Before FB came into picture, Google, Apple and other big techs colluded to artificially keep the pay low [1]. Every dev with a massive TC needs to thank FB everyday for refusing to become part of the cabal.
It's amusing that one of the concerns is Google employees leaving or potential candidates not applying at all because they'd rather "get rich by having a popular fb app." Just what happened to Facebook as a platform, were they just completely superseded by smartphone apps?
Incidentally, the decline of their platform is one of the reasons why I believe it is unlikely there will ever be a serious Meta third party App Store competitor on iOS- Facebook isn't very good at managing a developer community.
I think devs were more cognizant of the platform risk on FB, and the developer experience was absolutely pants. I dreaded every moment working within their platform, maybe it's different now. As well FB apps were necessarily less interesting, because they were so tightly integrated into FB it limited the potential experiences.
It just wasn't worth it when a developer could reach people on FB with ads instead, and point to their mobile app, where you can attempt to fully capture the value of the customer rather than just rent them from FB. Forgive me for the business speak there, I'm no longer in that space thank the stars.
They decided to dodge the spammy app problem by limiting the capabilities of apps until all kinds of apps, spammy or not, stopped being profitable, and then people stopped writing them. Seems to have worked for them.
Decline happened when FB started suppressing messages from apps on the feed and started prioritising news links and later images and videos. It also coincided with decline of flash, so a lot of apps like Farmville were re-built in HTML5 or as a native mobile app. These apps then used FB as an auth mechanism. The changes in FB APIs didn't help either.
Twitter envy was the cause of a lot of bad business decisions for Facebook.
They were really jealous of twitter being the source of “trending” topics on news broadcasts and wanted that role, so they boosted links and news articles rather than updates from friends, they even experimented with making all posts public.
It’s like they don’t know that their strength was that you could connect with people you know and care about, but they wanted to be another “shouting in the wind” platform.
If I know these guys I imagine a very clever statistician ran the numbers on this call.
My guess is that Facebook realized that being a "shouting in the wind" platform is an excellent way to retain what I'd call the "low engagement" tail end of the distribution.
i.e. the explicit goal was to provide content for those without all that many actual friends on Facebook.
I look at Facebook now and it seems like the connect with friends part of it is very much secondary to just driving groups, marketplace, and all the parasocial paraphernalia of the modern internet.
Which is of course a very profitable thing to do if you're in the eyeball minutes business. All those features are after all, there for users 24/7. And don't rely on the vagaries of end user content creation.
So true! A lot of folks in India shifted to FB from Orkut because it was private by deault compared to other networks at the time. They destroyed that base assumption in two years.
When I joined in 2011 the core infrastructure staff was so heavily ex-Google that the build files were valid Blaze.
There are a lot of factors that went into FB’s meteoric rise in the 2006-2014 range, but I think more than anything it was Sheryl telling the wage cartel that they could get fucked.
High-end Google hackers could walk across the street and TCO 2-5x more with negligible increase in risk.
I'm dating myself here, but back in the day, there used to be a weekly(?) strategy review that Google execs did, called a "GPS review" - I think it stood for Google Product Strategy review.
My guess is that a few 'misalignments' (exec speak for a review that went poorly) might make some key employees unhappy (e.g. their projects might get canceled) and that they might leave.
I think this should not be over-read. I believe that that's a form of sarcasm / ironical phrase, meaning _few minor incidents plus some planned retirements_ .
As of he's implying that the employees tend to get overworried/annoyed easily for any minor incident.
Sorry I don't speak English natively (and to make things worst, I'm Italian!!) and I'm not sure I was able to express my thoughts in a comprehensible way! Please feel free to rephrase if you can do it better then me! Thanks! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would posit rainy weather means some lower performance quarters in terms of stock price or performance in some way and GPS misalignments are strategic missteps with the overall direction of the company.
And in 2009 they gave everyone a phone (Nexus One or G1, I don't remember) for Christmas instead of a $1K cash bonus... and then that one guy complained loudly (on eng.misc?) that he didn't need a phone and didn't want this phone, and the phone would impact his taxes even though he never asked for it, and complained that the phone was a terrible gift and even worse than a gift, and people told him to just donate it to his damn family and he would yell "but I'm still responsible for the taxes on this thing!" even though it was clearly explained that he wasn't. Over ten years later, I'm still shaking my head at how a few extremely toxic people could so effectively poison the culture and good spirits of thousands of employees.
the first time it was a G1, that would have been my first year so I think it was 2008. That wasn't the best phone (although I loved the keyboard). I ported a physics engine to it, and it ran, but the phone got very hot very quickly. The next year was the nexus one, the excitement was palpable. The nexus one was truly sexy at the time, definitely the first android phone that I loved.
