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It seems like it's about the optics in the present BLM-heavy climate. But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hel

It seems like it's about the optics in the present BLM-heavy climate. But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hell Andela would exist and be so valuable if there wasn't significant arbitrage to be had? They're a business not a charity. I'm reminded of a story about child laborers and Nike. In an almost Kafkaeque twist, locales where this was happening ended up experiencing significant economic setbacks when Nike decided to close up certain offending factories. This is just another classic case of people reacting emotionally, biasing towards their own set of experiences and points of view.

seph-reed 6y ago
> They're a business not a charity I think maybe the world is starting to feel like companies that take more than they give back are ultimately parasitic and abusive. For a long time it has been considered completely okay to maximize profit over all else, but if corporations were people they wouldn't be very community oriented peoples. Much more on the manipulative and greasy gross spectrum, and maybe that's just going out of style? Also, they kind of were acting like a charity, so that could be part of it too.
- seibelj 6y ago
  What’s wonderful about a free, liberal society is that we can all make our own choices. For example, you can work at a business that operates more like a charity, while I can choose to work at a business that is laser-focused on maximizing profit. That is just my preference.
  - 0_gravitas 6y ago
    > you can work at a business that operates more like a charity, while I can choose to work at a business that is laser-focused on maximizing profit unlikely unless you have a good degree of financial security or are relatively 'in demand'
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The very way that value is looked at by most people is incorrect and it shows. Not just through rates of bankruptcy and overspending even when circumstances are clearly far outliers in their favor. There are a lot of old myths believed on a deep level like the idea of a universal fair price, fair profit margin, and zero sum benefit from trades where if anyone is making a profit it must be doing so at somebody's expense. All of them are wrong. If operating under those fallacious zero sum models companies always look parasitic if they survive, regardless of what they contributed and what would or wouldn't have occurred in their absense.
caymanjim 6y ago
I've spent much of my career as a software consultant. I usually make about 1/3 of my client billing rate. The rake is high. Part of that is normal overhead of employer-side taxes, benefits, expensable items (hardware, business lunches, continuing education), infrastructure/support (office space, office staff/HR/non-owner management). We can generously call that another 1/3 of the client bill rate. That leaves the final 1/3 to the company for profit and business development. There's nothing remotely unusual about this arrangement.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Back when I worked for Boeing, the accounting figure was that it cost Boeing about 45% over and above my salary to pay for my benefits package and taxes paid on my behalf (things like health insurance, retirement plan contributions, the so-called "employer's contribution" of Social Security taxes, etc.). This is why when one sees salary comparisons, they are misleading. A correct comparison would compare what is called "total compensation" which includes that 45%. For example, whenever you hear about public teacher salaries being low, no mention is ever made of the total compensation, which is pretty generous. Those "free" benefits aren't free at all. They come out of the employee's pocket.
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    > For example, whenever you hear about public teacher salaries being low, no mention is ever made of the total compensation, which is pretty generous. This is disingenuous. It's perfectly acceptable to compare teacher salary to any other salary. The default assumption is that you're comparing W2-with-benefits to W2-with-benefits. When people talk about low teacher salary, they're talking about it in comparison to another salary with the exact same overhead. It's not necessary to assign cash value to employer-paid taxes and benefits when making an apples-to-apples comparison.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      It is not disingenuous because the public teacher benefits package is much better than typical in the private sector. The teachers' unions have been quite clever about this, in negotiation for much of their pay in the form of benefits, so it looks like their pay is low. The newspaper, for example, often runs comparisons of salaries but never total compensation.
david38 6y ago
This is common because people in rich countries have no idea what the situation is in other countries. I remember something similar happened in India. Kids were sewing rugs or something, someone didn’t like it because it looked bad (like a sweatshop) and there was a boycott. The place went out of business. International investigators later found that 50% of those children had to resort to sex work while a good percentage of the rest ended up doing hard labor jobs and such. It was absolute catastrophe. The white rich people who started the boycott? They just went on with their lives. No significant and realistic effort was made to correct anything by them.
