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Comment by trieste92 | Hacker News Reader

Something that I've noticed in these anti work types is they assume work has negative value, that by working for someone you are "losing"

While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate, I think that this kind of work has inherent value. It has plenty of learning opportunities which lead to income increases (edit: through promotion or going to a different employer, whichever is more optimal) because you become more productive and knowledgeable over time

As far as engineering culture is concerned, you're worse off working with anti work types like op because you don't learn as much and piss away more time, providing fewer learning opportunities in the long run

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> While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate

If you did, why would a company hire you? The idea is the employee must create more value than he costs. And the employee gets more pay than his labor is worth to himself.

That's why it's a win-win relationship.

Except the company cut has been getting bigger and bigger for the last 40 years.

Productivity has increased and wages have not.

That's indeed true for the average worker, but are you sure it is the case for software engineer? How high were the salaries in the 80s?

Ultimately you always have the option of writing your own software. This is much easier than say starting your own package shipping center or whatever.

But there is a huge risk the software will never make money. Billions have been spent on failed software, the employees got to cash out and not care. So you trade risk for reward.

When you look at wages + benefits, the increase is more or less proportional.

Can you point to something that convinced you of this?

I don't have a cite, but I saw a graph in the WSJ decades ago that laid "productivity" and "total worker compensation" on the same graph, and they neatly overlaid each other.

In any case, neglecting the value of employee benefits makes comparing salary to productivity a completely worthless statistic. What needs to be included are the values of:

1. health insurance

2. retirement benefits

3. stock options

4. so-called employer contributions

5. all payroll taxes

6. 401k employer contributions

7. stock purchase plans

8. sick leave

9. vacation

10. severance pay

11. bonuses

12. profit sharing

These can add up to 50% more than the salary.

WSJ is also a very "pro business" paper, they aren't likely to publish anything that supports a pro labor pov

You'll know what you're reading is propaganda if they're comparing salary increases to productivity increases.

Don't overlook that the primary customer of the WSJ is not conservatives, but businessmen who are looking for accurate business information that will help them make money. If the WSJ just delivered pro-business propaganda, that would not serve their customers' needs.

I subscribed to the NYT for a while, and finally gave it up. Their business news was all propaganda, and of little use for things like picking a good company to buy stock in.

> I don't have a cite I wonder why

That's not how this works at all. You produce a certain amount of value that the business appropriates, and then you get paid a small portion of the value your produce as your salary. That's why it's the business owner who becomes and not the employees. The only way you would be paid the exact value that you generate is if you worked in a cooperatively owned business.

I’ve seen these types and they seem to live in some alternate reality where they want to die on very strange hills. Saw one guy ruin his job because he refused to implement an internal tool because he didn’t like the privacy policy of the tool (his concern was that the external company hosted too much company data). Very trivial things become pointless wars.

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