If middle class means the choice to own your own home, then the maybe tech workers stayed middle class and everyone else dropped right out of it.
I'm concerned that homeownership and retiring locally are luxuries now. American culture is already far too fractious these days. We don't need to jeer at people for being able to afford roots in their local communities.
> If middle class means the choice to own your own home, then the maybe tech workers stayed middle class
The average tech worker has not been able to afford a house in SV for at least a decade now. So by this definition, the average tech worker in SV is lower class.
> I'm concerned that homeownership and retiring locally are luxuries now.
I don't know about retiring, but home ownership is certainly still widely possible outside of SF, LA, and the other usual suspects.
> We don't need to jeer at people for being able to afford roots in their local communities.
If it's any comfort, I don't think the majority of residents of SF/Bay currently were born and raised there. More likely, they moved there for work. How many people were actually born and raised in places like Palo Alto, MTV, or even SF a generation ago?
Remember, MTV before the tech boom was a rather sleepy little suburb...
It still throws me, and I live and work out here. I see buses with this marked on them, I always think they're buses the to TV network, then I go 'Duh'
It suggests four actions, one of which is "provide affordable housing", which isn't as broad as your reading. It could just mean "build housing projects".
The bulk of the article implies some sort of zero sum problem. But Bay Area salaries in general aren't bad. The problem is almost entirely cost of living and transportation related. It's strange to think the tech elite are preventing better infrastructure and housing development.
Note that this report is in terms of percentages, which don't track what's happening to individuals. Population growth and turnover (as people move, retire, or join the workforce) mean that it's possible for average wages to decrease largely due to new low wage jobs filled by newcomers, rather than wage decreases for people already working in Silicon Valley. Someone would need to dig deeper to figure it out.
This trend towards inequality is still not good. The percentages do show that.
Or the mid-range jobs move out of the Bay Area because of the high cost of living?
I grew up in the Bay Area but there's a snowball's chance in hell I could ever go back due to what it costs to live there...just to rent a bedroom from some homeowner would cost more than the two bedroom apartment I currently live in.
> Tech companies are spending a large portion of their capital toward paying a limited number of research and development staff to design new products and software, but not toward maintenance and service staff like factory and maintenance workers
The entire article and everyone it quotes then proceed to argue that this wealth should be redistributed downwards.
This is not just unfair - it will also never work. Because some roles (like "low-skilled maintenance and factory work") have far more candidates than openings, while other roles (like high-skilled engineering) have the opposite supply/demand curve.
Now, suppose every single company starts artificially inflating the wages of low-skilled roles, and suppressing the wages for high-skilled roles, to keep everyone "equal" just like this article suggests. What will happen?
Nobody will invest the huge amount of time and effort required to become engineers, since that investment won't pay off. Why waste 4 expensive years in college, if I can get the same pay as a janitor, straight out of highschool and without the student debt?
All tech companies will become desperately starved for high-skilled talent. Eventually, one of these companies will realize it can fill its many vacancies by decreasing the wages for the low-skilled work (with huge surplus of candidates, it will still have plenty to choose from) and increasing the wages for high-skilled work, where candidates are scarce. This company will fill all its openings, poach the best engineers, increase its profits, and destroy its competition. At that point, all other companies will have to increase high-skilled pay to match... And we'll be back where we are right now.
In fact, that's how we got here in the first place.
>To improve workers’ wages across the board, the report calls for local and state government to support workers’ rights to organize, adopt better labor standards for subcontracted workers, increase taxes on corporate headquarters and provide affordable housing.
All of this seems reasonable and structural to me, ie it maintains a level playing field for businesses.
I believe that's exactly what's under contention, some people think corporations should not have as large windfalls in the name of spreading that wealth more generally.
They’ve also used taxpayer giveaways to fund stock buybacks which really don’t have any effect on products they’re pushing to market. I don’t think anyone is really arguing that corporations don’t provide value, but there is a very valid to what effects tax policy have had (especially when govt makes these deals with certain envisioned effects, and without retrospecting to see if they did, we are bound to get into a place where money is poorly spent)
Not really, they used them to buy back shares while simultaneously expanding equity compensation plans for executives. There is very little corporate investment going on anymore despite many companies being awash in new cash.
It‘s always really surprising and also really interesting how debates about „free“ markets and corporate taxes seem to get snarky and somewhat personal/emotional pretty quickly. For example, instead of having an open mind about possible solutions some ideas are dismissed outright under the premise that they haven‘t worked before, while it is pretty clear that such perceived bad outcomes (if they even exist objectively) have not been tied to anything fundamental wrong with the idea but with less than stellar execution.
To make a long story short, I would be interested in a constructive fact/evidence based position how we should tackle things like disappearing jobs due to automation, decreasing wages for unskilled labor, etc. in the future? Do you really have evidence and reason to believe that something like a government doesn‘t have to play a role in this? Really curious to understand your perspective and how you come to it :)
That logic should also work in reverse: If high-skill talent is rare their wages should rise. I do not see that happening. Well, at least not here in Germany. Industry is crying about a skill shortage but the corresponding wages are stagnant.
My theory is that wages are not that much about demand and supply of skill or labor. More evidence is that wages differ so much regionally. A Silicon Valley software engineer is paid more than a Montana software engineer even if skills are equal. The companies are willing to pay the premium so their engineers are close to the headquarter. The startups need to be close to the venture capital, but I still wonder why the big companies stay there. Why don't Google and Apple move away?
So in the bay area they found out that the largest employers actually conspired to not hire each other's senior employees. Which serves to decrease mobility for people and makes it so their wages become lower. When I worked in Canada it seemed like companies were very desperate for talent but weren't really willing to pay beyond a certain amount. It's hard to say if there is just a natural ceiling for pay or if it's actually some sort of setup to keep the compensation at that level.
This is why market demand works for the benefit of the employee.
> "Only when Facebook declined did Google consider how to retain its employees, the judge said. It boosted "the base salary of all of its salaried employees by 10% and provided an immediate cash bonus of $1,000 to all employees,""
This is a fascinating question. My guess is that all industries have different levels of collusion/wage-fixing. If something as big as THE TECH INDUSTRY can get away with colluding to keep a ceiling on wages, then surely every single other smaller industry can as well.
There are many ways to suppress wages besides wage-fixing collusion. About 25% of American workers have non-compete clauses in their work agreements, for instance.
Perhaps they are crying because a skill shortage means they would have to pay more, but instead they would rather the government encourage more people to train as software developers, increasing the supply so that salaries could be lowered.
This. Also, money doesn't grow on trees if you're a normal business. Rising wages means many businesses would have to close. It wouldn't matter to employees, because by corollary they'd have better opportunities, but if you were the owner of such a business, you'd be crying too.
Yes, but new markets have high network effects and winner-takes-all outcomes. There is a non-zero risk of having a couple of trillionaires and billionaires living isolated from a pariah sociality. That would cause a enormous instability, violence and crime.
> That logic should also work in reverse: If high-skill talent is rare their wages should rise.
Which is precisely why the top 10% in the Silicon Valley are earning more money. Some of what would otherwise be localized gains are offset by globalization and offshoring, but income is definitely going up for those people in the Valley.
I don’t know about Germany- that’s not where the article was about so it’s not terribly relevant here.
I don’t know what country you work in it might be worth doing an anonymous tip-off to your local competition authority if you’re in Europe. A software product providing affordances for tacit collusion would have a high bar to clear. It might be worth it if it’s even sold in the EU somewhere.
> If high-skill talent is rare their wages should rise. I do not see that happening. Well, at least not here in Germany. Industry is crying about a skill shortage but the corresponding wages are stagnant.
Businesses resist increasing pay, because that eats into their margins.
