561–570 of 764 posts
This is _madness_.
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Yes and it has always been like this. Why would companies truly "value" Engineering? The majority of execs thinks we are just interchangeable drones and the only reason the salaries are so high in SV is because they literally can't get away with less. If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require. They will fire you in an instant to sav…
> If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require. I think that misses a cultural difference, which is that Canada and EU jobs don't require as much work because our work ethic is different. I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being force…
This sounds like 90% of the people I knew at Google.
> US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle.
This isn’t even remotely true.
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I’m sure my 16 year old son would have loved that. And everyone arguing that a company doesn’t deserve to exist if it can’t profitably pay more, is posting on a site funding money losing companies that couldn’t exist if they actually had to make a profit.
If you want to advocate the position that there's some age where the correlation between work and income can or should be looser, be my guest. For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week doing something that requires no skill should still entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life. Further, that it should require only one person in a family to do that work in order for the family do live a basi…
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/San-Francisco
Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?
That’s $60/hour before taxes according to this gross up calculator
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/grossup/california/r...
Portland Oregon is #25 on the list of the 50 largest metro areas in the US. A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?
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I do not at all understand the reason for your response. Do you really think that I was saying that doing something for free is always a form of slavery? I think it’s obvious the meaning and intent of what I wrote and only a disingenuous interpretation could have led you to respond as you did.
Please stop with the motte and bailey. I interpreted what you wrote and what you wrote was itself disingenuous. You stated that a zero-dollar income in a laissez faire market is sufficient to render anyone earning that amount a slave. You made no exceptions. As to the claim that the "more enlightened" are those who would reject the laissez-faire system, you've presented no credible evidence to that either.
You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.
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You think that most companies that are YC funded and seeking additional rounds of funding are profitable?
"on average" does not mean "most companies". It could mean that, but in all likelihood it means that some YC funded companies make huge amounts of money for YC that sufficiently balances the losses that they keep doing it. Ya know, like most investment (that works).
Joe Bob’s Burgers don’t have the luxury of losing money hoping they can survive long enough to find the “greater fool” either via acquisition or IPO.
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> Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the exact amount of revenue a single emp…
In most cases, and almost certainly in any minimum wage case, sure. But sales people have a pretty directly attributable profit contribution.
This is most obvious when you take the extreme case of looking at the department level - sales and marketing are "responsible" for 100% of the revenue, but if you delete legal, support, R&D, HR, and finance, your revenue goes to zero pretty quickly.
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Wow, that was really poignant.
I dunno, it seemed fairly rosy. They could have twisted the knife quite a bit more: there were a couple 3-second interactions where people are buying things [0][1], if they had been denominated in "hours of service" rather than USD, with the Company knowing what their hours balance was, and having the balance tick down and go negative... that would have been dark. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=1m2…
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Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced h…
i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separat…
I think you're just factually wrong about this particular part. If I understand you correctly, you're claiming that the definition of "exploit" is "derive net profit from", but I've never seen any definition like that. Generally, I think there are two definitions:
1) use / utilize
2) use unfairly
The first is typical when describing resource exploitation. The second is typical when describing relationships between humans. In neither case does net profit come into it.
That's both my personal understanding of the word (but who cares what I think), and also what I see in three different online dictionaries that I just checked. So I ask you: where are you getting your definition from?
Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have…
Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have…
The article suggests they are on the verge of exhausting the labor supply because they can't get anyone to stay for more than a couple years though, because so many people have already been there and left -- and that this has in the past been intentional on the employer's part, to only keep workers for a couple years. If true, that puts a different light on things -- how the combination of having such a large labor f…