The Engineer’s Predicament
thedriftmag.com
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So yes, those people are more likely to gravitate towards a personal politics that offers a solution for their personal woes.
It’s not hard to fix as a society. Build enough housing and you’ll find all those busy educated relatively-high-earning folks go off to live a comfy life, like generations of relatively-high-earning folk before them.
I much prefer cost-of-living indicators to be an cruel indicator that the area is populated enough. Stop basing your model on everyone being able to move to the SV. Remote work is much better as a social model, if not just for the ecology.
Build some tall multifamily buildings in SF if you want to lower the carbon intensity of the residents.
Source:
https://jalopnik.com/nyt-report-confirms-that-density-reduce...
No. Asia has many denser cities than the Bay Area. The temperate climate and a dense urban setting with good public transportation make the Bay one of the most environmentally friendly places in the country for people to live. Even the usual California bugbear of water use is pretty small per resident in the Bay.
>Remote work is much better as a social model, if not just for the ecology.
All the remote workers moving to Montana and Tennessee ultimately consume more resources and damage more fragile ecosystems than if they had lived in cities.
Most people who do leave cities complain about noise, crime and school quality, not density per se.
Talk about nonsense.
I know numerous people who have moved out of NYC to long island, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and California, all to suburban or rural areas. Everyone one of them has stated that they wanted more property, privacy and less people. When they visit NYC or drive through they tell me they would NEVER live there ever again. Hell one friend born and raised Brooklyn tells me "fuck that dirty overcrowded shit hole." And I know a few more who are either thinking or planning to leave. So you are 100% wrong.
Bernie-ism is basically people who were promised a comfy white collar life in exchange for getting a college degree and are pissed to learn that this ship has sailed. The decent jobs are here and the affordable houses are there, take your pick.
I used to think that way too. For years. Until I realized that's never been how labor is valued. Ever. Let's dispense with this fantasy.
There's also a disconnect. Very few people value what they buy in stores this way. We don't care what it cost to manufacture what we buy. We just care what other stores sell it for. If all the other stores are selling it cheaper, then this store is charging more than it's worth.
People pay for product. People pay for services. To first order the pricing model is the same.
And of course as another commenter said: Try starting your own business and earning 150k. I bet 95% of readers here are incapable of it.
Ignore unicorn startups and listen to How I Built This. It's quite common that for several years the founders earn little. All they have is equity they can't liquidate. For years they have to pay employees a lot more than they themselves make and give them employee rights that they themselves don't have.
If you look across all businesses in the US, earning 150k puts you better off than 90% of business owners. The deck is in favor of employees, not business owners.
Unless you're a professional sportsball player, C-suite executive, actor, etc...
There's a number of labor jobs who haven't put capital into the business yet who receive compensation in line with the value they bring to the companies.
What we're lacking to receive the same is leverage, because unions have been defanged and discredited in our current times.
> Unless you're a professional sportsball player, C-suite executive, actor, etc..
How are these folks valued in a manner different from what my comment states?
same reason why sports school teacher cannot be paid NFL player's salary, despite both of them engaging in "sports".
high compensation - you have to compete for it, earn it, and prove everyday that you deserve it, you cannot demand handouts with your sole argument being some sort of "fairness"
I'd love the "risk" of failing up. Do the golden parachute and handcuffs come with that package?
same with rsu packages
The deck is in favor of massive inequality. This expresses in different ways. For many employees, it's exploitative workplaces. (These exploitative places are very often large companies - it turns out smaller companies usually have a sense of "together" that makes this harder). For many new businesses, it's an extremely harsh environment with low survival rates. A large part of that is that the environment is controlled by large companies and their owners.
There's a price to massive scale, and it seems we've chosen to pay it as massive inequality.
It takes a lot of patience, learning and failure. Even after 10 years I still feel like there's so much more to learn to get to where I want to go.
I still don’t understand this idea that labor supposedly has some sort of intrinsic value. The value is derived from the labor being done in the context of a system created by someone else. As others have said, if you want to reap the full value of your labor, you’re free to go it alone.
In option 3 the system benefits from every member’s labor contributions, AND every member benefits from the “context of a system created by someone else”
This assertion (regardless of the dollar value) bugs me, because it never considers the cost of living. Sure, if I lived in Vietnam, $150k would make me a relative millionaire.
But I don't live in (for example) Vietnam. A vast majority of people working a job that pays $150k don't live in a similar place either.