- sethammons 6y ago
  I upvoted because it is accurate. I wanted to comment that I think you can drop the race part from the comment.
  - bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
    No, it's essential to what's being communicated. > Baizuo (/ˈbaɪˌdzwɔː/; Chinese: 白左 báizuǒ, literally White Left) is a derogatory Chinese neologism and political epithet used to refer to Western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white people.
WalterBright 6y ago
> In an almost Kafkaeque twist Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives. Nike closing means they were forced to settle for the worse alternatives.
- bitcurious 6y ago
  > Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives. I don’t find it obvious at all. Children don’t get to consider alternatives, they do as they are taught. That’s the whole problem with child labor.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    That's the problem though: the "let them eat cake" attitude that thinks that child labor in the developing world is driven by agency instead of resource constraints, and that the poorest children in the world would go be architects or engineers if only they weren't forced to work in sweatshops. India's landmark child labor law passed in the 80s is a dramatic, tragic example of policy effects on this margin (though not driven by the same privileged ignorance as the Nike incident). When the law was passed, it lowered the welfare of the affected children and their families on pretty much every relevant metric: calories consumed, years of schooling, mortality, income/wealth, etc. The most stubborn advocate of ignoring the holistic consequences of policy might say it was all worth it, but the most damning thing is that _it increased hours of child labor per household_, coming largely from reduced time in school. Cracking down on child labor employers reduced demand for child labor, which reduced wages. But the problem is that labor supply was inelastic, where the choice was between child labor and starvation. The upshot was that children ended up working more for less money, a tragic lose-lose of a policy responsible for immense human suffering. This isn't an argument for sweatshops per se; it's entirely possible that one can do the legwork and realize that the actual effect of a seemingly good policy is horribly negative. It's an argument that judging policies on how they affect your privileged sensibilities instead of what they do to the people they affect is despicable. Transmuting suffering in sweatshops to much worse suffering from starvation simply because the latter is easier to deny responsibility for is disgusting, but unfortunately the average person doesn't have the moral reasoning ability to understand this.
franctic 6y ago
I think this is a pretty unfair reading of the situation. The grievance came directly from the people working for the company. You can certainly dig in to the situation and have an opinion about whether those grievances are valid, but I don’t see how that can be seen as a case of people “biasing towards their own set of experiences and points of view.” Who else’s point of view should they be considering? Also we definitely live in a global, interconnected world but it feels like a hell of a stretch to invoke BLM here. African workers sharing their feelings about their place of work are just “riding the wave” because they happen to black?
- realtalk_sp 6y ago
  > Yet its strategy misfires and communication blunders have left its African developers in a lurch, underscoring how difficult blending capitalism and social good can be. Stung by the experience, some developers informally refer to the company as “The Plantation.”
vinceguidry 6y ago
> But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hell Andela would exist and be so valuable if there wasn't significant arbitrage to be had? They're a business not a charity. The article appears address the incongruency: > As Andela moved into 2019, many within the company felt the mood shift. It moved from something resembling an NGO to a profit-driven enterprise — which it indeed always was. Andela appears to have been a profit-driven enterprise masquerading as a non-profit one. Until they could no longer sell the lie. Appearing as a benefits-first company drove a lot of "investment" dollars their way. Just looks like another example of fools and their money. With a heavy price tag paid by the innocents.
femiagbabiaka 6y ago
> I'm reminded of a story about child laborers and Nike. In an almost Kafkaeque twist, locales where this was happening ended up experiencing significant economic setbacks when Nike decided to close up certain offending factories. The situation is almost three times as complicated as you’re theorizing here, because those companies were not passive entities. They were political organizations as well who helped remake economies. When Walmart moves into town and all of the other stores close as a result, does that mean that Walmart was better for the town?
wutbrodo 6y ago
Most people don't have what you'd call "moral reasoning ability". The appearance of moral purity is more important than those being crushed by their "help": you can see this in the history of the average person's reactions to payday loans, boxing gloves, overseas labor, drug prohibition, and a million other things.

