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

How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

pando.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 488 posts

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#311

Post by johnmaddox »

kirubakaran wrote: post #58
zaidf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where he crosses the asshole line over to scumbag and crook territory. I say this as someone who respects Jobs deeply for his product vision.

He has always been there. "Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

I really respect Steve Wozniak. But why does he not rebel and leave him. Why does any body surrender when they have a choice unlike most others. And this is the reason i wish there are more people like RMS who are both talented and have deep philosophy.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#312

Post by zgm »

dredmorbius wrote: post #258
zgm wrote: post #139

As a new grad about to enter the workforce, I find this more than a little disconcerting. Do any experienced engineers have any advice on how to avoid this kind of mistreatment?

There are five courses of action: ⚫ Be ownership. Start your own company. You'll rapidly find that the same numerical collusion advantages which apply to large employers are even more applicable to VC and funders, and that the game they play is for control. Even Jobs got screwed out of his own company. ⚫ Opt out of the game. Welcome to the world of post-growth economics and the impact that has for wages everywhere. ⚫…

Thanks, dredmorbius! I'll definitely keep these in mind going forward.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#313

Post by sillysaurus2 »

pg wrote: post #223
cs702 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt we will ever be able to "measure" the effect. We can only guess and debate it with hypothetical scenarios -- "what if all these CEOs had had to compete for talented employees, instead of fixing the market for them?" Regardless of the effect, it is a shame to see that these leading CEOs, who for years have vociferously complained about media & telecom oligopolies for preventing competition, were for years simu…

This comment thread is like a micro version of the origins of the hard sciences.

Unfortunately, salary information is generally kept confidential. Nature is much more forthright with its facts.

There is some information on, say, glassdoor.com, but it's anecdotal. Is there a reliable and high-res salary datasource?

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#314

Post by zgm »

josho wrote: post #253
zgm wrote: post #139

As a new grad about to enter the workforce, I find this more than a little disconcerting. Do any experienced engineers have any advice on how to avoid this kind of mistreatment?

Know your market value. You can find this out by doing occasional job interviews and receiving offers. Don't view this as wasting your time or theirs, if a truly exceptional offer is made you would take it, and you often don't know if they are exceptional until late in the process. (e.g. my second job out of school nearly didn't happen because after the second interview I thought the role wasn't interesting, fortunat…

Thanks, josho! I appreciate the concrete, actionable advice.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#315

Post by mattlutze »

CGudapati wrote: post #291
marme wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

real changes that need to be made to h1b are the fact that they need to prioritize the h1bs to foreigners who graduate from US universities. Every year thousands of foreign PhD students graduate and go back to their home country not because they want to but because they could not get an H1B visa mostly because they wont work at the cut rate a person fresh from their home country would work for. These PhDs are trained…

Is this true? I am from India and want to do a PhD in US. I thought the work opportunities of PhD gards is good.

It is very variable depending on your subject and research focus.

Teaching opportunities are not good; there are far too many PhDs awarded compared to job openings for university positions.

It may be a benefit for private industry work, but remember that a PhD is primarily about showing you can perform rigorous scientific research, and compared to a Masters, matters less (or not at all) in jobs where research is not the focus.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#316

Post by dnautics »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #230
dnautics wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to know what marxism is like in america? Try academic research science. Pay lines for postdocs are effectively set by a centalized agency - NIH guidelines. There's limited market and a captive, oversupplied labor pool, zero ownership of the means of production ("it all goes for the collective effort"). Advancement is not meritocratic, but rather a combination of being in the right place when a position op…

All I gathered from your comment is that you are a PhD holder who doesn't know what "marxism" is.

Presumptively the 'most important' things that Marx believed is the idea that the workers should "control the means of production"[1] via a centrally organized apparatus, preferably the state, plus theoretically orthogonal (except to the keepers of the faith) stuff like labor theory of value, distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and dialectic model for social progression, plus a little bit of pining for the simplicity of the feudalistic era.

But, you're right, I don't know what "Marxism" is. But, I suspect many self-proclaimed marxists haven't even read Das Kapital or the Manifesto, so at least I'm a little bit ahead.

[1] I will cop to not fully understanding what it generally means to 'control the means of production' but I blame Marx. It's kind of not a really well-defined idea, and he had a penchant for florid language, in places where he was compensating for not being precise.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#317

Post by Already__Taken »

dba7dba wrote: post #265
Natsu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what I hear about him, it seems like I always end up respecting Steve Wozniak more.

Unfortunately most people only know/worship Jobs. Few non-geeks know about Wozniak. Sad.

It sounds like he likes it that way.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#318

Post by kayoone »

kirubakaran wrote: post #58
zaidf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where he crosses the asshole line over to scumbag and crook territory. I say this as someone who respects Jobs deeply for his product vision.

He has always been there. "Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

A lot of Woz' generosity comes from him not caring about money and power but that doesn't make him any less likable of course.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#319

Post by laichzeit0 »

I don't really feel sorry for the employees. There's this fascination between geeks to work at one of these "prestigious" companies, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. yet at the end of they day you are burning all your time, effort, essentially your life, to make a few guys rich.

They pay you enough to keep you happy, give you a few "interesting" problems to work on if you're lucky, maybe a couple of perks at the office. Why are you selling your soul to these guys in the first place? I just don't get why you'd be interested in making someone else rich for some geek-cred.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#320

Post by spiderPig »

hrjet wrote: post #235
spiderPig wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agr…

> Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds. That doesn't make sense. If they can be easily replaced, then why aren't they? Wouldn't it directly benefit the company hiring them to not hire them? Also, I don't like your characterization of people based on where they work. A person may choo…

> That doesn't make sense. If they can be easily replaced, then why aren't they? Wouldn't it directly benefit the company hiring them to not hire them?

In our cloud service, these guys are the first-line of defense in troubleshooting customer issues. They're the guys customers talk to and they follow a standard troubleshooting guide before pinging one of the on-call engineers. So it can't exactly be automated. And trust me, if that were possible, it would've been done. In a way, that's also one of the reasons this stuff is outsourced, companies don't want to go through the trouble of doing the hiring themselves for these roles.

> Also, I don't like your characterization of people based on where they work. A person may choose to work in BK/McDonalds but that doesn't imply anything (positive or negative) about their capability.

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear. That absolutely wasn't the message I was trying to get across. I understand working there doesn't mean anything about their capability and often it is a stepping stone to something greater (ex: college/high-school students). What I meant to say was the skill level here is the same. In effect, they just need to know their way around a machine and speak good English. Heck, they'd do a better job at it considering how poor the outsourced folks are at it. They'd even have more fun because there's still room for the occasional intellectual stimulation and creativity within these roles. And they'd be better pay too. Overall, it will be a better use of their time and they'd have more job satisfaction.

Post reply on HN