When property ownership is indefinite and transferrable between generations, then capital accumulation becomes about whoever did it first. Yes there is occasional disruption, but a guy like Micheal Bloomberg did the labor 40 years ago and has had people working for him ever since.
I think the idea is that we ALL stand on the shoulders of giants, and rather than holding all of the gains ourselves, they should be spread so as to give other people the opportunity to make something of themselves.
If this is true, the richest people in this country should be named Washington or Jefferson, or perhaps more recently, Carnegie or Vanderbilt. Instead, we have the likes of Bezos or Musk, the latter of whom wasn't even born here. Bloomberg was born to a bookkeeper, hardly the stuff of generational wealth. Empirical evidence suggests that it's actually pretty hard to remain at the top of the leaderboard across many generations.
I agree with the idea that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but I dispute the picture you paint that the wealthy are "holding all of the gains [themselves]". Salaries get paid, taxes get paid, new ecosystems are made upon which future wealth can be built. There is no compelling evidence that makes me believe that more redistribution on top of what we already have (which is already quite a bit, contrary to popular belief that the US is a low-taxes-on-the-rich, low-social-benefit nation) would result in better outcomes for the median person.
But I think these empirical studies are a bit silly when they describe what happens in a system that accumulates wealth in the hands of a few. Once you pass a certain critical mass, it becomes very difficult to lose power. But if you are just moving up into a slightly higher tax bracket, it's still easier to revert to the mean. By definition most people will return to the mean.
The issue is what happens when people are in the long tail of ultra-wealth. How does it affect the health of our society?
I attempted to address this when I said:
> Yes there is occasional disruption
Also Vanderbilt and Carnegie existed during a time of much higher taxation, and also Carnegie gave away most of his wealth. It's also not hard to find examples of "old money". They don't have nearly as much as a Bezos or a Musk, but still more than the average person could ever hope to earn. Finally, I hate to attribute systemic patterns to the actions of individuals, but I think it's more so that rich kids without the same grit as their hard-scrap capitalist parents end up squandering their wealth. Even after his insane corruption, Trump's returns on his dad's money are paltry compared to buying the S&P 500, or even bonds for that matter. I would attribute the dissipation of familial wealth more to hubris and infighting than the system being hostile to generational wealth transfer.
In addition, our current economic system, "shareholder capitalism" is about 40 years old. Under this paradigm it may be much easier to hold on to power. We don't know for sure, but regardless of the inter-generational aspect, think about how Bill Gates hasn't written a line of code in 40 years.
To try and quantify it, think about Bill Gates' total contribution to MSFT as a percentage. Say time multiplied by talent. When there are 10 employees with the same skill level, he contributes 10% and maybe he owns 1% of the company. Seems pretty generous. At 100 engineers he is now just doing CEO duties, but his total contribution averages out to about 2% and still owns 1%. After 40 years and thousands of employees his ownership is still 1%, while his contributions are like 0.00001% of the total contribution to MSFT. This is what I mean by it being about "whoever did it first". Someone with a higher lifetime contribution to the company can be making less simply because Bill was there first.
This is the nature of property ownership. You can defend it or not, but there is clearly a pattern of inequality that develops because of compounding growth's relationship with time. If that ends up harming your system somehow you need to address it. I don't think that pointing out the nature of it should be controversial. It's literally basic math.
> There is no compelling evidence that makes me believe that more redistribution on top of what we already have
Then you aren't looking hard enough.
That would imply no such thing as owning part of a company. But then a moral equivalent would probably just pop up in it's place. Instead of owning shares, investors become mini lenders collecting interest on their loans.
Probably some sort of cooperative ownership. If you could perfectly calculate the weighted contribution of every person, you would just divide ownership up by that number. A contributor who has done 1% of the total work within an organization has 1% ownership and has 1% of the profits. If that employee retires then their contribution diminishes, but this is (theoretically) countered by the growth in profitability of the company. As long as profit growth outpaces the increase in labor (this ratio is productivity) then people should be able to retire and have a growing pension, without also unfairly capitalizing on the labor of new employees.
So let's say they work 20 years and do 1% of the work. In the next 20 years, the number of employees stays the same, but productivity doubles. The original worker has now done 0.5% of all the work done by the company, but if the company has doubled in profitability, they are still making the same amount of profit they were before.
