Go to southern EU and you'll see numbers which are either very familiar or... actually lower.
Weird times. I wonder when will this growth in salaries stabilise?
That being said young people(less than 26yo) are either exempt from the first tax bracket(~20k €) or start off as contractors who pay lower taxes and contributions.
I was a student in the former Soviet Union in early 1990s when the old system collapsed, taking with it stipends that were sufficient for school cafeteria food. After that I occasionally worked for 30 cents per hour doing somewhat-synchronous translation for preachers who came from the US to convert the masses.
While the money sounded laughable (the US minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr) and some employers got borderline uncomfortably weird, working 4-5 evenings for a week allowed me to feed myself for a couple of months and focus on my studies. I never considered myself to be taken advantage of. Just my 2c.
The fact that to the outside Russia looks orthodox Christian today mostly reflects last 20 years of the state efforts to build an official religion, not some deep predisposition of the population. My 2c.
But a bigger question is why does a secular state is building a state religion?
This raises more of a modal/philosophical question for me which is: should we be outsourcing some of the most vile parts of social media? Is it fair to go to someone in a developing country and offer them a wage lightly above average in exchange for having to look at this content for hours? I have no answers to these questions myself but it's a question I ask when social media companies outsource the content moderation.
It would suck if responses to questioning the bible got worse because of religious moderators.
could the average income in kenya be around $1.25 because companies decide to pay abysmally? or the people don't merit any higher? would openai be offending the kenyans if they paid them, say, $5/hour? i think this is the question you should grapple with. openai will be selling this tech around the world, and i wonder if these $2/hr workers can afford it at all. would they, or their loved ones, be able to enjoy produce of their labor?
Employers don't pay $5 per hour because they wouldn't make a profit either.
In my own experience I've had several prospective employers at conferences say that they were interested in poaching me but mentioned that they were wary to start a poaching war. They knew the CEO of my company and were conscious of the fact that he would likely make an effort to respond in kind. The Nash Equilibrium is an interesting concept but reality is complex and messy.
[1] https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
But back to the central point the basic nash equilibrium is in the spherical cow realm of models as they relate to actual reality. There are some interesting additions to it involving time series and asymmetrical information to try and model real economic data.
Nope, they might be able to make profit at $5 or $10/hr, but there it doesn't make sense to pay more than you have to, that's why Chinese devices are significantly cheaper than their western counterparts, they can still compete if they raise the prices but they can allocate cheap labor in china that allows them to become a strong competitor
Big tech companies, maybe. But even those.
Once you raise prices the demand shrinks which also leads to smaller profits. There's no free lunch. If employers could make more money by paying higher wages, they generally would.
to me, it goes back to the argument about remote workers should be paid less than the in office worker. or workers living in cheaper areas should be paid less than those living in expensive areas. to me, the salary should be paying for the work being done and that's it. if the same level of work is being done by both employees, it shouldn't matter if one is in Kenya and the other is in the US. the value of the work is what should be getting compensated. again though, i'm no economist.
I agree with you. The issue is quantifying the essential cost of work. As companies sometimes have no idea how & where they lose or earn money, they tend to rely on external factors to select a "justified" level of wages: average industry wages, location, local laws, whether you need to commute etc.
Which honestly is a bullshit argument. The only destabilizing thing here is it would make the person in the higher-paying profession more valuable to society and more able to make economic impact where it might not normally. In this case, a rising tide does lift all boats...because you're giving more economic purchasing power to more people. Will this kill some businesses or disrupt the status quo? Yeah. Will it help more people than it hurts? Maybe, probably, who knows? But I personally see no problem with paying people relative to their output, no matter where in the world they are.
Having been to Kenya myself and worked with Kenyan developers for several years, most of whom were quite talented, I see absolutely no problem with paying them their value relative to the work being done. I have no problem with high skilled Kenyans making much more than the local average because they have a skill that is in demand all around the world.
>the salary should be paying for the work being done and that's it
100% agree. If a business derives $X profit from a laborer and agrees to pay a given % of $X to the laborer as compensation, it should not matter if the laborer is in a high cost or low cost of living area - the business still makes the same amount in profit, and shouldn't get to say "hey yeah we made $10mm off your application, but we're going to only pay you 5% of our profits as compensation because you live in Bangladesh and the cost of living is lower, so be happy with what we're giving you" when if you did the exact same labor and lived in, say, LA or NYC, they'd give you 10%. Just bullshit IMO.
I spoke with a US Civil Engineer who worked in Honduras in the 1980's, clearing paths in forests for electrical transmission lines.
He initially paid workers significantly higher than local wages-- US-level wages.
The result:
--> He was threatened with harm by bosses of local companies.
Why? He took all their workers.
The local companies couldn't compete-- they lost all their labor to his company which paid relatively (relative to Honduras) exorbitant wages.
His US company literally destabilized the local labor economy.
