91–100 of 353 posts
The problem with this article is that one does not need capital to start a tech company. This very website, sneered at in the article, is littered with examples of people who have built something at the side. I'm not sure knowledge workers can make the same complaints about class struggle that mechanical labourers can. We tend to get more valuable with age and experience.
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The company does better when they pay you less.
That depends. If they lose you to a competitor that pays more, then the company loses. It's that old Supply & Demand thing again.
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Some aspects are adversarial, some aspects aren't. How much compensation I get is adversarial. How much documentation I write or how many internal tools I develop isn't adversarial, not even if you put la liberté guidant le peuple above the fold.
> How much compensation I get is adversarial. It's not adversarial, it's set by market conditions. Only collusion can turn it into an adversarial matter, as seen e.g. when Big Tech CEO's were shown to have entered into a secret agreement not to poach each other's employees.
My broader point is that zero-sum sub-games don't make the entire game zero-sum.
I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it'…
Its only nonsense in the mind of plebs. For the class that's waging that war, its quite real. They are aware of what they are doing.
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"In competition" is a fundamental misunderstanding of the interests at play. It's adversarial whether you integrate that understanding into your actions or not. And acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners doesn't mean you have to be nasty to anyone on an interpersonal level.
> acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners It is not adversarial. It is a mutually beneficial, win-win relationship. It's the unions who (mistakenly) frame it as a win-lose relationship, which is why businesses don't like dealing with them.
The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked.
Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
Something that I've noticed in these anti work types is they assume work has negative value, that by working for someone you are "losing" While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate, I think that this kind of work has inherent value. It has plenty of learning opportunities which lead to income increases (edit: through promotion or going to a different employer, whichever is more optimal) because you becom…
> While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate If you did, why would a company hire you? The idea is the employee must create more value than he costs. And the employee gets more pay than his labor is worth to himself. That's why it's a win-win relationship.
Productivity has increased and wages have not.
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Sure it’s part of the description. But it is also free labor when you’re automatically expected to do the work of two people for the price of one. Or when you’re expected to do more for less pay. Like the “job description” is often pretty vague which makes wage theft easy. If you’re working 996 without extra pay or less pay because everything that your “job description” has cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour w…
If you're getting paid to work on something, it's not 'free labor', unless you're unable to leave. By behaving as if you've agreed to this undocumented arrangement, you've formed a 'constructive contract'.
Just because you’re getting paid doesn’t mean the company doesn’t get free labor. The company paid for the regular hours and the rest was free labor.
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Sure it’s part of the description. But it is also free labor when you’re automatically expected to do the work of two people for the price of one. Or when you’re expected to do more for less pay. Like the “job description” is often pretty vague which makes wage theft easy. If you’re working 996 without extra pay or less pay because everything that your “job description” has cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour w…
If you're getting paid to work on something, it's not 'free labor', unless you're unable to leave. By behaving as if you've agreed to this undocumented arrangement, you've formed a 'constructive contract'.
If I sell something with a 2-for-1 deal, what are the ways that’s different from selling two for 50% off?
If I am paid to work 40 hours a week, and I work 80, are the second 40 free, or are all 80 %50 my expected wage?
> free to leave
Ah! I see we agree on the need for such a robust social safety net that employment isn’t any degree of necessary!
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Of course it is adversarial (in a game theoretical sense). You are not doing any favours to the company and the company is not doing any favours to you; both are trying to extract as much value from the other as possible. Now if we were talking about a worker's co-operative (or any company where a significant portion of ownership laid with the workers), now that's a different story...
Smart businesses know that in order to prosper, you have to make win-win deals. Free market economies grow and prosper because people are making win-win deals. Win-lose deals are the path to poverty and misery.