8 ms·

The Engineer’s Predicament

40 points by nickwritesit 3y ago

hexator 3y ago
Is anyone surprised? It's really eye-opening working at a startup making a huge impact and the company is valuated in the hundreds of millions with only a few engineers. And you just make like $150k, a tiny TINY fraction of the value. Even if you make more than most workers, you're still getting robbed of the true value of your labor.
- marknutter 3y ago
  People often forget to factor in the value of risk. The reason engineers who join startups rather than found them make a fraction of what the founders make is because they didn't take on the initial risk of starting the company, which they are of course free to do anytime they like by starting their own company.
  - serverholic 3y ago
    [dead]
  - lejoko 3y ago
    There is usually another reason (and I share it) : they don't have enough money to start their own company without it being too big a risk. It is an order of magnitude easier to take risks when you already have enough money so that your family is not at stake...
    - marknutter 3y ago
      You're only proving my point about the value of being able to take on risk.
      - lejoko 3y ago
        I don't see how. You said that engineers can take risks if they want. I say that: 1. a lot can't take any risk at all, even if they'd be willing to, since they have no money. 2. the level of the risk you take depends enormously on your initial wealth. Wealthy founders take a lot less risk than founders who invest their life savings. And when you get to the other side of the investment, when you win, the money you earn does not depend at all on the level of risk you took. But when you lose, it totally depends on it. the risk is not the same for everybody.
        marknutter 3y ago
        What you're saying effectively boils down to "being rich is better than being poor". Risk is still risk, and it has a market value, whether or not you want to acknowledge it.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    Who do you think is taking on risk with downside that is remotely comparable to an individual engineer losing 2 years of salary?
    - marknutter 3y ago
      If I invest my life savings into founding a startup and it fails, I lose my life savings. The engineer I hired to help build the company loses nothing.
      - lejoko 3y ago
        If I invest pocket money (the same amount as you, or even more) into founding a startup with you and it fails, I lose pocket money. The engineer we hired together to help build the company loses his job and may find himself with serious problems because of that. Risk is in the eye of the beholder...
        marknutter 3y ago
        You as the founder also lose your job though..
  - lifeonlars 3y ago
    I don't think you are accurately critiquing the point made above. It is right that founders have a vastly different risk/reward tradeoff to employee engineers. I don't think that is the socialist engineers' argument. Suppose there are 3 people involved in a startup: the founder, the engineer and the investor. The engineer gets $300,000 for 2 years' work. The founder gets $200,000 for 3 years' very intense work + $10 million if the startup succeeds. The investor puts in capital, does no work, and gets $40 million if the startup succeeds. It is arguable that the founder and the engineer are getting a comparable amount but with a different risk profile. The socialist argument is that the person who only provides capital is overpaid for doing that. Whether that argument has an economic justification, or just a political or moral justification, and whether you believe that argument, is another matter. But it is clear that, if the investor got less, there would be more to pay both of the people who contribute work. Perhaps a source of confusion is that successful founders often go on to become investors with the money they have collected, for example Paul Graham or Marc Andreessen. You could also argue that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, while still nominally 'working' as CEO, has gone from being a founder in Facebook the product to being an investor who provides capital for various Facebook the company projects, and that perhaps much of his wealth was accumulated in the second stage.
    - marknutter 3y ago
      In the vast majority of cases, the startup will not succeed, and the investor will lose their investment, while the founder will make $100,000 less than the engineer and lose credibility as a founder in the process. The engineer loses nothing other than the potential future income they might have received if the company had succeeded, and they will likely just find another job.
      - lifeonlars 3y ago
        Obviously to the investor, only the average case over a large number of investments matters.
      - pseudalopex 3y ago
        Many founders had failed startups before. A significant loss of credibility is not the vast majority of cases in my experience. And paying themselves less than engineers is not universal either.
- throwaway585793 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Swizec 3y ago
  > you're still getting robbed of the true value of your labor. But as someone who has tried creating value from scratch (by starting businesses) … my god having a job is so much easier. Making $200k+ as a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to scraping together $50k of fully captured value.
- slt2021 3y ago
  then one can simply create his/her own startup, bear all the risks (99% of startups fail) and reap all the rewards. market should have found equilibrium, otherwise there is literally free money on the table. why would engineer work for 150k when he/she can create startup with multi-million valuation?
  - lifeonlars 3y ago
    > then one can simply create his/her own startup, bear all the risks (99% of startups fail) and reap all the rewards. How does that work? Most of the rewards go to the owners of the capital. That's literally the central idea of socialism.
    - slt2021 3y ago
      you don't have to raise capital at unfavorable terms. Plenty of bootstrapped startup founders out there or founders who raised at very favorable terms (like raising 50+ mln with just a powerpoint, not even a POC of a product). or alternatively - plenty of dual class stock holders (Zuckerberg is prime example), where you still retain control of company, while benefitting from cheap VC and public capital
- eastbound 3y ago
  As long as engineers are ok with returning 2 years of their pay if their work doesn’t allow the company to double in size, I’m perfectly ok with doubling or decupling the salary of said engineer.
  - jsharf 3y ago
    Do founders return the salary they pay themselves if their company doesn’t double in size? The answer is no, so I don’t see why software engineers should be held to higher standards.
    - parthianshotgun 3y ago
      Founders are simply better and more evolved human beings, the exalted ones, isn't it obvious? /s
      - throwaway585793 3y ago
        Non sequitur. Sarcasm doesn't make you funny or witty. This isn't reddit.
        parthianshotgun 3y ago
        Irrelevant. See? I can do it too.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        Founders do invest savings into creating the company, and can be condemned to prejudices if they fail to manage money properly. And every startup is managed at the edge of bankruptcy all the time, so founders can easily be found guilty of mismanagement.
