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> Gates created products. No he didn't. His employees did. The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asy

> Gates created products. No he didn't. His employees did. The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. So he pays them what they'll accept and keeps the surplus. But if you're not convinced, consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers when it comes to "poaching"[1] and "noncompete" agreements[2]. These suppress salaries, with the goal of funnelling more money to the C-suite and shareholders instead. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-... [2] https://www.epi.org/publication/noncompete-agreements/ https://www.epi.org/publication/noncompete-agreements/

WalterBright 3y ago
> No he didn't. His employees did. Gates traded money for the work of his employees. It was a fair trade, as both parties freely agreed. (Pedantically, Gates wrote Microsoft's first product - BASIC.) > The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. You imply that they were stupid. They certainly were not. And at any time they could have demanded more money. And at any time they could have quit, started their own company, and received the full value of their work. (Many did so, the PNW is full of them.) Story time! I know of a very successful salesman at BigCorp. He generated vast quantities of sales for them, and was paid him well. He could walk into any company and be ushered in to see the CEO, and make a sale. He quit to join a startup and do the sales. He was unable to close a single deal. He couldn't even get an audience from the decision makers in other companies, let alone see the CEO. He returned to BigCorp, who was happy to get him back. The point is, it was BigCorp standing behind him that enabled his success. Without that, it just didn't work for him. > consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers I know about that. The cartel was a handful of employers. It did not cover the zillions of other tech companies, nor was it remotely effective in stopping startups that they could start.
- benreesman 3y ago
  Walter you know I hold you in tremendous esteem: your achievements are among the most noteworthy of any of the regular commenters and frankly of living hackers, and many including myself wouldn't be in this business without your contributions. So please know I say this with the utmost respect. But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures don't happen in way that impacts both the public at large and people in our business particularly (not especially, just germane to these threads). Collusion and cartel-style illegality routinely distort markets, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy and connected and almost always at the cost of working people who actually create most of the value. Bludgeoning everyone else out of the personal computer business by breaking the law isn't "creating" value, it's capturing value, via capture. I don't think too many people frequent this site who don't fundamentally believe in markets as something to embrace, and that number probably rounds to zero for people with my join date, but markets and free exchange are only part of the story: people with ironclad obligations to anything from dependents to the IRS take what is offered in terms of wages and in the presence of market manipulation that is in no way a "free exchange". I came of age as a hacker during the 90s: I remember exactly how badly Gates had to break the law to get the Department of Justice to go after a domestic economic Cinderella story with hammer and tongs. Those people go after terrorists and money launderers and child traffickers, you have to really color outside the lines to get them to put that on hold to muzzle a domestic company with geopolitical reach. Gates did so for the first time that got him deposed when he tried to strangle the Web in the cradle, and it's neither the first nor the last time he's dealt with regulators or attorneys who'd rather be chasing conventional bad guys around. Going back even further, the reason why he was the one signing the small(-er) checks and cashing the big ones finds it's origin story in the fact that his parents organized and substantially financed his high school having an IBM mainframe in it at a time when probably a few dozen young people had any access to computers at all outside of maybe the clubs where the Steves were hanging out. By the time the personal computer revolution was taking off he had many years of head start. I hasten to add that I'm not advocating for some draconian policy of creating perfect equality of outcomes or any of that nonsense, but I'm likewise completely unimpressed that he "got there first", he was born down the block and his career from there was pretty much pressing that advantage with brass knuckle tactics until he basically had to retire from public life long enough to re-brand as a philanthropist. He's a really weird example to choose for the case I think you're making. His meme picture before we even called it that was him in a Borg suit. The major players tried to break the back of the last upwardly mobile desk profession again in the 2004-2010 timeframe, when again the people who go after al Quaeda for a day job decided it was bad enough to slap them hard enough to back off a little, which coupled with Sheryl defecting and paying "market" wages in the 2009-2014 timeframe incentivized a whole generation of people to go into CS. Sheryl was paying 2-5x what Eric was, which one was "market"? It's a hard case to make the case it was the guy who said in email that we need to suppress wages. Now they're at it again, no the mass layoffs followed by record-shattering EPS beats weren't a coincidence or because of COVID hiring, in fact they're hiring a bunch of those people back now that it's clear that GPT-4 isn't obsoleting the regular Internet in the imminent future, though wages haven't recovered and plenty of veteran hackers are still burning savings to make mortgage payments that were predicated on the comp packages they signed up for (a decidedly asymmetrical situation). I can't prove this because everything I know about this that isn't plain as day was said off the record, but I also don't make shit like that up. I'd petition you as someone people look up to (I certainly do) to examine why you feel so strongly that markets are generally free, employment is generally truly at will at truly "market" wages, and the status quo around all this is something we should all accept?

