Bosses Are Finding Ways to Pay Workers Less
wsj.com
wsj.com
Fortunately, most of these people managed to find new jobs relatively quickly, albeit with somewhat lower comp packages.
In backpacking when we're trying to lighten our packs, we have a saying, "don't cut ounces when you can cut pounds." Yet the highest-paid people involved in a company always look at the lowest paid workers to see where they can cut costs, because after all, they can't possibly pay themselves less.
This is certainly true, but that $100k MBA doesn't have enough money to buy the company, so he can't run it as a private company like Elon does. A Twitter owned by someone far less narcissistic (or publicly owned) could hire the MBA to run it, but that won't happen because that's not how companies choose their CEOs: the $100k MBA doesn't have the social connections and resume to get the job in the first place.
Troll elsewhere.
> And cutting 80% of your ounces in backpacking makes a difference. If cutting 80% of your ounces changes so little about your backpacking trip that you don't notice a decline in enjoyment you didn't need that 80%.
Exactly!
Now look at who owns 80% of the wealth in the US.
In a higher interest environment the startup money dries up a lot so the risk to your oligopoly is much lower and the demand for yield on your stock increases dramatically so you worry less about a startup and more about maximizing value from your work force (which leads to lower pay on average and layoffs to rightsize), plus the cost of buying a successful startup will be lower because the discount factor from the higher interest rate caps price expansion.
Productivity is up, companies are reporting record profits, and all forms of compensation are being squashed as much as possible
At some point enough is enough right?
This idea that people were being overpaid is absurd. We've been underpaid for decades and it's getting worse over time not better
I’m not furious about what this article is saying, this article is about doing economically viable thing with workers - inside this country - in lower cost of living areas with salaries relevant there instead of higher cost of living areas
I agree that employees could collectively extract more of the value they help create, I don't think every article ok the topic is the right place for that discussion
You don't agree with anything reasonable at all. The way you just said that blames workers, as if it's workers' fault.
Frankly, until people like you stop refusing to listen, every article on the topic is the right place for this discussion, because it's arguably the largest problem facing most people today and people who don't think it's important are a big part of the problem. Whatever ivory tower economics you want to talk about instead just isn't as important.
If you call blame or refusing to listen, I’m not sure which talking point you are referring to. I’m not familiar with any concept or movement beyond that.
Employers are not going to operate outside of market conditions, am I understanding that you wanted me to acknowledge their capability of paying more? Ok. There. I have now. The union can be a market condition.
Software engineers? The ones who proudly refuse to unionize?
There are plenty of software engineers who would unionize, given the chance. It's not easy to do. And sure, with enough effort we could, but that's a pretty big difference from "refusing to".
But that's the whole point of unionizing: have somebody speak for you. /s
Because software engineers don't want to. It is very easy to unionize if a majority wants to.
Software engineers and other white collar professionals want to believe we have more in common with our CEO than we do with a plumber because we work in offices, but I'd bet most of the executive class, ownership class, boards of directors and such see us the same as plumbers: we're a necessary expense
I find it fascinating and deeply sad how the fundamental position on capital markets seemingly shifts depending on how we feel about our current treatment (as if there were not always people who took a hit)
World Economic Forum [1] "Between 1948-1979, the percent growth in productivity and wages were relatively similar, with an increase of 108 percent and 93 percent, respectively. The growth from 1979-2018, however, has been drastically different. While net productivity has continued to increase by an expected 70 percent, hourly compensation in the country is less than a fifth of that at just 12 percent."
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
(You might even ask if you are, actually, more productive. Engineers in the 1960s created the 747 and put men on the moon. Not entirely sure either could be done today. GDP is not really the best way to measure "productivity.")
A: "The new economic system will be based on markets which price items based on their marginal cost over basically anything else, so no more of that tricky old philosophical talk of 'true value' or 'what someone deserves.' Nope, it'll all be based on whatever lands between the two parties' negotiating positions. Totally fair."
B: "Okay then, all of us individual workers will group together to improve our weak negotiating position."
A: "No! You're doing it wrong! You don't deserve to be paid that much, your labor isn't truly that valuable!"
That's not reality. Just because you base your fundamental position on capital markets on how you feel about your current treatment, doesn't mean everyone else does.
