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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#351

Post by Sebguer »

pwpw wrote: post #298
lordnacho wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> that guy at the top does not have greater risk. The CEO and CFO of publicly traded companies get paid pretty handsomely in exchange for taking on a significant amount of risk by signing off on the financial statements.

They get paid well to not do crimes? That's nonsensical.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#352

Post by topaz0 »

seti0Cha wrote: post #296
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.

I think you have the causality backwards. A person is able to demand higher pay not because they are in charge, but because the owners/upper management want them to be in charge. That is, they get hired with high pay because that's the value the employer puts on their labor. They determine that the same way the determine what they're willing to pay for other goods and services: how much do they want it, and how easy…

I don't know what point you are trying to make. You are describing some of the ways that people higher up the hierarchy have more power to demand higher wages. That's what I was talking about.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#353

Post by 0x457 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #336
0x457 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who wants that either? well, that's the only way to deliver the message, so yeah, I want that.

Really? The end result in France is that the young are chronically unemployed to the tune of 20% and will never have the luxury of early retirement, all so the retirement age won't be raised now.

Silly that you just take a look at the recent events instead of things as whole.

In France, I can go to lunch and not think about work. Here, I have to explain that "no, I won't eat lunch during this meaningless meeting to save time" every time I've invited to a meeting during lunch.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#354

Post by unity1001 »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #345
unity1001 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prof…

> > The former builds things and creates new paradigm Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it. Also Google just happened to be the winner in a winner-take-all market which was made of 10s of search engines. So it's true, MBAs might care about profits, but all the above…

> Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF.

Something being exploited in SF does not invalidate it. The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms. From search to social to Open Source. The last one even became a culture in which we are living today. People are so used to its paradigm that they think its 'normal' and not something different. The world of 90s was a totally different world, including how people worked.

> Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it.

It also made accessing knowledge and anything much easier compared to before. There is no comparison of the search after Google and before, like how it was with Altavista, Yahoo et al. There is even less comparison of the world before search and after.

> founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.

Many technical founders, or rather, 'non-MBAified' people just want to build things. Make something happen. And those things change how we do things. People mythologizing successful, actual founders does not make it any less valid.

...

The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990s. Thanks to technology and people who build things with that technology. "MBAification" of things is not a problem only in technology - it always afflicted all the other sectors too. Some people build things and change the way we do stuff, others come to milk it at the cost of destroying it.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#355

Post by danaris »

hackerlight wrote: post #301
amrocha wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Was a CEO only 6x more valuable to the company than a regular worker 70 years ago?

We know that CEO pay has increased vastly out of proportion to any other related changes in our economic system over the last several decades. We also know that the makeup of boards (who choose CEOs, and determine how much they will be paid) is significantly slanted toward CEOs of other corporations. There is a clear financial interest there both to choose people who will be favorable to you, and to raise their compensation, so that when they are on a board they will be more likely to choose you, and when that board is considering your compensation, they can look at the "average CEO compensation" and see that it's high...because you've kept it there.

Furthermore, I would posit that most CEOs do not actually have skills that managers and leaders at other levels don't have. What they have is the accident of birth, and a habit of authority. If you replaced most CEOs with any reasonably thoughtful and educated person, you wouldn't see much change overall in the average performance of businesses. (You might see an increase, actually, given the number of CEOs who govern primarily based on their own egos, rather than what would help the business.)

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#356

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

selectodude wrote: post #286
pmoriarty wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Roughly 25% of the world still lives this way. People can fill in the blanks of what happens to subsistence farmers who get impacted by drought, severe weather, swarm of locust, and other serious factors outside of their control.

Google employees complaining about Tech CEO salaries is the 1% complaining about the 0.01% of the world.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#357

Post by WalterBright »

par wrote: post #348
WalterBright wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to be employed by a corporation to have health insurance. I know this because I have health insurance and am not employed.

It costs a lot more, especially for families, once the cobra runs out. I know this because I have also not been employed, and had to provide health insurance for my family.

Obamacare ain't cheap, that's for sure. This year my premiums went up $200/mo.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#358

Post by JumpinJack_Cash »

unity1001 wrote: post #354
JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The former builds things and creates new paradigm Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it. Also Google just happened to be the winner in a winner-take-all market which was made of 10s of search engines. So it's true, MBAs might care about profits, but all the above…

> Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Something being exploited in SF does not invalidate it. The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms. From search to social to Open Source. The last one even became a culture in which we are living today. People are so used to its paradigm that they think its 'normal' and not something different. The world of 90s was a totally different w…

> > The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms . The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990

I feel the opposite, if anything the rate of innovation is slowing down, and besides this sort of religious type words should not be used in the context of business.

And if were to be used it should be reserved for something that really changes human life in a pivotal manner in the same way as the invention of fire or the wheel did back in the days.

I don't know what it could be that can be compared to fire and the wheel but Google and opensource isn't it.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#359

Post by blamestross »

MockObject wrote: post #269
blamestross wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That is a level of rationalization of capitalism that I had not previously imagined.

Competition doesn't have to be unbound. All things in nature find satiation. We can be satisfiers not optimizers.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#360

Post by throw93 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #344
throw93 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, which entity forces the employer to write these terms in the offer letter in the first place? Govt or courts can't. If you as the person interviewing asks for these terms, employer can just say no and move on to next person in queue. In other countries the notice periods are written in law. But then again, do we really want to wait(& trust) for the govt which is heavily lobbied by FAANG to legislate this? Isn'…

No entity forces startups to convert ISO's to NSO's when early employees leave the company, but they did it because it made their offers more competitive. The legal default was ISO's that expire quickly. It's the same. If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete. Heck, any smart company might do it voluntarily to make it harder…

>> If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.

Yes definitely they will.."today". Companies don't need to do anything special if supply overtakes demand. We feel we are special today only because IT is still relatively a new field and the demand still outweighs supply.

But the rate at which universities across the world are churning out CS grads and the increasing focus on automation, supply will definitely overtake demand. And when that happens we will end up in the same predicament as other professions. At that point, companies don't have to cave in to the demands from their employees or the people they want to hire.

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