So, I wouldn't be so quick to jump to "that is BS", as in my opinion it exemplifies naivete & ignorance.
This is one of those things in which it's better to sudden upsets (even if they're "positive"), might have negative consequences.
If you're paying +25% over the going rate, you're going to attract a range of people. Someone that designs software for reactor controls might not care (or be compensated enough anyway).
However, if you're offering 200% over, you're guaranteed to hoover up the top talent from strategic industries, and that might end up being a net negative in terms of the damage caused.
But, conversely, the multinational values your workers because it knows how to use them for business opportunities elsewhere to make money. But you're in a position to find many of those same opportunities. Which now means that your local economy is not just getting the profit of having the workers do so well, but of the fact that you're keeping the profit margin that otherwise would have gone to the multi-national!
Free trade on average makes everyone richer. (Observation originally due to Ricardo.) That means that it brings both opportunities and risks. And the opportunities usually exceed the risks.
that is, if you are stubborn about paying more
Have you worked at OpenAI in Kenya?
Because you're speaking in absolutes-- as though you're an authority on the topic.
Let's use basic logic: Working at a technology company by its nature provides:
- Increased experience with Computers
- Increased experience with Data
- Increased experience with Business Processes
- Increased experience with AI Technology & AI Business
- Increased experience with Potential business ideas for startups due to exposure to the business processes of the company and the potential therein for improvement
- Pay
Because you're speaking in absolutes-- as though you're an authority on the topic.
Let's use basic logic
No one in this thread knows a damn thing
Hahahaa. Well, I can't argue with that. I concur.
The GP told you: they've been to Kenya themselves and worked with Kenyan developers for years. Please read the whole comment before you fly off the handle at someone. This is unfortunately increasingly common on HN.
If me questioning someone using the term "BS" = flying off the handle.
Does the original poster using the term "BS" != flying off the handle ...?
likewise, mining companies launching in ghana have usually paid higher than the incumbent. it could be strategic as it allows them to hire highly skilled workers without the cost of pre-training. here too, a saturation is reached, and things stabilize, with people doing the same job but receiving different compensations. we at devcongress (https://devcongress.org) have worked hard to ensure that local companies pay top-dollar for tech talent. we enforce this through our job boards. still, there are companies out there paying $500/mo and they receive a flood of applicants. but these are my experiences. makes me believe that after the market has been excited, it will definitely dissipate the energy, and return to previous equilibrium (or achieve equilibrium at a higher orbit). i honestly believe that an equilibrium will be reached.
In addition to having lived (for a short time) in Kenya, worked for a company based out of Nairobi for nearly 5 years, and worked with Kenyans that whole time (in other words, I've seen this stuff firsthand in Kenya, which is the whole point of the article, and my comment)...I have also lived in, worked in, and studied in other developing countries, and seen firsthand what happens when high-paying companies swoop in and change the economic landscape.
You know what actually happens? Positive economic change. Isn't the whole point of HN (and YCombinator) to disrupt the status quo, and promote growth? Destabilizing a corrupted, top heavy, status quo where more people now have a chance to grow in life rather than live in abject poverty is a good thing. Nobody cried for the Taxi companies when Uber & Lyft came along, because they destroyed a parasitic, rent-seeking system (Taxi medallions) and the experience for the end-user (both driver and rider) was significantly improved. Same logic applies here.
>The result:
--> He was threatened with harm by bosses of local companies.
Why? He took all their workers.
Yet there's a flipside here that you're completely missing. Those same workers had a significant improvement in their lives, most likely able to accumulate what for them was generational wealth, or enough to give their kids a shot at a real chance in life. Those people had enough to stimulate their local economy much more than anyone beforehand. THAT is what drives positive change in 3rd world or developing countries. Keeping things the way they are economically with no disruption in the 3rd world keeps people poor and unable to grow which leads to bigger problems down the road. Giving them a real chance in life by paying them more gives them and their families a larger ability to make real change in their countries and communities. That should be celebrated.
Put yourself in the worker's shoes - if someone offered to 10x your wages, what would you do with the extra wealth that you now posses?
Having also lived in that part of the world (Mexico, which isn't the quite same as Honduras but analogous enough) , I understand how things sometimes play out in cases like this. The local bosses in your example were probably doing quite well for themselves and keeping a fat cut of the output of their laborers who were paid pennies, and not happy that their game was now being played by a bigger fish than they could fry. So, they acted like a cartel and tried to threaten the new king in town. Did some of the local companies in your example die? Yeah, probably. But nobody is entitled to stay in business....that's sort of the whole point of globalized capitalism - you compete, and you can win or lose, sometimes through your own fault, or sometimes through no fault of your own. Sometimes someone will steal your lunch, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. That's the reality of it.
Let's not think about the noble but the practical: did the man whose life was threatened continue to stay in the country and pay those workers, or did he leave or drop wages? Did people make decisions about where to work based on the idea of long-term compensation? What amount of people left an otherwise stable job to take this high-paying gig that disappeared? What is the net impact on these people _especially_ if the distortion was prolonged and did put other companies out of business?