This also assumes no outside investment from people who aren't workers, which makes it really hard to start a business. Maybe there could be some sort of bootstrapping period where investors can make their returns, which are capped at a certain amount. Or have unlimited returns but the company must switch to a cooperative structure past a certain headcount/size. Dealing with investment is certainly tricky in this thought experiment.
That is a totally theoretical solution but it's fun to explore different ways of organizing systems.
Not trying to cry that that's unfair since that was the deal at the time was salary instead of ownership. Plus what about all the stuff I spent time on that never produced any value? I still got paid and got to keep it.
Just saying as part of the theoretical conversation about other possible deals.
Cornelius Vanderbilt lived from 1794 to 1877, when there was no income tax; Andrew Carnegie lived in the US from 1848 to 1919, and he would only have paid income tax in the last six years of his life. Government receipts and expenditures were single-digit percent of GDP back then.
I do wish the wealthy of today were more familiar with the concept of noblesse oblige, and laud Carnegie's devotion to philanthropy, but you couldn't be more wrong with your statement that those people lived in a time of much higher taxation. On the contrary, American government of those times was very, very small, compared to the almost 40% of GDP that it is now.
> think about how Bill Gates hasn't written a line of code in 40 years
> Someone with a higher lifetime contribution to the company can be making less simply because Bill was there first.
Your engineering manager or CTO doesn't write code yet is paid more than you. There's value in directing labor and capital, and putting them together in a prudent way.
If Bill Gates wasn't there to be first, would there be a Microsoft that an employee would be contributing to? Risk and reward go hand in hand, and someone getting paid a handsome salary like clockwork is agreeing to take a small risk for a small slice of the output.
Henry Ford didn't toil away at the assembly line putting cars together; he came up with the whole idea and employed people to execute his vision, without which none of it would have existed to begin with. Seems like implicit to your argument is the idea that the capitalists are neither necessary nor sufficient to these great commercial successes, and it would have spontaneously erupted among the proletariat without them.
> Then you aren't looking hard enough.
OK, let me look harder. It's actually pretty hard, because the US is by most measures one of the richest countries in the world, even for the average person. For median disposable income per person (adjusted for purchasing power), the US tops the list; there is no country where the median person has more money to spend on what they choose to spend it on.
For another measure, look at the GDP (again, PPP) per capita; there are a handful (literally) of countries higher than the US -- Ireland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Qatar, Monaco, Macau, UAE, Bermuda, Switzerland, Isle of Man, and Norway. Most of them are some combination of a tiny tax haven or a petro-state, with Ireland, Singapore, and Switzerland being exceptions, all three of which have a lower government expenditure as a fraction of GDP than the US.
Ireland is famous for low corporate taxes; the average worker in Switzerland pays a lower tax rate than the average worker here; and Singapore is basically a tax haven, with no capital gains tax and low top tax rates, and a remarkably efficient government at only 15% of GDP (seriously, this is the best in the developed world).
Where is your evidence that higher taxation and more redistribution would lead to a better outcome for the median person in the US?
My bad, I was under the impression that the corporate tax rate was higher in the 1910s->1920s
> Your engineering manager or CTO doesn't write code yet is paid more than you. There's value in directing labor and capital, and putting them together in a prudent way.
I think the main question is how much of this can be measured and what is it worth? Sure it has value but I personally don't think the value is quantitatively different in a way that justifies the huge pay difference between execs and laborers, nor qualitatively different in a way that makes CEO pay be in ownership. I think that these distinctions are more to enforce a class system. If the idea is that a CEO's performance is tied to share price, therefore they should be rewarded in shares, then why doesn't that logic extend to all workers?
> For another measure, look at the GDP (again, PPP) per capita
GDP per capita doesn't really mean much because of averaging, I will address the median though:
> For median disposable income per person (adjusted for purchasing power), the US tops the list
Here are the numbers I found where US is third:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/45ae3dae-en/index.html?i....
Disposable income is post-tax. I would like to see normalization where we take things like education, healthcare, housing, and childcare costs that are covered by social democracies and add that to their disposable income, or subtract it from ours. We could even factor in household debt. Even better would be to take that normalized score and divide it by working hours. There's also the question of personal freedoms, how much agency does an individual have in their workplace, in the home the own or rent, wrt healthcare, etc. There is more to qol than just having money to spend.
> Most of them are some combination of a tiny tax haven or a petro-state
I think that the US being the world's reserve currency affords us some sort of status akin to being a tax haven or petro state, no?
