Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time.
From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all full-stack software engineers.
If anyone wants to help out, send me an email to song at garagescript.org. I believe the real long term solution is to train under-served communities better and help them acquire technical skills.
edit remove donation link.
The hardest bit will be doing the marketing, getting sponsorship or donations from alumni so that it’s a sustainable organisation
Just a my two cents, but I'm not trying to advocate for everyone to learn coding though. Simple jobs will always be there in the near future for those who need it. I just have a problem with people who are capable of a skilled jobs being forced into simple jobs because of financial reasons.
Hence being lucrative.
Generalise it? No, because it was specific.
The person said ‘why aren’t people immediately filling demand for gardeners it pays well’ and the answer is... they don’t know how to garden it’s a skill they don’t have that takes years to acquire.
Please be mindful that while this all sounds like a great idea and I hope it really exists, this also could be a scam as there is no evidence or any 3rd party that this is a real nonprofit which has been paying 20 people 2k a month to learn to code.
Please don't donate until you're sure this person is using the money as they claim. Attempting to verify their website and facebook leads to some red flags - no pictures of events, just events on facebook with 1 or 2 people attending, no documented proof of the 16 people who are full stack developers. If the non-profit is successful as they've said it is, then if he doesn't want to burn through his own savings (again supposedly) then he needs to seriously do better marketing and proof. Even with those things, I'd be skeptical unless it was independently verified.
I lost the pw to my original account on HN, but here's my username: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=songzme
EDIT: It looks like they do have it.
This article is instead talking about the middle 90% of the population. And many many people in this group are perfectly capable of moving to tech.
We didn't have an interview process (in terms of selection). I was originally volunteering at a local library at a Free Code Camp meetup and got our first couple of students from there (the ones who really needed help). Afterwards it was word of mouth.
Finding students wasn't hard. We ran a 3 month pilot at our local library to teach coding for free (our students teaching the public) and many students showed up. In Silicon Valley, libraries wants to provide more technical resource / training but there aren't enough volunteers.
Do you think it's scaleable?
Our students are grouped into teams to launch real products so they can list work experience on their resumes. When they start their interview process, they train new students on their codebase.
I think if some of our students launch profitable products that are sustainable, we could show corporations that it might make sense to invest and train their community and hire from there rather than constantly 'look for the best' around the world.
http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salar...
We do not teach for loops and while loops. (Recursion is the only loop we use)
...okay. Maybe that's a joke, but look at that Github account! Your typical 18 year old CS freshman could throw together a more impressive set of code than this "charity" that has the wherewithal to pay out 25,000 (or 24,000) times 20 dollars and landed 14 of said students "full stack" positions. My shit company would drop all 14 of their resumes right in the garbage. Where are they getting hired?
And who in hell would spend their 401k on something like that? No one. Not the greatest fool in the world. Especially not a fool who managed to gain all of 41 Twitter follows in the process.
...just a plea for a minimum of skepticism. Hate to see a rather obvious swindle fool people.
The students working on llip.io built an android/ios react-native app as well as a webapp. Everyone working on that project got a job, so there is no development on that anymore.
The remaining group of students is working on c0d3.com and running beta on it. Currently they volunteer at the library with FCC on Saturdays to get more people using it to improve it. If you want to meet them, show up for the Saturday meetups! https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/events/qzddrmyxpbgc...
I do empathize with your concern though.
> low and middle income jobs, such as teachers and firefighters or nannies and cooks, are key to the local economy.
Someone else commented in this thread how all these jobs (meaning every non-tech, middle-class job) will begin to pay more once they're more in demand. The assumption is that programming/tech is highly paid because it's so in demand, and every other job isn't because vice versa.
Let's just take one job that is critical for a local economy - teachers. Some might mention that because of online learning places like Udemy, teachers for middle or high school education could be gotten rid of without too much harm. Even if you think that's true, consider children ages 0-12. Those children, undoubtedly, still need teachers/daycare of some kind. They're simply too young and at this point most adults prefer not to deal with kids, pursuing their careers instead (this is good! More brains in the knowledge economy helps spur innovation).
However, San Francisco is currently experiencing a teacher shortage of several years [1], so that vice versa I mentioned above is simply not true. The city is offering cash bonuses for teachers now, and it introduced some legislature to attempt to incrementally increase their wage, but it's not enough. Fewer people are entering the profession, knowing they need more than a cash bonus but a continually valued job that gets them consistent revenue to be able to afford to buy a house here. Even those that might have been attracted to teaching, they figure - well, I need more money to live than what being a teacher pays. That's simply an unacceptable standard of living for me and my future children.
