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Tech's Elite Hates Labor (ez.substack.com)
316 points by davidgerard on Feb 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 415 comments



I think because individual tech workers are so highly paid relative to other industries, we fail to see how low our pay is relative to what the people at the top are making.

A high performing Google engineer may make 500k+ in total comp, Sundar Pichai makes $100M+ in many years. That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high.

You see startup founders who exit with generational wealth (tens or hundreds of millions). They are also frequently able to cash out along the way, or borrow against their success. Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets < 1% of the equity and none of the glory.

It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry.

The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. I don't envy the culture of those industries, but I do sometimes wonder what tech would be like if we leaned a little more that way.


I once worked at a startup that was acquired and the founders made a killing. A few years after the acquisition, they founded a new company in an adjacent domain and started raiding their original company for talent. At the time I was working with a guy who had product and marketing experience who happened to be close college friends with one of the cofounders. No one liked working with this guy. Yet rumor had it that he was offered a 5% stake in the new company while the engineers they were recruiting were being offered .25-.5%. I was very confident that they would be successful but I opted not to work for them because I was so offended by the inequity of the offers. The developers they were attempting to raid also had proven that they were productive and effective so it wasn't as though they were making a wildly speculative bet on them.

I also knew that in a major exit, I would be more resentful of the relative difference between my rewards and that of this other guy than I would have been pleased with my windfall. I had once had serious respect for the cofounders, but their greediness and willingness to perpetuate these systems of inequity permanently diminished my opinion of them.

Yet, I have to concede that the cofounders were correct in their assessment that they could lowball the engineers with little impact on their prospects for success. They were able to exploit their way to a second major windfall, far larger than the first.


Fascinating. We may have worked for the same founders at some point, as I have had nearly the exact same experience (I was an engineer at the 2nd startup with a ~0.5% stake (before dilution, of course!) -- the payout was nice but it was not a life changing event).

One detail in my story is that I found out a lot about the personal lives of the founders and their friends. They all came from obscene wealth to begin with. The founders father was on the board of a major tech company in the Bay that bought the first startup and financially backed the second.

The nepotism I've seen in my career disenchanted me long, long ago.


I've been working on re-framing nepotism as "selective altruism" -- it's like there's an "in" group, within which the members feel completely justified and even a little obligated to help each other out. So it's our usual human tribal stuff, basically, but we can recognize the altruism in there.

Of course the next step would be leveraging this thought to propose a mechanism to convince them to expand their notion of "in-group" to include, i dunno, everyone who works for them? Everyone who was integral in their success? Every living being with whom they share a planet? So that the altruistic instinct could be expanded to be helpful to many many more.

... no particular ideas atm, but commenting in case it helps someone else reach an actionable insight :)


It's also that good marketing of a product is probably more integral to its success than its engineering. There are so many stories of superior technologies failing because of bad marketing.


I agree that marketing is extremely important. There is no product without the engineers and no customers without the marketers. If you prioritize quality, I think the engineers are more important. If you prioritize making money, perhaps then the marketers are more important. I don't really know.

The problem is that in this particular case, the only things this person seemed exceptional at were being friends with the CEO and being unpleasant to work with.


IME at startups (well very small micro startups) you focus on quality at first, and wait for the company to go bankrupt. Then sell the IP to another company you happen to own. That second company focuses on marketing without having to worry about the ownership %'s afforded to the engineers at the first company.


Good marketing would make a mediocre product succeed, but it will not save a crappy one.

Also, "superior technologies" is a loaded term, because it is in fact very subjective.


Lots of products literally don't work at all and still sell, and even lead their industry in revenue. I wish it wasn't true.


Engineers should absolutely know their worth. Were they also offering much lower pay for that little equity? It's perfectly fine to accept lower equity for market rate salary. That's adjusting risk to your personal situation.


> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid.

This is wrong. Lawyers get paid worse than FAANG SWEs unless they make partnership, which is the equivalent to becoming a co-owner or working as a lower level exec at a big tech company.

Doctors at big hospitals in the bay make worse money than Google SWEs last time I was chatting with my friend’s wife who was a Doctor at Stanford medicine. The super highly paid doctors are the ones who found or cofound practices.

Finance can pay a little higher, but that’s only because the teams are usually smaller and you have more direct impact. You might pull down 1M/year at Renaissance or whatever, but the partners are still pulling in nearly 100x that.

> It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct.

This is the same across nearly all businesses. The owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs. It’s not a coop.


IME the OP is correct. In my experience, doctors, lawyers and veterinarians all make 6 figures. Low six figures if employee, high 6 figures if partner. 3X difference maybe, nowhere close to 100X.


The key difference is that those professions don't "scale", and the output is linear to the labor (hours) put in. The wealth doesn't lend itself to concentrate into a few hands, and the professional worker is mostly independent and in control of what they do themselves.

In tech, people work in teams where each person is a tiny cog in a (relatively) big machine. We still don't agree how to objectively quantify a person's work output. (Eg: do 10x programmers exist?) When a product becomes successful, there's no objective way to distribute the windfall, so the default capitalist rule applies (whoever invested money and/or has access to the best lawyers gets most of it).


I don't think the discrepancy is the same in any other field of knowledge work, though.

Even hospital CEOs and partners at law firms are making 3-15x what their doctors and attorneys are making. Not 100-200x. The magnitude of the gap is way higher in tech.


"The owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs."

They do make such decisions, but neither that nor their net worth makes them better than anyone else... yet too many of them act as if it does.

What they really are is nothing more than people who've won a rigged game.


Since when does this have to do with people “being better”?


The difference is not as great in these other fields, but that's because the pyramid isn't as large. There's one person at the top of Alphabet, and tens of thousands of people below him. No law firm has as many people, by a long shot. And the medical analogy isn't right either. You have to look at the CEO of a pharma company, who probably does make a similar multiple to Sundar.

But the person at the top also has a much greater risk because pay is tied to stock performance. The top lawyer in a firm gets paid well, and probably some of that is tied to firm performance. But the base salary is a much greater percent of total comp in that case.


I know this is beside the point you're making, but that guy at the top does not have greater risk.

The right measure of risk isn't money, it's freedom. Work as CEO of Google or Roche for a month and you don't have to work any more. You don't risk shit, you can only win or win bigger.

This is what I don't understand. There are plenty of people who can run a business, so why is it that we pay so much for them? There's a massive queue of candidates who will all do a decent job (you won't know), so why are they paid astronomical sums? There's no way you can be sure a guy is not going to mess things up, and paying him a lot of money won't motivate him more, he's only got a 24h day. He can't go and be CEO elsewhere because he doesn't know other businesses that well, only a few places could logically use him. On top of that a huge proportion of the stock price is not in his hands.


> that guy at the top does not have greater risk.

The CEO and CFO of publicly traded companies get paid pretty handsomely in exchange for taking on a significant amount of risk by signing off on the financial statements.


And when does that risk ever materialize apart from the Enron/Wirecard/FTX cases where the CEO and CFO truly were pulling a massive scam?


Kenneth Lay died after being convicted but before being sentenced, so afaik his family still has the money.


They get paid well to not do crimes? That's nonsensical.


They get paid to take responsibility for crimes that happen underneath them. That’s a lot different and why you got confused.


One creative theory I heard is that a rational benefit of seemingly-irrational executive pay is to incentivize harder work among the people who desire to be executives. Not sure if it makes sense or not, but it's an interesting possibility.


Only works if the would-be CEOs are themselves irrational. You can't seriously be expecting to outcompete thousands of other prospective CEOs.


It would only really apply to companies that promote from within. That could motivate a few dozen people who have a shot at becoming an executive in their career at the company.


You might feel that only a few people are qualified to be your CEO. And they all want to retire - you're competing with the "retire instead" option.


I think the problem here is it is incredibly difficult to evaluate the kind of value CEOs bring. Certainly I could have done a slightly better job than many ousted CEOs of large tech companies.

It’s also possible that simply by listening to your executives/board, an intelligent engineer could do about as well as Sataya or Ballmer or Sundar.


The bottom of their risk is having to become labor again, that's not a risk, that's the default for every one of their employees.


I don't see the problem here.

A burger flipper makes $10 in an hour. An engineer designing a burger flipping robot makes $100. Their department's engineering manager makes $1,000. The CTO makes $10,000.

The hardest worker here is the burger flipper. They work 16 hour days just to afford rent, and it's hard manual labor.

The engineer makes 10 times as much because each line of code they write produces more value than an entire day of manual burger flipping.

Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems.

The CTO makes 10 times that because their policies affect many engineering departments throughout a large organization and have multibillion-dollar consequences. It doesn't matter if they work 1000 times harder than a burger flipper, they probably work less than the burger flipper. But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.


Were what you said even remotely true than a really bad department manager and CTO would stand to lose 100x/1000x what a burger flipper makes when they fuck up and make things worse.

The force multiplier works in both directions.

More realistically, the pay is about control and class. An incompetent CTO who always makss everything worse is just not in the same social class as a programmer, let alone a burger flipper, and will typically still earn 100x as much while making everything 100x worse.

^ I've worked with one of them.


This is not 100% wrong, but you are missing an important part of the calculus, which is that as you go up the hierarchy you have more overall and more concentrated power to demand higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor.


I think you have the causality backwards. A person is able to demand higher pay not because they are in charge, but because the owners/upper management want them to be in charge. That is, they get hired with high pay because that's the value the employer puts on their labor. They determine that the same way the determine what they're willing to pay for other goods and services: how much do they want it, and how easy it is to get.


In my experience it’s not about labor at all. It’s very far from wanting to put the best high up and more about which social circles you get access to. It’s always a struggle between what’s best for the company and what is best for the individual board members/ceo and there is way to few real active investors for the best of the company to take priority usually.


I don't know what point you are trying to make. You are describing some of the ways that people higher up the hierarchy have more power to demand higher wages. That's what I was talking about.


Ok, let me say it a different way. They don't have the power to demand more than they are worth, because the amount the employer offers reflects what the employer thinks they are worth. You may disagree about how much value they supply, but that's not really relevant. Wages aren't set by what some 3rd party thinks is fair, they're set like other prices - how much the employee's skills are needed and the available supply of people with those skills. Hierarchy is only incidentally involved, and not always. Consider, for example, the wages of actors or professional athletes for example.


> higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor

To the extent this is a problem, it's a problem of corporate governance. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that problem is fixable, since its root cause is a shift in corporate ownership from individual stockholders to mutual funds (because mutual funds is how most people now invest their retirement savings in 401ks or the equivalent). The effect of this on individual corporations is to make their time horizon for stock price growth much shorter, because unlike individual retirement investors, most of whom adopt a buy and hold strategy and don't trade very often, mutual funds trade stocks all the time based on short term performance.


Somehow that wasn't always the case in the past, so presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future. If we have the audacity to imagine a different world, it is fixable through organizing and demanding that incentives be aligned with our values rather than with the spiraling fortunes of a handful of extremely self-centered people.


> that wasn't always the case in the past

Yes, that's correct. The movement of stock ownership to mutual funds largely took place in the few decades after WW II.

> presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future

Yes, but the changes that would have to take place are quite drastic. I don't think disallowing mutual funds is an option. But the only other mechanism of control (aside from market forces--see below) would be to drastically change the regulations concerning corporate governance, and it's not even clear that that would do more than exchange one problem for another, since regulatory capture is a thing.

The only other way to change the incentives facing corporate governance structures is to change the market, either on the producer side or the consumer side. On the consumer side, consumers would have to stop buying goods and services from companies that overpay their CEOs and underpay their workers. Unfortunately that would mean consumers choosing to take a huge economic hit, since those same companies provide huge economic value to consumers. (And in some cases, such as Google and Facebook, consumers don't even have the option of not paying, since the services are free; they would have to stop using the services altogether even though they're free, which is probably even harder to make happen than getting consumers to stop paying for something.)

On the producer side, new companies that are structured differently in terms of governance (for example as worker cooperatives) would need to enter the market and out-compete the existing companies. Sooner or later that might well happen, but it could be quite a long time.


I didn't say it would be easy. What I said is that the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle.

> regulatory capture

Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage. It is class struggle. The only solution is to struggle back.


> the potential for change is rooted in organizing and class struggle

I don't think this is a useful way to view it. I would say the potential for change is in people shifting to a more long-term viewpoint instead of always chasing short-term gain and satisfaction.

> Regulatory capture just is the capitalist class organizing to shape the structures of society to their continued advantage.

If you don't think of yourself as a capitalist, you are dooming yourself to always be on the losing side of interactions with those that do. Particularly if they are predators.

Regulatory capture is just one way that predators use the system to their own advantage at the expense of everybody else. But not all capitalists are predators. The immense wealth our society has was built by people who were both capitalists and cooperators: wealth building is positive sum, the aggregation of win-win interactions over time. But sustaining wealth building requires taking a longer term view in order to preserve the social institutions and social trust that are necessary for it to happen. Unfortunately, the current trend is in the opposite direction.


> not all capitalists are predators

That is simply untrue. Sure, some capitalists have good PR, touting their non-capitalist efforts in ways that intentionally confuse them with capitalism for the purpose of increasing PR value. The increase in PR value is just a more oblique means of wealth extraction. The actual act of being capitalist, i.e., extracting excess value from labor by leveraging capital (piles of money, factories, infrastructure, etc)... that is inherently predatory in nature. Capitalists use the fact that they own stuff, and the fact that workers need food, shelter and healthcare, to grift the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of public good, PR notwithstanding. It's codified into the cornerstone concept of shareholder value. Capitalism itself is distinct from any charity or other social good that a capitalist or company might engage in, and all capitalism exploits labor. Not every act a capitalist does is predatory, but every capitalist is a predator.


> That is simply untrue.

Sorry, you are simply misrepresenting the facts and the economics at this point.


So, is capitalism somehow not the extraction of excess value from labor (profit) by leveraging capital?


There is no evidence that management problems are harder to solve than coding problems. Not only that, but when coders make mistakes the impact can be large and the responsibility clearly falls on the coder, whereas when managers make mistakes, the responsibility is diffused to their subordinates. Managers should either be paid a lot less, or be fireable by their reports when they make mistakes.


It has nothing to do with difficulty. It’s not a leveling up game of leetcode.

> whereas when managers make mistakes, the responsibility is diffused to their subordinates.

No it’s not. They will roast their subordinates but unless the org is completely dysfunctional they are responsible for the ultimate deliverables.

The higher up you move, the more responsible for outcomes that are less and less in your control. You even gain legal liability as you enter the “officer of the company” levels.


> ...unless the org is completely dysfunctional they are responsible for the ultimate deliverables.

This is true in theory if everyone has perfect knowledge. In practice I've never seen it play out. A large part of management is framing (i.e. playing off imperfect knowledge). It happens before and after success or failure is decided. Smart managers commit, but frame their responsibilities or outcomes in favorable terms. They find ways to de-risk. They publicly share risky deliverables with other teams or increase scope to push decision making up the ladder. They commit to only what their team can slam dunk. They make sure to only lead rockstar teams (this is huge). They cherry pick metrics to make failure look reasonable and success look incredible. They leave before major failures are realized or hand failures off before they sour. Remember: In large human systems, feedback cycles can easily take years.

It's a game and there's lots of clever ways to play. But the only way to lose is to publicly accept loss. When you do, it's very honorable and moving. But I've never seen the hit to perceived competency offset by perceived integrity. Because at the end of the day, companies make money. There's no company metric for honor. It's politics, whether we choose to see it or not doesn't really matter. For an extreme example, take a look at the presidency. Incumbent presidents lose in election year recessions. Period. Never mind most economic crises are a decade or so in the making.

People in aggregate are much simpler than we like to think. And so leadership is much more sleight of hand than our nobler ideals would have us believe.


