, private jets, chauffeurs, staff that do everything, megawealth that grows in perpetuity without them even doing anything. They can travel anywhere they want on earth on a whim and have anyone in government (sometimes up to and including heads of state) on the phone in minutes. Their children, grandchildren, and grandchildren's grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives.

Meanwhile, the difference between a tech worker and a struggling teacher is that one is 50 missed paychecks away from insolvency, and the other is 2 missed paychecks away from insolvency. It's not even comparable.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#186

Post by kortilla »

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…

> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid.

This is wrong. Lawyers get paid worse than FAANG SWEs unless they make partnership, which is the equivalent to becoming a co-owner or working as a lower level exec at a big tech company.

Doctors at big hospitals in the bay make worse money than Google SWEs last time I was chatting with my friend’s wife who was a Doctor at Stanford medicine. The super highly paid doctors are the ones who found or cofound practices.

Finance can pay a little higher, but that’s only because the teams are usually smaller and you have more direct impact. You might pull down 1M/year at Renaissance or whatever, but the partners are still pulling in nearly 100x that.

> It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct.

This is the same across nearly all businesses. The owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs. It’s not a coop.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#187

Post by bryanlarsen »

Lionga wrote: post #136
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…

It is that 95 to 99% of the ones that go the Musk, Bezos or Kalanicks way fail and be left with no payout. In return the ones succeeding will have 20 to 100 times the payout. Its almost the same as if you just take your salary and bet everything on 13 at the roulette. Small chance of huge payout, high chance of failure.

But is that true? Every VC-backed founder I know "failed up". They pulled a more-than-dev salary from the company during the failure, and then after the failure they just started a new company and had an inside track on VC.

OTOH, the bootstrapped founders have my respect. They had their houses as collateral for their company's operating loan. They also succeeded at a much higher rate than the VC backed founders I've known.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#188

Post by rsaz »

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?

Confer with the team around me to ensure I make an informed decision. Hopefully they do the same. Maybe the CEO has the final say, but they don't make decisions on their own. I'm sure there's tons of research behind those decisions that was not collected by the CEO on their own.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#189

Post by Veen »

welshwelsh wrote: post #153
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…

But then you jump up another level, where someone is making a hundred thousand or a million times what the burger flipper makes. Are they generating enough value to warrant that? Elon Musk's current net worth is roughly what 100,000 burger flippers will make in their whole lives. Is it plausible that he generates some multiple of that value, or is he just much better at capturing value than the burger flipper?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#190

Post by hourago »

zozbot234 wrote: post #108
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…

Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. All things said, it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.

> Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers.

No, it is not. His job is to maximize profit, and his personal goal is to earn as much as possible. To say that the CEOs goal is to make money so employees have salaries is a very strange statement.

> If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job.

Google revenue is not at risk, but many engineers are already out of a job. Sundar job is only at risk if the board is not happy with him.

> it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.

No, it is not. That the people that earn more money is not the ones that produce the most but the ones that protect the rich is far from fair.

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