Tech's Elite Hates Labor

I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.

Crashing Twitter into the ground will never come close to diminishing what he has helped achieve with SpaceX, putting his money where his mouth was to the point of almost going broke, and, to a lesser extent, Tesla where, despite not being a founder, he was the biggest investor at the beginning.

I also knew that in a major exit, I would be more resentful of the relative difference between my rewards and that of this other guy than I would have been pleased with my windfall. I had once had serious respect for the cofounders, but their greediness and willingness to perpetuate these systems of inequity permanently diminished my opinion of them.

Yet, I have to concede that the cofounders were correct in their assessment that they could lowball the engineers with little impact on their prospects for success. They were able to exploit their way to a second major windfall, far larger than the first.

Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees).

In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ratio has increased from 20-to-1 in 1996 to 202-to-1 in 2018. [0]

"The average S&P 500 company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 324-to-1 in 2021." For NuSkin Enterprises, the ratio is 22,092:1, for Amazon, it is 6,474:1 ... pretty amazing chart. [1]

And this is why the tax system should recognize and tax excessive pay ratios. These are nothing but the financial result of abusive relationships between the executives and the workers, and the other taxpayers who pay more than their share of the burden. It is also easily measured to tax fairly (which of course corporations will hate, since it is hard to game). But of course, all the tech bros will cry that we need no govt so why should we be taxed? (Not incidentally, the same tech elites and wannabes as the article properly exposed as abusers.)

[0] https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/ideal-ceo-to-employee-...

[1] https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios

Its almost the same as if you just take your salary and bet everything on 13 at the roulette. Small chance of huge payout, high chance of failure.

What about the other people who are more deeply exploited by your employers, the factory workers in poorer countries, the $2/hour workers in Kenya "tortured" by having to tag obscene material to make ChatGPT less toxic? What about all the people downstream in space and time who pay the costs of all the environmental debt incurred by your luxurious and convenient upper caste first-world lifestyles, lifestyles made "efficient" by waste, consumption and the ability to outsource life's chores to bottom workers, enabling you to put all your time into higher rate-of-return tech work?

Anyway this debate about being 1000x more valuable is pointless. It does not matter what any individual thinks about their worth. We've all agreed(#) on this system(the worst, except for all others) ostensibly because of the benefits to the rest of society. The internal allocation of profits within a company is irrelevant.

# The old Marxist limitations about lacking capital or means of production don't count in tech/software. It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital.

A burger flipper makes $10 in an hour. An engineer designing a burger flipping robot makes $100. Their department's engineering manager makes $1,000. The CTO makes $10,000.

The hardest worker here is the burger flipper. They work 16 hour days just to afford rent, and it's hard manual labor.

The engineer makes 10 times as much because each line of code they write produces more value than an entire day of manual burger flipping.

Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems.

The CTO makes 10 times that because their policies affect many engineering departments throughout a large organization and have multibillion-dollar consequences. It doesn't matter if they work 1000 times harder than a burger flipper, they probably work less than the burger flipper. But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.

Not true at all. Partners & MD take a much larger share of the pie compared to execs at tech companies.

For law, finance and medicine there is lot more personal liability to reach for big rewards unlike coders sitting in office and implementing business requirements they received from management which in their view is clueless.

This is wrong. Lawyers get paid worse than FAANG SWEs unless they make partnership, which is the equivalent to becoming a co-owner or working as a lower level exec at a big tech company.

Doctors at big hospitals in the bay make worse money than Google SWEs last time I was chatting with my friend’s wife who was a Doctor at Stanford medicine. The super highly paid doctors are the ones who found or cofound practices.

Finance can pay a little higher, but that’s only because the teams are usually smaller and you have more direct impact. You might pull down 1M/year at Renaissance or whatever, but the partners are still pulling in nearly 100x that.

> It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct.

This is the same across nearly all businesses. The owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs. It’s not a coop.

Startups often use this argument in reverse ("we're a small company, we can't pay you as much") while paying their founders far, far more than 200X what they pay early engineers. I'm including equity grants in this calculation because you are, as well.

For whatever it's worth, market comp for Engineer #1 equity is significantly above 1%. Depends on a lot of things (number of founders, how many founders are already technical, whether hire is pre or post PMF, prior experience, etc.) but by and large <1% is not going to be competitive at this level.

People have a hard time with big numbers. See richest people in the world or how much money Apple makes. It's staggering when you turn it into visualizations or $/second or something. And even then, it's hard for our minds to comprehend something so completely foreign.

Either they did not negotiate for a better package with compensation and equity early on OR sadly, they joined too late. If they wanted a lot more equity (and therefore risk but also potential for a high return like Musk or Bezos or whatever), then they would have needed to join super early, or better yet, have been a co-founder to a Musk or a Bezos or whatever.

But they weren't, so no, they don't get anywhere near the sharing in the big reward, just a small or tiny slice.

Writing the damn code is not a big deal. Knowing what to write is.

One of the largest groups of non-union employees making movies are the VFX artists. Odd coincidence that they're paid much less and have worse working conditions.

