The lack of worker solidarity in tech is really astounding.
I've been in this industry for almost 20 years and have been trying to instill some sense of it in every workplace I worked. Some decades ago it really seemed that tech workers felt like they were just tech moguls that hadn't made it yet, any kind of labour protection was looked at as "stifling innovation".
Only lately I've seen people listen to me when I bring up that if you depend on a salary you're on the same side as 99% of other people, no matter you have a run away of 6 months saved, if you lose your job for 6-12 months and will be fucked by it you should have solidarity with others in the same spot or worse.
Trying to bring up class struggles used to be mocked in the tech scene, I feel that people are slowly waking up though, the latest layoffs definitely got me surprised about some folks I know finally understanding what that means.
I've seen what "solidarity" did to the manufacturing industry. I'd like my job to stay in my city. And anyone in tech has a lot more to gain from efforts to break the remaining guild-like systems in medicine and law making those services more affordable and available than they do from attempts to build a new one in tech.
And I've seen what solidarity (without the scary quotes) did to Sweden (and other Nordics), Germany, etc. as societies for the working class.
A union is not a guild, it's not about creating barriers of entry like in law or medicine, unsure why you conflate those concepts. Perhaps it's from ignorance, or perhaps from the fears that the ruling class instilled into you.
If we're going to copy the Nordics, someone is going to have to start by translating their laws into English so we know what it is they are actually doing. I don't like arguing based on what they are hypothetically doing and I don't think many of the people pointing at them as an example know either. They're tiny, homogeneous and Norway has obscene oil wealth. It isn't obvious we can copy them piecemeal, even if it does make sense which I doubt it does.
And although it isn't exactly fair, note that Germany is a wasteland for tech. In the centre of a tech desert. The EU can't do tech. Copying their policies we can do, but it'll probably involve a lot of jobs heading to Asia. All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.
I live and work in Sweden, even though worker solidarity here is almost at an all-time low it's still quite ingrained in society, it's one of the engines of making this society more trustworthy, less unequal and all the benefits that stems from that.
> All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.
Because USA's wages are the massive oddball here, not the standard. And to be honest, shouldn't be replicated anywhere else, having such a vast part of your population living how the bottom 50% of the USA lives is not really a goal for most developed countries, it doesn't create a healthy society (as you can see yourself by living in the USA).
Comparing purely on a wage basis is a reduction of what societies actually are. Great, you earn a lot more in the USA but now has to deal with all the stresses of living in the USA. Is that really what the average person in an advanced economy should be under? If you believe so, the USA is for you, I don't believe in it.
> The EU can't do tech.
The EU has a large language and cultural barrier that is nonexistent in the USA, it's not only a purely economical output.
ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? Tech couldn't exist without ASML...
On the point of tiny "homogeneous" Nordics:
Each US state is also pretty tiny with a few exceptions, isn't that the model of the USA? Why can't each tiny state also have their provisions for labour protection? Because it's not part of the culture.
>ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech?
My god, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time someone on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that ASML (and sometimes Spotify) is the only name that comes to mind when discussion EU tech dominance, speaks volumes. (I'm European BTW)
Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD?
Or why did Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum or Andrej Karpathy move to the US to make their impacts in the tech world instead of staying in their native European countries and doing it from here?
Europe is basically completely absent in terms of raising international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market. Our strength is making innovations and start-ups that end up swallowed by US money/entities and relocated across the Atlantic in some Delaware holding where they flourish on US soil.
Go to any tech job in Europe, and the tools you'll be using both HW and SW (client and infrastructure) will mostly be from some US tech giants or SV start-ups. Come home from work and fire up any digital entertainment platform it will most likely also come from the US or Japan or to a smaller degree China.
US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined, both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition.
>Tech couldn't exist without ASML...
False, more like ASML couldn't exist without US tech. We could be using non-EUV lithography machines from Canon and Nikon, so chip tech would exist just fine, but would probably be stuck around ~10nm level. Not great for bleeding edge tech, but not stone age levels either.
Short story, the only reason ASML won and Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier at the time, giving ASML a strategic US presence versus their Japanese competitors.
Longer story:
"The basics of EUV were invented in, and owned by, DOE labs (Sandia, Berkeley, and Lawrence) in the 1990s. The chip manufacturers wanted the labs' inventions commercialized, of course, so Intel took the lead on pushing that effort through a public/private partnership called a CRADA (Cooperative R&D Agreement) between the DOE labs and a consortium of private companies. They formed an entity called EUV-LLC to facilitate the CRADA.
Intel was eager to have Canon and Nikon participate in EUV-LLC, along with ASML and SVGL (the sole leading-edge American stepper supplier at the time and also a beneficiary of US taxpayer help). However, the DOE and the larger U.S. government weren't keen on handing U.S. taxpayer-funded research to foreign companies, so there was a lot of back and forth. I know only the sketchiest of details.
The DOE and Congress ended up rejecting Canon and Nikon's membership in EUV-LLC, denying them access to the underlying IP. But they allowed the (Dutch) ASML in. About 3 years later ASML was allowed to buy SVGL and, voilá, the only litho tool supplier that had a license to EUV IP, and the financial and technological backing of the EUV-LLC consortium, was Dutch."[1]
> Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD?
Some examples of Eu based tech would be: Nokia killed by MS, an US company. Skype. SAP. ARM, UiPath, Bitdefender.
But is true, we are unable to compete with US on tech. Part of the reasons is that we don't have good startup ecosystem and hubs, we don't have tech hubs, we don't have tech investors, our tech and entrepreneurship culture might be lacking. But another part is that big US tech companies are monopolies and they are trying to stifle the competition and succeeding at it.
Both EU bureaucrats and each country's politicians don't care. No one does a single thing to try to improve the EU tech ecosystem.
having a monopoloy is good business. as long as you don't rest your laurels. all the big tech companies - microsoft, apple, google etc are monopolies in their own particular niches.
as econ 101 says - perfect competition drives profits to zero.
the thing that kills europe tech ecosystem is complacency. there's plenty enough smart people.
> I live and work in Sweden, even though worker solidarity here is almost at an all-time low it's still quite ingrained in society, it's one of the engines of making this society more trustworthy, less unequal and all the benefits that stems from that.
By "worker solidarity" you mean laws enforced by socialist bureaucrats? Equality of outcomes, no matter the merits or the work put in? Is that a sustainable model? Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?
>By "worker solidarity" you mean laws enforced by socialist bureaucrats?
Socialist movements and ideas, although fair, win votes and elections, especially in tough times like these, even though those ideas aren't financially viable or would backfire in the long run. Because which voter doesn't want bigger wages or bigger pensions, who cares where the money comes form? It's why my Spanish, Greek and Italian friends tell me their countries are sliding downhill economically.
> Is that a sustainable model? Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?
It was a sustainable model before the rise of globalization, back in the '50s till the '80s, when it weas the west vs the east, capitalism vs communism, so western labor and governments had leverage over their large corporate entities. Now, in the globalized world, free of trade and capital barriers, not so much.
Tax corporate profits too much to pay for infrastructure, and social services that serve their workforce? The companies will just relocate to Luxembourg, Netherlands,
Ireland or other complex tax voidance structure involving some British overseas Territories.
Factory workers want more pay and less hours? They relocate production somewhere else where those aren't an issue.
Corporations have managed to have their cake and eat it too, at the expense of the workers and the environment.
I guess you don't know anything about labour laws in Sweden, given it doesn't define much at all (it's pretty barebones) and most of the labour protections come from agreements based on the tripod of government, employer and employee-representative unions negotiations.
And I guess you don't know much about Sweden in general if your follow-up question is "Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?"...
Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc.
While certainly not perfect and lacking in many ways, it is a system that is at least in theory aimed towards providing a decent standard of living to all, instead of allowing a lucky few (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) to juice the income statistics by earning insane amounts of money and giving the middle finger to the rest of society.
This is a big misconception. It's mostly not luck.
Different societies can and do focus on different things. The US focuses a lot more on innovation and progress, and invents and pioneers a lot of the things that other societies, who spend their money on other things, then get to benefit from. Sadly, some of the occupants of the latter also taking a moral stand against the economic and social differencies that create those advances.
