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

The boss who put everyone on 70K

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 381 posts

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#291

Post by fahadkhan »

bloblaw wrote: post #241

I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers. In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to d…

Saw a video of Price saying that his minimum salary may have indirectly raised housing costs in his city and that is not a problem he can solve but something that the city must. I don't know the figures but I would guess that any effect that he had caused was minimal.

He really does come across as great guy. If I was more local I would probably look to work for him.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#293

Post by galazzah »

alexbanks wrote: post #276
dominotw wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>average tech worker earns $275k a year I need to move to bay area this year. thats my sole mission this year.

I'm curious where this poster got that figure. I haven't found anything like it, in fact a pretty consistent 145k average salary. I would also be wary of average vs. median, as there's some real crazy outliers out there.

https://www.levels.fyi/ has some pretty good figures.

I also am fairly certain its total comp and not salary...

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#294

Post by lotsofpulp »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #249
lotsofpulp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its no surprise to me that paying workers a living wage (or even something close) results in measurable benefits for a business, in a variety of ways (not to mention immeasurably improving the lives of employees). Not if their work doesn’t really differentiate the product. I have all the research I need about products from the internet, so I don’t need a store employee to sell me anything. Same with many other low…

Spoken like someone who has never worked in a low-wage job, owned a business, or managed low-wage workers. There are low-paying jobs for a variety of reasons, including in large part, corporate welfare for the largest employers, like Wal-Mart, which the government subsidies at taxpayer expense to facilitate the payment of starvation wages. https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-... As far having…

I do own businesses that employ low wage workers, and have managed them myself. The claim I was responding, and am disputing, was that paying workers above market rate will result in benefits for the business.

There are very few businesses who target the upper middle class or those with a little bit of disposable income that can afford to go above and beyond for their workers, like Nordstroms, Costco, Apple, Trader Joes, etc. If you notice, these businesses are all located on the rich side of town, and usually there's only 1 or 2 for medium size cities.

You simply won't survive as a business if you pay workers more hoping to get something out of them when the customers don't value it, and reality shows this. If you want to increase the standard of living for low wage workers, one needs to support politicians who will pass legislation mandating paid time off, de-coupling health insurance from employers, parental leave, increasing minimum and overtime wages, reducing # of hours before overtime kicks in, etc.

This isn't a problem a single business can solve, it's a society wide issue that needs a society wide solution.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#295

Post by FalconSensei »

TimPC wrote: post #232
ylem wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Tokyo actively encourage building?

Toronto is fairly encouraging of building as well. It's just that it's the fastest growing city in the western world so demand is growing faster than supply. Most cities have problems with staying creative in the face of high rents because most artist jobs pay very poorly (unless you're one of the few who makes it big). It's pretty terrible that musicians, writers, painters and sculptors tend to be in salary brackets…

Toronto is building a lot, but you basically see more expensive condos that are already sold out for people who doesn't even live there

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#296

Post by uk_programmer »

benreesman wrote: post #28
domlebo70 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well would you pay 10 dollars a liter to fill your car up, when you can get perfectly good fuel for $1.50 a liter?

I’m not sure I follow the analogy, but I certainly pay extra for high-octane gasoline when I’m filling up a performance automobile.

But you wouldn't pay £1.30 for high octane petrol when you could pay £1.25 across the road.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#297

Post by whatsmyusername »

buzzkillington wrote: post #163
conjectures wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

What upper class tripe. The only freedom sons of Athenian slaves had was to die in the Athenian silver mines. >Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life. [0] It is always the most comfortable that consume the most vivi…

Can I introduce you to the concept of the 'rhetorical flourish?'

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#298

Post by whatsmyusername »

staticautomatic wrote: post #257
buzzkillington wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along with muslims, billionaires, homosexuals, communists, jews, vegans, nazis and libertarians. Pretty much the only people who are persecuted in the west are whistle blowers, zoophiles and pedophiles.

And atheists.

And many of the people on that list, but because it's not as out in the open they can easily ignore it.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#299

Post by Seenso »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #194
benreesman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a bit about what you mean by inefficient? People mean a lot of different things when they use the word “efficient” in a financial/economic context.

They are paying more than they have to for the low skilled workers. Which means that extra money is not going towards hiring better high skilled workers or just more workers in general. Everything else being equal, an average business would be outcompeted if they did something like that. If you still think what they are doing is efficient, take it further and further. Start increasing the salaries more and more. Very…

> They are paying more than they have to for the low skilled workers. Which means that extra money is not going towards hiring better high skilled workers or just more workers in general.

> Everything else being equal, an average business would be outcompeted if they did something like that.

You're operating using an oversimple mental model. For instance: you appear to believe a person will make a fixed contribution in a role, regardless of their wage. That's obviously false when you consider things like the demotivating effects of being underpaid or under-appreciated.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#300

Post by skookum »

Apocryphon wrote: post #284
skookum wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably from stories like this one earlier this week: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-tech-workers-earn-279k...

Amazon/Microsoft TC, probably. Base salary is a different story.

I don't know why there is always this nitpick. I just take it for granted that when someone talks about tech "salaries" they mean "total comp". Virtually everyone in my peer group makes more than half of their total comp from non-salary compensation. Sure that portion varies somewhat due to market forces, but there seems little point in discussing base salaries.
Post reply on HN