Even in capitalist America, SWE pay stagnated until fairly recently. Employers actively fought against increasing SWE pay, even as their shortage was getting worse. They kept wages artificially low, and successfully lobbied the government to fill their openings with cheap H-1B employees - the H-1B quota back then was over twice its current level.
That was a short-term victory, and long-term loss for the industry. If more engineers made $150,000 in SV back in 2005, there wouldn't be such a shortage today.
Eventually this flimsy dam broke, and now we're seeing pay more in line with where it should be according to the supply/demand curve. Arguably it's still not quite there, even in SV, where engineers with their "outrageous" pay still can't afford a home.
So in Germany, apparently employers are still in the "resist and whine to the government" phase. I bet they're begging for the government (i.e. taxpayer) to fund skill-building programs, import more high-skilled workers from 3rd-world countries... the usual stack of solutions.
I'd also suspect higher taxes have something to do with it. Why should I stretch myself paying $120k to an engineer, if he's only going to get $65k out of it? I don't know too much about the taxes in Germany, but I've seen this problem in other foreign locations where we were recruiting: increasing pay did not result in more or better candidates, and all the best candidates were just trying to get to the US any way they can.
There will never be enough pay for swes to buy homes, because there aren't enough homes for everyone - and so if you pay them more the prices will go up, but in most of SV there isn't that much room for more houses. Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of more money for swes (I'm a swe!) but I disagree with that point.
Sure, it was never my main point to begin with. I agree about the real solution, as I stated elsewhere in this comment thread: build more housing, especially efficient housing.
Still, I find it amusing when people complain about "filthy rich engineers" who can only afford to live in shared apartments with roommates in SF...
Build up. Thirty story apartment buildings are not cutting edge technology. Neither are eight story ones and they don’t even require steel beam construction.
I agree with you that there could be denser housing, but that zoning laws prevent people from building more dense housing. So in practice there's no more room.
Don't forget that more engineers can increase wages too. You seem to be stuck in a bit of a simplistic lump of labour idea about supply, demand and salaries.
More engineers means there are more companies that can grow, which increases opportunities for integration and building on top of. Think of engineers as more like fuel for a fire: the world isn't sufficiently automated, and the way we automate it is by applying engineers to the problem. The more we throw at it, the hotter it can burn; and the rewards depend on the value of the thing being automated, not mere supply and demand.
If we only had one engineer, they would not be worth the billions of amappgoosoft put together. It's very far from a zero sum game.
That’s not necessarily true. There’s a lot of high-profile executives that have left top tech companies because of family reasons. And even for ordinary engineers, if family on the opposite coast or in a different country becomes ill, they may move to take care of them, despite the lost income.
Google has 88k employees and had a $32B revenue last quarter. Let's assume 25% of employees are R&D, each paid $250k/y: Google would spend $5.5B a year on R&D, or 4.2% of revenues ; not quite a "large portion of their capital".
Comparing to revenue doesn't make much sense. If you look at profit margins they could easily be spending more than all of their profit on R&D.
Also, that's a rather low estimate for average compensation for devs at Google. If, as you mentioned elsewhere, the 25% number is a purposeful overestimate, then combining it with an underestimate of compensation means that your total number is murky; it could easily be a drastic over- or under-estimate.
That said, 25% is also an underestimate - in 2016 Google reported that ~38% of full-time employees were in R&D. So it sounds like you think you're overestimating how much they spend on R&D, but in fact you're way underestimating it.
Comparing costs with revenues is right. Profit already accounts for costs, and can be razor thin in very large companies with lots of costs - a comparison of costs with profit in such a company would be highly misleading.
I think you're right that comparing to profit isn't right, but I still contend that comparing to revenue isn't either. What I meant is looking at per-unit profit margins (i.e. excluding things like R&D) - if just producing whatever they're selling costs 99% of revenue generated from it, then 5% of revenue on R&D looks pretty high - they're drawing on capital to do so. If, on the other hand, those costs are only 5%, then they're stashing away an enormous portion of revenue despite R&D and thus they're R&D spend looks pretty low.
It's arguably Machiavellian: "Hey you, minimum-wage security guard, you know all these engineers you greet at the gate? Each one of them is making x5 your salary! Capitalistic pigs, eh?"
(But let's not talk about the executives you never see, coming in through private entrances straight from their private landing strips and making x1,000 your salary.)
25% of people are researchers at Google? Are you saying that's what you think it is at the moment or hypothetically? Research is a tiny tiny proportion of Google's work.
"R&D" is what SWEs do. If you're developing anything new, such as a new software system, then you are doing R&D by definition.
"Production" is something like building the same factory that was built thousands of times before, to fabricate the same widgets that were fully designed by an R&D team.
The actual top researchers at a place like Google would be making way more than $250k.
From what people relate to me, many smart, intelligent people in the USSR would become something like the quintessential DMV worker. Yeah, they become scientists and mathematicians but the also learned to slack off massively.
If low skilled jobs paid the same as engineering jobs, I’d still prefer to invest my time into learning to become an engineer as the work is more interesting. I assume this would be the case with enough others too.
With that being said, the gap in pay betweeen low and high skilled jobs is unlikely to ever be 0, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be reduced in a way that would benefit all of us.
Labour supply is not elastic like your naive market argument assumes. The lag is too long and people are simply not responsive enough to the incentives to change how they think to make themselves good engineers, which requires a particular mindset not easily taught, far more often discovered.
> To improve workers’ wages across the board, the report calls for local and state government to support workers’ rights to organize, adopt better labor standards for subcontracted workers, increase taxes on corporate headquarters and provide affordable housing.
Nobody claims the solution is CEO-mandated "artificial" wage inflation, the report emphasizes the need for strong workers unions that can demand more equitable pay.
The problem is that the unionizing workforce needs to have some basic level of skill or expertise with machinery or the business process that isn't easily replaceable. That and they need to be legal citizens, which isn't always a given in agriculture/food services/landscaping jobs. And provide something that a team in India/Ukraine can't.
We are "here" (large and growing inequality) because our educational system is failing to emphasize and produce the necessary amount of high skilled workers that can replenish the middle class through the value of their skilled labor.
But more fundamentally we are here because the pace of innovation in technology is slowing to a crawl, there are hardly any new machines being invented in silicon valley that take new skills to operate and generate real returns to raise the average American's standard of living. Most of what I observe from startups is either garbage powered by the ad economy, solutions looking for a problem, or get-rich blockchain/AI/ML get-rich-quick schemes looking for an easy VC buck.
> Nobody claims the solution is CEO-mandated "artificial" wage inflation, the report emphasizes the need for strong workers unions that can demand more equitable pay.
The report suggested multiple policies to attain "wage equality", including increased taxation and forcing companies to increase pay for subcontractors. The result of such policies would be downwards redistribution: less pay for high-skilled workers, more pay for low-skilled workers.
I'm sure you don't think that "wage equality" means that janitors in SV start making $250+ like senior engineers. That is not sustainable. Any realistic solution would bring engineers way down, while lifting the bottom a little bit higher.
I'm not sure when "equitable pay" became a goal. In a healthy free market, people are rewarded for their effort in developing rare and valuable skills. As far as I know, a market in which the government actively intervenes to keep all wages equal is called communism.
If the government wants to take action, perhaps they should work to make SV more affordable for everyone, for example, by lifting ridiculous NIMBY restrictions that keep housing expensive.
All those "high paid engineers" still can't afford a home anywhere near SF. Somehow I doubt the solution is to cut further into their pay.
There are reasons to believe that the free market isn't healthy at all when it comes to labor. Low salaries for low-skilled labor enable companies to delay modernization, automation and other increases in efficiency. High salaries for high-skilled labor creates inflationary spirals for things like housing.
There is absolutely reasons to believe that equalizing pay, across companies rather than occupations, could be part of the solution. Less efficient companies underpaying their employees would fold. More efficient companies would get more money to hire even more people. Prices would stabilize, careers would likely be more predictable.
