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

221–230 of 434 posts

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#221

Post by oblaff »

jmeister wrote: post #144
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…

In finance, law, and medicine, the workers are the product roughly. Anyway this debate about being 1000x more valuable is pointless. It does not matter what any individual thinks about their worth. We've all agreed(#) on this system(the worst, except for all others) ostensibly because of the benefits to the rest of society. The internal allocation of profits within a company is irrelevant. # The old Marxist limitatio…

The idea that the solution to lacking capital is to _raise capital_ is a contradiction.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#222

Post by idlewords »

2setIntrsction wrote: post #155
idlewords wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But warehouse workers did unionize. It was the programmers, who back then could get a new job whenever they wanted, who lacked the foresight and self-discipline to exercise their latent power while it was at its peak.

Some of the warehouses have organized, is there a union that represents all of these workers as a whole against leadership? Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by att…

Yes, and some of the Facebook cafeteria workers were getting up before 3 AM to make the commute in to Palo Alto, which meant that they had much more time in the mornings to think about organizing than the unfortunate techies who slept in.

The excuses really are endless in this business.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#223

Post by diebeforei485 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #187
Lionga wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But is that true? Every VC-backed founder I know "failed up". They pulled a more-than-dev salary from the company during the failure, and then after the failure they just started a new company and had an inside track on VC. OTOH, the bootstrapped founders have my respect. They had their houses as collateral for their company's operating loan. They also succeeded at a much higher rate than the VC backed founders I've…

The comparison shouldn't be VC-backed founders, but all founders including those who weren't able to fund their company and therefore failed.

Getting VC funding is a significant filter.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#225

Post by gnicholas »

kortilla wrote: post #186
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…

> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. This is wrong. Lawyers get paid worse than FAANG SWEs unless they make partnership, which is the equivalent to becoming a co-owner or working as a lower…

The difference is not as great in these other fields, but that's because the pyramid isn't as large. There's one person at the top of Alphabet, and tens of thousands of people below him. No law firm has as many people, by a long shot. And the medical analogy isn't right either. You have to look at the CEO of a pharma company, who probably does make a similar multiple to Sundar.

But the person at the top also has a much greater risk because pay is tied to stock performance. The top lawyer in a firm gets paid well, and probably some of that is tied to firm performance. But the base salary is a much greater percent of total comp in that case.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#226

Post by yamtaddle »

zozbot234 wrote: post #181
goodpoint wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?

If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.

Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics).

You might—might—out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take a real shot at them, high enough that there'd be no hope of a break-even exit if things don't go perfectly.

I'd call that a moat.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#227

Post by ketzo »

bdcravens wrote: post #44
thebradbain wrote: post #9

For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood. The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from. The WGA, for example, allows the…

Very little of Hollywood's work can be done remotely. Even the parts that can are essentially protected by that network that can't, they are so intertwined. Also Hollywood has a substantial moat that prevents an indie studio in Tulsa from having access to the same distribution network, etc. Not suggesting that "big tech" doesn't have advantages, but overall, there's an entire world of software development outside of…

Supporting your point further, one of the reasons Georgia gets so much film/TV work is because they are unfriendly to unions, so labor costs are much lower.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#228

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jeffbee wrote: post #149
coding123 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're Apple's CEO in 2018 and due to a decade of skillful engineering you own a proven platform that's already shipped in 2 billion devices, and is now objectively fast enough to run a PC, the demands of which are not all that different from the 12.9" iPad that already exists. Do you respect the work of this talented semiconductor organization by refactoring the Mac to use the same CPU? In what way is this a tricky…

I'd be surprised if Tim Cook even greenlit this decision. It's really something that should be decided by whoever is running the Mac business line.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#229

Post by briffle »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #198
throwaway23597 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.

In order for something to be valuable it needs to be rare and irreplaceable. And the true test is the subtraction, if Brin/Page were never born we'd still have something like Google, much like we'd know relativity if Einstein was never born or the 3 principles if Newton was never born. Humanity advances as a whole, while individual humans play dice and games to get to be the one guy (or girl although it's mostly guys…

In fact, yahoo would probably still be a major player. (remember them)

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#230

Post by kortilla »

wolverine876 wrote: post #193

This should create enormous business opportunities: Lots of talented, self-motivated, creative, forward thinking, skilled workers looking for a place that values them and is forward thinking, including about employment. Usually, layoffs happen in weak economies. But the economy is strong, unemployment is low. These layoffs are partly about power and ideology - sacrificing business interests. It's a rare opportunity f…

> how often do large companies shed their best people.

Less often than they shed under-performers. Hiring during mass layoffs is difficult because it’s a market of lemons situations. You have to sift through the majority that got let go because their manager identified them as performing below average to find the ones that were laid off because some failing departments were shut down.

Post reply on HN