20 ms·

Tech's Elite Hates Labor

• jdmtheNth 4y ago
  As long as there are more people that will do a given job for less, we're all replaceable. There's just no incentive to raise the wages or standards.
  • bdcravens 4y ago
    Not a popular take, but a correct one. A correct Javascript class runs the same whether it was written for $5/hr or $150/hr. Obviously there are certain advantages of efficiency and communication, but over time those advantages erode, especially with increased WFH and the like.
    • vintermann 4y ago
      "A correct JavaScript class", hah. Good luck if you think that's what it's about, chief.
      • bdcravens 4y ago
        I don't; I've been a developer since 1999. Those who have remained employed through the same downturns know this as well. However, there are plenty of developers whose jobs consist of 90-95% of work that a remote resource could easily do, and that 5-10% could be turned over to a short-term contractor (or consolidated). If a company saves 75%, 50% inefficiency is still a net positive. Hint: if someone describe themselves as "{some single language} Developer", they should always be concerned. Doubly so if they came out of a cookie cutter bootcamp.
  • vintermann 4y ago
    Oh, but there aren't.
  • sixothree 4y ago
    And when we are literally all replaced, what then? Seriously. What are we going to do when we are all replaced? We don't have support structures.
    • hackerlight 4y ago
      That's where welfare or a UBI is supposed to come in. If societal prosperity is something we care about, that's a much better mechanism for support than forcing companies to hire people that they don't need or want. Better to have lean and efficient and market-based enterprise that are taxed to provide welfare, rather than industries stunted by union activity.
• shapefrog 4y ago
  Tech's Elite Love Labor; without them they wouldnt have Gulfstreams, 400 foot yachts and billions of $$$s in the bank. They just don't want to see, pay or think about the little people - my jet is 2 years old, thats like keeping the same phone for 3 months, I am busy speccing out the gold toilet seat on my new one, please don't bother me.
  • luckydata 4y ago
    they love labor the same way I love steak.
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  > It’s also worth considering that the people that invested in these companies, that paid for the luxurious perks at these firms, that fucking hired these people in the first place are the same people that are crowing about them being treated too well. > I foolishly believed that these people were in the minority - that they were not indicative of the larger tech industry - and I was completely wrong. Humans don't change, just circumstances. Of course a whole lot of business leaders would gleefully set up company towns and have Pinkertons wage amphibious assaults (true story) on strikers and make employees work 6-day 60-hour workweeks with no overtime and all kinds of abusive, crazy shit like that, if they thought it'd make them more money and if the circumstances allowed it. We're just a few norms, laws, market conditions, and labor contracts away from exactly the same place labor was a century or so ago. We are not doing as well as we are because capitalists got nicer.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >We're just a few norms, laws, market conditions, and labor contracts away from exactly the same place labor was a century or so ago. Amazon warehouse workers of today have it nearly just as bad as workers a decade ago. It reminds me of that scene from Mike Judge's Silicon Valley satire where Gavin Belson, the big-tech CEO, sees protestors out the office window and says he misses the days when big business owners like him could have those protestors shot on sight[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtpibIF4MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtpibIF4MY
• monero-xmr 4y ago
  I love labor and do everything I can to make them productive and happy in the service of working for me. I hate labor activists who want to tell me how to run my company and antagonize workers to see themselves in some sort of power struggle with management. We are all working for the same mission - make as much money as possible. I don’t need hostile people around.
  • jedberg 4y ago
    > I love labor and do everything I can to make them productive and happy in the service of working for me. > I hate labor activists who want to tell me how to run my company and antagonize workers to see themselves in some sort of power struggle with management If you're actually doing everything you can to make them productive and happy, then you won't have labor activists because they won't have anyone to rally. And if you mean activists at other companies, they shouldn't affect you either, because you're already doing what they are asking for elsewhere, right? > We are all working for the same mission - make as much money as possible. They want to make as much money as they can for themselves which is diametrically opposed to your goal of making as much money for yourself. That's why it's looked at as hostile. The only way to be a good employer of labor is if your goal is to provide a great wage and benefits to your employees and then keep what is left over. Your goal can not be to make as money money as possible, because then you have to keep it away from your workers.
    • hnal943 4y ago
      You're forgetting that labor activists are also motivated by profit, which is not necessarily aligned with interests of labor themselves. As we've seen from the social and news media, it's relatively easy to a make people angry and jealous without improving their lives at all.
      • therouwboat 4y ago
        Labor activists = unions/people who run unions? Atleast in my country we pay % of our paycheck to unions, so when I get more, they get more. It really the opposite of my employer, when I get less, they get more.