    - Aunche 3y ago
      A lot of founders have worked for free or have already invested a lot of money in their company. If you want a salary and external investment, you better be prepared to part with much of the stake in your company.
- deleted 3y ago
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- nateabele 3y ago
  On the other hand, 150k is an astronomical sum for most people on the planet—and no one is being forced into accepting that as a market rate, or even living in a high-rent city, particularly post-COVID. I still don’t understand this idea that labor supposedly has some sort of intrinsic value. The value is derived from the labor being done in the context of a system created by someone else. As others have said, if you want to reap the full value of your labor, you’re free to go it alone.
  - green_man_lives 3y ago
    > The value is derived from the labor being done in the context of a system created by someone else. When property ownership is indefinite and transferrable between generations, then capital accumulation becomes about whoever did it first. Yes there is occasional disruption, but a guy like Micheal Bloomberg did the labor 40 years ago and has had people working for him ever since. I think the idea is that we ALL stand on the shoulders of giants, and rather than holding all of the gains ourselves, they should be spread so as to give other people the opportunity to make something of themselves.
    - prottog 3y ago
      > When property ownership is indefinite and transferrable between generations, then capital accumulation becomes about whoever did it first. If this is true, the richest people in this country should be named Washington or Jefferson, or perhaps more recently, Carnegie or Vanderbilt. Instead, we have the likes of Bezos or Musk, the latter of whom wasn't even born here. Bloomberg was born to a bookkeeper, hardly the stuff of generational wealth. Empirical evidence suggests that it's actually pretty hard to remain at the top of the leaderboard across many generations. I agree with the idea that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but I dispute the picture you paint that the wealthy are "holding all of the gains [themselves]". Salaries get paid, taxes get paid, new ecosystems are made upon which future wealth can be built. There is no compelling evidence that makes me believe that more redistribution on top of what we already have (which is already quite a bit, contrary to popular belief that the US is a low-taxes-on-the-rich, low-social-benefit nation) would result in better outcomes for the median person.
- ralusek 3y ago
  The value of your labor is a function of (what you do for them, what they do for you, what you can do without them, and what they can do without you). Why the value of your labor isn't (total profit of company / how much of the labor you think your work represents) is because you're not the only person that could have done that, and there are plenty of people who would do it for less. This exercise is being carried out millions of times per day, and the terminal value of this exercise is $150-$300k for most engineers in the area. The flip side is true, too. If the value of your labor is truly what you say it is, and all it takes is a few engineers like yourself to produce that high valuation of the total company, what are you doing employed somewhere where your work is so undervalued?
- BeetleB 3y ago
  > Even if you make more than most workers, you're still getting robbed of the true value of your labor. I used to think that way too. For years. Until I realized that's never been how labor is valued. Ever. Let's dispense with this fantasy. There's also a disconnect. Very few people value what they buy in stores this way. We don't care what it cost to manufacture what we buy. We just care what other stores sell it for. If all the other stores are selling it cheaper, then this store is charging more than it's worth. People pay for product. People pay for services. To first order the pricing model is the same. And of course as another commenter said: Try starting your own business and earning 150k. I bet 95% of readers here are incapable of it. Ignore unicorn startups and listen to How I Built This. It's quite common that for several years the founders earn little. All they have is equity they can't liquidate. For years they have to pay employees a lot more than they themselves make and give them employee rights that they themselves don't have. If you look across all businesses in the US, earning 150k puts you better off than 90% of business owners. The deck is in favor of employees, not business owners.
  - groby_b 3y ago
    So close. SO CLOSE. The deck is in favor of massive inequality. This expresses in different ways. For many employees, it's exploitative workplaces. (These exploitative places are very often large companies - it turns out smaller companies usually have a sense of "together" that makes this harder). For many new businesses, it's an extremely harsh environment with low survival rates. A large part of that is that the environment is controlled by large companies and their owners. There's a price to massive scale, and it seems we've chosen to pay it as massive inequality.
    - BeetleB 3y ago
      Yes engineers are on the side that's benefiting from the inequality. Virtually all societies with less inequality pay engineers less.
  - thsbrown 3y ago
    Preach! Been a self employed game developer for almost 10 years now. I think a lot of people fail to realize how incredibly hard it is to make a product (even a great one) and make a reasonable profit from it. It takes a lot of patience, learning and failure. Even after 10 years I still feel like there's so much more to learn to get to where I want to go.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Aunche 3y ago
  > valuated in the hundreds of millions with only a few engineers. And you just make like $150k It's telling that you need to compare your salary to a company's valuation rather than their income. That company worth hundreds of millions is probably actively losing tens of millions overall. It's only worth hundreds of millions because capital owners decided that this type of cash is worth burning. Without them, your $150k job simply wouldn't exist.
senko 3y ago
I can't take seriously an article that takes about socialist software engineers and never once mentions or at least hints at Stallman, the FSF, Chaos Computer Club, or many other people and movements that could be considered either straight out socialist or heavily inspired.
- nikanj 3y ago
  This is what you get when you’re tasked with writing about programmers, but don’t bother talking to a single one
- pphysch 3y ago
  There's a substantial difference between a socialist and a libertarian despite them both being "leftists". Stallman is clearly the latter. Socialist: harmonious society is the highest value Libertarian: personal liberty is the highest value These frequently come into conflict. For example, a socialist would support policies that benefit the collective (e.g. new rules), while the libertarian will frequently oppose them because they incur a cost to individual liberty.
  - oscillonoscope 3y ago
