7 ms·

Wouldn't be a HN thread about pay increases without someone saying it's not enough.

by icelancer 4y ago

hawthornio 4y ago
[flagged]
- icelancer 4y ago
  There is no amount Nintendo could have raised salaries that would have avoided the GP comment, is the point. >> In any event, based on increases in productivity since the 80s all workers should be making at least double their salary. This is happening. It's just happening to the people who are the most productive. There is no reason productivity gains would naturally be equally distributed amongst all workers, nor the wage gains. If you are a developer, you are partially responsible for this inequality in both pay and productivity. They tend to go hand in hand. Now, if you want to argue that software developers are underpaid, I certainly agree. But we're also part of the inequality problem, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
  - random314 4y ago
    > This is happening. It's just happening to the people who are the most productive Then why is the increased average productivity not reflected in increased average income?
    - icelancer 4y ago
      Because they're eliminating the jobs of the least productive people and not paying the most productive people equivalent to the productivity gains, i.e. software developers and the technical folk. But those people are still getting paid heaps, so there aren't a lot of complaints.
      - random314 4y ago
        > not paying the most productive people equivalent to the productivity gains, i.e. software developers and the technical folk. So now you are making hawthornio's point for him! Software developers are underpaid.
        icelancer 4y ago
        If you read up a few more comments, you'll note that I'm the one that made that point. > If you are a developer, you are partially responsible for this inequality in both pay and productivity. They tend to go hand in hand. Now, if you want to argue that software developers are underpaid, I certainly agree. But we're also part of the inequality problem, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
        random314 4y ago
        How does being underpaid make engineers part of the inequality problem. You are talking about 2 different things. 1. Productivity benefits not being passed down to the productive people 2. Inequality I am not talking about 2, only 1.
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        If I replace one staff member out of two with a machine that does half their work for them, that doesn't mean the other staff member gets a doubled salary. This is why we don't say a software engineer writing an website should get paid all the money that it would've cost to build and run a data centre for the website, but didn't have to because you used the cloud.
        random314 4y ago
        > If I replace one staff member out of two with a machine that does half their work for them, that doesn't mean the other staff member gets a doubled salary. So who keeps the surplus amount? It has to go somewhere, why not to the group that increased their productivity?
  - 8note 4y ago
    For an obvious counterexample, they could have raised everyone's salary by a million bucks, or 10 million. Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power is the real decider. If you're irreplaceable, you can demand high wages. If somebody is willing to do you job for a thousandth the price, you're screwed, even if they suck
    - icelancer 4y ago
      This statement: >> Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power is the real decider. Is in stark contrast to your next one: >> If you're irreplaceable, you can demand high wages. Extremely productive people carry high replacement costs. Very productive individuals have labor power. Whether they choose to band together and use it like a guild or a union is a separate matter entirely.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        Being irreplaceable is very different from high productivity. Being more productive than your peers barely gets you anything in most jobs.
        icelancer 4y ago
        This is simply not true in technical fields, specifically software development. The most productive developers have high labor mobility and high rates of pay. If you don't think so, try employing the industry's most productive developers and see how cheap (or not) it is.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        If you're 50% more productive than someone else, that's a lot of productivity, but it's very hard to measure in a software development situation. I'm not really talking about the top handful of people.
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        No, it is productivity. You're talking about how hard it is to measure productivity in some jobs. Not whether or not productivity is valuable.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    a sibling comment mentioned that Ninty is making 500k USD per head in profit. Salary postings sound like engineers at 10 years of experience are not making more than 100k USD. Entry at 50k. This is like.. not super lowball in Japan, but hell of a lot of companies with a lot less profit paying more. We aren't talking about companies as a whole, we're looking at a specific company. The mental gymnastics of "well more productive employees are getting paid more" with salaries of ICs not being _that_ much higher... I dunno.
  - WetMinister 4y ago
    > There is no amount Nintendo could have raised salaries that would have avoided the GP comment, is the point. Correct. Which is exactly as it should be, as there also is no amount of profit increase that would satisfy company owners.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > This is happening. It's just happening to the people who are the most productive. Oftentimes, not even that - just look at CEO compensation explosion over the last decade [1]. The real money ends up at shareholders and uppermost echelons of management, not at any level of the worker class. > There is no reason productivity gains would naturally be equally distributed amongst all workers, nor the wage gains. There is a reason, it's called unions - and it's no secret that the explosion of C-level compensation came together with union-busting laws and the general decline of unions. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-compensation-ratio-of-top-firms-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...