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I fear we're missing a bigger contextual change in the cost/benefit calculation that these people are making in regards to layoffs. For over a decade it was an absolute survival related imperative for these companies to hire as many people as possible, and to keep them from going to their competition. Google was so afraid of competition in the ads space that they bought entire companies for hundreds millions, and paid the former employees of these companies huge salaries for years ... just for the purposes of shutting them down -- including my former employer (see Page #39 of https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/download https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/downl...) They were willing to let compensation rates skyrocket. To hire like crazy with very little in the way of concrete performance results in terms of shipping more product or increasing revenues. Because they were mortally afraid that someone would compete with them and their ad revenue firehose would stop increasing in pressure each quarter. So what's changed? Why are they suddenly willing to unleash talent into the market where it can be eaten up by competition? Isn't Google worried that among the people it lays off (or fails to hire) there's someone who will finally conjure up a company that finally effectively takes marketshare from AdWords or Ad Exchange or whatever? I don't know the final piece to this puzzle is. Maybe people here have some ideas. (In particular anybody who is still in the ad-tech space who can speak to current trends)
  • fullshark 4y ago
    When there's a technological inflection point, there is a tremendous market share opportunity, so hire like crazy to win the market and then once it's solidified, either look for new markets or cut costs. All these VCs are desperately searching for these inflection points (metaverse! Web3! GPT models!) for that reason. These companies all hired like crazy because they thought COVID might have been a cultural inflection point, and when it turned out not to be, they cut costs.
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      Fair. The thing is they were hiring like crazy and hoovering up talent before COVID, too. Not the same exponential growth rates, but still high, and compensation packages reflected it.
• fullshark 4y ago
  They hate the professional managerial class, but love the coders that go above and beyond to write them patents and build them technologies (capital) for only a steady paycheck.
  • brightball 4y ago
    This one is more complex. If the company is explicitly paying you to build something to be patented, they should own it. Making it yourself means not accepting their paycheck for the work and covering the associated expenses of your own time and filings. Then you own it and can license it to whoever. If there’s some alternative way of doing this that still incentivizes the company to hire you in the first place, it’s probably worth negotiating up front. Patents aren’t very different from any other work for hire scenario in that the people paying for the work will own the result. If you hire someone to renovate your house and make a ton of money selling it, does the contractor deserve a cut? If so, did he charge you less for that cut knowing it was a flip?
  • AlbertCory 4y ago
    Patents are not worth much, sorry. Unless you're a patent troll. They're a by-product of other work.
    • xxpor 4y ago
      That's like saying nukes aren't worth much. They aren't at an individual level, but the total value is much greater than the sum of their parts. From a game theory perspective, patents essentially have MAD dynamics: no one is crazy enough to strike first, but if you come at anyone they'll respond in kind. This is why patent trolls are so dangerous, they don't have any actual assets, so they're not in any actual danger when suing.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    The people below the PMC hate them just as much if not more than the people above. It's one thing to have someone who makes more money than you can imagine swinging their dick into politics and being generally out of touch. It's a lot harder to make excuses when you see people who are more numerous and only make 2-10x what you make doing it.
• rektide 4y ago
  Different topic, but tech to me is a craft, where there are a lot of integral issues of quality. Yet orgs at many levels rarely seem to care about software. It thinks on terms of business need, and seems to detest lowering itself to what actually is & makes up the product; it doesnt know (& maybe at best wants to trust this all is being well handled somewhere) does doesmt grapple with the other 50% of the org: the code, what it is, what runs. Engineer concerns are treated with begrudging compromise & so often unsubtle adversarialism. Small groups of engineers must usually drive change they want, on an ad-hoc basis, and rarely is there a forum for the business to understand larger bigger picture internal-stength/weakness of thr product/architectures. The gulf beteeen the top & the rest of the org has seemed so very big, for so long. Rarely do orgs even try to foster a healthy relationship with their craftwork, with what powers them. That they would not really value the craftfolk either, as well as not really building strong orgs that understand the labor (output), is not surprising to me. It's why I keep hoping we see more companies ran by techies. Having a company that values being close to the machine in a real-way, that groks that there's this huge invisible world it's created & which wants to organizationally understand & better the systems, holistically, is a huge potential advantage for an org, but one that seems so rarely built into the genes. Understanding seems built on organizational scuttlebutt & heresay- in large part by many tech-agnostic & tech-apathetics going up the org chain- to suss out truth with, even though the code & it's constraints is the overwhelming shaper of many orgs available paths.
  • luckydata 4y ago
    I think the software engineering class has done some of that damage to itself over the years. We haven't been able to articulate a clear and actionable case for quality, different teams are wildly different in output and outcomes solving for the same problems... it's hard for the business side of the house to take you seriously if you can't back up any of your claims with data.