> It has nothing to do with difficulty. It’s not a leveling up game of leetcode.

Then you should reply to the parent comment and not mine.

> No it’s not. They will roast their subordinates but unless the org is completely dysfunctional they are responsible for the ultimate deliverables.

Please. If you’ve never seen incompetent managers bumbling along making their staff into scapegoats, etc., then you don’t have a lot of experience.

Nothing changes at the higher levels either. Projects are cancelled and teams fired etc, not the executive in charge. The time execs get fired is when they do deliver and there is some kind of liability.


I guess I’ve been mainly working at successful companies? The biggest company I worked at was Google 7+ years ago and managers that couldn’t deliver and blamed employees would get exited or demoted quite quickly.

It’s been even more aggressive in the startups I’ve been at since.


> There is no evidence that management problems are harder to solve than coding problems.

As someone who has done both in small and medium companies, I find people problems to almost always be harder. Most coding problems outside cutting edge companies tend to at least have solutions. People and leadership often doesn't have a right answer.

And yes, a key coders mistake can be large. But a management mistake 'build feature X over Y' or 'implement policy B' can just as easily cost the company dearly and put small companies out of business.


> There is no evidence that management problems are harder to solve than coding problems.

I think that's the sort of thinking some forms of schooling drill into our heads: harder problems = greater reward/value.

That's not really how it is. We get rewarded for the value we supposedly generate by solving some problem or at least some portion of that value is rewarded to us. So if there are some low hanging fruits that generate a ton of value, then that's how you will be rewarded. I'm sure Ph.D.s solve far harder problems than me all day long but societally we don't tend to value many of those problems or their solutions.


> We get rewarded for the value we supposedly generate by solving some problem or at least some portion of that value is rewarded to us.

And that's the sort of thinking other forms of schooling drill into our heads: value generated ~= value compensated.

That's not really how it is. We get rewarded for the position we are at in the class hierarchy. If you're "in charge of" someone, you have to be making more money than them.

Is that how it should be? No. It's very much not. But it's largely how it is.


Totally agree with you. I think your point and the one I made earlier are at least two of the naive beliefs often held by a lot of engineers in tech -- myself included. The really pernicious part is that the value generated by engineers are sometimes quite big and the reward they get is a small fraction of it but big enough to make the engineer happy that they never stop to ask for more or find a better deal.


There is! Management would be replaced by cheaper management if it were possible to do so at the same level of quality.

Either corporations are insane immoral pathological paperclip/profit maximizers, in which case any manager would be replaced with a cheaper version or even a algorithm, or they're not and managers aren't worth what they're being paid.

If the CEO or upper management is so fungible, why aren't they being replaced with staff who will work just as hard and effectively for a tenth of the price?


You’re confusing leverage and political positioning with competence and capability.

Not that all managers are incompetent. Some are indeed inspired and or excellent. However these are rare. Just as there are many average engineers who aren’t very productive, so there are many managers who aren’t very capable and are just in their position because they were in the right place at the right time.


Obtaining leverage and positioning oneself politically are indeed competencies and capabilities that are required to excel in medium to large orgs. They're not mutually exclusive.


> But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.

This too is misunderstanding the value equation. The cost of replacement has to be part of this too. Engineering salaries are bid up in the market relative to other professions not because their work is more "important" than teaching or administration or whatever, but because engineers are hard to hire. Literally every software group, even now, has open spots where they'd like to put someone. There are never enough people.

And... is that true at the top of the hierarchy? Have you ever even heard of a company with a VP req sitting open for months for lack of candidates? That just doesn't happen. Senior positions seem to be drowning in competition[1]. And yet, their salaries aren't showing the result of that competition between candidates. Boards aren't going out to find a "better deal" on their CEO. Maybe they should, but they don't.

And I think it's worth asking why that is.

[1] In fact I think with the exception of a very small list of genuine innovators, even tech CEOs are mostly just replacement level players shepherding already-tuned organizations. You could dump Jassy or Nadella out on the street tomorrow and Amazon and Microsoft would be just fine with whoever stepped in.


Let's pretend for a moment that your ratios were true (i.e. that we actually have an efficient labor market), it has nothing to do with what anyone deserves, nothing to do with their worth.

Do not conflate an economic system chosen for its ability to allocate resources efficiently (whether it does is another question) with a moral value system that assigns value to individual humans or what share of resources or power they deserve.


> Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems.

This is very rarely true.


Good point. Usually sentiment here is equality should be about pay of engineer and higher ups. Anyone lower than engineer deserve what they get due to market forces. They can always up-skill themselves to become engineers.


But then you jump up another level, where someone is making a hundred thousand or a million times what the burger flipper makes. Are they generating enough value to warrant that? Elon Musk's current net worth is roughly what 100,000 burger flippers will make in their whole lives. Is it plausible that he generates some multiple of that value, or is he just much better at capturing value than the burger flipper?


Given the things he has managed to bring to market, and the impact he is having on the world - I would say yes.

People can get really lucky once, but Musk has an overall track record that can't be attributed to just getting lucky or being in the right place at the right time;

I can't think of anyone else - except perhaps Steve Jobs, who managed to go from one huge idea to another and execute well more often than not, at several companies and industries.


Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees?

Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees).

In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ratio has increased from 20-to-1 in 1996 to 202-to-1 in 2018. [0]

"The average S&P 500 company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 324-to-1 in 2021." For NuSkin Enterprises, the ratio is 22,092:1, for Amazon, it is 6,474:1 ... pretty amazing chart. [1]

And this is why the tax system should recognize and tax excessive pay ratios. These are nothing but the financial result of abusive relationships between the executives and the workers, and the other taxpayers who pay more than their share of the burden. It is also easily measured to tax fairly (which of course corporations will hate, since it is hard to game). But of course, all the tech bros will cry that we need no govt so why should we be taxed? (Not incidentally, the same tech elites and wannabes as the article properly exposed as abusers.)

[0] https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/ideal-ceo-to-employee-...

[1] https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios


> Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees?

Moreover, we're not even "supposed" to look at value-created, aside from setting a maximum feasible pay level. At least, that's what we're always told when looking at employees farther down the org chart—"deserve has nothing to do with it".

I, for one, am deeply skeptical that the set of people who could run companies well is anywhere near as small as the comp suggests. I just think those at the top aren't interested in seeing that comp reduced. Sure, there's the board—but so-and-so on this board is a top officer with another company and wants to see top management pay rates stay high and need sky-high examples to compare themselves to when negotiating pay, and besides, they want their kids and nephews and so on to be able to pull those fat paychecks, too. And anyway, you want the CEO to appreciate you so that they use company resources (Other People's Money) to "appreciate" the other companies you have stakes in....


It's even more doubtful when we see historically the multiplier was more like 20x than the numbers now.

Have they got that much better, while everyone else hasn't ?

The extra value we all add is being skimmed off the top, and worse we are being treated with contempt.


Pay is determined by supply and demand, not just how difficult it is to provide the supply. And what determines the good pay of tech workers & CEOs is their BATNAs. To hire a CEO of a top tech company, you essentially have to be a better offer than the EV of them starting their own firm with copious amounts of venture capital out there and them out competing you with the efficiencies that come from startups. That is what big-corp tech CEO pay has essentially stabilized on.


The way I think of it is who do you want to be off sick for a day? The CEO, or 324 staff?


I don't know. Where is all this anger and righteousness when it comes to all the people servicing tech workers, from farm workers picking your food in record high temps for slave wages and no protections to food industry workers to janitors to delivery people to the nannies and school teachers caring for your children?

What about the other people who are more deeply exploited by your employers, the factory workers in poorer countries, the $2/hour workers in Kenya "tortured" by having to tag obscene material to make ChatGPT less toxic? What about all the people downstream in space and time who pay the costs of all the environmental debt incurred by your luxurious and convenient upper caste first-world lifestyles, lifestyles made "efficient" by waste, consumption and the ability to outsource life's chores to bottom workers, enabling you to put all your time into higher rate-of-return tech work?


All this whinging is what happens when SV restricted stock stops going up 20% annually for what, six months.. a year? Imagine some actual oppression.


I couldn't care enough about how much someone at the top makes, as long as I'm getting paid fairly for my work.

Startups often use this argument in reverse ("we're a small company, we can't pay you as much") while paying their founders far, far more than 200X what they pay early engineers. I'm including equity grants in this calculation because you are, as well.


"as long as I'm getting paid fairly for my work"

Fairness is in the eye of the beholder.

To me there's nothing fair about the economic whip. Nothing fair about starving or freezing to death if you don't work. Nothing fair about having to sacrificing my time and my life to afford to feed my family, have a roof over our heads.

There's nothing fair about someone's who orders others around never having to work another day in their life while the people who actually do the work having to make endless sacrifice to make their bosses rich, and usually be spat upon for it, while those who made their fabulous wealth by exploiting others are lauded endlessly as if they were the benefactors of mankind.


This is straying away from the original point of worker pay relative to CEO pay.

You can have highly paid CEOs that treat their employees well, and you can have low paid CEO's who are brutal towards their employees.


>Nothing fair about starving or freezing to death if you don't work. Nothing fair about having to sacrificing my time and my life to afford to feed my family, have a roof over our heads.

How on Earth do you think people survived before the dawn of capitalism?

Hint: you can do it today, head out onto a homestead, build your own house, get your own food, pool your own water.

The economic whip just allows you to do what your good at, I can do what I'm good at, and the guy who is good at growing food and feeding us is good at what they're good at. This isn't worse.


Roughly 25% of the world still lives this way. People can fill in the blanks of what happens to subsistence farmers who get impacted by drought, severe weather, swarm of locust, and other serious factors outside of their control.

Google employees complaining about Tech CEO salaries is the 1% complaining about the 0.01% of the world.


The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly

Did you mean to say you just want to be paid modestly?


> The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly

Really, "by definition"? You can't think of a possible universe where a CEO draws on all their skill to make a crucial decision, that most other possible people in that role probably wouldn't have made, that saves a company billions of dollars, and that this is 100x more valuable than what you or I have contributed or are likely capable of ever contributing? That's a lack of imagination, to say the least.


Another way to look at your story is that the CEO is just doing their job. Perhaps they had a specific talent, perhaps they had a stroke of insight, or perhaps they just randomly made the right decision. But at the end a cynic could say they were just being at the right place at the right time.

On the other hand, you can also say that the board should be paid 100x because they somehow picked the right CEO.

But why stop there? Shouldn't the CEO's parents get a bonus for the upbringing of such a brilliant person? Or should the CEO's teachers get paid as well? The possibilities are endless... why attribute success to one single person?

PS: I'm not seriously saying this is what we should do. I'm just trying to illustrate how the concept of fairness looks a bit funny if you think hard about it.


> The possibilities are endless... why attribute success to one single person?

I don't disagree, but this same critique can be applied to anyone, yet it disproportionately gets applied to CEOs. How can a SWE justify their $300k compensation? After all, the fact they hold that job can all be explained by circumstance, parenting, genes, being born in the right country, etc.


Indeed. That's kind of my gut reaction to highly paid big tech employees asking for "fair" pay. Seems a bit "hypocritical"(?) to only consider fairness within the industry and not society as a whole.


We generally talk about risk and probability when discussing this. You get 50% when it's just an idea with a 99.9% chance of failure, and below 0.1% when it's a rocket ship. So we have to apply that to your question too, and apply "market for lemons" thinking. So while it's possible that they can save a zillion dollars by making amazing decisions nobody else would have made, the odds of them doing so are empirically not that great, so the "fair" value is a zillion dollars times a very small number. So it seems like that's not a big factor in their comp. It's just a big factor in how they justify it.


That's not the expected value thinking anyone would go through when deciding who to hire as a CEO. I mean, firstly, it's ignoring the large downside of hiring the wrong CEO.

There's steps of difference between hiring someone good (Steve Jobs is worth a hundred million dollars a year if you can get him to run Apple, because he will improve Apple's market cap by more than a hundred million dollars), hiring someone average (worth negative if it means rivals eat market share and market cap declines), and hiring someone who will commit fraud and ruin the company (worth negative 2.43 trillion). The large asymmetric possibility of downside from a mediocre to bad CEO skews the expected value calculations.

> You get 50% when it's just an idea with a 99.9% chance of failure, and below 0.1% when it's a rocket ship. So we have to apply that to your question too, and apply "market for lemons" thinking.

Apples and oranges. You're comparing different markets. CEO compensation is in the context of labor markets. It should be compared with other labor market activity such as the compensation of software engineers or surgeons. But here you're talking about capital markets.


In your last paragraph, you're definitely misunderstanding me, but I can't figure out what you think I meant.


Sure, maybe the CEO makes great business decisions, but I don't see how that entitles them to 100x the compensation of the people around them. I don't think researching and making decisions is 100x harder than engineering or HR or law etc.


This misunderstand markets. It's not about some abstract and subjective notion of difficulty. It's about how much value you bring to the table in the context of labor market supply and demand.

You are 10x more valuable to your company than a cleaner, so you get 10x the pay. Why? Because your skills are more scarce than a cleaner, and because you can have a bigger impact on the company's profitability by writing code than cleaning toilets.

The CEO is 100x more valuable to your company than you are, so they get 100x your pay. Why? Because their skills are even more scarce than yours, and they can have an even bigger impact than writing code. That's it.


Was a CEO only 6x more valuable to the company than a regular worker 70 years ago?

We know that CEO pay has increased vastly out of proportion to any other related changes in our economic system over the last several decades. We also know that the makeup of boards (who choose CEOs, and determine how much they will be paid) is significantly slanted toward CEOs of other corporations. There is a clear financial interest there both to choose people who will be favorable to you, and to raise their compensation, so that when they are on a board they will be more likely to choose you, and when that board is considering your compensation, they can look at the "average CEO compensation" and see that it's high...because you've kept it there.

Furthermore, I would posit that most CEOs do not actually have skills that managers and leaders at other levels don't have. What they have is the accident of birth, and a habit of authority. If you replaced most CEOs with any reasonably thoughtful and educated person, you wouldn't see much change overall in the average performance of businesses. (You might see an increase, actually, given the number of CEOs who govern primarily based on their own egos, rather than what would help the business.)


Those statistics about CEO pay growth are often deceptive. If you sample the top N firms over time, where N is fixed, the mean market cap of those N firms will be growing, given that the economy has grown over the time window. That the average compensation of the CEO of these sampled firms is also growing is unsurprising. The omitted variable that causes this statistical illusion is GDP growth itself.

Now, even with a non-flawed methodology, I don't doubt that we'd still find that CEO pay has gone up a lot more than other job types. But that should be true for knowledge work in general, especially high-demand + low-supply roles. There has been large structural changes in the economic system that causes this. Mainly, China has come online, meaning the non-knowledge workers in wealthy countries must compete with a billion extra people, which depresses their compensation in the labor market, which increases the ratio of a CEO's pay divided by the pay of non-CEOs.

A non-market based explanation is highly suspect and should not be the default explanation. You are basically claiming that shareholders are willingly giving away their own money for no good reason. Why would shareholders do this? They are not running a charity. The simplest and least nefarious explanation is the most likely: Shareholders believe the CEOs are worth that much in the context of current (2023, not the 1970s) supply and demand dynamics in the labor market for highly niche highly impactful CEO positions. If I own an asset worth $2 trillion, I do not care about paying $100 million for someone to not ruin it.

> If you replaced most CEOs with any reasonably thoughtful and educated person, you wouldn't see much change overall in the average performance of businesses.

At least recognize this is a speculative claim made without evidence. More of a hunch. A hunch that I disagree with.


That's a lot of words to try and justify CEO/worker pay discrepancies of a factor of over 300.

All that bullshit about statistical illusions doesn't change the fact that the median worker in America has barely seen any real wage growth for 50 years, and all that extra wealth went straight to the wealthiest people in the country. Many of those are the CEOs we're discussing.

