Well labor absolutely despises tech's elite. So seems fair
The thing is they hadn't until recently. What do you think the change was?
Tech's Elite Hates Labor
111–120 of 434 posts
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#112I 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…
Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. All things said, it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.
But CEOs don't actually have that much impact...
So whatever decisions - in this example - Sundar makes, it only carries so much weight.
And, you also get fired if you're a $500k engineer and you suck at your job. So I'm not sure what's so much different about Sundar - except that if he sucks at his job he has a way better golden parachute.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#113I 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…
I can guarantee you employee 20 at Google is very well off, buying houses left and right.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I see anything in French history I'd particularly want to emulate. The story of the French Revolution which I assume you're referring to is one of senseless barbarism and the old elites ending up back on top at the end anyway. The drownings at Nantes are among the most awful things to happen in Europe prior to WWII. As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who want…
Sometimes you have to upset some people in order to make the world better. I for one is happy about previous labor movements, because I like weekends and I dislike child-labor. Without labor movements, unions and sometimes riots, everyone (below upper-class) would have it much worse off.
My point is that the French are effectively pulling up the ladder and younger people there are going to be stuck with a bill and none of the benefits.
It's all well and good to credit the end of child labor in the US to unions, even though it was the progressive movement generally that ended child labor and not unions, but whatever. That said, the American union movement was a powerful force FOR segregation and actually caused a real drop in wages for black workers in northern cities in the 1910s and 1920s, so I think it's important to be honest about the whole history.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
Abuse is an unnecessarily strong word there. It is true they colluded to keep salaries down, but I don't think that compares with actual abuse. Software Developers make several times the median salary in the U.S. The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.poli…
Tech Leaders / Managers are the ones that hold the power; they are not given a free-pass to lead because they pay living wages for Engineers (that speaks to the fact that other careers should be paying better wages, not that tech workers should accept their position and not argue for better treatment).
Expressing for 2.5 years that we’re able to work from anywhere, then immediately saying “well actually come back in for a day… or 2… now come back in everyday” is a misuse of power because the workers have no say in the conversation, the only option is to express your discontent and leave.
Abuse doesn’t have to mean they’re hitting us, but it can mean a misuse of power which is one of the main points of the article.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#116Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.
You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company.
You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company".
Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay.
In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#117I 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…
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 that he was offered a 5% stake in the new company while the engineers they were recruiting were being offered .25-.5%. I was very confident that they would be successful but I opted not to work for them because I was so offended by the inequity of the offers. The developers they were attempting to raid also had proven that they were productive and effective so it wasn't as though they were making a wildly speculative bet on them.
I also knew that in a major exit, I would be more resentful of the relative difference between my rewards and that of this other guy than I would have been pleased with my windfall. I had once had serious respect for the cofounders, but their greediness and willingness to perpetuate these systems of inequity permanently diminished my opinion of them.
Yet, I have to concede that the cofounders were correct in their assessment that they could lowball the engineers with little impact on their prospects for success. They were able to exploit their way to a second major windfall, far larger than the first.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those guilds are incredibly hard to break into. They're also why Georgia has been able to mop up all of the non union work. For better or for worse, they do their job but out of state scabs are a huge problem keeping industry work in LA.
Oh I agree! I think the guilds are great to its membership in general, but breaking in is itself a battle. Tech doesn’t need to copy Hollywood exactly (nor should it), but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.
Unions aren't a hack that let you subvert supply and demand. The "bad" parts of unions are what give it power. Without excluding an out-group, you're left with a useless bureaucracy.
For Hollywood, I think this is a necessary "evil" because the market rate for creative jobs is likely close to working making $0 for 80 hour work weeks. However, this isn't the same for tech.
Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#119I 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…
Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world. Crashing Twitter into the ground will never come close to diminishing what he has helped achieve with SpaceX, putting his money where his mouth was to the point of almost going broke, and, to a lesser extent, Tesla where, despite not being a founder, he was the biggest investor at the beginning.
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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I see anything in French history I'd particularly want to emulate. The story of the French Revolution which I assume you're referring to is one of senseless barbarism and the old elites ending up back on top at the end anyway. The drownings at Nantes are among the most awful things to happen in Europe prior to WWII. As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who want…
With “read French history” they’re not saying French history should be emulated, they’re saying it should be treated as a cautionary tale: Those at the bottom can only be pushed so far before they start building guillotine.
Yes, but ultimately the reign of terror killed more Sans-culottes than nobles which is the part people often leave out.