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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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431–434 of 434 posts

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#431
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

You’re confusing leverage and political positioning with competence and capability. Not that all managers are incompetent. Some are indeed inspired and or excellent. However these are rare. Just as there are many average engineers who aren’t very productive, so there are many managers who aren’t very capable and are just in their position because they were in the right place at the right time.

Obtaining leverage and positioning oneself politically are indeed competencies and capabilities that are required to excel in medium to large orgs. They're not mutually exclusive.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#432
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They get paid to take responsibility for crimes that happen underneath them. That’s a lot different and why you got confused.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#433

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…

The problem with this theory is that the gaming industry has to work with the Voice Actors Guild and they are a huge pain in the ass. The hourly rate is fine. The min/max hours is fine. The union exclusivity clause is bullshit. They won’t even allow you to use your own company’s employees to record temporary VO. It’s all or nothing. Expo hall unions are even worse. I have to wait 30 minutes and pay someone $50 so the…

My narrator, Maxwell Glick, just informed me that there is no such thing as "the Voice Actors Guild." It's all part of SAG.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#434
post #123
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…

Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees? Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees). In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ra…

Pay is determined by supply and demand, not just how difficult it is to provide the supply. And what determines the good pay of tech workers & CEOs is their BATNAs. To hire a CEO of a top tech company, you essentially have to be a better offer than the EV of them starting their own firm with copious amounts of venture capital out there and them out competing you with the efficiencies that come from startups. That is what big-corp tech CEO pay has essentially stabilized on.
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