8 ms·

I think this is a good article for tech workers to read to provide perspective on our place in the tech economy (particularly Americans): https://organizing.wor

I think this is a good article for tech workers to read to provide perspective on our place in the tech economy (particularly Americans): https://organizing.work/2020/12/there-is-something-missing-from-tech-worker-organizing/ https://organizing.work/2020/12/there-is-something-missing-f... particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized. it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.

themitigating 4y ago
As opposed to John Deere or Exxon?
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
One of the memes that you frequently see in the upper middle class left-leaning tech worker circles is that anything less than a worker co-op is ultimately an organizational structure that is inequitable and exploitative to its labor force, leading to negative externalities for society at large. I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion on this. Would someone mind steel manning both sides of that argument? E.g. I have questions like, if I'm the founder of a company and I sell it 10 years later and make most of the upside, did I exploit my employees because they didn't make as much as I did in the end?
- scarmig 4y ago
  Argument for the meme: Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance, in the USA the general strike was a powerful tool in the arsenal of workers' power and drove substantial wage gains, but disrupted capital too much and as such is banned by the NLRB. Since unions' scope is limited to accounting, law, and mediation, they become mostly administrative organizations staffed increasingly by members of the professional services class. These people can never provide leadership that primarily serves the working class, as their economic interests diverge and they can't do anything that would threaten their social good standing. Argument against: An economy dominated by worker co-ops is just wishful thinking. We have no idea how to get from point A to B, and no idea if it would even work. The limited evidence we have for that kind of economic structure comes from post WW2 Yugoslavia and suggests it wouldn't ("they just didn't do it right!" invites the question of how we do do it right). Conventional unions do shift some of the capital pie to workers, and we shouldn't let a very hypothetical best be the enemy of the concrete good. And even if worker co-ops are the ideal, any path that gets us there requires more worker power, so stronger unions would be a good first step to getting us to that point.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Also, in favor of point b, both can coexist, the same way that TV did not entirely eliminate the radio.
  - nightski 4y ago
    Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?
    - jtolmar 4y ago
      A highly successful worker coop leads to a bunch of people with comfortable lives and steady jobs. A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.
michaelchisari 4y ago
| Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age. Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation. Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Not only inflation but with debt. You can do extremely well with just a Bachelor’s in CS. Professions like nursing, medicine, law, even business have had their earning potential sapped by larger and larger costs of education. And degrees past Bachelor’s are less well supported by financial aid schemes.
  - 33955985 4y ago
    If there is one “tech disruption” I hope actually sticks is the death of credentialism and the rise of proof of ability by doing. I have only a bachelor’s in a liberal art(!) and working in tech has opened up so many doors for me, in teams where nobody cared where I went to school and my lack of a master’s was met with curious shrugs.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      well, this has upsides and downsides. proof of doing is in large part responsible for how grueling and grinding tech interviews are. you don't hire nurses by asking them to demonstrate operating on a cat. and to some degree the grueling and grinding is there because the degree doesn't indicate anything at all, and desirable companies ending up having to process a lot of underqualified applicants.
      - 33955985 4y ago
        All upsides for real people and all downsides for multi-billion-dollar companies, it would seem. There is never going to be a university degree program that precisely matches what a company needs. So why bother?
surement 4y ago
> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"
- jessehattabaugh 4y ago
  > prices are largely based on supply and demand Then we'd better unionize before AI starts doing all the easy stuff
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    Preserving inefficiencies for the sake of extracting money is called rent seeking.
    - mushbino 4y ago
      Rent seeking is collecting money while adding no economic value. Like landlords.
      - missedthecue 4y ago
        Unions don't add economic value, hence why employers don't like them. The way they secure higher pay is by going on strike, not by offering more production or value.
        mushbino 4y ago
        Unions provide training, good healthcare, and safety, which very much add economic value. Employers typically have the full force of market forces to pay as little as possible. Collectivisation is the workers only means to advocate for themselves.
      - surement 4y ago
        if you think that then buy a house instead of renting
tbrownaw 4y ago