This was part of economic policy in Sweden in the ~1960s and as far as I can tell generally considered successful. Though it will, and did, also created large wealth inequality without other measures.
> Low salaries for low-skilled labor enable companies to delay modernization, automation and other increases in efficiency.
I don't see that modernization or automation have been kept back in the US due to unequal wages.
They are "kept back" until the exact moment they become cheaper than human labor, then they effectively take over.
> High salaries for high-skilled labor creates inflationary spirals for things like housing.
High salaries for anyone create inflationary pressures. In fact, high salaries for a relatively small group would do this far less than paying everyone more, as the article suggests.
I'm wary of government intervention in the market because every case I've examined deeply enough turned out to be a failure.
would you call federal and state-mandated minimum wages, which generally allow service and low-skilled workers access to a decent home somewhat near their place of employment, a failure?
high salaries create inflation at different rates for different groups of people depending on their marginal propensity to consume. if you give $5k to someone living on $20k vs $200k annual income, the $20k person is much more likely to spend most or all of that $5k on food, housing, etc. - variables that directly affect inflation. the $200k person may invest it or save it in a bank account, removing it from M0 and M1 so it doesn't show up in the inflation statistics, or in the price you pay for staple goods. this is a large part of the reason we're not seeing any inflation today even though unemployment is historically low - there are no wage gains going to the lower earners who have a high propensity to consume and spend.
there always has to be a balance between those who own the capital and those who work the capital for society to function. otherwise the free market functioning without any ethical or moral underpinnings would return us to slavery - ownership of other human beings as just another form of capital
> if you give $5k to someone living on $20k vs $200k annual income, the $20k person is much more likely to spend most or all of that $5k on food, housing, etc.
That would normally be the case, but I would argue that salary and housing has a strong connection in places like SV. People need to get a certain salary to be able to stay (and start a family) in the Bay Area. Which means that people have a high incentive to increase their salary and that some of those who don't have to leave. As overall the people who stay have more and more money the cost of housing increase, in turn giving people even more need to increase their salary.
That would all normally stop at some point, but since so many wealth companies centralize in the Bay Area the spiral continues.
sure, housing costs are extremely inflated in SV, definitely a reality
i'm talking about inflation and marginal propensity to consume at the national level. not sure what inflation looks like in SV - how much does your average fast food meal run you in mountain view?
i think it's also worth noting the effect of the internet on who owns property and where they are able to own and effectively maintain it. as well as the rate of return on real estate vs. market interest rates of "safe" investments and why the two have diverged so drastically
> Why waste 4 expensive years in college, if I can get the same pay as a janitor, straight out of highschool and without the student debt?
I partially agree with the sentiment. However, I'd rather be intellectually challenged in a low paying role than bored out of my mind in a high paying role. Money isn't the only factor that goes through my mind as I look for a job.
The world simply doesn't work the way of naive economic theories.
One solution, that was common until neoliberalism became the defacto in the western world, was high taxes for the rich.
Neoliberalism has been an obvious bust, growth is anemic, wealth distribution is becoming civil-war causing bad, political corruption rampant, but because no-one else has a meaningful alternative we're all still stuck in this 'the rich getting richer means we all will' fallacy.
I don't understand the uncommented downvotes here. OP is provocant to make his point which is a valid one.
It IS pretty obvious that the raw, uncontrolled market is not increasing the quality of life for a majority of the population and arguably your luck (your family bought some hectars of land in SV in the 80s? Or even simpler: you were able to go to a good college?) is way more important for your economic situation than your own hard work. This is not healthy for society in the long term and if you are not closing your eyes you see more than enough alarming signs for wrong developments.
Better to share some wealth with everyone than being constrained to gated communities and let everyone else fight for meager rest in my opinion.
This assumes that salary is all that motivates people. In fact people like to work on challenging and prestigious tasks, and not only for money. Salary aside, given the choice, would you rather be an engineer or a janitor?
> This assumes that salary is all that motivates people.
First of all, much of my argument is about the effects of one company paying more for the same work than its competitors.
The company in my example pays its engineers better.
So there's no assumption that these engineers would rather become janitors if it paid the same. There's a much more reasonable assumption that given equivalent work, they'd rather be paid more for it.
As for people flocking to professions with the best pay prospects: that is not only logical, but has been proven many times over, including in our specific profession. I can link you some curves if you haven't seen them already.
Of course, there will always be exceptions. But even then, it's not a reliable way to recruit thousands of hard-working employees.
If engineering paid exactly the same as being a janitor, some of the most brilliant candidates will take a part-time job as a night guards, and spend all their time reading calculus books or playing chess.
P.S. even brilliant people won't willingly go into $200k in debt to attend an elite school for engineering just to be saddled with that debt for the rest of their lives. They'll become night guards and spend their time reading physics textbook for fun.
P.P.S. anecdotal evidence: some of the most brilliant people I know studied physics or pure math in top schools, then switched to tech because it pays.
Even Walt Disney was apparently shocked to hear that people were actually working for him to make a living and not just out of reverence for his projects.
i like coding a lot more than i like sweeping floors, and i like sweeping a lot more than most people do. this doesn't imply that i would prefer to code "useful things" to sweeping floors. when i code in my free time i usually make weird 3D simulations to watch for my own pleasure. afaik, no one is lining up to pay me well for the things i actually want to do.
Amazon's biggest R&D team of AI / facial recognition engineers is based in Ukraine. They make less than minimum wage in San Francisco. The point is capitalism focuses on keeping costs down over paying people what they are worth, regardless of their country or zip code.
Who should determine the metric of "what they're worth" if not the market? The engineers in Ukraine agreeing to work for the wages that Amazon promises them seems to me like a mutually beneficial relationship to me.
Ukraine is a war zone - like Syria in 2011. there are 1.5 million refugees in Ukraine with no place to go - EU will not take them in and Russia is attacking them.
Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe - their economy was shattered after the revolution. Why is it so crippling?
Cyber attacks - low wages on the tech sector. How do you expect them to negotiate higher wages if they can't even leave the country safely?
Um, no, not at all. The actual conflict is confined to fairly small parts of two provinces in the east of Ukraine, and even there it's mostly "frozen" at this point. If you're on the separatist-controlled parts, things are complicated, partly because of ongoing hostilities, and partly because of being governed by an administration that is not officially recognized by anyone, and that isn't really good at governing. So that's where the refugees come, mostly. But most of the rest of the country is not affected by the war in a way people were in 2011 in Syria. As in, no worries of enemy troops marching in and kicking you out of your apartment, no shellings, no bombings etc.
>> there are 1.5 million refugees in Ukraine with no place to go - EU will not take them
Fortunately, Poland is issuing 200k job permits for Ukrainians per year, which helps a little. Not to mention that there're twice as many Ukrainians coming to Poland illegaly.
Capitalism is just taking advantage of Globalization here. So if you're in favor of free trade and open borders, you're also gonna get low paid Ukrainian engineers.
High margins allow high salaries. Any money put into salaries is not profits it’s an expense.
This may sound like a nit but it’s important because they have high profits despite high salaries. It shows the lopsided value of well managed network effects businesses.
I don’t know if this is has evidence in data but is the income distribution for SWEs becoming increasingly bimodal? A range for individuals outside of elite tech companies and a range for individuals within it who have reaped the rewards of appreciating tech stock?
If anything, I'm seeing the opposite: non-"elite" tech pay is increasing to rival "elite" tech pay (since that's the only way you can hire a decent engineer in any of the major tech hubs in the US).
> If anything, I'm seeing the opposite: non-"elite" tech pay is increasing to rival "elite" tech pay (since that's the only way you can hire a decent engineer in any of the major tech hubs in the US).