    Left-libertarianism is a subset of socialism. Socialism is a wide umbrella term for multiple economic systems that put the people doing the work in charge of the workplace. It has nothing directly to do with a 'harmonious society'
    - pphysch 3y ago
      Arbitrary labels aside, my point stands that it is ridiculous to conflate "socialist" and someone who opposes social programs and a robust society by opposing the public governments that are necessary to implement such things on a large scale, because "privacy" is the highest virtue. What exactly is "socialist" about Stallman, aside from him not being a US Republican and disliking Big Tech? For example, a radically socialist policy would be that "social ownership" should extend to some amount of personal information, to increase accountability, cohesion, trust, etc. But Stallman would vehemently oppose this.
helen___keller 3y ago
If you can’t lead a comfy life (because house prices are in the millions), and you see everyone here 10-20 years before you leading a comfy life (and capitalizing on housing price growth), you’re going to feel the game is rigged and you’re being played the fool. So yes, those people are more likely to gravitate towards a personal politics that offers a solution for their personal woes. It’s not hard to fix as a society. Build enough housing and you’ll find all those busy educated relatively-high-earning folks go off to live a comfy life, like generations of relatively-high-earning folk before them.
- eastbound 3y ago
  Building more housing, does that sound like overpopulating the SF area, with predictable effects on the ecologic footprint which they’ll accuse the rich to be the cause of, like in Europe? I much prefer cost-of-living indicators to be an cruel indicator that the area is populated enough. Stop basing your model on everyone being able to move to the SV. Remote work is much better as a social model, if not just for the ecology.
  - mrosett 3y ago
    This would only make sense if the cost-of-living indicators were actually driven by ecological impact. Instead they’re largely driven by preferences of local residents.
  - waveBidder 3y ago
    suburban sprawl is worse ecologically than dense cities. for a given number of people, its almost tautological that the denser the living situation, the more space there is for the natural world.
    - MisterTea 3y ago
      To some people, city living is akin to being locked in a zoo.
      - 3y ago
azubinski 3y ago
"Modern computing is inconceivable without U.S. imperialism" "We pay $2,000 for essays" No advertisement, no signs of any commercial activity. Beautiful.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  The same people will turn around and talk about how great China is, and how Chinese imperialism is different for ... reasons.
  - meowface 3y ago
    Some fraction of internet socialists are also regularly defending Russia in the Ukraine war. The Ukrainians are Nazis and the Russians are somehow not imperialists and NATO and the US are to blame, etc.
  - 28fingies 3y ago
    If Chinese imperialism really exists it is so insignificant in the history of the world that it's not even worth mentioning.
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      See? Found one.
zabzonk 3y ago
> It might surprise you to learn that a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living are socialists. not really - most of the programmers i've ever worked with have been of fairly liberal/left-wing view.
- tombert 3y ago
  Sort of? Most of the engineers I know are generally fairly left-wing from a social perspective (pro LGBT+, pro-choice, etc) but also tend to skew a bit more towards the "Ayn Rand" libertarian economically (though generally less dogmatic).
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    > tend to skew a bit more towards the "Ayn Rand" libertarian economically perhaps much less so in the UK (where i am) as we tend to value public services (such as the NHS) and realise they have to be paid for.
    - tombert 3y ago
      That's fair; amongst my general friend-group it tends to be pretty left-leaning (very left-leaning by American standards, probably just left of center globally), but having worked with a bunch of engineers in New York and California, just the general vibe I've gotten has been the libertarian style I mentioned above.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  As a European, this is something I still find weird in American political terminology. From my perspective, socialism died with the Soviet Union. The left-wing ideologies that have been dominant since the 90s are closer to classical liberalism than socialism, because they fundamentally accept private property and free markets.
  - sime2009 3y ago
    As a European myself, I share that weird feeling when watching Americans discuss these topics. To me it looks like the discussion in the US has been poisoned such that there are only two options: Stalinism vs the-poor-can-starve-in-the-streets Capitalism. It's a framing from the cold war which the right in the US has kept alive. It exists to hide the possibility of a middle path, a popular middle path which Europe took after the war.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
[flagged]
- helen___keller 3y ago
  Lol what
- tivert 3y ago
  > It's something I REALLY miss about working for the MIC. People did their jobs, talked about baseball, and went home. The MIC?
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    Military Industrial Complex. FAANG people sleep on how cool the engineering they do is.
- naravara 3y ago
  I'm old enough to remember when "blue hairs" referred to old people. It's young people now?
  - groby_b 3y ago
    We have the audacity to color our hair. "It's just not natural, I tell you! Why, in my day..." is the usual response by folks who've forgotten they once were young too.
  - 28fingies 3y ago
    OP is creating a strawman for people he thinks are socialists (or perhaps what he thinks socialists are). Calling people "blue hairs" is probably an indication he spends too much time online.
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      The antifa organizer I am talking about had blue hair.
InTheArena 3y ago
Opens up the article, and starts reading about class traitors, American imperialism, and utopian ideals. chuckles walks away.
- abalashov 3y ago
  I suppose patronising bemusement can be applied to virtually any writing, art, theory or idea; the question is, what is the predicate here? What did you actually say? Are your sentences positive statements of some kind, or just a textually baroque but unmistakably emotive grunts?
candiddevmike 3y ago
With LLMs, we are either headed towards socialism+UBI or neo-feudalism.
karaterobot 3y ago
This is so vague, it's got my puzzling over what the point is. "A few desultory anecdotes about mostly failed attempts at pursuing something I am calling socialism, based on how I choose to define that term" is what I would call it. Not as punchy of a title, I grant you.
jasonlotito 3y ago
No mention of GNU, GPL, Stallman, free software, etc. Rise of socialist engineers? In fact, I see quite the opposite. I've seen a greater rise of capitalist focused engineers in the last decade. What would once be free or open source software is now pushed to a startup with VC funding, with an free/community/self-hosted version and a cloud/SSO version. Note: I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, better or worse, or anything else. This is just my observations.
