‘A Perfect Positive Storm’: Bonkers Dollars for Big Tech
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/technology/big-tech-pande...
And those farmers do use a lot of tech these day. Does it make them techies with these standard or not? Are we talking about software developers or entrepreneurs that happen to be using tech or have tech background?
I'm definitely well above average, but I think there is an illusion about software engineers being rich. They are better than many other fields, but definitely not on the rich side.
Go to LA and ask rich people what they do. I'm sure you will find a few "tech" entrepreneurs but you will be surprised how much people make in other professions.
Want to know what economic inequality looks like? Well, there you go.
Second, and more to the point, people in tech aren't getting rich "because tech is evil" or some emotionally charged political rallying cry like that. Tech people are getting rich because every single one of us is willing to part with some of our money to pay them to produce things we can't resist consuming! And these companies are operating totally rationally according to the rules we give them (and are / are not willing to change as a society).
It's like yelling at realtors getting rich when you're the one buying a house. Or cursing at the traffic jam you're sitting in. Or finding out that your minor recreational drug habit is causing a refugee crisis.
There is so much money built up in wealth around the world, and tech has found a way to tap into it.
Now, that raises other fundamental problems as we all know. But as long as we continue demanding these services, are you surprised that someone is making money from it? Or just unhappy it's not you and me?
If it were just about what people want to spend money on then people in agriculture would be getting rich too.
This is true of nearly every field with high average compensation in the American economy: real estate, finance, oil and gas, and tech. The other two big ones are medicine and law. The high paying law jobs are basically serving finance. Medicine's high compensation is due to screwed up regulatory stuff and an artificially limited supply of doctors (due to how AMA sets the number of residencies).
Edit: What I'm trying to say is, the easiest way to get rich in America is to work in an industry that is exposed to the financial industry. It embeds leverage into what you earn. Let's say you own a company making $10mm in revenue and you own the whole thing. You can probably sell that to a PE firm for $20mm, much more than you would make in a comparable amount of time just from owning it yourself.
I'm not making a value judgment or anything of that nature. This is the way it works.
In real estate, finance and oil and gas I believe you need to either start with big bucks yourself, or convince people to loan/let you manage them to you. Tech is ridiculously easy to get started with compared to almost any other legal high paying job, you can learn just following a few free courses and from that build apps that people are willing to pay.
Tech money seems to be made more via gatekeeping than providing a service.
A friendly guy called Raul drives the taxi and provides the actual service. Uber puts itself between me and him.
Uber doesn't make money if there are lots of people willing to be the go-between between me and Raul. Uber RAKES it in if they're one of two.
It's neat not having to dig around for cash and being able to see your driver on your phone arriving but it's not game changing.
The real innovation was using a tsunami of cheap financing to engage in a predatory pricing war to gain oligopoly status and opening up being a taxi driver to anyone with a car. This was basically exploitation of wealth inequality.
When I visited Buenos Aires in 2011 I was shocked that you could easily send somebody on a scooter to get you a starbucks and people regularly did. That "innovation" seems significantly less shocking these days. The west caught up.
That's what customers want. Taxis were always too expensive for normal people to use. In the past they needed to know the routes to any place inside a city, but since we have GPS navigation, now that knowledge is much less useful. Nowdays I care more about the car being modern than the knowledge of the driver.
That's largely coz the American precariat-with-a-car demographic wasn't large enough.
Had an Uber-like business kicked off in the 90s when fewer Americans were desperate for work and the world wasn't awash in capital seeking returns from, it would have gone spectacularly bust.
The magic ingredient was wealth inequality - both for providing cheap financing (VC funded rides!) and tapping into that critical precariat-with-a-car demographic at just the right time.
GPS is irrelevant. Taxis had it years before Uber was dreamed up. Giving them credit for that is like giving Mark Zuckerberg credit for the microchip.
