Meanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires who wouldn't piss on them to put out a fire and arguing about why we can't have unions because blah blah blah rugged individualism.
I find this complaint hard to square when US developers earn "moon money" compared to both: a) fields requiring similar levels of expertise like EE or Mech-E and b) international developers in similar roles. Plus, equity.
The vast majority of tech workers in the US make nowhere near FAANG-money and have never had meaningful equity.
Also the fact that people in group $X are getting screwed more than people in group $Y is no reason not to fight to not get screwed if you are in group $Y.
This leverage all has to do with the product, how close you are to it and how valuable it is. FAANG product is valuable, but the programmers are still just creating it and usually a small part of it at that. Pilots are the product when the product is "get plane to destination" they are the 1 or 2 people providing that product (ok service). Athletes are the product of sports. It's very valuable and there's only a dozen or so of them to deliver.
Now, using the leverage is the difficulty to unionize. Athletes are a tiny group, pretty easy to organize. Pilots are a small group, also pretty easy to unionize. The fact they have to be licensed means there is a record for all the people needed pull in. Software engineers seem to be 5x-20x larger population than commercial pilots (quick/rough searches). They have no certification or registry organization and have no common affiliations. It's incredibly difficult to organize this group. There's also no regulatory capture requiring developers to be US citizens so, if you did unionize and tried to negotiate too hard the industry would just move away from the US so there's just not a lot of leverage this profession has.
Pilots also spend years logging hours in small airplanes, then regional airlines, getting paid relative peanuts, working crazy hours, rarely home, etc. before they land a high-paying job at a major national airline. And any hint of health problems, depression, substance abuse, etc. they fail their medical and it's all gone.
These "unions" in high paying fields behave more like guilds or cartels than worker's unions - they generally restrict supply. Athletes and Hollywood unions are sort of special cases too, IMHO. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that top earners in those fields earn so much because of their unions - they benefit from natural supply restriction of outliers.
For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots or doctors, you'd have to agree on a way to restrict supply (H1B restrictions, more licensing and credentialling etc) to give the union leverage. You have to control the supply taps and rate limit entry to the field.
I think it's hard to say if this would net out better for workers than the current arrangements, which are already the best in the world on nearly every metric.
It also seems like there's a timing issue - if tech workers DID successfully unionise enough to withhold a meaningful fraction of labour, the gains might ultimately end up in the market cap of AI companies via substitution.
Structurally the way it works is that the AMA or ALPA or what have you lobby for regulations that just so happen to limit supply, and heavily push back whenever anyone proposes regulations that would loosen it, usually on safety / quality grounds.
There are also revolving doors between the regulator and the relevant professional bodies.
I'm pro union in cases where employers are a monopsony and workers have few options - it completely makes sense for coal miners in a coal town to form a union to even things out. I just don't think US tech right now meets the conditions for it to make sense, the market is too liquid for employers to capture all the upside.
US tech workers have real problems and complaints - PTO, maternity leave, health care to start - but these feel to me more like structural features of the US labour market? It makes more sense to me that these should be subject to national regulation rather than specific advantages for tech workers carved out by a union.
Its very simple. Look at the profit margins of those companies, there's simply a lot more to share.
If you don't need to buy a product to make a product, or when you have to that's typically pennies on the dollar you can share a lot more of that.
The real difference here is that when the market is favorable you CAN share more. And Samsung is doing so. In the US you probably wouldn't be able to do this because the shareholders will cry and will happily give a 100M bonus to whoever will 'lead' the company better. Where better means diverting as much as possible to the shareholders
The US has some of the highest levels of wealth and wage inequality in the developed world, and it's never had greater economic stratification in 1-2 lifetimes.
The number of people making "moon money" is very, very small compared to everyone else in the industry.
What’s an average nvidia “tech employee” worth today? How about compared to their base salary vs. Samsung line workers?
You have a point. But on this precise topic it’s pretty hard to make. A tiny handful of companies who are winners beyond anyone’s expectations simply do not matter.
