Folks should unionize for livable wages. Walk off the job and be noisy until they're paid fairly. There's no other way because wealth and power concedes nothing without a resolute disagreement backed by action.
Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
131–140 of 237 posts
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, San Francisco is currently experiencing a teacher shortage of several years [1], so that vice versa I mentioned above is simply not true. The city is offering cash bonuses for teachers now, and it introduced some legislature to attempt to incrementally increase their wage, but it's simply not enough. A "teacher shortage" isn't the same as an increase in (free market) demand for teachers (or education). Who…
This is why I constrained my argument to only consider children ages 0-12. Regardless of whether "people actually demand the education the public system forces upon them," people do demand a safe, stimulating place to put their very young kids while they go to work.
> This is why I constrained my argument to only consider children ages 0-12.
I don't see how that changes anything regarding what I said.
> Regardless of whether "people actually demand the education the public system forces upon them," people do demand a safe, stimulating place to put their very young kids while they go to work.
That's still not demand in the economic sense. People can "verbally" demand anything they want, if they're not willing and able to pay for it, it's not real economic demand.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#133I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…
First thanks for what you're doing. I think it's definitely part of the solution. My worry though is that I don't think everyone is equipped to be a programer. The thing I keep coming back to is my younger brother. He's got mental disabilities which mean he can't read or do math at more than a very basic level (first grade maybe) and for what ever it's worth he also scored pretty low on IQ tests. Despite a bit of a f…
The amount of people who actually have significant mental disorders is a small percentage of the total population.
This article is instead talking about the middle 90% of the population. And many many people in this group are perfectly capable of moving to tech.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything about this post is highly dubious, especially all the numbers involved. And then this: We do not teach for loops and while loops. (Recursion is the only loop we use) ...okay. Maybe that's a joke, but look at that Github account! Your typical 18 year old CS freshman could throw together a more impressive set of code than this "charity" that has the wherewithal to pay out 25,000 (or 24,000) times 20 dollars…
Thanks for the healthy dose of skepticism. We moved away from Github (their closed source policy always seemed fishy to me) and started hosting our own gitlab instance instead. Some products our students are building: llip.io and c0d3.com. The students working on llip.io built an android/ios react-native app as well as a webapp. Everyone working on that project got a job, so there is no development on that anymore. T…
It's awesome what you're doing. Keep it up. I wanted to do something like that a long time ago but never had the willpower. Keep in mind that HN comments are always going to be discouraging. I find the comments to be 80% discouraging, stop what you're doing, and you suck compared to X. Read them, but don't let it kill your flame. Then double down on the constructive posts that make up the other 20%.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#135I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…
From article - > low and middle income jobs, such as teachers and firefighters or nannies and cooks, are key to the local economy. Someone else commented in this thread how all these jobs (meaning every non-tech, middle-class job) will begin to pay more once they're more in demand. The assumption is that programming/tech is highly paid because it's so in demand, and every other job isn't because vice versa. Let's jus…
Yeah, the issue with the idea of the market sorting out public servants is that schools, police departments, fire departments and other public agencies can not simply charge what the market will bear to raise revenue for higher salaries. They don't have control over their revenue stream and that is by design, because their incentives can be quite difficult to manage.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. They’re spending it all on housing. To be clear the flow is: tech companies make enormous revenue but require high skill workers. To make this work they pay whatever it costs to get workers and no more - in this case that means just enough to offset the enormous cost of housing. Since the baby boomers practically banned all housing development in the bay once their little burns were built, this result in a little…
Employees are left with an equation that looks basically like: enormous salary - obscene rent = just a bit more cash flow than you’d earn in software anywhere else. It's probably true that the cost of minimally acceptable housing drives entry level tech salaries, but they go way up from there. A senior SWE at Google with salary+bonus+stock of $300k/year has a whole lot of disposable income even after the ridiculous h…
There are very few senior SWEs at Google, relative to tech employees as a whole.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#137Call any service business from top list on Yelp (Handyman, Dryer Vent Cleaning, Plumber etc), they would charge minimum 80$ (Irrespective of whether they do work or not). Where is this money going?
Time spent sitting in traffic?
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As the article points out, the huge influx of capital in the area is being returned only to the tech sector, who merrily spend it and drive up the cost of living. Most of the cost of living increase is due to bone-headed housing polices happily voted in by existing residents, the vast majority of which do not work in tech. I personally find it very sad that we've prioritized rewarding a tiny, vocal minority at the…
Are the policies bone headed? I'm not American so may not have this perfectly right but the Detroit of the past seems to be a good analogue to SV. Lots of well paid jobs in a single industry. When the eventual downturn occurs you don't want to be left with a ghost town.
The SV policies aren't about diversification -- they are about preventing housing from being built.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
the jobs that are mentioned in the article that are being hit the hardest are teachers, firefighters, caretakers and so forth. How many of those have been automated away? It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots. No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx…
There was a study which I cannot locate right now which discussed that one of the substantial impacts of a Walmart moving into a town was that all the "community leadership" type jobs left. Things like accountants and office admins and other business professionals. This was because the small businesses Walmart replaced were the ones that used these services locally. Walmart did these things at it's corporate office f…
It's not wrong, a LOT of tech companies have opened up support offices in Texas. The inexplicable thing is why engineering stays in SV.
Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. The money mostly goes to landlords. VC -> Startup -> Employee -> Landlord
Time to relearn the basic classes of economic goods, and their corresponding pricing behaviours: commodities, wages, rents, interest, public goods. Land, monopolies, skills and talent endowments, capital, and power all return rents. Likely risk as we'll. Most of books 1, 2, and 5 of Smith. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
One point Smith makes is that land rents tend to eat all other forms of revenue over time, since (a) the supply does not increase, (b) the use of land is necessary for every enterprise and (c) over time all the land that can be put to some use is and then it's just about competition over it.