As for that Googler- well, there were always a bunch of people there who had some or another circumstance that made them incompatible with the larger Google culture.
> I'm still shaking my head at how a few extremely toxic people could so effectively poison the culture and good spirits of thousands of employees.
But I'm assuming he did great at the whiteboard interview! Being sarcastic but I've always been surprised how some really terrible personalities are hired because they aced the tech quizzes.
Opposite of what I saw in my time there. Interviews focused little if at all on the person’s actual history and experience. Just pre-baked questions. Maybe I was surrounded by idiot interviewers.
Yeah, back in the 2000s or even early 2010s a $1K+ employee holiday bonus would be a "holy shit!" event that would make the news. Doing so today, even after adjusting for inflation, would be met with "yeah, whatever" by everyone, including new grads.
I don't get the phenomenon of piddling bonuses. I worked for Amazon in the 2000s. And we got an employee discount.
10% off anything on the site.
Capped at a maximum of $100 / year.
This is a discount that feels like they're going out of their way to spit in your face. What if you raised my annual pay by... $100? Who would notice or care?
for good or for bad, one of the things amazon does is focus on providing benefits that can apply to ALL employees, i.e. the six figure devs all the way down to the fc employees.
I agree. When I got there, I was stunned that that was the perk instead of "Free Prime membership" (which has about the same cost but just feels better).
There's a simple reason for it. This perk is a 10% discount on Amazon products, which means (1) to get $100, employees will have to spend $1000+, which not everyone will do, and (2) the total cost to Amazon is still less than $100, since a lot of the cost is their own profit margin.
On the other hand, Amazon operates Prime at a loss, since 2-day shipping is ridiculously expensive. It uses it as a way to get and hold on to new customers, but you don't exactly need to do that when the user is already working for Amazon. So offering that as a perk would end up costing the company more than $100/employee.
Amazon would notice because paying their whole workforce $100 extra per year would cost them significant money whereas that sum of all those discounts would work out to a small fraction of that amount.
"Significant" is possibly mis-reading it. They only do significant things if they have existential risk or an FEC reporting obligation. On Amazon's revenue, payrise is only "significant" if its company wide, above CPI. If they can pay box shifters less than 50c rise, they will do it. If they can pay coders 10%, they will do it. They won't pay box loaders and coders 10% unless the unionisation drive makes them.
Seriously? $100 per employee is almost too small to figure. Scale here. Amazon did $150b in quarterly revenue. QUARTERLY. it has 1.3m employees worldwide. $100 per employee is 0.001% of the quarters revenue.
As I recall it was a silly thing where you received the bonus as physical cash (ie paper money) and you could still receive other comp like stock or a monetary bonus to a bank account.
After this Google realised they would need to compete with Facebook on compensation and today employees at either company are paid a lot more than equivalent employees 15 years ago.
But Google at the time had huge revenue and profit compared to Facebook which was just getting started with monetization. Even today Meta/FB is not nearly close to Google looking at the revenue and profit. Google can always pay more if they want to.
Nope, WhatsApp works just on phone number, not an email. It would have given them perpetual anxiety.
So they would have made WhatsApp work only with “Gmail” addresses instead - with Google Login and in a Chrome Desktop app only (of course) - and they’d have then shut it down after few years. Or people might have stopped using it before the shutdown.
> Finally, we (or basically I) have not done a good enough job of high rewards for high performance.
15 years later, this is still a widespread problem everywhere. People don't capture the full value of their labor (which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is allocated), which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the value of their labor.
We've all heard stories about people being extra efficient and getting rewarded with raised expectations and maybe a paltry raise. If people were really incentivized to do their best work, I imagine we'd get a better world.
> which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is allocated
This doesn't just make a sort of sense to me, it makes perfect sense.