  • h2o_lover 4y ago
    In some sense I agree with you but I'd actually kind of invert the dynamic you're describing... I don't think writ large most people who have never professionally "done software" will ever be able to really "get it" about system maintainability and health. One aspect is that software engineers should probably get better at explaining this and backing it up with results and data, yes... but even moreso I think the problem is that software engineers haven't been empowered to influence, taught about, and held accountable for business strategy + outcomes nearly enough and business doesn't spend enough time trying to get engineers to buy in / understand / partner around their strategy. I think it's a massive opportunity for the discipline of software engineering as a whole for engineers to start stepping up a bit more to position ourselves less as the misunderstood computer monks and more as the experts in making smart tradeoffs around what's good for the business, product, users, software itself, etc etc. In many companies, the most influential engineers + engineering leaders operate like this as it is.
• thebradbain 4y ago
  For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood. The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from. The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families. And it likely comes as no surprise that very successful workers (celebrities, but also writers and directors that you may not have even heard of) can easily make 10-100x that— it clearly hasn’t affected the top of the ladder’s pay. It’s not unheard of for 20 year olds to make millions right out of college on their first movie, either— https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2022/01/28/apple-tv-plus-dances-the-cha-cha-real-smooth-buys-sundance-hit-for-15-million/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2022/01/28/apple-tv-plus... There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year. The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics. Imagine the boon to taking risks on smaller companies and projects if software engineers could easily transfer from large companies to smaller projects and teams they were interested in, without worrying about who was processing payroll or transferring retirement benefits or healthcare?
  • danuker 4y ago
    I wonder how the WGA will change its tune when language models will write episodes of indistinguishable quality from human writers.
    • 4y ago
• treis 4y ago
  Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
  • carapace 4y ago
    This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation#Civil_class_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...
    • idlewords 4y ago
      Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.
      • SoftAnnaLee 4y ago
        Because since the 1980's, the US government (as well as other western governments) have been dismantling the ability and protections for worker unionization. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were all notable for being anti-labor.
        • idlewords 4y ago
          Any excuse about anti-labor policies has to account for why cafeteria workers at Facebook managed to unionize in 2017 while tech workers there just sat on their ass. The Wagner Act is still law and is remains a powerful tool for those who can be bothered to use it.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
• newsclues 4y ago
  Big Tech is jus the evolution of Industrialization and the Factory. Rather than investing in a factory that employs people to churn out widgets... Tech is investing in a factory (software/platform) that churns out digital widgets...
• nus07 4y ago
  Something I want to see as an experiment- pause the H1B program for 3 years and see how the tech elite react.
• backtoyoujim 4y ago
  Great resets start at chopping off the top of the pyramid.
• eh9 4y ago
  It feels like we’re due for a “big reset”, but I doubt it’ll be aligned with VC interests. They need labor more than we need those companies. Americans should pick up a French history book.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    I'm not sure I see anything in French history I'd particularly want to emulate. The story of the French Revolution which I assume you're referring to is one of senseless barbarism and the old elites ending up back on top at the end anyway. The drownings at Nantes are among the most awful things to happen in Europe prior to WWII. As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who wants that either? Sure a narrow slice of the population gets early retirement but the youth unemployment rate is 20% and it is increasingly hard there to get onto a career ladder that would afford you an early retirement.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      Sometimes you have to upset some people in order to make the world better. I for one is happy about previous labor movements, because I like weekends and I dislike child-labor. Without labor movements, unions and sometimes riots, everyone (below upper-class) would have it much worse off.
      • nradov 4y ago
        Do you like having young workers taxed at high rates to subsidize pensions for 62 year olds? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64463330 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64463330
      • ch4s3 4y ago
        My point is that the French are effectively pulling up the ladder and younger people there are going to be stuck with a bill and none of the benefits. It's all well and good to credit the end of child labor in the US to unions, even though it was the progressive movement generally that ended child labor and not unions, but whatever. That said, the American union movement was a powerful force FOR segregation and actually caused a real drop in wages for black workers in northern cities in the 1910s and 1920s, so I think it's important to be honest about the whole history.
• freitzkriesler2 4y ago
  I find it ironic that for a long time people have been predicting the demise of low skilled and blue collar work to AI and robots. But as I see it at present, it's the high end white collar work that is the most at risk being made redundant to AI since robots and mobile power solutions aren't robust enough to eliminate blue collar work quite yet. I know someone will say why this isn't going to happen but for many in middle and upper management good enough will suffice if it means eliminating expensive white collar workers. That day is coming.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    I must say, it really is looking a lot more likely than it did ten years ago that we'll replace most knowledge workers before we replace humans-as-biological-robots with the regular kind of robots. Our hands, eyes, and legs may end up being the expensive parts to replace—not our creativity, not our raw intelligence—so, related niches may be the ones in which human labor thrives the longest. Perhaps Amazon will be able to slash its office workforce to a small fraction of its current size, before it can do the same with its warehouses. Go figure. Time to go lift some weights so I can still land a job in my 50s, I guess....
