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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>Someone stocking shelves in 2020 is about productive as someone stocking shelves in 1968.

This is not completely fair. There are countless innovations that have allowed these low skill jobs to have an increase in efficiency and productivity.

One example, when I was a teen and worked retail I remember we would all have to spend hours going around the store counting every product on the shelves in order to do our routine inventory checks because there was no other reasonable way to track that information. Now many stores have intelligent inventory tracking that requires little to no work from employees. The end result is that these employees are more efficient, stores need less workers, and stores can carry less inventory. Why isn't the benefit of that efficiency passed on to those employees who are now more efficient? How is that any different than a software developer receiving a higher salary because they are more efficient due to computers being more powerful?

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I think the point the OP is making is that the benefit of this efficiency gain is passed on to the technology teams that implement and maintain those intelligent inventory tracking systems. They are the ones getting paid the higher salaries. They are the ones making the the store workers more efficient.

What makes you feel that Software developer salary is linked to computing power? In fact, even if we were to consider it a fair comparison, computing power, if measured by Moore's law has doubled every 2 years. Software Engineer salaries have lagged far far behind.

>What makes you feel that Software developer salary is linked to computing power? In fact, even if we were to consider it a fair comparison, computing power, if measured by Moore's law has doubled every 2 years. Software Engineer salaries have lagged far far behind.

Honestly, I don't think there is any relation between developer salary and computational power. I was just reaching for a possible explanation for this[1] that fits with the theory that people are paid based on their productivity. It is my belief that people are paid based off the supply and demand for their labor. Productivity only serves as a ceiling for compensation and even then, that is only in the long term. Plenty of people are paid more than their production either over the short term or when productivity is difficult to measure. An employer's natural inclination is to pay people as far below their level of production as possible while still filling the job.

It is my belief that the reason that low skill wages have stagnated is not because their efficiency has stagnated. It is because their supply is outpacing their demand. The supply of software developers is not keeping up with demand so their wages are increasing. Neither has anything to do with productivity in my opinion.

[1] - https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/5n4R_Osks_fVsVmedxJKsp9zPu...

That graph is not very well laid out; in order to see the effect it purports to show, you'd want to scale the SWE salary to all salaries to compare them; otherwise, you're just looking at "SWE is paid more than most occupations" → "SWE is still paid more than most occupations". Both clearly experienced growth, but did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally?

The SWE line in that graph grows by ~74%, and all other occupations by ~57%. So, the title seems probably correct, plus or minus the accuracy of my eyeball in reading those. But that's not how to present that…

(And also, the sin of not putting the Y axis min at 0, to exaggerate the effect.)

As a SWE myself, looking at the potential cost of housing if I ever decide to start a family, I'd mostly say SWE's wage growth hasn't kept pace. All other occupations are just getting hosed even harder. (My opinion here is that it's somewhat housing cost/supply: too little supply is driving the cost up, and wage increases are likely to just push that further. What is needed there is increases in the supply, moreso than wages, for housing specifically. For wages, I do think the minimum wage is too low, and has not kept pace. See also this graph: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariou... )

Housing, Healthcare and Education. Those three have eaten up a larger and larger chunk of people's paychecks over the years.

In regards to the cost of housing, I came across an adage a while back that has stuck with me, "Housing can either be affordable, or a great investment, not both". I think the real solution is a change in policy for housing to no longer be treated as a great investment. Not that I have high hopes of this ever coming about.

What would that look like? Would you disallow non-occupant ownership?

Build housing and keep on building until prices stop rising.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...

> Like so many other global first-world cities, Tokyo is experiencing explosive population growth, increasing by 1.6 million people since 2000. And unlike practically every U.S. city, it has almost no empty land. So it has responded through vertical growth, tearing down old structures and replacing them with high rises at a pace light-years ahead of anywhere in modern America. As FT’s Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).” Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area. > This has stabilized Tokyo’s housing prices, wrote Harding, and has kept them far lower than in many U.S. cities.

I am confused on why you don't consider that 2nd paragraph as an answer to the 1st. "Did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally?" It "grows by ~74%, and all other occupations by ~57%". So yes, SWE expeirenced more growth. By measuring the percentage change you are scaling the salaries to each other.

That's an outcome that I was only able to derive after giving the graph the benefit of the doubt, eyeballing some of the numeric data, and doing some calculations in IPython. But it isn't a result that I feel one can accurately derive from the visualization presented by the graph. (If both had increased by 50%, the shape of the graph would be very similar.)

It is not a contradiction to say the presentation doesn't help show the conclusion, and that the conclusion is (nonetheless) correct.

Fair enough, I guess I just think about things a little differently. I didn't feel the need to do any calculations. You can just eyeball it and see one went from roughly $600 to $900 and that is obviously a 50% increase and one went from a little above $1000 to a little above $1800 and that is obviously around a 80% increase. Those are all nice and easy to process numbers even if they aren't exact. There is a big enough gap in the results to be confident that whatever margin of error existed in my estimates it is clear that the developer salaries grew at a faster rate.