It's hugely luck though. I don't want to discount the work I did to pursue a graduate degree and maintain and enhance my professional skills, but none of that would matter if I didn't win the birth lottery of being born American to a family that pushed me to higher education.
According to wikipedia, 9 of the 10 richest persons are white men from an upper-middle-class or upper class social background. Even people like Sergey Brin, Mukesh Ambani and Carlos Slim, while not born in the U.S. or Western Europe, have parents that were part of their countries' academic or business elite. Do you have any conception of how lucky you have to be to be born into such circumstances instead of being raised in the slums of Nairobi?
Simply put, if hard work would be the deciding factor, every 30-year old Nigerian woman toiling on her small farm while caring for several children would be richer than Jeff Bezos. Yes, hard work matters at the margin but the fact that the guy across the street is picking his food out of a dumpster while you order Uber Eats is mostly down to the the parents you are born to, the place and time you live in, random stuff like getting sick as a child and so on. Get over it, it doesn't mean that you have to feel bad about yourself but it does mean that you should not be an absolute ass to people less lucky than you are and respect demands for more solidarity with them.
You said it is "mostly not luck". I said and believe I did at least prove to a first approximation that it is indeed mostly luck. Yes, hard work matters at the margin. Among the people I studied with, those with a good work ethic are mostly in a better place today than those who slacked during college. But we were all able to attend college in the first place because we were very lucky, not because of any particular great achievements on our part. And in terms of standard of living and luxury, we are more or less all in the top 5% globally, I estimate.
Meanwhile I have worked and travelled across quite a few African countries and I can positively confirm that almost everyone I met there has worked quite a bit harder than I have throughout their lives and despite that, practically all are financially worse off than I am today.
I don't loose sleep over that, there is no cosmic balance I am upsetting with my privileged existence. But the least I and everyone else profiting from this privilege can do is to acknowledge it and stand in solidarity with efforts to redistribute some of that extreme profits that the most lucky people in our societies reap through no real sacrifice of their own.
Rich people should simply accept that they are rich mostly not because of their genius and/or hard work, but because of the privileges afforded to them by birth and chance, as well as the services provided to them by greater society. Consequently, I am all for enjoying the fruits of your labour but all this talk about systems like the U.S. "rewarding innovation" or "risk taking" etc. is simply propaganda by people who would rather see other people literally starve than lower their bank account balance from 10 to 8 figures.
I more meant that I don't split things up into "luck" and "hard work" - I think that's too broad. However, sticking to your framing, I would say a lot of that thing you call luck is the hard work of your parents, or their parents.
Eventually you can trace that back to more significant events - being invaded by the right people can jump-start your civilisation (e.g. Britain being invaded by the Romans). Equally, being invaded by the wrong civilisation can be devastating.
Or, say, sticking with Britain: the amount of thought and intellectual and cultural superstructure that had to go into the events that led up, say, to the signing of the Magna Carta, is enormous. The whole raft of arduous work that up to that point is just crazy. Or the building of Oxford University. Having a culture that is able and willing to instute massive, long-term investments is the result of a lot of hard work and intelligent thought.
And some luck - being close to Europe and the Middle East and being relatively to the world back then was definitely lucky. But luck isn't most of it. Even all the effort of translation and diplomacy and inventing ships and bearing the risk of travel was all hard work, translating that location into something useful.
Which, in an anthropic principle sort of way, does lead us to be something you could call "lucky" today. But it's not unearned luck. It's luck other people made for us. And for me, working hard to build things that are good and will (or their future iterations) survive me is the best way to make tomorrow's "luck".
Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump.
Personal wealth is to a first approximation just an expression of the hard work of other people (which is just another way of saying what you explained) and the luck of being in the right place at the right time (and more often than not having the right skin color, gender and social capital, also acquired by the work of other people). It should just be tolerated to the extend that it motivates people to take some risk to start businesses. But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.
On a side note, your last comment is broadly correct but does skip over a lot of exploitation and repression that enabled the economic dominance of European nations in recent history. And again, this exploitation and dominance wasn't enabled by a particular genius or hard work on the Europeans' part. European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.
> Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump
You'd have to cite this. The only people I see who are under the impression that labour is all it takes to make a business succeed are far left-wing, labour theory of value people.
> But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.
You're half right. The criminal vagueness of "society" aside, no one has a moral duty to enable it. But there is no morality in disabling it, through theft or other means.
> European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.
You seem to have misread. I wasn't saying or implying anything special about the complexity of European societies.
> Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream
So all this justifies German employers paying their workers less? I'm not sure how should this make sense. All of those things you've mentioned are great and are financed through taxation paid by the workers...
So just compare pretax salaries? Which are still considerably lower in Germany. ...
Yes, it justifies it because public services and insurance do, well, insure you against a lot of negative events that you would have to compensate for with much higher disposable income otherwise.
I.e. my child is severely disabled (not an example, it is actually the case) since birth. Adequately caring for his health, his special educational needs and required assistance in daily live would cost me between 5,000 and 10,000 Euros/month. I actually do not know the exact figure for sure, because I pay only a fraction of this out of pocket. Within the framework of the U.S. financial system, this would have ruined our families finances, my parents (considerable) savings and likely my other son's future earning potential, despite me and my wife both being the offspring of quite well-of families and us not having any student debt despite both having an M.A. degree. It would have locked both me and my wife into potentially sub-optimal employments simply to have some form of health coverage, while still under the soul-crushing fear that someday some manager decides I'm not "efficient" enough to merit payment.
As it is, I have to spend a lot of time on bureaucracy and even more time on caring for my son, but guess what: he is getting some of the best health and educational care available anywhere and I can still afford to go out for dinner once in a while and know that while certainly unnerving and disruptive, a bad turn in my personal luck will not sentence my child to suffer because I can't afford to care for him.
In the same way that it's OK to pay people in SF more than in Detroit, it's OK to have a lower number in Germany if it comes hand in hand with massively cheaper cost of living.
You need to compare the fully loaded cost, including health insurance and university access. If you add the fees that you had to pay in the US to send 3 kids to world-class universities, German salaries would probably come out as a higher value.
True but it's not unreasonable to expect to have an extra 30-50k+ per year left in the US that you can save or do anything with (save for retirement, move to Germany/Europe after a few years etc.) which is not unlikely to be close to the entire disposable income of someone working in a similar position in Germany.
Essentially all of these insurances are subsidized by the government and would not function without taxpayer money. Also because the insurance part is in many cases compulsory, not having these programs run on the government budget is mostly an accounting trick. The effect is essentially the same as leveling a tax it is just called differently.
In the case of health insurance, AFAIK the subsidies are the government paying on behalf of people who are insured but don't pay in (children, spouses out of the labour market, unemployed - "versicherungsfremde Leistungen") and amounts to about 14 billion out of the 280 billion paid in via employees.
My point is that we don't have "free healthcare" over here in Germany, as Americans often think. We pay in 15% of our income up to the limit into health insurance and we get ok, no-frills healthcare (shared rooms in hospitals, waiting times in big cities to see specialists) relatively equally distributed to the population.
German education systems scores slightly worse than US's system on the 2018 PISA score for what it is worth.
> Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc.
Still, if we add all those expenses with the wage, the total is still lower for a SWE in EU vs a SWE in US.
In terms of median income (which might arguably be better suited for this particular question than average income), the U.S. is on fourth position with Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway occupying higher ranks. Germany is only about 3,000 USD behind the U.S. in that measure: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
Note that I selected those for being strictly "tech", as in software,
electronics and telecoms. That leaves out plenty of big names in other sectors
like fintech, or biotech, etc. For example:
Note that the EU is 28 independent countries in a common market being built in
the last 40 years or so whereas the US is one country, so the comparison is
not straightforward. For example, Orange's $31 billion may not be a lot
compared to Apple or Gogole, but France is ~70 million people whereas the US
is ~330 million.
That list of market caps is comparable to Google, and EU fragmentation as an excuse is grasping at straws - not only is that an example of the absurdist over-regulation in the EU (why are they all so excited about banning trade with each other?) but Google actually makes 30% of its revenue from the EU so it isn't like fragmentation is stopping Google from success.
It isn't like the EU is short of great coders, they just regulate their way to oblivion. With good ideas like the one in the article, I cheerfully add. They are making it transparent that anyone with a choice should go work for a US company.