    • yourapostasy 4y ago
      > Perhaps Amazon will be able to slash its office workforce to a small fraction of its current size, before it can do the same with its warehouses. Go figure. See Moravec's Paradox [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
    • giraffe_lady 4y ago
      I read a novel recently that took place on a slave-crewed fishing boat. The "captain" was an AI, because analyzing market data and weather reports etc and deciding where to work, when and where to unload was something it was well suited to. Physically hauling nets and gutting fish was nowhere in the near future so human labor remains doing that. I think a less extreme form of this dynamic is coming for most of us in the next decade or two. And an exactly as extreme form coming for some of us.
• vintermann 4y ago
  > I realize I sound conspiratorial, but to be clear, I do not think they all got together and planned this. All it takes is a handful of big investors demanding it. It doesn't take very many people to agree that the tech workers are getting uppity and need to be taught a lesson about their replacability, if it is the right people. Nor does it really take a conspiracy, because as the author points out, many of those people are quite open about it.
• AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically. In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst employees of bigtech which are now basically blue-chips like the GE and GM of old and now employ all kinds of people. One consequence of this, I think, is that it is increasingly the case that the employees of a business and the leaders of that business don't really understand each other. Without moralizing either side, it is the case that there is a lot of misapprehension regarding what makes the other side tick. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but absent one we may see conflict in the form of both labor organization (from the workers) as well as more selective hiring (from the bosses).
  • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    >One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically. The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      No way it's grown faster. A "spoiled" tech worker who makes even as much as $300K has a lot more in common with a blue collar worker making $30K than he has with an executive making $300M. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude vs. 1. That executive has accumulated generational wealth after working one month. Their lifestyle is outrageously bananas-different than even the highest-paid software developer. We're talking dozens of homes, private jets, chauffeurs, staff that do everything, megawealth that grows in perpetuity without them even doing anything. They can travel anywhere they want on earth on a whim and have anyone in government (sometimes up to and including heads of state) on the phone in minutes. Their children, grandchildren, and grandchildren's grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives. Meanwhile, the difference between a tech worker and a struggling teacher is that one is 50 missed paychecks away from insolvency, and the other is 2 missed paychecks away from insolvency. It's not even comparable.
• idlewords 4y ago
  The author claims that "the only people acting in an entitled, reckless and ridiculous way have been venture capitalists and the most powerful people in tech", but the fact that a tech bubble existed and the excess couldn't last forever have been obvious to most people in the industry for a long time. There was an effort around 2017, catalyzed by Trump's election, to get tech workers to organize* while the times were still good in order to secure protections like a board seat for labor, or converting subcontracted work to full-time employment at name brand companies. People beat the drum at most of the tech companies, and at Twitter, to try to get high-wage workers there to take the tiniest steps toward collective action. During most of 2017 you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a journalist writing a major article about how tech workers were organizing, shaking off their chains, etc. Major foundations were going hat in hand to anyone who even mentioned workplace organizing, begging them to take their money. (I got turned down by one such foundation because I asked for a ~$80k budget; they told me my proposal would be accepted if I found a way to make it ten times bigger). The part of this effort that I witnessed was met with a mix of derision and complete indifference. Programmers and designers were eager to cheerlead their colleagues in food service unionizing, but didn't want to make the slightest effort to safeguard their own status as the most pampered workforce in the country. Arguments that the gravy train could not last, and that they were creating the tools to automate away their own very lucrative future, fell on deaf ears. I am a highly apathetic guy, and yet even I was astonished by the level of apathy. Now the good times are ending, a future of limitless high-wage programming jobs seems less secure, and people are justifiably mad. But fairness demands some of the victims of the current round of layoffs also go look in the mirror. (* 'organize' here means use the pretty robust framework of US labor law to achieve some shared goal. Many people take it as a synonym for 'unionize', but there is no requirement that concerted workplace action result in a traditional union. You might just organize to secure a specific goal, like a board seat for employees, specific rules for doing layoffs, or equal treatment of H1-B colleagues.)
  • Lich 4y ago
    > "Now the good times are ending, a future of limitless high-wage programming jobs seems less secure, and people are justifiably mad. But fairness demands some of the victims of the current round of layoffs also go look in the mirror." Big yup. I think the author's point is valid, but I think you're observation is completely true and valid too. I do remember that time around 2017. Lots of talk about tech unionization, but no action because like you said, they didn't want to endanger their comfy jobs. I live in Seattle, and many tech workers here talk about equality, labor rights (only for the Starbucks employee), but the moment something would endanger their job, benefits, or property values they wouldn't hesitate to vote against what they claim to value.
