6 ms·

Sure, but are you willing to apply the same test to every other job and outlaw the ones that fail?

jakelazaroff 5y ago
Maybe not what GP was getting at, but I would like to structure society so that people don't have to spend big chunks of their lives doing menial jobs in order to afford their basic needs!
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  More automation. Menial jobs still need to get done.
  - danbruc 5y ago
    Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there. EDIT: This is not meant literally, I am not talking about toilette cleaning jobs at Facebook, I am talking about paying people for the time they spent working and maybe how physically taxing or unpleasant the work is. This is in contrast to paying people what you can get away with because of the available supply of workers or how much money you have to throw around because you can get it from your customers.
    - username90 5y ago
      Then you would have millions of people applying for a few thousand jobs. How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries? Facebook does it by reducing the salary bit by bit until the number of people who wants to work there is roughly as many as they need.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more. I'll note that lots of people want FB developer jobs, but they don't solve that problem by cutting salaries until the number of applicants is roughly equal to the number of jobs. It's a tell that you use one hiring heuristic for people in your social class and a different one for people seen as lesser. That's a great illustration of the overall problem that the original article is part of.
        username90 5y ago
        A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense.
        tablespoon 5y ago
        >>> Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there. >> I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more. > A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense. A lottery is about the fairest way to distribute a scarce resource imaginable. And it seems even less fair to declare that everyone whose job is to clean toilets should continue to get equally crappy wages, while there's massive inequality in income all over the place.
        username90 5y ago
        That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing. In the case of Facebook we would tax it to hell so everyone could share, not do a damn lottery so a few janitors can get rich. Of course that is if you are in the "distribute resources to the people camp", but I see no reason why a lottery would ever be the right thing to do here no matter what camp you are in, it isn't like the world would be better off if we had a lottery of who gets to inherit the billions of dollars the 0.0001% owns rather than distribute it. So in short, the right thing to do is either leave facebook as is, or tax it so that neither its software engineers nor its janitors can earn much more than an average American.
        tablespoon 5y ago
        > That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing. Not every resource is divisible or practically divisible (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon). You're kind of going all over the place to dispute everyone's points. If Facebook were to pay its toilet cleaners far above the market rate for that job, a fair way to solve the problem of "who gets these jobs" in the face of a glut of qualified applicants is by using a lottery. You're right there's all kinds of other things that may be better to do, but we were talking about this specific artificial scenario.
      - danbruc 5y ago
        Just pick the one you consider most qualified, there is no need to have the number of applicants match the number of jobs. But this is actually besides my point which is that even though menial jobs are often the harder, more unpleasant, or whatever jobs they are also often the worst payed for jobs because there is an oversupply of workers and this is used against them. Economic theory might try to tell you that the low wages will incentivize people to seek better jobs which will reduce the supply of workers for menial jobs which will eventually get you a developer salary for cleaning toilettes, but as far as I can tell that is not what is actually happening. My understanding of fair payment is not what you can get away with because of the supply and demand situation, it is that if you put eight hour of your life time into your work, then you deserve being paid for that time more or less no matter what you do.
        username90 5y ago
        Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay anyone at the company even close to what facebook pays its engineers, it doesn't make sense that a few privileged janitors gets facebook engineering salary when most of them gets a small fraction of that. People who comes up with those arguments just haven't thought things through.
        danbruc 5y ago
        Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs. For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        > How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries? Pick the first person that applies who has seen a toilet before in their life and is physically able to clean one.
    - wruza 5y ago
      Costs. Facebook cannot replace a developer’s desk with auto-development station, but it definitely can do that to a toilet room. The only reason a toilet cleaner has a job is that they are cheap. If it was paid $300k/yr per floor, anyone at FB would automate floor mopping and sanitizer spraying in few weeks, if not rethink a toilet room completely. (Which isn’t a bad idea given how much of ancient legacy shit we are still dragging in this area.)
      - danbruc 5y ago
        Cut the salary of everyone by 5% and you can have one cleaner for every 20 developers. My point is simply that work should not be cheap, if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life, otherwise it is just a mild form of slavery.
        wruza 5y ago
        if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life I agree, humanely. But our entire competitive all-eating-optimizing nature works against this. Raising min.wages would likely lead to the situation where they have no job at all, because if low-paid jobs were enforced as decently paid by law, companies would simply automate them. They didn’t do that yet, only because it’s cheap to use human labor. Taxi, delivery, cleaning, you name it. If low skill job workers could get $$$$$$ jobs, they would. But they can’t, for various reasons. This is not fixable at the level we discussing. https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increases+unemployment https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increase...
        danbruc 5y ago
        I essentially agree with you but I think this not an argument against raising the minimum wage. They will not lose their jobs, they already do not have a job. Ignoring the facet of work as self-fulfillment or being part of society or whatever, the relevant part of a job for a worker is that it earns them a living wage, not that they do some work. In that sense someone with a job not earning them a living wage is already jobless. And if we actually run out of jobs valued at least a living wage for some part of society - and I have no illusion that everyone can become a developer if they just tried hard enough - then this is a problem that needs addressing. Just pretending that there are still jobs because there is work that is valued less than a living wage but still more expensive then automation, is not a solution. But I am not in a position to really judge objectively where we are, whether we are already out of jobs or whether some jobs are just underpaid because it is possible in the current market situation, or what mix of the former.