If it easier for a US firm to move into European markets than it is for Europeans to? That is 100% on the Europeans. The difference between 70 million and 300 million in the home country doesn't make that much of a difference of how easy it is to break in to the German market - the problem is that French regulators would never allow a French Google to grow.
If France had a Google-like company, it'd end up like Nokia. Hiding at number 16 on a list somewhere, rather unremarkable, trying not to think about what could have been.
During the most prosperous times in American history (post WW2 economy), income taxes on the highest earners were even higher than that. I don't like taxes, but capitalism does that too.
Equality is a socialist fairytale and unions is what keeps innovation from happening. All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this, stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on.
As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible with no impediments to this. And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things.
That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.
Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class (largely anointed by luck and/or heritage) to a broad segment of society. This in turn enables broad segments of society to give their children a decent education, which is the pre-requisite for society-scale innovation and (technological and social) progress.
The U.S. has long profited from being able to leverage plentiful natural resources and a dominating international position into being attractive to well-educated people from around the world and thus never having to fully rely on its own broadly abysmal but narrowly elite education system and other social services.
That is probably something you see as a victory, but it is also the definition of unsustainability: at some point the stresses introduced by this approach will start to crack the social fabric. Arguably, it already has.
> Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class
Wealth inequality is still huge in Scandinavia (especially Sweden which is even worse than the US in that regard), Germany and the Benelux (especially when compared to many other European countries which might not have very strong unions..). So unions didn't really help that much with that...
I can't speak for other countries because I never looked at the data but in Germany, increasing wealth inequality correlates with decreasing union membership in recent decades while the big and broadly distributed wealth gains of the post-war era correlated with historically high levels of union memberships. Intuitively it would make sense that rising income inequality is the result of too little unionization, not too much or it being irrelevant.
Also, there is plenty of actual research that backs this up, i.e.:
Of course they are possible not the most trustworthy source given the recent events..
To be fair I don't know how to explain the disparity, the report even says this: "For all other countries, except the United States, the wealth shares of the top groups are expected to be understated"
That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.
The most financially successful innovations in US tech this century have arguably been business models based on venture capital and barely regulated corporations achieving monopoly/oligopoly levels of control and engaging in exploitative behaviours at a larger scale than ever before. Is that really the kind of free market, light regulation economics to be proud of?
> That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.
i have a lot of questions. what do you mean by technology and what are the other domains? when did technology leapfrog those other domains? what are technology's innovations with respect to those other domains? why was technology free to innovate so fast? why were other domains not?
at a very basic level, the tech sector advancing must corrispond to advances in other sectors because tech only advances by advancing other sectors. if it doesn't advance other sectors of the economy, then it's just a waste of time and energy, which is a fair characterization of the tech sector for the last couple decades. in contrast, the advancement of tech happening now is nothing compared to the 1920s to the 1940s, when unions were a lot bigger in the united states.
not that that has anything to do with it. in truth technological breakthroughs happen every once in a while, take several decades to be fully exploited, after which point there's no real development for who knows how long until the next breakthrough happens, and it doesn't really make a difference (for technological development) how work is organized.
This ignores all of the decades of government and university research and funding that went into these technological advances. The US also had the great advantage of being one of the only countries to not be completely devastated by two World Wars.
Dear god what an indictement of your school system this comment is.
>All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this
No, what they want is for all workers _of the same job_ to earn a fair wage, at the very least. Not a single time has a union prevented people from having a higher wage than their colleagues.
>stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on.
Are a human being with a life, feelings and a family or a fucking object to be tossed away when you're drained dry ? Once again, unions don't prevent companies from firing people. They ask that it be done properly and respectfully. In most of the world, you get indemnities for being fired.
>As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible
So you can reach the glass ceiling because you're just yet another drone to your higher ups, that will do everything in their power to keep you as just that, a salaried man while they reap the fruits of _your_ labor ?
>And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things.
You won't be. You won't be because you're not part of them already. You won't get into YC because you're not a part of the cool kids club. You won't be because they make damn sure of it. And sure, you can make a bit of money. But you'll still be a prole to them, and to the world. But now you get to spit on those poorer than you, and think you're in any way superior to them while they laugh.
>Equality is a socialist fairytale
"Hard work gets rewarded" is the poisonous thought put into place by men who haven't worked a day in their lives. Your trash collector works harder than you ever will, and it's not unions holding him back.
> No, what they want is for all workers _of the same job_ to earn a fair wage, at the very least. Not a single time has a union prevented people from having a higher wage than their colleagues.
And who decides what is a fair wage? And even considering this is what they want, then why should then the ranges be public and tight for a specific job? There are a lot of people here saying it is not in the spirit of the law to say a position pays between 100k and 900k.
> Are a human being with a life, feelings and a family or a fucking object to be tossed away when you're drained dry ? Once again, unions don't prevent companies from firing people. They ask that it be done properly and respectfully. In most of the world, you get indemnities for being fired.
You are basically a cog in a machine. Yes, its callous, but it is what it is. This is why you have unemployment benefits in care you're fired. And do you mean fired properly and respectfully? A red carpet when you leave the premises?
> So you can reach the glass ceiling because you're just yet another drone to your higher ups, that will do everything in their power to keep you as just that, a salaried man while they reap the fruits of _your_ labor ?
This is laughable, it's the kind of socialist speech that has no basis in reality. This is why you are paid in the first place, to do some work that someone else designed for you. If you want to reap the fruits of your labor, start a company and sell your product(s).
> You won't be. You won't be because you're not part of them already. You won't get into YC because you're not a part of the cool kids club. You won't be because they make damn sure of it. And sure, you can make a bit of money. But you'll still be a prole to them, and to the world. But now you get to spit on those poorer than you, and think you're in any way superior to them while they laugh.
I don't know if you know, but there are a lot of stories about people quitting their jobs to start successful companies. And some of them joined YC and so on. Just because most people don't do it its because they prefer the perceived confort of a job to the stress of being an entrepreneur.
> "Hard work gets rewarded" is the poisonous thought put into place by men who haven't worked a day in their lives. Your trash collector works harder than you ever will, and it's not unions holding him back.
I worked hard and got rewarded. And it works. Regading your comment: It is simply the perceived value of the physical work that is put in. That's why you have a lot of low paying jobs: their perceived value to other people.
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor" fits really well with your comment.
If unions keep innovation from happening how can Sweden be considered one of the most innovative countries on Earth? Or how can Germany be a powerhouse of engineering and building the machines that build machines?
Your take is a regurgitation of the usual talking points that the elite class use to keep workers separated. Unions aren't forcing socialism, unions are there to build up labour power against employers, who have a much higher leverage in any working agreement you can think of.
Your comment is exactly what I hear for the past 20 years of my work life. Workers are, ultimately, the ones creating value, you are defending the class that has the means to take risks due to their accumulation of capital. The rare oddity of a self-made man is the carrot that those use to push you to regurgitate their points.
Technology leapfrogged everyone because it's an immense value, it's immensely useful, not because there weren't labour protections. That's such a sideways view of everything that's a bit laughable...
I would argue workers create indirect value, because what they do in the end is to execute the vision of the founder of the company. They would have created actual value for themselves if they would have had the vision and the grit to start a company.
What was invented in Sweden that is so groundbreaking they're the most innovative country on the planet?
Regarding technology, it happened in a country unencumbered by unions at every step. Yeah, the US sucks at a lot of things, but at least it's crazy bent on have unions everywhere.
I think that if you're good enough you have all the leverage that you need to be successful. You don't need to join an union for this.
> What was invented in Sweden that is so groundbreaking they're the most innovative country on the planet?
Although I don't know which country is the most innovative on the planet, I think it should be noted that Sweden has a fairly small population (smaller than some cities), so we should probably consider whether Sweden's inventions are in proportion with its population.
I think of Sweden as the home of Volvo, Saab, Skype, Sictus Prolog, Spotify, Minecraft, seatbelts, dynamite and Angstrom's spectroscopy. Don't the Swedes punch above their weight?
Edit: Lots of medical inventions, too: pacemakers, local anesthetics, ECGs, ultrasounds and ventilators. And more computer technology: graphics cards and Bluetooth.