This is not a 'compassionate' thing to do, it's short-termism that messes with other people's lives. Moreso depending on the function of how large the distortion was and the relative purchasing power of the job. An example of how this works is AWS jobs in other regions -- they pay significantly higher than base rate in many developing countries, but it is both a pedigree and leaves people in a position to get another white collar job that's fine later on. However, the same is not true for something like a gig-work cleaning agency paying 3 times market rate. I have the feeling based on the source that your experience might be closer to the former, which might leave you with a different take than what's happening here.
Maybe the guy in the example did leave the country, maybe he didn't. But either way, those workers were given a massive windfall for a short time, and I'm willing to bet that some of those workers took that money, invested in their families to the point where their children were able to get some form of education, and those children didn't have to lead the same impoverished lives their parents did. They were able to use that money as a stimulus for real growth. That counts.
As someone who has been poor, the idea that the massive windfall is better is so frustrating. It's not. At least where I lived, people could not explain to you how a bank worked. People often did not save money, and if someone found out you had money, you were immediately asked for 'loans'. Beyond that you have to think about _lifetime earnings_. If you hire all of the lumberjacks for your slick handmade-in-africa table business, what happens to the SYSTEM of these people when other businesses go out of business and liquidate their assets then you leave? It's not as simple as some new business popping up and employing people.
If I may point out, the argument (upholding the system) appears to be structured around justifying why others must have not by saying that all non-high-paying lumberjack-employing businesses will go out of business, and then this high-paying business will leave. Is there any reason why this high-paying business would leave? It sounds from your statement that this is guaranteed, for whatever reason. And if it does leave (because obviously no business is guaranteed for all time) is there reason to believe another external business would not step in to fulfill that demand for handmade-in-africa table business? Or that the newly unemployed lumberjacks (but flush with cash relative to local conditions from their high-paying salaries) will sit around and twiddle their thumbs for all time instead of starting their own lumberjack-related business?
It is fine to recognize that people who wield economic power might be upset when a new economic power arrives in town, but to describe the new guy who is trying to do the right thing as somehow immoral is classist nonsense.
If you are doing a 1-and-done kind of project, maybe you have a point. You would have to weigh the cost of the disruption of the local industry against the benefit to the workers though. If you pay what would normally be 5 years worth of wages for a year of work, it's fine to set the local industry back 3 years. The workers still come out ahead and can invest their wages into rebuilding industry.
I also don't think the calculus is as simple as "setting it back 3 years", all you would be doing is creating power vacuums (instability), whereas you ideally need constant upwards pressure. It would be like injecting cash via lotteries, it won't actually help in the long run, just create further instability and wealth inequality.
What happens to prices when a significant portion of the workforce suddenly has tons more money? What happens to the people not lucky enough to have the new high paying job? What happens to the local economy when you leave?
When you pay locally crazy high wages you seriously distort the economy for everyone, it doesn’t just magically snap to a new normal where everyone is happy and free, you can very easily create huge wealth disparities that make situations for many people way worse off, and the people who “win” that you don’t employ were generally already winning.
Just pouring money into a highly impoverished place can be very harmful. “Above average” is good, “ridiculously above average” and you have to start considering your effects across the economy.
We're not talking about developers though, we're talking about people with good enough English and internet connection to be able to tag or flag strings of text and images. That's not highly skilled work even in a country where native English fluency and internet connections aren't as universal as the US. It's just that the cost of living differences mean that the "get paid just enough to make rent" money that unskilled labour is worth in the US is "more than the local doctors" money in Kenya.
Just as a point to that - English is one of 2 official languages in Kenya, and is the national language of business and education. Practically everyone speaks it well enough to get by.
Also companies often can't tell how much profit they will make and can almost never tell how much profit each employee is contributing towards. IP, machinery, business processes, brand value, all contribute to the company profits. Some companies with very significant profits can even exist with zero employees. This idea that a laborer deserves some percentage of business profits is just fundamentally flawed.
That would be true if that were deal the business had with their employees. However, you made up the percentage thing by observation and are working from the assumption that because you can represent a wage as a percentage of a profit margin, that means the business agreed to share a fixed percentage of profit with the employee. This is incorrect reasoning.
Businesses generally don't contract with their employees to share a percentage of revenue or profits, with the narrow exception of commissions for people in sales. With regard to developers and almost all other employees, the contract both parties agreed to is almost always a trade of specific amounts of time for specific amounts of money and possibly some flexible additional benefits. And to the employee's benefit, the amount of pay does not flex based on whether the company is even producing a profit from the sale of the the products of their labor, only how many hours they put in. Caveat all manner of fuckery in labor relations, of course. Which is a giant caveat, I agree in advance.