WalterBright 3y ago

> No he didn't. His employees did. Gates traded money for the work of his employees. It was a fair trade, as both parties freely agreed. (Pedantically, Gates wrote Microsoft's first product - BASIC.) > The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. You imply that they were stupid. They certainly were not. And at any time they could have demanded more money. And at any time they could have quit, started their own company, and received the full value of their work. (Many did so, the PNW is full of them.) Story time! I know of a very successful salesman at BigCorp. He generated vast quantities of sales for them, and was paid him well. He could walk into any company and be ushered in to see the CEO, and make a sale. He quit to join a startup and do the sales. He was unable to close a single deal. He couldn't even get an audience from the decision makers in other companies, let alone see the CEO. He returned to BigCorp, who was happy to get him back. The point is, it was BigCorp standing behind him that enabled his success. Without that, it just didn't work for him. > consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers I know about that. The cartel was a handful of employers. It did not cover the zillions of other tech companies, nor was it remotely effective in stopping startups that they could start.

benreesman 3y ago
Walter you know I hold you in tremendous esteem: your achievements are among the most noteworthy of any of the regular commenters and frankly of living hackers, and many including myself wouldn't be in this business without your contributions. So please know I say this with the utmost respect. But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures don't happen in way that impacts both the public at large and people in our business particularly (not especially, just germane to these threads). Collusion and cartel-style illegality routinely distort markets, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy and connected and almost always at the cost of working people who actually create most of the value. Bludgeoning everyone else out of the personal computer business by breaking the law isn't "creating" value, it's capturing value, via capture. I don't think too many people frequent this site who don't fundamentally believe in markets as something to embrace, and that number probably rounds to zero for people with my join date, but markets and free exchange are only part of the story: people with ironclad obligations to anything from dependents to the IRS take what is offered in terms of wages and in the presence of market manipulation that is in no way a "free exchange". I came of age as a hacker during the 90s: I remember exactly how badly Gates had to break the law to get the Department of Justice to go after a domestic economic Cinderella story with hammer and tongs. Those people go after terrorists and money launderers and child traffickers, you have to really color outside the lines to get them to put that on hold to muzzle a domestic company with geopolitical reach. Gates did so for the first time that got him deposed when he tried to strangle the Web in the cradle, and it's neither the first nor the last time he's dealt with regulators or attorneys who'd rather be chasing conventional bad guys around. Going back even further, the reason why he was the one signing the small(-er) checks and cashing the big ones finds it's origin story in the fact that his parents organized and substantially financed his high school having an IBM mainframe in it at a time when probably a few dozen young people had any access to computers at all outside of maybe the clubs where the Steves were hanging out. By the time the personal computer revolution was taking off he had many years of head start. I hasten to add that I'm not advocating for some draconian policy of creating perfect equality of outcomes or any of that nonsense, but I'm likewise completely unimpressed that he "got there first", he was born down the block and his career from there was pretty much pressing that advantage with brass knuckle tactics until he basically had to retire from public life long enough to re-brand as a philanthropist. He's a really weird example to choose for the case I think you're making. His meme picture before we even called it that was him in a Borg suit. The major players tried to break the back of the last upwardly mobile desk profession again in the 2004-2010 timeframe, when again the people who go after al Quaeda for a day job decided it was bad enough to slap them hard enough to back off a little, which coupled with Sheryl defecting and paying "market" wages in the 2009-2014 timeframe incentivized a whole generation of people to go into CS. Sheryl was paying 2-5x what Eric was, which one was "market"? It's a hard case to make the case it was the guy who said in email that we need to suppress wages. Now they're at it again, no the mass layoffs followed by record-shattering EPS beats weren't a coincidence or because of COVID hiring, in fact they're hiring a bunch of those people back now that it's clear that GPT-4 isn't obsoleting the regular Internet in the imminent future, though wages haven't recovered and plenty of veteran hackers are still burning savings to make mortgage payments that were predicated on the comp packages they signed up for (a decidedly asymmetrical situation). I can't prove this because everything I know about this that isn't plain as day was said off the record, but I also don't make shit like that up. I'd petition you as someone people look up to (I certainly do) to examine why you feel so strongly that markets are generally free, employment is generally truly at will at truly "market" wages, and the status quo around all this is something we should all accept?