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

Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 207 posts

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#141

Post by krupan »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #129
dahuangf wrote: post #123

Samsung chip workers get $340k bonuses. American tech workers get laid off because AI is 'optimizing headcount.' Different kind of AI dividend

What do you think will happen to these chip workers as their jobs get automated with AI?

That is so far away. There is approximately 0 public training data for chip design. Just try asking an LLM to design hardware, it's laughable

EDIT: just realized I'm not sure what a "chip worker" in this article is. Someone doing digital design? Someone working in the fab? Hmm

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#142

Post by autoexec »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #75
aetherspawn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers are awful at advocating for themselves, and that’s why they study and work twice as hard as lawyers and finance, have less perks (travel, food, cars, private offices) yet they get paid half as much.

Most engineers who advocate for themselves would simply be fired. Job hopping was the way to get your salary up fast previously.

That sounds like the kind of problem unions were invented to solve.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#143

Post by missedthecue »

dahuangf wrote: post #123

Samsung chip workers get $340k bonuses. American tech workers get laid off because AI is 'optimizing headcount.' Different kind of AI dividend

These samsung workers are producing the compute that reduces demand for american coders. It's like pointing out that tractor factorymen are getting bonuses while the stable-manager gets laid off. Well of course.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#144

Post by antirealist »

arjie wrote: post #49
Adiqq wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the world, where instead of making billionaires and trillionaires, we would actually share with society. Providing affordable products/services to common people. Decommodification of life. There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them. So, if there's no money for public invest…

People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. If you create $6 of value for every American and capture half of it you are a billionaire. “Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we ha…

I think this is essentially correct. I'm sorry you're getting downvoted. I think there seems to be a prevailing attitude here (and in the world in general) that making money is 0 sum and you get it by taking taking it from others, rather than the reality (in free-ish, market-ish economies) that most people make money by adding value to other people's lives and being voluntarily paid for that value. Similarly there's a sentiment that policies are bad because billionaires lobby politicians, as opposed to that most people want terrible policies (though the lobbying can definitely be bad).

I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#145

Post by autoexec »

Carrok wrote: post #64
arjie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. If you create $6 of value for every American and capture half of it you are a billionaire. “Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we ha…

> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.

One day it's all going to trickle down, just like they promised us, keep waiting! All that wealth is going to leak through and soak our empty pockets until they are heavy with gold! The Holy Gipper wouldn't lie to us.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#146

Post by zozbot234 »

onion2k wrote: post #95
ai_slop_hater wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this absurd?

Two sorts of people become billionaires from share price increases. The founders and the early investors. Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions. And the slightly-less-early-hires who were too late to get equity usually get nothing more than their salary, regardless of their impact. I don't…

> Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions.

That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#147

Post by zozbot234 »

autoexec wrote: post #145
Carrok wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.

One day it's all going to trickle down, just like they promised us, keep waiting! All that wealth is going to leak through and soak our empty pockets until they are heavy with gold! The Holy Gipper wouldn't lie to us.

You do realize that any broad-based improvement in overall living standards is a result of exactly that kind of process?

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#148

Post by LPisGood »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #71
LPisGood wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional athletes and pilots have unions. They both make considerably more than your average programmer, even in FAANG and even with equity.

These "unions" in high paying fields behave more like guilds or cartels than worker's unions - they generally restrict supply. Athletes and Hollywood unions are sort of special cases too, IMHO. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that top earners in those fields earn so much because of their unions - they benefit from natural supply restriction of outliers. For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots o…

I don’t think pilots unions do much to restrict supply.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#149

Post by Danox »

winter_blue wrote: post #81
dyauspitr wrote: post #44

This is what bonuses would average out to in the US as well. It’s just that the CEO would get $100 million and the workers maybe $10k each. Does the article say how it’s going to work?

Perhaps U.S. workers could threaten to strike as well...

The Molly Maguire‘s lost a long time ago in America, the Goons, Pinkerton’s and the owners saw to that with a little help from the government and the police of course.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#150

Post by kannanvijayan »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #97
saghm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific for…

> companies don't run without employees, the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders That's why the owners get to keep what is left AFTER paying employees. It's called profit. One way to become a billionaire is when you offer that stream of future profits securitized as "stock" to other people who buy those future profits from you and collectively value those securitizations at over a billion…

What if over time, the system degrades in such a way that there's a group of people that extract more and more value from the system while adding less and less value themselves?

Is this a possible failure mode of the system?

What sort of symptoms might one look for in a society if we believed this might be happening?

Or do we simply dismiss that this has been proven impossible (as per the theory of Money 101) and move on?

Post reply on HN