So yes, those potential teachers can instead come to your non-profit and those individuals will be able to afford to live, fairly comfortably, as full-stack engineers.
But the community as a whole will have an even more drastic lack of teachers. While non-profits like yours help a few individuals, it is certainly not the panacea HN purports it to be.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-offers-rare...
I'm also not advocating everyone learn to become a software engineer. I think its unfair for people to become stuck in their low income jobs because of financial responsibilities. The goal of my nonprofit is really to help unstuck as many of them as I can.
http://www.mvla.net/files/user/776/file/Certificated%20Salar...
https://www.cusdk8.org/cms/lib/CA02218495/Centricity/Domain/...
A "teacher shortage" isn't the same as an increase in (free market) demand for teachers (or education). Who says that people actually demand the education that the public system forces upon them? It's more like the government can't fill the poorly paid positions it decided it needs to educate people.
If a private company figured out that it could make more money by hiring workers at a higher price, they would do it. But if they just have a "shortage" of cheap-enough workers to make more money, that's not actually more demand. That's equilibrium. Everybody always has a "shortage" of getting something for nothing.
Regardless of whether "people actually demand the education the public system forces upon them," people do demand a safe, stimulating place to put their very young kids while they go to work.
I don't see how that changes anything regarding what I said.
> Regardless of whether "people actually demand the education the public system forces upon them," people do demand a safe, stimulating place to put their very young kids while they go to work.
That's still not demand in the economic sense. People can "verbally" demand anything they want, if they're not willing and able to pay for it, it's not real economic demand.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-daycare-cost-in-the-Bay-...
The kind of teachers who have control over revenue are private school teachers, ballet teachers, music teachers, teachers at cram schools.
SF only has a shortage of teachers at the currently offered pay levels. If tech jobs paid the same as teaching, there'd be a "shortage" of tech workers too.
Glassdoor reports teachers teachers average $68k, Software engineers $137k.
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/san-francisco-teacher-s...
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/san-francisco-software-...
So why do we see only people complaining about the shortage of teachers, and not an increase in offered salary? Maybe cutting taxes to tech companies so they come to SF instead of the Peninsula wasn't such a good idea?
That's still supply and demand. A perfectly reasonable response to a shortage is to simple live with the consequences of the shortage.
I've heard of other ventures similar to this that would take a percentage of the students wages after getting them successfully hired, but even that seems to have fallen out of the news.
Have you looked for sponsorship from the big companies who are ultimately benefiting (the more potential staff they have, the lower the salaries they can pay)
I haven't had time to look for sponsorship yet, our numbers are pretty low and I've been focusing on each student, one by one.
Anyway, here's the report in question: http://www.everettprogram.org/main/wp-content/uploads/TIGHTR...
Reading the fine details of the report, you see that the top-line metric is real income, adjusted for inflation and local cost of living. And the #1 factor that's proved ruinous to local cost of living in the Bay Area these past two decades is of course housing prices. If zoning restrictions were relaxed and more housing was allowed to be built, costs would be reduced and a lot of these problems would be solved. The Bay Area has a critical lack of housing, which is driving all these prices up and causing most of the decline in CoL-adjusted non-tech wages.
My #1 issue is housing. We have got to build more in the Bay Area. It's a social justice issue.
All of which to say that assessing the property tax on the current market value of all those properties isn't an accurate number; there is no way there are so many people making that much money living in California.
It is no surprise that all but the fastest growing wages cannot outpace all but the fastest growing real estate prices in the world.
If those wages were nationally adjusted for inflation instead of locally adjusted for housing costs, the story would be entirely different. The middle-wage jobs aren’t fully pricing in real estate I suppose because the people who hold those jobs don’t live in the “Real Bay Area” and must commute long distances to work.
It’s terrible for just about everyone for housing prices to raise faster than 2-3% annually, certainly any faster than national inflation rates will impact mobility.
> Surprisingly, the UC Santa Cruz study suggests that employment in low wage industries is growing. The share of worker in jobs considered low-wage in 1997 grew 25 percent over the next 20 years, while the percent working in middle- and high-wage jobs declined.
The problem isn't that wages are dropping for certain work; the problem is that middle-wage jobs are being automated away, leaving only low-skill but non-automatable jobs that require organically-optimized things that all people have but machines don't, like fingers and eyes.
Machines already have those. They're just more costly and clunky than humans, often by a relatively small margin.
Anyone thinking low-skilled / low-paid jobs are not automatable is deluding themselves.
It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots.
No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx of capital in the area is being returned only to the tech sector, who merrily spend it and drive up the cost of living. The machines are not to blame for this one.