Income and wealth inequality of this level are genuinely harmful to the economy and to the political system, and every bit of effort you put into justifying them, rather than admitting that it is wrong and harmful, is effort being put into actively making the world a worse place.


It was a lot of words because you made a lot of factually false claims, so that's to be expected as per Brandolini's Law.

I appreciate that you brought moral certainty into this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of reality or factual premise correct, even if your moral conclusion may be correct by accident.

> doesn't change the fact that the median worker in America has barely seen any real wage growth for 50 years, and all that extra wealth went straight to the wealthiest people in the country.

Fist in the air != explanation. Depressed wage growth has little to do with managerial compensation. If you want an explanation based in fact rather than anger, you have to look at the labor market economics of the situation, which you aren't.


If you want an explanation based in fact rather than blind faith in market theory, you have to look at the capitalist labor relations side of it too, which you aren't.


I'm not misunderstanding anything, I just disagree with you.

On one hand you say pay is based on value brought to the company, on the other hand you say it's based on scarcity.

If it's value then how come the same engineer, bringing the same value, would receive different pay based on the country they live in?

Clearly that's not it.

So maybe it's scarcity? That drives up pay, but it's not enough by itself.

Markets forces are a factor, but they're not the only factor, or even the most important factor, in compensation.

No, the CEO is not 100x more valuable than the engineer. The decisions taken don't matter if you can't build well. Building well doesn't matter if you don't build the right thing. They're dependent on each other. Neither has impact by themselves.

Also disagreed on 'scarcity' of CEO skills. There's a scarcity of CEOs because there's only 1 per company, but the "skills" are pretty common imo. Any C level exec or director level person has the skills to do the job.


> On one hand you say pay is based on value brought to the company, on the other hand you say it's based on scarcity.

These things aren't separate unless you're using a colloquial definition of "value" which would be inappropriate. If water was more scarce, it would be more valuable and the market would price it more than $0.005/L or whatever it is. My wording implied these things are linked: "it's about how much value you bring to the table in the context of labor market supply and demand." Which, I admit, wasn't the most precise or clear way to word that.

Things hold $ value for two reasons: (1) the thing has perceived utility (we need water to survive, this is the demand side), and (2) the thing is scarce (this is the supply side).

The CEO ticks both boxes. There is high demand for a competent CEO because a bad one will cause Apple's market cap to go down by billions, and a good one the opposite. There is short supply (scarcity) because less people can run Apple well than can write code well. You may disagree personally, but the market, that is the people in charge of hiring the CEO, doesn't. And the market is what sets the price of labor.


No, what I mean is I don't care how highly paid the CEO or executive team is. It's the last thing on my mind.

I do care about how much I'm being paid.


Right, so as long as you're being paid modestly even if it's unfair you're ok with it. I think most people would agree.


> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry.

I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.


Organizations are nothing without labor. The 500k salaries are a but small percent of revenue the labor is generating. These companies are sitting on the largest ungodly amount of cash piles ever seen in history of mankind and that should be cause of huge concern.

These so called tech icons were at the right place at right time and nothing else. I refuse to believe that these individuals are somehow 200x smarter or deserve 200x more than the people who are working for them. The reason they have intergenerational wealth while you & I still have to worry about mortgage is because our f'd-up system allows these "titans" to steal the profit we the workers generate.

It's not a bad thing to generate useful products to improve society but it's definitely a bad thing when labor doesn't get their share.


there is absolutely no way that these guys are 100x as valuable as the people how actually build the product. if larry page and sergei brin's search engine hadn't won out, someone else's would have. these guys are all just average to dumb, and very often end up vaporizing millions if not billions of dollars with stupid decisions. there is no doubt in my mind that these tech giants would be better off if they fired their ceos and c levels. this should be obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with the ceo of a tech company.


> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin

What has Google done since Page and Brin left? Other than trying to suck what they already built dry for max profit?

...

You are equating early technical founders with the MBAs who later took over the big tech. They are not equal. The former builds things and creates new paradigm. The latter's purpose is to suck things dry for profit. Including the employees and the users. The former is scarce. The latter is plenty and it is imposed on the organizations, the tech sector and inevitably the end users by totally un-attached, profiteering, destructive investors.


> > The former builds things and creates new paradigm

Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF.

Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it.

Also Google just happened to be the winner in a winner-take-all market which was made of 10s of search engines.

So it's true, MBAs might care about profits, but all the above is very clear to them, founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.


> Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF.

Something being exploited in SF does not invalidate it. The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms. From search to social to Open Source. The last one even became a culture in which we are living today. People are so used to its paradigm that they think its 'normal' and not something different. The world of 90s was a totally different world, including how people worked.

> Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it.

It also made accessing knowledge and anything much easier compared to before. There is no comparison of the search after Google and before, like how it was with Altavista, Yahoo et al. There is even less comparison of the world before search and after.

> founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.

Many technical founders, or rather, 'non-MBAified' people just want to build things. Make something happen. And those things change how we do things. People mythologizing successful, actual founders does not make it any less valid.

...

The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990s. Thanks to technology and people who build things with that technology. "MBAification" of things is not a problem only in technology - it always afflicted all the other sectors too. Some people build things and change the way we do stuff, others come to milk it at the cost of destroying it.


> > The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms . The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990

I feel the opposite, if anything the rate of innovation is slowing down, and besides this sort of religious type words should not be used in the context of business.

And if were to be used it should be reserved for something that really changes human life in a pivotal manner in the same way as the invention of fire or the wheel did back in the days.

I don't know what it could be that can be compared to fire and the wheel but Google and opensource isn't it.


> I feel the opposite, if anything the rate of innovation is slowing down

Of course it is. The sector has been 'MBAified' after the first decade and a half. Its about extracting maximum value by providing the minimum. It happens to every sector - look at computer games. First decade is full of innovation and firsts. Then big corporations take over and consolidate the sector. Now its about milking what already existed by rehashing them.

> religious type words

They are not religious words. They are accurate words. Knowing the difference in between the attitudes in society and tech life are important in deciding what direction to go. Identifying destructive 'MBAification' (or whatever you may want to call it) of things as opposed to 'building' things and telling them apart is critical.

> I don't know what it could be that can be compared to fire and the wheel but Google and opensource isn't it

Wheel is exaggerated. People used other means before the wheel.

However Open Source is a major change in most attitudes. It even changed the hierarchical, feudal work relationships and organization that corporations inherited from early Victorian corporations. But that's a long topic that involves history and social sciences.


> > of things as opposed to 'building' things and telling them apart is critical.

Innovators of the past would call Brin and Page 'MBAs type' like you do, or better yet they'd call them not imaginative or risk taking enough given that MBAs didn't exist back then. It recursively goes like this the more you go back into the past.

In the end it's all about risk. You think MBAs are risk averse. People like Edison and Rockefeller would think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are risk averse.

Guys like the Montgolfier brothers and Christopher Coloumbus would laugh at Edison and Rockefeller for being risk averse and they themselves would be subject to the same ridicule from the guy who invented fire and the wheel.

This is coherent with the idea that the rate of innovation is slowing down because of less risks being taken.

The only difference between my stance and yours is that you only analyze the last 10 years and identify a bogeyman in the MBAs, and hail founders as the great pioneers, whereas in reality it's a phenomenon which traces its roots way back into the past.

As kids say: 'fuck around. Find out'

I don't think MBAs were the first figures who refused to 'fuck around' and I don't think Silicon Valley founders are the kings of the 'fuck around' either, that title belongs to our early ancestors

The rate of risk and innovation will never be as great as the time that we invented the wheel and fire. As I said it has been slowing down ever since, mostly because people 'fuck around' less and less. Not just MBAs but everybody.


> Innovators of the past would call Brin and Page 'MBAs type' like you do

They objectively wouldnt. The science and engineering history of late 19th century is filled with people like Brin and Page getting 'MBAified' out of their inventions. Tesla and Westinghouse is a good example of such stories.

> Christopher Coloumbus

A genocidal profiteer is the last person who you would want to invoke as an example of such people. He didnt invent or innovate anything, he didnt want to change anything, he didnt bring about any new paradigm.

> because of less risks being taken

Equating innovation with taking risks is a faulty concept to start with. You can bet that the 'person' who invented the fire or the weel didnt take any risks. To start with, those were not invented by singular people 'taking risks' but invented by entire species (likely more than one) by adopting them gradually through observation from nature and learning from each other. Likewise agriculture. If anything, risk-taking was not something that early human ancestors or their close relatives would risk themselves.

> The only difference between my stance and yours is that you only analyze the last 10 years and identify a bogeyman in the MBAs

Sorry, but its otherwise. Thinking that fire or wheel were invented by singular people shows the lack of insight into science of history, leaving aside the history of this species.


> > Equating innovation with taking risks is a faulty concept to start with. You can bet that the 'person' who invented the fire or the weel didnt take any risks. To start with, those were not invented by singular people 'taking risks' but invented by entire species

Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'.

Innovation happens when risks are taken (eg. Montgolfier brothers, Wright Brothers, the guy who discovered testosterone by self injected blood taken from the testicular veins of horses...) and given that risk and confidence are a state of mind much less a business practice, you cannot conflate it just to science and technology but said risk and confidence will be visible all around society. So wars, genocides, violence and genearlly stuff considered bad.

The rate of innovation has been slowing down due to the diminishing in the standard deviation of human behavior. Or as kids say: 'Less fucking around, means less finding out'

Standard deviation of human behavior goes both ways, people rejoice that we eliminated the negatives but we have also eliminated the positives. No Einsteins without Hitlers, no Archimedes without Alexanders etc.

So even if the guy who personally discovered fire or the wheel didn't take risks personally (I doubt it) he operated in an environment where the standard deviation of human behavior was much larger. For sure there were people jumping off trees with wooden wings, wars, genocides, much more violence. And that is statistically enough to make sure that at least one unit in the sample stumbles into something great like fire or the wheel.


> Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'.

Not relevant. All of those were established behavior patterns at the time. Not 'risk taking'.

> Innovation happens when risks are taken

For every such example you can pull out from history, there are dozens of innovations resulting from incremental improvement and learning from others and the nature.

> The rate of innovation has been slowing down due to the diminishing in the standard deviation of human behavior.

There has never been more deviants in human history than now. In human history, sticking with the social norms, known behavior patterns and keeping the existing social group and its framework safe were critical to survival. From traditions to laws everything were based on those. With your logic, it should be the most innovative period in history whereas the past should be the least innovative. Yet you are saying the opposite.

Innovation as you see it has been slowing down because science and technology have been privatized through patents towards the end of 19th century by big money entering the field and consolidating it. Exacerbated by the 'state secrets' concept. Before that, virtually everything was Open Source during the scientific revolution.

> So even if the guy who personally discovered fire

There was no such singular guy.

...

In any case, thanks for the discussion.


> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin

Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?


This is what happened in the Soviet Union. Leadership at consumer-facing enterprises had no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum because profits are socialized. Meanwhile the Soviet military did a much better job of keeping up with that of America because that was of upmost importance to the politburo and and successes were rewarded with political capital.


From my job to my marriage to my artwork, what couldn't conceivably be done by someone else, if I wasn't available?

Most of us are fungible.


Bingo. Nearly everyone is replaceable. It may not be easy to replace a certain individual, but it can be done.


If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.


Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics).

You might—might—out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take a real shot at them, high enough that there'd be no hope of a break-even exit if things don't go perfectly.

I'd call that a moat.


So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?


Well, Amazon is actually too young to tell, Japanese conglomerates, while not being all dominating anymore, are doimg quite well. As do the Korean ones, e.g. Samsung.


Is the thing keeping some other person from building Not-Amazon (or a dozen companies that effectively, together, fill its entire role—potentially better, even) that Bezos is uniquely capable, or that the existence of Amazon makes trying to do it way, way riskier than when Bezos got started, no matter how good you are?

Other businesses get started and are very successful, somewhat often. Are all those successful business people just not going after Bezos because he's so much better at business than them that they cannot hope to succeed, or is it because the market is transformed by the existence of Amazon such that trying to take Amazon on is a bad use of capital?


>It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.

They absolutely do. Their market share means that you must sell on them or lose a massive amount of sales. To sell on them you must agree to their anticompetitive price controls - must give them a cut, can't sell cheaper elsewhere. To get good product placement you have to agree to cominglinging and allow your legitimate product to be mixed with counterfeits.


The have built a huge moat, but that's besides the point. You are making an absurd claim.


I do. In my career, the choice has always been working hard at a company where the founders are trying to become billionaires, or going to a company where the drive for success has atrophied and sitting on my hands for 80% of my working hours.

I remember one job where I did literally nothing for the first 2 weeks because maintenance didn’t connect the Internet in my cube and my manager couldn’t find the external drive with the training videos on it. There’s no law of nature which says all the Googlers couldn’t be working there.


Uh yes, because they founded the company? If Google was never founded nobody would be working there, don't think I need a citation for that.


They're necessary but not sufficient conditions for google to exist. There are countless other contributors who are also necessary but not sufficient conditions for google too.

What's the incentive for other necessary people to work at these companies?

Assuming that they are necessary and sufficient for making new businesses that hire lots of people, aren't we disincentivizing them by paying so handsomely for their first such business. If we realigned the incentives, we could have 200 google equivalents made by Sergey and brinn, not just the one


But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.


> > These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin

Stop believing in fairy tales, they were just the lucky winners in a winner-take-all market. Those 500k people would sill be employed by say a company called Poogle, founded by Parry Lage and Bergey Srin.

It's like all common sense and statistics goes out of the window when people discuss the Forbes 400, it takes people meeting them to realize they are just dudes winging it like anybody else.


So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.


In order for something to be valuable it needs to be rare and irreplaceable.

And the true test is the subtraction, if Brin/Page were never born we'd still have something like Google, much like we'd know relativity if Einstein was never born or the 3 principles if Newton was never born.

Humanity advances as a whole, while individual humans play dice and games to get to be the one guy (or girl although it's mostly guys) who get the privilege to be the person signing off the advancement. But in the end there is nothing special about the person doing the signing off, much like there is nothing special about the person who wins the lottery among the many who play.


In fact, yahoo would probably still be a major player. (remember them)


It is that 95 to 99% of the ones that go the Musk, Bezos or Kalanicks way fail and be left with no payout. In return the ones succeeding will have 20 to 100 times the payout.

Its almost the same as if you just take your salary and bet everything on 13 at the roulette. Small chance of huge payout, high chance of failure.


But is that true? Every VC-backed founder I know "failed up". They pulled a more-than-dev salary from the company during the failure, and then after the failure they just started a new company and had an inside track on VC.

OTOH, the bootstrapped founders have my respect. They had their houses as collateral for their company's operating loan. They also succeeded at a much higher rate than the VC backed founders I've known.


The comparison shouldn't be VC-backed founders, but all founders including those who weren't able to fund their company and therefore failed.

Getting VC funding is a significant filter.


But in my experience those who got VC funding failed at a higher rate than those that didn't.

A far better filter is "do you have enough revenue that you can afford to hire employees." Self-funded entrepreneurs pass that filter, whereas VC funded ones usually don't.

The article is about employees so we don't care about the entrepreneurs that fail before they hire anybody.


If making sunsets and co. showed us something, it is that nepotism makes VC money access a lot easier.


Being born into a lot of wealth and "bootstrapping" a company is infinitely easier than raising funds from a VC.


I've seen this as well. VCs are actually terrible at their investments by and large. They mostly use gut instinct or personal networking as their determiner of whether to invest in stuff.

That's a poor heuristic and it is why so many people continue to fail upward.


This is among the problems of capitalism. We act like it makes sense for the winners to decide about the resources (money, businesses) they've won because their success suggests they are good at administrating it.