There is exactly zero percent chance this profit sharing contract would have been negotiated by either party as it is if this had been remotely predicted in advance. Same as the retrospectively extremely lucrative RSUs granted to nvidia employees just five years ago.
Tech folks employed by the top tech companies have been fine. I do not cry even a minute for them. The fun part of the Korean memory worker compensation is that blue collar folks finally are getting just a little bit of the taste the laptop class has been part of for so long. And it is likely to be comparatively very fleeting.
I feel the opposite. Looking at the yearly revenue of these companies and dividing them by the number of people that contributed, I clearly created much more value than my comp gave me.
I learned pretty quickly that money in Silicon Valley has nothing to do with getting what you "deserve" after a co-worker sold a domain name at the height of the dot-com bubble and retired on the proceeds. Sometimes people get lucky and there's no point in getting angry about it.
Do you think it's reasonable Zuckerberg or Bezos get rewarded the way they do while Amazon drivers piss in bottles and barely paid contractors get PTSD from moderating Facebook?
The system is rotten to the core. We as tech workers are somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being exploited while also benefiting from the exploitation of others.
I think I have shown gratitude to all my employers. They have invariably treated me well, and I believe the relationships were mutually beneficial.
If you do not feel gratitude to your employer I suggest you find a different one. If you cannot find such an employer over an extended time frame, perhaps the problem is you.
401(k) and IRA’s were not a gift. It was a way for the companies to end the company pension plans in the early to mid 1980s. Half of the people who did receive them squandered them by cashing out before retirement to pay bills. If Social Security goes the same way most would squander it paying for necessities.
Most of the unionize workers still left in America get a better share of the pie than the non-Union workers not even close. It’s always good to work together in a union had to be footloose and fancy free by yourself.
I don't think it would be bad for equity in any way. It might actually be good instead actually.
First, the general public would have more disposable income if we shift more of the tax burden on the ultra rich.
Second, people like Elon Musk won't be able to give themselves massive bonuses that are essentially paid by diluting common stock.
Also, with regard to the U.S., the U.S. could wipe out its national debt with a one-time wealth tax, and also pass a balanced budget const. amendment so it never ends up deep in debt again.
Lastly, perverse and extremely greed-based exploitative businesses might become less common, since there aren't ultra fat executive paychecks. Although it might still happen if a large group of people are able to make a somewhat high salary off such schemes.
No way wealth tax covers the debt. It would be more of an asset seizure and forced sale or nationalization of a bunch of businesses and illiquid asset classes. The rich don’t hold enough cash to make it happen.
The other issue is the U.S. deficit is a feature not a bug. As long as the world buys the bonds, it’s “free” and no one will care until forced austerity happens.
Look into the end of the Gilded Age to see how this really gets fixed.
Nationalization is arbitrary and wrong. That's not what I'm proposing.
We'd largely be transferring shares in companies to the treasury bond holders, ie the people and orgs who hold US debt.
The federal government might for example force mega-sized private companies like Koch Industries to go public to get an accurate market valuation (or just sell it to private equity by starting a bidding war on it across many private equity investors).
The wealth tax cutoff would be determined by the national debt. It might fall to a relatively harsh / low threshold like 99.9% of assets over $20 million. Or maybe 99% of assets between $20 million to $1 billion, and 99.9% on assets above $1 billion.
Treasury bonds themselves would be subject to the wealth tax, so someone with $100 billion in T bonds might just see 99% of $80 million erased. So even the total number of T bonds payable will drop under this wealth tax.
But someone with $100 million in shares in private and public companies will see their shares transferred to the federal government, and then eventually sold.
Once every T bond has been paid off, Congress and the states could try to close the centuries-long chapter on debt by trying to pass a balanced budget constitutional amendment.
Well yeah America has achieved what the communists sought: public ownership of the means of production . Today most of the American public owns the largest means of production in government advantaged accounts. Marx ought to be proud
So basically most older professionals, and today's young professionals will step into their shoes as they grow their wealth over time too. Which means probably far more than 10% of the population will at some point in their life belong to that group which owns 90% of the means of production.