For example, Essex: https://www.essexapartmenthomes.com/about
They're even publicly listed: NYSE:ESS
Or the Irvine company, after which Irvine, California is named after because they designed the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company
A fun fact is that the University of California, Irvine, was named that six years before the city was incorporated.
In the case of the building I live in (in "downtown" Sunnyvale), the three front office workers and two maintenance persons come nowhere near making a dent in the $4.5 million in income this one property earns yearly. Can't speak to the wages of the staff in the other >12 buildings in the portfolio, but the folks keeping this place running aren't driving Teslas.
To be clear the flow is: tech companies make enormous revenue but require high skill workers. To make this work they pay whatever it costs to get workers and no more - in this case that means just enough to offset the enormous cost of housing.
Since the baby boomers practically banned all housing development in the bay once their little burns were built, this result in a little see-saw battle where landlords raise the rent until tech companies are forced to raise wages, back and forth. Employees are left with an equation that looks basically like: enormous salary - obscene rent = just a bit more cash flow than you’d earn in software anywhere else.
Thus the flow of capital is from tech companies to landlords, in an arms race that will only end when the landlords have taken so much of the capital out of tech that the industry sputters and moves away.
It's probably true that the cost of minimally acceptable housing drives entry level tech salaries, but they go way up from there. A senior SWE at Google with salary+bonus+stock of $300k/year has a whole lot of disposable income even after the ridiculous housing expenses.
The simplest is families living on one income. In most of the country this is easily achievable if you can break six figures, but in SF housing is priced for two full area incomes, so if you want to make it work with one parent at home you either have a relatively small and ratty apartment (compared to housing stock elsewhere) or you spend $6000+ per month on housing which takes a dramatic bite out of that $300k you’re taking about.
They often aren't, they are saving it (effectively, often directly, investing in the global capital markets and/or, insofar as their compensation has an equity component, directly in their own firm.)
While you'll no doubt continue telling the deplorables that they're racist and xenophobic for failing to welcome their currency and cost-of-living arbitraging foreign-replacements with open arms, could you at least refrain from pretending that the basic laws of economics (i.e supply and demand) no longer exist?
Immigrants increase the supply of labor, and thus lower wages. That's not a boogieman. It's a fact.
Nope....
Immigrants are more likely to start businesses than the local population, thus creating jobs. Mostly that's small service and retail businesses. But also Google and Tesla.
Plus, obviously, a population increase also drives demand. In fact, for every job that somebody has, exactly one job was somehow created, on average.
In your theory, the US could radically lower unemployment by simply splitting up.
Most of the cost of living increase is due to bone-headed housing polices happily voted in by existing residents, the vast majority of which do not work in tech. I personally find it very sad that we've prioritized rewarding a tiny, vocal minority at the expense of literally everyone else, but it seems a large number of people would rather point fingers at the villian-of-the-day than change anything.
you mean the tech industry? I mean, sure NIMBYism is a big problem but the tech industry gentrifies everything it touches.
I'm not American so may not have this perfectly right but the Detroit of the past seems to be a good analogue to SV. Lots of well paid jobs in a single industry. When the eventual downturn occurs you don't want to be left with a ghost town.
The lack of diversification in employment makes the residents as a whole more vulnerable to the next sector based bust (see dotcom crash).
If there is a larger supply of housing then more properties will be put on the market in such an event. This could exacerbate any fall in prices or result in a large number of abandoned properties which can be pretty damaging to a neighborhood.
We get a sort of similar effect here in Australia. A mine opens in the outback somewhere and prices rise rapidly in the nearest town(s). Then a whole heap of new housing gets built to meet the demand and make some profit. One day resource prices fall, the mines cut back on operations, and suddenly there is a housing oversupply and the whole local market falls pretty harshly.
If you were a local resident who lived there the entire time you would probably be feeling pretty shortchanged by the end.
The correct answer is probably to build some new housing supply but definitely not as much as the peak demands.
Why is that? It doesn't change the fact that once the mines are gone, they're gone. The value of existing homeowner's investment has been preserved but nothing's been done to buffer the economy or help people pushed out of rentals. It's just transferring wealth to rentiers.
Diversifying the economy -- having an environment more encouraging to industry, not less -- is the right answer.
A whole heap of people are working high wage jobs in essentially the middle of nowhere. The local towns don't have the capacity to replace many lost jobs and aren't the ideal place for all of the now unemployed workers to end up. You don't want a whole heap of empty houses in an area with no jobs.
Diversifying the economy is definitely a step in the right direction and is likely more feasible in an area like SV. On the flipside you've got to be careful that the other industries are valuable in their own right and don't exist solely due to the rivers of money in the area.
And that housing stock overseen by a corrupt government that embezzled from the public, and a school board presided by a guy who seemingly can't write. It's a city whose politics are scarred by _multiple_ race riots.