"deserve" doesn't exist. What does exist is "what price makes the market clear". Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.
- 7sidedmarble 4y ago
  Why shouldn't we have ethical opinions about the economy?
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    So, things like "functioning markets are good" and "price-fixing is bad"?
    - User23 4y ago
      And usury is awful.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Slave markets were functional. Feudalism was functional. The market for drugs and organs are functional. Lets try tougher ones - are markets captured by cartels functional? Does OPEC inhibit free market or are they free market in action? When tech companies create anti-poaching agreement to supress wages, is that functional?
  - nec4b 4y ago
    Do you have ethical opinions for example about Newton's laws in physics? Or do you accept them for what they are?
    - BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
      Humans design the system in which the market operates. Obviously one cannot make an appeal to change physics.
      - 4y ago
quags 4y ago
For your three examples getting early into theses stocks, say stock compensation, or employee stock purchases would have produced outsized returns up until a few months ago. Much of the wealth is not from salary and simply stock compensation. Musk/bezos/zuck became billionaires on stock price alone. Early employees at these companies became millionaires many times over. But this is backwards looking and a survivor ship bias - for every one of these companies there companies who didn’t make it big , or value went to zero.
moneywoes 4y ago
My worry is bringing unions in the US tech industry will just accelerate off shoring especially with super fast growing companies like Deel What are your thoughts?
- devmor 4y ago
  With the price of tech labor in places like Pakistan and India on the rise, that won't be sustainable for long.
- scruple 4y ago
  Outsourcing technical work comes in waves. I've seen it up-close-and-personal 3 times. It's worked once and the magic that went into making it work (one of the founders moved back to his home country and started a consultancy that was contracted by the original business) in that specific instance isn't something that is easily replicated.
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    If you write a check to a body shop you’re just going to get fleeced. I’ve seen “tested deliverables” that did not compile. If you open a branch office and do your own careful hiring (just like HQ would have), that can work.
- azemetre 4y ago
  Well if there was an actual union in place there would be general strikes. A company that lost all IT/SWE staff for the period of the strike may be more open to negotiations.
whiddershins 4y ago
This is an intrinsically Marxist framing. Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error. Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago. I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.
- scarmig 4y ago
  Marx didn't predict that capitalism wouldn't generate wealth. On the contrary, he believed it was the most economically revolutionary structure the world had yet devised and would create untold wealth. That's entirely consistent with the world we see. To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    He's referring to marx belief in the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall" which is literally objectively wrong and the opposite of it is accepted within economics. This is the accepted explanation, which implies that the rate of profit rises over time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem Btw, marx predicted that capitalism is inevitably destroyed due to tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I believe capitalism is the strongest that it's ever been right now.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - scarmig 4y ago
      I'd emphasize not only that there have been advances in theory but also in, more importantly, the empirical evidence. Marxism is a scientific theory in the sense that it can be falsified, and if you look at the rate of profit over time in most countries and periods, the evidence very strongly falsifies Marxism. Even if someone refuted Okishio, Marxism makes predictions about capitalist economics that simply aren't consistent with the world we see.
Aunche 4y ago
>when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce The workers that built the foundations of these companies received stock options or RSUs over a decade ago and reached FATFIRE territory as well. Had they unionized, the companies they worked for wouldn't be able to reinvest as much money into growth, which would be compounded by a lack of external investors. In that case, they would lose to an unionized competitor.
ncr100 4y ago
+1 Worker-Unions-conversation-point for using "oligarch" in a comment. /jk The comment about "used to feel bad about making a lot of money" hits home for me, when I compare my wages to other family members who're struggling. Thanks for the perspective, it helps open me up a bit more about this. Great information in the link, too - helps to consider whether and how a Union might be attractive, under various workplace circumstances.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nec4b 4y ago
>> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? You should ask your clients or employers.
RickJWagner 4y ago
Why pick on those 'oligarchs'? How about the Media moguls? A pretty good argument can be made that media oligarchs produce less value, but they dominate financial and political circles.

themitigating 4y ago

As opposed to John Deere or Exxon?

