| > "You can take less, and I even bet few employers will complain. I gonna let you start the trend and I'll hold back though." Which is why I won't do it. It might be a symbolic gesture, but it'll also be useless. Expecting people to take voluntary pay cuts is unrealistic, it also overlooks a fundamentally better solution: increasing supply. Growing the labor pool is good - it means more wealth and more employment all around. It means better lives for more people (as opposed to reducing the quality of your own life for no apparent purpose). It means more people in our community, it means more technologists will exist, and a larger portion of the population will understand what we do. I will gladly take a pay cut if it means more people have joined the fold and enjoy the upper-middle class income that was previously out of reach. > "I submit, w/o proof, laundry startups are a symptom of how shitty a city sf is. In a real city (ny) there are wash & folds near your apartment" Hehe, agreed on all counts. I too am of the opinion that a large number of startups exist solely to paper over what is a civic planning failure of gigantic proportions. SF is not a functioning city, it is an embalmed tribute to the 1940s, kept "alive" solely by the massive and unending injection of cash. |
Growing the labor pool is far from good when the goal is what passes for leadership in the valley -- pmarca, zuckerberg, larry page, et all -- are really advocating: avoid investing in education, or growing the workforce domestically, in favor of importing cheap foreign-educated labor which can then be exploited via our pseudo-indentured servitude h1b system. Most of these folks already let their ethics show w/ their engineering wage cram-down, along with their tax avoidance schemes which reduce funds to the government which heavily subsidizes their industries via, for example, public support of education of the skilled employees.
There are plenty of good engineers available in the US. You can do any of:
hire remote employees
pay better so that people can afford to live in the valley without making huge financial sacrifices, or use your leadership role to attack any of the things (transport, nimby, lack of housing, lack of dense housing) that make living in the valley so expensive
foster an engineering pipeline and work culture that doesn't systematically exclude women (double your potential employee base alone), plus other minorities
But since they make none of these changes, I oppose any increase in visa allotments.