A decade of working in Bay Area tech meant watching kids of rich parents get rich off dubious business plans by creating a startup in San Francisco while their parents buy them a house, pay their expenses and tap into their networks for seed funding all the while the company loses money for over a decade while they become millionaires from selling shares during rounds of fundraising. Then I go for the big guy where they are profitable, but then we are chasing the quarterly earning report because we are scared of what Jim Cramer will say about us instead of the everyday impact on the people who use our products. Yeah, I'm disillusioned with it all. I just want to practice my craft to build useful software for people and live a nice life.
Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
121–130 of 293 posts
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a variety of things get conflated. (anecdotal insight here): Many people at tech companies are not software engineers. I believe they are more often to the left of the general tech workers. Tech workers can be pretty left still, but I have found to tend more libertarian/a-political. In general though, many people employed at tech companies are young, coastal (by virtue of where they work), and work in cities.…
I’ve seen a couple comments saying that it’s the non-SWE’s that are the liberal ones. That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends. My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either d…
"diehard" seems like a stretch when you consider how much support there tends to be for unionisation (and most of us could get by on way less than we make, so it's not like we don't have to power to take some stands)... Lot of social democrats in my neck of the woods for sure but in US terms it'd be way more Warren than Sanders, and she is absolutely not a socialist from what I can see.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, agreed, both sides have ample ability to manufacture outrage (I mean, come on: no one serious actually expresses the outrageous contempt you're imagining, that's 100% interpretation) over takes like this. I just don't see why it's remotely as asymmetric as you think it is. You don't think lefty folks get offended too?
The post you're replying to is presumably a high income left-leaning voter from the way they phrased the comment. They're literally expressing what you say doesn't exist quite clearly. And anyway your own candidate in 2016 famously called everyone that didn't agree with her "deplorable", and it's a common theme throughout left-leaning high income coastal communities to look down on those hicks in flyover country who…
"I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, "Well, he's done this time." We are living in a volatile political environment.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
-Hillary Clinton
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wealth taxes are actually bad for society, and especially bad for altruistic people who care about the less fortunate. A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most. If you care about lowering inequality without hurting folks more than you have to, what you want is a mildly-progressive consumption tax. (I.e. an income t…
Government spending in capitalist countries creates returns to capital. Financing that spending almost entirely through taxes on labor, as the US does today, means that government spending is (in part) a direct transfer from labor to capital. Also, capital is not a scarce resource in the US today. For firms that would be worth investing in but don't have access to capital on reasonable terms, the reason for their lac…
> Government spending in capitalist countries creates returns to capital.
Mostly, it doesn't. It boosts the value of specific, scarce assets. The increase in e.g. land values that's directly attributable to government spending is a lot more tangible than any fuzzy effect on rates of return for capital. This makes most government spending basically a transfer from the productive (labor and capital) to the rent-seekers, but that has nothing to do with capital per se.
> isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.
Uncertain cashflows make the effect more meaningful, not less. Few investors will be well-positioned to fund a firm with hard-to-assess future cashflow, so capital is meaningfully scarce for those firms.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wealth taxes are actually bad for society, and especially bad for altruistic people who care about the less fortunate. Maybe instead of depending on the sporadic largesse of billionaires and all the awful political and economic consequences that come along with that kind of wealth concentration, we can have a functioning safety net, like the rest of the developed world.
You can have a functioning safety net and pay for it via a progressive consumption tax. That's actually what most Western countries outside of the U.S. seem to do, broadly speaking. Some countries even tried out a wealth tax, like France - they had to reverse it real quick because the unintended effects were so dismal.
France/EU is not the United States. There are structural reasons that make a wealth tax virtually impossible to implement in the EU, but aren't present in the US.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Warren's motivation behind breaking the Googles of the world up is to .... wait for it, ensure that the already overpaid tech workers at Google, get paid "free-market" wages, because if Warren is known for anything these days, it is for fighting for the pay-rights of Google employees
Another point of her platform is that underpaid "contractors" are in fact "employees"
Like the underpaid, overworked campaign staff of Sanders [1] and Warren?
[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/7...
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#127Wasn't too surprised to see that Bloomberg neglected to mention a pretty self evident reason why tech workers might want that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the co…
Wait, hold the phone, are you saying that the relationship between an employer and their employees is actually, by nature, antagonistic? Such that what is good for one is actually bad for the other?
Who could possibly have predicted this?
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not quite sure that smaller companies can offer higher wages. Also, keep in mind a story of Bell Labs - the innovation power house hugely responsible for tens of Nobel Prize winning inventions such as transistor and solar cells. You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this (only Alphabet is kind pf doing it these days)
There is a difference between big companies and monopolies. Big companies will likely always be the ones offering the highest salaries and they'll always exist. Once they monopolize the labor market though: they'll no longer have a need to offer those wages as high (even if they're the highest within the market).
How do you break up alphabet?they will just move their corporation over seas, set up in africa and avoid any monopoly breakers. The government has no power over these companies. They would have to raid the offices and send the ceo to prison before alphabet agrees to break their monopoly.
Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#129What a surprise. I'd love to be a billionaire, but I like Sanders opinions about whether they should exist. I'd love to be worth enough for it to hurt me, but I like Warren's wealth tax idea. I'd love to pay lower taxes, or less progressive taxes, but I'm happy to support those less fortunate. As a matter of fact, I'm not even a single-issue voter! Perhaps most controversially, I think altruism is good for society. S…
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Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zuckerberg is known to rave about Emporer Augustus achieving 200 years of world peace through "harsh methods". So they cherry pick whatever stories they want from history to justify their mistakes.
Do you have a source for the Zuckerberg quote?
Not hard to find...
I think the original is here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zucke...
And then there's a ton of commentary about it: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/12/what-a...
https://theconversation.com/mark-zuckerbergs-admiration-for-...
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