However the fundamental agreement is still time for money without the employee having to worry whether the products of their labor can be sold for more than their hourly wage, that's the business's problem to deal with. The employee expects their paycheck to show up on time all the time, or the deal is off.
With that sort of agreement, it is absolutely expected and reasonable that the business keeps any profit from selling the product of the labor after the agreed upon fees for said labor have been paid. That was the deal.
---
If you'd like a different deal for most people, as I would love to see more of in the world economic future, then most people need to change over from needing a job to needing some form of income to support their long term future growth as they live currently off of savings.
Instead of expecting someone else to ensure there is a buffer of money to pay you so you can pay your expenses, you will have to keep that buffer yourself and be okay with the fact that sometimes you will get paid a lot and sometimes not so much, but you will then be getting that percentage of the profit you wanted and it will be totally reasonable to expect the same percentage regardless of what the cost of living is.
You also won't have to worry about layoffs as much because the company's costs now also scale directly with it's profits, so there is no need to cut head count when things get really bad and the company's buffers run low.
But again, that also means you will be responsible for keeping a big enough buffer yourself to deal with the fact that your income fluctuates with both short an long term market swings. Otherwise all you have done is trade the annoyance at seeing the company profit massively from your fix-time-cost labor for the annoyance of being broke even though you have a job whenever the market takes a shit.
Most people still don't want to deal with that, even in super wealthy countries like the US. In fact most people in wealthy countries actually scale their own living expenses in step with any increases in their income such that they can be living paycheck-to-paycheck even at $200k+/yr.
So the balance of things present day is that most people take full-time or even part-time contracts as employees and hope they don't get fired at the wrong time in life.
This is possible to change though, for yourself and for others if you like. So if you think your current deal is bullshit, feel free to change the deal.
The key question is how we improve lives of these people.
It is difficult for me to overstate the impact a 5-fold improvement in income has on people's lives. I've seen initiatives which train people to do tasks like basic data entry, bricklaying, or otherwise, taking $2/day workers to be $10/day workers. Programs like these are typically a few months long. They don't train people to have the equivalent of even a middle school diploma, and they won't be competitive with even the least educated Western workers.
Still, breaking generational poverty is a long process, and that basic increased stability is a first step.
If we shut off employment paths following those programs by giving bad PR to anyone who employs people for $2/hour, we've doomed a key pathway for hundreds of millions of people to escape abject poverty.
Gapminder shows four income levels:
https://www.gapminder.org/fw/income-levels/
Westerners tend to group levels 1-3 together. However, the gap in quality-of-life from level 1 to level 2 is much greater than the rest of the stack. Level 1, life basically sucks. Hunger, lack of basic life-saving medicine, and early death.
Levels 2-4, I've lived at (for at least a few months), and it's okay once you get used to it.
It takes surprisingly little to bring people from 1 to 2, and these sorts of jobs are one way to do that.
As a footnote: People often confuse financial stress with simply being poor, since in the US, those correlate almost completely. Financial stress sucks. Most people worldwide living at levels 2-3 don't have high levels of financial stress. A much more typical situation is a village, where no one has a lot of stuff, but people own the land and their homes. Financial stress sucks. I'd rather own a home at Level 3, with savings, a stable family, income, etc. than live paycheck-to-paycheck at Level 4.
One of the interesting trends you'll see is we've gone from /the vast majority/ of the world at Level 1 really not all that long ago to around a billion people today (probably less when as I write this).
The world is getting a lot better very quickly for a lot of people. At the same time, solving the problem is no longer intractable.
I will also mention: "Privilege" is complex, and life isn't all about money. Starting around level 2 or 3, "stuff" usually isn't the biggest problem in life. You get used to the inconvenience of needing to boil running water or having to ride a bike instead of a car pretty quickly. You don't experience it as inconvenience at all if you've never had it (as most of humanity hasn't for most of time).
On the other hand, humans are social creatures. Many places where people live at level 2 or 3 have communities and families of a type you've never experienced if you grew up in the US. The US is a very lonely place, and there's a mental health crisis in the US that would be completely foreign in many places at level 2 or 3.
The US also experiences much greater financial stress. If you're in a poor village, but you grow your food and own your home, you stress out a lot less about money than if you're making a 6-figure income, but worried about college debt and making your mortgage if you have a short-term job loss, divorce, or medical crisis, as is common in the US.
Who's more privileged?
I have to admire the beauty of this argument as it has occurred over time - let's exploit them using force and make them poor (enriching ourselves), then use the poverty to justify paying them less (enriching ourselves), using the argument that we are slowly lifting these billions out of poverty (enriching our souls).
Interesting. If true, that sounds like a good argument for capping salaries. Would the US be a little less chaotic if we set a maximum wage?
Around 50 m have some construction where further work is paid with a salary for life or until the company goes bankrupt.
development economics is not about the wages, it's more about market access. the problem is that many developed economies (looking at you USA) have protectionist tariffs which make it hard for developing ones to gain market share.