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

One of the memes that you frequently see in the upper middle class left-leaning tech worker circles is that anything less than a worker co-op is ultimately an organizational structure that is inequitable and exploitative to its labor force, leading to negative externalities for society at large. I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion on this. Would someone mind steel manning both sides of that argument? E.g. I have questions like, if I'm the founder of a company and I sell it 10 years later and make most of the upside, did I exploit my employees because they didn't make as much as I did in the end?

scarmig 4y ago
Argument for the meme: Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance, in the USA the general strike was a powerful tool in the arsenal of workers' power and drove substantial wage gains, but disrupted capital too much and as such is banned by the NLRB. Since unions' scope is limited to accounting, law, and mediation, they become mostly administrative organizations staffed increasingly by members of the professional services class. These people can never provide leadership that primarily serves the working class, as their economic interests diverge and they can't do anything that would threaten their social good standing. Argument against: An economy dominated by worker co-ops is just wishful thinking. We have no idea how to get from point A to B, and no idea if it would even work. The limited evidence we have for that kind of economic structure comes from post WW2 Yugoslavia and suggests it wouldn't ("they just didn't do it right!" invites the question of how we do do it right). Conventional unions do shift some of the capital pie to workers, and we shouldn't let a very hypothetical best be the enemy of the concrete good. And even if worker co-ops are the ideal, any path that gets us there requires more worker power, so stronger unions would be a good first step to getting us to that point.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Also, in favor of point b, both can coexist, the same way that TV did not entirely eliminate the radio.
- nightski 4y ago
  Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?
  - jtolmar 4y ago
    A highly successful worker coop leads to a bunch of people with comfortable lives and steady jobs. A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.

michaelchisari 4y ago

| Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age. Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation. Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Not only inflation but with debt. You can do extremely well with just a Bachelor’s in CS. Professions like nursing, medicine, law, even business have had their earning potential sapped by larger and larger costs of education. And degrees past Bachelor’s are less well supported by financial aid schemes.
- 33955985 4y ago
  If there is one “tech disruption” I hope actually sticks is the death of credentialism and the rise of proof of ability by doing. I have only a bachelor’s in a liberal art(!) and working in tech has opened up so many doors for me, in teams where nobody cared where I went to school and my lack of a master’s was met with curious shrugs.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    well, this has upsides and downsides. proof of doing is in large part responsible for how grueling and grinding tech interviews are. you don't hire nurses by asking them to demonstrate operating on a cat. and to some degree the grueling and grinding is there because the degree doesn't indicate anything at all, and desirable companies ending up having to process a lot of underqualified applicants.
    - 33955985 4y ago
      All upsides for real people and all downsides for multi-billion-dollar companies, it would seem. There is never going to be a university degree program that precisely matches what a company needs. So why bother?

surement 4y ago

> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"

jessehattabaugh 4y ago
> prices are largely based on supply and demand Then we'd better unionize before AI starts doing all the easy stuff
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Preserving inefficiencies for the sake of extracting money is called rent seeking.
  - mushbino 4y ago
    Rent seeking is collecting money while adding no economic value. Like landlords.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      Unions don't add economic value, hence why employers don't like them. The way they secure higher pay is by going on strike, not by offering more production or value.
      - mushbino 4y ago
        Unions provide training, good healthcare, and safety, which very much add economic value. Employers typically have the full force of market forces to pay as little as possible. Collectivisation is the workers only means to advocate for themselves.
    - surement 4y ago
      if you think that then buy a house instead of renting

tbrownaw 4y ago

"deserve" doesn't exist. What does exist is "what price makes the market clear". Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.