What happens? They spunk their money on kids who are playing League of Legends during meetings.

I've not often been in an investor meeting where the investors asked smart questions. They send people who aren't equipped to think about what they're shown. They think DD means making sure your accounts can't be stolen by the boss.


I believe what you're describing is an anomaly from a decade+ of negative real interest rates due to quantitative easing. Getting rich while failing upwards in the future will be an exceptional rarity.


Real interest rates are lower today than they have been for the last few decades.

4.5% interest with 6.5% inflation is lower than anything we've had in the period of 1.5% - 2% inflation.


You are using backwards-looking inflation figures and comparing against forward yields. If you believe that the Feb 2024 price level will be 6.5% inflated compared to Feb 2023, then please go ahead and take that 4.5% loan. The rest of the market believes that inflation will continue to fall and infinite money has ended.

Basically, if you borrow at 4.5% today with the assumption that it is effectively a negative real rate, you will be pretty disappointed in a year.


all the engineers at an early stage company are "gambling" with exactly the same stakes as the founder. If they fail, they're all out of a job. The founder risks nothing more than that: he's gambling with other people's money. Why should one of those people reap generational wealth while everyone else ends up in the upper-middle class?


You have to invest a lot of time and effort to convince other people that they should "gamble" their money on you and your idea.

The early engineer has a pay check from the start.

Again if you want your shot at generational wealth just bet all at the roulette. Or convince someone that they should gamble their money on you.


Hmmm it seems like the engineers bounce around jobs whenever they feel like it while the founder is locked in for 5 to 25 years. Way different stakes.


Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. All things said, it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.


But CEOs don't actually have that much impact...

So whatever decisions - in this example - Sundar makes, it only carries so much weight.

And, you also get fired if you're a $500k engineer and you suck at your job. So I'm not sure what's so much different about Sundar - except that if he sucks at his job he has a way better golden parachute.


They do have impact if they're super competent or super incompetent.


Yeah - but most CEOs are super average.


You're Apple's CEO, its 2018 and you are about to bet 80% of the current profit stream on M1 platform or stick with Intel. What do you do?


That one is obvious. The decision was made long before that. Apple’s A-series of chips were clearly on that trajectory for years prior.

The bigger decision was deciding to buy NEXT instead of Be Inc. That decision brought Steve Jobs back to the company and acquired a modern operating system to replace Mac OS Classic.

Amelio was fired for his decision even though it was the right one to save the company. That’s the truly hard part about being a CEO.


You take the bet because it's not even your entire profit stream and iPhone is much more of your revenue.

Tim Cook's operational experience helped them increase their market cap dramatically once he took over, so I'm not sure you can discount the value of him as CEO.

A bad CEO can definitely drive a company into the ground, so in many cases I think the pay can make sense. Spending the money does not assure a good pick though...


Except the M1 did not magically show up at the CEO's doorstep by one of their underlings in 2018. Apple (i am guessing) would have had several secret projects pointing towards this. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary given how many parallel streams they would have had to invest in to bring all those iP[aeiou]*d devices (running non-intel) to market?


Confer with the team around me to ensure I make an informed decision. Hopefully they do the same. Maybe the CEO has the final say, but they don't make decisions on their own. I'm sure there's tons of research behind those decisions that was not collected by the CEO on their own.


You're Apple's CEO in 2018 and due to a decade of skillful engineering you own a proven platform that's already shipped in 2 billion devices, and is now objectively fast enough to run a PC, the demands of which are not all that different from the 12.9" iPad that already exists. Do you respect the work of this talented semiconductor organization by refactoring the Mac to use the same CPU?

In what way is this a tricky decision?


I'd be surprised if Tim Cook even greenlit this decision. It's really something that should be decided by whoever is running the Mac business line.


Pay experts—using our may-as-well-be-infinite warchest—to do literal years of R&D on several options and pick the best one, such that the decision's not anywhere near as risky as you imply?

You know, same thing they've surely been doing with VR behind the scenes for years and years. If/when they finally release a product, it won't be because the CEO just suddenly decided to make a big bet, but because they'd made a ton of small bets and waited for one of them to look worth betting big on.

I think Apple'd be easy-mode for a CEO, actually. Tons of capital behind you to undo all but the gravest "whoopsie", and no direct competitors credibly doing anything like the same thing you are (others making devices, sure, but nobody even really trying to attack your niches—not really). It's why they can fuck up a few times in a row and it hardly even matters, as long as they come back to their senses within a few years.


> Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers.

No, it is not. His job is to maximize profit, and his personal goal is to earn as much as possible. To say that the CEOs goal is to make money so employees have salaries is a very strange statement.

> If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job.

Google revenue is not at risk, but many engineers are already out of a job. Sundar job is only at risk if the board is not happy with him.

> it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.

No, it is not. That the people that earn more money is not the ones that produce the most but the ones that protect the rich is far from fair.


Nature abhors arbitrage. If you think the tech elite are somehow renting out ill gotten gains, the go out and eat their lunch.


> That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high.

People have a hard time with big numbers. See richest people in the world or how much money Apple makes. It's staggering when you turn it into visualizations or $/second or something. And even then, it's hard for our minds to comprehend something so completely foreign.


I think your argument is advocating that the 'person who probably wrote half the damn code' should get a lot more, right? What should that person have gotten, exactly?

Either they did not negotiate for a better package with compensation and equity early on OR sadly, they joined too late. If they wanted a lot more equity (and therefore risk but also potential for a high return like Musk or Bezos or whatever), then they would have needed to join super early, or better yet, have been a co-founder to a Musk or a Bezos or whatever.

But they weren't, so no, they don't get anywhere near the sharing in the big reward, just a small or tiny slice.


Abstract arguments about fairness and who provides more value aren't really useful, IMO. What is definitely true is that the engineers, who have lots of options, accepted those terms. The investors decided to invest their money, and grant the authority to spend it to those particular founders. Could somebody else have done it better? Maybe, but I'm not sure how I, or anyone else, would have the confidence to tell the VCs how to invest their money, the founders how to hire, or the engineers about which offers to accept, and do it better than the people directly involved.


> Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets < 1% of the equity and none of the glory.

For whatever it's worth, market comp for Engineer #1 equity is significantly above 1%. Depends on a lot of things (number of founders, how many founders are already technical, whether hire is pre or post PMF, prior experience, etc.) but by and large <1% is not going to be competitive at this level.


Big law (at least outside of the US, in the UK/EU) is very much pyramid shaped. Typically the model is based on getting the maximum number of chargeable hours from the minimum number of associates, for a dim prospect of eventually making partner. The overwhelming majority of profits flow to partners at the top of the equity structure.


At the same time, thousands of companies, where hundreds of thousands software engineers writing the damn code, going into oblivion, generating billions of dollars losses for their investors.

Writing the damn code is not a big deal. Knowing what to write is.


This again comes to same place. The person who wrote code can launch their company and keep all proceed of billions to themselves if code is that good. For now its like asking for upside of owner and risk of hired hand. Doesn't really work that way in past or now.

For law, finance and medicine there is lot more personal liability to reach for big rewards unlike coders sitting in office and implementing business requirements they received from management which in their view is clueless.


I can guarantee you employee 20 at Google is very well off, buying houses left and right.


In finance, law, and medicine, the workers are the product roughly.

Anyway this debate about being 1000x more valuable is pointless. It does not matter what any individual thinks about their worth. We've all agreed(#) on this system(the worst, except for all others) ostensibly because of the benefits to the rest of society. The internal allocation of profits within a company is irrelevant.

# The old Marxist limitations about lacking capital or means of production don't count in tech/software. It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital.


There's no such thing as the cloud, just other people's servers (means of production) you're renting.


> It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital.

It takes time.


The idea that the solution to lacking capital is to _raise capital_ is a contradiction.


I’m saying it’s way easier than for a factory worker in 1823 or 1923 to raise money or gather machines.

I’m not being cynical. I’d really like to see alternative governance structures to produce and sell software. Co-ops are an example.


> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid.

Not true at all. Partners & MD take a much larger share of the pie compared to execs at tech companies.


That's because of leverage. MD : consultant is 1:7 or so. Plus another 1:2 or 3 for admin staff. So there is a limit to the scale of wealth generated. That said, MDs make 10x what entry level consultants get.

This is different than tech where exec : professional staff can be 1:x,000 or more.

(Source: was a consulting MD.)


Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world.

Crashing Twitter into the ground will never come close to diminishing what he has helped achieve with SpaceX, putting his money where his mouth was to the point of almost going broke, and, to a lesser extent, Tesla where, despite not being a founder, he was the biggest investor at the beginning.


> > Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world.

I always hear this argument about the supposed great impact on the world, society etc.

But I am a citizen of the world and think this guy is a scam because he actually hasn't done nothing for me but he keeps pushing his name into my face. Kinda like the POTUS except the POTUS is forced to do media and speeches whereas this guy injects himself into every situation or debate out of his own will to shill his products.

For a regular individual who is not concerned about climate change or has a deep desire to life off the grid (but still wants internet) mr. Musk is like the Kardashians with the trash entertainment unfolding on twitter instead of E!


Examples of Musk benefitting Musk do not demonstrate a net-positive impact on the world.

The artists criticizing Mr. Musk make a good point about what's really happening.

https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k


SpaceX does not belong in the same conversation as "net positive impact."


For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood.

The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from.

The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families. And it likely comes as no surprise that very successful workers (celebrities, but also writers and directors that you may not have even heard of) can easily make 10-100x that— it clearly hasn’t affected the top of the ladder’s pay. It’s not unheard of for 20 year olds to make millions right out of college on their first movie, either— https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2022/01/28/apple-tv-plus...

There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year. The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.

Imagine the boon to taking risks on smaller companies and projects if software engineers could easily transfer from large companies to smaller projects and teams they were interested in, without worrying about who was processing payroll or transferring retirement benefits or healthcare?


Related: https://www.vulture.com/2023/01/inside-the-vfx-union-brewing...

One of the largest groups of non-union employees making movies are the VFX artists. Odd coincidence that they're paid much less and have worse working conditions.


Yes, but they get access to a coffee machine and get to make memes during unpaid lunch, why would they bargain that sort of freedom away to get a union?


Not sure why downvoted: lots of tech companies offer these benefits while omitting others which are much needed.


Those guilds are incredibly hard to break into. They're also why Georgia has been able to mop up all of the non union work. For better or for worse, they do their job but out of state scabs are a huge problem keeping industry work in LA.


Oh I agree! I think the guilds are great to its membership in general, but breaking in is itself a battle.

Tech doesn’t need to copy Hollywood exactly (nor should it), but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.


Unions aren't a hack that let you subvert supply and demand. The "bad" parts of unions are what give it power. Without excluding an out-group, you're left with a useless bureaucracy.

For Hollywood, I think this is a necessary "evil" because the market rate for creative jobs is likely close to working making $0 for 80 hour work weeks. However, this isn't the same for tech.


Well, an important distinction in Hollywood versus my understanding of most other unions is that being a part of a guild does not guarantee you a job (though it is a prerequisite for many of them):

You still need to be hired by a production, who chooses to work with you and sets your rate.

The guild just provides a guarantee of pay floor, hours, conditions, healthcare, etc across and transcending individual companies.

So the guilds could theoretically let in as many people as they wanted without diluting supply and demand, because membership does not mean actively working.

The Guild system is unique because its as much as a credentialing system as a union, which is why I think it works.


> Unions aren't a hack that let you subvert supply and demand. The "bad" parts of unions are what give it power. Without excluding an out-group, you're left with a useless bureaucracy.

So much of tech in the past few decades have been about hacking regulation. Why is it when it comes to labor power, it's suddenly an impossibility?

> However, this isn't the same for tech.

Video games are notoriously underpaid and overworked, due to it being a body pit for the passionate. But that's a specific tech niche, sure.


The Hollywood Guild contracts are between the guilds and the studios, so the filming location doesn't matter. Even international shoots are subject to the guild agreements.

Georgia didn't mop up any non-union filming work. The state decided to hand out a lot of tax credits for filming in Georgia, and that's the only reason studios film there.


The guilds are also good for helping to prevent too much of a race to the bottom for those who can break in and get work. They're less good for preventing people from having to wait tables between running out for auditions while waiting for their "big break."


One wonders if this has something to do with managerial hate for remote work. If the boss wants to move his production from a high-age area to a lower-wage area, the workers can't do much about it if their mobility is limited. For film and tv, you need people on set, but if your job is a desk job that can be done from anywhere, and you can get work from anywhere, you get some of that control back.


You do NOT want to point at entertainment industry as some sort of better meritocracy model.

The ratio of nepotism hires and who-you-knowism in that industry is insane. There's a reason you have multi-generation families all "in the business".

Met plenty of people in NYC in the industry, and they are either nepotism hires or surrounded by them.


Guilds and unions aren’t in place to prevent nepotism, which is difficult to prevent and happens in all industries. Really, that’s just a network effect, albeit a bad one.

Labor organizations exist to turn disparate sources of a supply (labor) into a more monolithic source that can control some or all of the access to that supply, driving up the price, which is good the members. They may have controls in place to try to prevent nepotism or other bad hiring practices, but at the end of the day that can be a difficult problem to detect and prevent.


That doesn’t have really anything to do with the guilds, though— in fact, it would likely be worse because then those high up in a production could just elevate and pay who they choose (it’s not their money, after all).

The guilds do still have objective criteria to get in, and pay scales so that regardless of if you’re a director’s child or not, you’re getting the same pay as everyone else with your title.

Yes, nepotism in Hollywood is a well-known issue, but it’s also an issue in pretty much every industry that’s been around for multiple generations. I imagine we will see the same thing happen in tech— just as it has in healthcare, politics, sports, law, finance, and all manner of highly desirable skilled professions


I'm skeptical this could be worse than the tech industry.


WGA west has about 10k members, whole US has about 15k. (This is from Google, please correct me if I got the wrong number.) By contrast, there are over a million people building software. Will this model scale up two orders of magnitude?


WGA is just one of many unions, but you’re right— getting into the “best” guilds is itself a process; but ostensibly, it’s to ensure that the guild keeps its prestige as a genuine body of talent. It’s a balancing act for sure, and I don’t know if tech wants to emulate everything exactly with the Hollywood guild system, but it’s worth taking inspiration from.


Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?


Traditional guilds fostered apprenticeship, mentorship and relationships between practitioners that transcend firms/projects.

Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill I don’t think it’s far fetched to imagine that a guild system could be better.


> Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill

That’s not true and I suspect you know it.


It’s a fine line, but I don’t see anyone saying the members of the Hollywood guild aren’t talented— it’s a (perhaps already too hard) battle just to get in it.

However, just because you’re in the guild does not mean you have a job. Productions still have to hire and choose to work with you. Generally, if you don’t get work within sometime between 1-2 years you lose membership.

If you’re not “skilled enough” for the minimum floor pay, then the studio or show has no obligation to hire you. Don’t see why that model can’t work for tech?


The unions don't decide who gets hired for a project, only the set of terms should you hire someone from the union.


But crucially, they also decide who is in the union.


Probably in the same way that companies go about determining it now: programming tests, certifications, diplomas, etc.


I'm not sure what you mean.


Quick search suggests that United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has 1.3m members, so why not? And a union isn't always the best solution for some places, so it's easy for me to imagine smaller companies not having one while larger ones do. Or different unions for different situations and types of work.

(edited to add: Obviously the UFCW is not the type of prestige guild the WGA is. Unionizing probably isn't always the best solution, but some amount of work in tech -- QA for example (https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/2/23489932/activision-blizz...) -- could be unionized under that type of system, while other employees become members of more powerful guilds that command higher salaries.)