The hourly rate is fine. The min/max hours is fine.

The union exclusivity clause is bullshit. They won’t even allow you to use your own company’s employees to record temporary VO. It’s all or nothing.

Expo hall unions are even worse. I have to wait 30 minutes and pay someone $50 so they can plug my surge protector into a floor outlet? Thanks but no thanks.

Working in games I have had to work with different unions on several occasions. Each experience is absolutely dreadful. I’ll pass.

Edit: downvote my opinion if you think it’s bad. that’s cool. Doesn’t change that every experience I have ever had working with unions was absolutely awful.

Not suggesting that "big tech" doesn't have advantages, but overall, there's an entire world of software development outside of those companies where developers can contract, compete from other countries, and companies are free to hire all sorts of contract labor free of control. You don't even need a college education to do most of the work in our industry.

There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable industry they'll rack up high compensation as a matter of course, even in the most highly competitive, merit-based environment. That's why archaic and even medieval institutions such as guilds only make things worse by hobbling the industry.

The ratio of nepotism hires and who-you-knowism in that industry is insane. There's a reason you have multi-generation families all "in the business".

Met plenty of people in NYC in the industry, and they are either nepotism hires or surrounded by them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...

When that's all you've got, arbitrary layoffs to boost market cap are the side effects.

> The tech industry is desperate to somehow frame a period of time where it took advantage of low interest rates to recklessly overhire and overinvest as something that created entitled workers. What they don’t want to discuss is the truth that the only people that have ever acted entitled are the already-wealthy ghouls who cry about how workers don’t do enough for their paychecks.

You always look at the person being paid less than you or working in "relatively" worse conditions and think oh at least I'm not doing that job. All amenities that these companies "treat their workers" with are not out of goodness of there hearts but they are all designed to keep the worker in the office longer and work longer hours. The cost of those amenities are a fraction of profits these workers make for the company.

You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. "Our profits dipped 5% this year? well too bad you gotta go even if you worked 20 years for this company".

Also don't be under any illusion that the golden era of a high paid dev job is going to last forever. As the supply for skilled tech increases and the automation evolves, the average tech workers are going to be as expendable as any other profession, they already are in fact. In fact the sole reasons these companies promote "teach your kids to code" is not because they care about our kids development, but it's because they want a steady supply of tech workers in future at low cost. The more tech workers there are, the less they have to pay.

In the end, the fact that these companies are making ungodly amounts of profits should be seen as a huge red alert. This is nothing but exploitation of labor no matter which field you are working on. Exploitation doesn't have to be working in poor conditions. If a worker is getting paid only a fraction of value they are producing then it qualifies as exploitation and should be looked with scrutiny.

The heirs who own the majority of most of the FAANG stock created none of the wealth, did none of the work. These rich kids of Instagram never worked, never will - nor did their parents, nor did their parents.

So your argument is the workers creating the wealth should fork over the amount of surplus labor value to these heirs, that is being expropriated.

What about these parasitical heirs you are arguing for? The ones who live off the dividend check wealth created by those who work? "I can't even begin to comprehend your POV". If the worker creating wealth keeping it is an entitled attitude, what is the attitude of these parasitical heirs who do not work?

Look here, kids, go ask those graybeards you laugh at behind their backs what it was like during the dotcom bust.

The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.

Maybe something to do with the change in the type of people wanting to work in tech - it used to be geeks and now it is a high status job and attracts status/money seekers. Great discussion on “The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098

  2000’s
  - “the Dark Ages you and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s”
  - “it's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool Tech was”
  - “I was a Yale 05 graduate and in my graduating year Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids”
  - “status seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after:” Finance, Consulting, Law, or Medicine (not startups, not tech)

  2020’s
  - “now things have changed you know fast forward um a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists”
  - “college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview just as much as people study how to interview how to get into Goldman Sachs”
  - “they want the status they want the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs: bam, they're all now associated with big Tech”
  - “at first you see the explosion of CS majors in school and I think you would think to yourself oh man that means that there are a lot more people who are interested in building but that's not actually the case like it's it's it's uh it's deceiving the numbers are deceiving. I remember going to a class and talking to a bunch of kids who are kind of interested in in Tech and startups and so forth and I remember saying to them ‘hey like how many of y'all are studying CS and and write code’ and 90 of the people raise their hands and then I remember asking oh that's amazing like ‘what percentage of you would want to be writing code as part of your job in a startup or a company’ and like 90 of those hands went down”

I think it's a massive opportunity for the discipline of software engineering as a whole for engineers to start stepping up a bit more to position ourselves less as the misunderstood computer monks and more as the experts in making smart tradeoffs around what's good for the business, product, users, software itself, etc etc. In many companies, the most influential engineers + engineering leaders operate like this as it is.

Less often than they shed under-performers. Hiring during mass layoffs is difficult because it’s a market of lemons situations. You have to sift through the majority that got let go because their manager identified them as performing below average to find the ones that were laid off because some failing departments were shut down.