> to me, it goes back to the argument about remote workers should be paid less than the in office worker.
Can you make a stronger link here? Because I'm not seeing the connection other than wages are involved.
The same way that a CEO in our world is getting paid 100 times as much as a janitor?
i suspect that when we look at what caused a raise in salaries at a certain place it is rarely companies from abroad paying more, but simply the local economy developing, causing people to ask for more (which often meant that international companies stopped hiring there, e.g. china).
This is the average rate the government pays secondary school teachers in Ghana, after 2-3 years of experience. It's almost 2x the rate that private schools pay teachers.
With this wage, no allowances, a single person can live independently in an apartment, and eat out every single night of the week if they choose. It's a fine and decent wage for what amounts to work only requiring a good pair of eyes and basic literacy.
And that's a good thing, because you're increasing the spending power someone who will keep the money velocity high has, which by definition helps the local economy. They are spending that money, which will move about and cause growth.
Now for instance, the class of goods we were talking about is restaurant food. This may be a pure substitute for home cooked food, leading to no increase in food demand and money simply being spread to the service workers. Or it could be that they eat different food (e.g chicken imports rather than local fish), which also wouldn’t affect the balance of demand/supply for the poorest and neediest.
We are payed what the company can get away with.
It’s about power, not value. Value is much less of a factor than people like to think.
Same goes for people who are payed a lot (like CEOs). Sure they have impact on the organization, but they also have power.
Is there a big difference between the two in a free market?
How exactly are you measuring what you're worth?
Let's imagine there is no minimum wage in America. Now let's say that workers in America demand $10/hour and African workers ask for $2/hour for the exact same job. What's the correct value for that labor? It's a non-sensical question.
You could say it's the minimum value at $2. But then some other worker asks for $1. Did you make a mistake? Was it not actually worth $2 the whole time?
If they are inherently subjective, why are you claiming we're not paid what we're worth? This statement is meaningless, isn't it?
> It kinda/sorta works, but it also kinda doesn't
In what way it doesn't work? Clearly it has more utility than other attempts at measuring value. I can agree it's not perfect (nothing is), but that's very different from not working.
> let's say that workers in America demand $10/hour and African workers ask for $2/hour for the exact same job. What's the correct value for that labor?
The correct value is whatever someone is paying for that labor on a free market.
> You could say it's the minimum value at $2. But then some other worker asks for $1. Did you make a mistake?
The only mistake is treating value as inherent and static.
When an amazon warehouse worker has to pee in bottles to meet a quota do you think the worker and amazon came to a fair agreement? Or perhaps amazon had more bargaining power.
The more people go there looking to hire somebody, the quicker it gets pushed up. But salaries do basically never change suddenly anywhere, because it's the local people that pay most of them.
(And, no, this is not fair. And locals should push for higher pay.)
That is what's happening in Cuba where highly skilled people with good English skills rather work in tourism than as doctors, engineers or teachers. Not a good long-term situation.
And then Kenya doesn't gain the benefit of the $2/hr wages (which, as mentioned, is already above average), plus the benefits in knowledge & experience, improved infrastructure, and secondary jobs, as well as the possibility of similar jobs in the future.
China started out competing almost exclusively on wages (like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan before them), and now the US and EU worry about Chinese advanced industries (eg. semiconductors) surpassing their own, the same way Taiwan did with chips and Japan did with cars.
Competing via low wages is, unfortunately, a necessary first step to growing an economy.
Also, they were labeling graphic and illegal (in the US) content including child porn.
Seems like paying them around the minimum wage for a receptionist is way way too low to me.
Which makes $2 a RELATIVELY better wage, however for the work - basically content filtering through the worst of the internet - there should be a higher compensation and psychological help available.
In this case, if Facebook and other online services had it available, they would have been better off reusing what they already developed for their side of content filtering. I want to believe 99% of bad content is already automatically filtered out, and anything that comes through and flagged by content moderators fed back into the systems that automate the process.
> The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance.
How much does rice cost? Beans? Other subsistence food? If it's all cheaper than the US, then not pointing that out (or showing how a wage compares to the average for a country), it's misleading journalism.
Of course, PPP doesn't constrain itself to subsistence food.
This whole thing makes OpenAI seem evil if you ask me. Just another company exploiting people who are already being exploited. It's depressing.
The difficult part, where you'd get the most out of human labeling of data, is the grey area where the models diverge or are uncertain.
"That month, Sama began pilot work for a separate project for OpenAI: collecting sexual and violent images—some of them illegal under U.S. law—to deliver to OpenAI"
"Sama delivered OpenAI a sample batch of 1,400 images. Some of those images were categorized as “C4”—OpenAI’s internal label denoting child sexual abuse—according to the document. Also included in the batch were “C3” images (including bestiality, rape, and sexual slavery,) and “V3” images depicting graphic detail of death, violence or serious physical injury, according to the billing document."
