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> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that mak

> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry. I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.

goodpoint 4y ago
> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?
- MockObject 4y ago
  From my job to my marriage to my artwork, what couldn't conceivably be done by someone else, if I wasn't available? Most of us are fungible.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Bingo. Nearly everyone is replaceable. It may not be easy to replace a certain individual, but it can be done.
- throwaway23597 4y ago
  Uh yes, because they founded the company? If Google was never founded nobody would be working there, don't think I need a citation for that.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics). You might—might—out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take a real shot at them, high enough that there'd be no hope of a break-even exit if things don't go perfectly. I'd call that a moat.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Well, Amazon is actually too young to tell, Japanese conglomerates, while not being all dominating anymore, are doimg quite well. As do the Korean ones, e.g. Samsung.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Is the thing keeping some other person from building Not-Amazon (or a dozen companies that effectively, together, fill its entire role—potentially better, even) that Bezos is uniquely capable, or that the existence of Amazon makes trying to do it way, way riskier than when Bezos got started, no matter how good you are? Other businesses get started and are very successful, somewhat often. Are all those successful business people just not going after Bezos because he's so much better at business than them that they cannot hope to succeed, or is it because the market is transformed by the existence of Amazon such that trying to take Amazon on is a bad use of capital?
- Aunche 4y ago
  This is what happened in the Soviet Union. Leadership at consumer-facing enterprises had no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum because profits are socialized. Meanwhile the Soviet military did a much better job of keeping up with that of America because that was of upmost importance to the politburo and and successes were rewarded with political capital.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  I do. In my career, the choice has always been working hard at a company where the founders are trying to become billionaires, or going to a company where the drive for success has atrophied and sitting on my hands for 80% of my working hours. I remember one job where I did literally nothing for the first 2 weeks because maintenance didn’t connect the Internet in my cube and my manager couldn’t find the external drive with the training videos on it. There’s no law of nature which says all the Googlers couldn’t be working there.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Stop believing in fairy tales, they were just the lucky winners in a winner-take-all market. Those 500k people would sill be employed by say a company called Poogle, founded by Parry Lage and Bergey Srin. It's like all common sense and statistics goes out of the window when people discuss the Forbes 400, it takes people meeting them to realize they are just dudes winging it like anybody else.
- throwaway23597 4y ago
  So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
    In order for something to be valuable it needs to be rare and irreplaceable. And the true test is the subtraction, if Brin/Page were never born we'd still have something like Google, much like we'd know relativity if Einstein was never born or the 3 principles if Newton was never born. Humanity advances as a whole, while individual humans play dice and games to get to be the one guy (or girl although it's mostly guys) who get the privilege to be the person signing off the advancement. But in the end there is nothing special about the person doing the signing off, much like there is nothing special about the person who wins the lottery among the many who play.
    - briffle 4y ago
      In fact, yahoo would probably still be a major player. (remember them)
throw93 4y ago
Organizations are nothing without labor. The 500k salaries are a but small percent of revenue the labor is generating. These companies are sitting on the largest ungodly amount of cash piles ever seen in history of mankind and that should be cause of huge concern. These so called tech icons were at the right place at right time and nothing else. I refuse to believe that these individuals are somehow 200x smarter or deserve 200x more than the people who are working for them. The reason they have intergenerational wealth while you & I still have to worry about mortgage is because our f'd-up system allows these "titans" to steal the profit we the workers generate. It's not a bad thing to generate useful products to improve society but it's definitely a bad thing when labor doesn't get their share.
flimsypremise 4y ago
there is absolutely no way that these guys are 100x as valuable as the people how actually build the product. if larry page and sergei brin's search engine hadn't won out, someone else's would have. these guys are all just average to dumb, and very often end up vaporizing millions if not billions of dollars with stupid decisions. there is no doubt in my mind that these tech giants would be better off if they fired their ceos and c levels. this should be obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with the ceo of a tech company.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.
unity1001 4y ago
> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin What has Google done since Page and Brin left? Other than trying to suck what they already built dry for max profit? ... You are equating early technical founders with the MBAs who later took over the big tech. They are not equal. The former builds things and creates new paradigm. The latter's purpose is to suck things dry for profit. Including the employees and the users. The former is scarce. The latter is plenty and it is imposed on the organizations, the tech sector and inevitably the end users by totally un-attached, profiteering, destructive investors.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  > > The former builds things and creates new paradigm Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it. Also Google just happened to be the winner in a winner-take-all market which was made of 10s of search engines. So it's true, MBAs might care about profits, but all the above is very clear to them, founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Something being exploited in SF does not invalidate it. The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms. From search to social to Open Source. The last one even became a culture in which we are living today. People are so used to its paradigm that they think its 'normal' and not something different. The world of 90s was a totally different world, including how people worked. > Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it. It also made accessing knowledge and anything much easier compared to before. There is no comparison of the search after Google and before, like how it was with Altavista, Yahoo et al. There is even less comparison of the world before search and after. > founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias. Many technical founders, or rather, 'non-MBAified' people just want to build things. Make something happen. And those things change how we do things. People mythologizing successful, actual founders does not make it any less valid. ... The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990s. Thanks to technology and people who build things with that technology. "MBAification" of things is not a problem only in technology - it always afflicted all the other sectors too. Some people build things and change the way we do stuff, others come to milk it at the cost of destroying it.
8note 4y ago
They're necessary but not sufficient conditions for google to exist. There are countless other contributors who are also necessary but not sufficient conditions for google too. What's the incentive for other necessary people to work at these companies? Assuming that they are necessary and sufficient for making new businesses that hire lots of people, aren't we disincentivizing them by paying so handsomely for their first such business. If we realigned the incentives, we could have 200 google equivalents made by Sergey and brinn, not just the one

goodpoint 4y ago

> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?

