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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#301

Post by hackerlight »

amrocha wrote: post #294
hackerlight wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 contri…

Sure, maybe the CEO makes great business decisions, but I don't see how that entitles them to 100x the compensation of the people around them. I don't think researching and making decisions is 100x harder than engineering or HR or law etc.

This misunderstand markets. It's not about some abstract and subjective notion of difficulty. It's about how much value you bring to the table in the context of labor market supply and demand.

You are 10x more valuable to your company than a cleaner, so you get 10x the pay. Why? Because your skills are more scarce than a cleaner, and because you can have a bigger impact on the company's profitability by writing code than cleaning toilets.

The CEO is 100x more valuable to your company than you are, so they get 100x your pay. Why? Because their skills are even more scarce than yours, and they can have an even bigger impact than writing code. That's it.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#302

Post by matwood »

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…

> That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high.

People have a hard time with big numbers. See richest people in the world or how much money Apple makes. It's staggering when you turn it into visualizations or $/second or something. And even then, it's hard for our minds to comprehend something so completely foreign.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#303

Post by unity1001 »

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…

> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin

What has Google done since Page and Brin left? Other than trying to suck what they already built dry for max profit?

...

You are equating early technical founders with the MBAs who later took over the big tech. They are not equal. The former builds things and creates new paradigm. The latter's purpose is to suck things dry for profit. Including the employees and the users. The former is scarce. The latter is plenty and it is imposed on the organizations, the tech sector and inevitably the end users by totally un-attached, profiteering, destructive investors.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#304

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ryandrake wrote: post #185
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.

No way it's grown faster. A "spoiled" tech worker who makes even as much as $300K has a lot more in common with a blue collar worker making $30K than he has with an executive making $300M. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude vs. 1. That executive has accumulated generational wealth after working one month. Their lifestyle is outrageously bananas-different than even the highest-paid software developer. We're talking d…

We're talking about the cultural gap here. Not the money gap.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#305

Post by matwood »

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…

Engineers should absolutely know their worth. Were they also offering much lower pay for that little equity? It's perfectly fine to accept lower equity for market rate salary. That's adjusting risk to your personal situation.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#306

Post by whack »

Here's a hot take. VCs don't hate labor. They love money. They will do anything that makes the most money for them. If that means investing in people who they think will be successful (ie, impressive resume, past success), they will do that. If that means not investing in people who they think will not be successful founders, they will certainly not do that. Ultimately their drive to make money by backing the right horse, trumps any sort of power/status game.

Founders also don't hate labor. They love money. If they can hire good enough developers by paying them 0.5% equity, they will do that. If the market demands that they pay developers 500k/year and hire thousands of them during a bull run, they will do that. If they think paying a "superstar" CEO $200M/year creates even more value, they will do it. If they can get away with paying that same guy nothing, that's also exactly what they will do. If they can improve the company's long-term profitability by laying off thousands of developers during a downturn, they will also do that.

Labor for the most part doesn't hate anybody either. We love money. If a company hires me right after college, trains me, helps me build my resume, and another company comes around with a promotion and a 30% higher comp offer, I would take that offer. If the company has fallen on hard times and isn't able to pay me as much as another company, I would give a few months notice and then jump ship.

I find it hard to take these sort of conspiracy theories seriously. No one is purposely conducting layoffs in order to "put labor in their place." No one is purposely trying to underpay startup employees because they hate them. Everyone is trying to enrich themselves as much as possible. Partly by collaborating with their complements in order to create something of value. And partly by paying their complements as little as they can get away with. This is literally how every single free market works.

If you think your startup isn't paying employees enough, don't work for that startup. If you think all startups are paying developers too much relative to support engineers, try building a career for yourself as a developer instead. If you think all startups are too generous with its founders relative to employees, try building a career for yourself as a founder instead. If you're able to succeed as a developer/founder, great! If you're not able to succeed as a developer/founder, maybe you have a better appreciation for why they get paid whatever they do. You don't owe them anything, they don't owe you anything, nobody hates anyone, everyone's just trying to make the most money they can for themselves.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#307

Post by throw93 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #239
throw93 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. This is a reasonable ask. It's easily addressable - build a notice period into the offers (for example, if you've been with the company more than a year, you get at least 4 weeks notice). The problem with any sort of exclusive guild is that it becomes more difficult to break into, which is bad for a growing industry.

Who will enforce that? The policies are made by companies themselves and they can change them whenever/however they want with no employee welfare in mind. We as individual employees don't have any power influencing or enforcing those policies.

The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce than individual employees.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#308

Post by hnfong »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #201
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…

IME the OP is correct. In my experience, doctors, lawyers and veterinarians all make 6 figures. Low six figures if employee, high 6 figures if partner. 3X difference maybe, nowhere close to 100X.

The key difference is that those professions don't "scale", and the output is linear to the labor (hours) put in. The wealth doesn't lend itself to concentrate into a few hands, and the professional worker is mostly independent and in control of what they do themselves.

In tech, people work in teams where each person is a tiny cog in a (relatively) big machine. We still don't agree how to objectively quantify a person's work output. (Eg: do 10x programmers exist?) When a product becomes successful, there's no objective way to distribute the windfall, so the default capitalist rule applies (whoever invested money and/or has access to the best lawyers gets most of it).

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#309

Post by gamblor956 »

danuker wrote: post #12
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…

I wonder how the WGA will change its tune when language models will write episodes of indistinguishable quality from human writers.

About the same as programmers will feel when language models churn out better software than human programmers are capable of. Based on some blog posts from this morning, it seems ChatpGPT already conquered coding WordPress plugins despite it's notoriously difficult and nonsensical codebase, and at this rate ChapGPT should be able to replace most programmers by Independence Day. It should gain sentience on or by August 29th.

Sarcasm aside, the volume of scripts has never been the problem in Hollywood. Everybody and their mother has a screenplay. 99% of screenplays that are actually purchased aren't worth making. There are plenty of people who make a good living, outearning the average SV FAANG programmer, just churning out 1 or 2 C-movie scripts a year that they might spend a week or two writing.

And even the screenplays that get made aren't very good. One of my former clients made his fortune making D-movie action films, some of which you may have seen on cable or streaming. The entire portion of the screenplay dedicated to the gunfight at the end of one of his recent films was: "They have an epic fucking gunfight. Explosions everywhere. It's FUCKING AWESOME." (If you look up the screenplay for the movie adaptation of SWAT, the minutes-long fight at the beginning of the film is similarly scripted. By the way, that movie made $200m+.)

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#310

Post by matwood »

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.

As someone who has done both in small and medium companies, I find people problems to almost always be harder. Most coding problems outside cutting edge companies tend to at least have solutions. People and leadership often doesn't have a right answer.

And yes, a key coders mistake can be large. But a management mistake 'build feature X over Y' or 'implement policy B' can just as easily cost the company dearly and put small companies out of business.

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