5 ms·

while we are fighting over gender and race gaps, we fail to notice the gap between tech salaries and salaries of marketing and sales executives, C level roles,

by b20000 5y ago

while we are fighting over gender and race gaps, we fail to notice the gap between tech salaries and salaries of marketing and sales executives, C level roles, lawyers and so on.

tehjoker 5y ago
It's true, but if we do manage to mostly equalize those (and in an ideal world they would be!), it will really sharpen the criticism of the top because there will be nothing left to divide us.
- llampx 5y ago
  There will never be a lack of divisions the elites can foster in the populace. If you had told me that in the middle of a pandemic, people would politicize medicinal measures and vaccinations, i would have laughed.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    We don't have to win over right-wingers, they're a lost cause. I think among the broad left, the contradictions of race and gender are healing slowly. For example, a black marxist professor told me that in the 1960s white people could not show up to a police brutality protest, but now the George Floyd protests were fully mixed race. The condition of the capitalist system is declining and more people are feeling it. By removing things the elites can point to, we narrow their ability to navigate. The right wing is turning to conspiracy and nationalism as they usually do. However, they are the minority of the country (the friends and family of the ownership class is necessarily smaller than the prolaterians), they just have the ability to do a LOT of damage.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      You are badly mistaken if you think the right wing is only, or even primarily, "the friends and family of the ownership class".
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        I did oversimplify sorry. There's a hard core of the right wing that has a class interest in their political beliefs (. There's also a mass base they've assembled out of the working class based on fascist ideas of nationalism, xenophobia, creating hierarchies of races, genders, etc that they believe they're superior to, and some kind of conviction that capitalism is either meritocratic or will give them personally a shot at the top. The key is for the working class right wing, these ideas are often against their material interest in either the short or long term and so they are a softer core that can be peeled away. Probably not with direct appeals, but by substantive action. Only about 30-40% of the country are convicted right wingers, somewhere between a minority and a super-minority of the population, and a reasonable fraction (guessing 5-10%) of them would be peeled away by a positive material change in their circumstances by a re-distributive economic policy.
    - syshum 5y ago
      Wow.. Please leave your echo chamber.. Please
    - the_lonely_road 5y ago
      Isn’t beloved white and left politician Bernie Sanders famous for a photo of him as a young adult being dragged away from an African American rights protest by police? I spent just a few seconds looking at photos of 1960’s police brutality photos on Google and see white people in most of them. https://www.google.com/search?q=1960%27s+police+brutality+protest&client=safari&hl=en-us&prmd=invx&sxsrf=AOaemvKRUwX1b4HIFDewuEKaiC5KWNkFQw:1633558632640&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjk-ZGQ6LbzAhUQSjABHSbwAk0Q_AUoAXoECAIQAQ&biw=375&bih=553&dpr=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=1960%27s+police+brutality+pr... Good time to also point out that conservative voters make up something like 24-25% of the population and liberal voters roughly the same. Half the population doesn’t vote in general though the numbers are higher for presidential elections than your average election.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Reminds me of a great doc I saw on Kanopy last month about the goings on at Berkeley. Look like it may not be available any more, maybe other places. https://www.kanopy.com/product/berkeley-sixties https://www.kanopy.com/product/berkeley-sixties
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        That's pretty interesting in the photos. Will have to discuss with some friends. I believe the professor, but there might be subtle differences between the different kinds of protests. EDIT: Looking at some side-by-sides with the George Floyd protests, it seems apparent to me that while there were some non-black participants in the 1960s, the proportion of them significantly increased. https://www.google.com/search?q=george+floyd+protests&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1423&bih=741&ei=oWxfYa7GINvR5NoPz5mG-AE&ved=0ahUKEwjums_6pLnzAhXbKFkFHc-MAR8Q4dUDCAY&uact=5&oq=george+floyd+protests&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIICAAQgAQQsQMyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6BAgAEAM6CAgAELEDEIMBOgsIABCABBCxAxCDAVCXA1iiHmDAH2gAcAB4AIABSYgBoQmSAQIyMZgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1n&sclient=img#imgrc=jKfSb8zqWMvL6M https://www.google.com/search?q=george+floyd+protests&tbm=is...
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Communities of color are the least likely to be vaccinated and have good reason to distrust the medical establishment and the government. Call that politicization if you want but their reasons go back far beyond the start of this pandemic.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- refenestrator 5y ago