I'm seeing the same in the Central Florida area. Postings open for months, the pay scale slowly increasing at the same time. I've even worked with recruiters to help drag those salaries up, explaining how to go back to their clients and explain their expectations are unrealistic. A rising tide lifts all boats.
At least in the Valley, this is very much not true. Very few companies are willing to match the compensation from the tech giants. I work for a non-Amazon FAANG and I'll be surprised if a company was willing to match almost $300k of unvested stock (after 1 review cycle & 1 year of vesting), a healthy salary on top of my existing one, and comparable annual refresh grants - only companies I see really doing so would be another FAANG and VC firms.
If you are a Software Engineer you are likely in the top 10%. Just mentioning this because I saw a thread in /r/programming the other day and some Software Engineers actually thought they were not in the top 10% of Americans when it comes to salary.
It can be frustrating to read HN sometimes when it feels like you're the only one making under 200k. I do wonder how many engineers realize how astonishingly well paid they are compared to, say, their kid's teacher.
Teachers being criminally underpaid doesn't change the fact that most engineers are underpaid. A good engineer can generate multiples of their salary in revenue.
At one point, WhatsApp had 40 engineers and 400 million users.
That’s 10,000,000 users per engineer.
And more users than the US population.
If WhatsApp generates $1 per user per year in revenue, each engineer would be responsible for $10,000,000 in revenue. From my view, no issue paying them $250,000 each and spiffing them with stock options to compensate them for taking full advantage of that insane leverage that modern Internet platforms provide.
Yeah, but it wouldn't really matter if it were a billion users per engineer if engineers with the needed skills/qualities etc. were a dime a dozen. Market scarcity determines price.
I mean, a computer allows me to do analysis that would take years in seconds, and to share it with millions of people trivially, but it's still dirt cheap because, well, there are lots of computers and not particular barriers to building more.
We may have different experiences, but in a long career the worst I've seen are useless engineers. Are you seriously claiming that the population of engineers destroying multiples of their salary (sabotage/gross negligence) is comparable to the population who create multiples (and are exploited)? Silicon Valley lore is filled with stories of fortunes earned on the backs of engineers being paid market rates. You don't have to look hard to find them, start with Apple, or look at any modern "unicorn."
I've seen several engineers who make more work for other people to fix than they contribute in progress themselves. Sometimes it is by bikeshedding on code reviews, other times by choosing some pet architecture/technology for a project which everyone else has to waste time learning about and/or migrating to, or by putting something in that bottlenecks all development of a critical codebase through only them, leading to people getting constantly blocked. Then again, these have been great lessons for me in what not to do, and what to recognize as red flags.
yes, they make more work for other people to fix than they contribute, but they don't make more work to fix than the people who are making work that fixes are doing. There is no -10x engineer, hardly even any -1x engineer - probably the worst you find are -.5 engineers.
In fact I knew a guy whose effect on a project was to wipe out several years of progress but to be fair he was not a -.5 engineer, in some ways it was just the bad chance that led to him having such a detrimental effect, in another scenario he might very well have been a +2 or more engineer.
I saw -10x: they chose some crazy architecture for something then dug their heels in. The two people who historically got all the work done, both about 5x, decided to quit because of this. So now the work still needed to be done, in the crazy architecture, without the two best engineers, and on top of that time needed to be spent on hiring. Go forward a year and the progress the company made was probably less than it would have in a month before the fancy new architecture was introduced, and the loss of talent.
Additionally I've seen managers/HR demotivate a team of 5 so thoroughly that nobody got work done for 2 weeks. That is -5x from a single meeting.
You can't claim engineers are exploited because some cherry picked tech companies make huge profits. You have to look at the tech sector as a whole, including the parts that lost untold billions while the famous ones raked them in.
Often claimed, rarely proven. Usually in those cases it's actually management doing the value-destroying, by either misallocating people or refusing to act on removing bad engineers.
If you have a good engineer who is constantly tutoring the bad instead of building things, then you are losing a good portion of value (the $10m that would've otherwise been created) by the good engineer. This is not as big a problem for Google with thousands of engineers but is a huge problem in smaller startups.
There are a number of people I see consistently in the commit logs at work and I am quite confident that they have created more than a handful of new jobs each. So while they didn’t directly remove revenue, these people have an astonishingly bad ROI.
How about the good engineer, employed to design the wrong thing?
I feel like I've put good quality engineering work, in to projects that were completely wrong-headed in the bigger picture, and thereby lost the company money.
I agree; my point was just that the "goodness" of an engineer doesn't necessarily relate to their impact on revenue.
In the particular situation I was thinking about above, it actually could've been better from a business perspective had I not been as "good" of an engineer. I took over a project that was simply not working at a technical level - it was a DSP-based thing, and the chosen DSP appeared not to have enough oomph. I managed to optimise the electronics and firmware enough to make it go, so it went on to production and AFAIK (I'm no longer at that company) has been a money pit ever since. The other possibility was a redesign with a burlier DSP, but I'd bet that the project would've been cancelled instead.
A limiting factor on salaries is competitiveness. It doesn't matter how much value you produce if somebody else is able and willing to do the same work, of comparable quality, for less pay. And as there has been a huge push to get more people into computer science, over time I expect we'll see compensation for such work begin to decrease, not increase. The only way this would end up being not true is if proportionately more desirable jobs emerge than the push to bring more people into computer science manages to achieve.
And if you pay each person for their marginal impact on revenue, many business models wouldn't work. E.g. the engineer can only drive another $1m+ because marketing and product management and support staff and everyone else are also doing their jobs. If you pay for marginal impact, you'd have to give the same dollar to multiple employees.
You're kidding right? https://i.imgur.com/GapKBh1.png And I know from experience living in that area that Google Maps is lacking a great many of the local kebab shops.
My understanding is that "Kebab" as such simply means "meat". In continental Europe, "Kebab" is often short for "Döner Kebab" (meat sliced off a central rotating skewer in thin shavings), while in the US, it seems to usually stand for "Shish Kebab", (skewers of meat cubes served on a plate either with or without the skewers).
Ah thanks but I don't really need consolation, I knew what I was doing when I left California. Also I sometimes don't understand why we don't get more Brits over here in Ireland since we seem to have somewhat better pay.
I understand what you are saying but I would argue that few jobs have as much of a long term economic impact as teachers. They serve as child care during the day allowing parents to work. They teach and care for children who then grow up to be wage earners and business starters. The quality of their future work and the direction they take can often be linked directly to the quality of education they had in elementary through high school.
Living in a district with poor quality schools strongly encourages those that can afford it to send their kids to private school (me included). I am very not rich. The money I spend on private school would allow me to start a business, retire early, donate to charity or any number of things. The quality of local teachers and schools has a massive impact on my financial well being. I would gladly pay more in taxes to raise the quality of public education if it allowed me to save on private school. Sadly public education in many areas is very weak and the low teacher pay as well as the general lack of respect causes many people that would make excellent teachers to seek employment in other fields. Our children, economy and nation suffer as a result.
Those months aren't "off", they're spent doing course prep, professional development, and other admin tasks. And during the school term, teachers spend at least a couple of unpaid hours a day on marking and lesson prep. And their contact time is spent wrangling a large group of immature psychopaths who don't want to be there.
It's not as tough as some teachers make out but it's nowhere near as cruisy as it looks from the outside, either.
I work remote in a rural western state, I make closer to the national average for an SE than the SV worker. I ran the math once in my county and found that I was in the top 1% wage earners for my county.
This isn't necessarily true in Canada. The top 10% of "working-age" Canadians earn around 100k/year, and there are lots of software engineers who get paid less than that.
The top 10% individually was 108k in 2017. The median software engineer was making 107.6k in 2017.