People trade their labor at a lower rate for higher stability (less risk). The people who start companies, find capital, and distribute that capital in ways that increase the value of the company have taken on more risk (how significant varies case-by-case and usually is a natural market cap ceiling to the total value the owners can extract ahead of employees).
If the company I work at gives me shares in that company, I want the company to pay less for my labor (and everyone's) if my belief is that collectively all employees output will accelerate my own wealth creation when I sell my shares in the company. The share becomes a transitive store of value I believe my own labor alone will never be able to keep up with, and I want to make sure the value it's accumulating is not diminished because the company is paying out the full capital value of everyone's labor. Then there would be very little incentive for me to take the shares in the first place, and, honestly, very little incentive for anyone to start a company (why take on that risk if there's no payout in excess of just joining another company?).
Feels like many are stuck in this dichotomy between choosing stable rates or venturing out on your own where more middle ground should probably exist. Employee incentives should probably align more
Isn't RSU the middle ground already? You can part of your compensation in salary, part in ownership of the company. If you work and the company does well, you do better.
The % of comp in RSU raises as you get promoted to higher levels, where you (theoretically at least) actually have more impact on the success of the company.
If my contributions increase the value of a $100M company by 10%, there's no way my RSUs' value is going to increase by $10M (unless I own 100% of the company). In a realistic scenario of $100k/yr of RSUs, even this near-impossible mythical single-person contribution of 10% would only net me $10k/yr.
RSUs go a long way, but don't totally align the incentives.
The value proposition is that RSUs goes up more than your 10% contribution, so using MSFT's stock price, $100k at the start of 2021 is worth some $150k by the end of it. Still not $10mm but better than $10k. The change in value is +$70k if you were at TSLA. This only works while the stock is going up though. If you were at FB, you'd be underwater so that $100k of RSUs is now only worth $80k, but at least RSUs mean you can still get $80k out of them if you had to liquidate (unlike options which have a strike price and can even be worth negative dollars, depending on your tax situation).
At a company of, say, 100,000 employees, how much my individual contribution will makes the stock price go up is debatable, but getting more of those RSUs will materially boost my TC, where at upper levels the majority of TC is stock-based.
Even considering the risk-neutral compensation, this is not how much employment ought to be discounted. Especially not in the U.S. where many states have at-will laws.
> People don't capture the full value of their labor
Why would you expect people to capture the full value of their labor?
Imagine you operate a business. You do the math and determine that hiring a new employee will cost you $100K/year, but it will bring in $100K/year of revenue. In other words, the employee would capture the full value that they create (assuming nothing goes wrong).
Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make any business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the company, and most importantly it provide $0 financial value to the company. It's an easy no.
Now if you can hire someone for $100K and their addition will bring in $150K, that's a different story.
You can't expect to capture the full value of your labor as an employee. However, you're also free from capturing the full value of the losses you might create. If you fail to ship your objectives or you accidentally drop the main DB and cost the company $100K, you don't receive a bill for the negative value you created. You get to keep your paychecks.
> which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the value of their labor.
This doesn't make sense at all. People increase the value of their labor all the time because it leads to more and better opportunities and gives more leverage in future negotiations.
You don't have to capture the "full value" of your labor to have an incentive to improve.
There's a theoretical response and a practical response.
In theory, if you had a competitive and fungible marketplace where a specific employee would boost profits by $100k, and you offered her a salary of $80k, someone else would outbid you with $90k, and someone else would outbid them at $95k etc. Even if the "margins" are low, no one is going to pass up on free money.
In practice, the labor marketplace isn't nearly competitive or fungible enough to expect the above. However, there is still a very different problem. Even if the average salary is "fair", people get rewarded a tiny fraction of the value they generate. Imagine if I'm working at Google and I find a way to save Google $10M/year via improved hardware efficiency. Despite the fact that this isn't part of my job description. How much of that $10M would I get in the form of a salary increase or bonus? A pretty darn tiny amount. 1% if I'm lucky. Is it worth it? Probably not. I might as well just do what my manager asks me to do, and spend my extra time learning Haskell and going to happy hours. This is pretty much what GP was alluding to. If companies started giving people a significant fraction of the value they generate, corporate life would change dramatically.
> Imagine if I'm working at Google and I find a way to save Google $10M/year via improved hardware efficiency.
The sole reason while your research generates millions of dollars of year of saving is because it would be applied at Google scale. So your work times google scale = $10M/year.