hablog 3y ago
[flagged]
- 28fingies 3y ago
  oh cool, transphobia.
  - hablog 3y ago
    That's not what I meant, but I suppose there's also a correlation there. I was referring more to the fact that coastal software engineers tend to be testosterone-deficient as a group, which strongly affects political alignment. E.g. https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/155441/version/V1/view https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/155441/version/V... or https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717495/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717495/
    - 28fingies 3y ago
      sure, buddy.
      - hablog 3y ago
        You responded to my comment in like 8 seconds so you obviously didn't even glance at either study.
        28fingies 3y ago
        obviously
      - tristor 3y ago
        > sure, buddy. That's an interesting response to a scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal that says testosterone supplementation causes people who hold left-wing political views to shift rightward in their political compass. It's likely not conclusive, it's just one study after all, but I think a less-dismissive response is probably warranted. You are responding to the parent poster as if they are entering the conversation with an agenda, but the way you are responding informs any third-party readers that actually you are the one engaging in this conversation with an agenda and not taking the charitable read of the other posters comments as aligned to the HN guidelines. I'd encourage you to read the HN guidelines, read the studies they linked, and then respond with something less snarky and dismissive and more substantive.
green_man_lives 3y ago
> Modern computing is inconceivable without U.S. imperialism > Some technologies are class traitors, you could say. "Wanting a different future is stupid because the tools you use were made by people with different value systems" is not a good argument. If I can work at a FAANG and have home ownership in a reasonable location (flyover state, but not in DR Horton suburban hell) be a pipe dream, then I must imagine how impossible comfort and security is for people working real jobs. From there socialism is the obvious conclusion. If the cold war was about determining which system was better, socialism (we can argue that the USSR was actually state capitalist but whatever) or liberalism, then I would argue that when the wall came down, the American ruling class thought that liberalism had won. But the thing about ideas is that you cant ever really kill them. You have to constantly convince the next generation that your system is worth buying into. The arguments in favor of capitalism keep getting weaker and weaker. Why is it citizen's fault for looking at a raw deal and saying "no thanks". The ruling class should instead be sweetening the deal.
- glitchc 3y ago
  There is a time-tested concept of noblesse oblige that our neo-feudal lords (Elon et al.) have never been trained to understand. They lack class.
  - tristor 3y ago
    > They lack class. I think you're very much on to something here. There's the age old saying that "money can't buy class", and it seems to be held true by what we see in the public eye with the behavior of most of the wealthiest people in the world, almost all of whom are nouveau rich.
nicbou 3y ago
I found this article difficult to read. It never really makes a point, or even finishes a thought. It reads the way I sound when I have too much coffee. Still, it's a good discussion prompt. There is a sort of tech aristocracy who thinks that because they get paid well, they are of a greater caste than their median wage-earning colleagues. They don't just earn more, they deserve to earn more. They let themselves believe that they can tackle any societal problem by throwing tech at it. Others just lose touch with the reality of their peers, having earned far more than them since they left college. They are aware that they have it pretty good, but forget how much. I don't hear too many tech workers worry about their work concentrating wealth in the wrong hands, their blue collar colleagues not getting invited to the offsites, or their participation in various destructive ventures. As long as they get paid, it's all right. I'm not sure if there are truly that many socialist software developers. They only feel like they are workers when they can't afford a backyard. Champagne socialists, as they say. I do meet a few socialists who play with code, but they tend to apply their skills very differently, at very different organisations.
- tristor 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - lifeonlars 3y ago
    [flagged]
pickovven 3y ago
As someone who is aligned with these general politics, I would strongly encourage folks working towards a "post-capitalist" world to start by clearly and explicitly stating what that means. What would qualify as "post capitalist?" It's hard to work towards something vague and undefined. I think this is worth raising because the article sweeps across a broad range of topics that -- in my humble opinion -- are not necessarily "post capitalism." And it may be the case that some political concerns mentioned are in opposition to a post capitalist world. For example, what if the fastest way to a post capitalist world is a changing American politics and then using American hegemony to export those politics?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
"The Information Problem"[0] has always been regarded as the insurmountable poison pill inside of Socialism's command economy, so it's completely unsurprising that it attracts engineers. The problem with solving the Information Problem, as Charles Stross notes[1], is that people will know that it was solved by other people. Thus a technical solution in a national context becomes a political proposition, where it's going to instantly die at the cash-laden hands of the rentiers. Engineering isn't the problem. It's within human means to solve the Information Problem, now, with current technology. One could argue that massive, vertically scaled companies like Wal Mart and Amazon have been doing exactly that for decades, and have - as Marx predicted - been making enormous profits from the interchange with adjacent economies that lack central planning[2]. But Walmart and Amazon don't need to deal with political problems. For the solution to be practical, long term, at the nation-state level, it has to appear motiveless. Naturally this is going to rub the nubbins of the AI boosters hard enough that they'll need towels for their chairs. A little note in closing. Beware anyone who tries to equate an economic tool with an ideological or - worse - moral position. Sometimes hammers are better than screwdrivers, and sometimes hex bolts are better than screws. They're all just systems tools to get things from where they get made to where they're needed. That's it. Nothing more. Anyone saying otherwise - that an economic system will make you gay, or will get you to heaven, or make people like you - is selling you something. Be skeptical. Just my $.02. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem [1] Via the character Gianni Vittoria in Accelerando, speaking as a former Italian minister of economics [2] Hell, does that describe the entire post-1970s rise of the entire finance industry? Eh. That's a little much.

