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

Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 293 posts

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#171

Post by sidibe »

tdhoot wrote: post #131
treis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you write some code that increases conversions by 0.01%. Thats worth 10 bucks to momandpop.com compared with millions to Amazon. No wonder that programmers can make more at Amazon.

Analogy doesn't really hold up. Increasing conversions by 0.01% probably takes an hour at momandpop.com and maybe a year or more at Amazon. Not to mention low-hanging fruit already being picked at large corps.

A lot of things at big companies aren't ever going to be worth doing at little companies. In cloud companies they spend tens of millions of dollars going after 1-2% efficiency gains that really make a big difference when many of these little gains are all stacked and applied to billions of dollars of equipment. Maybe if these companies got broken up, several little companies could sell these little gains, but that seems much less likely than one of the broken up companies naturally becoming big again and doing it themselves.

This field has a ton of natural incentives to scale as big as possible. I feel like the main beneficiaries of breaking up big tech companies are business people and lawyers getting to insert themselves everywhere to interface between groups that used to be the same company.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#173

Post by habosa »

I don't get why this is so shocking. The future of the company I work at is not the most important political issue to me. I don't want to have a good job in a bad country.

I'll happily vote for Elizabeth Warren and if she does break up the company I work at I'll deal with that when it happens.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#174

Post by Brakenshire »

pmoriarty wrote: post #165
option wrote: post #25

Earlier 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)

"You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this" Or the US government, which funds the overwhelming majority of basic research in the world.

Seems a stretch, what about all the other national research bodies?

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#175

Post by mrkurt »

dageshi wrote: post #96
mrkurt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antitrust concerns are reasonably bipartisan. The democratic candidates are getting traction with antitrust platforms because the time is right and they’re the presidential challengers. If Obama was still president, Josh Hawley (for example) would be running a similar primary campaign, with similar success.

I doubt it. As someone outside the US looking in, real rage towards companies like Facebook/Google only really became a mainstream topic after Trump won. The rage induced by that event got directed at Facebook initially and has now broadened to include all the big tech companies that profit from data collection. If Hillary had won or in a theoretical world where Obama was still president then talk of breaking up Face…

I think that’s just a coincidence. This has been simmering for about 30 years, I think tech monopolies are just very visible.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was going to make a presidential run and went canvassing the country in 2016? The dems loved the guy.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#176

Post by opportune »

There’s nothing wrong with voting against your own (direct) interest. In fact what goes against your direct interest can be more than made up for indirectly by making a fairer or generally better society.

Obvious example: green energy, generally speaking, is less economically efficient than fossil fuels (yes, it’s getting better everyday, that’s not the point). We are probably all going to be slightly worse off economically while we transition to green energy. But that doesn’t mean the transition is not worth doing to avoid all the long lasting, externalized negative side effects of fossil fuels.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#177

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

option wrote: post #157
toast0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restructuring the company as Alphabet with a set of subsidiaries was a start to setting up lines to divide the company along. The way to divide up Google is into the ad network, the search engine, operating systems, and everything else. Allow them to contract each other on public FRAND terms to start with, but setup annual reviews to consider a bigger hammer. If they play games with moving house to avoid jurisdiction…

you do understand that ad network pays for search engine, right? And operating systems isn’t exactly a profit generator either...

The market didn't always work that way. Until Google monopolized it, search engines and ad networks were independent pieces competing on an open market. For example, one of early Google's successes was getting Yahoo to license its search engine.

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#178

Post by chipotle_coyote »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #168

One thing I've definitely noticed is the culture of fear in tech about not appearing "progressive enough". Given that tech workers, especially in the bay area tend to come from fairly privileged backgrounds with relative financial stability and also live in safer areas they tend to underestimate the importance of reducing crime and maintaining a strong economy. This definitely provides a "psychological safety net" th…

Or alternatively, they believe that it's in the collective best interest of the country and future generations to elect candidates who are proposing stronger regulation to address income equality, rather than candidates who propose that income equality either doesn't exist, doesn't matter, or will sort itself out without regulation.

Your phrasing suggests that you think someone like me who believes in the strong regulation approach is just "virtue signaling," but I would suggest that it's because I've looked back at the US in the last century and couldn't help but observe that there's a strong and consistent correlation between market regulation and the economic success of the lower-to-middle class. Income inequality dropped dramatically with the New Deal, the notional "American Dream" largely came about in the post-WWII economy -- and the move toward radical deregulation and trickle-down economics in the 1980s coincides with a sharp rise in income inequality, a concentration of wealth at the highest ends, and dramatic fraying of safety nets for the lowest ends. It is not unreasonable to look at all that and say, "Hey, maybe there was something to that whole 'market regulation' thing after all."

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#179

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #132
bobbytherobot wrote: post #121

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 t…

> we are scared of what Jim Cramer will say about us instead of the everyday impact on the people who use our products Reminds me of a thing I read by someone that worked Broadway for at that time 40 years. He said the best thing for Broadway would be to take the NYT art critics out for a ride in the country. Because no one was making plays for the regulars or the tourists, they were making plays for the critics. Sam…

It's a great anecdote, but it's hard for me to read that and not immediately think "then explain Andrew Lloyd Webber, please."

Re: Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

#180

Post by rayiner »

dlp211 wrote: post #142
robomartin wrote: post #105

The only reason anyone in the US supports these people is because they have never lived in the socialist big government utopia these politicians champion. In fact, not even the politicians themselves have lived in the society they propose! How is that for a brilliant starting point. Ask anyone who has experienced these ideas in the flesh and you’ll find someone absolutely perplexed that US voters don’t laugh these pe…

Now name the Democrats trying to replace capitalism...I'll wait.

57% of them: https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socia...

All of the major candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which espouses a massive economic program where the "public receives" "ownership stakes." It also calls for a WWII-level economic mobilization premised on wide-scale central planning.

Post reply on HN