seph-reed 6y ago

> They're a business not a charity I think maybe the world is starting to feel like companies that take more than they give back are ultimately parasitic and abusive. For a long time it has been considered completely okay to maximize profit over all else, but if corporations were people they wouldn't be very community oriented peoples. Much more on the manipulative and greasy gross spectrum, and maybe that's just going out of style? Also, they kind of were acting like a charity, so that could be part of it too.

seibelj 6y ago
What’s wonderful about a free, liberal society is that we can all make our own choices. For example, you can work at a business that operates more like a charity, while I can choose to work at a business that is laser-focused on maximizing profit. That is just my preference.
- 0_gravitas 6y ago
  > you can work at a business that operates more like a charity, while I can choose to work at a business that is laser-focused on maximizing profit unlikely unless you have a good degree of financial security or are relatively 'in demand'
Nasrudith 6y ago
The very way that value is looked at by most people is incorrect and it shows. Not just through rates of bankruptcy and overspending even when circumstances are clearly far outliers in their favor. There are a lot of old myths believed on a deep level like the idea of a universal fair price, fair profit margin, and zero sum benefit from trades where if anyone is making a profit it must be doing so at somebody's expense. All of them are wrong. If operating under those fallacious zero sum models companies always look parasitic if they survive, regardless of what they contributed and what would or wouldn't have occurred in their absense.

caymanjim 6y ago

I've spent much of my career as a software consultant. I usually make about 1/3 of my client billing rate. The rake is high. Part of that is normal overhead of employer-side taxes, benefits, expensable items (hardware, business lunches, continuing education), infrastructure/support (office space, office staff/HR/non-owner management). We can generously call that another 1/3 of the client bill rate. That leaves the final 1/3 to the company for profit and business development. There's nothing remotely unusual about this arrangement.

WalterBright 6y ago
Back when I worked for Boeing, the accounting figure was that it cost Boeing about 45% over and above my salary to pay for my benefits package and taxes paid on my behalf (things like health insurance, retirement plan contributions, the so-called "employer's contribution" of Social Security taxes, etc.). This is why when one sees salary comparisons, they are misleading. A correct comparison would compare what is called "total compensation" which includes that 45%. For example, whenever you hear about public teacher salaries being low, no mention is ever made of the total compensation, which is pretty generous. Those "free" benefits aren't free at all. They come out of the employee's pocket.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  > For example, whenever you hear about public teacher salaries being low, no mention is ever made of the total compensation, which is pretty generous. This is disingenuous. It's perfectly acceptable to compare teacher salary to any other salary. The default assumption is that you're comparing W2-with-benefits to W2-with-benefits. When people talk about low teacher salary, they're talking about it in comparison to another salary with the exact same overhead. It's not necessary to assign cash value to employer-paid taxes and benefits when making an apples-to-apples comparison.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    It is not disingenuous because the public teacher benefits package is much better than typical in the private sector. The teachers' unions have been quite clever about this, in negotiation for much of their pay in the form of benefits, so it looks like their pay is low. The newspaper, for example, often runs comparisons of salaries but never total compensation.

david38 6y ago

This is common because people in rich countries have no idea what the situation is in other countries. I remember something similar happened in India. Kids were sewing rugs or something, someone didn’t like it because it looked bad (like a sweatshop) and there was a boycott. The place went out of business. International investigators later found that 50% of those children had to resort to sex work while a good percentage of the rest ended up doing hard labor jobs and such. It was absolute catastrophe. The white rich people who started the boycott? They just went on with their lives. No significant and realistic effort was made to correct anything by them.

sethammons 6y ago
I upvoted because it is accurate. I wanted to comment that I think you can drop the race part from the comment.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  No, it's essential to what's being communicated. > Baizuo (/ˈbaɪˌdzwɔː/; Chinese: 白左 báizuǒ, literally White Left) is a derogatory Chinese neologism and political epithet used to refer to Western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white people.