40 points by nickwritesit 3y ago

Is anyone surprised? It's really eye-opening working at a startup making a huge impact and the company is valuated in the hundreds of millions with only a few engineers. And you just make like $150k, a tiny TINY fraction of the value. Even if you make more than most workers, you're still getting robbed of the true value of your labor.

marknutter 3y ago
People often forget to factor in the value of risk. The reason engineers who join startups rather than found them make a fraction of what the founders make is because they didn't take on the initial risk of starting the company, which they are of course free to do anytime they like by starting their own company.
- serverholic 3y ago
  [dead]
- lejoko 3y ago
  There is usually another reason (and I share it) : they don't have enough money to start their own company without it being too big a risk. It is an order of magnitude easier to take risks when you already have enough money so that your family is not at stake...
  - marknutter 3y ago
    You're only proving my point about the value of being able to take on risk.
    - lejoko 3y ago
      I don't see how. You said that engineers can take risks if they want. I say that: 1. a lot can't take any risk at all, even if they'd be willing to, since they have no money. 2. the level of the risk you take depends enormously on your initial wealth. Wealthy founders take a lot less risk than founders who invest their life savings. And when you get to the other side of the investment, when you win, the money you earn does not depend at all on the level of risk you took. But when you lose, it totally depends on it. the risk is not the same for everybody.
      - marknutter 3y ago
        What you're saying effectively boils down to "being rich is better than being poor". Risk is still risk, and it has a market value, whether or not you want to acknowledge it.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  Who do you think is taking on risk with downside that is remotely comparable to an individual engineer losing 2 years of salary?
  - marknutter 3y ago
    If I invest my life savings into founding a startup and it fails, I lose my life savings. The engineer I hired to help build the company loses nothing.
    - lejoko 3y ago
      If I invest pocket money (the same amount as you, or even more) into founding a startup with you and it fails, I lose pocket money. The engineer we hired together to help build the company loses his job and may find himself with serious problems because of that. Risk is in the eye of the beholder...
      - marknutter 3y ago
        You as the founder also lose your job though..
- lifeonlars 3y ago
  I don't think you are accurately critiquing the point made above. It is right that founders have a vastly different risk/reward tradeoff to employee engineers. I don't think that is the socialist engineers' argument. Suppose there are 3 people involved in a startup: the founder, the engineer and the investor. The engineer gets $300,000 for 2 years' work. The founder gets $200,000 for 3 years' very intense work + $10 million if the startup succeeds. The investor puts in capital, does no work, and gets $40 million if the startup succeeds. It is arguable that the founder and the engineer are getting a comparable amount but with a different risk profile. The socialist argument is that the person who only provides capital is overpaid for doing that. Whether that argument has an economic justification, or just a political or moral justification, and whether you believe that argument, is another matter. But it is clear that, if the investor got less, there would be more to pay both of the people who contribute work. Perhaps a source of confusion is that successful founders often go on to become investors with the money they have collected, for example Paul Graham or Marc Andreessen. You could also argue that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, while still nominally 'working' as CEO, has gone from being a founder in Facebook the product to being an investor who provides capital for various Facebook the company projects, and that perhaps much of his wealth was accumulated in the second stage.
  - marknutter 3y ago
    In the vast majority of cases, the startup will not succeed, and the investor will lose their investment, while the founder will make $100,000 less than the engineer and lose credibility as a founder in the process. The engineer loses nothing other than the potential future income they might have received if the company had succeeded, and they will likely just find another job.
    - lifeonlars 3y ago
      Obviously to the investor, only the average case over a large number of investments matters.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      Many founders had failed startups before. A significant loss of credibility is not the vast majority of cases in my experience. And paying themselves less than engineers is not universal either.
throwaway585793 3y ago
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Swizec 3y ago
> you're still getting robbed of the true value of your labor. But as someone who has tried creating value from scratch (by starting businesses) … my god having a job is so much easier. Making $200k+ as a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to scraping together $50k of fully captured value.
slt2021 3y ago
then one can simply create his/her own startup, bear all the risks (99% of startups fail) and reap all the rewards. market should have found equilibrium, otherwise there is literally free money on the table. why would engineer work for 150k when he/she can create startup with multi-million valuation?
- lifeonlars 3y ago
  > then one can simply create his/her own startup, bear all the risks (99% of startups fail) and reap all the rewards. How does that work? Most of the rewards go to the owners of the capital. That's literally the central idea of socialism.
  - slt2021 3y ago
    you don't have to raise capital at unfavorable terms. Plenty of bootstrapped startup founders out there or founders who raised at very favorable terms (like raising 50+ mln with just a powerpoint, not even a POC of a product). or alternatively - plenty of dual class stock holders (Zuckerberg is prime example), where you still retain control of company, while benefitting from cheap VC and public capital
eastbound 3y ago
As long as engineers are ok with returning 2 years of their pay if their work doesn’t allow the company to double in size, I’m perfectly ok with doubling or decupling the salary of said engineer.
- jsharf 3y ago
  Do founders return the salary they pay themselves if their company doesn’t double in size? The answer is no, so I don’t see why software engineers should be held to higher standards.
  - parthianshotgun 3y ago
    Founders are simply better and more evolved human beings, the exalted ones, isn't it obvious? /s
    - throwaway585793 3y ago
      Non sequitur. Sarcasm doesn't make you funny or witty. This isn't reddit.
      - parthianshotgun 3y ago
        Irrelevant. See? I can do it too.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      Founders do invest savings into creating the company, and can be condemned to prejudices if they fail to manage money properly. And every startup is managed at the edge of bankruptcy all the time, so founders can easily be found guilty of mismanagement.
  - Aunche 3y ago
    A lot of founders have worked for free or have already invested a lot of money in their company. If you want a salary and external investment, you better be prepared to part with much of the stake in your company.
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nateabele 3y ago
On the other hand, 150k is an astronomical sum for most people on the planet—and no one is being forced into accepting that as a market rate, or even living in a high-rent city, particularly post-COVID. I still don’t understand this idea that labor supposedly has some sort of intrinsic value. The value is derived from the labor being done in the context of a system created by someone else. As others have said, if you want to reap the full value of your labor, you’re free to go it alone.
- green_man_lives 3y ago
  > The value is derived from the labor being done in the context of a system created by someone else. When property ownership is indefinite and transferrable between generations, then capital accumulation becomes about whoever did it first. Yes there is occasional disruption, but a guy like Micheal Bloomberg did the labor 40 years ago and has had people working for him ever since. I think the idea is that we ALL stand on the shoulders of giants, and rather than holding all of the gains ourselves, they should be spread so as to give other people the opportunity to make something of themselves.
  - prottog 3y ago
    > When property ownership is indefinite and transferrable between generations, then capital accumulation becomes about whoever did it first. If this is true, the richest people in this country should be named Washington or Jefferson, or perhaps more recently, Carnegie or Vanderbilt. Instead, we have the likes of Bezos or Musk, the latter of whom wasn't even born here. Bloomberg was born to a bookkeeper, hardly the stuff of generational wealth. Empirical evidence suggests that it's actually pretty hard to remain at the top of the leaderboard across many generations. I agree with the idea that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but I dispute the picture you paint that the wealthy are "holding all of the gains [themselves]". Salaries get paid, taxes get paid, new ecosystems are made upon which future wealth can be built. There is no compelling evidence that makes me believe that more redistribution on top of what we already have (which is already quite a bit, contrary to popular belief that the US is a low-taxes-on-the-rich, low-social-benefit nation) would result in better outcomes for the median person.
ralusek 3y ago
The value of your labor is a function of (what you do for them, what they do for you, what you can do without them, and what they can do without you). Why the value of your labor isn't (total profit of company / how much of the labor you think your work represents) is because you're not the only person that could have done that, and there are plenty of people who would do it for less. This exercise is being carried out millions of times per day, and the terminal value of this exercise is $150-$300k for most engineers in the area. The flip side is true, too. If the value of your labor is truly what you say it is, and all it takes is a few engineers like yourself to produce that high valuation of the total company, what are you doing employed somewhere where your work is so undervalued?
BeetleB 3y ago
> Even if you make more than most workers, you're still getting robbed of the true value of your labor. I used to think that way too. For years. Until I realized that's never been how labor is valued. Ever. Let's dispense with this fantasy. There's also a disconnect. Very few people value what they buy in stores this way. We don't care what it cost to manufacture what we buy. We just care what other stores sell it for. If all the other stores are selling it cheaper, then this store is charging more than it's worth. People pay for product. People pay for services. To first order the pricing model is the same. And of course as another commenter said: Try starting your own business and earning 150k. I bet 95% of readers here are incapable of it. Ignore unicorn startups and listen to How I Built This. It's quite common that for several years the founders earn little. All they have is equity they can't liquidate. For years they have to pay employees a lot more than they themselves make and give them employee rights that they themselves don't have. If you look across all businesses in the US, earning 150k puts you better off than 90% of business owners. The deck is in favor of employees, not business owners.
- groby_b 3y ago
  So close. SO CLOSE. The deck is in favor of massive inequality. This expresses in different ways. For many employees, it's exploitative workplaces. (These exploitative places are very often large companies - it turns out smaller companies usually have a sense of "together" that makes this harder). For many new businesses, it's an extremely harsh environment with low survival rates. A large part of that is that the environment is controlled by large companies and their owners. There's a price to massive scale, and it seems we've chosen to pay it as massive inequality.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    Yes engineers are on the side that's benefiting from the inequality. Virtually all societies with less inequality pay engineers less.
- thsbrown 3y ago
  Preach! Been a self employed game developer for almost 10 years now. I think a lot of people fail to realize how incredibly hard it is to make a product (even a great one) and make a reasonable profit from it. It takes a lot of patience, learning and failure. Even after 10 years I still feel like there's so much more to learn to get to where I want to go.
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Aunche 3y ago
> valuated in the hundreds of millions with only a few engineers. And you just make like $150k It's telling that you need to compare your salary to a company's valuation rather than their income. That company worth hundreds of millions is probably actively losing tens of millions overall. It's only worth hundreds of millions because capital owners decided that this type of cash is worth burning. Without them, your $150k job simply wouldn't exist.