MockObject 4y ago
From my job to my marriage to my artwork, what couldn't conceivably be done by someone else, if I wasn't available? Most of us are fungible.
- matwood 4y ago
  Bingo. Nearly everyone is replaceable. It may not be easy to replace a certain individual, but it can be done.
throwaway23597 4y ago
Uh yes, because they founded the company? If Google was never founded nobody would be working there, don't think I need a citation for that.
zozbot234 4y ago
If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics). You might—might—out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take a real shot at them, high enough that there'd be no hope of a break-even exit if things don't go perfectly. I'd call that a moat.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Well, Amazon is actually too young to tell, Japanese conglomerates, while not being all dominating anymore, are doimg quite well. As do the Korean ones, e.g. Samsung.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Is the thing keeping some other person from building Not-Amazon (or a dozen companies that effectively, together, fill its entire role—potentially better, even) that Bezos is uniquely capable, or that the existence of Amazon makes trying to do it way, way riskier than when Bezos got started, no matter how good you are? Other businesses get started and are very successful, somewhat often. Are all those successful business people just not going after Bezos because he's so much better at business than them that they cannot hope to succeed, or is it because the market is transformed by the existence of Amazon such that trying to take Amazon on is a bad use of capital?
Aunche 4y ago
This is what happened in the Soviet Union. Leadership at consumer-facing enterprises had no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum because profits are socialized. Meanwhile the Soviet military did a much better job of keeping up with that of America because that was of upmost importance to the politburo and and successes were rewarded with political capital.
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
I do. In my career, the choice has always been working hard at a company where the founders are trying to become billionaires, or going to a company where the drive for success has atrophied and sitting on my hands for 80% of my working hours. I remember one job where I did literally nothing for the first 2 weeks because maintenance didn’t connect the Internet in my cube and my manager couldn’t find the external drive with the training videos on it. There’s no law of nature which says all the Googlers couldn’t be working there.

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago

> > These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Stop believing in fairy tales, they were just the lucky winners in a winner-take-all market. Those 500k people would sill be employed by say a company called Poogle, founded by Parry Lage and Bergey Srin. It's like all common sense and statistics goes out of the window when people discuss the Forbes 400, it takes people meeting them to realize they are just dudes winging it like anybody else.

throwaway23597 4y ago
So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  In order for something to be valuable it needs to be rare and irreplaceable. And the true test is the subtraction, if Brin/Page were never born we'd still have something like Google, much like we'd know relativity if Einstein was never born or the 3 principles if Newton was never born. Humanity advances as a whole, while individual humans play dice and games to get to be the one guy (or girl although it's mostly guys) who get the privilege to be the person signing off the advancement. But in the end there is nothing special about the person doing the signing off, much like there is nothing special about the person who wins the lottery among the many who play.
  - briffle 4y ago
    In fact, yahoo would probably still be a major player. (remember them)

throw93 4y ago

Organizations are nothing without labor. The 500k salaries are a but small percent of revenue the labor is generating. These companies are sitting on the largest ungodly amount of cash piles ever seen in history of mankind and that should be cause of huge concern. These so called tech icons were at the right place at right time and nothing else. I refuse to believe that these individuals are somehow 200x smarter or deserve 200x more than the people who are working for them. The reason they have intergenerational wealth while you & I still have to worry about mortgage is because our f'd-up system allows these "titans" to steal the profit we the workers generate. It's not a bad thing to generate useful products to improve society but it's definitely a bad thing when labor doesn't get their share.

flimsypremise 4y ago

there is absolutely no way that these guys are 100x as valuable as the people how actually build the product. if larry page and sergei brin's search engine hadn't won out, someone else's would have. these guys are all just average to dumb, and very often end up vaporizing millions if not billions of dollars with stupid decisions. there is no doubt in my mind that these tech giants would be better off if they fired their ceos and c levels. this should be obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with the ceo of a tech company.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.

unity1001 4y ago

> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin What has Google done since Page and Brin left? Other than trying to suck what they already built dry for max profit? ... You are equating early technical founders with the MBAs who later took over the big tech. They are not equal. The former builds things and creates new paradigm. The latter's purpose is to suck things dry for profit. Including the employees and the users. The former is scarce. The latter is plenty and it is imposed on the organizations, the tech sector and inevitably the end users by totally un-attached, profiteering, destructive investors.

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > The former builds things and creates new paradigm Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it. Also Google just happened to be the winner in a winner-take-all market which was made of 10s of search engines. So it's true, MBAs might care about profits, but all the above is very clear to them, founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF. Something being exploited in SF does not invalidate it. The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms. From search to social to Open Source. The last one even became a culture in which we are living today. People are so used to its paradigm that they think its 'normal' and not something different. The world of 90s was a totally different world, including how people worked. > Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it. It also made accessing knowledge and anything much easier compared to before. There is no comparison of the search after Google and before, like how it was with Altavista, Yahoo et al. There is even less comparison of the world before search and after. > founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias. Many technical founders, or rather, 'non-MBAified' people just want to build things. Make something happen. And those things change how we do things. People mythologizing successful, actual founders does not make it any less valid. ... The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990s. Thanks to technology and people who build things with that technology. "MBAification" of things is not a problem only in technology - it always afflicted all the other sectors too. Some people build things and change the way we do stuff, others come to milk it at the cost of destroying it.

8note 4y ago

They're necessary but not sufficient conditions for google to exist. There are countless other contributors who are also necessary but not sufficient conditions for google too. What's the incentive for other necessary people to work at these companies? Assuming that they are necessary and sufficient for making new businesses that hire lots of people, aren't we disincentivizing them by paying so handsomely for their first such business. If we realigned the incentives, we could have 200 google equivalents made by Sergey and brinn, not just the one