High skilled workers in Sweden and Germany and severely underpaid compared to their US counterparts? So either they suddenly become much more productive after moving the US, they are subsidizing their less skilled colleagues or most of that surplus is going to their employers instead?
Probably a bit of each depending on the location/sector/etc.. However Sweden in particular has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the word (even a bit higher than the US)...
I've seen what no solidarity and no unions did to the US job market and work conditions.
You are not a temporarily embarassed millionaire about to disrupt the medecine and law sectors. You're just yet another drone that corporate is happy to use, expandable and easy to throw away.
Solidarity and diversity are opposing forces. Now you understand why Tech is so obsessed with diversity. There will never be the solidarity you seek while companies, to the cheers of their employees, atomize their workers as much as possible. But diversity is now a secular religion whose tenets are ever changing to keep everyone divided. Any solidarity that arises in such a religion can quickly be quashed by changing some of the previously unquestionable core beliefs.
This sentence is close to brain cancer. Diversity means accepting others amongst yours despite your differences, it's the essence of solidarity.
>But diversity is now a secular religion whose tenets are ever changing to keep everyone divided.
What you are referring to is the ever changing propaganda theater of "left" vs right, which pictures a caricature enemy stereotype, the simple minded can easily hate. "Look here a radical transgenderist!" and suddenly the whole concept of diversity is subject to scrutiny.
I think, the lesson you need to learn is not getting triggered by pink hair.
What are you on about? Diversity in the makeup of a group isn't the opposite of the ability for a group to unite for a common cause. Being employed in the same industry is already more than enough to practice solidarity, e.g. unions. I cannot fathom how one would bring a diversity argument against a statement like "workers deserve better protections".
Your argument sounds like a stepping stone for racism and anti-diversity rhetoric to me, and I vehemently disagree.
I don't even understand how they would be against something that benefits them personally. I wonder if it's the mentality that "one day" they would become the IT moguls that own one of these companies, and wouldn't want this to disadvantage them?
They believe they are exceptional and deserve even higher pay than the ones listed, that the leopards-eating-peoples-faces-party won't eat their faces if they vote for it, that they are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires in a bit of a ruffle and golden times are just around the corner, they believe that they are better off if their surroundings are worse off, that the invisible hand of the market will fix everything except when it is them that suffer within the market, that is when the government needs to step in. The idea is vampirism, the polar opposite of Karma. Take as much as you can, kick down when you gained an slight angle on others, always priorize winning over any set of consistent principles, have a flexible relationship with the truth and underline aspects of it in inconsistent ways, as your goal is not to be truthful, but to win over others. Everything is a zero-sum-game, others having it good means they took something from you.
I really think you strawman to the extreme with this. I’ve never met one of these people, but on the internet they get made up because they need to exist in order for posters to feel so justified and unarguably right in their political opinions.
They probably think that they've gotten one over everyone, and are super-skilled negotiators that are earning 40% more than their peers for the same work.
Reality is probably quite different from that imagination.
Just rewatched the film "Margin Call", and salary as social status is one of the main themes that arises in almost every scene with the junior members of the firm.
> Tech people are doomed not by AIs, but by lack of solidarity, raw greed and lack of long term vision.
I see the same.
If there would be an "IT people"'s union it would be likely one of the most powerful organizations on this planet—as verbatim nothing in business works without computers these days (which need to be constantly operated and maintained by some).
But even mentioning the idea of such an union will give you instant backlash, up to pure hatred. Even in the EU where unions in general are seen as mostly positive by the majority of people. (But for some reasons not the IT crowd).
In the US I had to work with unionised workers and they would come in at 7am, do whatever they did and at 4pm they would drop everything and would not care if you needed them to work overtime to finish a project on time. Obviously paid overtime, in case anyone wonders.
In other cases I worked with non-unionised workers and they worked more and they were actually cheaper by the hour.
Very few of us are currently suffering from a panthera pardus to the face despite recent events. I'm also not even sure how many on this forum voted for the LEPF party either, given that while it's focused on Silicon Valley it's definitely got a global user base (I'm in Berlin!)
Unelected bureaucrats who think they are above the citizens, too much reach, too much influence, insistence in regulating every industry and every activity. This can only end in a can a cashless mass-surveillance social credit system dystopia even worse than China. Give it a few years.
Give me a break. Parlimant is elected directly, commission is made of PMs of the member states government, that were also elected. If feels like hearing Brits touting those 'unelected bureaucrats' while at the same time having unelected PM and house of Lords... no voting system is perfect nor the EU is perfect but this is one of the dumbest arguments there. As for policies - they are quite often very pro-citizen and having lived outside the EU for a couple of years I appreciate them even more...
I definitely agree that in balance the EU has been greatly beneficial but let's not get overoptimistic...
> Parliament is elected directly
The institution is a joke with no real power compared to national parliaments. They don't get to appoint the government, can't propose legislation etc. basically they just rubber-stamp anything which is brought by the commission by them. Barely any anywhere takes the EU elections seriously.
> made of PMs of the member states government
PMs? National governments can appoint anyone they want and often use it as a way to reward their buddies with a very cushy job (with close to zero political accountability) for a few years. Or to get someone influential/popular/etc. but whom the government finds dangerous from the country for a few years.
The process for picking ("electing") a commission president is a bit different but perfectly illustrates my point. They just appointed the most incompetent high ranking politician they could find in Germany...
> unelected PM
Just like the head of government in every single non-presidential country in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Austria etc... (the only excpetion is France). Anyway be any objective metric this is more democratic than the EU government.
> and house of Lords.
I agree. But it's an anachronistic and a powerless institution. Basically a retirement program for retired influential politicians...
> The institution is a joke with no real power compared to national parliaments. They don't get to appoint the government, can't propose legislation etc. basically they just rubber-stamp anything which is brought by the commission by them. Barely any anywhere takes the EU elections seriously.
Agreed. By the push towards more powerful Parliament is greeted with huge opposition from "nation states" because you know... "sovereignty"... :|
> PMs? National governments can appoint anyone they want and often use it as a way to reward their buddies with a very cushy job (with close to zero political accountability) for a few years. Or to get someone influential/popular/etc. but whom the government finds dangerous from the country for a few years.
Yes, that's correct but how else do you want to handle it? Ideally there should be two chamber body, lower one (Parliament) with proportional representation and upper one (Commission) with representation of member states (akin to the US) but that's just yet another election (you have EU one, national one and then regional ones)...
> The process for picking ("electing") a commission president is a bit different but perfectly illustrates my point. They just appointed the most incompetent high ranking politician they could find in Germany...
Yeah... and also corrupted from what I heard. But - case in point, even incompetent and corrupted ones can be elected via direct democracy (Poland, Hungary, Tukey…)?
> Just like the head of government in every single non-presidential country in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Austria etc... (the only excpetion is France). Anyway be any objective metric this is more democratic than the EU government.
Not sure if those are more democratic or not. Problem may be that those head of states usually wield less power than Commission.
AFAIR this year was a push to give Parliament more power but was met with butthurt from nation states...
> I agree. But it's an anachronistic and a powerless institution. Basically a retirement program for retired influential politicians...
AFAIR HoL can be quite influential and can block certain laws. And it's not abolished because it's unelecetd, so they can have more scrutiny over certain laws without fearing the election... Either way - it's "wobbly wobbly" and complicated :D
I'm not from the UK, I'm from South America. It doesn't matter though, both the UK and the EU will crumble apart so fast that I'm already expecting the hordes of expats trying to find refuge here.
Which is funny, because SA lives in a perpetual economic and social crisis, but even still, even a poor and somewhat corrupted country like Bolivia or Paraguay is a better prospect than living in a dystopian communist hellhole.
Never said you were. Only that you sound like a Brit...
> I'm from South America.
Greetings from Chile, the lovely state of estallido social de 2019 :P
> It doesn't matter though, both the UK and the EU will crumble apart so fast that
Lol, we've been hearing this as well for the past 20-30 years, mostly from the UK press and Leave campaign :D
> I'm already expecting the hordes of expats trying to find refuge here.
>
> Which is funny, because SA lives in a perpetual economic and social crisis, but even still, even a poor and somewhat corrupted country like Bolivia or Paraguay is a better prospect than living in a dystopian communist hellhole.
Arm, hasn't "the red wave" just swept the LatAm? Chile? Venezuela? Colombia? Brasil?
