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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#211

Post by steveBK123 »

eevilspock wrote: post #137
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 know. Where is all this anger and righteousness when it comes to all the people servicing tech workers, from farm workers picking your food in record high temps for slave wages and no protections to food industry workers to janitors to delivery people to the nannies and school teachers caring for your children? What about the other people who are more deeply exploited by your employers, the factory workers in…

All this whinging is what happens when SV restricted stock stops going up 20% annually for what, six months.. a year? Imagine some actual oppression.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#212

Post by acchow »

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 believe what you're describing is an anomaly from a decade+ of negative real interest rates due to quantitative easing. Getting rich while failing upwards in the future will be an exceptional rarity.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#213

Post by xxpor »

AlbertCory wrote: post #55
fullshark wrote: post #8

They hate the professional managerial class, but love the coders that go above and beyond to write them patents and build them technologies (capital) for only a steady paycheck.

Patents are not worth much, sorry. Unless you're a patent troll. They're a by-product of other work.

That's like saying nukes aren't worth much. They aren't at an individual level, but the total value is much greater than the sum of their parts. From a game theory perspective, patents essentially have MAD dynamics: no one is crazy enough to strike first, but if you come at anyone they'll respond in kind.

This is why patent trolls are so dangerous, they don't have any actual assets, so they're not in any actual danger when suing.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#214

Post by zozbot234 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #183
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.

See also: the U.S. healthcare industry.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#215

Post by diebeforei485 »

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 couldn't care enough about how much someone at the top makes, as long as I'm getting paid fairly for my work.

Startups often use this argument in reverse ("we're a small company, we can't pay you as much") while paying their founders far, far more than 200X what they pay early engineers. I'm including equity grants in this calculation because you are, as well.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#216

Post by scruple »

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…

Fascinating. We may have worked for the same founders at some point, as I have had nearly the exact same experience (I was an engineer at the 2nd startup with a ~0.5% stake (before dilution, of course!) -- the payout was nice but it was not a life changing event).

One detail in my story is that I found out a lot about the personal lives of the founders and their friends. They all came from obscene wealth to begin with. The founders father was on the board of a major tech company in the Bay that bought the first startup and financially backed the second.

The nepotism I've seen in my career disenchanted me long, long ago.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#217

Post by manuelabeledo »

freedsoftware wrote: post #202
norir wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good marketing would make a mediocre product succeed, but it will not save a crappy one.

Also, "superior technologies" is a loaded term, because it is in fact very subjective.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#218

Post by hangonhn »

strawpeople wrote: post #182
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…

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.

> There is no evidence that management problems are harder to solve than coding problems.

I think that's the sort of thinking some forms of schooling drill into our heads: harder problems = greater reward/value.

That's not really how it is. We get rewarded for the value we supposedly generate by solving some problem or at least some portion of that value is rewarded to us. So if there are some low hanging fruits that generate a ton of value, then that's how you will be rewarded. I'm sure Ph.D.s solve far harder problems than me all day long but societally we don't tend to value many of those problems or their solutions.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#219

Post by RobotToaster »

jmeister wrote: post #144
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…

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 limitatio…

There's no such thing as the cloud, just other people's servers (means of production) you're renting.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#220

Post by ketzo »

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…

I don't think the discrepancy is the same in any other field of knowledge work, though.

Even hospital CEOs and partners at law firms are making 3-15x what their doctors and attorneys are making. Not 100-200x. The magnitude of the gap is way higher in tech.

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