Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech's Elite Hates Labor

ez.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 434 posts

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#131

Post by coding123 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #112
zozbot234 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're Apple's CEO, its 2018 and you are about to bet 80% of the current profit stream on M1 platform or stick with Intel. What do you do?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#132

Post by carapace »

idlewords wrote: post #48
carapace wrote: post #37

Earlier 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...

Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.

They did. That's what the WP article section I linked to was about:

> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer ...

I used to think we (high tech labor) didn't need unions (you can actually find comments of mine here on HN several years ago arguing that.) Then this crazy and illegal scheme came to light. Now I think that we need something, maybe not a union per se, but something, to "flex [our] considerable latent power", eh?

The thing that really grosses me out about the "no-poaching" collusion is that Apple, at least, famously has more money than Scrooge MacDuck yet still actively and stridently worked to rip off their own people.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#133

Post by duped »

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?

The unions don't decide who gets hired for a project, only the set of terms should you hire someone from the union.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#135

Post by electricEmu »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #110
habosa wrote: 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…

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.

Examples of Musk benefitting Musk do not demonstrate a net-positive impact on the world.

The artists criticizing Mr. Musk make a good point about what's really happening.

https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#136

Post by Lionga »

habosa wrote: 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…

It is that 95 to 99% of the ones that go the Musk, Bezos or Kalanicks way fail and be left with no payout. In return the ones succeeding will have 20 to 100 times the payout.

Its almost the same as if you just take your salary and bet everything on 13 at the roulette. Small chance of huge payout, high chance of failure.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#137

Post by eevilspock »

habosa wrote: 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…

I don't know. Where is all this anger and righteousness when it comes to all the people servicing tech workers, from farm workers picking your food in record high temps for slave wages and no protections to food industry workers to janitors to delivery people to the nannies and school teachers caring for your children?

What about the other people who are more deeply exploited by your employers, the factory workers in poorer countries, the $2/hour workers in Kenya "tortured" by having to tag obscene material to make ChatGPT less toxic? What about all the people downstream in space and time who pay the costs of all the environmental debt incurred by your luxurious and convenient upper caste first-world lifestyles, lifestyles made "efficient" by waste, consumption and the ability to outsource life's chores to bottom workers, enabling you to put all your time into higher rate-of-return tech work?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#138

Post by yourapostasy »

yamtaddle wrote: post #72
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #38

I find it ironic that for a long time people have been predicting the demise of low skilled and blue collar work to AI and robots. But as I see it at present, it's the high end white collar work that is the most at risk being made redundant to AI since robots and mobile power solutions aren't robust enough to eliminate blue collar work quite yet. I know someone will say why this isn't going to happen but for many in…

I must say, it really is looking a lot more likely than it did ten years ago that we'll replace most knowledge workers before we replace humans-as-biological-robots with the regular kind of robots. Our hands, eyes, and legs may end up being the expensive parts to replace—not our creativity, not our raw intelligence—so, related niches may be the ones in which human labor thrives the longest. Perhaps Amazon will be abl…

> Perhaps Amazon will be able to slash its office workforce to a small fraction of its current size, before it can do the same with its warehouses. Go figure.

See Moravec's Paradox [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#139

Post by duped »

subsubzero wrote: post #74
zozbot234 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ..allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. ... There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable ind…

Also looking at the trajectory of Hollywood its all down, down, down. Award show ratings have been plummeting faster than a meteorite[1]. Box Office sales have been dropping for years and this was before covid, after covid sales are back but are at a level last seen since 2000! [1]. The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there…

The last decade has been referred to in Hollywood as the "content explosion" because of how much more content (and money from it) is being produced. The decline of certain media is not evidence of a decline in industry, the opposite is true.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#140

Post by zeroonetwothree »

causalmodels wrote: post #98
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #43

One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically . In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst…

Something that I think is often overlooked when talking about this is a large chunk of tech labor are millennials. These people are now in their thirties or early 40s. Many now have families and want different things from work than they did in their 20s. This is totally natural but it does create new tensions.

People aren't born in buckets, it's a continuous process. 10 years ago there were many 30/40 year olds in tech as well. Indeed if you look at the average age it's gone down, if anything, so there should be fewer now.
Post reply on HN