Besides you seem to have USA-based definition of "communism", which is even funnier :D
Haha you're right, but as I always say, Latam, despite becoming red all over, is too corrupt/poor/unstable/inept to pull anything off.
There are talks of a single currency ("Sur") which will never happen because Brasil doesn't want to hold Argentina's bags, because there's always been a grudge among many of these countries.
Furthermore, there's a philosophy here: many rules, barely any enforcement (because of reasons stated above).
Ultimately I believe that the EU does have the capacity to do what they say. That's whats scary. Mercosur, not so much.
As an european who also had the "pleasure" of living through communism, the EU is becoming super communist and socialist with a ferocity that even the soviets lacked.
I'm also from an ex-Communist country and I don't agree.
If anything I would argue that Communist/early post-Communist generations in these countries are tainted by a ferocious anti-Socialist streak, which is kind of natural (people reach for the other extreme due to all the Communist abuse).
In my country, Romania, this leads to private development (real estate, businesses, etc) that completely ignores the public domain. Only in the past 5-7 years have people started to wizen-up that the Libertarian paradise is actually hell.
Developed countries in Europe are a lot more mellow regarding capitalism and socialism.
Random example from a supposed hyber-bastion of capitalism, Switzerland. A friend of mine working for Google found an awesome apartment close to work, super cheap. He had to provide a salary slip and the owner - either on his own or due to legislation - basically said: you make too much for this, let people with lower incomes get it, you get an apartment fitting your salary.
That blew my little post-Communist mind. The action practically screamed Communism to me.
You can call it a sort of awakening. You can't build everything on your own. We reach the stars by working together.
Having worked at just-below-FAANG companies with a surely above average oversight on how compensation strategy works, let me summarize my experience:
We, as a company already know how much our competitors pay for a given role as everyone in the industry is buying and selling statistical data on their compensation structure through 3rd party agencies.
Therefore, we can and do intentionally target, which salary band our positions should fall to in the broader market.
You have absolutely no way to negotiate your base salary above the band which was already known when we created the position.
There could still be substantial differences, as even mid level roles have 30%+ difference in band limits.
You can however, have the position to be upgraded or downgraded if certain circumstances met, but that's a new position with new salary ranges.
These regulations likely increase employee leverage, but to which extent, hard to tell. You should care about your total compensation anyway and neither cash bonus, nor equity is covered in the disclosure, although especially for senior positions, those are very substantial part of your compensation.
I've had folks hard quit at previous companies as soon as they find out how big a difference between their pay and new hires. We are talking about £20k+.
This would be extremely useful during annual reviews and other events during your tenure at an organisation not just at hiring time.
> You have absolutely no way to negotiate your base salary above the band which was already known when we created the position
I don't actually want to negotiate the base salary, but I want to know before hand if all the time invested in interviews and the risk taken when switching jobs is worth it for me.
> You should care about your total compensation anyway and neither cash bonus, nor equity is covered in the disclosure, although especially for senior positions, those are very substantial part of your compensation.
No, because equity and all the other benefits besides the base salary are most of the time at the company's whim - I might or not receive them and I'll have only the freedom to choose between options offered by the company, not real freedom.
> You should care about your total compensation anyway and neither cash bonus, nor equity is covered in the disclosure, although especially for senior positions, those are very substantial part of your compensation.
Even if you do get a bonus or equity as part of your TC, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get anything for it. I've had options several times that ended up worthless as well as bonuses that were never paid or partially paid due to nebulous company-wide performance metrics.
Unless you're working for a very well established tech company, ideally public, I'd give those parts of your TC a discount to what's written in your contract.
> You should care about your total compensation anyway and neither cash bonus, nor equity is covered in the disclosure, although especially for senior positions, those are very substantial part of your compensation.
Most people outside of the tech-sector will never see any bonus, equity, etc. besides their normal salary.
> Most people outside of the tech-sector will never see any bonus, equity, etc. besides their normal salary.
From my POV, even in tech sector a lot of people are overestimating equity values. With a median tenure in FAANG likely below two years, base salary becomes much more important than people think about it.
There is an interesting side effect here.
Salaries throughout EU vary a lot. This will give people chance to better understand the salary differences between countries.
I doubt it. It'll be apples and oranges. Can't even compare salaries between companies in many countries because a salary isn't expressed as a single amount. It's a combination of some gross periodic amount, a random collection of benefits which differs from employer to employer, and even "the same" benefits can have radically different values (e.g. health insurance from provider A instead of provider B).
There's no way for candidates to derive the real value from such a complex offer, let alone compare it to other offers. I imagine employers would like to keep it that way.
When comparing across countries, you'll also have to factor in how things are taxed in said countries and what you get in return for those taxes.
In Germany, private health insurance is the norm above a certain salary level (it's not actually mandatory but when you read about it online, makes it seem so). There is a hybrid private-public insurance option below that level.
It's common for employers to subsidise the private insurance at least.
And no, it's not messed up like in the US, although it's a large expense by European standards/cheap by US standards (the insurance companies raise the rates every year, and are protected by legislation in doing so, a bit like a utility company).
Small correction: because contributions to the public health insurance fund are capped at a certain salary level (just shy of 60.000€/year), it would actually be pretty stupid to opt out of the public model just because you earn a lot. Private insurance can be attractive for people in Germany because i.e.
- their are no eligible for public insurance (only impacts a very small number of people, who are in many cases "independently wealthy", i.e. are not actually working)
- have very specific employment structures (most public school teachers benefit from having a private insurance due to certain government benefits paid to them)
- require or want certain benefits not offered by public insurance
- think that because of their special circumstance, private insurance will work out cheaper for them long-term (usually when you have the financial capacity to enter the private system at a very young and healthy age)
In France you get 'top up' insurance called a mutuelle (the state pays the first 70% - 80% of most healthcare costs - chronic conditions are paied 100% by the state). A basic mutuelle is obligatory at all jobs, but many will provide a decent one (that includes glasses, advanced dental work, hearing aids etc) as a benefit.
The Nordic countries might look similar to each other from the outside but in fact they often differ substantially.
In Norway (about 9% of the population [1]) at least it appears to be similar to the UK (about 13% or respondents to a survey[2])
So I'm not sure if that counts as very common and in Norway it is largely a perk offered by companies as part of the salary package rather than something that individuals choose for themselves.
On the other hand Denmark has about twice as many people with private health insurance [1] as Norway and about the same population.
In the Netherlands private health insurance is obligatory but not tied to an employer, however employers can negotiate better group policy deals or compensate somehow. My last employer for example paid a bit extra for me to chose my own (was a salary line item) and my current actually pays for one directly. The basic insurance is all the same regardless of provider, but they vary on secondary benefits.
For me at least, this wouldn’t really be a deciding factor among competing job offers.
In France you usually get a mutuelle through your company, helping to pay the extra-costs for things not reimbursed or not fully (fancy glasses, psychologist, this kind of things)
Some companies present it as a benefit, typically if using Alan
Not really. I lived in three different european countries (France, Germany and Poland) and the switch to private was never worth the price : way more expensive for a barely better service. With public healthcare, you have the power of the numbers. Way more people are on the public side, which drives the prices down. If people are not willing to pay an astronomical price for their health, then health companies follow as long as they make decent profit.
Government employees in Spain have an option to use MUFACE which gives them access to private health centers. Some companies will offer private health insurance as a benefit. Most residents of Spain should have access to the public health system, exact details depend on each autonomous region.
Public health tends to have better resources, but longer wait times. Private health has shorter wait times, though these would definitely increase if more people started using it.
Just to clarify, health insurance is a benefit-in-kind in the UK which means you legally pay tax on it at your marginal tax rate. If you earn over about £50k you have to pay 40% of the value of the health insurance etc.
Literally every EU country has health insurance as a benefit. This is on top of the default healthcare provided by the country in question. Depending on the insurance, it can get you things such as private hospital rooms, dental plans, better eyecare, payment plans, or even extra income guarantees if you're unable to work.
> Literally every EU country has health insurance as a benefit
Well while private insurance is obviously available everywhere in some/many(?) countries employers only provide it for a very small proportion of workers.