The other thing is, you don't need everyone covered. All the other grocers know that someone can just quit and go work at the grocery store down the road and get a certain level of pay and benefits, so they need to at a minimum, meet those same benefits to keep their employees. So it raises everyone's standard in an area.


Very little of Hollywood's work can be done remotely. Even the parts that can are essentially protected by that network that can't, they are so intertwined. Also Hollywood has a substantial moat that prevents an indie studio in Tulsa from having access to the same distribution network, etc.

Not suggesting that "big tech" doesn't have advantages, but overall, there's an entire world of software development outside of those companies where developers can contract, compete from other countries, and companies are free to hire all sorts of contract labor free of control. You don't even need a college education to do most of the work in our industry.


Supporting your point further, one of the reasons Georgia gets so much film/TV work is because they are unfriendly to unions, so labor costs are much lower.


If the studio has a contract with one of the guilds in Hollywood, the labor is still covered regardless of geographic location. Georgia has a LOT of tax breaks for film production costs which is what makes it attractive for studios.


> You don’t even need a college edification to do most of the work in our industry

You don’t in entertainment either, I can assure you that unless you’re working at an agency or a studio salaryman, no one will ask. But those are more corporate than creative jobs, anyways.

And at least from person experience, a lot of Hollywood TV writers rooms are still remote or hybrid (they found it works better!)


> a lot of Hollywood TV writers rooms are still remote or hybrid

Yes, I was addressing that in the "Even the parts that can are essentially protected by that network that can't, they are so intertwined." part of my comment.


These are guilds in a very traditional, medieval, sense: they have very exclusive membership, and drive up the cost of labor by deliberately causing shortages. This is great for the people lucky enough to be members. But it sucks both for the consumers that pay inflated prices, and for the workers who don't have the connections to get into the guild.


See also: the U.S. healthcare industry.


Except fields requiring expert knowledge (and in this case can cause injury or death) it’s very good that there are licensing and regulatory bodies that prevent any old person or group from wandering in and participating. No one dies if a script isn’t very good.


The problem with this theory is that the gaming industry has to work with the Voice Actors Guild and they are a huge pain in the ass.

The hourly rate is fine. The min/max hours is fine.

The union exclusivity clause is bullshit. They won’t even allow you to use your own company’s employees to record temporary VO. It’s all or nothing.

Expo hall unions are even worse. I have to wait 30 minutes and pay someone $50 so they can plug my surge protector into a floor outlet? Thanks but no thanks.

Working in games I have had to work with different unions on several occasions. Each experience is absolutely dreadful. I’ll pass.

Edit: downvote my opinion if you think it’s bad. that’s cool. Doesn’t change that every experience I have ever had working with unions was absolutely awful.


Oh I agree— certain things with Hollywood Guilds are exclusive for the point of being exclusive. Tech doesn’t need to, nor should it, strive to copy Hollywood exactly. We’re a completely different industry, after all


Exclusivity is a two sided coin. Speaking as someone who dealt with the Teamsters Union at a few expos myself, it can be very annoying to not be able to carry your own boxes, or plug in a new power strip. Honestly, it’s maddening.

The flip side (for me, personally) is that I believe that the conference hall would charge me the same fee with the same restrictions, pocketing a large majority of it. It’s no different than going to a stadium and spending $60 on two beers and a hotdog while the person behind the counter makes a fraction of the sale but cleans the space, warms and hauls the food, handles the sale, and puts it together and gives it to me.

So again, there is pain with the teamsters in a convention space (specifically in this context), I fully agree. But if I’m going to have to pay too much for a service I’d rather it went to working class families with stable jobs in the area I’m visiting and doing business in.


My narrator, Maxwell Glick, just informed me that there is no such thing as "the Voice Actors Guild." It's all part of SAG.


I wonder how the WGA will change its tune when language models will write episodes of indistinguishable quality from human writers.


About the same as programmers will feel when language models churn out better software than human programmers are capable of. Based on some blog posts from this morning, it seems ChatpGPT already conquered coding WordPress plugins despite it's notoriously difficult and nonsensical codebase, and at this rate ChapGPT should be able to replace most programmers by Independence Day. It should gain sentience on or by August 29th.

Sarcasm aside, the volume of scripts has never been the problem in Hollywood. Everybody and their mother has a screenplay. 99% of screenplays that are actually purchased aren't worth making. There are plenty of people who make a good living, outearning the average SV FAANG programmer, just churning out 1 or 2 C-movie scripts a year that they might spend a week or two writing.

And even the screenplays that get made aren't very good. One of my former clients made his fortune making D-movie action films, some of which you may have seen on cable or streaming. The entire portion of the screenplay dedicated to the gunfight at the end of one of his recent films was: "They have an epic fucking gunfight. Explosions everywhere. It's FUCKING AWESOME." (If you look up the screenplay for the movie adaptation of SWAT, the minutes-long fight at the beginning of the film is similarly scripted. By the way, that movie made $200m+.)


The Level of cringe of this comment is off the charts


wow it took only one comment to make the article right, and it's not only the elite, it's even the "little people" doing a lot of the hating.


Taking feedback is a sign of maturity and adaptability.

Genuinely, what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen, because people are going to use these new technologies?

Thinking about these scenarios is the POINT of a union, making sure writers stay relevant for the long-term future. Failing to address them makes for a lot of broken dreams and missed opportunities.


Scripts are already a dime a dozen! The stereotype you see in tv shows of unemployed writers writing screenplays in coffee shops is because writers of those tv shows are making fun of themselves.

An experienced writer could (and does) make an entire first draft of a script for a tv show in less than a day. Before your first job out of college you likely have 10+ scripts for movies or shows written for a portfolio. 99% of scripts written already will never see the light of day— and that includes the ones that get bought!

Hollywood does have genuine shortcomings, but I can guarantee you one is not the lack of scripts, nor even the lack of good scripts.


It is a fair point (I think your tone is what has set people off, and for the record I didn’t enjoy it either). The real question, in my opinion, is what does humanity do in general with our fellow humans whose labor is displaced by some form of automation? And that fully includes all of us here on Hacker News.

Do we prevent the lose of income to people by forming a collective bargaining group (guild, union, co-op—whatever you’d like) to prevent the job loss and maintain income? Do we tax the owners of businesses who are using large amounts of automation so that the profits are shared with larger society? Do we let the market figure out it out?

It’s an incredibly difficult and complicated question and I don’t have a good answer. But I do personally believe that the people who will be hit hardest will be average people: ourselves and our neighbors and we should consider how we want to react to that fact sooner rather than later.


I think one way to stay safe is to buy shares in competitors or disruptors. If, say, pension funds include automation companies, you get a much more resilient future.


> what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen

Being nowhere close to this, it’s difficult to say. Maybe the creative field gets reduced to the guy who can put the right prompt into a script, voice-acting and moving-image combined model?


I wonder when SWEs will change their tune when the same thing will happen to them.


The same way SWEs should have changed their tune when faced with outsourcing: Expand your skillset to ensure you're more than just an expensive commodity.


1. Why do you think the writers won't be able to do the same? They are writers, they aren't idiots.

2. That's great advice for buggy horses who want to win the game of musical chairs, but when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing?


> Why do you think the writers won't be able to do the same? They are writers, they aren't idiots.

Didn't say they were. Was only addressing the comment about SWEs.

> when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing

What they did after the dotcom crash - become the upper 15-20%, shift to another job in tech (project management, devops, etc) or switch entirely to another job like car sales, accounting, or greeting customers at Walmart.


We're in the business of making the same thing happen to ourselves.


> ..allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. ...

There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable industry they'll rack up high compensation as a matter of course, even in the most highly competitive, merit-based environment. That's why archaic and even medieval institutions such as guilds only make things worse by hobbling the industry.


…do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage? And has been for almost a century?

I could not think of any industry less “hobbled” than Hollywood. They have a sign worshipping itself sprawling across some of the most expensive hillside real estate in the country.

Regardless, as another commentator pointed out— VFX artists are the largest group of non-union workers in Hollywood. They’re also the most overworked and lowest paid— I’m talking about near minimum wage working on a movie with as a high a budget as Marvel. Oftentimes entry-level assistants to assistants to cameramen make more than them.

Know your worth, and charge for it.


> …do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage?

AIUI if you run the numbers, the content industry is worth a lot and Hollywood is a big chunk of that, but the tech sector still wins handily.

VFX is a highly visible industry, that people want to be in even with the cost of low pay or bad work conditions. It's quite comparable to videogame development, which is one of the worst sectors to be in "tech".


How can you say that the union is privileged and in the next sentence say it's lose-lose? Privilege means the union won something.


Also looking at the trajectory of Hollywood its all down, down, down. Award show ratings have been plummeting faster than a meteorite[1]. Box Office sales have been dropping for years and this was before covid, after covid sales are back but are at a level last seen since 2000! [1]. The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there are maybe 2-3 movies a year that are watchable. Hollywood is not a industry that tech should look to for guidance.

[1] - https://businessreview.berkeley.edu/award-shows-a-thing-of-t...

[2] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/


Do you know how much more there is to Hollywood than… wide release studio movies. Those are the most corporate of creative jobs. I won’t write a thinkpiece here, but if your only exposure to Hollywood is big box office movies that are released in every city in the US, you’re seeing just one slice of that industry. It’s like if you said tech as industry was SOLELY defined by FAANG, which also had a terrible year.

Nonetheless, Netflix is as much claimed by Hollywood as it is Tech. Apple too is thought as Hollywood-adjacent, as aside from Apple TV they’re also historically responsible for Pixar. Important to realize that working in tech does not mean every successful company is purely a tech company.


> The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there are maybe 2-3 movies a year that are watchable.

Hollywood puts out maybe 2-4 "blockbuster" high-marketing-budget movies that are decent or better per year, sure, but the US film industry overall, and the smaller-splash side of Hollywood, produces probably 3-4x that many (and that's just the US—there are usually a bunch of decent-or-better foreign productions per year, too)


The last decade has been referred to in Hollywood as the "content explosion" because of how much more content (and money from it) is being produced. The decline of certain media is not evidence of a decline in industry, the opposite is true.


Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.


This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.

You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company.

You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company".

Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay.

In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.


>>This is the kind of thinking that prevents labor from organizing and having no power.

But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.

I thought the goal was for people to make a good living and have good working conditions - most SV/hi-tech types have those things already, so why should they care that the union doesn't exist or doesn't have power?

I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.


>>But is that the end goal? for the union to have power? sometimes it does seem like that is in fact the goal.

The end goal is to balance the power dynamic between capital owners and the labor. As of today especially in US, the labor has little to none bargaining power and capital owners have infinite power to even influence govt.

The only reason we had relatively higher salaries than other fields "till now" is because of lower supply/demand ratio and it's still a relatively new profession than others. This ratio will eventually balance out and when it happens we will be left with no bargaining power.

>> I work in the tech industry, I never worried for one second that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk gets paid more than me.

We're definitely not getting our fair share of the value we produce and that's just theft to me.


> You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees.

This is a reasonable ask. It's easily addressable - build a notice period into the offers (for example, if you've been with the company more than a year, you get at least 4 weeks notice).

The problem with any sort of exclusive guild is that it becomes more difficult to break into, which is bad for a growing industry.


Who will enforce that? The policies are made by companies themselves and they can change them whenever/however they want with no employee welfare in mind. We as individual employees don't have any power influencing or enforcing those policies.

The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce than individual employees.


The employer can't unilaterally change the terms written in the offer letter. That would be clear breach of contract. Any state or federal court in the US can enforce this. I'm not sure how it works in other countries.


Again, which entity forces the employer to write these terms in the offer letter in the first place? Govt or courts can't. If you as the person interviewing asks for these terms, employer can just say no and move on to next person in queue.

In other countries the notice periods are written in law. But then again, do we really want to wait(& trust) for the govt which is heavily lobbied by FAANG to legislate this? Isn't it more efficient to organize and demand your terms from the employer.


No entity forces startups to convert ISO's to NSO's when early employees leave the company, but they did it because it made their offers more competitive. The legal default was ISO's that expire quickly.

It's the same. If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.

Heck, any smart company might do it voluntarily to make it harder for their employees to be poached by other companies that only offer a fire-at-will employment (the legal default).

A few posts on Medium/Substack might catalyze this change.


>> If companies hear loud and clear from both their employees and from people they want to hire, they will do it if they want to compete.

Yes definitely they will.."today". Companies don't need to do anything special if supply overtakes demand. We feel we are special today only because IT is still relatively a new field and the demand still outweighs supply.

But the rate at which universities across the world are churning out CS grads and the increasing focus on automation, supply will definitely overtake demand. And when that happens we will end up in the same predicament as other professions. At that point, companies don't have to cave in to the demands from their employees or the people they want to hire.


Having a union isn't going to change this. If most of the voting members are "new CS grads bring churned out", you'll have the same dynamics inside the union.


I will rather trust the democratically elected union leaders who are also my co-workers than the management. I don't really know what else to say at this point. It's just weird taking side of the management.


Couldn’t agree more. Our interests as employees is far different from management and the C-suite. Don’t forget that board members currently have a legal obligation to provide value to investors and no obligation to do the same for their employees.

It’s one of the reasons we see layoffs during a time of record profits. It’s easy to turn humans out to boost the profit margin and the stock value.


In fact, the legal default is that ISOs convert to NSOs, but the vast majority of startups force-expire them. Indeed we have seen that if no entity forces a startup to allow an employee-friendly policy to go forward, the company would rather fuck the employee and blame it on "it's the law," even if it isn't.


> You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job.

The words "middle class" use this slight of hand. Anyone who is not literally burger flipping can be called "middle class" simply by pointing at the people below them. Politicians regularly use it [1]. The proportion doesn't matter if people don't ask. If people knew the proportions, that'd be bad. So please also never talk about your salary with anyone but your closest partner, and never ask how much your executive makes.

The two classes that are important are capital-owning and worker. Even the best paid workers are disposable (see this thread, or Google layoffs) and will never be close to accumulating the wealth someone with generational wealth has. The difference is simply too big. No laying off the avocado toast will fix this. The mobility between those two classes is non-existent, aside from freak accidents.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd7cohTdRAo


The company does treat the employees well, the article specifically calls out VCs and executives as the principal actors:

> The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the already-wealthy ghouls who cry about how workers don’t do enough for their paychecks.


But that's not the truth. You can see it anytime this sort of thread comes up. People think they should be able to work very little and get paid a lot of money as long as they "meet expectation". That's entitlement.


Sure, some people act and think like that. But at the end of the day executives and the C level have no obligation other than returning as large a profit as possible to investors.

Additionally, it’s a straw man argument to say that everyone who is being let go currently at a time of record profits is just being a lay about. It’s easy to say until it happens to you, and it shouldn’t. People—our neighbors and fellow humans—deserve better treatment than to be cast aside to make the stock price rise again.

Some people have been hard at work on products that were never great, but the direction they took came from leadership. That’s as much a strawman argument, but it belabors the point that making broad judgements on a group is the wrong way to go about taking a position.


I read the article differently than you. The article isn’t saying those workers have bad treatment. It’s saying that much of tech’s elite sees that good treatment as a problem.


This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...


Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.


They did. That's what the WP article section I linked to was about:

> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer ...

I used to think we (high tech labor) didn't need unions (you can actually find comments of mine here on HN several years ago arguing that.) Then this crazy and illegal scheme came to light. Now I think that we need something, maybe not a union per se, but something, to "flex [our] considerable latent power", eh?

The thing that really grosses me out about the "no-poaching" collusion is that Apple, at least, famously has more money than Scrooge MacDuck yet still actively and stridently worked to rip off their own people.


“If working in the warehouse is really that bad, why don’t the warehouse workers unionize?”

I wouldn’t really say it’s a cloak of victimhood as much as a disillusionment of those that aren’t acknowledging they’re labor is being exploited combined with the fact that attempting to organize can be met with a loss of work.


