Billionaires Build • Hacker News Board

Re: Billionaires Build

#861

Post by MinorTom » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #847

greenyouse wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persons B, C, and D are being paid a rate proportionate to the available labor market for their product building skill set. There was nothing stopping persons B, C, or D from being person A and founding a company for that idea. If B, C, and D chose to strike for a higher wage then they could but there might be an E, F, and G which could take over for them at their previous rates. Anybody can make a giant sized, billi…

> Persons B, C, and D are being paid a rate proportionate to the available labor market for their product building skill set. The labor market doesn't set prices based on value to society and scarcity. If it did, nurses and teachers would be millionaires (there's a shortage of both and they provide high value to society) and middle managers would make very little (there's a glut and they provide very little value to…

> If it did, nurses [...] would be millionaires (there's a shortage of both and they provide high value to society)

I know the situation in Germany will be quite different to that in the US, but the reason we have a shortage of nurses is that the pay is not decided on supply and demand in order to have enough of them, but rather as a political decision.

> The law of supply and demand also doesn't explain or account for things like race/gender pay gaps, monopsonies, and collusion.

I'll mostly (but not completely) agree here. Humans are never fully rational, and that irrationality is certainly a relevant element.

> employment is very sticky

Of course it is. Teaching an employee on your systems/way of working costs money and is an element in the decision of whether or not to hire an employee. This decision affects demand and therefore price/wages.

Re: Billionaires Build

#862

Post by webmaven » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #465

akg_67 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Amazon warehouse worker making $10-20 an hour that instead of putting food on the table, roof on the head of his family, he should have bought Amazon shares. Bezo is epitome of what’s wrong with America and American “capitalist” system.

New Amazon workers aren't the ones who made it a trillion-dollar company. The older ones were. By your standards, the only way Amazon could compensate them fairly is to pay workers in Amazon shares and force them to hold it.

> New Amazon workers aren't the ones who made it a trillion-dollar company. The older ones were. By your standards, the only way Amazon could compensate them fairly is to pay workers in Amazon shares and force them to hold it.

Something like mandatory equity contributions to the company pension fund would probably work.

Re: Billionaires Build

#863

Post by ericd » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

CraigJPerry wrote: post #852

ericd wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were talking about needing startup capital to get the business off the ground, so this is kind of moving the goalposts. But if you have a library nearby, that can take care of a lot of the concerns you’re talking about. Before the pandemic, I frequently worked out of one. Your hypothetical 16 year old likely has a suitable spot at their school. You really don’t need an existing network to get a business started. Y…

If that’s true, why is it so rare? Why is this secret undiscovered?

What is “it” referring to? Bootstrapping a small business?

There are quite a lot of successful small saas startups that took no funding. Are you familiar with microconf? The business of software conference?

It might seem rare if you don’t know anybody doing it, the knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. Doesn’t mean it is rare.

Re: Billionaires Build

#864

Post by dang » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

slumpt_ wrote: post #770

dang wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually snark works quite a bit better in academic discourse, where the communities are smaller and more cohesive. It doesn't work well in large, open internet forums like this one, where it basically just triggers an avalanche of tedious and ever-worse behavior. I'm not making a moral point—rather an empirical one about this particular type of internet environment. Here's a related explanation from a few weeks ago…

It is unfortunate flagging censors the posts. Was interested to get more context in the thread and instead it’s hidden entirely. Regarding the rest, I’m happy to simply disagree with you having observed this in practice in other communities. It’s not black and white.

One thing to remember about online communities is that size is by far the most important factor. Things work very differently at different orders of magnitude. If you know of a community of HN's size or greater (millions of users a month) where snarky dismissals have helpful systemic effects, I'd like to know what it is, because I don't currently believe that's possible.

As for flagging, what thread are you referring to?

