121–130 of 353 posts
As an engineer, I'm not falling for his sad attempt to drive a wedge between tech workers, engineers and management. I have more in common with tech company lofty goals than I do with his.
> Google, Amazon, IBM, Spotify, PayPal, Salesforce, 3M, Coinbase, and more are all conducting mass layoffs at the same time.
Yes, it's a conspiracy just to lower tech wages, not a recession.
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> 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.
How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? 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 al…
The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as much compensation as possible for the least effort possible. In other words: The market of labour.
> 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.
You win by taking your business elsewhere and start working for another employer, or start your own business. Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit that situation while we can.
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> Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. Did it start that way though? I feel like from the 50s-70s, outside of a narrow slice of academia, companies were mass hiring (and training!) people to program.
Yes. Companies used to send people to "IBM School", to learn COBOL or Job Control Language. If you have to pay to train people, the technology tends to be kept simple and understandable.
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'…
> class warfare nonsense 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.
Personal attacks are against the site rules, by the way.
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Capitalist vs laborer is a true dichotomy, in that one cannot be both simultaneously within one context. But it is important to remember these are embodied roles and not character traits . I.e., a laborer becomes a consumer when they leave their place of employment to drive to the grocery store.
What about owner-operators? Truckers who own their own trucks are both laborers and capitalists.
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> Capitalist vs laborer is a true dichotomy, in that one cannot be both simultaneously within one context. Sure one can. One can be a "laborer" in the sense of spending one's working hours doing work for an employer instead of starting a startup or owning your own company, and also be a capitalist in that same context in the sense of using your skills as bargaining power with your employer to get the best return on t…
> and also be a capitalist in that same context in the sense of using your skills as bargaining power with your employer to get the best return on the capital you own This is not what being a capitalist is, in the context you're using it. Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone who has to work. That's it. Gets fuzzy when you start adding a 3rd group of people in th…
Yes. That's true of everyone, including those that you are calling "capitalists". But that being true, and a person knowing that it's true and acting accordingly, are two very different things.
> Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone who has to work.
If you think that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, etc., don't work, you are egregiously mistaken. They work very, very hard. They just don't work at the same things that low level tech workers do. That's because they understand, as many, if not most, low level tech workers apparently do not, that the best use of their work--their labor, the hours they put in doing whatever it is they do--is to maximize the return on their capital. So they optimize their work towards that goal. Whereas most low level tech workers don't even think in those terms--and that is why they are at the mercy of the "capitalists" who do.
(The usual economist's term for a person who doesn't work, but "lets their money work", is "rentier", and the associated behavior--getting into a position where one can have a steady reliable income without having to work--is called "rent seeking". There is certainly an element of that in the way many rich people act, but I don't think it's the primary issue in the context of this discussion.)
The real argument for those "capitalists" being overpaid is not that they don't work, but that most of the work they are doing is not actually creating wealth; it's just transferring wealth from others to themselves. But that has nothing whatever to do with them being "capitalists" instead of "laborers" and "laborers" being underpaid. It has to do with our entire system of social incentives being screwed up because for decades now we have increasingly allowed short-term viewpoints to undermine the long-term stability of our social institutions. "Class warfare" rhetoric, in fact, is one of the ways that has been done.
I don't live in NY or Seattle. The tech sector is much smaller where I am. I've never seen it be advantageous to treat other people as someone I'm in competition with. I've been laid off. Yeah it sucks, but no job is forever, and being nice to people means I get to sleep at night. I've also never seen anyone who can't be replaced. Time and time again something wasn't documented, and other devs/dbas/admins stepped in…
The effect on the culture was pronounced and teamwork went out the window.
Everyone was worried they were next, so they put their head down, concentrated on their own tasks and didn't help each other.
Layoffs can really destroy a company's culture, especially multiple rounds.
I don't live in NY or Seattle. The tech sector is much smaller where I am. I've never seen it be advantageous to treat other people as someone I'm in competition with. I've been laid off. Yeah it sucks, but no job is forever, and being nice to people means I get to sleep at night. I've also never seen anyone who can't be replaced. Time and time again something wasn't documented, and other devs/dbas/admins stepped in…
> treat other people as someone I'm in competition with Your coworkers are not your adversaries, your employer is. When the going's good, each side is generous. When your employer withdraws their generosity, it pays to think twice whether your continued generosity works in your interest, and more broadly in the interest of the industry, and society. The limit being a grueling, subpar environment where underpaid and o…
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Skills are not capital assets.
Yes, they are. The people who own and run Google and Facebook and Amazon didn't magically get "capital" from nowhere. They used their skills, and turned those skills into huge amounts of money. In other words, they understood what capital they owned, and acted to maximize their return on that capital. If you insist on refusing to view your own skills as capital, you're just giving up the chance to maximize (or at lea…
Skills are the ability to meet spec quicker than someone who has to learn as they go. Sounds like potential energy to me. Since capital acts like potential energy, it follows that skills are capital.
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Well if everyone decides to pay less, like it’s being argued here, then there is no supply demand, that’s just the cost of your labor.
> if everyone decides to pay less That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with cartels is the members cheat on them under the table. They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using the law to punish members who cheat). I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth shut. Deal!
What is the basis for this assertion? Is this why OPEC exists?
Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.