But warehouse workers did unionize. It was the programmers, who back then could get a new job whenever they wanted, who lacked the foresight and self-discipline to exercise their latent power while it was at its peak.


Some of the warehouses have organized, is there a union that represents all of these workers as a whole against leadership?

Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by attempting to organize.


Yes, and some of the Facebook cafeteria workers were getting up before 3 AM to make the commute in to Palo Alto, which meant that they had much more time in the mornings to think about organizing than the unfortunate techies who slept in.

The excuses really are endless in this business.


I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here, I’m simply trying to understand what has previously stopped tech laborers from organizing. As a relatively new tech laborer, I would like to learn from these mistakes in order to actually organize and get our rights recognized.

Sounds like they had a great need to organize, and they were able to— I’m trying to extract patterns that could be applied to other organizations. Do you have any insights on that, or would you simply like to dunk on the out of touch techies that have it oh-so-good?


Because since the 1980's, the US government (as well as other western governments) have been dismantling the ability and protections for worker unionization. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were all notable for being anti-labor.


Any excuse about anti-labor policies has to account for why cafeteria workers at Facebook managed to unionize in 2017 while tech workers there just sat on their ass. The Wagner Act is still law and is remains a powerful tool for those who can be bothered to use it.


And Subway made their wage slaves sign non-competes for $8 an hour to stand and make sandwiches all day.

The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations


Fair enough.


Also worth noting that once this collusion was stopped and exposed, salaries went up across the industry. If you work in tech, even if you never worked for one of these companies, this collusion made you poorer.


Abuse is an unnecessarily strong word there. It is true they colluded to keep salaries down, but I don't think that compares with actual abuse. Software Developers make several times the median salary in the U.S.

The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...

(not to mention how much U.S. software developers benefit from an overly restrictive immigration policy which limits programmer supply)


Tech Leaders / Managers are the ones that hold the power; they are not given a free-pass to lead because they pay living wages for Engineers (that speaks to the fact that other careers should be paying better wages, not that tech workers should accept their position and not argue for better treatment).

Expressing for 2.5 years that we’re able to work from anywhere, then immediately saying “well actually come back in for a day… or 2… now come back in everyday” is a misuse of power because the workers have no say in the conversation, the only option is to express your discontent and leave.

Abuse doesn’t have to mean they’re hitting us, but it can mean a misuse of power which is one of the main points of the article.


A lot of Leftist tech workers like to think they’re working in a coop. They think the company should exist to serve their needs, rather than the needs of investors and customers. It’s a recipe for catastrophe.


I saw a discussion about tech layoffs few weeks ago. Someone had noted that layoffs should have come as no surprise when you had employees bragging about how little work they were doing. This comment stirred up a lot of people calling the poster heartless and saying things like "these people have families".

That is such a naive perspective of the world. These are businesses and their goal is to make as much money as possible. That means they strive to be as efficient as possible. I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.


>>I don't know where the expectation that they should function as charities or job programs came from.

Personally I think it comes from many of these people being young (under about 33-35), and having worked almost their entire careers in a booming economy where things always went up in a straight line; you would need to have about 15 years working as an adult to have lived thru the last big down cycle in 2008.


This is such a naive perspective of the world. The company should care equal parts about the the needs of the people who consume the product and those who produce it doing actual work.

The idea that a company can produce a product without caring about the quality of how the product is produced is laughable in any Econ 101 classroom. Additionally there are plenty of models of businesses in the US and Europe where the labor force is included in business decisions.

Your idea that the people making a living from building a product want to destroy it and their own livings, are some how not aligned with the customers—who want a good product and will return if it is good—is completely without logic or knowledge of market economics.


It has less to do with being treated better and much more to do with imposing an accountability structure that is divorced from shareholder value and returns.

When that's all you've got, arbitrary layoffs to boost market cap are the side effects.


Think about how it looks to all the people who have never lived through a recession before. The only valid reason to layoff workers is if you, as a caring founder, have no other choice. Then they see these tech giant laying off people, and not because it’s that or bankruptcy, and start calling bullshit. Oh, and start making up conspiracy theories about how it isn’t really an over hiring correction like TFA.

Look here, kids, go ask those graybeards you laugh at behind their backs what it was like during the dotcom bust.


It is telling when priviledged white collar tech employees consider themselves to be the same group as classical blue collar workers. At FAANG, only Amazon has what is traditionally regarded as blue collar worlers, and those aren't treated any better or worse than the same roles elsewhere. With the exception, that Amazon is in a position to actually treat those folks better.


Apparently Google has fired all the massage therapists. The working conditions are getting abysmal!


For those massage therapists who are now jobless, surely.


newsflash: people can be treated well comparatively, and still be in incredibly daunting and humiliating situations that is completely out of their control.


That's why they call them "golden handcuffs" and "gilded cages"


> The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous

The heirs who own the majority of most of the FAANG stock created none of the wealth, did none of the work. These rich kids of Instagram never worked, never will - nor did their parents, nor did their parents.

So your argument is the workers creating the wealth should fork over the amount of surplus labor value to these heirs, that is being expropriated.

What about these parasitical heirs you are arguing for? The ones who live off the dividend check wealth created by those who work? "I can't even begin to comprehend your POV". If the worker creating wealth keeping it is an entitled attitude, what is the attitude of these parasitical heirs who do not work?


I work specifically to give things to my children. They are not parasites, they are the motivating force which keeps me productive.


Just because they treat better doesn't mean they treat good, just because it could be worse doesn't mean it's good either.


One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically.

In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst employees of bigtech which are now basically blue-chips like the GE and GM of old and now employ all kinds of people.

One consequence of this, I think, is that it is increasingly the case that the employees of a business and the leaders of that business don't really understand each other. Without moralizing either side, it is the case that there is a lot of misapprehension regarding what makes the other side tick.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but absent one we may see conflict in the form of both labor organization (from the workers) as well as more selective hiring (from the bosses).


> that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically

Maybe something to do with the change in the type of people wanting to work in tech - it used to be geeks and now it is a high status job and attracts status/money seekers. Great discussion on “The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098

  2000’s
  - “the Dark Ages you and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s”
  - “it's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool Tech was”
  - “I was a Yale 05 graduate and in my graduating year Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids”
  - “status seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after:” Finance, Consulting, Law, or Medicine (not startups, not tech)

  2020’s
  - “now things have changed you know fast forward um a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists”
  - “college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview just as much as people study how to interview how to get into Goldman Sachs”
  - “they want the status they want the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs: bam, they're all now associated with big Tech”
  - “at first you see the explosion of CS majors in school and I think you would think to yourself oh man that means that there are a lot more people who are interested in building but that's not actually the case like it's it's it's uh it's deceiving the numbers are deceiving. I remember going to a class and talking to a bunch of kids who are kind of interested in in Tech and startups and so forth and I remember saying to them ‘hey like how many of y'all are studying CS and and write code’ and 90 of the people raise their hands and then I remember asking oh that's amazing like ‘what percentage of you would want to be writing code as part of your job in a startup or a company’ and like 90 of those hands went down”


I think in the old days people realized a startup had to sell real products and have real revenue and profits, your stock would only be worth anything at the IPO if the company had solid cashflow. Now there are so many tech companies that will never make any money but somehow are worth millions or billions, most tech workers really dont care about company profits because it doesn't affect them.


Something that I think is often overlooked when talking about this is a large chunk of tech labor are millennials. These people are now in their thirties or early 40s. Many now have families and want different things from work than they did in their 20s. This is totally natural but it does create new tensions.


People aren't born in buckets, it's a continuous process. 10 years ago there were many 30/40 year olds in tech as well. Indeed if you look at the average age it's gone down, if anything, so there should be fewer now.


the thinkpieces about how Millenials need to treat Gen Z are starting to flow already, ha. Retreads of what was written about millenials.

I remember.


>One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically.

The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.


No way it's grown faster. A "spoiled" tech worker who makes even as much as $300K has a lot more in common with a blue collar worker making $30K than he has with an executive making $300M. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude vs. 1. That executive has accumulated generational wealth after working one month. Their lifestyle is outrageously bananas-different than even the highest-paid software developer. We're talking dozens of homes, private jets, chauffeurs, staff that do everything, megawealth that grows in perpetuity without them even doing anything. They can travel anywhere they want on earth on a whim and have anyone in government (sometimes up to and including heads of state) on the phone in minutes. Their children, grandchildren, and grandchildren's grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives.

Meanwhile, the difference between a tech worker and a struggling teacher is that one is 50 missed paychecks away from insolvency, and the other is 2 missed paychecks away from insolvency. It's not even comparable.


We're talking about the cultural gap here. Not the money gap.


I'm a spoiled tech worker, and I feel I have much more in common culturally with a less well-off guy who works on their own car, shops for their own groceries, and carefully budgets every dollar they earn so their checks don't bounce (which I do, too). More culturally than I have in common with someone who has three nannies for their kids, summers in the Hamptons, takes Luge lessons in the Alps, and is currently deciding whether to buy a fifth home in New Zealand or bankroll their own B-movie.


Different topic, but tech to me is a craft, where there are a lot of integral issues of quality. Yet orgs at many levels rarely seem to care about software. It thinks on terms of business need, and seems to detest lowering itself to what actually is & makes up the product; it doesnt know (& maybe at best wants to trust this all is being well handled somewhere) does doesmt grapple with the other 50% of the org: the code, what it is, what runs.

Engineer concerns are treated with begrudging compromise & so often unsubtle adversarialism. Small groups of engineers must usually drive change they want, on an ad-hoc basis, and rarely is there a forum for the business to understand larger bigger picture internal-stength/weakness of thr product/architectures.

The gulf beteeen the top & the rest of the org has seemed so very big, for so long. Rarely do orgs even try to foster a healthy relationship with their craftwork, with what powers them. That they would not really value the craftfolk either, as well as not really building strong orgs that understand the labor (output), is not surprising to me. It's why I keep hoping we see more companies ran by techies. Having a company that values being close to the machine in a real-way, that groks that there's this huge invisible world it's created & which wants to organizationally understand & better the systems, holistically, is a huge potential advantage for an org, but one that seems so rarely built into the genes. Understanding seems built on organizational scuttlebutt & heresay- in large part by many tech-agnostic & tech-apathetics going up the org chain- to suss out truth with, even though the code & it's constraints is the overwhelming shaper of many orgs available paths.


In some sense I agree with you but I'd actually kind of invert the dynamic you're describing... I don't think writ large most people who have never professionally "done software" will ever be able to really "get it" about system maintainability and health. One aspect is that software engineers should probably get better at explaining this and backing it up with results and data, yes... but even moreso I think the problem is that software engineers haven't been empowered to influence, taught about, and held accountable for business strategy + outcomes nearly enough and business doesn't spend enough time trying to get engineers to buy in / understand / partner around their strategy.

I think it's a massive opportunity for the discipline of software engineering as a whole for engineers to start stepping up a bit more to position ourselves less as the misunderstood computer monks and more as the experts in making smart tradeoffs around what's good for the business, product, users, software itself, etc etc. In many companies, the most influential engineers + engineering leaders operate like this as it is.


I call it "Product Engineering"


I think the software engineering class has done some of that damage to itself over the years. We haven't been able to articulate a clear and actionable case for quality, different teams are wildly different in output and outcomes solving for the same problems... it's hard for the business side of the house to take you seriously if you can't back up any of your claims with data.


This should create enormous business opportunities: Lots of talented, self-motivated, creative, forward thinking, skilled workers looking for a place that values them and is forward thinking, including about employment.

Usually, layoffs happen in weak economies. But the economy is strong, unemployment is low. These layoffs are partly about power and ideology - sacrificing business interests.

It's a rare opportunity for people hiring - how often do large companies shed their best people. Better workplaces and new startups should be moving quickly. And it's a great opportunity for the job-seekers to find places that value them and want to do new, innovative things.

It requires you to believe in people as valuable, in cooperative not adversarial relationships, in the potential of human innovation, which can come from anywhere. Just like SV before the new reactionary power grab.


> how often do large companies shed their best people.

Less often than they shed under-performers. Hiring during mass layoffs is difficult because it’s a market of lemons situations. You have to sift through the majority that got let go because their manager identified them as performing below average to find the ones that were laid off because some failing departments were shut down.


I think this case is different: The companies may be shedding people who don't want to be in the new 'bossism' culture that focuses on megalomaniacal CEOs (see my description in the GP). At least some companies are arguably prioritizing that culture over talent.


underperforming at FAANG is more than enough for 90% of workplaces


I fear we're missing a bigger contextual change in the cost/benefit calculation that these people are making in regards to layoffs.

For over a decade it was an absolute survival related imperative for these companies to hire as many people as possible, and to keep them from going to their competition. Google was so afraid of competition in the ads space that they bought entire companies for hundreds millions, and paid the former employees of these companies huge salaries for years ... just for the purposes of shutting them down -- including my former employer (see Page #39 of https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1563746/downl...)

They were willing to let compensation rates skyrocket. To hire like crazy with very little in the way of concrete performance results in terms of shipping more product or increasing revenues. Because they were mortally afraid that someone would compete with them and their ad revenue firehose would stop increasing in pressure each quarter.

So what's changed? Why are they suddenly willing to unleash talent into the market where it can be eaten up by competition?

Isn't Google worried that among the people it lays off (or fails to hire) there's someone who will finally conjure up a company that finally effectively takes marketshare from AdWords or Ad Exchange or whatever?

I don't know the final piece to this puzzle is. Maybe people here have some ideas. (In particular anybody who is still in the ad-tech space who can speak to current trends)


>Isn't Google worried that among the people it lays off (or fails to hire) there's someone who will finally conjure up a company that finally effectively takes marketshare from AdWords or Ad Exchange or whatever?

From my experience working at FAANG, most of the developers working at these companies are the same skill as anywhere else, they just managed to pass the interview by studying and prepping for it slightly more than the other guy


Yes and no. When I was there I met a lot of very smart people -- much smarter than me-- but they were mostly employed doing really boring work. I look at the academic and work resumes of some of the people I used to work with and they're very impressive. The work they were doing was mostly of the "take proto from here and shove it over there" variety.

The really useful people at Google were the SREs.

In any case, its beside the point. The distribution of quality of the talent doesn't so much matter as the fact that Google & others wanted to hoard it all.


When there's a technological inflection point, there is a tremendous market share opportunity, so hire like crazy to win the market and then once it's solidified, either look for new markets or cut costs. All these VCs are desperately searching for these inflection points (metaverse! Web3! GPT models!) for that reason.

These companies all hired like crazy because they thought COVID might have been a cultural inflection point, and when it turned out not to be, they cut costs.


Fair. The thing is they were hiring like crazy and hoovering up talent before COVID, too. Not the same exponential growth rates, but still high, and compensation packages reflected it.


You make great points about the siphoning of talent. Seems to me there is a tipping point where the benefit of hoarding talent get outweighed by the literal dollar cost of having them. As the stock market drops for macro reasons, this line crossed quickly and they looked at cutting staff as better than keeping them. Then once one big tech corp did a layoff, everyone else took a good look at themselves and did the same.

My point is there is no strategy outside of “make line go up”.


It's easy for laid off tech workers to start their own companies. Lots of my friends and colleagues have over the years.

The fun thing about starting your own company, is you find out how much you're really worth!


in the majority of cases the number is negative. but seriously, most people do start-ups for passion, not money, and they get what they want out of it. not everyone sees making money as the be all and end all of life. the people who do make a lot more of it. good for them. better to not worry about other people's choices and make sure you are happy with yours.


> in the majority of cases the number is negative

It is true that some I know who quit a high paying job to do a startup had a very rude reality check on how good they actually were. I know one who would always be ushered in to see the CEO to make the sale. On his own, he couldn't even get an audience with an underling. He eventually begged to get his old job back.

