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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#381

Post by hackerlight »

danaris wrote: post #355
hackerlight wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those statistics about CEO pay growth are often deceptive. If you sample the top N firms over time, where N is fixed, the mean market cap of those N firms will be growing, given that the economy has grown over the time window. That the average compensation of the CEO of these sampled firms is also growing is unsurprising. The omitted variable that causes this statistical illusion is GDP growth itself.

Now, even with a non-flawed methodology, I don't doubt that we'd still find that CEO pay has gone up a lot more than other job types. But that should be true for knowledge work in general, especially high-demand + low-supply roles. There has been large structural changes in the economic system that causes this. Mainly, China has come online, meaning the non-knowledge workers in wealthy countries must compete with a billion extra people, which depresses their compensation in the labor market, which increases the ratio of a CEO's pay divided by the pay of non-CEOs.

A non-market based explanation is highly suspect and should not be the default explanation. You are basically claiming that shareholders are willingly giving away their own money for no good reason. Why would shareholders do this? They are not running a charity. The simplest and least nefarious explanation is the most likely: Shareholders believe the CEOs are worth that much in the context of current (2023, not the 1970s) supply and demand dynamics in the labor market for highly niche highly impactful CEO positions. If I own an asset worth $2 trillion, I do not care about paying $100 million for someone to not ruin it.

> 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.

At least recognize this is a speculative claim made without evidence. More of a hunch. A hunch that I disagree with.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#382

Post by q845712 »

scruple wrote: post #216
norir wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fascinating. We may have worked for the same founders at some point, as I have had nearly the exact same experience (I was an engineer at the 2nd startup with a ~0.5% stake (before dilution, of course!) -- the payout was nice but it was not a life changing event). One detail in my story is that I found out a lot about the personal lives of the founders and their friends. They all came from obscene wealth to begin wit…

I've been working on re-framing nepotism as "selective altruism" -- it's like there's an "in" group, within which the members feel completely justified and even a little obligated to help each other out. So it's our usual human tribal stuff, basically, but we can recognize the altruism in there.

Of course the next step would be leveraging this thought to propose a mechanism to convince them to expand their notion of "in-group" to include, i dunno, everyone who works for them? Everyone who was integral in their success? Every living being with whom they share a planet? So that the altruistic instinct could be expanded to be helpful to many many more.

... no particular ideas atm, but commenting in case it helps someone else reach an actionable insight :)

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#383

Post by unity1001 »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #376
unity1001 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Innovators of the past would call Brin and Page 'MBAs type' like you do They objectively wouldnt. The science and engineering history of late 19th century is filled with people like Brin and Page getting 'MBAified' out of their inventions. Tesla and Westinghouse is a good example of such stories. > Christopher Coloumbus A genocidal profiteer is the last person who you would want to invoke as an example of such peop…

> > Equating innovation with taking risks is a faulty concept to start with. You can bet that the 'person' who invented the fire or the weel didnt take any risks. To start with, those were not invented by singular people 'taking risks' but invented by entire species Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'. Innovation happens when risks are taken (eg. Montg…

> Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'.

Not relevant. All of those were established behavior patterns at the time. Not 'risk taking'.

> Innovation happens when risks are taken

For every such example you can pull out from history, there are dozens of innovations resulting from incremental improvement and learning from others and the nature.

> The rate of innovation has been slowing down due to the diminishing in the standard deviation of human behavior.

There has never been more deviants in human history than now. In human history, sticking with the social norms, known behavior patterns and keeping the existing social group and its framework safe were critical to survival. From traditions to laws everything were based on those. With your logic, it should be the most innovative period in history whereas the past should be the least innovative. Yet you are saying the opposite.

Innovation as you see it has been slowing down because science and technology have been privatized through patents towards the end of 19th century by big money entering the field and consolidating it. Exacerbated by the 'state secrets' concept. Before that, virtually everything was Open Source during the scientific revolution.

> So even if the guy who personally discovered fire

There was no such singular guy.

...

In any case, thanks for the discussion.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#384

Post by sneak »

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! Management would be replaced by cheaper management if it were possible to do so at the same level of quality.

Either corporations are insane immoral pathological paperclip/profit maximizers, in which case any manager would be replaced with a cheaper version or even a algorithm, or they're not and managers aren't worth what they're being paid.

If the CEO or upper management is so fungible, why aren't they being replaced with staff who will work just as hard and effectively for a tenth of the price?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#385

Post by goodpoint »

zozbot234 wrote: post #181
goodpoint wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?

If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.

The have built a huge moat, but that's besides the point. You are making an absurd claim.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#386

Post by diebeforei485 »

throw93 wrote: post #360
diebeforei485 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chu…

Having a union isn't going to change this. If most of the voting members are "new CS grads bring churned out", you'll have the same dynamics inside the union.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#387

Post by throw93 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #386
throw93 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 chu…

Having a union isn't going to change this. If most of the voting members are "new CS grads bring churned out", you'll have the same dynamics inside the union.

I will rather trust the democratically elected union leaders who are also my co-workers than the management. I don't really know what else to say at this point. It's just weird taking side of the management.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#388

Post by kilna »

pdonis wrote: post #361
topaz0 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it would be easy. What I said is that the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle. > regulatory capture Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage. It is class struggle. The only solution is to struggle back.

> the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle I don't think this is a useful way to view it. I would say the potential for change is in people shifting to a more long-term viewpoint instead of always chasing short-term gain and satisfaction. > Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage. If you don't think of yourse…

> not all capitalists are predators

That is simply untrue. Sure, some capitalists have good PR, touting their non-capitalist efforts in ways that intentionally confuse them with capitalism for the purpose of increasing PR value. The increase in PR value is just a more oblique means of wealth extraction. The actual act of being capitalist, i.e., extracting excess value from labor by leveraging capital (piles of money, factories, infrastructure, etc)... that is inherently predatory in nature. Capitalists use the fact that they own stuff, and the fact that workers need food, shelter and healthcare, to grift the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of public good, PR notwithstanding. It's codified into the cornerstone concept of shareholder value. Capitalism itself is distinct from any charity or other social good that a capitalist or company might engage in, and all capitalism exploits labor. Not every act a capitalist does is predatory, but every capitalist is a predator.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#389

Post by mrzimmerman »

steveBK123 wrote: post #232
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…

You do NOT want to point at entertainment industry as some sort of better meritocracy model. The ratio of nepotism hires and who-you-knowism in that industry is insane. There's a reason you have multi-generation families all "in the business". Met plenty of people in NYC in the industry, and they are either nepotism hires or surrounded by them.

Guilds and unions aren’t in place to prevent nepotism, which is difficult to prevent and happens in all industries. Really, that’s just a network effect, albeit a bad one.

Labor organizations exist to turn disparate sources of a supply (labor) into a more monolithic source that can control some or all of the access to that supply, driving up the price, which is good the members. They may have controls in place to try to prevent nepotism or other bad hiring practices, but at the end of the day that can be a difficult problem to detect and prevent.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#390

Post by mrzimmerman »

dlkf wrote: post #61
thebradbain wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WGA is just one of many unions, but you’re right— getting into the “best” guilds is itself a process; but ostensibly, it’s to ensure that the guild keeps its prestige as a genuine body of talent. It’s a balancing act for sure, and I don’t know if tech wants to emulate everything exactly with the Hollywood guild system, but it’s worth taking inspiration from.

Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?

Probably in the same way that companies go about determining it now: programming tests, certifications, diplomas, etc.
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