senko 3y ago

I can't take seriously an article that takes about socialist software engineers and never once mentions or at least hints at Stallman, the FSF, Chaos Computer Club, or many other people and movements that could be considered either straight out socialist or heavily inspired.

nikanj 3y ago
This is what you get when you’re tasked with writing about programmers, but don’t bother talking to a single one
pphysch 3y ago
There's a substantial difference between a socialist and a libertarian despite them both being "leftists". Stallman is clearly the latter. Socialist: harmonious society is the highest value Libertarian: personal liberty is the highest value These frequently come into conflict. For example, a socialist would support policies that benefit the collective (e.g. new rules), while the libertarian will frequently oppose them because they incur a cost to individual liberty.
- oscillonoscope 3y ago
  Left-libertarianism is a subset of socialism. Socialism is a wide umbrella term for multiple economic systems that put the people doing the work in charge of the workplace. It has nothing directly to do with a 'harmonious society'
  - pphysch 3y ago
    Arbitrary labels aside, my point stands that it is ridiculous to conflate "socialist" and someone who opposes social programs and a robust society by opposing the public governments that are necessary to implement such things on a large scale, because "privacy" is the highest virtue. What exactly is "socialist" about Stallman, aside from him not being a US Republican and disliking Big Tech? For example, a radically socialist policy would be that "social ownership" should extend to some amount of personal information, to increase accountability, cohesion, trust, etc. But Stallman would vehemently oppose this.