While that's technically true also in EU, the salaries are quite directly comparable, because these benefits are a much smaller portion of total compensation than in USA, as the difference between e.g. no employer-provided health insurance and very good extra health insurance is simply not that much money in EU, and also because similar job roles offer a roughly similar level of benefits.
Like, if I'm comparing two offers, the difference in money value of the benefits provided by the best offer and the worst offer (let's assume that apart from some fancy words they're really providing the bare minimum required by EU law) is going to be at most something like 10% of the compensation - but the difference in offered salary may easily be much, much more than that.
Sure, things like performance-determined pay/bonuses may be a big part of the total compensation in some areas (e.g. sales) but not as much as in USA, and benefits even less so; in EU market generally the contracted amount is not that far from the total compensation.
Realistically the gross salary has very little bearing in the net salary between EU countries. Taxation, social contributions and health care deductions at source are vastly different.
I'm all for salary transparency, but I also miss the days when every tech company would have a single "Software Engineer" job posting on their board, and if you liked their vibe you'd apply for it. If they liked you in return, you were in. Everything else (your job title, seniority, salary, stock, what team and product you were actually going to work on, whether they had open headcount or not) were all just minor details that could be figured out later. And this wasn't just some tiny startup thing – companies like Google and Facebook were proud of this hiring process.
All of the laws and expectations around hiring today have made this model impossible to maintain. What exactly does this position entail? How much will the candidate get paid? What team is it for? How many open positions does the company have in total right now? What is the average salary for all of them? You have to answer all of this and more before you can even think of hiring someone new. The old response of "we just hire as many smart people as we can find and pay them what we think they are worth" doesn't cut it anymore.
That model works for people with super high mobility: if you can afford to take a job, put efforts I to it for a few months, see if it pans out, and get out depending on how it goes, it's a good model.
If you have a family and a mortgage and need a pretty good idea of what they're offering because you can't afford to take stab a three or four jobs randomly and leave them if it doesn't work out.
Basically I see your model as perfect for newly graduates and freelancers, and pretty tough for everyone else.
In a way, these kind of openings still exist, they're basically consulting roles or internships.
The unfortunate reality is that it's really difficult for the employees themselves to make sure that everyone is being paid equitably in a situation like that. At least with (reasonably sized) salary ranges, people will have a general feel of where they are - and then it's also easier to do other analysis, e.g. "does the company, for some reason, only ever promote men?"
The whole women perspective is ridicolous. I subscribe to the pov that there is no pay gap between sexes sprouting from hateful discrimination.
But this will be great for Italy because a huge problem of our labor market is that salary is considered something dirty. This law may create a better culture. I hope so.
> But this will be great for Italy because a huge problem of our labor market is that salary is considered something dirty
Same for Cyprus and Poland.
I am very open about my salary on purpose, and i keep telling my friends to talk about theirs with their co workers at least so that they don’t get the short end of the stick.
The pay gap exists because women tends to negociate less. And in male-dominated fields (fields that on average, pay more), they tend to be less outspoken, thus less visible, and as every dev here know, at least 50% of all promotions are based on visibility/performative work and not real skills.
This law won't change anything for the wage gap (which is smaller and smaller are companies tends to promote less internally and hire external management).
> because women tends to negociate less
And unfortunately, not only that, there are some findings that when they do attempt to negotiate, they are perceived badly quicker than men.
On the contrary, a law like this is clearly a benefit for all people who tend to negotiate less - that reduces the information asymmetry and the role of "haggling"; so I would definitely expect this to reduce the wage gap between the people who currently get market-rate salary because they do hard negotiation and those who currently do not.
> But this will be great for Italy because a huge problem of our labor market is that salary is considered something dirty
Truly. Employees being termed "dependents" of the company is a big tell on Italy's work culture. I can also vouch for the toxicity of the Brazilian labor market. Every middling manager carries on like a petty feudal lord...
> Employees being termed "dependents" of the company is a big tell on Italy's work culture
In german there's a funny situation as well: The employer is called the "work provider", while the employee is the "work receiver". Thank you, company, for providing me with work.
Literally it's actually "work giver" and "work taker", I just found it less idiomatic in english (it doesn't quite transport the connotation of providing the work being something noble).
From the article, it isn't clear whether a pay range of minimum wage to 1 million euros would be in compliance with this new rule. This is an actual tactic that many US employers have used to follow the letter but not the spirit of salary transparency laws.
It's not clear, because the details don't exist yet. There is only a directive that requires the member states change their national laws within a few years. There will likely be at least 27 different interpretations of the directive, which will all evolve in response to the specific circumstances in each member state.
Many countries also have informal mechanisms of enforcement. For example, businesses may have learned that it's often better to comply with the spirit of the law voluntarily. That way the final regulations will be more flexible and reasonable than by forcing the government to spell out the details explicitly. Or there may be strong unions, in which case many issues may be effectively decided in discussions between unions, businesses, and the government. If businesses burn too much political capital on a minor issue, they will have less influence on bigger issues.
I have also seen them spelled out in massive walls of text. Petty as fuck.
Carefully scan the disclaimer section at the bottom for:
> Colorado, New York City, California, and Washington Candidates Only. The salary range for this position is seventy thousand dollars to one hundred forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars.
EU is perfectly ok with issuing fines to smartasses who abide by the word of law but violate the spirit of it. Like the whole iPhone USB debacle and how Apple got warned again and again when they announced they were trying to go around the requirements in "smart" ways
You don't even need to be that hostile for this to be... difficult. I've seen salary bands for a specific role + level to be pretty wide - like 90k-150k. And then there's where you might be willing to accept mid level to principal dev - should you just publish a range where the upper is multiples of the lower? What's that really helping?
I'm all for more transparency, especially when it helps to equal out the power inbalance in employer to employee, but these attempts seem rough.
> They will not have to publish the precise salary due to fears that this could be commercially sensitive.
If you're going to preserve the commercially sensitive nature of pay at a given firm, the tolerances that you must accept will be several multiples higher than the cited 13 percent difference in pay between men and women.
Supermarkets should not have to disclose their COST prices, because these are non public negotiations, not a public offer to buy/sell. That so many people wilfully choose not to understand this distinction frustrates useful conversation.
No the equivalent scenario would be a grocery store (or online store, hotel, airline etc.) not publicly advertising any prices at all. If you want something you have to take it to the cashier, and they will give you a personalized price based on whatever factors they choose.
Should that be legal? Maybe, maybe not. But there are plenty of laws out there that mandate that companies make pricing more transparent, because that is good for the end consumer.
Is the analog for hiring a software engineer closer to buying:
1. An economy round trip on Airline A, with max 2 checked bags, leaving from JFK at datetime D1 to SFO, returning at D2.
2. A round trip on a plane starting in New York in month M, all other details unknown.
Employees are different; how well matched they are for a given job is not knowable in advance of a first conversation, so for jobs were a range of value creation is possible, the range of possible agreement is wide and is certainly not a point.
I have two SWEs where one creates twice as much value as the other. If you hired both of them into your firm, which one created 2x as much value could easily switch.
I agree it's orthogonal to the original discussion, but I am interested in the hyptothesis that we'd be all better off if e.g. we could see the cost prices at supermarkets (and perhaps all their other relevant costs). E.g. is society better or worse off with less secrecy?
There's lot of poorly paying (and very mediocre) companies who must be a tad worried about that development. I've been very under-compensated by a few employers, but had to put up with all sorts of smoke and mirrors in their review meetings about them "matching market rates" for compensation.
This will cut through that nonsense, and get their compensation "spin" to fact some proveable hard facts.
It would make more sense to publish lowest paid, highest paid, median and average salaries across the entire structure of the company. Plus data about other compensation in the form of bonuses, stock options, etc.
Or make all compensation public information for everyone. I believe in Norway you can see anyone's tax return, which isn't exactly the same because it aggregates all earnings from all sources into one, but it doesn't appear, as far as I can tell, to have had many ill effects.
There are already sites that require salary disclosure on submitting an offer: nofluffjobs.com. It doesn't change anything. Companies are posting inflated salary ranges there, higher than normal, higher than anyone will ever get after the real interview, just to make their offer more interesting to look at.
If there's a gap between what men and women get (and I really doubt this gap exists), then this doesn't change absolutely anything; a position will have a salary RANGE bound to it, and the employer will be freely able to give lower salary to women than to men anyway.