> Where is your evidence that higher taxation and more redistribution would lead to a better outcome for the median person in the US?
I think this is a bit of a loaded question. I think the median person is decently well-off in the US barring some medical catastrophe. I think the question should be how to improve the social mobility chances for those below the median. I can't be bothered to look them up now but there are plenty of studies where you can see the effects of social spending on the earning power and life outcomes of people. It's a pretty simple idea that if you give poor people access to the same education and networking opportunities as wealthy people, they will perform better. Anecdotally, I find it a lot easier to take risky career moves now that I have a safety net of savings under me than I did when I was making $12/hr.
Lastly I think you only need to look back as far as the 40s-60s under managerial capitalism to see the effects of higher taxation and more investment in productive sectors of the economy plus housing/schooling. I think most people here would agree that our current economy has been propped up by debt and currency manipulation.
> I think the question should be how to improve the social mobility chances for those below the median
but we differ on the "how", as well as having a more (me) or less (you) optimistic view on the current state of things in the country.
Perhaps it's fair to say that you see income and wealth inequality as the proximate cause of what ails us, and an expanded role of government, funded through more progressive/redistributive taxation, as the best way to afford better chances for those most poorly off; whereas I see the worsening of the social fabric seen in the steep rise in single-parent households and increasing permissiveness towards behavior previously deemed sinful (such as drug use) as the proximate cause, and that bigger government will only ultimately hinder the ability of those most poorly off to help themselves.
You may be interested in Thomas Sowell's book, A Conflict of Visions, for a truly elegant analysis of this type of dichotomy.
But as someone who has tried creating value from scratch (by starting businesses) … my god having a job is so much easier. Making $200k+ as a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to scraping together $50k of fully captured value.
The flip side is true, too. If the value of your labor is truly what you say it is, and all it takes is a few engineers like yourself to produce that high valuation of the total company, what are you doing employed somewhere where your work is so undervalued?
It's telling that you need to compare your salary to a company's valuation rather than their income. That company worth hundreds of millions is probably actively losing tens of millions overall. It's only worth hundreds of millions because capital owners decided that this type of cash is worth burning. Without them, your $150k job simply wouldn't exist.
market should have found equilibrium, otherwise there is literally free money on the table.
why would engineer work for 150k when he/she can create startup with multi-million valuation?
How does that work? Most of the rewards go to the owners of the capital. That's literally the central idea of socialism.
or alternatively - plenty of dual class stock holders (Zuckerberg is prime example), where you still retain control of company, while benefitting from cheap VC and public capital
The answer is no, so I don’t see why software engineers should be held to higher standards.
Sarcasm doesn't make you funny or witty. This isn't reddit.
See? I can do it too.
Suppose there are 3 people involved in a startup: the founder, the engineer and the investor. The engineer gets $300,000 for 2 years' work. The founder gets $200,000 for 3 years' very intense work + $10 million if the startup succeeds. The investor puts in capital, does no work, and gets $40 million if the startup succeeds.
It is arguable that the founder and the engineer are getting a comparable amount but with a different risk profile. The socialist argument is that the person who only provides capital is overpaid for doing that. Whether that argument has an economic justification, or just a political or moral justification, and whether you believe that argument, is another matter. But it is clear that, if the investor got less, there would be more to pay both of the people who contribute work.
Perhaps a source of confusion is that successful founders often go on to become investors with the money they have collected, for example Paul Graham or Marc Andreessen. You could also argue that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, while still nominally 'working' as CEO, has gone from being a founder in Facebook the product to being an investor who provides capital for various Facebook the company projects, and that perhaps much of his wealth was accumulated in the second stage.
imo market forces have some equilibrium in current state
Its not like founders are forced to. They can always be profitable and fund from their own operational cash flow
chuckles walks away.
I think this is worth raising because the article sweeps across a broad range of topics that -- in my humble opinion -- are not necessarily "post capitalism." And it may be the case that some political concerns mentioned are in opposition to a post capitalist world. For example, what if the fastest way to a post capitalist world is a changing American politics and then using American hegemony to export those politics?
Still, it's a good discussion prompt.
There is a sort of tech aristocracy who thinks that because they get paid well, they are of a greater caste than their median wage-earning colleagues. They don't just earn more, they deserve to earn more. They let themselves believe that they can tackle any societal problem by throwing tech at it.
