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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#201

Post by bryanlarsen »

kortilla wrote: post #186
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…

IME the OP is correct. In my experience, doctors, lawyers and veterinarians all make 6 figures. Low six figures if employee, high 6 figures if partner. 3X difference maybe, nowhere close to 100X.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#202

Post by freedsoftware »

norir wrote: post #117
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 once worked at a startup that was acquired and the founders made a killing. A few years after the acquisition, they founded a new company in an adjacent domain and started raiding their original company for talent. At the time I was working with a guy who had product and marketing experience who happened to be close college friends with one of the cofounders. No one liked working with this guy. Yet rumor had it tha…

It's also that good marketing of a product is probably more integral to its success than its engineering. There are so many stories of superior technologies failing because of bad marketing.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#203

Post by eevilspock »

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…

Let's pretend for a moment that your ratios were true (i.e. that we actually have an efficient labor market), it has nothing to do with what anyone deserves, nothing to do with their worth.

Do not conflate an economic system chosen for its ability to allocate resources efficiently (whether it does is another question) with a moral value system that assigns value to individual humans or what share of resources or power they deserve.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#204

Post by giantg2 »

Of course they hate labor. They think all us peons are just lazy losers for not being super successful. Sort of like the divine right of kings, only the self perception is about superior effort and intelligence than birthright

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#205

Post by pdonis »

topaz0 wrote: post #177
welshwelsh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not 100% wrong, but you are missing an important part of the calculus, which is that as you go up the hierarchy you have more overall and more concentrated power to demand higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor.

> higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor

To the extent this is a problem, it's a problem of corporate governance. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that problem is fixable, since its root cause is a shift in corporate ownership from individual stockholders to mutual funds (because mutual funds is how most people now invest their retirement savings in 401ks or the equivalent). The effect of this on individual corporations is to make their time horizon for stock price growth much shorter, because unlike individual retirement investors, most of whom adopt a buy and hold strategy and don't trade very often, mutual funds trade stocks all the time based on short term performance.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#206

Post by bink »

sixothree wrote: post #86
WalterBright wrote: post #56

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!

Why is starting a company your solution to this problem?

It's the classic abusive boss trope. "Don't like how I treat you? Go start your own company!"

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#207

Post by therouwboat »

hnal943 wrote: post #30
jedberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love labor and do everything I can to make them productive and happy in the service of working for me. > I hate labor activists who want to tell me how to run my company and antagonize workers to see themselves in some sort of power struggle with management If you're actually doing everything you can to make them productive and happy, then you won't have labor activists because they won't have anyone to rally. An…

You're forgetting that labor activists are also motivated by profit, which is not necessarily aligned with interests of labor themselves. As we've seen from the social and news media, it's relatively easy to a make people angry and jealous without improving their lives at all.

Labor activists = unions/people who run unions? Atleast in my country we pay % of our paycheck to unions, so when I get more, they get more. It really the opposite of my employer, when I get less, they get more.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#208

Post by freedsoftware »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #187
Lionga wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've seen this as well. VCs are actually terrible at their investments by and large. They mostly use gut instinct or personal networking as their determiner of whether to invest in stuff.

That's a poor heuristic and it is why so many people continue to fail upward.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#209

Post by sofixa »

ch4s3 wrote: post #58
eh9 wrote: post #36

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…

> 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.

Some parts of the old elites ended up kind of on top at the end anyway, however in a drastically different situation - citizens had rights and power at the top came from below, not above (divine right was no longer a thing). So massive difference regardless of the title of the person on top.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#210

Post by wolverine876 »

sixothree wrote: post #111
anm89 wrote: post #60

Well labor absolutely despises tech's elite. So seems fair

The thing is they hadn't until recently. What do you think the change was?

It's an important question to think about. What changed from the Silicon Valley of old that believed anyone could accomplish anything - someone in their garage could change the world - and harnassing that enormous talent and ideas was their mission.

IMHO, they seem to be following the reactionary culture that dominates the US now - the worship of power, the contempt for humanity, for humans, and for the future.

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