In contrast, SV is a network of small suburban towns, all of which are happily constructing new office spaces but virtually no new housing. Rent prices are 3k USD a month, highest in the nation. An economic downturn shifts the local market from 'absurdly unaffordable' to 'merely very expensive'. And due to California's own political schemes, a permanent drop in housing prices would probably help local governments balance the books if it meant they could pay folks less while still taking in the same amount of tax revenues due to Prop 13.
bone-headed housing polices happily voted in by existing residents
Cities and counties don't even have an initiative or referendum power open to residents, generally.
Oddly, I only know of two people in my condo associate that work in tech, and both of us support new housing, the ones that are most vocally opposed have been here for 20+ years. Ok, maybe that's not so odd, the people that have been here the longest don't want more change.
a lot of current residents showing up at planning meetings
In reality, almost all such meetings are lightly attended at best unless a "progressive" interest group transports then in.
Almost all Bay Area city council try to portray themselves as "progressives". Even in stodgy San Jose, not one councilmember is a Republican.
The last one I went to was packed full of neighborhood residents
[1] https://hoodline.com/2015/11/sf-planning-101-how-community-i...
They do in San Francisco.
There's the power of the refererendum (for instance, Prop C)
"Referendum" has a specific legal meaning in CA and is almost never used because the signature threshold is the same as for Initiative statues that you can bend however you want. Referendum takes just as much work with far less utility.
a dedicated neighbor can stall construction for years by forcing reviews
So those who did mid-level things like accounting or office administrative work could no longer find work locally and either had to move or take a lower paying service worker position at Walmart.
Essentially what that reveals is that most of these mid-level jobs are susceptible to the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect [1]
Which means that most jobs that do not require physical labor onsite are either being rapidly outsourced to cheaper markets or automated if possible. This ends up being that group in the middle of the pay range and likely accounts for the reduction in overall wages for that group.
[1] http://www.bankpedia.org/index.php/en/87-english/b/23137-bal...
- Google bought the Port Authority building, which is like 2 empire state buildings in terms of office space. They have plenty of engineers working there: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/google-nyc/ This year they bought the building next door: https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/... - Apple has a large campus in Austin: http://fortune.com/2016/09/01/apple-austin-campus/ - Amazon's obviously diversifying "HQ" locations
The question is why companies hiring engineers by the thousands every year keep pushing to open more offices in the valley. Why is it ideal to shift HR and accounting away from the west coast but keep engineering local?
VC are in SV and they want founders/CEOs close by. And founders/CEO want their engineers close by.
But honestly even if you really need your headquarters in SV (for VC money, network, saying you're a "Silicon Valley company", etc) your best bet is to open offices in other locations to hire engineers. Not only they can have a better standard of living even if you pay them less, but you will have less competition to hire and retain engineers.
VC -> Startup -> Employee -> Landlord
Land, monopolies, skills and talent endowments, capital, and power all return rents. Likely risk as we'll.
Most of books 1, 2, and 5 of Smith.
That website explicitly includes benefits, what are you talking about?
Caretakers - all those robotic vacuums that are starting to become ubiquitous. Certainly not a total replacement but it lowers demand for humans.
But you don't need to automate a job to depress it's wages, just increase the supply of potential workers by automating many of the other jobs.
Hmm. In California? No.
[Ok, the bit about "spread[ing] the same way" may be relevant, but not in the implied direction. And yes, the need for large numbers of firefighters in an emergency undoubtably makes planning/costs tricky.]
(But no, no one involved in that discussion was from California)
I'm confused by "(But no, no one involved in that discussion was from California)" in the context of a discussion about salaries in Silicon Valley...
Edit: and from out of state too: https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2018/11/11/cgb-13-...
The article does NOT say that teachers and firefighters are seeing wage cuts.
> Workers in low and middle income jobs, such as teachers and firefighters or nannies and cooks, are key to the local economy.
teachers and firefighters are middle income, and are the core of that bracket who have demand inelasticity. Store clerks do not enjoy that, so they just lose their middle-income jobs.
1) Introducing a much higher tax rate for rental property income.
2) Making property taxes be reassessed every single year unless your AGI is lower than average and you are a resident.
3) Introducing a much (much!) higher tax for non-residents/foreign investors who buy a house purely for investment, and sometimes they don't even rent it out (I know a few rich folks from FAANG who bought a handful of houses in MV, and they keep them empty because they don't want the trouble of dealing with tenants, they say the appreciation is more than enough, to me it's borderline criminal).
I've seen numerous instances of those three events playing out against normal people trying to afford some housing while working a normal job. If it's not obvious, I'm heavily biased against real estate investors, because housing is a need for everybody, so the market should be much more regulated.
