Tech's Elite Hates Labor • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#401

Post by hackerlight » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 3:01 AM UTC

danaris wrote: post #398

hackerlight wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those statistics about CEO pay growth are often deceptive. If you sample the top N firms over time, where N is fixed, the mean market cap of those N firms will be growing, given that the economy has grown over the time window. That the average compensation of the CEO of these sampled firms is also growing is unsurprising. The omitted variable that causes this statistical illusion is GDP growth itself. Now, even with…

That's a lot of words to try and justify CEO/worker pay discrepancies of a factor of over 300 . All that bullshit about statistical illusions doesn't change the fact that the median worker in America has barely seen any real wage growth for 50 years, and all that extra wealth went straight to the wealthiest people in the country. Many of those are the CEOs we're discussing. Income and wealth inequality of this level…

It was a lot of words because you made a lot of factually false claims, so that's to be expected as per Brandolini's Law.

I appreciate that you brought moral certainty into this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of reality or factual premise correct, even if your moral conclusion may be correct by accident.

> doesn't change the fact that the median worker in America has barely seen any real wage growth for 50 years, and all that extra wealth went straight to the wealthiest people in the country.

Fist in the air != explanation. Depressed wage growth has little to do with managerial compensation. If you want an explanation based in fact rather than anger, you have to look at the labor market economics of the situation, which you aren't.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#402

Post by pdonis » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 3:31 AM UTC

kilna wrote: post #388

pdonis wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle I don't think this is a useful way to view it. I would say the potential for change is in people shifting to a more long-term viewpoint instead of always chasing short-term gain and satisfaction. > Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage. If you don't think of yourse…

> not all capitalists are predators That is simply untrue. Sure, some capitalists have good PR, touting their non-capitalist efforts in ways that intentionally confuse them with capitalism for the purpose of increasing PR value. The increase in PR value is just a more oblique means of wealth extraction. The actual act of being capitalist, i.e., extracting excess value from labor by leveraging capital (piles of money,…

> That is simply untrue.

Sorry, you are simply misrepresenting the facts and the economics at this point.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#403

Post by kortilla » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 3:45 AM UTC

strawpeople wrote: post #252

kortilla wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with difficulty. It’s not a leveling up game of leetcode. > whereas when managers make mistakes, the responsibility is diffused to their subordinates. No it’s not. They will roast their subordinates but unless the org is completely dysfunctional they are responsible for the ultimate deliverables. The higher up you move, the more responsible for outcomes that are less and less in your control. You…

> It has nothing to do with difficulty. It’s not a leveling up game of leetcode. Then you should reply to the parent comment and not mine. > No it’s not. They will roast their subordinates but unless the org is completely dysfunctional they are responsible for the ultimate deliverables. Please. If you’ve never seen incompetent managers bumbling along making their staff into scapegoats, etc., then you don’t have a lot…

I guess I’ve been mainly working at successful companies? The biggest company I worked at was Google 7+ years ago and managers that couldn’t deliver and blamed employees would get exited or demoted quite quickly.

It’s been even more aggressive in the startups I’ve been at since.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#404

Post by kortilla » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 3:50 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #238

kortilla wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs." They do make such decisions, but neither that nor their net worth makes them better than anyone else... yet too many of them act as if it does. What they really are is nothing more than people who've won a rigged game.

Since when does this have to do with people “being better”?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#405

Post by kilna » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 4:27 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #402

kilna wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not all capitalists are predators That is simply untrue. Sure, some capitalists have good PR, touting their non-capitalist efforts in ways that intentionally confuse them with capitalism for the purpose of increasing PR value. The increase in PR value is just a more oblique means of wealth extraction. The actual act of being capitalist, i.e., extracting excess value from labor by leveraging capital (piles of money,…

> That is simply untrue. Sorry, you are simply misrepresenting the facts and the economics at this point.

So, is capitalism somehow not the extraction of excess value from labor (profit) by leveraging capital?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#406

Post by amrocha » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 4:42 AM UTC

hackerlight wrote: post #301

amrocha wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe the CEO makes great business decisions, but I don't see how that entitles them to 100x the compensation of the people around them. I don't think researching and making decisions is 100x harder than engineering or HR or law etc.

