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Other than small bumps to bonus multipliers, big companies don’t share higher profits with employees.
by harles 5y ago
Other than small bumps to bonus multipliers, big companies don’t share higher profits with employees.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoOf course they do. Google pays some of the highest salaries in tech because they managed to become so profitable. I'm saying long term, profitable companies who want to reinvest in themselves will pass profits on to employees because they need talent to make their products. There are certainly companies who decide not to reinvest, and simply extract profit. They become the dinosaurs.
- r4w8173 5y agoDo you say that at Google salaries increase with profits and are not capped by "fair amount for your location"?
- unityByFreedom 5y agoNo. I'm saying Google is able to offer more than an upstart company with no VC backing in part because it, like everyone else, receives IP protection in exchange for publishing methods. Sergey and Larry weren't born rich. By the way, I see you comment once every 3-5 years. Are you an alt?
- eru 5y agoYes, I already agree with the strict ability part. But eg just giving companies cash would also trivially increase their ability to pay higher salaries. But obviously, that's not really something anyone advocates for.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago> that's not really something anyone advocates for. Right because cash comes from government which comes from taxes which come from companies' profit. Cash has value because governments put some limits on how much there is. Of course, they do end up printing some and dilute the value. They don't just hand it out willy nilly.
- eru 5y agoYou are right about cash. And even if there was a windfall, eg imagine something silly like a gold meteorite just falling down on the treasury building: there are always opportunity costs to consider. But monopoly profits aren't too different: they don't just fall from the sky either. An enforced monopoly like those granted from a patent works by restricting what other people can do.
- r4w8173 5y agoNot sure what "alt" is. I just answer when the topic and my current focus intersects :)
- eru 5y agoThey most likely mean an alternate account. Like an alter ego.
- Jochim 5y agoGoogle literally colluded with other tech companies to avoid passing on those profits to employees.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoThat happened once they became a top-paying employer. You get there by paying high salaries.
- eru 5y agoThey do, when competition forces them to. I guess one _can_ make some kind of argument about how adding government enforced monopolies, ie patents, increases that kind of competition. But it would have to be a somewhat sophisticated one.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoThat's right, it's a temporarily granted monopoly in return for publishing the tech. The argument isn't so sophisticated.
- eru 5y agoProblem is that it doesn't really work. Most patents are written in such a way to be maximally defendable/enforceable in court, and minimally useful for reproduction. Often you need to pair them with lots of trade secrets to get anything to work. The other common argument in favour of patents is that they reward innovation. And that might or might not be an argument that actually works. Patents certainly also hinder innovation, so it's an empirical question which effect dominates, and whether any net beneficial effect is big enough to overcome our basic economic presumption against encouraging monopolies.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoPatents do not hinder innovation. Without them, the richest companies would steal every new idea that showed promise.
- eru 5y agoWhy only the richest companies? Wouldn't everyone be copying all the best ideas from everyone else? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Both in general and for innovation? (And even if only the richest companies did this, they would still have to compete against each other's copy-cat implementations of those ideas.) We don't necessarily have to re-hash this discussion, other people already had it, eg at https://sciencebusiness.net/news/79887/The-Great-IP-Debate%3A-Do-patents-do-more-harm-than-good%3F https://sciencebusiness.net/news/79887/The-Great-IP-Debate%3... In any case, whether patents help or hinder innovation is an empirical question that deserves study! Instead of just assuming that they _must_ encourage innovation, because they say so. You can also get a start on the literature by following the sources of this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_and_patents#Innovation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_and_patents#Innovati...