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

241–250 of 434 posts

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#241

Post by ajross »

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 their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.

This too is misunderstanding the value equation. The cost of replacement has to be part of this too. Engineering salaries are bid up in the market relative to other professions not because their work is more "important" than teaching or administration or whatever, but because engineers are hard to hire. Literally every software group, even now, has open spots where they'd like to put someone. There are never enough people.

And... is that true at the top of the hierarchy? Have you ever even heard of a company with a VP req sitting open for months for lack of candidates? That just doesn't happen. Senior positions seem to be drowning in competition[1]. And yet, their salaries aren't showing the result of that competition between candidates. Boards aren't going out to find a "better deal" on their CEO. Maybe they should, but they don't.

And I think it's worth asking why that is.

[1] In fact I think with the exception of a very small list of genuine innovators, even tech CEOs are mostly just replacement level players shepherding already-tuned organizations. You could dump Jassy or Nadella out on the street tomorrow and Amazon and Microsoft would be just fine with whoever stepped in.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#242

Post by manuelabeledo »

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…

> 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.

This is very rarely true.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#243

Post by ejb999 »

throw93 wrote: post #116
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.

This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power. You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours…

>>This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.

But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.

I thought the goal was for people to make a good living and have good working conditions - most SV/hi-tech types have those things already, so why should they care that the union doesn't exist or doesn't have power?

I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#244

Post by norir »

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.

I agree that marketing is extremely important. There is no product without the engineers and no customers without the marketers. If you prioritize quality, I think the engineers are more important. If you prioritize making money, perhaps then the marketers are more important. I don't really know.

The problem is that in this particular case, the only things this person seemed exceptional at were being friends with the CEO and being unpleasant to work with.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#245

Post by zozbot234 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #226
zozbot234 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics). You might— might —out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take…

So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#246

Post by bryanlarsen »

acchow wrote: post #212
bryanlarsen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Real interest rates are lower today than they have been for the last few decades.

4.5% interest with 6.5% inflation is lower than anything we've had in the period of 1.5% - 2% inflation.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#247

Post by [deleted] »

UncleEntity wrote: post #178
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.

Think about how it looks to all the people who have never lived through a recession before. The only valid reason to layoff workers is if you, as a caring founder, have no other choice. Then they see these tech giant laying off people, and not because it’s that or bankruptcy, and start calling bullshit. Oh, and start making up conspiracy theories about how it isn’t really an over hiring correction like TFA. Look here…

[deleted]

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#248

Post by yamtaddle »

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?

Pay experts—using our may-as-well-be-infinite warchest—to do literal years of R&D on several options and pick the best one, such that the decision's not anywhere near as risky as you imply?

You know, same thing they've surely been doing with VR behind the scenes for years and years. If/when they finally release a product, it won't be because the CEO just suddenly decided to make a big bet, but because they'd made a ton of small bets and waited for one of them to look worth betting big on.

I think Apple'd be easy-mode for a CEO, actually. Tons of capital behind you to undo all but the gravest "whoopsie", and no direct competitors credibly doing anything like the same thing you are (others making devices, sure, but nobody even really trying to attack your niches—not really). It's why they can fuck up a few times in a row and it hardly even matters, as long as they come back to their senses within a few years.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#249

Post by hef19898 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #223
bryanlarsen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The comparison shouldn't be VC-backed founders, but all founders including those who weren't able to fund their company and therefore failed. Getting VC funding is a significant filter.

If making sunsets and co. showed us something, it is that nepotism makes VC money access a lot easier.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#250

Post by jmeister »

oblaff wrote: post #221
jmeister wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The idea that the solution to lacking capital is to _raise capital_ is a contradiction.

I’m saying it’s way easier than for a factory worker in 1823 or 1923 to raise money or gather machines.

I’m not being cynical. I’d really like to see alternative governance structures to produce and sell software. Co-ops are an example.

Post reply on HN