> most people do start-ups for passion

A dry cleaners is not a passion project.


plus you only have to work 1/2 days, and it doesn't even matter which twelve hours you pick. :)


two words for you: health insurance


You don't need to be employed by a corporation to have health insurance. I know this because I have health insurance and am not employed.


It costs a lot more, especially for families, once the cobra runs out. I know this because I have also not been employed, and had to provide health insurance for my family.


Obamacare ain't cheap, that's for sure. This year my premiums went up $200/mo.


Why is starting a company your solution to this problem?


not the OP, but if 'the problem' is that the people who are running companies are not running them in a way that some people feel is fair to their employees, then when people start their own companies they have the ability to institute whatever policies they want - i.e. never lay people off, pay everyone top dollar, guarantee health insurance after you leave - i.e. whatever policies the founders think are 'fair' and just.


It's the classic abusive boss trope. "Don't like how I treat you? Go start your own company!"


Why would you want to work for an abusive boss? I don't understand that.


As long as there are more people that will do a given job for less, we're all replaceable. There's just no incentive to raise the wages or standards.


Not a popular take, but a correct one. A correct Javascript class runs the same whether it was written for $5/hr or $150/hr. Obviously there are certain advantages of efficiency and communication, but over time those advantages erode, especially with increased WFH and the like.


"A correct JavaScript class", hah. Good luck if you think that's what it's about, chief.


I don't; I've been a developer since 1999. Those who have remained employed through the same downturns know this as well. However, there are plenty of developers whose jobs consist of 90-95% of work that a remote resource could easily do, and that 5-10% could be turned over to a short-term contractor (or consolidated). If a company saves 75%, 50% inefficiency is still a net positive.

Hint: if someone describe themselves as "{some single language} Developer", they should always be concerned. Doubly so if they came out of a cookie cutter bootcamp.


And when we are literally all replaced, what then? Seriously. What are we going to do when we are all replaced? We don't have support structures.


That's where welfare or a UBI is supposed to come in. If societal prosperity is something we care about, that's a much better mechanism for support than forcing companies to hire people that they don't need or want. Better to have lean and efficient and market-based enterprise that are taxed to provide welfare, rather than industries stunted by union activity.


Oh, but there aren't.


> I realize I sound conspiratorial, but to be clear, I do not think they all got together and planned this.

I'm not so sure the possibility should be dismissed so easily. It's hardly a secret that CEOs gather periodically gather at various retreats. Is it really talking conspiracy theories to recognize they actually do talk business with each other and at least informally coordinate their actions? They don't all need to be at the same location just to get a few massages.


I definitely feel like, over the past 15 years, there's been a growing rift between VCs/founders and software engineers.

Back in the aughts there were so many posts and thought-pieces written by both founders and VCs about attracting and supporting developers. Lots of founders talking up how their engineers make a real difference. By the first half of the '10s that stuff disappeared, and by the 2nd half you started seeing lots of resentment going both ways.

Capital thinks devs are capturing too much upside; labor thinks capital is capturing too much upside. From capital's point of view, the engineer circa 2023 is doing the same work their engineers did circa 2008 so why are they entitled to 2.5x the comp? And of course the engineer is wondering why the value they're creating is worth 10x what it was back in 2008 but their pay is only up 2.5x?


I can only speak for my own Big N but I would say we certainly did overhire. I was pleased that we had a layoff and would have even doubled it. Processes have become very slow with so many unnecessary people involved in everything.

You might argue that I would be speaking differently if I were the one laid off, but I actually would have welcomed it, since it would be nice to take a break for a few months. I am certainly privileged to be able to do that (although it comes from working very hard for 10+ years and saving >50% of my income so I do take some credit).

I feel worst for people on visas that might get kicked out of the US because of this. But I don't think it's the job of corporations to atone for the sins of the government. We should make immigration easier and not tied to your employer (and health insurance as well).


They hate the professional managerial class, but love the coders that go above and beyond to write them patents and build them technologies (capital) for only a steady paycheck.


This one is more complex.

If the company is explicitly paying you to build something to be patented, they should own it.

Making it yourself means not accepting their paycheck for the work and covering the associated expenses of your own time and filings. Then you own it and can license it to whoever.

If there’s some alternative way of doing this that still incentivizes the company to hire you in the first place, it’s probably worth negotiating up front. Patents aren’t very different from any other work for hire scenario in that the people paying for the work will own the result.

If you hire someone to renovate your house and make a ton of money selling it, does the contractor deserve a cut? If so, did he charge you less for that cut knowing it was a flip?


Patents are not worth much, sorry. Unless you're a patent troll. They're a by-product of other work.


That's like saying nukes aren't worth much. They aren't at an individual level, but the total value is much greater than the sum of their parts. From a game theory perspective, patents essentially have MAD dynamics: no one is crazy enough to strike first, but if you come at anyone they'll respond in kind.

This is why patent trolls are so dangerous, they don't have any actual assets, so they're not in any actual danger when suing.


The people below the PMC hate them just as much if not more than the people above.

It's one thing to have someone who makes more money than you can imagine swinging their dick into politics and being generally out of touch. It's a lot harder to make excuses when you see people who are more numerous and only make 2-10x what you make doing it.


It feels like we’re due for a “big reset”, but I doubt it’ll be aligned with VC interests. They need labor more than we need those companies. Americans should pick up a French history book.


I'm not sure I see anything in French history I'd particularly want to emulate. The story of the French Revolution which I assume you're referring to is one of senseless barbarism and the old elites ending up back on top at the end anyway. The drownings at Nantes are among the most awful things to happen in Europe prior to WWII.

As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who wants that either? Sure a narrow slice of the population gets early retirement but the youth unemployment rate is 20% and it is increasingly hard there to get onto a career ladder that would afford you an early retirement.


With “read French history” they’re not saying French history should be emulated, they’re saying it should be treated as a cautionary tale: Those at the bottom can only be pushed so far before they start building guillotine.


Yes, but ultimately the reign of terror killed more Sans-culottes than nobles which is the part people often leave out.


Is that based on absolute number or percentage?


It's impossible to really know, the official number of death sentences was only around 16k, but another 10k died in prison. However out in the departments there was a lot of random killing like in the drownings in Nantes. At various points anyone accused by anyone of selling anything at an unfair price was executed, and it was often even more arbitrary. This chaos caused a lot of poor people to simply stare to death which lead to Paris sending out "revolutionary armies" to "requisition" grain which resulted in a lot of farmers being summarily killed. Keeping score on a class basis is beside the point and just gross.


> The story of the French Revolution which I assume you're referring to is one of senseless barbarism and the old elites ending up back on top at the end anyway.

Some parts of the old elites ended up kind of on top at the end anyway, however in a drastically different situation - citizens had rights and power at the top came from below, not above (divine right was no longer a thing). So massive difference regardless of the title of the person on top.


Sure, but they could have gotten that without all of the wars, reign of terror, and general horribleness of the revolution.


Like how exactly? If they had gotten crazy luck with a benevolent king that decided to bestow them rights? I'm struggling to think of a case where subjects became citizens with rights without either violence, threat of violence, or the sovereign getting scared of violence elsewhere. The French Revolution made many of the liberal reforms across Europe possible precisely because many rulers were deathly afraid of getting guillotined.


The reign of terror and wars happened after most of the nobility voluntarily gave up their hereditary rights. Even after the storming of the Bastille there had been very little real violence.


This is some weird revisionism. The Reign of Terror was until the Fall of Robespierre, July 1794. The Armée des Émigrés was still going strong and represented nobles actively fighting with France's enemies to destroy the revolutionary regime. The Vendée uprising was facing brutal suppression at the same time, but also existed and had local nobles participating.

Voluntarily is a massive stretch. Even more so when you consider that many that returned after the Restauration tried to get "their" lands and titles back - so it was only the threat of violence that made them abandon everything and run.


It isn't revisionism at all. The August Decrees happened in 1789 ending many of the privileges of the 1st and 2nd estates and by 1793 they were amended to turn land over to peasants for free. This was all before the reign of terror started. The nobles and clergy that participated in the National Constituent Assembly were practically racing to be the most forward thinking, the proposal to end feudalism came out of the Club Breton and was proposed by the Duke d'Aiguillon.

The Vendée uprising like many such uprisings was sparked by the Levy Decree(levée en masse) which was a response to the Girondins stirring up a stupid war for "national unity".


Sometimes you have to upset some people in order to make the world better. I for one is happy about previous labor movements, because I like weekends and I dislike child-labor. Without labor movements, unions and sometimes riots, everyone (below upper-class) would have it much worse off.


My point is that the French are effectively pulling up the ladder and younger people there are going to be stuck with a bill and none of the benefits.

It's all well and good to credit the end of child labor in the US to unions, even though it was the progressive movement generally that ended child labor and not unions, but whatever. That said, the American union movement was a powerful force FOR segregation and actually caused a real drop in wages for black workers in northern cities in the 1910s and 1920s, so I think it's important to be honest about the whole history.


Do you like having young workers taxed at high rates to subsidize pensions for 62 year olds?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64463330


> As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who wants that either?

well, that's the only way to deliver the message, so yeah, I want that.


Really? The end result in France is that the young are chronically unemployed to the tune of 20% and will never have the luxury of early retirement, all so the retirement age won't be raised now.


Silly that you just take a look at the recent events instead of things as whole.

In France, I can go to lunch and not think about work. Here, I have to explain that "no, I won't eat lunch during this meaningless meeting to save time" every time I've invited to a meeting during lunch.


I wouldn't say that's representative of the US in general. I regularly take an hour for lunch. And, those benefits in France only apply to CDI employees if I'm not mistaken, and the percentage of employees who are CDD seem to be rising yoy while youth unemployment is also very high. It seems to be a lot easier to get onto the career ladder in the US.


> I realize I sound conspiratorial, but to be clear, I do not think they all got together and planned this.

All it takes is a handful of big investors demanding it. It doesn't take very many people to agree that the tech workers are getting uppity and need to be taught a lesson about their replacability, if it is the right people. Nor does it really take a conspiracy, because as the author points out, many of those people are quite open about it.


Something I want to see as an experiment- pause the H1B program for 3 years and see how the tech elite react.


We're always fed the line that the tech elite are the alpha men/women, especially by business media. But then when they hit economic reality, are found to be investing in garbage like Web3, or don't have maximum economic leverage in workplace negotiations, what do they do?

They whine. On the bird site, and to business media. Definitely very alpha.

It smacks of impotence. If they had the power, why couldn't they just fix the situation instead of whining about it? I bet they would, if they could, but they can't.

And they're humans, just like us. Not as special as we've been told.


Here's a hot take. VCs don't hate labor. They love money. They will do anything that makes the most money for them. If that means investing in people who they think will be successful (ie, impressive resume, past success), they will do that. If that means not investing in people who they think will not be successful founders, they will certainly not do that. Ultimately their drive to make money by backing the right horse, trumps any sort of power/status game.

Founders also don't hate labor. They love money. If they can hire good enough developers by paying them 0.5% equity, they will do that. If the market demands that they pay developers 500k/year and hire thousands of them during a bull run, they will do that. If they think paying a "superstar" CEO $200M/year creates even more value, they will do it. If they can get away with paying that same guy nothing, that's also exactly what they will do. If they can improve the company's long-term profitability by laying off thousands of developers during a downturn, they will also do that.

Labor for the most part doesn't hate anybody either. We love money. If a company hires me right after college, trains me, helps me build my resume, and another company comes around with a promotion and a 30% higher comp offer, I would take that offer. If the company has fallen on hard times and isn't able to pay me as much as another company, I would give a few months notice and then jump ship.

I find it hard to take these sort of conspiracy theories seriously. No one is purposely conducting layoffs in order to "put labor in their place." No one is purposely trying to underpay startup employees because they hate them. Everyone is trying to enrich themselves as much as possible. Partly by collaborating with their complements in order to create something of value. And partly by paying their complements as little as they can get away with. This is literally how every single free market works.

If you think your startup isn't paying employees enough, don't work for that startup. If you think all startups are paying developers too much relative to support engineers, try building a career for yourself as a developer instead. If you think all startups are too generous with its founders relative to employees, try building a career for yourself as a founder instead. If you're able to succeed as a developer/founder, great! If you're not able to succeed as a developer/founder, maybe you have a better appreciation for why they get paid whatever they do. You don't owe them anything, they don't owe you anything, nobody hates anyone, everyone's just trying to make the most money they can for themselves.


> VCs don't hate labor. They love money.

Marx would agree. People who don't know better tend to think that labor vs capital is an aesthetic or moral conflict rather than a material one. The mechanics of capitalism force the owners to exploit the workers as much as possible, or else they will be driven out of business. That doesn't necessarily make the owners bad or hateful people, though it does select for people who are able to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing in spite of the evidence.


The purchasing power of the average labourer in the US has not much changed since 1971 when gold convertibility was ended and the monetary system moved to a pure fiat one. At the time, a food service worker could have bought about an ounce of gold a day with their labour. Now even mid to mid upper tech salaries are not enough for such a feat, to say nothing of what a food service worker salary could do.

It stands to reason if the financing method of a nation moves from a hard money system where you either turn a profit in a hard asset by increasing efficiency, to one where politically connected parties benefit and are first in line at the spigot of federal reserve funding which they then employ however they see fit mostly freed from the rigor of market discipline, the people in the game that will succeed will be those closest to the feeding trough and those at the back will eat the inevitable inflation that occurs. It doesn't matter if you're a moron and your competition is a genius when you are gulping down first, second and third order fresh fiat from the fed firehose constantly, while they're stuck with getting it from you or your peers.

All that said, enterprises aren't charities and of course they're going to see a limited supply pool of talented labour with actual leverage and bargaining power as "entitled", but they're still going to have to compete for them because that's one of the few remaining market forces still on the side of that quite rare labour pool. The vast majority of labour get no such choice and just have to suck it up. In light of all that people in this industry should keep in mind that between a tech worker of today and a food service worker of just over fifty years ago, the tech worker has less purchasing power. They're not nearly as coddled and overpaid as the parties in front of them filtering newly created money down the chain would have us believe.


I don’t really like tech executives…but the idea that tech workers are somehow oppressed is ludicrous.

We get paid extremely well! FFS have any of you guys taken a moment to talk to folks outside the industry?


The argument isn’t that tech workers are oppressed more than any other laborer, the issue is that the balance of power between laborers and capitalists is flawed.

Tech workers can be oppressed even if other laborers are more oppressed; believe this is where the idea of class solidarity originates.

Tech workers are in the same class as all other laborers; not capitalists.


I find this tone annoying. Let's discuss systems and incentives, not personalities. The decision makers aren't all nasty people, they're maximizing their profits, just as most people would do in their shoes. (Or if they're all mean people, why do the mean rise to the top?)

> Illustrating this grotesque point further, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft saw their collective valuations rise by $800bn after announcing steep job cuts

So the market felt very strongly that the layoffs were a good business decision. Is that because Wall Street is mean, too? Or isn't that somewhat objective evidence that the layoffs were good for the companies?

A very interesting article could have been written in its place.


> The decision makers aren't all nasty people, they're maximizing their profits

At least where I'm standing, fundimental profit incentive is morally bad. Yes they are by definition "nasty people". Our fundimental responsibility is to improve ourselves and the world around us. It can occasionally align with profit incentive (we have a culture where money can be a powerful tool), but considering it "normal" or "ok" seems problematic.

If you want to talk about incentives, how about what we can do to change them?


When I review human history, in all its approaches to organizing technologically advanced societies ever since the plow, I see profit-seeking behavior everywhere, even in societies deliberately engineered to thwart the profit motive, so evidently, altruism never scales much further than an extended family.

