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Uber uses an algorithm to estimate the lowest possible compensation employees will take in order to keep labor costs down Of course they do. I'd like to blame

Uber uses an algorithm to estimate the lowest possible compensation employees will take in order to keep labor costs down Of course they do. I'd like to blame Uber. I'd like to blame Kalanick. But I keep coming back to blaming us, the engineers, for being the willing hands that let Silicon Valley dismantle every good thing we'd built up. We built algorithms to find out how little we could pay ourselves. We built apps to turn employees into contractors earning MacDonald's level wages. We routed around the government's limitations on surveillance and record-keeping by selling ourselves open microphones to Amazon's data centers. It seems almost quaint, looking back on the 90s, how what we feared were bureaucrats in government offices.

eternalban 9y ago
It appears the PC was a black swan event for the establishment. The establishment was anticipating a mainframe future with centralized servers and dumb terminals for the masses. The Personal Computer, and the imaginal political and social aspirations of the workers in that era, posed a very real threat to their hold on power, in my opinion. Throwing money and social prestige at a select and compliant few; diminishing the economic power of the American software developer with outsourcing of jobs to developing world; [non-stop] propaganda about "hackers"; and pouring VC money into organizations, such as Google and Facebook, that had a contrary social and political view to the 80s and 90s idealists and promoted a curiously infantile ideal of the workplace, all took their toll. Today, they have their centralized and controlled servers ("cloud") and armies of coders who have nothing but $ signs in their eyes.
Anderkent 9y ago
Why does it make a difference if it's an algorithm estimating what you're willing to work for rather than some person in the corporation structure? Yes, corporations will always try to figure out what's the least they could pay you. But it's still up to you to set that number.
- fatbird 9y ago
  You don't negotiate in a vacuum. If you participate in writing that algorithm that exerts downward pressure on salaries generally (because it's more efficient/effective, and it's applied at the level of a tech behemoth with a lot of influence), you're incrementally lowering the baseline from which you and everyone else negotiate. You're basically arming the other side of the negotiating table--and that other side is already a multi-billion dollar unicorn. At some point, you'd think a basic sense of self-interest would remain. I swear, if someone held a contest to design a better rope for hanging engineers, we'd fall all over ourselves trying to win. If someone kickstarted that idea, they'd need new stretch goals in an hour.
  - Anderkent 9y ago
    It might be more efficient/effective, or it might just be more predictable and cheaper to run than person-to-person negotiations. I think I'd prefer a clear algorithm for salaries to "what you get depends on who your lead is and how much of an asshole you're willing to be".

eternalban 9y ago

It appears the PC was a black swan event for the establishment. The establishment was anticipating a mainframe future with centralized servers and dumb terminals for the masses. The Personal Computer, and the imaginal political and social aspirations of the workers in that era, posed a very real threat to their hold on power, in my opinion. Throwing money and social prestige at a select and compliant few; diminishing the economic power of the American software developer with outsourcing of jobs to developing world; [non-stop] propaganda about "hackers"; and pouring VC money into organizations, such as Google and Facebook, that had a contrary social and political view to the 80s and 90s idealists and promoted a curiously infantile ideal of the workplace, all took their toll. Today, they have their centralized and controlled servers ("cloud") and armies of coders who have nothing but $ signs in their eyes.

Anderkent 9y ago

Why does it make a difference if it's an algorithm estimating what you're willing to work for rather than some person in the corporation structure? Yes, corporations will always try to figure out what's the least they could pay you. But it's still up to you to set that number.

fatbird 9y ago
You don't negotiate in a vacuum. If you participate in writing that algorithm that exerts downward pressure on salaries generally (because it's more efficient/effective, and it's applied at the level of a tech behemoth with a lot of influence), you're incrementally lowering the baseline from which you and everyone else negotiate. You're basically arming the other side of the negotiating table--and that other side is already a multi-billion dollar unicorn. At some point, you'd think a basic sense of self-interest would remain. I swear, if someone held a contest to design a better rope for hanging engineers, we'd fall all over ourselves trying to win. If someone kickstarted that idea, they'd need new stretch goals in an hour.
- Anderkent 9y ago
  It might be more efficient/effective, or it might just be more predictable and cheaper to run than person-to-person negotiations. I think I'd prefer a clear algorithm for salaries to "what you get depends on who your lead is and how much of an asshole you're willing to be".