Meanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires who wouldn't piss on them to put out a fire and arguing about why we can't have unions because blah blah blah rugged individualism.
[GIF of Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money]
Also the fact that people in group $X are getting screwed more than people in group $Y is no reason not to fight to not get screwed if you are in group $Y.
For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots or doctors, you'd have to agree on a way to restrict supply (H1B restrictions, more licensing and credentialling etc) to give the union leverage. You have to control the supply taps and rate limit entry to the field.
I think it's hard to say if this would net out better for workers than the current arrangements, which are already the best in the world on nearly every metric.
It also seems like there's a timing issue - if tech workers DID successfully unionise enough to withhold a meaningful fraction of labour, the gains might ultimately end up in the market cap of AI companies via substitution.
There are also revolving doors between the regulator and the relevant professional bodies.
I'm pro union in cases where employers are a monopsony and workers have few options - it completely makes sense for coal miners in a coal town to form a union to even things out. I just don't think US tech right now meets the conditions for it to make sense, the market is too liquid for employers to capture all the upside.
US tech workers have real problems and complaints - PTO, maternity leave, health care to start - but these feel to me more like structural features of the US labour market? It makes more sense to me that these should be subject to national regulation rather than specific advantages for tech workers carved out by a union.
Now, using the leverage is the difficulty to unionize. Athletes are a tiny group, pretty easy to organize. Pilots are a small group, also pretty easy to unionize. The fact they have to be licensed means there is a record for all the people needed pull in. Software engineers seem to be 5x-20x larger population than commercial pilots (quick/rough searches). They have no certification or registry organization and have no common affiliations. It's incredibly difficult to organize this group. There's also no regulatory capture requiring developers to be US citizens so, if you did unionize and tried to negotiate too hard the industry would just move away from the US so there's just not a lot of leverage this profession has.
Developers don't set EE wages. It's always the management class that is the source of your woes, not your fellow workers. We're in this together.
The number of people making "moon money" is very, very small compared to everyone else in the industry.
If you don't need to buy a product to make a product, or when you have to that's typically pennies on the dollar you can share a lot more of that.
The real difference here is that when the market is favorable you CAN share more. And Samsung is doing so. In the US you probably wouldn't be able to do this because the shareholders will cry and will happily give a 100M bonus to whoever will 'lead' the company better. Where better means diverting as much as possible to the shareholders
-- A proud programming union worker in South Korea since 2018.
You have a point. But on this precise topic it’s pretty hard to make. A tiny handful of companies who are winners beyond anyone’s expectations simply do not matter.
There is exactly zero percent chance this profit sharing contract would have been negotiated by either party as it is if this had been remotely predicted in advance. Same as the retrospectively extremely lucrative RSUs granted to nvidia employees just five years ago.
Tech folks employed by the top tech companies have been fine. I do not cry even a minute for them. The fun part of the Korean memory worker compensation is that blue collar folks finally are getting just a little bit of the taste the laptop class has been part of for so long. And it is likely to be comparatively very fleeting.
(It sounds like the union got a great deal for these workers, though.)
You seem surprised? Do you know how things (sometimes) work in Silicon Valley?
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
The system is rotten to the core. We as tech workers are somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being exploited while also benefiting from the exploitation of others.
Markets are fundamentally just a proxy for the interests of rich people. There can be no fair allocation of resources as long as the mechanism to do so is a figleaf for the oligarchy.
If you do not feel gratitude to your employer I suggest you find a different one. If you cannot find such an employer over an extended time frame, perhaps the problem is you.
You can feel a job has been worthwhile, lucrative, satisfying… (mutually beneficial)
But feeling gratitude to an _entity_ that puts profits before your well-being is misplaced. Maybe there are exceptions, but not in big tech.
Mostly I choose to work for small companies, getting reimbursed in job satisfaction and work-life balance rather than a big paycheck.
Tech pulled a great trick here: equity.
America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k
It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.