These companies all hired like crazy because they thought COVID might have been a cultural inflection point, and when it turned out not to be, they cut costs.

My point is there is no strategy outside of “make line go up”.

From my experience working at FAANG, most of the developers working at these companies are the same skill as anywhere else, they just managed to pass the interview by studying and prepping for it slightly more than the other guy

If the company is explicitly paying you to build something to be patented, they should own it.

Making it yourself means not accepting their paycheck for the work and covering the associated expenses of your own time and filings. Then you own it and can license it to whoever.

If there’s some alternative way of doing this that still incentivizes the company to hire you in the first place, it’s probably worth negotiating up front. Patents aren’t very different from any other work for hire scenario in that the people paying for the work will own the result.

If you hire someone to renovate your house and make a ton of money selling it, does the contractor deserve a cut? If so, did he charge you less for that cut knowing it was a flip?

It's one thing to have someone who makes more money than you can imagine swinging their dick into politics and being generally out of touch. It's a lot harder to make excuses when you see people who are more numerous and only make 2-10x what you make doing it.

As for modern France and their propensity for rioting over minor labor disputes, who wants that either? Sure a narrow slice of the population gets early retirement but the youth unemployment rate is 20% and it is increasingly hard there to get onto a career ladder that would afford you an early retirement.

Marx would agree. People who don't know better tend to think that labor vs capital is an aesthetic or moral conflict rather than a material one. The mechanics of capitalism force the owners to exploit the workers as much as possible, or else they will be driven out of business. That doesn't necessarily make the owners bad or hateful people, though it does select for people who are able to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing in spite of the evidence.

Tech workers can be oppressed even if other laborers are more oppressed; believe this is where the idea of class solidarity originates.

Tech workers are in the same class as all other laborers; not capitalists.

At least where I'm standing, fundimental profit incentive is morally bad. Yes they are by definition "nasty people". Our fundimental responsibility is to improve ourselves and the world around us. It can occasionally align with profit incentive (we have a culture where money can be a powerful tool), but considering it "normal" or "ok" seems problematic.

If you want to talk about incentives, how about what we can do to change them?

Big yup. I think the author's point is valid, but I think you're observation is completely true and valid too. I do remember that time around 2017. Lots of talk about tech unionization, but no action because like you said, they didn't want to endanger their comfy jobs. I live in Seattle, and many tech workers here talk about equality, labor rights (only for the Starbucks employee), but the moment something would endanger their job, benefits, or property values they wouldn't hesitate to vote against what they claim to value.

Our hands, eyes, and legs may end up being the expensive parts to replace—not our creativity, not our raw intelligence—so, related niches may be the ones in which human labor thrives the longest. Perhaps Amazon will be able to slash its office workforce to a small fraction of its current size, before it can do the same with its warehouses. Go figure.

Time to go lift some weights so I can still land a job in my 50s, I guess....

Pair that with what we have seen "distrust in institutions" can do to people. I have grave fear our future.

AI is still quite far off from a notion of "common sense", if we _did_ have that it would actually solve a very large host of open problems in robotics that prevent it from being taking lots of blue collar jobs (at least my former coworkers at a Toyota's robotics R&D lab thought so).

As automation improves the leverage on top talent increases and the premium for incrementally better skills improves. I'm arguably a worse programmer than my uncle was 30 years ago but earn far more (inflation adjusted) because I can leverage things like AWS, open source libraries, and various SAAS offerings.

Amazon warehouse workers of today have it nearly just as bad as workers a decade ago.

It reminds me of that scene from Mike Judge's Silicon Valley satire where Gavin Belson, the big-tech CEO, sees protestors out the office window and says he misses the days when big business owners like him could have those protestors shot on sight[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtpibIF4MY

It clearly is not, so asking why it "must" seems a bit odd.

> The only rationale I see is jealousy

Others might call it justice or fairness, but that's basically it. People's feeling of personal security and self-worth.

The same basic force is behind most wars, revolutions, and other forms of inter-personal violence. That begins to answer the question, really.

1. HR needs to justify real estate costs or HR will be cut back

2. HR wants to fire some people who refuse to go back because if they're not in the office then HR will be cut back

3. HR doesn't like the people that WFH because they are bucking the pay bands and if HR doesn't enforce the arbitrary salary bands then there won't be budget for hiring and HR will be cut back

> I hate labor activists who want to tell me how to run my company and antagonize workers to see themselves in some sort of power struggle with management

If you're actually doing everything you can to make them productive and happy, then you won't have labor activists because they won't have anyone to rally. And if you mean activists at other companies, they shouldn't affect you either, because you're already doing what they are asking for elsewhere, right?

> We are all working for the same mission - make as much money as possible.

They want to make as much money as they can for themselves which is diametrically opposed to your goal of making as much money for yourself. That's why it's looked at as hostile.

The only way to be a good employer of labor is if your goal is to provide a great wage and benefits to your employees and then keep what is left over. Your goal can not be to make as money money as possible, because then you have to keep it away from your workers.