Someone should do a "lights out" analysis in the Bay, where you count the number of homes that don't turn their lights on at night for 30 days.
It will take a lot of political organizing to undo. There have been several attempts and they all meet stiff resistance.
No that's actually a large part of housing problems. Like a third of Manhattan real estate is empty. And Manhattan is already super dense but still has homeless people.
[0] https://www.nakedapartments.com/blog/nyc-vacancy-rate/ [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/18HSR.pd...
I live in Manhattan and the idea that a full third of the real estate here is empty is laughable. Have you ever visited??
As my sibling comment points out, the real rate (as determined by actual data) is less than 5%.
"about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant for more than 10 months a year" [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-...
Even your source shows it... that's 30 percent of a small (presumably affluent) section of the city, not of the whole city. There are some 2.5 million apartments in the city, and this is talking about just 5k.
There are other sources that cite the actual percentage as 11% [1]. That's still high, unfair to residents, and worth discussing, but you can't win arguments by putting up fake stats.
[1] https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-si...
The article itself says > Among all of the 845,000 apartments and houses in Manhattan, 102,000 were identified as vacant in the 2005-9 American Community Survey.
The numbers are a bit muddied, because the article hints but doesn't ivestigate the seasonal bias in vacancy:
> Of those, about 33,000 — or about 1 in every 25 Manhattan homes — had an owner or renter who lived there less than two months of the year.
“Many” may be an exaggeration: Berkeley, Emeryville, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Francisco.
There is a fundamental disconnect in daily life between perceptions of what a job entails and its true costs. No wonder management and purchasing departments everywhere is constantly underestimating effort and costs, then getting pissed when risks and quality issues come up.
[1] https://www.electriciantalk.com/f2/why-do-you-charge-so-much...
Most of my neighbors are contractors / construction workers. Nobody I know can fathom buying a home. But until last year things were fairly stagnant for them. There is a lot more construction going on now, but it's mostly to turn homes we can't afford into vacation rentals.
For decades now we’ve been surviving off technical debt. Cars and roads allow us to survive even when our cities are absurdly inefficiently organized. But as the nation changes more and more, our top cities’ roads and street layouts don’t adapt to the change, so we have unbearable traffic in every major city. On top of that, we continue to ignore the needs of a more efficient method of organizing ourselves - relaxing zoning to allow organic growth in the city, and construction of mass transit between the dense regions that develop under this system.
That’s how we developed cities before we started relying on cars, and what we need to do to continue scaling American cities. Or we can just accept as every house in the Bay Area reaches multimillion dollar price tag.
Not really - a natural side effect of corporations not paying their fair share in taxes, alongside employees who are compensated in ways (stock options) where large chunks of their salary are untaxable by local governments.
(It's my understanding it's much harder for local governments to tax stock options as capital gains go to feds, please correct me if I'm mistaken)
Capital gains are reported on your tax return as a form of income. The rate at which they're taxed is up to each jurisdiction. For federal taxes, long-term capital gains happen to be taxed at a lower rate than other income. For California state taxes, there is no such distinction - all income, including capital gains, is taxed on the same progressive taxation schedule. So for Californians, getting paid in stock options usually results in lower federal taxes, but no change in state taxes.
Now, where it gets interesting is with local jurisdictions. In California, cities and counties are not allowed to collect income taxes. However, San Francisco does collect payroll taxes. Paying your employees in options could reduce the amount that counts as payroll, but only if the stock options are increasing in value quickly. If your employees are getting all of their money from you, the city gets its cut. If your employees are getting some of their money from you and some from the stock market, then the city loses out on the latter portion - but most employees should consider that a bonus and negotiate pay primarily based on current value, so that shouldn't matter too much in the long run.
What the city (but not the state!) definitely misses out on taxing is capital gains on wealth already accrued. When I make money on investments (not so much this year, but hypothetically), the city doesn't get anything from that, because there's no payroll involved. The feds get some of it (at the reduced capital gains rates, assuming I've held for a year); California gets some of it (at the full income tax rate); San Francisco gets none. But again, that story is only for investment income on money I already had, not for new stock compensation.
1. Housing is expensive because of the influx of people immigrating to the state from out of state and also out of country. (I'm one of them.) This causes a housing shortage which will naturally drive up price of housing.
2. The housing prices don't come down because California in general has very restrictive zoning laws, especially in the most expensive areas, that prevent building of sufficient housing density to cover demand. This in turn drives housing development further outside of the bay area forcing long commute times and highway usage.