I see profit-seeking behavior when I watch a squirrel hoard nuts, or a dog snap at a scrap of meat on the ground. I see the entire biosphere as a profit-seeking process, and I don't want to set my morality against the very biosphere that created everything I value, and my very ability to value.


That is a level of rationalization of capitalism that I had not previously imagined.

Competition doesn't have to be unbound. All things in nature find satiation. We can be satisfiers not optimizers.


This goes far beyond capitalism, and describes all forms of human complex societal organization, from the ancient slave states described by Marx, to the Leninist states in our modern times.

Nature's balance is found as each organism struggles with all its might and ability to expand, but not by any organism voluntarily refraining from maximizing its production.


> Nature's balance is found as each organism struggles with all its might and ability to expand, but not by any organism voluntarily refraining from maximizing its production.

This is both right and wrong. What makes an organism? You are a multicellular system of cooperating cells. If this statement was true, you couldn't exist. The truth is that the most powerful adaptation to increase your organisms ability to compete is to in fact build a bigger organism. Your body is a product of that strong evolutionary trend.

Bacterial mats, multicellular organisms, forests, fields of grass, mamals, families, civilizations. All of these things are escalations in survivability due to every part of them choosing to "voluntarily refraining from maximizing its production." in favor of behavior that improves the status quo for others.

We call portion of organisms that revert to this competitive mentality "cancer" and eventually it does win. That doesn't make it morally right, just the last parts of a body to die after it kills the rest in shortsightedness.


> Bacterial mats, multicellular organisms, forests, fields of grass, mamals, families, civilizations. All of these things are escalations in survivability due to every part of them choosing to "voluntarily refraining from maximizing its production." in favor of behavior that improves the status quo for others.

Cooperation is definitely a popular strategy for survival, and our instinct for altruism benefits the survival of human families and small groups. Consider though, that in each of your examples, the collective entities formed then grow to the greatest extent, limited only by resource constraints and competition from other entities.


And access to higher trophic levels is unlocked by learning to work together in bigger groups instead of fighting each other. Growth is bottlenecked by "othering"


In this thread, tech people whining they are'nt paid very well or dont have enough power when literally no one is stopping them from making their own company and making more money. Power belongs to the person that takes it.


A theory that seems to predict the modern SV power elite's behavior is megalomania.

Megalomania: "In Psychology: delusions of power or self-importance, esp. resulting from mental illness; a passion for grandiose schemes. More generally: lust for power, a desire to control."

They have different rationalizations and explanations for different events, but many/most ideas come down to more power for themselves, and believing that only they can accomplish anything - not their employees, government, democracy, anything or anyone else.


I hope this comes back to bite big tech in the ass. As far as I can see, the sequence of events were:

1. Employ a large number of tech workers and upskill them with state of the art practices.

2. Throw lots of money at them, so they can build nest-eggs

3. Test their capacity for - and self-confidence in - working long hours

4. Unload them onto a hot market; unemployment is at a 50-year low

My hope is that a million lifestyle LLCs will bloom from this fertile soil. I got laid off, and registered my first LLC while interviewing. I bet I'm not the only one


Tech's Elite Love Labor; without them they wouldnt have Gulfstreams, 400 foot yachts and billions of $$$s in the bank.

They just don't want to see, pay or think about the little people - my jet is 2 years old, thats like keeping the same phone for 3 months, I am busy speccing out the gold toilet seat on my new one, please don't bother me.


they love labor the same way I love steak.


The author claims that "the only people acting in an entitled, reckless and ridiculous way have been venture capitalists and the most powerful people in tech", but the fact that a tech bubble existed and the excess couldn't last forever have been obvious to most people in the industry for a long time. There was an effort around 2017, catalyzed by Trump's election, to get tech workers to organize* while the times were still good in order to secure protections like a board seat for labor, or converting subcontracted work to full-time employment at name brand companies. People beat the drum at most of the tech companies, and at Twitter, to try to get high-wage workers there to take the tiniest steps toward collective action.

During most of 2017 you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a journalist writing a major article about how tech workers were organizing, shaking off their chains, etc. Major foundations were going hat in hand to anyone who even mentioned workplace organizing, begging them to take their money. (I got turned down by one such foundation because I asked for a ~$80k budget; they told me my proposal would be accepted if I found a way to make it ten times bigger).

The part of this effort that I witnessed was met with a mix of derision and complete indifference. Programmers and designers were eager to cheerlead their colleagues in food service unionizing, but didn't want to make the slightest effort to safeguard their own status as the most pampered workforce in the country. Arguments that the gravy train could not last, and that they were creating the tools to automate away their own very lucrative future, fell on deaf ears. I am a highly apathetic guy, and yet even I was astonished by the level of apathy.

Now the good times are ending, a future of limitless high-wage programming jobs seems less secure, and people are justifiably mad. But fairness demands some of the victims of the current round of layoffs also go look in the mirror.

(* 'organize' here means use the pretty robust framework of US labor law to achieve some shared goal. Many people take it as a synonym for 'unionize', but there is no requirement that concerted workplace action result in a traditional union. You might just organize to secure a specific goal, like a board seat for employees, specific rules for doing layoffs, or equal treatment of H1-B colleagues.)


> "Now the good times are ending, a future of limitless high-wage programming jobs seems less secure, and people are justifiably mad. But fairness demands some of the victims of the current round of layoffs also go look in the mirror."

Big yup. I think the author's point is valid, but I think you're observation is completely true and valid too. I do remember that time around 2017. Lots of talk about tech unionization, but no action because like you said, they didn't want to endanger their comfy jobs. I live in Seattle, and many tech workers here talk about equality, labor rights (only for the Starbucks employee), but the moment something would endanger their job, benefits, or property values they wouldn't hesitate to vote against what they claim to value.


The Oligarchs Hate Labor

There. Fixed the headline for you. You might also note the oligarchs, and the aristocracy before them, have always loathed the common man and thought themselves superior. Our supposed meritocracy have just made matters worse.


Of course they hate labor. They think all us peons are just lazy losers for not being super successful. Sort of like the divine right of kings, only the self perception is about superior effort and intelligence than birthright


It's hard to see what's happening as anything other than a capital strike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_strike


Big Tech is jus the evolution of Industrialization and the Factory.

Rather than investing in a factory that employs people to churn out widgets...

Tech is investing in a factory (software/platform) that churns out digital widgets...


The irony is that some tech workers seem to be frustrated about the natural outcome of free market while exactly enjoying the outcome of free market when it works for them.

I did not see these people jumping out when a coding boot camp guy got paid 200K/year two years ago while people with 20 year experience in other industries only get 100K .

Company has a positive revenue does not mean they don’t have to optimize their cost structure. They have to pay off people just like they need to hire like crazy when the market is good.


I find it ironic that for a long time people have been predicting the demise of low skilled and blue collar work to AI and robots.

But as I see it at present, it's the high end white collar work that is the most at risk being made redundant to AI since robots and mobile power solutions aren't robust enough to eliminate blue collar work quite yet.

I know someone will say why this isn't going to happen but for many in middle and upper management good enough will suffice if it means eliminating expensive white collar workers. That day is coming.


I must say, it really is looking a lot more likely than it did ten years ago that we'll replace most knowledge workers before we replace humans-as-biological-robots with the regular kind of robots.

Our hands, eyes, and legs may end up being the expensive parts to replace—not our creativity, not our raw intelligence—so, related niches may be the ones in which human labor thrives the longest. Perhaps Amazon will be able to slash its office workforce to a small fraction of its current size, before it can do the same with its warehouses. Go figure.

Time to go lift some weights so I can still land a job in my 50s, I guess....


I read a novel recently that took place on a slave-crewed fishing boat. The "captain" was an AI, because analyzing market data and weather reports etc and deciding where to work, when and where to unload was something it was well suited to. Physically hauling nets and gutting fish was nowhere in the near future so human labor remains doing that.

I think a less extreme form of this dynamic is coming for most of us in the next decade or two. And an exactly as extreme form coming for some of us.


> Perhaps Amazon will be able to slash its office workforce to a small fraction of its current size, before it can do the same with its warehouses. Go figure.

See Moravec's Paradox [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox


Lowend or midlevel whitecollar work sure, I'm skeptical about highend.

AI is still quite far off from a notion of "common sense", if we _did_ have that it would actually solve a very large host of open problems in robotics that prevent it from being taking lots of blue collar jobs (at least my former coworkers at a Toyota's robotics R&D lab thought so).

As automation improves the leverage on top talent increases and the premium for incrementally better skills improves. I'm arguably a worse programmer than my uncle was 30 years ago but earn far more (inflation adjusted) because I can leverage things like AWS, open source libraries, and various SAAS offerings.


The day is coming for literally every job that exists. It's only a matter of _when_. And we simply do not have any sort of economic system to account for such a shift.

Pair that with what we have seen "distrust in institutions" can do to people. I have grave fear our future.


More and more I think this will be the future. I was watching an episode of "Dirty Jobs" yesterday and all I could think was "I guess this is what I'll be doing in 10 years".


> It’s also worth considering that the people that invested in these companies, that paid for the luxurious perks at these firms, that fucking hired these people in the first place are the same people that are crowing about them being treated too well.

> I foolishly believed that these people were in the minority - that they were not indicative of the larger tech industry - and I was completely wrong.

Humans don't change, just circumstances.

Of course a whole lot of business leaders would gleefully set up company towns and have Pinkertons wage amphibious assaults (true story) on strikers and make employees work 6-day 60-hour workweeks with no overtime and all kinds of abusive, crazy shit like that, if they thought it'd make them more money and if the circumstances allowed it.

We're just a few norms, laws, market conditions, and labor contracts away from exactly the same place labor was a century or so ago. We are not doing as well as we are because capitalists got nicer.


>We're just a few norms, laws, market conditions, and labor contracts away from exactly the same place labor was a century or so ago.

Amazon warehouse workers of today have it nearly just as bad as workers a decade ago.

It reminds me of that scene from Mike Judge's Silicon Valley satire where Gavin Belson, the big-tech CEO, sees protestors out the office window and says he misses the days when big business owners like him could have those protestors shot on sight[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtpibIF4MY


Except that , when people see the "compensation" that people get for doing tiny changes in css files, they start disbelieving this kind of talk. Silicon valley people are not "labor" to the common man, they are ... something else. Sorry, it's part of the package

Imagine calling investment bankers as typical "labor"


If you think "tiny changes in css files" is what IT work consists of you are in a fantasy world.


Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid in your company rather than what you are worth to the company and what the market for your labor will pay? The only rationale I see is jealousy which doesn't seem very noble or sustainable. Assume worker A gets paid $100k and his CEO gets paid 10x that. Worker B also gets 100k but her CEO gets paid 2x that. How is it fair to increase worker A's comp more than worker B based on that fact alone which worker A has no control over. Alternatively, lowering the CEO's comp only makes sense if it will lead to better returns for the company but if it results iin the good CEO leaving and a lower quality CEO replacement, the company may well perform poorly and than everyone suffers. I would say that jealousy is not a good basis for economic policy. A Company in the tech field needs flexibility to grow and shrink its labor force quickly to adapt as technologies come and go. Labor unions hamper growth which otherwise would benefits everyoe and siphon off money to unproductive and divisive union bureaucracies. particularly in the tech field where worker mobility is high I see little reason for unions.


> Why must your compensation be based on relative pay to the most highly paid

It clearly is not, so asking why it "must" seems a bit odd.

> The only rationale I see is jealousy

Others might call it justice or fairness, but that's basically it. People's feeling of personal security and self-worth.

The same basic force is behind most wars, revolutions, and other forms of inter-personal violence. That begins to answer the question, really.


The reason CEO compensation tends to be 100x higher is a loose form of collusion, where market forces does not hold because a lot of time exec sets compensation for themselves.


If the CEO is getting paid 100x an average employee, at least one of them is clearly not being paid according to their value to the company.


This is going to be unpopular, but business has these priorities: debt-holders(sometimes employees are here), owners, customers, employees, everything else. Articles that try to re-order these priorities really get it wrong. If being an "elite" means you are holding debt or own shares, you are very much


The problems with CEO pay and tech worker pay and treatment would resolve itself if the tech space was more competitive. Instead we have gov subsidized/sponsored monopolies in a lot of areas with poor oversight and outdated regulation.


Might as well strike "Tech's" from the headline.


Well labor absolutely despises tech's elite. So seems fair


The thing is they hadn't until recently. What do you think the change was?


I'm going to suggest that it wasn't human nature that changed. Ie, the elites are not better or worse today than they have ever been as human beings

My real answer is that 40 years of low interest rates, have shifted all power to capital (not capital as a group of human beings. to literal capital) and now the workers are mad at a system setup to screw them and scapegoating the people on the other side of that system who really aren't the ones who set this up either.


It's an important question to think about. What changed from the Silicon Valley of old that believed anyone could accomplish anything - someone in their garage could change the world - and harnassing that enormous talent and ideas was their mission.

IMHO, they seem to be following the reactionary culture that dominates the US now - the worship of power, the contempt for humanity, for humans, and for the future.


Great resets start at chopping off the top of the pyramid.


Is this note not entirely, but still a bit of an over-reaction, given that the post-layoff numbers are still much larger than ~2 years ago?


Maybe that labor force should not sign up for jobs at a shady company with a fad/vaporware product that is on a hiring spree?


>The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers.

But in a way, didn't it do exactly that? Lots of tech workers have the audacity to complain about having to show up to the office, like it's some form of oppression. Or act like getting laid off is something really cruel, while getting months worth of severance.


After 2 years of WFH, the RTO complaints are absolutely valid. Everyone saw that it was not necessary for most people to be at the office to continue doing their work, but now they are being forced to go back because...

1. HR needs to justify real estate costs or HR will be cut back

2. HR wants to fire some people who refuse to go back because if they're not in the office then HR will be cut back

3. HR doesn't like the people that WFH because they are bucking the pay bands and if HR doesn't enforce the arbitrary salary bands then there won't be budget for hiring and HR will be cut back



We can see it coming now - the Final Solution to high tech salaries.

Expect to see a huge downward salary trend in the web front end/back end sector. That stuff is a solved problem. Expect salaries for new hires to drop below $100K and old hires being gradually pushed out.


ITT: People making > $200k TC complaining that they are mistreated "labor", and how they are not entitled and deserve more.


Tech's labor loves elites.


I automatically dismiss anything that uses the term "elite".


I love labor and do everything I can to make them productive and happy in the service of working for me.

I hate labor activists who want to tell me how to run my company and antagonize workers to see themselves in some sort of power struggle with management.

We are all working for the same mission - make as much money as possible. I don’t need hostile people around.


> I love labor and do everything I can to make them productive and happy in the service of working for me.

> I hate labor activists who want to tell me how to run my company and antagonize workers to see themselves in some sort of power struggle with management

If you're actually doing everything you can to make them productive and happy, then you won't have labor activists because they won't have anyone to rally. And if you mean activists at other companies, they shouldn't affect you either, because you're already doing what they are asking for elsewhere, right?

> We are all working for the same mission - make as much money as possible.

They want to make as much money as they can for themselves which is diametrically opposed to your goal of making as much money for yourself. That's why it's looked at as hostile.

The only way to be a good employer of labor is if your goal is to provide a great wage and benefits to your employees and then keep what is left over. Your goal can not be to make as money money as possible, because then you have to keep it away from your workers.


You're forgetting that labor activists are also motivated by profit, which is not necessarily aligned with interests of labor themselves. As we've seen from the social and news media, it's relatively easy to a make people angry and jealous without improving their lives at all.


Labor activists = unions/people who run unions? Atleast in my country we pay % of our paycheck to unions, so when I get more, they get more. It really the opposite of my employer, when I get less, they get more.




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