  Dude, the git master branch is divisive, somehow. There will never be an end to it, it's an entertainment/outrage complex with billions in funding. Ignoring class divisions and real-world material conditions while we get rich and kibbitz about trivialities is the whole point, you can't run out of trivialities.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    > you can't run out of trivialities. Spot on. I'd add... you can't run out of irrelevant trivialities.
    - Izikiel43 5y ago
      aren't trivialities irrelevant by definition?
      - iammisc 5y ago
        To be trivial means to be unimportant, but there is a difference between unimportant and irrelevant. For example, if we found that factor X led to minorities making y% less, but y was 0.00000001, then factor X is trivial, but depending on what you're doing, it may be relevant t the discussion at hand. Often though today, the things mentioned are not only trivial (not having any meaningful effect) but also irrelevant (in that the causal relationship hypothesized is extremely strained if not non-existent).
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    You're right about that, there will never be an end to trivialities, but I think that if movements focus on material issues (some of which are cultural) we can find ways to knit together a stronger coalition. I struggle with this too, what's the right emphasis to focus on? Right now the US is so divided and there's no strong left coalition to make demands. I feel we are in a nascent rebuilding phase where we have to knit together groups and build groups from unorganized elements. My current thinking is that these are issues people care about, so we should help them and explicitly link them into economic class struggle so that the nascent coalitions build towards something. People that engage in the movements in any capacity AND talk with class conscious activists become more radical over time. Participation in solely liberal movements can do it too, but mostly to the point where the people participate feel something is missing as the liberal demands always undershoot the problem. They need to read and talk to socialists, and socialists need to listen more than they talk in those conversations.
- gremIin 5y ago
  That is not realistic. Do I really need to elaborate?
didibus 5y ago
Agree completely, that's why they say the biggest decline in recent years has been the middle class, so much attention in making sure everyone in the middle is equally in the middle, and less focus on the fact that the middle is itself on a decline.
- syshum 5y ago
  There is a decline to the middle class, however that is because most of the middle class moved to the upper classes, not down to the lower class.. https://youtu.be/4J5s6aZCPSg?t=499 https://youtu.be/4J5s6aZCPSg?t=499
  - havelhovel 5y ago
    You can't just define the middle class according to arbitrary income bands, as the presenter in your link does. The middle class is an ideal: a single family home, yearly vacations, pensions, etc. The presenter is pretending like we're complaining about the cost of Netflix subscriptions when we're actually complaining about major expenses like housing and education being less affordable relative to wages over time. I stopped watching after the presenter started comparing silent films to the MCU to prove how great our quality of life is today. It's a wildly disingenuous take and misses the entire point.
    - dack 5y ago
      How do you know they are being disingenuous rather than just ignorant / incorrect?
      - didibus 5y ago
        He might not be, but the way he is giving a talk, wearing a suit, has the video up on YouTube, and speaks as if he is very knowledgeable on the matter, if he were to be incorrect or ignorant, it would still have a disingenuous effect on the viewer, even if he doesn't know that he's wrong or ignorant and totally believes his own body odor smells of roses. And notice I said "if he were to be incorrect or ignorant", I have not tried to fact check or anything what he's saying in the talk, and so I'm making no claim to the accuracy and veracity of it.
bpodgursky 5y ago
Most sales reps are not especially well-compensated... it is a brutal job. The sales superstars and sales execs earn a lot but IMO absolutely deserve it. Any of those guys work WAY harder than any software dev. And have no idea how much money they're going to make until last day of the quarter. Rough stuff. Lawyers I can see the case against, but remember that they are paying off a ton of debt, and missed a couple years of earnings in law school.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And the reason you don't see sales rep interview drama is that it's pretty simple. You hire people out of school or based on previous record and if they don't make their numbers even if mostly based on customer issues outside of their control, they don't get their bonuses or get let go. The relevant quote I've heard is that "Sales managers have no trouble firing people."
- b20000 5y ago
  if you think sales is harder than software engineering you are totally nuts, and the points you make here are equally valid for engineering.
nunez 5y ago
It's all about being close to the money/equity. Sales people will always be close to the money, by definition, and C-suite will always have the most equity (because they carry the most risk by dint of them being the face of the company). The markets were white hot during COVID, and while lots of businesses suffered, lots went to the god damn moon

by b20000 5y ago

while we are fighting over gender and race gaps, we fail to notice the gap between tech salaries and salaries of marketing and sales executives, C level roles, lawyers and so on.

