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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#281

Post by gridspy »

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…

You might feel that only a few people are qualified to be your CEO. And they all want to retire - you're competing with the "retire instead" option.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#282

Post by diebeforei485 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #264
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.

"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 da…

This is straying away from the original point of worker pay relative to CEO pay.

You can have highly paid CEOs that treat their employees well, and you can have low paid CEO's who are brutal towards their employees.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#283

Post by edouard-harris »

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…

> Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets For whatever it's worth, market comp for Engineer #1 equity is significantly above 1%. Depends on a lot of things (number of founders, how many founders are already technical, whether hire is pre or post PMF, prior experience, etc.) but by and large <1% is not going to be competitive at this level.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#284

Post by polygamous_bat »

ch4s3 wrote: post #120
eschaton wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With “read French history” they’re not saying French history should be emulated, they’re saying it should be treated as a cautionary tale: Those at the bottom can only be pushed so far before they start building guillotine.

Yes, but ultimately the reign of terror killed more Sans-culottes than nobles which is the part people often leave out.

Is that based on absolute number or percentage?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#285

Post by spamizbad »

I definitely feel like, over the past 15 years, there's been a growing rift between VCs/founders and software engineers.

Back in the aughts there were so many posts and thought-pieces written by both founders and VCs about attracting and supporting developers. Lots of founders talking up how their engineers make a real difference. By the first half of the '10s that stuff disappeared, and by the 2nd half you started seeing lots of resentment going both ways.

Capital thinks devs are capturing too much upside; labor thinks capital is capturing too much upside. From capital's point of view, the engineer circa 2023 is doing the same work their engineers did circa 2008 so why are they entitled to 2.5x the comp? And of course the engineer is wondering why the value they're creating is worth 10x what it was back in 2008 but their pay is only up 2.5x?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#286

Post by selectodude »

pmoriarty wrote: post #264
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.

"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 da…

>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.

How on Earth do you think people survived before the dawn of capitalism?

Hint: you can do it today, head out onto a homestead, build your own house, get your own food, pool your own water.

The economic whip just allows you to do what your good at, I can do what I'm good at, and the guy who is good at growing food and feeding us is good at what they're good at. This isn't worse.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#287

Post by hackerlight »

sixothree wrote: post #105
jdmtheNth wrote: post #2

As long as there are more people that will do a given job for less, we're all replaceable. There's just no incentive to raise the wages or standards.

And when we are literally all replaced, what then? Seriously. What are we going to do when we are all replaced? We don't have support structures.

That's where welfare or a UBI is supposed to come in. If societal prosperity is something we care about, that's a much better mechanism for support than forcing companies to hire people that they don't need or want. Better to have lean and efficient and market-based enterprise that are taxed to provide welfare, rather than industries stunted by union activity.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#288

Post by vkou »

bdcravens wrote: post #51
vkou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder when SWEs will change their tune when the same thing will happen to them.

The same way SWEs should have changed their tune when faced with outsourcing: Expand your skillset to ensure you're more than just an expensive commodity.

1. Why do you think the writers won't be able to do the same? They are writers, they aren't idiots.

2. That's great advice for buggy horses who want to win the game of musical chairs, but when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#289

Post by mattgreenrocks »

We're always fed the line that the tech elite are the alpha men/women, especially by business media. But then when they hit economic reality, are found to be investing in garbage like Web3, or don't have maximum economic leverage in workplace negotiations, what do they do?

They whine. On the bird site, and to business media. Definitely very alpha.

It smacks of impotence. If they had the power, why couldn't they just fix the situation instead of whining about it? I bet they would, if they could, but they can't.

And they're humans, just like us. Not as special as we've been told.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#290

Post by pdonis »

topaz0 wrote: post #262
pdonis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> that wasn't always the case in the past

Yes, that's correct. The movement of stock ownership to mutual funds largely took place in the few decades after WW II.

> presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future

Yes, but the changes that would have to take place are quite drastic. I don't think disallowing mutual funds is an option. But the only other mechanism of control (aside from market forces--see below) would be to drastically change the regulations concerning corporate governance, and it's not even clear that that would do more than exchange one problem for another, since regulatory capture is a thing.

The only other way to change the incentives facing corporate governance structures is to change the market, either on the producer side or the consumer side. On the consumer side, consumers would have to stop buying goods and services from companies that overpay their CEOs and underpay their workers. Unfortunately that would mean consumers choosing to take a huge economic hit, since those same companies provide huge economic value to consumers. (And in some cases, such as Google and Facebook, consumers don't even have the option of not paying, since the services are free; they would have to stop using the services altogether even though they're free, which is probably even harder to make happen than getting consumers to stop paying for something.)

On the producer side, new companies that are structured differently in terms of governance (for example as worker cooperatives) would need to enter the market and out-compete the existing companies. Sooner or later that might well happen, but it could be quite a long time.

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