SWE's don't have a union, so of course they're getting relatively hosed, too.

Though the disparity is somewhat justified in that the efficiency of software (neither in its running nor production) haw kept up with Moore's Law. In any case, owners and executives are funneling up the excess value created. It's there, you're just not getting it.

> they're getting relatively hosed

If by "hosed" you mean getting $120K salary right out of school, then I guess that's true. I'm just not sure I'd call that "getting hosed" though.

If you want to see what "getting hosed" means, go work as an SWE in Europe.

High US tech salaries are an ephemeral business problem that owners have not yet eliminated. Eventually they will.

If they haven't been able to do so in 20 years, I don't think this is a problem they particularly care about "solving".

Yeah, it always baffles me when people say things like that.

Yes, SWE's only get a piece of the pie but it's a pretty nice piece (Especially compared to everyone else). If you want more, go and bake your own pie.

Relatively. It's not based on what you can buy with it, it's based on what your company pulls in with your turning your cog.

My experience as a long-time SWE is that companies are willing to pay us upper-middle class (or better) salaries to do things that many of us would happily do for free in our spare time. The only “catch” is that we have to work on their problems instead of ones we pick.

If that’s “getting hosed”, I hope they never run out of water!!

Within some constraints, the decision on how to distribute these excess productivity benefits is basically arbitrary. There is some minimum you need to pay people in order to get them to work. Once that’s done, you have some excess. You could distribute that to front-line workers. You could distribute it to the software teams, but you sure don’t have to. In practice, human nature being what it is, what will most likely happen - in the absence of specific government policies incentivizing other choices - is that management will distribute it to themselves and their shareholders.

We in the US once had a number of tax policies that were designed to disincentivize this kind of payout, and encourage companies to maintain full-time workforces with decent benefits, invest in R&D and facilities improvements etc. Other countries still have those policies. But we here in the US got rid of a lot of them. The result is that excess productivity benefits have been distributed in exactly the way you’d expect - with frankly alarming effects on our political stability.

> Now many stores have intelligent inventory tracking that requires little to no work from employees. > Why isn't the benefit of that efficiency passed on to those employees who are now more efficient?

It is, though, right? It is passed on to the employees who were responsible for the efficiency gains. Those employees who built those innovations — could be employees of retailer, or employees of the companies, say tech companies, for whom the retailer is a customer.

I think the parent commenter’s point is still valid that:

>>Someone stocking shelves in 2020 is about productive as someone stocking shelves in 1968.

I would phrase it slightly differently: “the skill of stocking shelves in 2020 has been as efficient as it has been in 1968”. It’s the skill of creating innovations in inventory tracking , better statistical modeling and predictions/estimates, and probably the advent of tracking all this in digital systems that has multiplied the efficiency at the macro level.

Employees who are stocking shelves have not been able to participate in those contributions.

That is a reasonable retort, but it ignores that last question I asked.

>How is that any different than a software developer receiving a higher salary because they are more efficient due to computers being more powerful?

I'll admit software developers might be a bad example for that given question since they are responsible for some downstream efficiency, but the overall point still stands. Why do high skill jobs get to capture the value of their increased efficiency but low skills jobs don't?

It sounds like the argument is that high skill jobs are the reason for the increased efficiency, so they get to keep the surplus value generated?

It feels very arbitrary to claim the employees responsible got the gains. Like take Walmart, the biggest beneficiaries by far are the relatives of Sam Walton. Yet they did nothing to build the automated inventory tracking, the statistical modeling, or the digital systems.

Or take the programmers who worked on Walmart.com. They didn't invent the transistor, Linux, or Java. They just used them to build a crud app.

> Or take the programmers who worked on Walmart.com. They didn't invent the transistor, Linux, or Java. They just used them to build a crud app.

Likewise, the shelf stockers who work at Walmart didn't invent pasteurization, the tin can, or the grocery cart. They just move the cans around.

What does that have to do with the fact that programmers contribute (on an ongoing basis) to improved productivity, while shelf stockers do not?

My point is that it is somewhat arbitrary who captures the value, and it is not always clear who produces the value. Say a grocery store is stocking at twice the rate they did 40 years ago because they have an app. Is the guy who wrote the app responsible for all the increased productivity? Not really, writing the app was fairly trivial compared to inventing the transistor, the operating system, and the programming language. Is the guy who invented the transistor responsible? Well it would not have mattered at all if there wasn't a store to make use of his invention. Is the store owner responsible? Well he isn't technical at all, he didn't invent the transistor, write the app or stock the shelf. Besides he would have no one to sell to if there wasn't a town to sell to. Is the town responsible? Well they provided road the stocker drove on to work, the university that the programmer and transistor developer went to, the police force that protects the store, and the customers that buy the cans.

I propose a thought experiment.

Assume the app was developed in the past five years. Replay the last five years twice, with different circumstances: Once without the shelf stocker, and once without the programmer. In one case, the increased productivity still appears, in the other, it does not.

It seems to me that the person who is required for the addition of the increased productivity caused the increased productivity, while the person who is not required for it did not.