tehjoker 5y ago

It's true, but if we do manage to mostly equalize those (and in an ideal world they would be!), it will really sharpen the criticism of the top because there will be nothing left to divide us.

llampx 5y ago
There will never be a lack of divisions the elites can foster in the populace. If you had told me that in the middle of a pandemic, people would politicize medicinal measures and vaccinations, i would have laughed.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  We don't have to win over right-wingers, they're a lost cause. I think among the broad left, the contradictions of race and gender are healing slowly. For example, a black marxist professor told me that in the 1960s white people could not show up to a police brutality protest, but now the George Floyd protests were fully mixed race. The condition of the capitalist system is declining and more people are feeling it. By removing things the elites can point to, we narrow their ability to navigate. The right wing is turning to conspiracy and nationalism as they usually do. However, they are the minority of the country (the friends and family of the ownership class is necessarily smaller than the prolaterians), they just have the ability to do a LOT of damage.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    You are badly mistaken if you think the right wing is only, or even primarily, "the friends and family of the ownership class".
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      I did oversimplify sorry. There's a hard core of the right wing that has a class interest in their political beliefs (. There's also a mass base they've assembled out of the working class based on fascist ideas of nationalism, xenophobia, creating hierarchies of races, genders, etc that they believe they're superior to, and some kind of conviction that capitalism is either meritocratic or will give them personally a shot at the top. The key is for the working class right wing, these ideas are often against their material interest in either the short or long term and so they are a softer core that can be peeled away. Probably not with direct appeals, but by substantive action. Only about 30-40% of the country are convicted right wingers, somewhere between a minority and a super-minority of the population, and a reasonable fraction (guessing 5-10%) of them would be peeled away by a positive material change in their circumstances by a re-distributive economic policy.
  - syshum 5y ago
    Wow.. Please leave your echo chamber.. Please
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    Isn’t beloved white and left politician Bernie Sanders famous for a photo of him as a young adult being dragged away from an African American rights protest by police? I spent just a few seconds looking at photos of 1960’s police brutality photos on Google and see white people in most of them. https://www.google.com/search?q=1960%27s+police+brutality+protest&client=safari&hl=en-us&prmd=invx&sxsrf=AOaemvKRUwX1b4HIFDewuEKaiC5KWNkFQw:1633558632640&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjk-ZGQ6LbzAhUQSjABHSbwAk0Q_AUoAXoECAIQAQ&biw=375&bih=553&dpr=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=1960%27s+police+brutality+pr... Good time to also point out that conservative voters make up something like 24-25% of the population and liberal voters roughly the same. Half the population doesn’t vote in general though the numbers are higher for presidential elections than your average election.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Reminds me of a great doc I saw on Kanopy last month about the goings on at Berkeley. Look like it may not be available any more, maybe other places. https://www.kanopy.com/product/berkeley-sixties https://www.kanopy.com/product/berkeley-sixties
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      That's pretty interesting in the photos. Will have to discuss with some friends. I believe the professor, but there might be subtle differences between the different kinds of protests. EDIT: Looking at some side-by-sides with the George Floyd protests, it seems apparent to me that while there were some non-black participants in the 1960s, the proportion of them significantly increased. https://www.google.com/search?q=george+floyd+protests&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1423&bih=741&ei=oWxfYa7GINvR5NoPz5mG-AE&ved=0ahUKEwjums_6pLnzAhXbKFkFHc-MAR8Q4dUDCAY&uact=5&oq=george+floyd+protests&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIICAAQgAQQsQMyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6BAgAEAM6CAgAELEDEIMBOgsIABCABBCxAxCDAVCXA1iiHmDAH2gAcAB4AIABSYgBoQmSAQIyMZgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1n&sclient=img#imgrc=jKfSb8zqWMvL6M https://www.google.com/search?q=george+floyd+protests&tbm=is...
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Communities of color are the least likely to be vaccinated and have good reason to distrust the medical establishment and the government. Call that politicization if you want but their reasons go back far beyond the start of this pandemic.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
refenestrator 5y ago
Dude, the git master branch is divisive, somehow. There will never be an end to it, it's an entertainment/outrage complex with billions in funding. Ignoring class divisions and real-world material conditions while we get rich and kibbitz about trivialities is the whole point, you can't run out of trivialities.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > you can't run out of trivialities. Spot on. I'd add... you can't run out of irrelevant trivialities.
  - Izikiel43 5y ago
    aren't trivialities irrelevant by definition?
    - iammisc 5y ago
      To be trivial means to be unimportant, but there is a difference between unimportant and irrelevant. For example, if we found that factor X led to minorities making y% less, but y was 0.00000001, then factor X is trivial, but depending on what you're doing, it may be relevant t the discussion at hand. Often though today, the things mentioned are not only trivial (not having any meaningful effect) but also irrelevant (in that the causal relationship hypothesized is extremely strained if not non-existent).
- tehjoker 5y ago
  You're right about that, there will never be an end to trivialities, but I think that if movements focus on material issues (some of which are cultural) we can find ways to knit together a stronger coalition. I struggle with this too, what's the right emphasis to focus on? Right now the US is so divided and there's no strong left coalition to make demands. I feel we are in a nascent rebuilding phase where we have to knit together groups and build groups from unorganized elements. My current thinking is that these are issues people care about, so we should help them and explicitly link them into economic class struggle so that the nascent coalitions build towards something. People that engage in the movements in any capacity AND talk with class conscious activists become more radical over time. Participation in solely liberal movements can do it too, but mostly to the point where the people participate feel something is missing as the liberal demands always undershoot the problem. They need to read and talk to socialists, and socialists need to listen more than they talk in those conversations.
gremIin 5y ago
That is not realistic. Do I really need to elaborate?