So, on a technicality you are wrong - most software engineers are not in the top 10%. But even if you were right, there is a wide range of pay for software engineers, so it should not be surprising that some of those getting paid less will comment.
If you’re a software engineer,
you’re likely in the middle 30% of whatever city you live in. Which, if it’s the Bay Area, probably does mean the top 10% of America.
As a software engineer, I make approximately the median income for my county. I don’t know who these top-10% tech workers are, but they’re certainly not my colleagues.
> As a software engineer, I make approximately the median income for my county. I don’t know who these top-10% tech workers are, but they’re certainly not my colleagues.
They are at FAANG companies. Engineers there with 5+ years of experience are pulling down more than $200k total comp in most roles, and many of them make a bit more than that.
You are likely wildly underpaid then. I live in a fairly affluent area and right out of college I started above the median income for my city, which was considerably higher than the median income for my county.
You clearly don’t work in the area the article is about them, do you? It sounds like you likely don’t even live in the same country, let alone that specific region of that specific state.
I do work in the Bay Area. Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco counties all have median household incomes over $100k. It’s not at all unusual for a single software engineer to be in that ballpark. Look at college graduate incomes and you will find software engineering compensation even less exceptional. At the national level, anyway, personal college graduate incomes around the same as overall household incomes.
Living in California recently I actually met a few software engineers that were driving Uber as their second job, because their SWE salary was not enough. This really shocked me.
It’s enough to be okay, certainly, but not enough for the lifestyle you would have anticipated by getting an education and entering a lucrative white collar field.
“STILL WALKING THE LIFELONG TIGHTROPE:
TECHNOLOGY, INSECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WORK” by
Chris Benner, Gabriela Giusta, Louise Auerhahn, Bob Brownstein, Jeffrey Buchanan
As a relatively high-earning person in tech, let me say again: Please tax me and people like me (or wealthier) more. Please, please, please. I'm a greedy capitalist, but income disparity hurts everyone and our country would be such a more pleasant and productive place if those at the top would express just a shade more generosity by supporting their fellow citizens.
Taxing wages doesn't seem like a very smart strategy. You probably feel rich, but if your primary source of income is wages then you aren't. This won't solve income disparity as it's not how wealthy people earn income. It really will hurt the middle to upper-middle class without making a huge difference.
That seems like suboptimal policy - even to a layman like me. For one, if you're not making money off an asset you're already paying a "tax" in terms of opportunity cost.
Second, it feels unfair - taxes are the price we pay for prospering in, and benefiting from a just society with strong property rights. So if you're not profiting (either investment/business returns or earned income), why should you pay tax?
Third, for something that has a fairly cut-and-dry definition, income is already fudged and mis-reported on so many tax returns. Property valuation is way more subjective; think about things like art, patents, copyrights, real estate without comparable sales, software, trade secrets, brands and trademarks. Correctly and fairly taxing it seems nightmarish, might require far more bureaucracy. It would certainly be more intrusive - the government would need to know every single item of value that you own.
Of course, I'm no expert and maybe there are places that have successfully implemented a property-only tax system that includes non-real property.
No, we should tax consumption. A consumption tax encourages savings, which lowers cost of capital, which is overall an economic stimulant.
Most people say: "But wait! A consumption tax is regressive!". No, you are thinking of something like a sales tax collected at point of sale. A consumption tax can be progressive, and I do advocate for a progressive consumption tax. It is no harder to administer than the current US income tax. All the entities currently required to report to the IRS are sufficient to implement a consumption tax formula, and mostly even with the same data, although probably with a few tweaks. Income - net savings == consumption. Apply table. Done. Rich people will still buy yachts and pay their share of tax. You could even implement UBI and/or welfare as a "negative consumption tax", and eliminate huge swaths of bureaucracy.
I wouldn’t say tax property per se, but rather just tax the land itself. Land is the fixed resource, but you can always develop more buildings on it. This would encourage people to use the land to it’s full extent.
Part 16 of the Mirrlees comprehensive review of taxation [0] in the UK goes into more detail.
If you want to do the most with your apparently surplus income, look into effective altruism. Your dollar will go a lot further with <take your pick of 1,000 charitable organizations> than it will after going through 10 layers of bureaucracy.
The great thing about is you can start doing it today - you don't have to wait for a gridlocked, highly polarized federal legislative body to come to some pork-filled "compromise".
We should just remove healthcare and replace it with effective altruism. That would work right?
The problem with effective altruism is that it requires people to invest in things that sometimes would go against their own personal interests. For example I have no reason to invest my money in improving the public transit of towns I can never see myself living in, instead I would invest that money in places that I or my family lives in.
The flaw of course is that it leads to companies heavily investing only in regions where they're located which are usually heavily gentrified and upper-class neighborhoods.
I think you and the other replies here either 1) assumed too much about what I was saying or 2) made some mental shortcuts because you've had this conversation before.
I'm not making an argument against taxation here. Ostensibly, the reason we have taxes is that many people would not chip in if they weren't forced (free rider problem). It's hard to imagine that anyone would sign up for a SaaS-style military service.
The OP, by their own admission, is not a free rider - they're ready to help! And there are many immediate ways to help in a way that is, empirically, more efficient than taxes that would fund public institutions in the United States. The other great thing about that approach, aside from speed and efficiency, is that there's no long, drawn-out gridlock associated with getting your money into the system. Year-long political fights that result in maybe a .5% increase in a band of income tax is...let's call it a process.
To wrap up/sum up, people that want to give can make better spending decisions than the government generally has shown. This is not a replacement for taxation since most people do not seem to want to give to charities.
Okay, since you're said the magic word 'empirically' I would like you to cite your studies and evidence that proves your position.
Because for example let's say I wanted to put my money towards having proper healthcare for everyone. What action would be more effective: wanting people in my wealth bracket to be taxed more, or donating my income to charity?
> What action would be more effective: wanting people in my wealth bracket to be taxed more, or donating my income to charity?
Donating your income to charity, for the sole reason that "wanting people in your wealth bracket to pay more taxes" isn't an action, it's the desired outcome. Voting would be an action. Activism would be an action. The simple desire is not an action. It's one thing to say, "I want to be taxed more", knowing that your declaration is not likely to have any impact on the reality of the situation. Saying, "I'm writing a 10,000 dollar check to a malaria or deworming charity" (of which there are many: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities) is an action.
> Okay, since you're said the magic word 'empirically' I would like you to cite your studies and evidence that proves your position.
I think you understand that paying 10 dollars for a person's meal is more efficient than having 6,000 administrators facilitate the transfer of that 10 dollars to a person. Every person you add to the process wants their cut, which is why any organization (private, public, government, corporate) becomes less efficient. They can make up for that efficiency in scale, but scale comes at a price. And, again, I haven't advocated for the elimination of taxes, I'm just giving the OP an actionable option that will do more than his desire to be taxed at a higher rate.
There are not a lot of great studies I could find that compare the efficacy of "tax + welfare" vs "charity", other than libertarian-ish journals that you probably won't view as valid.
Just move to an EU country? Over here for any senior software professional the net salary is half of the total salary cost. 50% it is. Dissapointingly it doesn’t convert to exceptional public services or social mobility. It just indicates that one is not connected enough or not born high enough to be above the employment contract relationship.
It's the same rate in Silicon Valley. Federal tax in the higher bracket is 35-40% (it changed with the new tax laws). On top, California will tax 9-12%. That's roughly equivalent to your European 50% rate.
It doesn't convert to exceptional public services? Over here in the Netherlands we have practically no homelessness, extremely low crime, public transit that can take you nearly everywhere worth going very quickly and reliably, a great primary education system that will leave you bilingual (with working knowledge of a third language!) by the time you're 16, a great university system that only costs €1800 a year, and a great social support system in case you no longer make that high salary and need support from the government.