• wolverine876 4y ago
  A theory that seems to predict the modern SV power elite's behavior is megalomania. Megalomania: "In Psychology: delusions of power or self-importance, esp. resulting from mental illness; a passion for grandiose schemes. More generally: lust for power, a desire to control." They have different rationalizations and explanations for different events, but many/most ideas come down to more power for themselves, and believing that only they can accomplish anything - not their employees, government, democracy, anything or anyone else.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  It's easy for laid off tech workers to start their own companies. Lots of my friends and colleagues have over the years. The fun thing about starting your own company, is you find out how much you're really worth!
  • sixothree 4y ago
    Why is starting a company your solution to this problem?
    • ejb999 4y ago
      not the OP, but if 'the problem' is that the people who are running companies are not running them in a way that some people feel is fair to their employees, then when people start their own companies they have the ability to institute whatever policies they want - i.e. never lay people off, pay everyone top dollar, guarantee health insurance after you leave - i.e. whatever policies the founders think are 'fair' and just.
    • bink 4y ago
      It's the classic abusive boss trope. "Don't like how I treat you? Go start your own company!"
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        Why would you want to work for an abusive boss? I don't understand that.
  • metalspot 4y ago
    in the majority of cases the number is negative. but seriously, most people do start-ups for passion, not money, and they get what they want out of it. not everyone sees making money as the be all and end all of life. the people who do make a lot more of it. good for them. better to not worry about other people's choices and make sure you are happy with yours.
    • 4y ago
• thedriver 4y ago
  >The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. But in a way, didn't it do exactly that? Lots of tech workers have the audacity to complain about having to show up to the office, like it's some form of oppression. Or act like getting laid off is something really cruel, while getting months worth of severance.
  • lezojeda 4y ago
    [dead]
  • guhidalg 4y ago
    After 2 years of WFH, the RTO complaints are absolutely valid. Everyone saw that it was not necessary for most people to be at the office to continue doing their work, but now they are being forced to go back because... 1. HR needs to justify real estate costs or HR will be cut back 2. HR wants to fire some people who refuse to go back because if they're not in the office then HR will be cut back 3. HR doesn't like the people that WFH because they are bucking the pay bands and if HR doesn't enforce the arbitrary salary bands then there won't be budget for hiring and HR will be cut back
• anm89 4y ago
  Well labor absolutely despises tech's elite. So seems fair
  • sixothree 4y ago
    The thing is they hadn't until recently. What do you think the change was?
    • wolverine876 4y ago
      It's an important question to think about. What changed from the Silicon Valley of old that believed anyone could accomplish anything - someone in their garage could change the world - and harnassing that enormous talent and ideas was their mission. IMHO, they seem to be following the reactionary culture that dominates the US now - the worship of power, the contempt for humanity, for humans, and for the future.
    • anm89 4y ago
      I'm going to suggest that it wasn't human nature that changed. Ie, the elites are not better or worse today than they have ever been as human beings My real answer is that 40 years of low interest rates, have shifted all power to capital (not capital as a group of human beings. to literal capital) and now the workers are mad at a system setup to screw them and scapegoating the people on the other side of that system who really aren't the ones who set this up either.
• Animats 4y ago
  We can see it coming now - the Final Solution to high tech salaries. Expect to see a huge downward salary trend in the web front end/back end sector. That stuff is a solved problem. Expect salaries for new hires to drop below $100K and old hires being gradually pushed out.
• habosa 4y ago
  I think because individual tech workers are so highly paid relative to other industries, we fail to see how low our pay is relative to what the people at the top are making. A high performing Google engineer may make 500k+ in total comp, Sundar Pichai makes $100M+ in many years. That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high. You see startup founders who exit with generational wealth (tens or hundreds of millions). They are also frequently able to cash out along the way, or borrow against their success. Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets < 1% of the equity and none of the glory. It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry. The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. I don't envy the culture of those industries, but I do sometimes wonder what tech would be like if we leaned a little more that way.
  • lezojeda 4y ago
    [dead]
  • zozbot234 4y ago
    Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. All things said, it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      But CEOs don't actually have that much impact... So whatever decisions - in this example - Sundar makes, it only carries so much weight. And, you also get fired if you're a $500k engineer and you suck at your job. So I'm not sure what's so much different about Sundar - except that if he sucks at his job he has a way better golden parachute.
