Awesome to see something like this on HN. As we keep working for less pay, more hours, the constant threat of layoffs, and business leaders frothing at the mouth to replace us all with AI, it's important to remember that we aren't powerless as workers. It's also important to remember that your relationship to the higher-ups is adversarial. They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible. It's not because they're evil, it's just good business. Organizing helps protect us as things get worse.
I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
> It's not because they're evil, it's just good business
Almost everything I have ever heard described as "good business" is pretty evil
You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
It's always stuff like "we put 10000 orphans through a meat grinder to make 10 cents, it wasn't personal it was just good business"
Edit: of course that is an exaggeration
But more realistic examples include things like "we laid off 200 people the week before Christmas so we hit our targets for the next year. Not personal, just good business"
Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
> You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
Lots of big tech companies give people raises automatically when they think they're too underpaid.
> Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
I really, really don't get this. Sometimes companies overhire. Sometimes it's even their own fault that they've overhired.
Either way, clearly IT HAPPENS and sometimes companies will need to lay off workers when it becomes clear they're not useful enough to justify their pay.
It's not inherently a reflection on the workers or the company; most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more.
> most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying
Unsustainably over-hiring to take advantage of low interest rates is viewed as a smart business decision. It may actually be a smart business decision, but it is still evil
Startups are risky and unionizing won't force them to keep you employed. In fact, it will create an environment of less startups and more large companies with less choices for the employee.
Union heavy countries like Sweden have almost no startup scene and wages are normalized (ie: almost all the same across white collar industries).
> They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible
It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
> I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work.
> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.
In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.
But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.
You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.
And again, the questions.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.
I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question
The answer is 100%. This brings us to the start point of the real conversation this person is trying to have, which likely centers on the nature of employment, the importance of Job Creators, and/or the infallibility of markets.
But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.
The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.
This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?
I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.
100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?
It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.
Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.
I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created. How you split up the credit is a difficult problem. (As many developers will note, there is no such thing as a 'cost center'; all labor contributes to the outcome.)
However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
You’ve just found a roundabout way to repeat the idea that you don’t like that someone else is getting what you believe to be an unfairly large piece of the pie.
Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.
You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.
So we’re back where we started.
> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?
I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!