What's deeply sad about this situation is that you don't even consider the possibility of empathy and concern for people less fortunate than ourselves.
You mean, I can quit software engineering and install flooring for $150,000/year!? Count me in
If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation. "Yep boss, those face-to-face meetings and talks around the coffee pot are VITAL to this company's success." You have to choose your battles.
But they're not cheap from what I've heard, especially with overhead setting up shop in a foreign country. Similar story for devs from São Paulo as well.
Being at the mercy of a cost cutting boss isn’t going to improve your situation - they will always find a way.
If they don’t realize their mistakes, they eventually end up being like Boeing. Cheaper coders are cheaper for a reason.
Keep thinking that work from home has no negative consequences domestically, and you'll eventually end up like a Boeing castoff.
Very few of Boeing's myriads of problems are related to offshoring (basically only on the 787 program, and it was mostly its initial delays - the recent manufacturing issues are due to low quality work in South Carolina).
737 Max MCAS? Layers upon layers of incompetent people / deadline chasers. It wasn't s software issue, it was a software design issue that should have been caught by the designers, engineers, quality assurance, inspectors. Nobody did their job properly there.
737 Max door blowout? Halfwits forgetting to put bolts back in after sidestepping procedures to save time. Total lack of security culture, missing records, high level pressure to fulfil impossible timelines, and enormous quality issues out of their supplier out of Kansas.
777X delays? Lots of issues, mostly around the engines which isn't Boeing's fault directly.
Back when this scandal broke it came out that Boeing had outsourced MCAS software to offshore contractors making $13/hr. From what I understand software development at Boeing Commercial Aviation has been offshored for many years.
Boeing only uses US nationals for software development in their military division because they're required to do so by law.
When I check in with folks still there, they mainly talk about how the time difference and distance has done nothing but add churn to the entire process both between devs but also between devs and management. Hopefully higher ups will recognize these inefficiences too, but that's wishful thinking.
I don't buy that. Saudi Arabia and the United States, via Saudi Aramco, have figured out a solution to that long ago. Business "flows" unimpededly between the two for decades.
It's not as if you have any influence on that. It all comes down to dollars. Faking a need for office collaboration will only postpone matters a short while.
To be honest I'd love to get my redundancy package now, I've worked at a major enterprise for 15 years and would get more than a year's wage.
I hate working there since the pandemic. Our IT top leaders are complete idiots. And the flex desk office is a nightmare to work in, always running around with your bag of stuff trying to find a desk because nobody obeys the booking system (planon, which is admittedly a total piece of shit)
I'd love to go and work for a startup again but I need the redundancy money to make it through.
Frankly, businesses are due for a reckoning because they're coasting on skeleton crews barely managing to survive critical incidents. More businesses than you think are ran like Boeing under the hood.
There is no real special secret in the WFH world that changes this pattern.
Tech is special in that there is no real capital barrier to a whole lot of what we do; and yet low cost countries are not outputting products...
Offshoring is not new and I’m not sure work from home has any influence. They certainly had these ideas years ago.
I can say from my experience the output and productivity of offshore devs hasn’t matched local. Not necessarily because of capabilities, but communication and culture.
https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/when-outsourcing...
It's odd that you're pretending executives didn't already know this, and in fact havnt either already tried it, or have not already been engaging in such practices for a very long time. It's called outsourcing and tech companies have been doing it for literally decades. I didn't see "being in the office" saving any of those people.
Outsourcing is one of the first things i've heard out of the mouth of more mediocre mid level managers than I can count at this point in my career.
> If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation.
Thanks for the advice, but i'll pass.
That would be more likely a memory loss and not a light bulb. They already did that but it didn't work out.
That's sounds more like fell for the AI promises, were everybody can code with AI support.
A major premise of the book was that post-dot com boom, software engineering in the US had already gone the way of manufacturing — and was never coming back - because executives had figured out that people in much poorer countries with internet connections could do the work for much cheaper.
People have been trying to make outsource only models work for a lot longer than the pandemic.
This is called offshoring, and has been done for decades, to varying degrees of success.
Companies are always trying to undermine label. This is a tale as old as time. WFH changes nothing in that regard.
Anecdotally, my first job in tech was as a cheap developer from a poor country, more than 2 decades ago.
Is this what happened with Crowdstrike?