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The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time

The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.

tc7 7y ago
Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case. I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)
- vlan0 7y ago
  Maybe? I know I make about the same as my uncle did working for Ernst & Young (in DC) during the late 90s early 2000s. However, neither of us were/are in development.
- nabnob 7y ago
  I think this is why tech companies and venture capitalists are investing in bootcamps. Take the Lambda school for example - it got funding from Peter Thiel, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital, Google Ventures, GGV Capital, Vy Capital, and Y Combinator. https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambda-school-raised-30m-to-expand-its-income-sharing-tuition-plan-for-online-coding-students/#278dcfe02c68 https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambd...
- zanny 7y ago
  There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5 years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to largely maintain the status quo. And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create. Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune. So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.
Consultant32452 7y ago
We live in a global economy now. Like a billion people have been raised out of abject poverty. It's an absolute falsehood that only the top earners have prospered. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. We brought in millions and millions of foreign workers from impoverished countries, did their wages remain stagnant?
- knightofmars 7y ago
  > The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. This is only half the picture. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because some are moving up and some are moving down.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    According to the US Census data, the percentage of households that are low income is smaller than ever. https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a-good-thing/ https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a...
    - knightofmars 7y ago
      No, according to Mark J. Perry and FEE the percentage of households that are low income is smaller than ever, not the US Census data. This article cherry picked $35,000 as the middle to lower class threshold for a reason. The Brookings Institute, "Our definition is a relative one, meaning that the thresholds pictured above will shift as the income distribution changes shape. If income rises across the distribution, so too will the thresholds that delimit middle-class incomes." Long-running non-biased standard measures of middle-class do not agree with this article's definition of where the middle-class starts and ends: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-midd... https://www.brookings.edu/who-are-the-middle-class/ https://www.brookings.edu/who-are-the-middle-class/
- mikelyons 7y ago
  > Only the top earners have prospered This is actually a relative truth, absolute falsehood cannot exist. It's not absolute truth though.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
People need to start seeing the value of unions again.
- gzimhelshani 7y ago
  Ah shit, here we go again. This how it starts, the mighty socialism.
Draiken 7y ago
> Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases. I know that would be the ideal world but... that's never going to happen under capitalism. I'll die 50 times over before capitalists say "I have enough". While the world revolves around companies, it can't change. Companies have only one objective in mind: increase profits. There is literally zero incentive for anything to change, specially with more and more people in the world. Edit: wording

tc7 7y ago

Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case. I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)

vlan0 7y ago
Maybe? I know I make about the same as my uncle did working for Ernst & Young (in DC) during the late 90s early 2000s. However, neither of us were/are in development.
nabnob 7y ago
I think this is why tech companies and venture capitalists are investing in bootcamps. Take the Lambda school for example - it got funding from Peter Thiel, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital, Google Ventures, GGV Capital, Vy Capital, and Y Combinator. https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambda-school-raised-30m-to-expand-its-income-sharing-tuition-plan-for-online-coding-students/#278dcfe02c68 https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/01/08/how-lambd...
zanny 7y ago
There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5 years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to largely maintain the status quo. And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create. Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune. So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.

Consultant32452 7y ago

We live in a global economy now. Like a billion people have been raised out of abject poverty. It's an absolute falsehood that only the top earners have prospered. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. We brought in millions and millions of foreign workers from impoverished countries, did their wages remain stagnant?

knightofmars 7y ago
> The middle class is shrinking in the US, because they're moving up. This is only half the picture. The middle class is shrinking in the US, because some are moving up and some are moving down.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  According to the US Census data, the percentage of households that are low income is smaller than ever. https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a-good-thing/ https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a...
  - knightofmars 7y ago
    No, according to Mark J. Perry and FEE the percentage of households that are low income is smaller than ever, not the US Census data. This article cherry picked $35,000 as the middle to lower class threshold for a reason. The Brookings Institute, "Our definition is a relative one, meaning that the thresholds pictured above will shift as the income distribution changes shape. If income rises across the distribution, so too will the thresholds that delimit middle-class incomes." Long-running non-biased standard measures of middle-class do not agree with this article's definition of where the middle-class starts and ends: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-midd... https://www.brookings.edu/who-are-the-middle-class/ https://www.brookings.edu/who-are-the-middle-class/
mikelyons 7y ago
> Only the top earners have prospered This is actually a relative truth, absolute falsehood cannot exist. It's not absolute truth though.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

People need to start seeing the value of unions again.

gzimhelshani 7y ago
Ah shit, here we go again. This how it starts, the mighty socialism.

Draiken 7y ago

> Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases. I know that would be the ideal world but... that's never going to happen under capitalism. I'll die 50 times over before capitalists say "I have enough". While the world revolves around companies, it can't change. Companies have only one objective in mind: increase profits. There is literally zero incentive for anything to change, specially with more and more people in the world. Edit: wording