As stated above, you deserve to be compensated for a part of your work. But pretending that your compensation should also include the "Google scale" factor - which you did not contribute to in any meaningful way - is not right.
If you want your compensation to be based on the outcome of your work on the company as a whole, you need to work for equity and not for salary, and accept the associated risks - which might include getting nothing for a lot of efforts. Of course, your compensation will then also include the work made by others, which you might like or dislike.
If you want to be able to precisely measure your own contribution, exclude any other factors, and capture almost all of it, you probably are better of creating your own solo-founder type of company and stay solo. When 1+1=3, it's hard to precisely pinpoint which "1" generated the extra value.
What a silly argument, decoupling the company's status from the contributions of its high-performing employees as if they're independent events.
Google probably runs at 25% profit margin, so $10M/y savings equate to $40M/y additional revenue. A Google cloud sales rep probably makes at least 5% sales commission, so they'd net at least $2M for equivalent sales (which they would only able to achieve because of Google scale, but if you make that argument with them, good luck keeping them employed). Conversely, a SWE delivering $10M/y savings would probably only see a small bump on their refreshers and bonus.
> The sole reason while your research generates millions of dollars of year of saving is because it would be applied at Google scale. So your work times google scale = $10M/year.
"Google scale" wouldn't exist without the workers that make it possible. Seems to me like they can get more of that value they enable than they currently do.
> But pretending that your compensation should also include the "Google scale" factor - which you did not contribute to in any meaningful way - is not right.
If I can make $1 on my own, and you can make $1 on your own, but together we can make $4, we each deserve $2. I don't deserve $3, even though I turned your lone $1 into $4. But I also don't deserve just $1, because I did contribute to the scale factor. In todays world, it seems like we'd each get $1.
More accurately: If me and me friends lemonade stands makes $1 million on it's own and your lemonade stands makes $1 on it's own. We bring them together and make $1.1 million because we had an amazing product and you are an amazing sales guy (yay!).
How do we divide the extra $100k. Are you pretending that you should get $50k (50 thousands times what you were doing alone) and we should get $50k (1.005 times what we were doing without you) as well ? That does not seem very fair to me at all.
Some of that extra $100k should probably go to the company, but sales is maybe not the best example because salespeople are quite often paid on a base+commission basis and would easily get a fixed percentage of all of their sales for the year. It seems high for sr engineers to make $500k/yr but it should be noted that senior sales people can also make $500k/yr if they're doing well!
Not necessarily. If you add a 3rd person, C, that also can make $1 alone, but $5 with person A, then person A's worth is somewhere between $2 and $3 if my intuition is right (i.e. B would need to agree to uneven split to convince A to work with them). This falls under computational social choice field (coalition formation), and is not a straightforward thing to compute.
> where a specific employee would boost profits by $100k
This isn't a good model.
Boosting your company's profit by 100k doesn't mean they can boost any company's profit by 100k. If they could, they'd capture a lot more of the 100k.
>Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make any business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the company, and most importantly it provide $0 financial value to the company. It's an easy no.
That's what the model predicts, but it's unfortunately not how companies beyond a certain size work in practice. Hiring decisions are not made by the business owner to increase profit, but middle-ranking members of the hierarchy who have their own parallel goals.
Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people.
There is usually no way to quantify how much value each developer is contributing. I mean, if your job for 6 months is to go through your company’s software and update to a new API since an old one is getting deprecated, how much business value did you produce? Yet you did something that needed to be done.
There are people who take on big, flashy projects that generate a lot of measurable value, and there are people who do the boring stuff that needs to be done too. Without one, you don’t get the other.
> Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people.
I think at this point it's unfair if we were to say the specific people are the issue. A big business has a lot of required components in order to keep running, and some of them are not directly revenue generating, but you still need most of them. That's a value of small companies, being so lean you can be hyper-focused and efficient. Bigger companies can perform at scales smaller ones can't, but that comes at the cost of inefficiencies of orchestrating the bigger operation. Just getting all the people aligned to do the things the business needs them to do is a huge and messy cost that smaller companies don't have, but it's required else your conglomerate would fall apart.
Honestly, after working at my previous employer (Blackmagic Design in Port Melbourne, 500+ employees across many products), I just can't believe that.