Others just lose touch with the reality of their peers, having earned far more than them since they left college. They are aware that they have it pretty good, but forget how much.
I don't hear too many tech workers worry about their work concentrating wealth in the wrong hands, their blue collar colleagues not getting invited to the offsites, or their participation in various destructive ventures. As long as they get paid, it's all right.
I'm not sure if there are truly that many socialist software developers. They only feel like they are workers when they can't afford a backyard. Champagne socialists, as they say.
I do meet a few socialists who play with code, but they tend to apply their skills very differently, at very different organisations.
"Wanting a different future is stupid because the tools you use were made by people with different value systems" is not a good argument.
If I can work at a FAANG and have home ownership in a reasonable location (flyover state, but not in DR Horton suburban hell) be a pipe dream, then I must imagine how impossible comfort and security is for people working real jobs. From there socialism is the obvious conclusion.
If the cold war was about determining which system was better, socialism (we can argue that the USSR was actually state capitalist but whatever) or liberalism, then I would argue that when the wall came down, the American ruling class thought that liberalism had won.
But the thing about ideas is that you cant ever really kill them. You have to constantly convince the next generation that your system is worth buying into. The arguments in favor of capitalism keep getting weaker and weaker. Why is it citizen's fault for looking at a raw deal and saying "no thanks". The ruling class should instead be sweetening the deal.
I think you're very much on to something here. There's the age old saying that "money can't buy class", and it seems to be held true by what we see in the public eye with the behavior of most of the wealthiest people in the world, almost all of whom are nouveau rich.
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Beautiful.
Socialist: harmonious society is the highest value
Libertarian: personal liberty is the highest value
These frequently come into conflict. For example, a socialist would support policies that benefit the collective (e.g. new rules), while the libertarian will frequently oppose them because they incur a cost to individual liberty.
What exactly is "socialist" about Stallman, aside from him not being a US Republican and disliking Big Tech?
For example, a radically socialist policy would be that "social ownership" should extend to some amount of personal information, to increase accountability, cohesion, trust, etc. But Stallman would vehemently oppose this.
it is closer to libertarian movement imo
The problem with solving the Information Problem, as Charles Stross notes[1], is that people will know that it was solved by other people. Thus a technical solution in a national context becomes a political proposition, where it's going to instantly die at the cash-laden hands of the rentiers.
Engineering isn't the problem. It's within human means to solve the Information Problem, now, with current technology. One could argue that massive, vertically scaled companies like Wal Mart and Amazon have been doing exactly that for decades, and have - as Marx predicted - been making enormous profits from the interchange with adjacent economies that lack central planning[2].
But Walmart and Amazon don't need to deal with political problems. For the solution to be practical, long term, at the nation-state level, it has to appear motiveless. Naturally this is going to rub the nubbins of the AI boosters hard enough that they'll need towels for their chairs.
A little note in closing. Beware anyone who tries to equate an economic tool with an ideological or - worse - moral position. Sometimes hammers are better than screwdrivers, and sometimes hex bolts are better than screws. They're all just systems tools to get things from where they get made to where they're needed. That's it. Nothing more. Anyone saying otherwise - that an economic system will make you gay, or will get you to heaven, or make people like you - is selling you something. Be skeptical. Just my $.02.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
[1] Via the character Gianni Vittoria in Accelerando, speaking as a former Italian minister of economics
[2] Hell, does that describe the entire post-1970s rise of the entire finance industry? Eh. That's a little much.
Rise of socialist engineers? In fact, I see quite the opposite. I've seen a greater rise of capitalist focused engineers in the last decade. What would once be free or open source software is now pushed to a startup with VC funding, with an free/community/self-hosted version and a cloud/SSO version.
Note: I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, better or worse, or anything else. This is just my observations.
not really - most of the programmers i've ever worked with have been of fairly liberal/left-wing view.
perhaps much less so in the UK (where i am) as we tend to value public services (such as the NHS) and realise they have to be paid for.
From my perspective, socialism died with the Soviet Union. The left-wing ideologies that have been dominant since the 90s are closer to classical liberalism than socialism, because they fundamentally accept private property and free markets.
To me it looks like the discussion in the US has been poisoned such that there are only two options: Stalinism vs the-poor-can-starve-in-the-streets Capitalism. It's a framing from the cold war which the right in the US has kept alive. It exists to hide the possibility of a middle path, a popular middle path which Europe took after the war.