helen___keller 3y ago

If you can’t lead a comfy life (because house prices are in the millions), and you see everyone here 10-20 years before you leading a comfy life (and capitalizing on housing price growth), you’re going to feel the game is rigged and you’re being played the fool. So yes, those people are more likely to gravitate towards a personal politics that offers a solution for their personal woes. It’s not hard to fix as a society. Build enough housing and you’ll find all those busy educated relatively-high-earning folks go off to live a comfy life, like generations of relatively-high-earning folk before them.

eastbound 3y ago
Building more housing, does that sound like overpopulating the SF area, with predictable effects on the ecologic footprint which they’ll accuse the rich to be the cause of, like in Europe? I much prefer cost-of-living indicators to be an cruel indicator that the area is populated enough. Stop basing your model on everyone being able to move to the SV. Remote work is much better as a social model, if not just for the ecology.
- mrosett 3y ago
  This would only make sense if the cost-of-living indicators were actually driven by ecological impact. Instead they’re largely driven by preferences of local residents.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  suburban sprawl is worse ecologically than dense cities. for a given number of people, its almost tautological that the denser the living situation, the more space there is for the natural world.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    To some people, city living is akin to being locked in a zoo.
    - 3y ago

azubinski 3y ago

"Modern computing is inconceivable without U.S. imperialism" "We pay $2,000 for essays" No advertisement, no signs of any commercial activity. Beautiful.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
The same people will turn around and talk about how great China is, and how Chinese imperialism is different for ... reasons.
- meowface 3y ago
  Some fraction of internet socialists are also regularly defending Russia in the Ukraine war. The Ukrainians are Nazis and the Russians are somehow not imperialists and NATO and the US are to blame, etc.
- 28fingies 3y ago
  If Chinese imperialism really exists it is so insignificant in the history of the world that it's not even worth mentioning.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    See? Found one.

zabzonk 3y ago

> It might surprise you to learn that a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living are socialists. not really - most of the programmers i've ever worked with have been of fairly liberal/left-wing view.

tombert 3y ago
Sort of? Most of the engineers I know are generally fairly left-wing from a social perspective (pro LGBT+, pro-choice, etc) but also tend to skew a bit more towards the "Ayn Rand" libertarian economically (though generally less dogmatic).
- zabzonk 3y ago
  > tend to skew a bit more towards the "Ayn Rand" libertarian economically perhaps much less so in the UK (where i am) as we tend to value public services (such as the NHS) and realise they have to be paid for.
  - tombert 3y ago
    That's fair; amongst my general friend-group it tends to be pretty left-leaning (very left-leaning by American standards, probably just left of center globally), but having worked with a bunch of engineers in New York and California, just the general vibe I've gotten has been the libertarian style I mentioned above.
jltsiren 3y ago
As a European, this is something I still find weird in American political terminology. From my perspective, socialism died with the Soviet Union. The left-wing ideologies that have been dominant since the 90s are closer to classical liberalism than socialism, because they fundamentally accept private property and free markets.
- sime2009 3y ago
  As a European myself, I share that weird feeling when watching Americans discuss these topics. To me it looks like the discussion in the US has been poisoned such that there are only two options: Stalinism vs the-poor-can-starve-in-the-streets Capitalism. It's a framing from the cold war which the right in the US has kept alive. It exists to hide the possibility of a middle path, a popular middle path which Europe took after the war.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

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helen___keller 3y ago
Lol what
tivert 3y ago
> It's something I REALLY miss about working for the MIC. People did their jobs, talked about baseball, and went home. The MIC?
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  Military Industrial Complex. FAANG people sleep on how cool the engineering they do is.
naravara 3y ago
I'm old enough to remember when "blue hairs" referred to old people. It's young people now?
- groby_b 3y ago
  We have the audacity to color our hair. "It's just not natural, I tell you! Why, in my day..." is the usual response by folks who've forgotten they once were young too.
- 28fingies 3y ago
  OP is creating a strawman for people he thinks are socialists (or perhaps what he thinks socialists are). Calling people "blue hairs" is probably an indication he spends too much time online.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    The antifa organizer I am talking about had blue hair.

InTheArena 3y ago

Opens up the article, and starts reading about class traitors, American imperialism, and utopian ideals. chuckles walks away.

abalashov 3y ago
I suppose patronising bemusement can be applied to virtually any writing, art, theory or idea; the question is, what is the predicate here? What did you actually say? Are your sentences positive statements of some kind, or just a textually baroque but unmistakably emotive grunts?

candiddevmike 3y ago

With LLMs, we are either headed towards socialism+UBI or neo-feudalism.

karaterobot 3y ago

This is so vague, it's got my puzzling over what the point is. "A few desultory anecdotes about mostly failed attempts at pursuing something I am calling socialism, based on how I choose to define that term" is what I would call it. Not as punchy of a title, I grant you.

jasonlotito 3y ago

No mention of GNU, GPL, Stallman, free software, etc. Rise of socialist engineers? In fact, I see quite the opposite. I've seen a greater rise of capitalist focused engineers in the last decade. What would once be free or open source software is now pushed to a startup with VC funding, with an free/community/self-hosted version and a cloud/SSO version. Note: I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, better or worse, or anything else. This is just my observations.