• globalreset 4y ago
  ITT: People making > $200k TC complaining that they are mistreated "labor", and how they are not entitled and deserve more.
• seydor 4y ago
  Except that , when people see the "compensation" that people get for doing tiny changes in css files, they start disbelieving this kind of talk. Silicon valley people are not "labor" to the common man, they are ... something else. Sorry, it's part of the package Imagine calling investment bankers as typical "labor"
  • sixothree 4y ago
    If you think "tiny changes in css files" is what IT work consists of you are in a fantasy world.
• antipaul 4y ago
  Is this note not entirely, but still a bit of an over-reaction, given that the post-layoff numbers are still much larger than ~2 years ago?
• rank0 4y ago
  I don’t really like tech executives…but the idea that tech workers are somehow oppressed is ludicrous. We get paid extremely well! FFS have any of you guys taken a moment to talk to folks outside the industry?
  • 2setIntrsction 4y ago
    The argument isn’t that tech workers are oppressed more than any other laborer, the issue is that the balance of power between laborers and capitalists is flawed. Tech workers can be oppressed even if other laborers are more oppressed; believe this is where the idea of class solidarity originates. Tech workers are in the same class as all other laborers; not capitalists.
• sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
  > I realize I sound conspiratorial, but to be clear, I do not think they all got together and planned this. I'm not so sure the possibility should be dismissed so easily. It's hardly a secret that CEOs gather periodically gather at various retreats. Is it really talking conspiracy theories to recognize they actually do talk business with each other and at least informally coordinate their actions? They don't all need to be at the same location just to get a few massages.
• poisonborz 4y ago
  Maybe that labor force should not sign up for jobs at a shady company with a fad/vaporware product that is on a hiring spree?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stuaxo 4y ago
  It's hard to see what's happening as anything other than a capital strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_strike
• MockObject 4y ago
  I find this tone annoying. Let's discuss systems and incentives, not personalities. The decision makers aren't all nasty people, they're maximizing their profits, just as most people would do in their shoes. (Or if they're all mean people, why do the mean rise to the top?) > Illustrating this grotesque point further, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft saw their collective valuations rise by $800bn after announcing steep job cuts So the market felt very strongly that the layoffs were a good business decision. Is that because Wall Street is mean, too? Or isn't that somewhat objective evidence that the layoffs were good for the companies? A very interesting article could have been written in its place.
  • blamestross 4y ago
    > The decision makers aren't all nasty people, they're maximizing their profits At least where I'm standing, fundimental profit incentive is morally bad. Yes they are by definition "nasty people". Our fundimental responsibility is to improve ourselves and the world around us. It can occasionally align with profit incentive (we have a culture where money can be a powerful tool), but considering it "normal" or "ok" seems problematic. If you want to talk about incentives, how about what we can do to change them?
    • MockObject 4y ago
      When I review human history, in all its approaches to organizing technologically advanced societies ever since the plow, I see profit-seeking behavior everywhere, even in societies deliberately engineered to thwart the profit motive, so evidently, altruism never scales much further than an extended family. I see profit-seeking behavior when I watch a squirrel hoard nuts, or a dog snap at a scrap of meat on the ground. I see the entire biosphere as a profit-seeking process, and I don't want to set my morality against the very biosphere that created everything I value, and my very ability to value.
      • blamestross 4y ago
        That is a level of rationalization of capitalism that I had not previously imagined. Competition doesn't have to be unbound. All things in nature find satiation. We can be satisfiers not optimizers.
• zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I can only speak for my own Big N but I would say we certainly did overhire. I was pleased that we had a layoff and would have even doubled it. Processes have become very slow with so many unnecessary people involved in everything. You might argue that I would be speaking differently if I were the one laid off, but I actually would have welcomed it, since it would be nice to take a break for a few months. I am certainly privileged to be able to do that (although it comes from working very hard for 10+ years and saving >50% of my income so I do take some credit). I feel worst for people on visas that might get kicked out of the US because of this. But I don't think it's the job of corporations to atone for the sins of the government. We should make immigration easier and not tied to your employer (and health insurance as well).
• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  https://archive.is/RbgdO https://archive.is/RbgdO
• nodemaker 4y ago
  In this thread, tech people whining they are'nt paid very well or dont have enough power when literally no one is stopping them from making their own company and making more money. Power belongs to the person that takes it.