What do we think the second order effects of this will be? I think the main effect won't be to equalize mens and womens salaries (though it may help) but it will probably lead to more brain drain and concentration of talent in higher-paying organizations and richer geographies.
My past company had a playbook of simply offering 20-30% above whatever the going rate was in EU countries for remote work. For any offers we put out we had something like a 95% close rate (the big exception was France)
It’s in the right direction, but it will be implemented in 3 years and for companies with more than 100 employees, without specifying limits or edge cases.
Self-publishing salary ranges without intense oversight will likely not properly work unless the following are fully utilized & followed to the letter:
- The company in question can only use salaries of existing roles, with string Levenshtein distance of 3 [0]. If it's a new role within the company, they're mandated to use the government's average salary.
- The company can only use the term "Expect {low_bound} - {high_bound}", where
(low_bound := min(current_salaries_for_role || government_average) * 0.85), and
Any given leeway would inevitably be used by corporations to misadvertise their job postings, so it must be paramount that the possible space & terms available be made extremely strict in anticipation of such abuse.
Yes god forbid employers are allowed to - checks notes - set wages. The Ministry of Truth knows better than they do what they can afford to pay for a given role!
I applaud efforts to make companies publish salary ranges. It corrects an information disparity that leads to inefficiency. But what you propose (basically government-set salaries) is economically illiterate and would do nothing but harm employers and employees alike (not to mention the broader economy).
> Yes god forbid employers are allowed to - checks notes - set wages. The Ministry of Truth knows better than they do what they can afford to pay for a given role!
> I applaud efforts to make companies publish salary ranges. It corrects an information disparity that leads to inefficiency. But what you propose (basically government-set salaries) is economically illiterate and would do nothing but harm employers and employees alike (not to mention the broader economy).
As noted in the provided definitions, the company can set their own ranges if they have existing staff that are currently performing the defined role. As noted here:
> (low_bound := min(current_salaries_for_role || government_average) * 0.85), and
This is still better than nothing. If a company thinks a staff software engineer is worth a maximum of $95k, for example, I would be able to spot this before wasting anyone’s time with an application and potentially an interview.
> So, if a company is hiring for a new role they they are not yet paying anyone for, they cannot offer more than 1.15x the government average?
They can: The government average is just the starting point for salary negotiations for the worker - It gives them a leg up on what the industry pays on average.
There's also a hidden information advantage for the employee: If the company in question advertises that average, and the say that it's a new position, then the worst that they can offer is around the industry average, with higher salaries up for grabs. The "Expect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as it says "There's probably an 80% chance you're getting a salary within this range.", with new positions advertising as "This is a new position, so there's a higher chance of getting a good salary here."
Not all permutations of meta-analyses can be avoided, but the scope of what's allowed can be trimmed down to the point where it's possible for an applicant to guess what the company wants in terms of salary expectations.
If you advertise a position with a tight, high salary band, then you are going to get the best candidates (all other things being equal).
The proposed law gives organisations that offer good pay and conditions a stronger competitive advantage in the labour market than they currently have.
This law basically enshrines what has being going on at the top SV companies for years: make it known that you offer high wages, and then tolerate the sharing of wage information by employees (protected under Californian law).
That's so terrible. The "overall market" range for "roles in this area" are "typically" anywhere within an entire order of magnitude. I haven't seen anything vaguer in my entire time on this earth.
How so? My understanding is that Netflix offers a wide range of compensation based on individual performance. If they didn't disclose this, they'd be violating the law.
I think it's more like they don't know how much you're worth, so they'll give you a chance to prove yourself. Depending on how you do, you may end up at the high end, the low end, or anywhere in between.
There's only so much signal you can get from an interview or from reading someone's resume, and that signal is often obscured by the interviewers' biases. It seems to me that this way of doing things can lead to more equitable outcomes (which is the stated goal of publishing salary ranges) as it lets you evaluate and compensate people based on performance in their actual job.
It's not clear they're looking for someone specific. When I applied for Google, I was first accepted, got the job, and then had to find an internal team that wanted me. I even decided which country I want to work in after I got accepted.
It's mentioned in the article that a salary range should be published. So a minimum and maximum amount should be listed in a job posting to avoid this kind of nonsense.
As noted elsewhere in the discussion, the EU tends to come down heavily on companies who violate the spirit of the law like that. Not to say it won't happen, but high profile examples will be clamped down on like Apple with the USB-C trickery.
Still in the real world it is not uncommon for there to be a 50% spread between employees in the same role. I've worked for companies where the official policy is a 50% higher pay for top performers vs worst performers and i'm sure there are companies with a even bigger spread.
In case of small companies it's not unusual to have just a "software engineer" job posting, and consider everyone from mid to principal engineer (with salary dependent on their skill level). I wonder how job postings would work in this case.
The two reasons I disagree with publishing salaries and "ranges" are that a) the implicit collusion creates mean reversion that disadvantages talent, who can afford to leave and go where they are valued and b) the values behind it presume that a job is something paternalistic granted by a manager in return for supplication, and not due consideration for value offered. Together these create a race to the bottom in office culture, where people optimize to compete not on competence and value, but on debasing themselves and attrition with others.
Sure, if you are doing government work, (which is basically a sinecure anyway) this is fine, but any country that implements it will only ever be a kind of outsourced piecework shop, like a maquilladora or "friendshoring," where the real talent who manages the work and handles the money will be in places with rational incentives.
How does that work? Say 10 companies are competing for the best talent. All of them offer the public going rate, except 1 which offers 10% more. Guess where the talent is going? To the one that offers 10% more, and now the other 9 companies are incentivized to pay more if they want to attract top talent.
I don't understand how secretive salaries benefit anyone other than parties trying to get away with paying lower.
> I don't understand how secretive salaries benefit anyone other than parties trying to get away with paying lower.
Because they don't.
This Bill will be a major win for all employees and will force employers to increase benefits whether financial or otherwise.
The day this Bill is enacted and companies publish ranges, you as an existing employee will know where you sit on that range and whether you're undervalued. This Bill will be the single biggest revolution in workers welfare and living standards since legally required paid holiday or maternity leave. It's about time.
What is fair about anchoring candidates to an average wage set by otherwise competitive buyers who are now using 'transparency' to signal to each other, let alone +10%? That's collusion against employees.
If I can get the same talent for less, I will buy that. However, if that talent costs less because their government has imposed market conditions that remove the persons opportunity to earn closer to what I would pay them based on the value of their work to me, then I am exploiting an arbitrage of talent in that closed and manipulated market vs. adjacent ones.
It must be nice to read this thread and be confident that not only will people in tech still work for less than they are worth, but they will even assert the obligation of others to do so.
Facebook employees have an average revenue per employee well above a million dollars, is a web developer working for them only worth the $10/h that other employers are have agreed to offer them because they are from a poor area that enforces these policies, or does this developer earn an equity portion of the millions in value they are creating? Even if it were $100/h, that only seems attractive because most people don't understand contracts, negotiations, numbers, or economics.
If you want to know who wins, it's political parties who sell out their populations to global companies by using manipulations like this to suppress the value of their local labour market, and when they attract more foreign companies exploiting this, they get the revenue to spend on getting re-elected by the smaller coalitions they are paying off with the proceeds. Maybe this would have been less controversial if they had marketed it as, "Your bargaining power will be sold out to global corporations and you will be happy."
>a) the implicit collusion creates mean reversion that disadvantages talent, who can afford to leave and go where they are valued
Doesn't this logic rest on the assumption that companies that pay better than average are doing it accidentally? Facebook has a reputation for paying better than many other tech companies for example. If I know that, Facebook surely knows that. Why would they stop doing that just because other companies are publishing their pay ranges?
It goes a bit beyond that in reality. Companies buy salary data for certain industry segments, then have a goal to pay within a percentile range. A company may say aim to pay on the 50-60th percentile of insurance companies for example.
It’s a kind of laundering also. Company absolves responsibility to consultant research data on market, chooses percentile, and forces it onto managers and workers as a due process regardless of precision and accuracy. Can’t argue with a correct looking decision making process just because you don’t like the result. The data however is sus if you’ve seen it
How does that work? If the value offered isn't enough, then I'm not working somewhere. Now I can skip the part where I still have to do the interview first before they tell me that 'based on experience' maxes out at 80k.