WalterBright 6y ago

> In an almost Kafkaeque twist Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives. Nike closing means they were forced to settle for the worse alternatives.

bitcurious 6y ago
> Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives. I don’t find it obvious at all. Children don’t get to consider alternatives, they do as they are taught. That’s the whole problem with child labor.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  That's the problem though: the "let them eat cake" attitude that thinks that child labor in the developing world is driven by agency instead of resource constraints, and that the poorest children in the world would go be architects or engineers if only they weren't forced to work in sweatshops. India's landmark child labor law passed in the 80s is a dramatic, tragic example of policy effects on this margin (though not driven by the same privileged ignorance as the Nike incident). When the law was passed, it lowered the welfare of the affected children and their families on pretty much every relevant metric: calories consumed, years of schooling, mortality, income/wealth, etc. The most stubborn advocate of ignoring the holistic consequences of policy might say it was all worth it, but the most damning thing is that _it increased hours of child labor per household_, coming largely from reduced time in school. Cracking down on child labor employers reduced demand for child labor, which reduced wages. But the problem is that labor supply was inelastic, where the choice was between child labor and starvation. The upshot was that children ended up working more for less money, a tragic lose-lose of a policy responsible for immense human suffering. This isn't an argument for sweatshops per se; it's entirely possible that one can do the legwork and realize that the actual effect of a seemingly good policy is horribly negative. It's an argument that judging policies on how they affect your privileged sensibilities instead of what they do to the people they affect is despicable. Transmuting suffering in sweatshops to much worse suffering from starvation simply because the latter is easier to deny responsibility for is disgusting, but unfortunately the average person doesn't have the moral reasoning ability to understand this.

franctic 6y ago

I think this is a pretty unfair reading of the situation. The grievance came directly from the people working for the company. You can certainly dig in to the situation and have an opinion about whether those grievances are valid, but I don’t see how that can be seen as a case of people “biasing towards their own set of experiences and points of view.” Who else’s point of view should they be considering? Also we definitely live in a global, interconnected world but it feels like a hell of a stretch to invoke BLM here. African workers sharing their feelings about their place of work are just “riding the wave” because they happen to black?

realtalk_sp 6y ago
> Yet its strategy misfires and communication blunders have left its African developers in a lurch, underscoring how difficult blending capitalism and social good can be. Stung by the experience, some developers informally refer to the company as “The Plantation.”

vinceguidry 6y ago

> But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hell Andela would exist and be so valuable if there wasn't significant arbitrage to be had? They're a business not a charity. The article appears address the incongruency: > As Andela moved into 2019, many within the company felt the mood shift. It moved from something resembling an NGO to a profit-driven enterprise — which it indeed always was. Andela appears to have been a profit-driven enterprise masquerading as a non-profit one. Until they could no longer sell the lie. Appearing as a benefits-first company drove a lot of "investment" dollars their way. Just looks like another example of fools and their money. With a heavy price tag paid by the innocents.

femiagbabiaka 6y ago

> I'm reminded of a story about child laborers and Nike. In an almost Kafkaeque twist, locales where this was happening ended up experiencing significant economic setbacks when Nike decided to close up certain offending factories. The situation is almost three times as complicated as you’re theorizing here, because those companies were not passive entities. They were political organizations as well who helped remake economies. When Walmart moves into town and all of the other stores close as a result, does that mean that Walmart was better for the town?

wutbrodo 6y ago

Most people don't have what you'd call "moral reasoning ability". The appearance of moral purity is more important than those being crushed by their "help": you can see this in the history of the average person's reactions to payday loans, boxing gloves, overseas labor, drug prohibition, and a million other things.