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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#261

Post by hef19898 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #245
yamtaddle wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, Amazon is actually too young to tell, Japanese conglomerates, while not being all dominating anymore, are doimg quite well. As do the Korean ones, e.g. Samsung.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#262

Post by topaz0 »

pdonis wrote: post #205
topaz0 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 individ…

Somehow that wasn't always the case in the past, so presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future. If we have the audacity to imagine a different world, it is fixable through organizing and demanding that incentives be aligned with our values rather than with the spiraling fortunes of a handful of extremely self-centered people.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#263

Post by pnathan »

causalmodels wrote: post #98
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…

Something that I think is often overlooked when talking about this is a large chunk of tech labor are millennials. These people are now in their thirties or early 40s. Many now have families and want different things from work than they did in their 20s. This is totally natural but it does create new tensions.

the thinkpieces about how Millenials need to treat Gen Z are starting to flow already, ha. Retreads of what was written about millenials.

I remember.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#264

Post by pmoriarty »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #215
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.

"as long as I'm getting paid fairly for my work"

Fairness is in the eye of the beholder.

To me there's nothing fair about the economic whip. Nothing fair about starving or freezing to death if you don't work. Nothing fair about having to sacrificing my time and my life to afford to feed my family, have a roof over our heads.

There's nothing fair about someone's who orders others around never having to work another day in their life while the people who actually do the work having to make endless sacrifice to make their bosses rich, and usually be spat upon for it, while those who made their fabulous wealth by exploiting others are lauded endlessly as if they were the benefactors of mankind.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#265

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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?

I do. In my career, the choice has always been working hard at a company where the founders are trying to become billionaires, or going to a company where the drive for success has atrophied and sitting on my hands for 80% of my working hours.

I remember one job where I did literally nothing for the first 2 weeks because maintenance didn’t connect the Internet in my cube and my manager couldn’t find the external drive with the training videos on it. There’s no law of nature which says all the Googlers couldn’t be working there.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#266

Post by Arainach »

zozbot234 wrote: post #181
goodpoint wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.

They absolutely do. Their market share means that you must sell on them or lose a massive amount of sales. To sell on them you must agree to their anticompetitive price controls - must give them a cut, can't sell cheaper elsewhere. To get good product placement you have to agree to cominglinging and allow your legitimate product to be mixed with counterfeits.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#267

Post by hackerlight »

amrocha wrote: post #257
diebeforei485 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly Did you mean to say you just want to be paid modestly?

> The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly

Really, "by definition"? You can't think of a possible universe where a CEO draws on all their skill to make a crucial decision, that most other possible people in that role probably wouldn't have made, that saves a company billions of dollars, and that this is 100x more valuable than what you or I have contributed or are likely capable of ever contributing? That's a lack of imagination, to say the least.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#268

Post by rr888 »

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…

I think in the old days people realized a startup had to sell real products and have real revenue and profits, your stock would only be worth anything at the IPO if the company had solid cashflow. Now there are so many tech companies that will never make any money but somehow are worth millions or billions, most tech workers really dont care about company profits because it doesn't affect them.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#269

Post by MockObject »

blamestross wrote: post #199
MockObject wrote: post #157

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…

> The decision makers aren't all nasty people, they're maximizing their profits At least where I'm standing, fundimental profit incentive is morally bad. Yes they are by definition "nasty people". Our fundimental responsibility is to improve ourselves and the world around us. It can occasionally align with profit incentive (we have a culture where money can be a powerful tool), but considering it "normal" or "ok" see…

When I review human history, in all its approaches to organizing technologically advanced societies ever since the plow, I see profit-seeking behavior everywhere, even in societies deliberately engineered to thwart the profit motive, so evidently, altruism never scales much further than an extended family.

I see profit-seeking behavior when I watch a squirrel hoard nuts, or a dog snap at a scrap of meat on the ground. I see the entire biosphere as a profit-seeking process, and I don't want to set my morality against the very biosphere that created everything I value, and my very ability to value.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#270

Post by Mountain_Skies »

throwaway23597 wrote: post #109
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 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…

But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.
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