- charcircuit 4y ago
  People aren't paid for their productivity.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > In any event, based on increases in productivity since the 80s all workers should be making at least double their salary. I don't understand - why should this be?
  - random314 4y ago
    Of course, the benefits of increased productivity should go to the shareholders, not the workers who increased their productivity. It is the shareholders who are responsible for keeping the economic engine going through their smart trading and index funds.
  - 6510 4y ago
    Try picture the long ago, picture a man with a scythe, picture a millstone, picture a baker hammering out bread by hand, imagine the effort involved.... ...picture an enormous John Deere tractor or a Claas Lexion, picture cargo trains, road trains and cargo ships, our engineered roads and water ways, picture our giant factories cranking out bread and what nots... Then we also did a complex point system to divide and allocate resources, the fruits of innovation and the fruits of labor. Ideally those who contribute the most valuable things get the most points. Create organizations, take risks, invest where you think growth will occur. But fixing exploits is poorly rewarded compared to exploiting them. People continue to find ways to be elaborately rewarded for great (and not so great) accomplishments that happened generations ago. One could argue there to be 2 industries, one of miraculous production, progress, collective happiness and quality of life, squeezing wine out of a rock is not easy but we are apparently doing it in many ways. The other industry is also looking to improve quality of life but only for it self, it does so at the expense of others. It's not a black and white division, many of us play a role in both. Picture people at a discount store excited to buy the slave labor but also employers collectively driving down salaries. The systemic problem we run into is that in order for further progress to take place (and I do mean durable progress in quality of life) people have to be able to afford it first. Enough of the resources and the other fruits have to be allocated to average Joe so that we can build a new and improved iphone, better cars, new and improved hospitals, better tractors, boats, factories etc etc On top of the bill for maintaining infrastructure, roads, houses, dykes, etc You can see things went wrong in food subsidies. Food production is tens of thousands of times more efficient than before but hard working Joe needs subsidies to buy food(!?) Take the language models, lots of people are very excited about the development but only few can spend [say] 100 per month just to play with it. Making a product is still possible but it will have to be a watered down shadow of what it could have been. Finding investors is still possible but without the river of easy money it is going to be much less obvious to bet on. No doubt the technology is going to do miraculous things in countless sectors and [like before] replace millions of jobs. We will have to find other things to do for them which isn't hard really, there is plenty to do. But do you think if the pool of resources to be divided by the system grows by [in this case] an amount that use to take millions of hands.. do you think this should also mean the amount of resources allocated to working people should dramatically decline? Like a game of musical chairs? The opportunity to cut salaries is certainly there every time. I could even picture an end game where we don't need people anymore. I mean, what do you and I have to contribute if our hands and our brains are to slow and to clumsy? I like to think we've accomplished the current state of the art to improve life for humans? If that is what we want we should design the system to enforce that idea. It seems kind of important for you to agree :P
- analognoise 4y ago
  Hit the nail on the head about boot licking neoliberals here. Watching people rush to assume that every laid off employee is simply "unproductive" to make sense of a big layoff is... well, it's something. People rush to scorn workers because they didn't get the axe this time, or last time, not realizing it will eventually be them - their superpower of valuable work will clearly protect them forever, right? It's so...weird, I don't get it. Like they're so convinced the system loves them and will take care of them that they'll defend it! But it won't remember when it's their time on the block.
  - random314 4y ago
    Decades of CNN and Fox news will do that to the brain.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  easy to lick boots when the system works well for you, which is most of the gen X / millennial tech crowd, heavily represented here on HN. big when once I jumped into tech. but when I was bartending America seemed like a pretty rough place.
- dang 4y ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads, and your comment would have been fine with just the second bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
manuelabeledo 4y ago
That 10% sure looks nice, but like everything, it needs context. If I'm not mistaken, Nintendo is currently making nearly two million dollars per employee. In an industry littered with claims of overwork and burnout, no less. And in Japan, where white collar workers still strive to stay in the same company until they retire.
dang 4y ago
I'm not going to cite the 'sneer' guideline at you because I don't think this was a sneer, but it was definitely a generic tangent, and that's also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please try to avoid those—it makes discussions more predictable and then nastier. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34701705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34701705.

