If we excuse a "news" organization from fact checking because "well, I've heard stories along those lines" we're screwed.. because where will most people hear those stories? The same organizations.
You’ll notice that Carney never disputes the truth of the claims. He only attacks the character of the people who made them- or adds related but not contradictory details. Overall, side issues not actually related to the substance of the claims themselves.
The point is that "journalists" have ethical guidelines they have to follow. Failure to do so compromises themselves and their profession. It leads to the defense and promotion of "fake but accurate" articles that tell a great story but risk being just that.. stories.
It's the equivalent of asking Hillary Clinton's opinion of Donald Trump. She may be 100% accurate in her assessment but she is not neutral or impartial.
This is a very naive view of journalism. It is trivial to do horrible, biased reporting while printing statements that are factually true or not falsifiable. In fact, that is how most of the biased articles are constructed these days. In the age of the Internet you can't get away with outright lies. The tool of trade are mission, misrepresentation, manufactured context, selective citation, cherrypiked expert opinions and so on.
I don't doubt that the original anti-Amazon article was a hit piece that was commissioned. That doesn't make its claims false, however.
We have a "news" organization doing opposition research, calling it investigative "journalism", and then the editor defending their process and integrity without an appropriate disclosure.
I sincerely hope that isn't the case. I could see the FTC getting involved if it was.
You pay for a column to advertise for your company, you get your column. You pay for a column to criticize your competitor, you get your column. You pay for columns to introduce new concepts that your company will use in the future so that the public has been primed for what you're going to put out there. All of the major companies do these things in order to stay in the public consciousness, and stay favorable.
Sure, these columns will admit "alternative viewpoints" in passing to maintain their veneer of credibility, but that's no threat to their actual purpose. The editor is going to defend their process and integrity until he is fired-- and firing him would represent a concession that mistakes were made. This spat with Amazon is good for the NYT, as it proves that they're willing to "stand up for themselves", which is the perfect trait for a proxy to have when you're paying them to go after the other guy.
It is a bit like when two people are accused of something, one is guilty and one is not. The one who is guilty will react more violently usually and go to extra lengths to "prove" their innocence.
So in this case we see them going the "extra length" with these response articles months after the original incident.
Edit: I meant in a tech role at Amazon. Amazon are not known for low pay.
Median salary for SF Region in 2014 was $75,900. Thats ~10k over the median for an ENTRY level position. Sure, could Google pay them more, absolutely. But I don't think 86k a year is anything to scoff at.
You don't think that among the many thousands of people working at Google, perhaps someone has 10% worse negotiating ability than you, or someone's background and experience impressed their interviewers 10% less? Or work in an area of the country with 10% less cost of living?
> and way more with stocks/bonuses.
The base pay is one thing, the total is quite another. Don't be surprised if the total comes to 200K +.
If you make $100,000 per year at an 8 person company, but the company's profit is $12 billion per year — do you have low pay?
The tech industry has discovered you can make employees happy by paying them more than "average," but it's still a lot lower than the benefits, productivity, and supernormal growth powers employees are providing to companies.
A productive software developer is worth at a minimum $3 million per year.
So, let's say $100k per year. That's (roughly, rounded up) $50 per hour.
What's minimum wage? A few places have minimum, uneducated, non-creative wage of $15 per hour.
Your hourly rate of $50/hr is about 3x of just somebody who does manual, non-creative labor. Are you worth more than 3x of a restaurant employee? I sure am.
Then, what's your "better than a non-creative womp" multiplier for your output? 10x? Surely you provide more than 10x value as compared to a fast food employee. You're a creative force (or, you can be when you apply yourself). 100x? That's more in the correct range.
So, 100x * minimum wage of $15/hr * 2087 hours/year = $3 million per year.
Amazon simply canceled $170 million (http://recode.net/2014/10/23/amazon-takes-170-million-writed...) due to their fire phone failure. Or, they could have given each employee working on the project a bonus of a little over a million dollars.
Easy come, easy go.
If the company is earning $12B/year with 12 employees, then the company founders (and early employees who contributed sweat-equity to get the company off the ground) should enjoy their success, but that doesn't mean that they need to pay new hires extravagant amounts of money as a sense of "fairness".
I've seen the balance sheet for my company, and right now, our software developers (well, all employees really) are worth negative dollars per year. Sure, our investors (and to a lesser extent our employees) may be rewarded handsomely some years down the road, but it's not the developers money that's on the line - they get a paycheck for as long as the company is in business, and they have no chance of losing any money they invested in the company. Though even if I could snap my fingers and make the company earn $100M/year overnight, there's no way a developer is worth $3M/year.
Just because you "got in early" and worked for a year then coast for the next 10 years while other people pull of the business doesn't mean you should get outsized rewards.
there's no way a developer is worth $3M/year.
Then perhaps your company isn't using developers as efficiently as they could be used? Sure, you can automate a $10 million industry, or you can destroy an $800 billion industry. Not all choices are equal.
Not all developers can work for companies poised to take over an $800B industry. For every developer in a disruptive company that's going to earn huge rewards, there's 100 developers writing a web backend for a struggling publishing company, or writing integrations for an ERP implementation. (and though that ERP can save the company millions of dollars, that savings is only due in a small part to that single developer's efforts)
That's the point of managing your own career and your own life, isn't it?
Nothing gets handed to you. You have to position yourself for success.
that savings is only due in a small part to that single developer's efforts
Not if you quit, make it SaaS and sell it to 3,000 companies for $100/month (or even $1,000/month).
Well no, it's a market limitation, not every developer can work for companies that are poised to take over an $800B industry. No matter how successful a developer is at such a company, there will still be a need for developers in less lucrative, more mundane jobs.
Not if you quit, make it SaaS and sell it to 3,000 companies for $100/month (or even $1,000/month).
Again, that's the risk part, not every developer is in a place in his life where he can quit his job with a steady paycheck and work for some speculative startup that may or may not ever become successful.
And besides, didn't you just say that developer who quit his job to work at a small startup shouldn't get an outsized reward just because he took that risk to work for an early stage startup?
I can't say that I have heard that of any other tech company.