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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#271

Post by polygamous_bat »

sam345 wrote: post #254

Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid in your company rather than what you are worth to the company and what the market for your labor will pay? The only rationale I see is jealousy which doesn't seem very noble or sustainable. Assume worker A gets paid $100k and his CEO gets paid 10x that. Worker B also gets 100k but her CEO gets paid 2x that. How is it fair to increase worker A…

The reason CEO compensation tends to be 100x higher is a loose form of collusion, where market forces does not hold because a lot of time exec sets compensation for themselves.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#272

Post by VirusNewbie »

gnicholas wrote: post #225
kortilla wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The difference is not as great in these other fields, but that's because the pyramid isn't as large. There's one person at the top of Alphabet, and tens of thousands of people below him. No law firm has as many people, by a long shot. And the medical analogy isn't right either. You have to look at the CEO of a pharma company, who probably does make a similar multiple to Sundar. But the person at the top also has a mu…

I think the problem here is it is incredibly difficult to evaluate the kind of value CEOs bring. Certainly I could have done a slightly better job than many ousted CEOs of large tech companies.

It’s also possible that simply by listening to your executives/board, an intelligent engineer could do about as well as Sataya or Ballmer or Sundar.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#273

Post by thwayunion »

sam345 wrote: post #254

Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid in your company rather than what you are worth to the company and what the market for your labor will pay? The only rationale I see is jealousy which doesn't seem very noble or sustainable. Assume worker A gets paid $100k and his CEO gets paid 10x that. Worker B also gets 100k but her CEO gets paid 2x that. How is it fair to increase worker A…

> Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid

It clearly is not, so asking why it "must" seems a bit odd.

> The only rationale I see is jealousy

Others might call it justice or fairness, but that's basically it. People's feeling of personal security and self-worth.

The same basic force is behind most wars, revolutions, and other forms of inter-personal violence. That begins to answer the question, really.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#274

Post by fallingknife »

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…

Abstract arguments about fairness and who provides more value aren't really useful, IMO. What is definitely true is that the engineers, who have lots of options, accepted those terms. The investors decided to invest their money, and grant the authority to spend it to those particular founders. Could somebody else have done it better? Maybe, but I'm not sure how I, or anyone else, would have the confidence to tell the VCs how to invest their money, the founders how to hire, or the engineers about which offers to accept, and do it better than the people directly involved.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#275

Post by [deleted] »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #251
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…

Nature abhors arbitrage. If you think the tech elite are somehow renting out ill gotten gains, the go out and eat their lunch.

[deleted]

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#276

Post by lordnacho »

freedsoftware wrote: post #208
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'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.

This is among the problems of capitalism. We act like it makes sense for the winners to decide about the resources (money, businesses) they've won because their success suggests they are good at administrating it.

What happens? They spunk their money on kids who are playing League of Legends during meetings.

I've not often been in an investor meeting where the investors asked smart questions. They send people who aren't equipped to think about what they're shown. They think DD means making sure your accounts can't be stolen by the boss.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#277

Post by giraffe_lady »

yamtaddle wrote: post #72
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #38

I find it ironic that for a long time people have been predicting the demise of low skilled and blue collar work to AI and robots. But as I see it at present, it's the high end white collar work that is the most at risk being made redundant to AI since robots and mobile power solutions aren't robust enough to eliminate blue collar work quite yet. I know someone will say why this isn't going to happen but for many in…

I must say, it really is looking a lot more likely than it did ten years ago that we'll replace most knowledge workers before we replace humans-as-biological-robots with the regular kind of robots. Our hands, eyes, and legs may end up being the expensive parts to replace—not our creativity, not our raw intelligence—so, related niches may be the ones in which human labor thrives the longest. Perhaps Amazon will be abl…

I read a novel recently that took place on a slave-crewed fishing boat. The "captain" was an AI, because analyzing market data and weather reports etc and deciding where to work, when and where to unload was something it was well suited to. Physically hauling nets and gutting fish was nowhere in the near future so human labor remains doing that.

I think a less extreme form of this dynamic is coming for most of us in the next decade or two. And an exactly as extreme form coming for some of us.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#278

Post by lordnacho »

toss1 wrote: post #123
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…

Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees? Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees). In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ra…

The way I think of it is who do you want to be off sick for a day? The CEO, or 324 staff?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#279

Post by sp332 »

sam345 wrote: post #254

Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid in your company rather than what you are worth to the company and what the market for your labor will pay? The only rationale I see is jealousy which doesn't seem very noble or sustainable. Assume worker A gets paid $100k and his CEO gets paid 10x that. Worker B also gets 100k but her CEO gets paid 2x that. How is it fair to increase worker A…

If the CEO is getting paid 100x an average employee, at least one of them is clearly not being paid according to their value to the company.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#280

Post by gnicholas »

lordnacho wrote: post #256
gnicholas wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is not as great in these other fields, but that's because the pyramid isn't as large. There's one person at the top of Alphabet, and tens of thousands of people below him. No law firm has as many people, by a long shot. And the medical analogy isn't right either. You have to look at the CEO of a pharma company, who probably does make a similar multiple to Sundar. But the person at the top also has a mu…

I know this is beside the point you're making, but that guy at the top does not have greater risk. The right measure of risk isn't money, it's freedom. Work as CEO of Google or Roche for a month and you don't have to work any more. You don't risk shit, you can only win or win bigger. This is what I don't understand. There are plenty of people who can run a business, so why is it that we pay so much for them? There's…

One creative theory I heard is that a rational benefit of seemingly-irrational executive pay is to incentivize harder work among the people who desire to be executives. Not sure if it makes sense or not, but it's an interesting possibility.
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