Wouldn't be a HN thread about pay increases without someone saying it's not enough.

hawthornio 4y ago

[flagged]

icelancer 4y ago
There is no amount Nintendo could have raised salaries that would have avoided the GP comment, is the point. >> In any event, based on increases in productivity since the 80s all workers should be making at least double their salary. This is happening. It's just happening to the people who are the most productive. There is no reason productivity gains would naturally be equally distributed amongst all workers, nor the wage gains. If you are a developer, you are partially responsible for this inequality in both pay and productivity. They tend to go hand in hand. Now, if you want to argue that software developers are underpaid, I certainly agree. But we're also part of the inequality problem, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
- random314 4y ago
  > This is happening. It's just happening to the people who are the most productive Then why is the increased average productivity not reflected in increased average income?
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Because they're eliminating the jobs of the least productive people and not paying the most productive people equivalent to the productivity gains, i.e. software developers and the technical folk. But those people are still getting paid heaps, so there aren't a lot of complaints.
    - random314 4y ago
      > not paying the most productive people equivalent to the productivity gains, i.e. software developers and the technical folk. So now you are making hawthornio's point for him! Software developers are underpaid.
      - icelancer 4y ago
        If you read up a few more comments, you'll note that I'm the one that made that point. > If you are a developer, you are partially responsible for this inequality in both pay and productivity. They tend to go hand in hand. Now, if you want to argue that software developers are underpaid, I certainly agree. But we're also part of the inequality problem, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
        random314 4y ago
        How does being underpaid make engineers part of the inequality problem. You are talking about 2 different things. 1. Productivity benefits not being passed down to the productive people 2. Inequality I am not talking about 2, only 1.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        If I replace one staff member out of two with a machine that does half their work for them, that doesn't mean the other staff member gets a doubled salary. This is why we don't say a software engineer writing an website should get paid all the money that it would've cost to build and run a data centre for the website, but didn't have to because you used the cloud.
        random314 4y ago
        > If I replace one staff member out of two with a machine that does half their work for them, that doesn't mean the other staff member gets a doubled salary. So who keeps the surplus amount? It has to go somewhere, why not to the group that increased their productivity?
- 8note 4y ago
  For an obvious counterexample, they could have raised everyone's salary by a million bucks, or 10 million. Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power is the real decider. If you're irreplaceable, you can demand high wages. If somebody is willing to do you job for a thousandth the price, you're screwed, even if they suck
  - icelancer 4y ago
    This statement: >> Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power is the real decider. Is in stark contrast to your next one: >> If you're irreplaceable, you can demand high wages. Extremely productive people carry high replacement costs. Very productive individuals have labor power. Whether they choose to band together and use it like a guild or a union is a separate matter entirely.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Being irreplaceable is very different from high productivity. Being more productive than your peers barely gets you anything in most jobs.
      - icelancer 4y ago
        This is simply not true in technical fields, specifically software development. The most productive developers have high labor mobility and high rates of pay. If you don't think so, try employing the industry's most productive developers and see how cheap (or not) it is.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        If you're 50% more productive than someone else, that's a lot of productivity, but it's very hard to measure in a software development situation. I'm not really talking about the top handful of people.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        No, it is productivity. You're talking about how hard it is to measure productivity in some jobs. Not whether or not productivity is valuable.
- rtpg 4y ago
  a sibling comment mentioned that Ninty is making 500k USD per head in profit. Salary postings sound like engineers at 10 years of experience are not making more than 100k USD. Entry at 50k. This is like.. not super lowball in Japan, but hell of a lot of companies with a lot less profit paying more. We aren't talking about companies as a whole, we're looking at a specific company. The mental gymnastics of "well more productive employees are getting paid more" with salaries of ICs not being _that_ much higher... I dunno.
- WetMinister 4y ago
  > There is no amount Nintendo could have raised salaries that would have avoided the GP comment, is the point. Correct. Which is exactly as it should be, as there also is no amount of profit increase that would satisfy company owners.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > This is happening. It's just happening to the people who are the most productive. Oftentimes, not even that - just look at CEO compensation explosion over the last decade [1]. The real money ends up at shareholders and uppermost echelons of management, not at any level of the worker class. > There is no reason productivity gains would naturally be equally distributed amongst all workers, nor the wage gains. There is a reason, it's called unions - and it's no secret that the explosion of C-level compensation came together with union-busting laws and the general decline of unions. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-compensation-ratio-of-top-firms-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...