If you remove the individual programmer or the individual shelf stocker nothing will change. The company will just get someone else to do the job. If you remove all programmers the shelves will be stocked at a slower rate. If you remove all shelf stockers, the entire system falls apart and no shelves are stocked.

It certainly seems like the shelf stockers are more important to this process than the programmers. They still provide value without the programmers but the programmers are entirely dependent on the shelf stockers to provide value.

Why do the programmers therefore get to claim the entire surplus in productivity if they are dependent on the shelf stockers for that productivity boost to actually materialize?

Yes fair enough. This is why every employee should get paid _stock/rsu/whatever_. The rewards of efficiency gains that Walmart, the enterprise makes, should be shared by the people who made it happen. But then again, not many people would prefer to take that risk and instead prefer to get paid a set hourly wage. Of course, it’s a matter of balance — how much guaranteed income vs. risky income does a person want?

I don’t know. That’s a really difficult problem to solve through legislation.

Ultimately though stocking shelves in 1968 Walmart is about as efficient as stocking shelves in 2020.

It is much more efficient these days. They use apps to determine when to stock, how much to stock ect. They need many fewer people, and they run much leaner.

Like I mentioned in a comment above, who we consider made it happen is arbitrary. Walmart cannot exist without a functioning society. The daughter of Sam Walton never worked at Walmart, yet she gets more of that gain than any other individual.

For other products, it is even more arbitrary who gets the benefits. If facebook disappeared, another company would quickly take the role of social media leader. Likely not much would change from a productivity standpoint. Yet whoever happens to get the role of dominant social media ceo makes billions.

What if the minimum wage also included x stock per paycheck? Minimum stock options?

> Why isn't the benefit of that efficiency passed on to those employees who are now more efficient?

Because any teenager would be more efficient with automated inventory control. Teenager X didn't have to learn how to do something more complicated. The labor is interchangeable. It is a victory of capital.

Labor specialization and labor skills are what allow labor to collect more of the spoils. Otherwise, labor is interchangeable. The job must need you more than you need the job. Supply and demand.

On the computer power point: scaling has changed as Moore's law has died. It takes something more subtle to make modern systems sing. Something inaccessible to most teenagers without both aptitude and training.

It's not fair at all. The responsibilities of retail employees have grown vastly in the last 50 years. There's more product, with a greater diversity of handling requirements, which need to be stocked across larger stores later in the day (as closing times slowly approach midnight or later). That's for supermarkets (which are increasingly part of larger big box stores). If you work checkout at a place that sells anything with a microprocessor, be prepared for weeks of onboarding as you learn enough about your products to actually sell to and support customers, across a stupidly wide assortment that used to be spread across several departments.

Let's not get started on discussing the interpersonal communication skills needed to survive Thanksgiving/Black Friday.

And for all this, you're getting paid less than Joe W. Cash Register got way back when.

Your are comparing one industry and one job in that industry and it is still a bad comparison. The idea that working a cash register now takes more skill than before is false. The idea that you have to now have more knowledge is false. People were not stupid back then and supermarkets still existed, and neither then nor now does a minimum wage employee need vast amounts of knowledge. The best retail employee has a positive attitude, not knowledge of how to get to the bread aisle. It is outrageous to make such a comparison and assume current jobs are more difficult or harder when advances in nearly all technology has only improved. Remember when cashiers had to do math?

Every sentence you've written is the opposite of true.

And cashiers still have to do math. Most places don't have automatic change dispensers, nor can a machinr account for a customer suddenly switching which bills they're going to give you. I understand that never having had to work one of those jobs is a source of pride in a lot of places, but in this thread, it just outs you as ignorant.

“ How is that any different than a software developer receiving a higher salary because they are more efficient due to computers being more powerful?”

There’s a much higher barrier to entry as a software engineer than a shelf stacker. The breakdown of returns to labor vs capital will always favour capital (absent regulatory intervention or shortage of unskilled labor) for commodity-type work.

> One example, when I was a teen and worked retail I remember we would all have to spend hours going around the store counting every product on the shelves in order to do our routine inventory checks because there was no other reasonable way to track that information. Now many stores have intelligent inventory tracking that requires little to no work from employees.

Manual inventory is still done, often quarterly. Shrinkage will never disappear, and it needs to be accounted for regardless of smart or dumb inventory systems are:

* https://www.thebalancesmb.com/top-sources-of-retail-shrinkag...

* https://losspreventionmedia.com/how-to-calculate-shrinkage-i...

* https://paladinsecurity.com/security-prevention/prevent-shri...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)

An outside team (either in-house or third-party) is brought in so the regular employees aren't doing their own 'audits'.

The employees are not more efficient because of their effort but because of the tech in inventory management. They are still doing the same amount of human labor that 8hrs a day calls for. Companies don't buy machines to pass on the savings to their employees in form of higher wages, they pass those savings to the owners of the company.

Those innovations have 0 to do with labor of the workers. The cost of the investment in the innovation is where the wage went. How does it make sense to pay for that twice. The worker sans the innovation is no more productive.

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