7sidedmarble 4y ago
Why shouldn't we have ethical opinions about the economy?
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  So, things like "functioning markets are good" and "price-fixing is bad"?
  - User23 4y ago
    And usury is awful.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Slave markets were functional. Feudalism was functional. The market for drugs and organs are functional. Lets try tougher ones - are markets captured by cartels functional? Does OPEC inhibit free market or are they free market in action? When tech companies create anti-poaching agreement to supress wages, is that functional?
- nec4b 4y ago
  Do you have ethical opinions for example about Newton's laws in physics? Or do you accept them for what they are?
  - BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
    Humans design the system in which the market operates. Obviously one cannot make an appeal to change physics.
    - 4y ago

quags 4y ago

For your three examples getting early into theses stocks, say stock compensation, or employee stock purchases would have produced outsized returns up until a few months ago. Much of the wealth is not from salary and simply stock compensation. Musk/bezos/zuck became billionaires on stock price alone. Early employees at these companies became millionaires many times over. But this is backwards looking and a survivor ship bias - for every one of these companies there companies who didn’t make it big , or value went to zero.

moneywoes 4y ago

My worry is bringing unions in the US tech industry will just accelerate off shoring especially with super fast growing companies like Deel What are your thoughts?

devmor 4y ago
With the price of tech labor in places like Pakistan and India on the rise, that won't be sustainable for long.
scruple 4y ago
Outsourcing technical work comes in waves. I've seen it up-close-and-personal 3 times. It's worked once and the magic that went into making it work (one of the founders moved back to his home country and started a consultancy that was contracted by the original business) in that specific instance isn't something that is easily replicated.
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  If you write a check to a body shop you’re just going to get fleeced. I’ve seen “tested deliverables” that did not compile. If you open a branch office and do your own careful hiring (just like HQ would have), that can work.
azemetre 4y ago
Well if there was an actual union in place there would be general strikes. A company that lost all IT/SWE staff for the period of the strike may be more open to negotiations.

whiddershins 4y ago

This is an intrinsically Marxist framing. Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error. Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago. I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.

scarmig 4y ago
Marx didn't predict that capitalism wouldn't generate wealth. On the contrary, he believed it was the most economically revolutionary structure the world had yet devised and would create untold wealth. That's entirely consistent with the world we see. To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  He's referring to marx belief in the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall" which is literally objectively wrong and the opposite of it is accepted within economics. This is the accepted explanation, which implies that the rate of profit rises over time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem Btw, marx predicted that capitalism is inevitably destroyed due to tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I believe capitalism is the strongest that it's ever been right now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I'd emphasize not only that there have been advances in theory but also in, more importantly, the empirical evidence. Marxism is a scientific theory in the sense that it can be falsified, and if you look at the rate of profit over time in most countries and periods, the evidence very strongly falsifies Marxism. Even if someone refuted Okishio, Marxism makes predictions about capitalist economics that simply aren't consistent with the world we see.

Aunche 4y ago

>when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce The workers that built the foundations of these companies received stock options or RSUs over a decade ago and reached FATFIRE territory as well. Had they unionized, the companies they worked for wouldn't be able to reinvest as much money into growth, which would be compounded by a lack of external investors. In that case, they would lose to an unionized competitor.

ncr100 4y ago

+1 Worker-Unions-conversation-point for using "oligarch" in a comment. /jk The comment about "used to feel bad about making a lot of money" hits home for me, when I compare my wages to other family members who're struggling. Thanks for the perspective, it helps open me up a bit more about this. Great information in the link, too - helps to consider whether and how a Union might be attractive, under various workplace circumstances.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nec4b 4y ago

>> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? You should ask your clients or employers.

RickJWagner 4y ago

Why pick on those 'oligarchs'? How about the Media moguls? A pretty good argument can be made that media oligarchs produce less value, but they dominate financial and political circles.