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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

How exactly is Big Tech depressing wages? Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft all pay more than almost any other companies, regardless of role. Amazon pays all its employees at least $15 and offers far better benefits than any other large employer to those lowest on the totem pole. Compare Amazon to Walmart and then tell me who the bad guy is. Google and others have raised the median wages for tech workers through the roof, to the point that a career that barely existed 20 years ago is now one of the best-paying jobs you can get. Tech employs millions of people making six figure starting salaries, many of them self-taught or with very affordable educations. Tech has created the largest crop of millionaires in generations.

I'm not saying there aren't problems with large companies, tech or otherwise, but how exactly are they depressing wages? Who's getting screwed?

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Other than the time Apple and Google (and others) got sued for exactly that[1], some economists believe that the large size of many companies is why wages have been stagnating. Specifically, that they've become big enough that there's essentially a monopsony on hiring[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/06/18/733510647/appl... which references https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/536-...

you are. you should actually be getting paid much more. Just because you are getting paid more than everyone else doesn't mean that you still aren't getting underpaid.

That is the scarcity mindset. Instead, engineers should be getting million+ salaries instead of the measly 150k+.

Well, none of this applies to me personally, since I'm not working at all, and would never work for one of the big tech companies. Most people I see making six figures aren't actually all that productive. I don't believe in the 10X engineer, but I may believe in the -10X engineer.

> I don't believe in the 10X engineer, but I may believe in the -10X engineer.

I think you mean a X/10 Engineer. A -10X engineer would have to work backwards.

I think it’s possible to have a -X engineer.. someone who might accomplish some amount of work but then also create a lot more work for everyone else, enough that they’re actually a net drain in productivity. I’m sure there are quite a few -NX managers as well

That is what I meant. I've worked with a lot of expensive engineers who created net negative value, drained the resources of everyone around them, and would have created a more productive team simply by departing and being replaced with no one.

In this case, it isn't the wage of each employee that matters. Companies like Amazon and Google and especially Facebook have become so digitally automated that they pay much lower wages per dollar of income than any competitor can hope to do.

While this depresses jobs more than it does wages, it makes it equally as hard for a competitor to compete on the cost of labor as suppressing wages would do. Either way, the net effect is to suppress competition.

A greater problem comes when a market dominator extends their power into other market niches controlled only by cost, like generics and foodstuffs, as Amazon especially is doing.

One solution is to disable entry of a monopolist into these downstream markets, as Warren is proposing. But a more lasting redress must somehow diminish the company's position of monopoly.

> Who's getting screwed?

SWE's who do not get hired at all because there are so few competitive ecommerce, search, online advertising, and social networking companies.

From a politician's perspective, it may be a far more powerful vote-getter to have policies where 3X people are employed at $70K than one where X people are employed at $210K.

Amazon at least is out-competing a lot of retail nationally, essentially moving tax revenue from brick and mortar stores throughout the country to Seattle. So a lot of people not living in costal cities are getting screwed.

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