• etherael 4y ago
  The purchasing power of the average labourer in the US has not much changed since 1971 when gold convertibility was ended and the monetary system moved to a pure fiat one. At the time, a food service worker could have bought about an ounce of gold a day with their labour. Now even mid to mid upper tech salaries are not enough for such a feat, to say nothing of what a food service worker salary could do. It stands to reason if the financing method of a nation moves from a hard money system where you either turn a profit in a hard asset by increasing efficiency, to one where politically connected parties benefit and are first in line at the spigot of federal reserve funding which they then employ however they see fit mostly freed from the rigor of market discipline, the people in the game that will succeed will be those closest to the feeding trough and those at the back will eat the inevitable inflation that occurs. It doesn't matter if you're a moron and your competition is a genius when you are gulping down first, second and third order fresh fiat from the fed firehose constantly, while they're stuck with getting it from you or your peers. All that said, enterprises aren't charities and of course they're going to see a limited supply pool of talented labour with actual leverage and bargaining power as "entitled", but they're still going to have to compete for them because that's one of the few remaining market forces still on the side of that quite rare labour pool. The vast majority of labour get no such choice and just have to suck it up. In light of all that people in this industry should keep in mind that between a tech worker of today and a food service worker of just over fifty years ago, the tech worker has less purchasing power. They're not nearly as coddled and overpaid as the parties in front of them filtering newly created money down the chain would have us believe.
• wolverine876 4y ago
  This should create enormous business opportunities: Lots of talented, self-motivated, creative, forward thinking, skilled workers looking for a place that values them and is forward thinking, including about employment. Usually, layoffs happen in weak economies. But the economy is strong, unemployment is low. These layoffs are partly about power and ideology - sacrificing business interests. It's a rare opportunity for people hiring - how often do large companies shed their best people. Better workplaces and new startups should be moving quickly. And it's a great opportunity for the job-seekers to find places that value them and want to do new, innovative things. It requires you to believe in people as valuable, in cooperative not adversarial relationships, in the potential of human innovation, which can come from anywhere. Just like SV before the new reactionary power grab.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    > how often do large companies shed their best people. Less often than they shed under-performers. Hiring during mass layoffs is difficult because it’s a market of lemons situations. You have to sift through the majority that got let go because their manager identified them as performing below average to find the ones that were laid off because some failing departments were shut down.
    • wolverine876 4y ago
      I think this case is different: The companies may be shedding people who don't want to be in the new 'bossism' culture that focuses on megalomaniacal CEOs (see my description in the GP). At least some companies are arguably prioritizing that culture over talent.
    • kwere 4y ago
      underperforming at FAANG is more than enough for 90% of workplaces
• giantg2 4y ago
  Of course they hate labor. They think all us peons are just lazy losers for not being super successful. Sort of like the divine right of kings, only the self perception is about superior effort and intelligence than birthright
• robertoandred 4y ago
  I automatically dismiss anything that uses the term "elite".
• swader999 4y ago
  The problems with CEO pay and tech worker pay and treatment would resolve itself if the tech space was more competitive. Instead we have gov subsidized/sponsored monopolies in a lot of areas with poor oversight and outdated regulation.
• LarryMullins 4y ago
  Might as well strike "Tech's" from the headline.
• layoff_payoff 4y ago
  I hope this comes back to bite big tech in the ass. As far as I can see, the sequence of events were: 1. Employ a large number of tech workers and upskill them with state of the art practices. 2. Throw lots of money at them, so they can build nest-eggs 3. Test their capacity for - and self-confidence in - working long hours 4. Unload them onto a hot market; unemployment is at a 50-year low My hope is that a million lifestyle LLCs will bloom from this fertile soil. I got laid off, and registered my first LLC while interviewing. I bet I'm not the only one
• sam345 4y ago
  Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid in your company rather than what you are worth to the company and what the market for your labor will pay? The only rationale I see is jealousy which doesn't seem very noble or sustainable. Assume worker A gets paid $100k and his CEO gets paid 10x that. Worker B also gets 100k but her CEO gets paid 2x that. How is it fair to increase worker A's comp more than worker B based on that fact alone which worker A has no control over. Alternatively, lowering the CEO's comp only makes sense if it will lead to better returns for the company but if it results iin the good CEO leaving and a lower quality CEO replacement, the company may well perform poorly and than everyone suffers. I would say that jealousy is not a good basis for economic policy. A Company in the tech field needs flexibility to grow and shrink its labor force quickly to adapt as technologies come and go. Labor unions hamper growth which otherwise would benefits everyoe and siphon off money to unproductive and divisive union bureaucracies. particularly in the tech field where worker mobility is high I see little reason for unions.
  • polygamous_bat 4y ago
    The reason CEO compensation tends to be 100x higher is a loose form of collusion, where market forces does not hold because a lot of time exec sets compensation for themselves.
  • thwayunion 4y ago
    > Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid It clearly is not, so asking why it "must" seems a bit odd. > The only rationale I see is jealousy Others might call it justice or fairness, but that's basically it. People's feeling of personal security and self-worth. The same basic force is behind most wars, revolutions, and other forms of inter-personal violence. That begins to answer the question, really.
