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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

As a programmer sure this annoys me, but I find it a bit disingenuous to tie it to growing societal inequality. Tech workers are definitely on the beneficiary side of the inequality gap, so I don't see how these conspiracies to indirectly keep tech workers salaries down to 2x to 5x of median American household income is really germane.

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So the money that would have gone to the programmers goes to the upper executive layers instead. This merely moves things around slightly, and if anything further squeezes wealth into the top 1% as opposed to top 10%.

This whole story looks fairly damning, especially to Jobs and Schmidt, though that is probably the intent. Faced with a hiring war with 2005 era Jobs you'd have to have serious guts to refuse - like apparently the Palm CEO did.

>So the money that would have gone to the programmers goes to the upper executive layers instead. This merely moves things around slightly, and if anything further squeezes wealth into the top 1% as opposed to top 10%.

Citation needed. Where do you see that it went to the people at the top and wasn't invested back into the company?

Even re-investment back into the company could lead to increased revenues for the people at the top.

Regardless, I find it doubtful you could possibly prove such a thing, even if it were true. One just has to assume that such things helps the company, which in turn helps the people who profit from the company doing well.

>Even re-investment back into the company could lead to increased revenues for the people at the top.

I think the best comparison is Wall Street firms, where a disprportionate chunk of revenues are paid out as compensation to employees. There's longstanding criticism by shareholders that this outsized compensation should be reduced in favor of giving back that value to shareholders.

"re-investment" back into Google likely benefits such shareholders (the majority of whom are not employees of the company) than employees.

True, but as the article seems to point out, the people at the top tend to be major shareholders of the company they work for, as well for the other companies in the group that they were board members.

So, in that train of thinking, they double-dipped by helping the bottom line of multiple companies of which they profit from with their illegal agreements.

Remember how Jobs was considered such a good person for taking a $1 (or something low like that) salary at Apple? How much stake in the Apple stock did he have? He wasn't benefiting from a salary from Apple, but probably was from Apple's profit margins. Profit margins that likely benefited from such agreements.

I strongly disagree that the average tech worker is on the "beneficiary side" of the inequality gap. This is a case of people looking around themselves and seeing they seem to be above average, and concluding that they are on the rich side. Reminds me of a ten-year-old article [1] that presented the remarkable finding that 39% of Americans believe they are or will one day be among the top 1%.

It's certainly in the interests of those REALLY on the right side of the gap to have tech workers believe they are on their side.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hop...

There's that possibly-apocryphal quote about socialism in the US never having taken hold because Americans all believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I definitely buy that software developers have a huge veil of ignorance[1].

We accept lower salaries today because we assume that one day we might be in the ownership class. But this is somewhat reasonable, at least vs other forms of labor. (A line cook will never end up as a millionaire, but a developer might by either founding a startup or getting options on the right one.)

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

The median income for Americans over 18 is $24,062[1].

You're correct that tech workers are still workers--they're not part of the ownership class--but they're the lucky workers who are benefiting from the shifts in the economy toward automation/software/knowledge work.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

Of course income distribution is technically a smooth curve with no gap, so you can draw that line anywhere you want. Hell, Gates can look over at Slim and shake his head, "God damn 0.0000000001%!"

Every tech job creates 4.3 other jobs[1] Maybe that would be 5 or 6 or 7 other jobs if the market was allowed to function without manipulation. So yes it does directly effect social inequality in general.

1. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tech-hiring-creates-other...

So, anyone who has any sort of income at all should be humble and content, because while someone may be artificially hindering their income and networth, at least they aren't a homeless person on the street with no income. I guess . . .?

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