Re: Billionaires Build

#865

Post by ardy42 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

elefanten wrote: post #717

nostrademons wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a selection bias there: people who think YC or YC's startup model is out-of-touch don't apply to YC, and certainly don't get selected. Personally, I've watched YC grow from something that I thought was an obviously good idea but nobody else agreed with me about (I applied to the first SFP in 2005, as a college student), to something mainstream that lots of people aspired to (~2010), to being something at best…

I think your timeline illustrates another point: fashions are always changing. And fashions also come into play in these judgments. I will eat my 8G-networked collapsible VR headset if, 20 years from now, people aren't horribly cringing at the popular 2020 notions of "solving climate change" and "working for racial justice". Not because of whatever feelings I have towards those advocacies, but because even their curr…

> And fashions also come into play in these judgments. I will eat my 8G-networked collapsible VR headset if, 20 years from now, people aren't horribly cringing at the popular 2020 notions of "solving climate change" and "working for racial justice".

Are people today horribly cringing at the civil rights activists from the 50-60s or gay rights activists from the 80s-90s?

I think people are far more likely to cringe at naive optimism (e.g. postwar enthusiasm for heavy industry and its products) than genuine attempts to tackle problems.

Re: Billionaires Build

#866

Post by pdonis » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #774

pdonis wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxation is the proper remedy for breaking this power. No, it's one possible remedy, and historically it doesn't appear to have worked very well. The fundamental problem with taxation is that governments are even worse than individual billionaires like Jeff Bezos at choosing what to do with large amounts of money. Another possible remedy is to reduce the power of governments, so there is less value to be captured b…

> The fundamental problem with taxation is that governments are even worse than individual billionaires like Jeff Bezos at choosing what to do with large amounts of money. Citation needed. When Governments had lots of revenue, they assist the population with public services, which tend to benefit the lowest stratum of society the most. But the cumulative effect is to raise the quality of life of society as a whole. T…

> Citation needed. When Governments had lots of revenue, they assist the population with public services, which tend to benefit the lowest stratum of society the most. But the cumulative effect is to raise the quality of life of society as a whole.

Citation needed.

Re: Billionaires Build

#867

Post by avindroth » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

tekdude wrote: post #207

I think one issue with this viewpoint is that while a successful company may be doing wonderful things for its users... not everyone is a user. Even the users themselves are not users 100% of the time. So, even if a company is not actively exploiting its workforce, customers, or suppliers, it might be exploiting its non-users without ever giving them much opportunity to object. Again, Airbnb is probably the best exam…

You can’t really account for every externality, without also considering positive externalities.

Re: Billionaires Build

#868

Post by webmaven » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #779

curun1r wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

The expected monetary value of the average software engineer’s work working at Google is much higher than that of the same engineer working at a small company, launching the same product. The difference is the leverage provided by the structure that is Google - the audience, brand, machinery, etc. The software is important, but so is the massive built-in audience. It is the company’s structure accounts for the majori…

> It is the company’s structure accounts for the majority of the value created by that engineer’s work.

Except that billionaire founders also persist in flattering themselves that their company "only hires the best". If that were true, FAANG salaries for ICs ought to be even higher than they are, and competition between them for employees would be cutthroat rather than collegial.

As it is, they are competing for employees as a group with the rest of the industry, more so than with each other, so the truth is a mixture: individual employees matter more than their compensation actually reflects, and the company the employee is embedded in matters a great deal too (enough so that we only ever see a randomly occurring concentration of high quality employees producing innovative products and services when that group is more-or-less the whole org: a startup. Inside a larger org, such groups only flourish deliberately).

Re: Billionaires Build

#869

Post by z3t4 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #544

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. > just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way You're not wrong, but funding education is _expensive_, and education is only part of the puzzle, access is another large part of it, and so are…

Yep. And good luck figuring out how to impress girls that spent every summer of their childhood in Paris and Switzerland.

Tell them about the eiffel tower

Re: Billionaires Build

#870

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #831

WalterBright wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freelance programming doesn't require any more capital than owning a computer. Anyone can start by contributing to open source projects.

That's not "starting a business," that's just finding work.

It's a business in every way (be sure to register it with the government as a business). You can turn it into leverage by finding gigs for your programming friends, handling the negotiation, billing, and payment and thereby collecting a percentage. In fact, you can become quite wealthy doing this.