So if a company wants to attract top talent they can just publicy offer +10% and they get the best people. Seems to me it could become a race to the top, heavily benefiting employees.
A bunch of competitive companies can (don't say collude) mirror each other's salary ranges and maybe they're OK with not using higher salaries to hire away talent which may or not actually be worth more money anyway. Of course, this happens to some degree anyway as companies research this sort of information.
In game theory territory, no company's best response is to stick to publicly posted salary ranges.
Suppose that you are among the top performing workers in the labor market. If you have two job offers, you could get those two companies to match each other's offers.
Each of the two company's best response is to match the other's offer to the point at which their offer is exactly equal to the value that you would bring to them. At that point, your net value to them is exactly zero, and beyond that, your net value is negative. So the highest salary that you can get is the value that you would produce for the company where you would be the second most productive.
If either company tries to stick to the publicly posted salary ranges even though you would bring them more value than that, then they are forgoing profits and not following their equilibrium best response.
It did. That was a cooperative equilibrium in which they could share their gains from offering you a lower salary. In a non-cooperative equilibrium, they cannot share their gains so their best response is to match competing offers.
Yeah, and it was blown up when Facebook refused to play ball. They wanted to hire more engineers. They paid more and didn’t restrict where they recruited.
Hmm, this could only work if the entire industry is either stagnant or heavily regulated. You need only a few companies that don't go along to completely disrupt that plan.
Companies already do research into what other companies pay. As another poster noted, if there is a non-competitive equilibrium (mostly among a certain class of competitors), there can be a tacit agreement that we just do whatever Google does. No formal agreements needed. Of course, companies already have better information than public websites do so they can mostly already do this without narrow salary bands being published.
Salary is just one part of total compensation. It's also pretty normal, at least in my experience, to know what your competitor is paying. In my field we are often poaching talent from each other, so closing a deal often comes down to not only a bump in salary but to better benefits and work conditions, say more PTO, higher bonuses and/or less amount of travel.
I don’t understand the logic around transparency not giving an advantage to talent, could you expand? Certainly seems like there are counter examples in many places where compensation is public
I'm not sure if I completely follow the parent, but I would also be concerned since it means it'll be far more difficult to negotiate above the range. In the obfuscated market, if you are good at proving your value and negotiating, then the usual range people have in mind for that type of job becomes less relevant. But if the range is explicit and paying one person above that range will disadvantage the company (since they now have to increase the range and give more leverage to everyone else), they will be less flexible.
It should be good for the middle and low ends, but I expect pretty bad for the high-end of any given job type.
> It should be good for the middle and low ends, but I expect pretty bad for the high-end of any given job type.
The high end are doing good by definition. The exceptionally talented are winning anyways, if they win a little less outlyingly they will still be winning. It's not as if this would be a project of "pay everybody exactly the same".
Who might in theory consider this regulation a problem is companies who like to hire a mix of bottom of the barrel cheap and gold plated rockstars, but in reality those would already have separate roles for these opposites and are therefore not affected are all.
The "open" system was already a semi-defacto practice for many job boards, where you'd have the field present at input when creating the offer (I don't think it was mandatory, but many candidates won't look at an offer without a number)
That said, I personally negociated and had offers negociated for above the offering.
Think of it more as anchoring than hard bounds: a company details what they expect and how much they'd pay for it, and if on interview you don't fit the bill they could offer you a different job at a lower price instead of just refusing you, or you can ask a higher price for bringing a lot more skills than what they are requiring.
> the values behind it presume that a job is something paternalistic granted by a manager in return for supplication, and not due consideration for value
does open tender create similar outcones- should tenders for construction have price hidden?
Should other markets hide prices, for example healthcare services?
it appears that an argument agaist knowing salary or price upfront is an argument against open markets in general
True, incredible rockstars that are so good can have custom roles created for them that pay a different salary; or, you can have a special, incredible-pay band with a broader range. Say:
I think this is only true of the lower end where poorly performing companies are looking to hire poorly performing (or junior) devs, where they care more about bums in seats than actual productivity per person.
It's the opposite of a race to the bottom. Currently the market is asymetric, the employers hold the cards as they know the going rate, employees do not. And they can artificially push down prices over the longer term.
Disclosure is also a benefit for start ups and small businesses s they can actually see the cost and plan accordingly (more certainty, potentially allowing more business), they don't have the resources to interview all day or hire big HR firms who know market rates.
I guess I like seeing the range as an applicant, but I do strongly agree with you in terms of paying people based off what they can command as individuals.
Not entirely the same situation, but when companies have full salary transparency (i.e. the salaries of all are known to all), then there will be fewer outliers. So, there are fewer "underpaid" people, but also fewer "overpaid" people. I put those terms in scare-quotes because it's unknown whether or not those differences were deserved or not.
I did have a source for that, but it was in a podcast and I can't remember which. (1) The assumed mechanism made sense to me though: companies/managers would need to be able to justify salaries to anyone, which is much harder for outliers than for an average salary. It could be detrimental to company peace to hire somebody who earns 50% over everybody else, even if they are worth it.
It changed my mind a bit on whether I like transparency. I used to like it unconditionally, but now I'm not so sure. At least in an opaque world, there's skills you can learn to become an outlier. With transparency the average could hinder your salary growth even more than it already does.
(1) One of the weird things about listening to podcasts is I sometimes remember my physical location when hearing something better than the actual source of the information. That's also what happened here. I remember the traffic light I was stopped at, but not the podcast.
> I did have a source for that, but it was in a podcast and I can't remember which.
Was it maybe on the What is Wrong with Hiring podcast?[1]
> At least in an opaque world, there's skills you can learn to become an outlier. With transparency the average could hinder your salary growth even more than it already does.
We can also reasonably expect an opposite effect. Salary secrecy could push down the pay of even high-productivity workers.
Searching for a new job is costly, both in terms of time and stress. If you don't know how little you earn, you are less likely to be dissatisfied with your current job and pay the search cost. This means that you are less likely to collect outside options that your employer would need to match by giving you a raise.
> Was it maybe on the What is Wrong with Hiring podcast?
No, I haven't heard of that one before now. I looked again, but can't find the one I listened to.
Side note: pay transparency is an economy podcaster's wet dream. There are soooo many podcasts about it.
> If you don't know how little you earn, you are less likely to be dissatisfied with your current job and pay the search cost.
The thing is: that is something you can influence. It's not a popular opinion, but employees do have some amount of agency when it comes to compensation.
You can learn about salaries of others, even when it's not fully public.
You can study negotiation.
You can hop jobs every few years to get a raise.
None of that is a job skill (though being high-agency is...), but they are things you can do to get more than average.
Just getting the average OTOH, does not give you any agency in your salary. It's just been decided by circumstances outside your control. (1) And it gives an employer the greatest excuse ever to not go higher: "this is what everybody else is making."
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The downside of explaining "the other side" is that it makes you look like you're against something. I'm not. I'm just not in favour without reservations. But so much is already written in favour of pay transparency, that it adds nothing to regurgitate those arguments. Any economy podcaster will have several podcasts about the pros.
(1) I've been part of collective bargaining, and this complete disempowerment annoyed me. Instead of the employer and me hashing something out, it's become the union and the employer deciding for me. It felt like mommy and daddy discussing my allowance.
> where people optimize to compete not on competence and value, but on debasing themselves and attrition with others.
That's all well and good - but then by that definition companies actively hire folks who are unable to do the actual work, and impact the company's bottom line, just because they're cheap. Companies that do that go out of business.
a battle i started 5 years ago when i launched https://golang.cafe hopefully it will become the norm and not the exception, salary ranges should be public
Every salary range I've ever seen has been negotiable unless it's for government or tertiary roles. I don't understand how this helps except for quickly assessing who the top players are in the market, which you'll already know.
In Austria companies are already mandated to post salaries for job descriptions. Some companies are very vague about it (here is the mininum, based on your experience you can negotiate,...), some are very clear about it.
For me it helped filtering out companies and saved me a lot of time.
Lord knows companies have probably 80% of the leverage in the job market.
Tech people are doomed not by AIs, but by lack of solidarity, raw greed and lack of long term vision.