Moving countries isn't really viable option for most people. I'm happy to stick around here and try to make this place better.
Anyway, I'd gladly admit that money isn't the only thing. But it's an important thing. If people in your government aren't using that money wisely (and you live in a democracy): Vote for people who will.
And realize that there's no utopian solution: There's stuff that's better and stuff that's worse. Any system will have major flaws. Crooked timber of humanity, and all that.
It is not as simple as just voting better, more consistently.
The balance of money in politics has taken representation well away from the needs and basic interests of ordinary people. (Among other things.)
There needs to be people and policy to vote for. Tepid turnout is rooted in the lack of both and that is rooted in the money imbalance.
Much of our current body politic is vote against. Secondly, it is often about implied mutual, public good too. What did I just say?
One example is the lesser evil type conversation. Related is the "not those people" conversation. In simple terms, we point to bad, and the idea is get rid of bad, which implies good or better will be the outcome.
The reality is there will simply not be a robust, mutual, public good, unless we are explicit about it. That means positive policy advocacy, a current, national example being Medicare For All. Many other examples are easy to find, once a person begins seeking positive politics.
That is vote for as opposed to vote against.
Finally, we have a lot of fear, blame and shame in our body politic. These things do motivate people, but not all people, and not in the same ways.
Because vote against bad does not necessarily mean we are left with good, or a net progress type gain, many people see this as futile and prefer to put their time anywhere but politics.
What complicates all this is judgement. Voted "wrong", did not vote, and so forth. The reality is we did what we did and we had reasons. Fair enough.
The progress does not come from thrashing about those things. Understanding others and why they made the choices they have made is never a bad thing however. There is a lot more to all of that than many of us will admit. Worth it.
It, this better we crave, need, comes from the votes we will cast together. The votes to come and the reasons for them. I have come to learn I do not want or need to judge others on their politics. I have also learned we all benefit when we demonstrate mutual respect and understanding.
Does not matter why, nor what any of us may think about all of that. It just is lower turnout and often a set of dubious, unexciting choices where we do not have more explicit policy visions to vote for, get behind.
Our remedy is a sustained, positive civic effort. People getting involved and doing so FOR things, basic, important things. Some will run for office, others will organize, others do advocacy, write code, produce media, etc...
A majority of people in the US are really struggling. I won't speak to answers here, just the "why didn't you vote?" part of this discussion.
Lack of vote FOR is why. Being jaded is why. Not being spoken to, or about, relevance is why.
Where we address those things, make basics explicit, people are motivated differently, and that GOTV looks very different from the usual fear, blame and shame dominated GOTV.
Think of this as an add, not a replace.
We can attract voters, ask for votes, explain why.
Notice how infrequently that ask actually happens? I do.
We cannot tell people what to do, and compelling them with fear, blame and shame has it's limits.
More is needed.
I do a lot of election related work. I have noticed people under 35 'ish are responding differently. There is a generational changing of the guard in progress.
New politics, positive, explicit politics are part of this shift.
Make no mistake. Money is a big deal. However, people to people politics is also a thing and it packs a big punch.
Put vote FOR politics out there, speak right to people, and they will turn out and with that, impact the body politic in positive ways. Support those people who put vote FOR politics out there. Few of us can, will run. That is OK. We all can play a role.
A better state of policy will be the most likely outcome.
All that is where my personal time and money goes. Honestly, a good metric seems to be about 5 to 10 percent of our personal time.
That is what I have been doing for a while now. More people are.
I feel better about politics, despite the horror show we have going on right now. I can laugh, as well as lament the pain.
But, I also have positives in play and a growing peer group doing similar things. This helps a lot, and it helps because I understand a lot more about the process and the more immediate impact local politics can have.
National politics is hard. Local is easier, and one can see good happen fairly quickly. It all adds up, in my view.
Voting is vital, but so is being involved. Activism, lending skills and time, simple volunteering all matter a lot more than I see many well meaning, but frustrated, people appear to realize.
One last thing. Nothing I put here is partisan. Examples given may be, but that is not my intent. Better politics happen within a more robust, vibrant body politic, and that is my intent.
Consider placing more trust in that, get involved, share with your friends. All that is where the good stuff is, money or no money. I did, and it helps. Maybe it will for you and yours too.
I like how your post differs from the pessimism of most HN posts when it comes to politics, and how you have a well thought-out strategy i.e. put the emphasis on explicit public goods and for things. Do you have any other examples aside from Medicare for All? I'd be interested in learning more.
Hey, I am way late on all this. Got blitzed and really only have a brief time to put info your way.
People break down into a few types, conditions. To a majority of Americans, there are three big issues most of them will express interest in:
Health Care
Living Wages
Debt, college and or personal.
Vote for is all about positive conversations surrounding those. What CAN we do, and how much sense does it make? it's also about not blaming or shaming or using fear.
Truth is, they feel fear already. They might not make it, or they might lose their house if they get sick. Slapping on something ugly like, "those people are going to make your life worse, unless you vote for X" turns people off big time. That is probably the single largest reason for anti-politics, not voting, the topic being taboo.
Judging people sucks. Scaring the shit out of them sucks, unless the scientists do it. That's OK. People get that.
Shaming them sucks too.
They feel shame because they either work hard, or can't find good work, or something basic, and they struggle. They need help. They don't want to need those things, but they do not know what to do either.
And blaming them? That's a core tenet of positive politics. Senator Sanders does a great job of this. He's worth watching, whether we agree on his policy prescriptions or not. That style of politicking is powerful.
The rest is in my comment.
Now, how to get going on this stuff?
Start local. In your town, there will be common issues. They will work like health care, living wages and debt do nationally. Examples:
Flu Shots
Getting rid of some traffic. (huge in a lot of places)
Parks
Crime
Preserve the landmark.
Land use planning.
By talking to people, you can get a sense of what the local heartbeat is.
Then you contribute and encourage others to do the same. I once was part of a group that got a park made on an old abandoned site. It started with a couple of us realizing there wasn't one to serve the large number of kids in our region. Chatting with other parents didn't take long for consensus and momentum to pick up.
The city had a program for activities like this, and we got into it and got the work done. There is a little park somewhere with my name on it, right along with the core people, and we built the play things, did a lot of the basic work to contribute.
Common public good helps everyone, and it inverts the story. Often, we are being told we need to be concerned about matters that do not impact everyone equally. Couple that with fear, blame and shame, and it's all sort of ugly.
Rather than get sucked into that, it's much better to be about specific mutual good things and work to get them done.
Many issues are not even partisan. The park wasn't, and I found myself in a group with a diverse set of people. A couple of us were told we had to be mortal enemies. We laughed and had beers instead.
Hope this helps.
Specific ideas:
Run for a position in your party. These do not cost you, and you get to go to the party meetings and meet lots of people. It's networking for politics.
Seek out action groups. The better ones are positive, and are looking to get a specific thing done. Same story, networking for politics.
Identify positive candidates, and phone bank, text bank, donate, and all of that. Those people are winning races, and it's over 1/3 now easy. Each one helps dilute the mess we've got going on right now, and replace it with explicit, positive politics.
Have fun. That's no fucking joke. I laugh with my political friends and fellow advocates / activists all the damn time. I won't participate where that is not true.
When I am doing this advocacy, I prefer it not be linked to specific parties. Same for general politics, but I do make an exception on M4A. It is too compelling of an example right now.
And this advocacy is foundation stuff. Improve democracy, empower peeps, that kind of thing. I believe in it passionately.
Can you explain how income disparity hurts? Just using that measurement alone it can distort the ground reality. To list a couple high wealth disparity countries: Singapore, US, and North Korea. Clearly one of them is not like the others.
North Korea is peasants, military and a tiny elite. There is no real commercial sector.
