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Tech's Elite Hates Labor

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Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#61

Post by dlkf »

thebradbain wrote: post #34
dlkf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WGA west has about 10k members, whole US has about 15k. (This is from Google, please correct me if I got the wrong number.) By contrast, there are over a million people building software. Will this model scale up two orders of magnitude?

WGA is just one of many unions, but you’re right— getting into the “best” guilds is itself a process; but ostensibly, it’s to ensure that the guild keeps its prestige as a genuine body of talent. It’s a balancing act for sure, and I don’t know if tech wants to emulate everything exactly with the Hollywood guild system, but it’s worth taking inspiration from.

Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#62

Post by civilized »

zozbot234 wrote: post #45
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…

> ..allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. ... There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable ind…

How can you say that the union is privileged and in the next sentence say it's lose-lose? Privilege means the union won something.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#63

Post by Animats »

We can see it coming now - the Final Solution to high tech salaries.

Expect to see a huge downward salary trend in the web front end/back end sector. That stuff is a solved problem. Expect salaries for new hires to drop below $100K and old hires being gradually pushed out.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#64

Post by medvezhenok »

carapace wrote: post #37
treis wrote: post #15

Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.

This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...

Abuse is an unnecessarily strong word there. It is true they colluded to keep salaries down, but I don't think that compares with actual abuse. Software Developers make several times the median salary in the U.S.

The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...

(not to mention how much U.S. software developers benefit from an overly restrictive immigration policy which limits programmer supply)

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#65

Post by habosa »

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 of millions). They are also frequently able to cash out along the way, or borrow against their success. Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry.

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. I don't envy the culture of those industries, but I do sometimes wonder what tech would be like if we leaned a little more that way.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#66

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

treis wrote: post #15

Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.

I read the article differently than you. The article isn’t saying those workers have bad treatment. It’s saying that much of tech’s elite sees that good treatment as a problem.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#67

Post by briffle »

MrMetlHed wrote: post #40
dlkf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WGA west has about 10k members, whole US has about 15k. (This is from Google, please correct me if I got the wrong number.) By contrast, there are over a million people building software. Will this model scale up two orders of magnitude?

Quick search suggests that United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has 1.3m members, so why not? And a union isn't always the best solution for some places, so it's easy for me to imagine smaller companies not having one while larger ones do. Or different unions for different situations and types of work. (edited to add: Obviously the UFCW is not the type of prestige guild the WGA is. Unionizing probab…

The other thing is, you don't need everyone covered. All the other grocers know that someone can just quit and go work at the grocery store down the road and get a certain level of pay and benefits, so they need to at a minimum, meet those same benefits to keep their employees. So it raises everyone's standard in an area.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#68

Post by thebradbain »

zozbot234 wrote: post #45
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…

> ..allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. ... There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable ind…

…do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage? And has been for almost a century?

I could not think of any industry less “hobbled” than Hollywood. They have a sign worshipping itself sprawling across some of the most expensive hillside real estate in the country.

Regardless, as another commentator pointed out— VFX artists are the largest group of non-union workers in Hollywood. They’re also the most overworked and lowest paid— I’m talking about near minimum wage working on a movie with as a high a budget as Marvel. Oftentimes entry-level assistants to assistants to cameramen make more than them.

Know your worth, and charge for it.

Re: Tech's Elite Hates Labor

#69

Post by treis »

carapace wrote: post #37
treis wrote: post #15

Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.

This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...

And Subway made their wage slaves sign non-competes for $8 an hour to stand and make sandwiches all day.

The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations

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