3. Because of the high cost of living (primarily from housing, food/etc is not significantly more expensive) from the above problems the solution proposed is to greatly raise the minimum wage, now hitting $15 in many areas. This causes a drive to automate away simpler jobs (also providing an entry for further tech startups to automate these things) or more commonly, move the jobs out of the state via company acquisition followed by moving the administrative jobs to company headquarters located out of state or sometimes out of country. A high minimum wage reduces the available job market by putting an artificial job supply limit in place thus causing unemployment for these simpler jobs.
4. On top of this there's a loophole for illegal immigrants where companies abuse them by paying them below minimum wage because they are here illegally. (Another reason that giving a path to legal immigration for illegal immigrants would help things.)
The first thing and most important thing that needs to happen is for the state to overrule local zoning laws (as opposed by the NIMBYs) and force generic zoning, allowing unrestricted housing development. Just look at the south bay area. The zoning is obvious even looking at satellite maps. Industrial areas are kept separate from housing which are kept separate from retail. This prevents natural intermixing of these causing a lot of need for road development to allow people to travel between these blocks rather than walking down the street.
I would rather consider paying anyone below minimum wage a form of wage theft and prosecutable as a criminal offense. Dunno why embezzlement is a felony but breaking the law to underpay people is just grounds for a lawsuit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/technology/silicon-valley...
Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe in this one....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay here.
https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/ftc-brings-first-wage-fixin...
Oh, indeed I shall. Still, we're sold a bundle of goods by the capitalists that "unions are evil" and et cetera, yet when when it is advantageous to the very capitalists, they form unions of their own to hold down the very workers' wages.
Now, some unions do indeed suck. They were ineffective and only lacklusterly fought for employee rights. Yet, many demanded fair compensation and safe working conditions. And with companies forming unions, are pushing both of those down.
Look at FAANG on glassdoor and news websites. They're no rosy pictures, unless you're in ML at the top. But that price bump is just temporary. It'll come down in time.
What I'd hope is that tech realizes that the capitalists are treating us IT people as yet more line workers. Where once we had rooms, they dissolved to cubicles. From cubicles, we only wish we had them as now it is "open office" concepts. Insurance premiums keep going up, and compensation keeps lowering. And with more automation, the demand for more work skyrockets. 'Fire 2 and let the 3rd take over'. Ive read those stories again and again.
IT needs unions, now more than ever. It is the only counteracting force when 'They' (capitalists) are indeed out to get us.
It's not like unions aren't susceptible to the same thing. [1]
[1]http://nlpc.org/2018/01/18/top-ten-union-corruption-stories-...
The large tech companies should have been broken up about 5 years ago.
The only reason that any of us have job is because capitalists in the 70s and 80s popularised computers so they were small enough and low enough in price for anyone to own. It really pains me that most are completely ignorant of anything that happened in computing before the mid-90s.
Regulation and Unions help corporations because it makes it raises the bar of difficultly for startups to enter any market.
As for working environment. I work from home and I freelance. I run a high end modern workstation with dual 4k screens, a nice sound system for music and my choice of caffeinated beverages. If you don't want to be a slave to the man, work for yourself.
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity [0]
Please keep your ideological battles away from HN.
I've made a point, from multiple sources, that SV major players are retarding salaries from all but the C-level positions. Considering that YC is in that area, it would be a rather interesting discussion to hear from the VC's vs workers vs founders.
But, threats.
I'd love to hear that conversation, I think it'd be very interesting. That is very tangential to commentary on capitalism itself, which is purely ideological.
This article is about low-skill workers, and has nothing to do with tech companies being against unions.
But, it could simply be a tangential discussion, and those are often interesting! My main concern was the
Capitalists are well known to conspire together and create capitalist unions to block workers of all stripes.
So... You're masquerading as a HN mod? Damn.
Now, that seems like a bannable offense.
I've edited my first comment to make it more apparent - I thought that sort of comment was a common thing, but perhaps I'm wrong.
We have a problem with corporatism not capitalism.
Please learn the difference.
True.
> We have a problem with corporatism not capitalism.
In the U.S., we have a problem with something much closer to capitalism. (People occasionally indicate that it is a problem with “crony capitalism”, but cronyism has always been a feature or capitalism, it is not an aberration or alien feature.)
In China (and even maybe Mexico, though much moreso during the PRI one-party era) there is a problem with corporatism, which is not th same thing as (even crony) capitalism.
Both are problems of global impact, to be sure.
No crony capitalism is not a feature of capitalism. Crony capitalism is a feature of corporatism. You clearly don't understand the terms you are using.
China is a totalitarian state that as long as those businesses keep in line and bring enough benefit to the state (which is run by wealthy elites). Businesses are allowed to exist if they don't challenge this status quo. In China an individual has no property rights unlike most of the Anglo-sphere. This is because property rights are an important pre-requisite to many of the other rights we enjoy in the western world.
