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Society doesn’t owe an obligation to support highly skilled engineers earning more than $50k per year, and in some cases earning more than $200k a year. These p
by simple-thoughts 4y ago
Society doesn’t owe an obligation to support highly skilled engineers earning more than $50k per year, and in some cases earning more than $200k a year. These people are going to be fine, yeah they might have to cook their own food and move somewhere cheaper, but calling for society to bail out one of the most advantaged classes is ridiculous.
- woodruffw 4y agoNothing in the GP's comment implies a "bail out," or that they don't understand the immense privilege associated with tech wages. Focusing on that talks past the point: a person can simultaneously be paid handsomely and still underpaid, if their productive output significantly outstrips their salary. The last time I checked, Google's revenue-per-employee was around $1.6 million.
- nickff 4y agoRevenue per employee is a very poor measure of productivity; it would imply that many people working at startups are completely unproductive (which rings false to me).
- woodruffw 4y agoThere is a very literal sense in which working at a early startup is less productive: you're trading current productive capacity for potential future productive capacity. The economics bear this out: early startups pay less, and offer equity to compensate. That's a long way of saying that we shouldn't confuse economic productivity with effort.
- kilgnad 4y agoSociety owes engineers all of civilization. They built it. When I see engineers getting 200k what I see is society as it should be. The majority of wealth should be distributed to the most skilled workers on the bottom. But even at 200k, this is not what is happening in tech companies. The thing that nobody owes anything to is execs. Execs just tell engineers what to build. The injustice that's going on here is just power dynamics that lets executives have unfair safety and engineers get fucked. The irony is that Engineers as a group they are 100000x more powerful then any exec, the issue is engineers don't operate from a place of central authority. This is what unions are for. In times like this it's worth considering.
- pinewurst 4y agoHardly the engineers of Google’s ad empire.
- kilgnad 4y agoGoogle engineers changed the world.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ryloric 4y agoWhat? That's like arguing which one of the four wheels a car relies on the most... It's nonsense.
- kilgnad 4y agoBad analogy. The engineers are the four wheels, the execs are car paint. You remove the car paint, the car looks ugly. You remove the four wheels... you can't even call the thing a car anymore.
- piva00 4y agoSolidarity among workers starts with... Solidarity. Privileged or not, they are all salaried, the more we can all agree that if you depend on a salary you are part of the same class of people the more power to workers we get.
- simple-thoughts 4y agoThe economic, political, and social system advantages certain classes of workers over others. Personally, that doesn’t bother me as I am benefiting from the system myself. But to claim solidarity with workers who are not from our class and do not share our values is something I will never stoop to. Instead it’s better to recognize privilege and act in a way that recognizes your class obligations.