Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skybrian 25 days ago
Yes, if you're treated well. It was a fair deal. More than fair, generous. I can't point to anything I did that was worth so much.

You seem surprised? Do you know how things (sometimes) work in Silicon Valley?

2 comments

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.

Labor is entitled to all it creates.

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.

Would you rather people not be allowed to do these jobs at all? That wouldn't leave them better off. Even paying them more must necessarily be weighed against the opportunity of expanded hiring at the prevailing market wage, lest you simply create a new privileged high caste of super highly paid Amazon drivers or Facebook content moderators.
I would rather not have people's dignity priced by the market, the same one that created the Zuckerbergs and Sacklers of this world.

Markets are fundamentally just a proxy for the interests of rich people. There can be no fair allocation of resources as long as the mechanism to do so is a figleaf for the oligarchy.

I’ve read news reports about those jobs and they do sound very bad. But as for being exploited, I’m certain that I wasn’t.
Why are you so certain? How much does your CEO provide in value compared to your labor? You really sure its a fair distribution of the proceeds?
No, despite working there and (apparently) making too much money to complain. Spell it out for us please.