hablog 3y ago

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28fingies 3y ago
oh cool, transphobia.
- hablog 3y ago
  That's not what I meant, but I suppose there's also a correlation there. I was referring more to the fact that coastal software engineers tend to be testosterone-deficient as a group, which strongly affects political alignment. E.g. https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/155441/version/V1/view https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/155441/version/V... or https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717495/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717495/
  - 28fingies 3y ago
    sure, buddy.
    - hablog 3y ago
      You responded to my comment in like 8 seconds so you obviously didn't even glance at either study.
      - 28fingies 3y ago
        obviously
    - tristor 3y ago
      > sure, buddy. That's an interesting response to a scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal that says testosterone supplementation causes people who hold left-wing political views to shift rightward in their political compass. It's likely not conclusive, it's just one study after all, but I think a less-dismissive response is probably warranted. You are responding to the parent poster as if they are entering the conversation with an agenda, but the way you are responding informs any third-party readers that actually you are the one engaging in this conversation with an agenda and not taking the charitable read of the other posters comments as aligned to the HN guidelines. I'd encourage you to read the HN guidelines, read the studies they linked, and then respond with something less snarky and dismissive and more substantive.

green_man_lives 3y ago

> Modern computing is inconceivable without U.S. imperialism > Some technologies are class traitors, you could say. "Wanting a different future is stupid because the tools you use were made by people with different value systems" is not a good argument. If I can work at a FAANG and have home ownership in a reasonable location (flyover state, but not in DR Horton suburban hell) be a pipe dream, then I must imagine how impossible comfort and security is for people working real jobs. From there socialism is the obvious conclusion. If the cold war was about determining which system was better, socialism (we can argue that the USSR was actually state capitalist but whatever) or liberalism, then I would argue that when the wall came down, the American ruling class thought that liberalism had won. But the thing about ideas is that you cant ever really kill them. You have to constantly convince the next generation that your system is worth buying into. The arguments in favor of capitalism keep getting weaker and weaker. Why is it citizen's fault for looking at a raw deal and saying "no thanks". The ruling class should instead be sweetening the deal.

glitchc 3y ago
There is a time-tested concept of noblesse oblige that our neo-feudal lords (Elon et al.) have never been trained to understand. They lack class.
- tristor 3y ago
  > They lack class. I think you're very much on to something here. There's the age old saying that "money can't buy class", and it seems to be held true by what we see in the public eye with the behavior of most of the wealthiest people in the world, almost all of whom are nouveau rich.

nicbou 3y ago

I found this article difficult to read. It never really makes a point, or even finishes a thought. It reads the way I sound when I have too much coffee. Still, it's a good discussion prompt. There is a sort of tech aristocracy who thinks that because they get paid well, they are of a greater caste than their median wage-earning colleagues. They don't just earn more, they deserve to earn more. They let themselves believe that they can tackle any societal problem by throwing tech at it. Others just lose touch with the reality of their peers, having earned far more than them since they left college. They are aware that they have it pretty good, but forget how much. I don't hear too many tech workers worry about their work concentrating wealth in the wrong hands, their blue collar colleagues not getting invited to the offsites, or their participation in various destructive ventures. As long as they get paid, it's all right. I'm not sure if there are truly that many socialist software developers. They only feel like they are workers when they can't afford a backyard. Champagne socialists, as they say. I do meet a few socialists who play with code, but they tend to apply their skills very differently, at very different organisations.

tristor 3y ago
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- lifeonlars 3y ago
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pickovven 3y ago

As someone who is aligned with these general politics, I would strongly encourage folks working towards a "post-capitalist" world to start by clearly and explicitly stating what that means. What would qualify as "post capitalist?" It's hard to work towards something vague and undefined. I think this is worth raising because the article sweeps across a broad range of topics that -- in my humble opinion -- are not necessarily "post capitalism." And it may be the case that some political concerns mentioned are in opposition to a post capitalist world. For example, what if the fastest way to a post capitalist world is a changing American politics and then using American hegemony to export those politics?

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MilStdJunkie 3y ago

"The Information Problem"[0] has always been regarded as the insurmountable poison pill inside of Socialism's command economy, so it's completely unsurprising that it attracts engineers. The problem with solving the Information Problem, as Charles Stross notes[1], is that people will know that it was solved by other people. Thus a technical solution in a national context becomes a political proposition, where it's going to instantly die at the cash-laden hands of the rentiers. Engineering isn't the problem. It's within human means to solve the Information Problem, now, with current technology. One could argue that massive, vertically scaled companies like Wal Mart and Amazon have been doing exactly that for decades, and have - as Marx predicted - been making enormous profits from the interchange with adjacent economies that lack central planning[2]. But Walmart and Amazon don't need to deal with political problems. For the solution to be practical, long term, at the nation-state level, it has to appear motiveless. Naturally this is going to rub the nubbins of the AI boosters hard enough that they'll need towels for their chairs. A little note in closing. Beware anyone who tries to equate an economic tool with an ideological or - worse - moral position. Sometimes hammers are better than screwdrivers, and sometimes hex bolts are better than screws. They're all just systems tools to get things from where they get made to where they're needed. That's it. Nothing more. Anyone saying otherwise - that an economic system will make you gay, or will get you to heaven, or make people like you - is selling you something. Be skeptical. Just my $.02. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem [1] Via the character Gianni Vittoria in Accelerando, speaking as a former Italian minister of economics [2] Hell, does that describe the entire post-1970s rise of the entire finance industry? Eh. That's a little much.