charcircuit 4y ago
People aren't paid for their productivity.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> In any event, based on increases in productivity since the 80s all workers should be making at least double their salary. I don't understand - why should this be?
- random314 4y ago
  Of course, the benefits of increased productivity should go to the shareholders, not the workers who increased their productivity. It is the shareholders who are responsible for keeping the economic engine going through their smart trading and index funds.
- 6510 4y ago
  Try picture the long ago, picture a man with a scythe, picture a millstone, picture a baker hammering out bread by hand, imagine the effort involved.... ...picture an enormous John Deere tractor or a Claas Lexion, picture cargo trains, road trains and cargo ships, our engineered roads and water ways, picture our giant factories cranking out bread and what nots... Then we also did a complex point system to divide and allocate resources, the fruits of innovation and the fruits of labor. Ideally those who contribute the most valuable things get the most points. Create organizations, take risks, invest where you think growth will occur. But fixing exploits is poorly rewarded compared to exploiting them. People continue to find ways to be elaborately rewarded for great (and not so great) accomplishments that happened generations ago. One could argue there to be 2 industries, one of miraculous production, progress, collective happiness and quality of life, squeezing wine out of a rock is not easy but we are apparently doing it in many ways. The other industry is also looking to improve quality of life but only for it self, it does so at the expense of others. It's not a black and white division, many of us play a role in both. Picture people at a discount store excited to buy the slave labor but also employers collectively driving down salaries. The systemic problem we run into is that in order for further progress to take place (and I do mean durable progress in quality of life) people have to be able to afford it first. Enough of the resources and the other fruits have to be allocated to average Joe so that we can build a new and improved iphone, better cars, new and improved hospitals, better tractors, boats, factories etc etc On top of the bill for maintaining infrastructure, roads, houses, dykes, etc You can see things went wrong in food subsidies. Food production is tens of thousands of times more efficient than before but hard working Joe needs subsidies to buy food(!?) Take the language models, lots of people are very excited about the development but only few can spend [say] 100 per month just to play with it. Making a product is still possible but it will have to be a watered down shadow of what it could have been. Finding investors is still possible but without the river of easy money it is going to be much less obvious to bet on. No doubt the technology is going to do miraculous things in countless sectors and [like before] replace millions of jobs. We will have to find other things to do for them which isn't hard really, there is plenty to do. But do you think if the pool of resources to be divided by the system grows by [in this case] an amount that use to take millions of hands.. do you think this should also mean the amount of resources allocated to working people should dramatically decline? Like a game of musical chairs? The opportunity to cut salaries is certainly there every time. I could even picture an end game where we don't need people anymore. I mean, what do you and I have to contribute if our hands and our brains are to slow and to clumsy? I like to think we've accomplished the current state of the art to improve life for humans? If that is what we want we should design the system to enforce that idea. It seems kind of important for you to agree :P
analognoise 4y ago
Hit the nail on the head about boot licking neoliberals here. Watching people rush to assume that every laid off employee is simply "unproductive" to make sense of a big layoff is... well, it's something. People rush to scorn workers because they didn't get the axe this time, or last time, not realizing it will eventually be them - their superpower of valuable work will clearly protect them forever, right? It's so...weird, I don't get it. Like they're so convinced the system loves them and will take care of them that they'll defend it! But it won't remember when it's their time on the block.
- random314 4y ago
  Decades of CNN and Fox news will do that to the brain.
red-iron-pine 4y ago
easy to lick boots when the system works well for you, which is most of the gen X / millennial tech crowd, heavily represented here on HN. big when once I jumped into tech. but when I was bartending America seemed like a pretty rough place.
dang 4y ago
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads, and your comment would have been fine with just the second bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

manuelabeledo 4y ago

That 10% sure looks nice, but like everything, it needs context. If I'm not mistaken, Nintendo is currently making nearly two million dollars per employee. In an industry littered with claims of overwork and burnout, no less. And in Japan, where white collar workers still strive to stay in the same company until they retire.

dang 4y ago

I'm not going to cite the 'sneer' guideline at you because I don't think this was a sneer, but it was definitely a generic tangent, and that's also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please try to avoid those—it makes discussions more predictable and then nastier. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34701705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34701705.