Yes, it's a feature of the real world system for which the term capitalism was coined by it's 19th Century critics, and it's been a prominent feature of every real example (including, to a varying extent, the modern mixed economies that have completely replaced the original system named “capitalism”, but retain significant elements of its structure, and are often referred to as “capitalism”.)
It may not be a feature of the incoherent and unworkable “ideal” capitalism dreamed up as a defense after the criticism in which “capitalism” was named, but that fantasy has little relevance to anything.
> Crony capitalism is a feature of corporatism.
No, it's not. Capitalism, crony or otherwise, isn't an essential feature or corporatism, though some versions of corporatism have encompassed elements of capitalism though sometimes at a fairly superficial level.
It's true that corporatism provides strong opportunities for cronyism, though.
Capitalism isn't really a system. It is just what comes about if people are allowed to trade freely and property rights are protected by the government/law enforcement. It is now recognised as an economic system.
I am not really wanting to get into a debate about Marxism. However the ideas that have spawed from Marxism probably killed 100 million people last century. So I don't really give much credence to them and you aren't going to convince me otherwise.
The mixed economies we have in Europe are frankly shite if you want to create your own business. In the UK I get taxed 4 times. I get have:
1. Corporation tax
2. Tax on withdrawing dividends
3. VAT Tax
4. Income tax.
Then if I employ other people full time. I have to setup a pension scheme because the Government (through collusion) bailed out the banking system and made everyone's state pensions worthless, which requires me employing more people I can't afford (as I am a one man band) to manage that. This has created the rise of more evil things like zero day contracts and the gig economy in the UK.
This means it is impossible in some circumstances to enter the market and grow if you are a smaller business because simply the overheads are too high. So there really isn't an open or competitive market.
So they aren't really capitalism either.
> It may not be a feature of the incoherent and unworkable “ideal” capitalism dreamed up as a defense after the criticism in which “capitalism” was named, but that fantasy has little relevance to anything.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Please be specific.
>No, it's not. Capitalism, crony or otherwise, isn't an essential feature or corporatism, though some versions of corporatism have encompassed elements of capitalism though sometimes at a fairly superficial level.
Err. I never said that. I originally said that capitalism wasn't corporatism. Crony capitalism isn't really capitalism because capitalism requires competitive markets.
"Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class."
This implies there isn't a competitive market. Therefore it isn't capitalism.
I don't believe anyone mentioned Marxism or Communism anywhere in this thread. But no matter...
I'd love to hear an analysis of all deaths that capitalism has caused. And yes, I'm counting wars over resources, starvation, lack of medical care.. You know, the same way capitalists count against communists. Lets compare apples to apples.
And for a statement: I don't believe communism is a way forward. It's a 200 year old idea, that when it was implemented multiple times, has ugly failure modes. And.. the citizens end up trading one master (capitalist) for another (communist overseer).
The rest of this "Crony" vs "Corporate" seems like a word definition war. How about some good definitions before we move on.
Capitalism has brought a huge population of the world out of poverty in the last century.
Wars over resources isn't capitalism, most starvation last century was caused by communism. Lack of medical care, I have no idea what this has to do with free trade and property rights. On the subject of healthcare, I live in the UK and the NHS fails to deliver adequate care and constantly doesn't meet targets, even though there is an ever increasing amount of tax payers money invested in it. So social healthcare doesn't work and the NHS is probably one of the better examples in the world.
Capitalism is just the results of free trade and property rights.
> And.. the citizens end up trading one master (capitalist) for another (communist overseer).
What are you talking about? If you live in a capitalist system in the west you have individual rights and property rights. Nobody is your master, anyone can start their own business and be their own boss.
If you wanna work for a large megacorp so be it. Not for me, I started my own small IT business. I make enough monthly to pay myself a decent pension (funded by myself), my own healthcare and buy myself property next year (just a regular house nothing fancy but it is mine, I won't be renting anymore if all goes well).
> The rest of this "Crony" vs Corporate" seems like a word definition war. How about some good definitions before we move on
I have given the correct definitions and have linked or quoted them in my replies. You can look them up, I have used the common definitions. Our other friend I have no idea what definitions he was using.
Again, one can critique a system (Capitalism) without forwarding some other system (Communism).
> Capitalism has brought a huge population of the world out of poverty in the last century.
And we can't even AB test this. We don't know how it would have fared with strong constitutional monarchies, or more democracy, or what-have-you.
This statement is a tautology. It sounds good to capitalists, but is effectively unprovable against other systems we have.