  • sp332 4y ago
    If the CEO is getting paid 100x an average employee, at least one of them is clearly not being paid according to their value to the company.
• spamizbad 4y ago
  I definitely feel like, over the past 15 years, there's been a growing rift between VCs/founders and software engineers. Back in the aughts there were so many posts and thought-pieces written by both founders and VCs about attracting and supporting developers. Lots of founders talking up how their engineers make a real difference. By the first half of the '10s that stuff disappeared, and by the 2nd half you started seeing lots of resentment going both ways. Capital thinks devs are capturing too much upside; labor thinks capital is capturing too much upside. From capital's point of view, the engineer circa 2023 is doing the same work their engineers did circa 2008 so why are they entitled to 2.5x the comp? And of course the engineer is wondering why the value they're creating is worth 10x what it was back in 2008 but their pay is only up 2.5x?
• mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  We're always fed the line that the tech elite are the alpha men/women, especially by business media. But then when they hit economic reality, are found to be investing in garbage like Web3, or don't have maximum economic leverage in workplace negotiations, what do they do? They whine. On the bird site, and to business media. Definitely very alpha. It smacks of impotence. If they had the power, why couldn't they just fix the situation instead of whining about it? I bet they would, if they could, but they can't. And they're humans, just like us. Not as special as we've been told.
• whack 4y ago
  Here's a hot take. VCs don't hate labor. They love money. They will do anything that makes the most money for them. If that means investing in people who they think will be successful (ie, impressive resume, past success), they will do that. If that means not investing in people who they think will not be successful founders, they will certainly not do that. Ultimately their drive to make money by backing the right horse, trumps any sort of power/status game. Founders also don't hate labor. They love money. If they can hire good enough developers by paying them 0.5% equity, they will do that. If the market demands that they pay developers 500k/year and hire thousands of them during a bull run, they will do that. If they think paying a "superstar" CEO $200M/year creates even more value, they will do it. If they can get away with paying that same guy nothing, that's also exactly what they will do. If they can improve the company's long-term profitability by laying off thousands of developers during a downturn, they will also do that. Labor for the most part doesn't hate anybody either. We love money. If a company hires me right after college, trains me, helps me build my resume, and another company comes around with a promotion and a 30% higher comp offer, I would take that offer. If the company has fallen on hard times and isn't able to pay me as much as another company, I would give a few months notice and then jump ship. I find it hard to take these sort of conspiracy theories seriously. No one is purposely conducting layoffs in order to "put labor in their place." No one is purposely trying to underpay startup employees because they hate them. Everyone is trying to enrich themselves as much as possible. Partly by collaborating with their complements in order to create something of value. And partly by paying their complements as little as they can get away with. This is literally how every single free market works. If you think your startup isn't paying employees enough, don't work for that startup. If you think all startups are paying developers too much relative to support engineers, try building a career for yourself as a developer instead. If you think all startups are too generous with its founders relative to employees, try building a career for yourself as a founder instead. If you're able to succeed as a developer/founder, great! If you're not able to succeed as a developer/founder, maybe you have a better appreciation for why they get paid whatever they do. You don't owe them anything, they don't owe you anything, nobody hates anyone, everyone's just trying to make the most money they can for themselves.
  • thescriptkiddie 4y ago
    > VCs don't hate labor. They love money. Marx would agree. People who don't know better tend to think that labor vs capital is an aesthetic or moral conflict rather than a material one. The mechanics of capitalism force the owners to exploit the workers as much as possible, or else they will be driven out of business. That doesn't necessarily make the owners bad or hateful people, though it does select for people who are able to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing in spite of the evidence.
• taylodl 4y ago
  The Oligarchs Hate Labor There. Fixed the headline for you. You might also note the oligarchs, and the aristocracy before them, have always loathed the common man and thought themselves superior. Our supposed meritocracy have just made matters worse.
• indymike 4y ago
  This is going to be unpopular, but business has these priorities: debt-holders(sometimes employees are here), owners, customers, employees, everything else. Articles that try to re-order these priorities really get it wrong. If being an "elite" means you are holding debt or own shares, you are very much
• up2isomorphism 4y ago
  The irony is that some tech workers seem to be frustrated about the natural outcome of free market while exactly enjoying the outcome of free market when it works for them. I did not see these people jumping out when a coding boot camp guy got paid 200K/year two years ago while people with 20 year experience in other industries only get 100K . Company has a positive revenue does not mean they don’t have to optimize their cost structure. They have to pay off people just like they need to hire like crazy when the market is good.
• trimethylpurine 4y ago
  Tech's labor loves elites.