The point of the OP comment is that it's not "next to nothing". The cost of living differs from place to place and a small amount of USD can be worth a _lot_ in many developing nations.
Let’s imagine an alternative timeline where OpenAI pays $200/hr for this service.
At that price point is it still exploitive?
Is it ever appropriate or ethical to ask humans to voluntarily subject themselves to traumatic experiences in exchange for compensation?
I’m still processing my own thoughts on this topic so I’m curious to learn about other viewpoints.
Basically, it is a job that needs to be done in society, but one that is torturous, and can leave you with long-term or permanent problems. In essence though, it is not fundamentally different in the way a coal miner would jeopardize their physical health, just with mental health instead. This risk/possible damage should be rewarded with a higher wage, and adequate measures should be put in place to minimize the possible damage, eg. in the case of content moderation with access to therapy and only exposing employees to short intervals of traumatic content.
This is of course how things should be, in reality coal miners working environments only reached a decent level through unions and a long fight for better rights. Content moderators are not paid well anywhere either.
My belief: When you have a legitimate choice of your place of employment, and all of the opportunities will let you live your definition of a comfortable life, that's when it's no longer exploitative.
So many times - especially for poor folks - there is no meaningful choice. "I do this or I don't have a place to live." "I hold two jobs so I can feed my child."
By that argument, paying 200$ an hour would be much more exploitative. This would be like landing a job paying $6 million a year in the US; it would be insane to quit such an opportunity, especially since every other opportunity is basically poverty (not even in comparison). Following this logic, it's 'graceful' to only pay 2$/h, since that makes them equal to the other opportunities and therefore not exploitative (while still paying reasonably well).
Effectively, it seems like you're calling OpenAI exploitative based on factors they can't change.
> paying 200$ an hour would be much more exploitative
I didn't say that - I only said that it depends on choice. Does the employee have a choice if they have a $60k (average individual income in the US) option and a $6M option? Yes. Are they de-facto forced into taking the $6m one? No.
I know many people who didn't take higher paying jobs, or left such jobs, because they knew the high paying job was going to be miserable.
There was even an article about one such individual just the other day here on HN: Quitting the Rat Race
"I’m currently working at a top tier investment bank as a software engineer. I’m an insignificant cog in a machine that skims the cream from the milk. I’m earning the most money I’ve ever made and yet I’m the least fulfilled I’ve ever been."
> This whole thing makes OpenAI seem evil if you ask me. Just another company exploiting people who are already being exploited.
In that context, there is no way for OpenAI not to be evil, since they are (by definition) only one option in the market. In fact, taking your argument to the extreme, there is no way to offer jobs in Kenya as the first company to offer jobs would either be exploitative by paying minimum wage or exploitative by being the only real option. Going from that, paying a higher wage just worsens the situation, as it makes the alternatives even less feasible.
That being said, I do get where you are coming from. But it is not a good point to accuse OpenAI on, as they are making the situation better by offering options at a (for a Kenyan level seemingly reasonable) rate and they really don't have any other option[0].
[0] Except maybe paying Americans a lot of money for the job, but I find it morally hard to argue that they should pay US citizens a lot of money instead of paying Kenyans (comparatively) good money, even leaving aside economical feasibility.
Probably the most important measure a company could take to prevent lasting harm with this kind of work would be to spread it around a whole lot more than just 36 people. The real risk of long term impact here would probably be with persistent exposure to it all day long. Most people can handle reading or seeing some graphic stuff with proper mental preparation for it but to see nothing but that day and day out would quickly wear you down.
>Is it ever appropriate or ethical to ask humans to voluntarily subject themselves to traumatic experiences in exchange for compensation?
Probably not. Yet people still voluntarily sign up for military service around the world by the millions, and they do so for a bunch of personal, family, idealistic, cultural, and societal reasons that are hard to reduce to a few easy to argue points like a lot of people online try to do with stuff like this.
Personally, I think it's admirable to hold the ideal that we should like to never offer jobs like this, we should also like to never offer jobs that involve going to war, cleaning up hazardous materials, dealing with explosives, working around heavy fast-moving machines, cleaning sewers, or a myriad of other terrible experiences either; but we're probably not in a position to make those better choices just yet. Until then, people are willing to do these things for a dozen different reasons per person, only two of which are the pay and support they get from the employer.
A Kenyan has told you that this job pays substantially better than average and that they wish more companies would make such jobs available, and your response is "no, you're wrong, this job pays too little". On what basis do you make that claim? What makes you better qualified than OP to comment on conditions in Kenya?
Instead of having this elaborate, inefficient system of funnelling money to first world billionaires and then having them (maybe) send some of it back to the developing world, wouldn't it be better if these workers were just paid better in the first place?
There is overhead to sending jobs to poor, unstable countries in timezones far from headquarters. If we insist that everyone, worldwide should be paid the same wages we are in the US, what incentive do companies have for not just hiring locally and avoiding those costs? If we step it back and say "okay, you should at least pay what you would in India", then why not just hire in India, which is a far more predictable environment than Kenya?