> Wars over resources isn't capitalism, most starvation last century was caused by communism. Lack of medical care, I have no idea what this has to do with free trade and property rights. On the subject of healthcare, I live in the UK and the NHS fails to deliver adequate care and constantly doesn't meet targets, even though there is an ever increasing amount of tax payers money invested in it. So social healthcare doesn't work and the NHS is probably one of the better examples in the world.
Again, when capitalists compare deaths, its deflected and obfuscated with other justifications that it isn't indeed capitalism that causes it. But as you ask, what does this have to do with "free trade and property rights"? Its because free trade and property rights are the initial conditions. Yet when we look at first and second derivatives of where those rules lead, it leads to the abuses and horrific uses of power. Communists have no corner on violence, btw. The US military was moved in multiple times to bust up worker protests and strikes... And they usually killed quite a few people. Again, 2nd derivative action.
And about NHS, "So social healthcare doesn't work and the NHS is probably one of the better examples in the world." Let me get this straight - -because 1 system has "failed" (your definition of failure, undefined), that NO social healthcare can work? Pretty sure there's a problem with that logic.
> Capitalism is just the results of free trade and property rights.
As initial conditions, sure. I'm talking about how those base rules expand and lead to logical rules from them. You've seen Conway's Game of Life? They are simple rules as well, but contain all sorts of emergent behavior. I'm only saying that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and further derived rules of capitalism are not healthy and good for society.
I'm not positing communism. If anything, I would put forth worker cooperatives as a possible interim solution. That would change the dynamic of work from a dictatorship to that of democracy. Democracies aren't always better, but dictatorships are usually regarded as terrible things.
> If you wanna work for a large megacorp so be it. Not for me, I started my own small IT business. I make enough monthly to pay myself a decent pension (funded by myself), my own healthcare and buy myself property next year (just a regular house nothing fancy but it is mine, I won't be renting anymore if all goes well).
Maybe we aren't clear. When I talk about capitalists, I'm not taking of an IT worker, retail worker, or even a middle manager. I'm talking of the people/organizations that own the bulk of property and/or own most the money or resources. I'm talking "banking crisis, 2008" type of people/orgs. Those are the capitalists.
In the end, you may do better or worse than other IT workers. I hope you do well. But, the ugly truth is that you are (in the UK) fighting against others in your same boat, for the few scraps. And that fighting is what fractures us. We see the same with Uber (cab), that pits driver against driver, for the same few scraps.
1. The deaths under communism (of which there were millions were directly caused by communism). In the Soviet Union, Land was taken from the peasants that had finally got themselves some property and those that protested were killed. The land was then given to those that didn't know how to farm it. Millions died.
In Maoist china there was "The great leap forward" again there was a massive famine because of Agricultural collectivisation. Part of this was the four pests campaign. Millions died, we are talking 25-40 million people.
I am not even counting things like the holodomore yet.
All of these were a direct consequences of the collectivisation and tyrannical communist system.
Your complaints about the negatives of capitalism are simply vagaries about secondary effects and the odd time that Western powers have been tyrannical. It is neither convincing or provides a base for sensible discussion. it is simply what-aboutery when you consider the number of people that perished. Also you are using the term capitalist incorrectly yet again.
As for the claim am obfuscating issues away. I can point directly to policies/order made by tyrants that led to the death or millions. In response I get vagaries back about secondary effects.
This sort of comparison is a complete nonsense.
2 Regarding the NHS and to quote you "your definition of failure, undefined". I had defined it. They had consistently missed targets for a number of years despite cash injections. Almost anyone sensible would say that was a failure.
3. Again more vagaries about secondary effects. This is how you fix those secondary effects, you put in sensible legislation / regulation. BTW the un-intended consequence of the "Four pest campaign" is that many well known insects that destroyed crops had no natural predators (in this case I believe it was sparrows IIRC). So the unintended consequence of a policy I can directly point that killed 25-40 million people, yet you present to be vagaries about health care and wars which maybe tangentially related to the economics of capitalism.
Read some history, read some philosophy and get your terminology correct please.
4.
> I'm talking of the people/organizations that own the bulk of property and/or own most the money or resources. I'm talking "banking crisis, 2008" type of people/orgs. Those are the capitalists.
You are using the term capitalists incorrectly yet again. A capitalist is some that simply believes in free trade, wage labour and the pre-requisites like individual rights and property rights. You mean a social political elite and banking cartels. BTW your views align more with Steve Bannon btw.
5. Thank you for the well wishes. I have taken my destiny into my own hands. I work freelance and my fortunes are wholly up to me. If it doesn't work out well there is a whole world of opportunities out there I am a fairly smart person.
Where is this money going?