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A lot of trades people also have a shelf life. It's hard work and you may not be able to work as carpenter or welder after 50. I agree about unions. The older

A lot of trades people also have a shelf life. It's hard work and you may not be able to work as carpenter or welder after 50. I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
> I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few. Can't agree more with this. When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation. Which was precisely what the Luddites were doing too. They weren't anti-tech. They were anti-exploitation. In these days, such exploitation often involved use of weaving machines, so the latter got destroyed in the process, but it was never about technology itself.
esoterica 8y ago
You don't need to win the IPO lottery to make good money in tech. Facebook's median compensation according to their SEC filings is 240k/year. That's the median over all employees; the median engineer compensation is probably even higher. If half of their 25,000 employees are making 240k+, a decent fraction of them are probably making 400k, 500k+ even. It's hard to consider these people exploited.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Getting a job at Facebook is also a lottery win. Not too many will get a job at these highly paying companies.
  - esoterica 8y ago
    It's a minority of tech workers who will end up at a FAANG-tier company, but it's not a tiny minority. There are hundreds of thousands of people being employed by firms in this category. It's less like winning the lottery and more like winning a dice roll.
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  I was reading that it is up to the discretion of companies like Facebook as to how they compute the median. So Facebook can decide to include stock options and projections of their future value when computing the median. I suspect that they fudged their numbers in an effort to make their executive pay look reasonable relative to the employee pay.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

> I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few. Can't agree more with this. When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation. Which was precisely what the Luddites were doing too. They weren't anti-tech. They were anti-exploitation. In these days, such exploitation often involved use of weaving machines, so the latter got destroyed in the process, but it was never about technology itself.

esoterica 8y ago

You don't need to win the IPO lottery to make good money in tech. Facebook's median compensation according to their SEC filings is 240k/year. That's the median over all employees; the median engineer compensation is probably even higher. If half of their 25,000 employees are making 240k+, a decent fraction of them are probably making 400k, 500k+ even. It's hard to consider these people exploited.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Getting a job at Facebook is also a lottery win. Not too many will get a job at these highly paying companies.
- esoterica 8y ago
  It's a minority of tech workers who will end up at a FAANG-tier company, but it's not a tiny minority. There are hundreds of thousands of people being employed by firms in this category. It's less like winning the lottery and more like winning a dice roll.
MrTonyD 8y ago
I was reading that it is up to the discretion of companies like Facebook as to how they compute the median. So Facebook can decide to include stock options and projections of their future value when computing the median. I suspect that they fudged their numbers in an effort to make their executive pay look reasonable relative to the employee pay.