If you look at the US, it’s more of a developing Brazil like situation. We’re developing a growing peasant/underclass, growing the wealthy as assets concentrate and squeezing the professional and semi-professional classes.
Every time I look at trends in income distribution in the US, I don't see low income earners increasing. I see middle income earners moving up. If you have quantitative information that contradicts this, I'd like to see it.
Edit: I want to clarify that I don't see the same thing in California, where market restrictions have made the average joe poorer.
Middle earners are at best holding steady in the US. Inflation doesn't always capture the full picture since inelastic goods (housing, healthcare, education &c.) are taking up a larger fraction of the paycheck.
The top 10% are doing fairly well, the top 1% doing better and the top 0.1% are making out like bandits.
I don't have a good solution, but the current state of affairs is unsustainable.
It makes for social instability. Studies show time and again that it's the relative wealth that makes people unhappy, not absolute.
Don't get me wrong, I would much rather have a large salary, and take home as much of it as I can after taxes. But I would also rather have it be a permanent, stable arrangement (maybe not at any particular company, but in general). Angry torches-and-pitchforks-wielding mobs tend to disrupt that, so I consider it to be in my long-term financial interest to contribute to building a society where people are generally happy and don't feel like they need to get violent to fix their problems. Just looking at the news headlines daily, I wouldn't say that what we have in US right now is such a society.
It’s too simplistic a measurement to use, clearly it’s incorrect to use it by itself. Another example to use would be imagine a neighborhood with the Forbes 100 richest, the extreme income disparity there between Number 1 and Number 100 clearly breaks what you’re commenting on.
Maybe the measurement should be ability to move up and down the economic strata.
Comments like this are really unhelpful if you can't even provide a link. There's probably thousands of arguments on Google for how "income disparity hurts", and most can likely be successfully argued against rather simply.
If you've found a sound argument, please at least provide a link to it.
I think you might come to regret such an attitude when you find out your too old to be hired and age discrimination kicks in. You might take job security for granted now, but there's no guarantee that software engineering will be in high demand forever.
When you get older, you'll be left with whatever meager amount you've earned. If I were you I'd start saving, rather than reveling in your seemingly high salary.
First, I’m not sure why you’re making assumptions about what I do and don’t do with my money.
Second, you’re exactly right in that people’s fortunes can turn. Which is why we should all support things like universal healthcare and higher minimum wages. No one should feel like if things go badly for them they could literally no longer afford to live.
Please tax me and people like me (or wealthier) more.
You can pay more tax than you do now, voluntarily -- there's a place for it right on your 1040 (if USA). If thus statement is sincere, you should be doing so already.
The State of California is already showing annual surpluses.
But in any case you will note that both your Federal and State tax forms permit a voluntary donation beyond what you owe ..do you take advantage of this?
No, because I can't be sure that my peers also "take advantage" of it to the same extent.
I and many people are happy to contribute more, but only if others also contribute more. Especially if people better off than me (like my landlord) aren't paying their fair share, that strongly indicates to me that I should not pay my fair share either.
Who cares what your peers are doing. In your ideology every penny counts, so why not be the first one?
You're a complainer. Start a movement. Be the change you want to see. I'm sure there's still a pithy Twitter hashtag to be had out there for you and others that agree with you but are afraid to take the first step.
Your logic is incredibly flawed and assumes that the prisoners dilemma does not exist.
If I donate money to the government expecting it to improve things, I can't expect other people to be donating the same amount because it's impossible for me to know. If we consider people to be rational actors (as free markets often do), the free market would effectively dictate that no one would donate money to the government because that would be against their own self-interests.
Additionally it ignores the fact that I as an individual have far less influence than say, Elon Musk or Bezos with the amounts of contributions they make.
It is perfectly rational not to want to pay for other people, if they don't also pay for themselves.
It is obvious that some societal services need income from everyone, so I am perfectly happy to pay tax - as long as everyone else pays their fair share.
OTOH you seem to be blinded by some ideology that pretends that the rest of the world doesn't exist, and that only your own actions matter.
> Your landlord is paying what society asks. Who are to say this isn't fair?
He's a member of society.
You can't say "society asks", and then complain when someone wants to change people's minds. The current state of affairs isn't necessary and absolutely correct.
Throwing money at it would solve all sorts of problems. It'd let us pay teachers more. It'd let us provide more healthcare opportunities to people. It'd help us improve our infrastructure like roads and public transportation. It'd help our libraries. It'd make education less expensive, allowing more people access. Fewer people in economic distress means less crime. Better parks. Better maintenance of natural spaces. Etc.
Government isn't perfect. But neither is private industry. We need both. And both need money to function well.
The US already spends more than almost all other countries on education: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country.... Infrastructure costs are significantly higher as well: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne.... And of course our deranged health care system delivers worse results at higher costs by capturing exactly the worst aspects of both free markets and central planning. Flinging more money at these institutions is unlikely to do anything useful unless we can figure out why they're performing so poorly.
Our zoned housing capacity fits only N residents. No matter how much money you throw around, rents will simply rise until only N people can afford them. We don’t need more and more dollars chasing the same apartments. We need more apartments. Give low income workers more to spend on housing, and the only person whose life materially improves is the landlord.
In most Bay Area communities education bond measures pass with ease. Same with open space measures.
Mid Peninsula Open Space is swimming in money, they buy land faster than they can open it. Bay Area voters just recently approved major funding boosts for Mid Peninsula...why would they do so again so soon?
Seems like HN readers would do well to survey what has passed in the last ten years...
More money == things are better is just too simple of a model to make a decision like this. You add more money to the system and where does it go? It's not automatically allocated to your causes, some of it gets siphoned off in administrative overhead. Some of it gets reallocated. Some of it is just used for cronyism or lost in the bureaucracy of doing business (e.g. paying lawyer fees to fight NIMBY's who are using environmental review to prevent the development of transportation or public housing).
On a tangential note, there is nothing stopping you and a group of like-minded individuals from just paying more taxes to the government.
> You add more money to the system and where does it go?
Probably from rich person to rich person, but there's the hope tax money goes to actual services. At worst we're in the same position.
> On a tangential note, there is nothing stopping you and a group of like-minded individuals from just paying more taxes to the government.
The people inclined to act in this communal/moral way are often not suited to make significant amounts of money to give away. You need to take the money from the rich people and give it to the poor people.
> no, the worst case is that capital was misallocated,
Who is to say this isn’t happening already? I don’t see many signs it’s well allocated today. Look at healthcare costs in America. Look at our defense spending for little tangible return. Look at the homeless on the streets. Look at where VC investments are going (ads, lifestyle spending, and automation—little to no benefit to society as the productivity returns go to the capitalists). Look at the debt necessary to get what is commonly considered a base for any career, ie a degree. Symptomatically, cash is already misallocated for a society that bolsters values I hold dear.
> growth that could’ve happened, didn’t
Ahh yes, the “market before everything” philosophy. I don’t buy into it. If growth were meaningfully good we’d see wage increase adjusted for inflation in the lower class. We haven’t seen this for decades.
> On a tangential note, there is nothing stopping you and a group of like-minded individuals from just paying more taxes to the government.
If I was wealthy enough to self-fund quality healthcare for all Americans, I would. I can't. But I am pleased when hyper-wealthy people give back significant contributions to the common good.
Start a non-profit corporation. Get investors. Figure out a business model that works and make it happen.
Oh, right... that's hard work compared to just taking money away from people.
Heck I'm not even opposed to paying more in taxes, but I refuse to do so when the US already has the highest costs across the board for several sectors including education, health care and transportation. Get the house in order and then we can talk about more taxes. We can start by getting rid of public-sector unions which are a racket and then we can also loosen regulations to encourage faster development.
I’ll give you healthcare: That can likely be improved while also lowering costs.