But it does not take away from the fact that it can negatively affect the employees in an adverse way long term, and takes advantage of poor people to give them an objectively bad deal based on an information asymmetry where the person in question might not know that they have to read graphic descriptions of bestiality and pedophilia.
Scarred for life by reading/labeling text? There is obviously a big difference between labelling pictures or video and text. I would be open to seeing an actually study, but my prior would be that text must be harmless. I would certainly be open to reading any text, especially if the context is that the text is for training purposes.
Sama/source in trouble yet again!
You could apply your logic to sweatshop scenarios where the people in those countries are just happy to have work, even if the work pays unfair wages, requires unreasonable hours, uses child labor, and provides no benefits to the workers. But hey... the disenfranchised are just happy to have a paycheck right?
If we insist upon that, then why hire in Kenya, which is an unstable and unpredictable environment that has a lot of inherent risks for the company?
Or are you arguing these jobs shouldn't exist at all?
For ChatGPT related, yes/maybe. But for other content filetering work, it's primarily video & pictures: https://www.wired.com/story/social-enterprise-technology-afr...
Can you get there without that? Likely not.
What you’re suggesting is to actually keep them poor for their own good. It’s a nonsensical and counterproductive argument that your making.
You can chop logic on this all day long if you like, but the point is, this work is terrible and damaging, and that's why we farm it out to countries like Kenya where the people there don't have a choice.
The set of choices for people earning $2/day is different than $20 or $200, but not smaller.
Your aggression is better targeted towards manufacturing jobs in parts of Asia, or Walmart workers in the rural US, than to this context.
I think this kind of moral puritanism is an enemy of real social progress. Maybe we shouldn't or can't expect some supreme, pure state of "ethical", maybe all we can or should expect is "better".
> I only assume that one Kenyan is more representative than one westerner. I'd happily invite other Kenyans to comment their own perspective!
"One Sama worker tasked with reading and labeling text for OpenAI told TIME he suffered from recurring visions after reading a graphic description of a man having sex with a dog in the presence of a young child. “That was torture,” he said. “You will read a number of statements like that all through the week. By the time it gets to Friday, you are disturbed from thinking through that picture.” The work’s traumatic nature eventually led Sama to cancel all its work for OpenAI in February 2022, eight months earlier than planned."
I'll be glad when this kind of "suck it up buttercup" bullshit is gone from our world.
Yeah, violence hardens people. Most often to the point where they're one light tap away from shattering. PTSD is a real thing, and just because folks in Africa aren't being diagnosed with it doesn't mean witnesses to this violence don't have it.
This kind of attitude - that since we've seen some shit we're immune to it all - is just a badly misplaced sense of pride.
And that misplaced pride just hurts people.
In this case is text. There’s no graphic depictions of anything. There could be foul, abusive, or racist language. But that’s much less difficult to deal with.
Its not exploitation if you're paying people higher than their local cost of living and higher than other local jobs. If you're just appalled about people being paid an amount of money that to YOU, based on your cost of living isn't fair because you'd want to make more, then be appalled at capitalism as a whole and how much work is being hired outside of company's originating countries. The production of almost everything globally is outsourced to locales where the cost to compete is lower than in the originating country.
includes a section about Google hiring Americans to do vaguely similar work, at $15/hour. I say "vaguely" because I don't think my cousin Missy had much racist or sexual content to deal with; at least that wasn't the whole point of the job like the Sama example.
Some of you may have heard this story before. The big company uses a small company to be insulated from the legal complications of hiring. That figured into the story: Google claimed they couldn't fix an obvious inequity, and HR told them to try harder. Missy got paid.
(In case you're wondering, that's not a fake name. I showed this to her beforehand, and she said it was fine.)
I myself do work with mediation of content for several social networks, getting a little more than that. The only problem is that the monthly hours are irregular, there are very few hours.
If someone has an offer of 4 dollars an hour for 200 hours a week without any benefits, I accept it immediately. And that's half the US salary, as I understand it.
I could pay a Kenyan $17 an hour, or I could pay a Kansan instead and get US government benefits. The same applies at every payment level. Your logic fails the moment you realize that not every person/worker on earth is equal.
Insisting on this sort of articles just goes to show how sheltered these offended people are. I live in the third world and I know people who are thankful to Coca Cola for their "$2 wages."
(And I think most of what you wrote is based on similar stereotypes)
What stereotypes?
That would be transformational.
To remain stable, economic growth must be slow and steady. The alternative is you simply don't go to Kenya, rather, you go somewhere else, and Kenyans get $0/hour.
I also didn’t suggest anything like paying way over market.
Also...yes it is a sentiment (a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion). Our opinions about what constitutes "taking advantage" are different. Saying otherwise doesn't make your argument more compelling.