But to give them their due, I do in fact think Uber made the product of paying someone to drive you from point A to B much better. Even in the early days of Uber (when they were still just Towncars), it was very rare to get in a taxi in Washington DC that accepted cards for payment. It was also much harder to get a ride if you weren't downtown. You would have to call a dispatcher and in about 30 minutes (if you were lucky and they didn't just ghost you entirely) a cab would show up. Also, if you were downtown and wanted a ride out to Arlington, they would sometimes just drive off because they knew they wouldn't be able to get a fare back into the city.
You understand how a precariat makes this type of thing possible, right?
It's not like Uber drivers wouldn't pull this type of shit if they had more leverage. They absolutely would. They don't coz they really need the $$.
I agree with that 100% but I wouldn't say that they "didn't change the game." The sheer availability of taxi services outside of a handful of densely populated urban centers was almost non-existent before Uber. They existed but I certainly wouldn't call them "on demand." In my relatively small college town it was basically impossible to get a taxi to pick you up in less than an hour from when you called the dispatcher (and sometimes they would just not show up at all....). Now I can have an Uber pick me up within 10-15 minutes basically anywhere at almost any time.
As you said this is mostly because they are subsidizing all of this with huge gushers of capital and it remains to be seen whether they can actually operate that sort of service profitably.
It absolutely is game changing! Before, unless you were in a city like NYC, you would never use a taxi if you could avoid it because they might just never even show up. The accountability and tracking was the very first thing UberCab (Uber's original name) built, and it was the thing that got people initially invested.
It's easy now to look back and say that was easy to figure out, but as with everything, it felt very different before Uber proved it out.
Google search, not so much.
I know people in non-engineering, non-sales roles (e.g. recruiting and HR) at large tech cos buying 3rd houses in the Bay Area because their RSUs have appreciated so much so they're diversifying. It's absolutely insane how much wealth is being generated by the stock price run-up.
Just a new grad thread from Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/m635u7/o...
Anecdotally, my friend who just closed on their 3rd house runs engineering recruiting for a large public Bay Area company (and used to run their new grad hiring) so they've told me specifically what that company pays for grads of their target schools which they've obviously honed based on competing offers from other tech companies.
The more correct summary of the situation is, "some are not, but many are."
> Big Tech is emerging from the pandemic lean, mean and ready for a U.S. economy expected to roar back to life in 2021. Meanwhile, there are still long lines at food banks. Some American workers who lost their jobs last year may never get them back. Housing advocates are worried that millions of people will be evicted from their homes. And being Big Tech is an invitation for everyone to hate you — but you do have towering piles of money.
They're trying so hard here to link "Big Tech"'s growth with pandemic-induced unemployment and housing crisis. What they say here is true in isolation. Big tech grew. There is unemployment and houses are getting pricier. But there's no evidence, in the article or otherwise, that these are linked whatsoever.
It may not be the FAULT of the tech companies mentioned here, but it's time we take a look at how spectacularly these companies have benefitted from the situation of the last year and tax them accordingly to help alleviate the impacts of the pandemic.
> Based on data pulled from 2,650 Tesla owners, the average household income of a Tesla Model X owner is $143,177 per year.
> The average household income of a Tesla Model S owner is $153,313 per year.
> This compares to the United States national medium household income of $78,500.
143k is about the 85th percentile ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United... )
So, this is at least upper middle class.
In the US: you're either in tech or banking/finance, or you're shoveling coal to earn your cockroach protein block. From where I sit from yet another overpriced goddamn gentrification ivory "mixed-use development" tower of yuppies, I can see 50 tents of homeless people. This wasn't the case in the '80's.
Also that article says medium instead of median, besides the spelling issue, average and median aren't comparable.
I have a Toto S550e bidet toilet seat, towel warmer, and gigantic waterfall showerhead.. am I rich too?
Acting rich and being rich (of which, there are many gradations) have almost nothing to do with one another. Thomas J. Stanley wrote a number of books on the subject.
So you have to go for something ambiguous and nebulous to impress people. No wonder you have a hard time "explaining" it!