Unfortunately most evidence indicates that lowering costs and increasing efficacy also means increasing government involvement, so that’s effectively a no-go. So. We’re a bit stuck.
> Yes tax us more so it can be spent just as inefficiently.
Citation needed. Even supposedly inefficient government spending helps the economy more than having the top 1% hoard resources. Consider Apple's huge cash on hand as an example of the latter. What economic benefit is society deriving from allowing Apple to dodge taxes and keeping that money out of the hands of government?
Now consider that some government programs are wildly efficient[1] while funding basic research that private VCs won't touch. And finally that government employees are often paid orders of magnitude less than their private-sector counterparts for doing largely the same work.
Is there inefficiency in government? Yes. But probably no more than in a similarly sized private company.
It's not prima facie obvious that public spending via taxation is less efficient. It's also not clear which argument you might be making asserting that it is -- the general characterizing of state agencies as bureaucratic and wasteful, or something like the undergrad econ models relating taxes to clearing gaps in supply/demand curves, or perhaps something even less specific -- but suffice it to say neither is the end of the story.
How would a Post-Capitalist Silicon Valley be different from today?
And what if everyone in Silicon Valley started practicing shamanism?
And/or anarchism?
What things would companies measure instead of or in addition to money & attention?
What if tech leaders & workers joined together in saying "We peacefully revoke consent to be governed this way and request immediate transformative justice." (Or something more effectively worded than that)
Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways. We've been doing that pretty much since the Cambrian explosion, and we're not going to stop any time soon. Asking what would happen if we did is useless -- like asking what would happen if gravity reversed, or if black was white and white was black.
If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am -- then it's best to pursue avenues of enquiry and develop theses which aren't fundamentally impossible from the fifth syllable onwards.
> Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways.
Serious advice #1: thought experiments can have value even if the thought experiment does not directly model plausible human behavior. The same is true of statistical, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical inquiry. Many foundation proofs begin with "assume this unlikely thing is true." Heck, laissez-faire capitalism as a concept started as a thought experiment based around the fiction of a prior redistribution of wealth (too bad everyone seems to forget that first part).
This is a discussion forum, and the question "what if the majority of folks start doing ______" isn't so absurd a question to ask in all but the most degenerate cases.
> like asking what would happen if gravity reversed
Ironically written given the front page has a detailed writeup on an experiment looking for signs of anti-gravity in the cosmos.
Serious Advice 2: "If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am" is defining activism of any sort with you as its focal point. Any such activism is doomed, because one need only render you unlikable to derail even unrelated work (as we have seen in the UK's politics these last few years). It's even worse to admonish other people to operate this way. Reconsider it, please.
I see I wasn't clear because I used absolute terms. Please insert your own desired population percentages for the questions where I've implied 100%.
In the meantime, I'll still consider the ideas because I find it useful. There are no bad questions, just people who find it useful to judge others and their questions. I've found it transformationally useful to minimize my judgment, so I don't count myself among that crowd anymore and I don't judge others who do.
If it's the absolute terms I used, like "everyone," that's put you off, cool. Let's instead imagine what would happen if a majority chose to. Or 25%. Or 3.5%.
Just as you chose to answer a question I didn't ask, you could've easily modified my questions to fit your standards.
Serious advice: Responding with judgment isn't typically conducive to learning unless the recipient has learned to let go of other people's judgments. Here's a paper on the subject I find useful.
This is a good reply, and I apologise for the judgemental reaction.
We probably actually share much of the same ethos. Personally I think it would be absolutely if everybody dropped mushrooms and spent a week in the wilderness coming to terms with the unity of consciousness of all beings and the absurdity of building a society based on false economies of wage labour and conspicuous consumption, etc. Worked wonders for me, and no doubt it would be groovy if everybody else did that too.
The severity my reaction is due to the fact that I've seen too many people hit this wavelength and then get lost in the daydream of what would happen if literally everybody else got on this wavelength too. And then spend -- and please believe that I mean this very very literally -- the entire rest of their lives lost in that daydream. I find this to be tragic, because I think that such people have something to contribute to the world, and pursuing this question explicitly degrades their ability to do so.
And thus I actually do think it's a bad question. If you're interested in changing the world, then becoming attached to any kind of theory whose initial predicate is fundamentally impossible means that you are not going to change the world.
A far better starting point is: "how can I change the world without anybody noticing at all"? Followed closely by: "how can I change the world if I get one in a million people to see things my way?" Work your way up from there. Starting from the other direction is a mind-killer.
You're assuming parent wasn't going for the top comment. In addition to the open-ended hypothetical, popular tactics include prefacing with "This is an unpopular opinion" and "My theory is". Depending on the goal, they might be using their brain correctly. Stacking open-ended hypotheticals is a savvy move.
I think you're onto something. Perhaps it's best to focus on the design of the design though. A further derivative of subjectivity ought to fit the bill! :)
I started by working on a theory of design. The religion is an artistic packaging of a programming framework for the human self. It's all centered around hacking my perceptions.
Does that seem to address what you're talking about? Cause now I'm intrigued by whatever other thoughts you might have.
If you're asking seriously.... I think there's serious potential for co-ops. There's no reason services like Yelp need to be designed around a hockey stick revenue curve.
A Silicon Valley that counted its value in the amount of happiness it created for people using its products (and perhaps even for people who don't use their products) instead of the amount of financial value it extracted from them would be a very different place indeed.
The older I get the more I feel like capitalism is a system for turning human misery into profits for a lucky few.
> How would a Post-Capitalist Silicon Valley be different from today?
What's interesting is that I don't think the day-to-day of it would look very different. Extremely hierarchical corporate structures don't work very well in small scale unless you have phenomenally charismatic (or even rarer, actual top-of-field domain expert) leaders. As an incentive to bring folks into the space, varying degrees of group ownership and power are offered to the founding set (and founding investors, which are often an integral part of the early business).
In a very real sense but perhaps to a lesser total degree, this is (as the syndicalists love to put it) "the workers owning the mill they operate."
What's also interesting is that as the company scales, this approach is considered increasingly untenable (mostly from a profit-generation standpoint) and a more absolutely hierarchical system emerges. But nearly everyone has the opinion that these corporate structures are awful, inefficient beasts that create incentives for parasitic management, outsized rewards for C-sets who may or may not provide actual value, and a constant conflict within the workforce to avoid being trivialized by the desire to increase efficiency over product quality or market share.
There was a pair of papers recently that I really enjoyed investigating what "fractal" community (and by obvious extension, corporate) structures could look like by De Florio & then Pajaziti:
These delve into how one can build service organizations around non-traditional (e.g., not-straight-line-to-the-top-always-centralized) structures and how these can actually have deceptively better efficiency even if their outcomes are only statistically predictable.
It's worth noting that these sorts of organization styles are not untested in the valley. The biggest success for such an organization I can think of off the top of my head is Google's technical support and loaner laptop system, which is semi-fractal and horizontal and despite looking like it'd be a huge money pit (from the traditional "control outcomes and limit loss" school of IT management), is actually dramatically cheaper than traditional IT departments at its scale. Data driven organizations often naturally push towards open and relatively flat org structures, with the understanding that the overhead of abuse of such system's leniency is much less expensive than the total expense of minimizing said abuse.
This isn't isn't exactly new, we see echos of the "actually the chaotic version of this over resources that are infinite in principle but constrained in a time domain is not much worse than the perfectly scheduled system" principle in lots of fields. Market economics likes this outcome (although not when you start making them own "externalities" like environmental damage). Network engineers have long ago made their peace with this truth, as well. A randomly scheduled network is only about 1/3 worse than an optimally scheduled network!
I'm concerned that homeownership and retiring locally are luxuries now. American culture is already far too fractious these days. We don't need to jeer at people for being able to afford roots in their local communities.