I think the question we are all considering is why OpenAI behaves differently overseas than they might when trying to poach a smart engineer from a competitor in the Us.
This is a bad take. Globalization (what you call "taking advantage") raised a billion people out of abject poverty in the last few decades.
When a company pays more than the prevailing wage, they're doing good and deserve kudos. Expecting economic deals with less developed countries to be driven by charity (which is what you're advocating for) rather than mutual benefit is A) paternalistic and demeaning, and B) cannot possibly be the basis of sustainable economic gains for developing countries.
Doesn't it? If you have some kind of objective measure of fairness, I would like to hear it.
What kind of business model is one that relies on exploitation of extreme poverty in order to succeed?
that's a very good question, but asking it as if it is a problem of OpenAI and not a problem of literally all of our economy sounds a little strange to me.
That is just economic nonsense. Labor productivity of economy depends on utilization of capital and ideas in that economy and it is pretty hard to increase. Average wage per hour in that economy cannot be higher than average productivity per hour. If you set minimal wage higher than its productivity, then you just destroyed almost all legal employment and forced everyone to grey economy or subsistence agriculture.
They paid decent wages by Kenyan standards it seems. They did not force, exploit or abuse the workers.
You and I offered them no work for no pay.
The workers have made clear they prefer OpenAI's offer.
We could tell the workers that we know what's best for them. Sitting here in my rich country with my six-figured job, I'm supposed to tell the workers they're wrong, they should have taken my offer instead?
It's a terrible incentive that helping people a little bit will get you criticism while helping not at all earns you no criticism. In fact, as non-helpers we get to sit and sanctimoniously criticize the people actually doing something.
By your logic, you are more evil because you pay Kenyans $0.
One of the companies I’m following now is Oxide (https://oxide.computer/careers). They pay everyone the same salary ($200k) regardless of position. It’s a bit extreme but am following them precisely for that. It’d be interesting to see how Oxide fares down the road.
It’s funny that some years ago that software developers were complaining that they were getting paid less because of politics and because people who talked controlled the businesses and the money. It’s funny because now that the table turned, most of them are doing the same thing.
Respectfully, the existance, and the need, for minimum wage puts lie to this assumption. People need money to survive, and will take whatever job they can when they don't have one, even if it not for enough pay.
I'm not claiming this is the case here, but that this argument is badly flawed.
That’s what minimum wage does. It eliminates the alternatives below the line, not above it.
> That’s what minimum wage does. It eliminates the alternatives below the line, not above it.
You should go back and look at why minimum wage was established in the first place - so people could work and still have lives outside of work.
And frankly, the "option" of starving out on the street is not a real alternative we should even be including in our discussions in 2023. It smacks of treating poor folks as some subhuman species who has to earn their right to live from us.
No one is discussing that alternative. Not sure who you think is? We’re discussing whether a $2 wage in a country with an average wage of $1.50 is abusive.
My position is simply that 1) a wage in one country appearing low to the standards of a completely different country is not evidence of abusive employment; 2) people accepting those wages when they’re not coerced is evidence that the wages are not abuse, though it could also be evidence of other problems that preclude a better alternative.
From your own post:
> working for sub-living wage is better than zero.
Respectfully, I'm not interested in continuing. Have a great day.
I have been hearing about Oxide since 2019 [1]. 3 years later, it seems they don't yet have paying customers that one can read about. And with a tag line like: "Servers as they should be" I'm inclined to ask: "Servers as they should be [by whom?]".
Is the demand for such ideal servers driven by engineers/sys admins or by businesses (i.e. businesses who are currently being served poorly by existing options in the market)?
Is the demand for such ideal servers enough to make them a sustainable business, especially with the enormous amounts they'll likely be pouring into R&D before they can bring a product to market that lives up to their ideals?
If you are asking "does anyone want a rack-scale computer?" the (short) answer is: yes, they do. The on-prem market has been woefully underserved -- and there are plenty of folks who are sick of Dell/HPE/VMware/Cisco, to say nothing of those who are public cloud borne and wondering if they should perhaps own some of their own compute rather than rent it all.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/holistic-bo...
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-oxide-s...
[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringup-lab...
[3] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/more-tales-...
[4] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/another-lpc...
[5] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-pragmat...
[6] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...
[7] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-sidecar...
[8] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron
Yes they are, that's what borders are: rent-seeking in the labor market.
That said, I can see some benefit in occasionally testing viewpoints that are "obviously" true.
by using the same argument, you can claim that someone taking home $300k USD a year living in CA is a victim of modern slavery simply just because his/her employer can afford more.
Kenya is a multilingual country. Swahili, a Bantu language, and English are widely spoken as lingua francas and serve as the two official languages. English was inherited from colonial rule (see British Kenya).
Hate this argument. As a for-profit company, OpenAI is legally and ethically obligated to minimize unnecessary expenses. It's purpose is to develop AI systems, not to provide people with high-paying jobs.