This misunderstand markets. It's not about some abstract and subjective notion of difficulty. It's about how much value you bring to the table in the context of labor market supply and demand. You are 10x more valuable to your company than a cleaner, so you get 10x the pay. Why? Because your skills are more scarce than a cleaner, and because you can have a bigger impact on the company's profitability by writing code…

I'm not misunderstanding anything, I just disagree with you.

On one hand you say pay is based on value brought to the company, on the other hand you say it's based on scarcity.

If it's value then how come the same engineer, bringing the same value, would receive different pay based on the country they live in?

Clearly that's not it.

So maybe it's scarcity? That drives up pay, but it's not enough by itself.

Markets forces are a factor, but they're not the only factor, or even the most important factor, in compensation.

No, the CEO is not 100x more valuable than the engineer. The decisions taken don't matter if you can't build well. Building well doesn't matter if you don't build the right thing. They're dependent on each other. Neither has impact by themselves.

Also disagreed on 'scarcity' of CEO skills. There's a scarcity of CEOs because there's only 1 per company, but the "skills" are pretty common imo. Any C level exec or director level person has the skills to do the job.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#407

Post by amrocha » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 4:45 AM UTC

hackerlight wrote: post #401

danaris wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of words to try and justify CEO/worker pay discrepancies of a factor of over 300 . All that bullshit about statistical illusions doesn't change the fact that the median worker in America has barely seen any real wage growth for 50 years, and all that extra wealth went straight to the wealthiest people in the country. Many of those are the CEOs we're discussing. Income and wealth inequality of this level…

It was a lot of words because you made a lot of factually false claims, so that's to be expected as per Brandolini's Law. I appreciate that you brought moral certainty into this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of reality or factual premise correct, even if your moral conclusion may be correct by accident. > doesn't change the fact that the median worker in America has barely seen any real wage gr…

If you want an explanation based in fact rather than blind faith in market theory, you have to look at the capitalist labor relations side of it too, which you aren't.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#408

Post by up2isomorphism » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 5:28 AM UTC

The irony is that some tech workers seem to be frustrated about the natural outcome of free market while exactly enjoying the outcome of free market when it works for them.

I did not see these people jumping out when a coding boot camp guy got paid 200K/year two years ago while people with 20 year experience in other industries only get 100K .

Company has a positive revenue does not mean they don’t have to optimize their cost structure. They have to pay off people just like they need to hire like crazy when the market is good.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#409

Post by mrzimmerman » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 5:49 AM UTC

throw93 wrote: post #387

diebeforei485 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a union isn't going to change this. If most of the voting members are "new CS grads bring churned out", you'll have the same dynamics inside the union.

I will rather trust the democratically elected union leaders who are also my co-workers than the management. I don't really know what else to say at this point. It's just weird taking side of the management.

Couldn’t agree more. Our interests as employees is far different from management and the C-suite. Don’t forget that board members currently have a legal obligation to provide value to investors and no obligation to do the same for their employees.

It’s one of the reasons we see layoffs during a time of record profits. It’s easy to turn humans out to boost the profit margin and the stock value.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#410

Post by mrzimmerman » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 5:54 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #342

guhidalg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company does treat the employees well, the article specifically calls out VCs and executives as the principal actors: > The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the…

But that's not the truth. You can see it anytime this sort of thread comes up. People think they should be able to work very little and get paid a lot of money as long as they "meet expectation". That's entitlement.

Sure, some people act and think like that. But at the end of the day executives and the C level have no obligation other than returning as large a profit as possible to investors.

Additionally, it’s a straw man argument to say that everyone who is being let go currently at a time of record profits is just being a lay about. It’s easy to say until it happens to you, and it shouldn’t. People—our neighbors and fellow humans—deserve better treatment than to be cast aside to make the stock price rise again.

Some people have been hard at work on products that were never great, but the direction they took came from leadership. That’s as much a strawman argument, but it belabors the point that making broad judgements on a group is the wrong way to go about taking a position.