> will at some point in their life belong to that group which owns 90% of the means of production
Would love to but I'm afraid you grossly misunderstand how the power law distribution works. Unfortunately the billionaires are running away from us exponentially faster than we are catching up.
Speaking as someone who will almost certainly become a multi millionaire in the next decade or two. (even if I stop adding more savings manually)
But crucially this only happens if there _isnt_ a big revolution in USA. If there is, I'm fucked.
The idea that communism means that everyone owns everything equally is retarded. Communes themselves don't do this. People with more stake get more ownership
This corresponds to the first stage of Marxs theorized progession from capitalism too communism
Done hate the messenger. I'm just taking what I read and applying it to observed reality and telling you it fit.
Self described commies are dumb because they are incapable of enacting the very system they claim to idealize.
Can you show a commune that has lasted 3 generations? So like people move in, they stay and have kids and their kids stay long enough to have kids themselves. So at least about ~50 years?
My impression of all these communes is:
- idealistic people move in
- they realize 90% of the people that moved in are lazy and don't want to work
- the rest of the 10% run the show and the commune either breaks down here or kicks out many people
- kids are born, they grow up and by the time they get to university age they find the whole thing cringy and leave to go have normal lives
- commune ends
Other than some that also degenerate into sexual abuse between members and other weird power games. My impression of these outsider hippie / communist groups is that their failure rate is very high.
The United States, since most of our means of production is owned by the public. That was the point. The United States has the highest equity ownership rate in the world. We all have a stake in this.
That's just an infantile straw man though which has nothing to do with how communism works. Communism simply means that workers own their workplace and are the primary beneficiaries of their labor. In practice this means a mix of state ownership for cross-cutting concerns such as energy production or infrastructure and cooperative ownership for things like light industry. Cooperatives operate exactly the same way as companies owned by capitalists, except workers are in charge of running the company. Huawei is an example of how this works in the real world.
Maybe avoid opining on topics you have no idea in the future as not to make an ass of yourself in public.
Actually, it’s the other way around in America the government and the people get to pay for the debt and the Robber Baron insiders get to scuttle away with the profit.
In all honesty, I’d rather get paid the $500k/yr people make here than have a union negotiate a $350k one time bonus in a time of unprecedented success. Given these two options, I’m not that eager to have their system.
I mean, on levels.fyi the 90th percentile in San Francisco is 500k. Most of HN is tech workers in the bay area.
The average person on hacker news is easily in the 90th percentile of software engineers, so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the most people here make somewhere around there.
The biggest confounding factor is the other fact that most HN users are startup founders living off ramen in Peter Thiel's garage, so that probably brings down the average some.
I mean as someone who works in American AI chip firms , our compensation is larger. You can bitch about America as much as you want but it's pretty much the best in terms of monetary compensation
Of course I'm late to the game. My colleagues who have been here ten years are either extremely wealthy and bored or sailing the Caribbean at this point. Every other week someone is taking a sabbatical
Very true, but some are acting like it’s the end of the world if a few people in the middle to lower end who worked very hard get a bonus and when I say work hard, I would say they probably in South Korea worked a lot harder that many people in the west in the same position have relatively speaking.
Doesnt need to be tech. My blue collar UPS worker friend is all in on down with regulations, and claimed if anything we meed MORE billionaires. Many in America see regulation and taxes in all forms as bad, and the primary thing holding back prosperity for all.
I remember thinking like this when i was younger (hes older than me). Then here i am working nearly half as many hours as this guy, for 5-10x the pay.
This is a widespread, pervasive train of thought in America. Yet i wonder as the houses and healthcare stay expensive, food and fuel too... at some point this mental model breaks right?
I have a hard time understanding this complaint. A US tech worker earning $340k bonus wouldn't even make news, it happens every year all around the silicon valley.
That is, a US tech worker is taking much more for their own from those billionaire employers, compared to what Samsung's workers managed to do after a lot of haggling.
[GIF of Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money]