Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’m trying to piece together a thought. Is it right if my employer wants to “own” the gain in productivity from these tools?

I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.

View on HN

Unless the method of increasing productivity increases it disproportionately for you or you find a way to outcompete in productivity gains, I am not sure that ever happens.

Edit: To put a finer point on this, generally,employed people don't get paid more for the excess value they produce, they get paid more for for the delta in perceived value between them and the next best option to fill the position (on a grand statistical scale for careers).

* There are exceptions to this in the form of commission based jobs.

That goes for everything, you wont take a job that pays much less than the other jobs you can get, customers do the same with products they buy. In the end just a few percent go to profits for most companies, extremely few companies pay out more profits than they pay in salaries.

So all that productivity increase didn't result in higher profits either, end users mostly captured it by getting a lot of free services that previously used to cost money. International communication used to be extremely expensive but today I exchange hundreds of messages with people across the sea daily for almost nothing.

In a competitive environment, yes.

But, tech has been particularly monopolistic/duopolistic and anticompetitive in a lot of different ways. Avoiding being treated as a commodity the same way many of the employees of those companies have.

The way we got to 40 hours workweek wasn't really through productivity increase despite productivity increasing substantially in the era before less work hours became standard. It was due to rebellion by the workers and syndicates. I expect any further changes will require standing up to the elite who's been preparing for that moment by buying themselves islands and private bomb shelters.

The productivity increase religion has never really been about workers. Any increase in productivity is used to reduce the workforce count and to bleed dry existing workers who now have to overproduce in place of their fired coworkers. Its sad how occasionally some people obsess about their productivity on HN as-if they're unaware that they're buying into the very thing that will get them fired and/or burned out.

I don't pay for the tokens I use, so why would I expect to be compensated for it?

Hell, I paid for my own programming environment (SlickEdit) years ago with my own money and still didn't expect to get paid more. I did it because it helped me deliver higher quality work more efficiently and I was proud of that.

You can absolutely capture the value of your additional productivity. Strike out on your own. Start your own company or consulting firm. That has always been the answer. Why would you think it would be any different now?

Of course, but not as an employee

"Ah you textile workers are so whiny. If you're mad at your jobs being obsoleted by massive machine factories, why not just buy a few dozen such factories? Strike out on your own."

Yeah man I don't know if mommy and daddy are paying your rent and healthcare (as I often see from people with this attitude). Or maybe you're one of the 45 year old tech workers whose mid life crisis involves a music project no one will listen to and going to work on some startups with your FIRE nest egg until you come crawling back to a big tech company. But for now I, like most millennial Americans, am reliant on wage labor to afford a dignified life in a tolerable town.

> Ah you textile workers are so whiny...

hell yeah baby, I'm a proud Luddite.

True. I wasn’t born American so there is that. I have some of the lesser promoted freedoms like getting to think critically about if this is what I really want to be doing in life.

> maybe you're one of the 45 year old

> But for I, like most millennial Americans

Someone who turns 45 in 2026 is a millennial though.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

under neoliberal capitalism? no. it's late, but not too late, to join a union.

Careful, you're dangerously close to rediscovering Marxism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com