Would love to but I'm afraid you grossly misunderstand how the power law distribution works. Unfortunately the billionaires are running away from us exponentially faster than we are catching up.
Speaking as someone who will almost certainly become a multi millionaire in the next decade or two. (even if I stop adding more savings manually)
But crucially this only happens if there _isnt_ a big revolution in USA. If there is, I'm fucked.
Why does that matter? Who is trying to catch up with a billionaire? They are not even playing the same game as the rest of us.
This corresponds to the first stage of Marxs theorized progession from capitalism too communism
Done hate the messenger. I'm just taking what I read and applying it to observed reality and telling you it fit.
Self described commies are dumb because they are incapable of enacting the very system they claim to idealize.
My impression of all these communes is:
- idealistic people move in
- they realize 90% of the people that moved in are lazy and don't want to work
- the rest of the 10% run the show and the commune either breaks down here or kicks out many people
- kids are born, they grow up and by the time they get to university age they find the whole thing cringy and leave to go have normal lives
- commune ends
Other than some that also degenerate into sexual abuse between members and other weird power games. My impression of these outsider hippie / communist groups is that their failure rate is very high.
Maybe avoid opining on topics you have no idea in the future as not to make an ass of yourself in public.
First, the general public would have more disposable income if we shift more of the tax burden on the ultra rich.
Second, people like Elon Musk won't be able to give themselves massive bonuses that are essentially paid by diluting common stock.
Also, with regard to the U.S., the U.S. could wipe out its national debt with a one-time wealth tax, and also pass a balanced budget const. amendment so it never ends up deep in debt again.
Lastly, perverse and extremely greed-based exploitative businesses might become less common, since there aren't ultra fat executive paychecks. Although it might still happen if a large group of people are able to make a somewhat high salary off such schemes.
The other issue is the U.S. deficit is a feature not a bug. As long as the world buys the bonds, it’s “free” and no one will care until forced austerity happens.
Look into the end of the Gilded Age to see how this really gets fixed.
We'd largely be transferring shares in companies to the treasury bond holders, ie the people and orgs who hold US debt.
The federal government might for example force mega-sized private companies like Koch Industries to go public to get an accurate market valuation (or just sell it to private equity by starting a bidding war on it across many private equity investors).
The wealth tax cutoff would be determined by the national debt. It might fall to a relatively harsh / low threshold like 99.9% of assets over $20 million. Or maybe 99% of assets between $20 million to $1 billion, and 99.9% on assets above $1 billion.
Treasury bonds themselves would be subject to the wealth tax, so someone with $100 billion in T bonds might just see 99% of $80 million erased. So even the total number of T bonds payable will drop under this wealth tax.
But someone with $100 million in shares in private and public companies will see their shares transferred to the federal government, and then eventually sold.
Once every T bond has been paid off, Congress and the states could try to close the centuries-long chapter on debt by trying to pass a balanced budget constitutional amendment.
Most of the unionize workers still left in America get a better share of the pie than the non-Union workers not even close. It’s always good to work together in a union had to be footloose and fancy free by yourself.
No not a gift but they sure do align incentives
I think I am making a shrewd decision here if my math and equine knowledge holds.
The average person on hacker news is easily in the 90th percentile of software engineers, so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the most people here make somewhere around there.
The biggest confounding factor is the other fact that most HN users are startup founders living off ramen in Peter Thiel's garage, so that probably brings down the average some.
Of course I'm late to the game. My colleagues who have been here ten years are either extremely wealthy and bored or sailing the Caribbean at this point. Every other week someone is taking a sabbatical
I remember thinking like this when i was younger (hes older than me). Then here i am working nearly half as many hours as this guy, for 5-10x the pay.
This is a widespread, pervasive train of thought in America. Yet i wonder as the houses and healthcare stay expensive, food and fuel too... at some point this mental model breaks right?
That is, a US tech worker is taking much more for their own from those billionaire employers, compared to what Samsung's workers managed to do after a lot of haggling.
Just the average doesn’t say enough.