Maybe not what GP was getting at, but I would like to structure society so that people don't have to spend big chunks of their lives doing menial jobs in order to afford their basic needs!

rootusrootus 5y ago
More automation. Menial jobs still need to get done.
- danbruc 5y ago
  Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there. EDIT: This is not meant literally, I am not talking about toilette cleaning jobs at Facebook, I am talking about paying people for the time they spent working and maybe how physically taxing or unpleasant the work is. This is in contrast to paying people what you can get away with because of the available supply of workers or how much money you have to throw around because you can get it from your customers.
  - username90 5y ago
    Then you would have millions of people applying for a few thousand jobs. How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries? Facebook does it by reducing the salary bit by bit until the number of people who wants to work there is roughly as many as they need.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more. I'll note that lots of people want FB developer jobs, but they don't solve that problem by cutting salaries until the number of applicants is roughly equal to the number of jobs. It's a tell that you use one hiring heuristic for people in your social class and a different one for people seen as lesser. That's a great illustration of the overall problem that the original article is part of.
      - username90 5y ago
        A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense.
        tablespoon 5y ago
        >>> Pay the menial jobs better. The person cleaning the toilets at Facebook should earn more than the developers there. >> I don't think you've tried very hard to figure out ways to decide. The obvious one is lottery, but there are many more. > A lottery doesn't feel very fair though, does it? Why should a few people get paid more for the same work? Doesn't make sense. A lottery is about the fairest way to distribute a scarce resource imaginable. And it seems even less fair to declare that everyone whose job is to clean toilets should continue to get equally crappy wages, while there's massive inequality in income all over the place.
        username90 5y ago
        That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing. In the case of Facebook we would tax it to hell so everyone could share, not do a damn lottery so a few janitors can get rich. Of course that is if you are in the "distribute resources to the people camp", but I see no reason why a lottery would ever be the right thing to do here no matter what camp you are in, it isn't like the world would be better off if we had a lottery of who gets to inherit the billions of dollars the 0.0001% owns rather than distribute it. So in short, the right thing to do is either leave facebook as is, or tax it so that neither its software engineers nor its janitors can earn much more than an average American.
        tablespoon 5y ago
        > That is such a stupid argument, lottery is one of the worst way to distribute a scarce resource. It is better to split it up and pay everyone dividends rather than give a few the whole thing. Not every resource is divisible or practically divisible (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon). You're kind of going all over the place to dispute everyone's points. If Facebook were to pay its toilet cleaners far above the market rate for that job, a fair way to solve the problem of "who gets these jobs" in the face of a glut of qualified applicants is by using a lottery. You're right there's all kinds of other things that may be better to do, but we were talking about this specific artificial scenario.
    - danbruc 5y ago
      Just pick the one you consider most qualified, there is no need to have the number of applicants match the number of jobs. But this is actually besides my point which is that even though menial jobs are often the harder, more unpleasant, or whatever jobs they are also often the worst payed for jobs because there is an oversupply of workers and this is used against them. Economic theory might try to tell you that the low wages will incentivize people to seek better jobs which will reduce the supply of workers for menial jobs which will eventually get you a developer salary for cleaning toilettes, but as far as I can tell that is not what is actually happening. My understanding of fair payment is not what you can get away with because of the supply and demand situation, it is that if you put eight hour of your life time into your work, then you deserve being paid for that time more or less no matter what you do.
      - username90 5y ago
        Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay anyone at the company even close to what facebook pays its engineers, it doesn't make sense that a few privileged janitors gets facebook engineering salary when most of them gets a small fraction of that. People who comes up with those arguments just haven't thought things through.
        danbruc 5y ago
        Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs. For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      > How would you decide who gets to work there and earn those salaries? Pick the first person that applies who has seen a toilet before in their life and is physically able to clean one.
  - wruza 5y ago
    Costs. Facebook cannot replace a developer’s desk with auto-development station, but it definitely can do that to a toilet room. The only reason a toilet cleaner has a job is that they are cheap. If it was paid $300k/yr per floor, anyone at FB would automate floor mopping and sanitizer spraying in few weeks, if not rethink a toilet room completely. (Which isn’t a bad idea given how much of ancient legacy shit we are still dragging in this area.)
    - danbruc 5y ago
      Cut the salary of everyone by 5% and you can have one cleaner for every 20 developers. My point is simply that work should not be cheap, if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life, otherwise it is just a mild form of slavery.
      - wruza 5y ago
        if someone works 40 hours a week for you, you owe that person a wage that allows a decent life I agree, humanely. But our entire competitive all-eating-optimizing nature works against this. Raising min.wages would likely lead to the situation where they have no job at all, because if low-paid jobs were enforced as decently paid by law, companies would simply automate them. They didn’t do that yet, only because it’s cheap to use human labor. Taxi, delivery, cleaning, you name it. If low skill job workers could get $$$$$$ jobs, they would. But they can’t, for various reasons. This is not fixable at the level we discussing. https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increases+unemployment https://www.google.ru/search?q=raising+minimum+wage+increase...
        danbruc 5y ago
        I essentially agree with you but I think this not an argument against raising the minimum wage. They will not lose their jobs, they already do not have a job. Ignoring the facet of work as self-fulfillment or being part of society or whatever, the relevant part of a job for a worker is that it earns them a living wage, not that they do some work. In that sense someone with a job not earning them a living wage is already jobless. And if we actually run out of jobs valued at least a living wage for some part of society - and I have no illusion that everyone can become a developer if they just tried hard enough - then this is a problem that needs addressing. Just pretending that there are still jobs because there is work that is valued less than a living wage but still more expensive then automation, is not a solution. But I am not in a position to really judge objectively where we are, whether we are already out of jobs or whether some jobs are just underpaid because it is possible in the current market situation, or what mix of the former.