didibus 5y ago

Agree completely, that's why they say the biggest decline in recent years has been the middle class, so much attention in making sure everyone in the middle is equally in the middle, and less focus on the fact that the middle is itself on a decline.

syshum 5y ago
There is a decline to the middle class, however that is because most of the middle class moved to the upper classes, not down to the lower class.. https://youtu.be/4J5s6aZCPSg?t=499 https://youtu.be/4J5s6aZCPSg?t=499
- havelhovel 5y ago
  You can't just define the middle class according to arbitrary income bands, as the presenter in your link does. The middle class is an ideal: a single family home, yearly vacations, pensions, etc. The presenter is pretending like we're complaining about the cost of Netflix subscriptions when we're actually complaining about major expenses like housing and education being less affordable relative to wages over time. I stopped watching after the presenter started comparing silent films to the MCU to prove how great our quality of life is today. It's a wildly disingenuous take and misses the entire point.
  - dack 5y ago
    How do you know they are being disingenuous rather than just ignorant / incorrect?
    - didibus 5y ago
      He might not be, but the way he is giving a talk, wearing a suit, has the video up on YouTube, and speaks as if he is very knowledgeable on the matter, if he were to be incorrect or ignorant, it would still have a disingenuous effect on the viewer, even if he doesn't know that he's wrong or ignorant and totally believes his own body odor smells of roses. And notice I said "if he were to be incorrect or ignorant", I have not tried to fact check or anything what he's saying in the talk, and so I'm making no claim to the accuracy and veracity of it.

bpodgursky 5y ago

Most sales reps are not especially well-compensated... it is a brutal job. The sales superstars and sales execs earn a lot but IMO absolutely deserve it. Any of those guys work WAY harder than any software dev. And have no idea how much money they're going to make until last day of the quarter. Rough stuff. Lawyers I can see the case against, but remember that they are paying off a ton of debt, and missed a couple years of earnings in law school.

ghaff 5y ago
And the reason you don't see sales rep interview drama is that it's pretty simple. You hire people out of school or based on previous record and if they don't make their numbers even if mostly based on customer issues outside of their control, they don't get their bonuses or get let go. The relevant quote I've heard is that "Sales managers have no trouble firing people."
b20000 5y ago
if you think sales is harder than software engineering you are totally nuts, and the points you make here are equally valid for engineering.

nunez 5y ago

It's all about being close to the money/equity. Sales people will always be close to the money, by definition, and C-suite will always have the most equity (because they carry the most risk by dint of them being the face of the company). The markets were white hot during COVID, and while lots of businesses suffered, lots went to the god damn moon