There was no HR, no management class, no purchasing agents or head of IT, maybe one hour of meetings a month and everything worked ridiculously, buttery smoothly.
We built the products that needed building, everyone pitched in and morale was generally high.
I could name one person who I'd consider had a "bullshit job", and another who's job was semi-bullshit. This is out of maybe 100 people I met across multiple departments.
I don't think we disagree, I think your example fits with what I was saying but I didn't really explain what I meant by required components. It's going to be different for every company too. Like at Blackmagic Design, there is probably a team handling the accounting, and that doesn't directly generate profit by putting products in the hands of consumers but it's a required component to operate with 500+ employees. I really just meant that bigger companies can have more cost center requirements.
I agree that a lot of businesses can cut down on bullshit process and bullshit jobs and keep running fine, but there's a lot of "cost centre" style jobs that are non-negotiable, especially when it comes to compliance and government reporting. Compliance and reporting is a business requirement that the software industry very rarely has but I'm expecting to see that change over the next decade. Accounting kind of falls in that category actually.
An aside, Blackmagic sounds great to work at. I avoid big companies specifically to avoid the bullshit process and people, so that sounds like a dream.
There was an accounting team, of course, as well as support and the most competent IT department on planet Earth (consisting of two guys for the whole company), but they were nimble and didn't overreach in terms of their authority.
In a company with no HR, whose role is it to deal with employment contracts, ensure the company's compliance with labour laws and deal with personnel issues (which, at 500+ employees, probably arise more frequently than either of us would think)?
I'm assuming the contracts were all written up by a competent lawyer, once, and then just had the titles and salaries slightly changed from person-to-person.
Interviews were handled by the team that the new hire would be joining, and most personnel issues were handled locally too. Very rarely they'd be kicked up the chain to the department head, but honestly these issues were very rare.
Seriously, without an "HR police" to complain to, most people would just deal with interpersonal issues like adults and move on.
I think the GP is from Australia, where a lot of that stuff is handled by government departments and labour laws. We have lots of labour protection laws that as an employee you can action through the Ombudsman, a federal department. The "401k" is called super anuation and is handled as a standardized legal requirement by the federal government, which simplifies it a lot. Because the ombudsman has teeth, they are pretty good at compelling businesses to comply with labour laws. Health care and so on are also all handled by the government or privately by the individual, rather than being tied to your company.
> Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only reason the company still turns a profit is because their existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-productive people.
Or the company has a near monopoly over certain lucrative markets.
> People don't capture the full value of their labor (which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is allocated),
I think it is primarily due to de-risking. You agree with your employer that the biggest percentage of your income will be fixed and independent of how much value the company produced (be it profits or share appreciation or whatever). This makes sense because your life has high fixed costs, and your cash-flow cannot allow for years when you make zero (or even a negative amount), even if in the next one you would make 5 times your current salary.
> which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the value of their labor.
Don't think this is necessarily true. I would love to walk into an apple orchard now and spend an hour picking if I could keep 25% of the apples.
> If people were really incentivized to do their best work, I imagine we'd get a better world.
Assuming wages are a function of the free market. And the less mobile people are, the less job-applicants exist, and the higher wages need to be to poach. Incentivizing for good work might have diminishing returns after a certain point.
Is it actually a problem everywhere? I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not written about much on HN, but my guess is that at least some of the big tech companies will sometimes do large off-cycle performance bonuses. It may depend a lot on the work though, e.g. doing the thing the company actually cares about vs what they say they want or needing to fight one’s case a lot, or needing to have product focused improvements rather than some equivalent savings from efficiency.
This is the entire foundation of capitalism. The idea is that people who own capital only reward other people for their time who help add to their capital. If companies distributed all of the gains in terms of stock awards to employees, you will see very different asset distribution in our society.
Respectfully, if you think entrepreneurship has anything to do with lottery or has an "already-rich" requirement to
start with, I'd suggest you double-check whether you have an accurate mental model to succeed in this area (assuming you have an interest in succeeding in this area, which, if not, it's totally fine).
Make a lot of friends, buy up the tickets together, and split the winnings.
Applied another way, everyone in a given class of YC should share a bit of ownership with everyone else in their YC class, and then everyone of them is likely to end up a millionare.
I still wish that YC would provide some more concrete figures, and ideally include separate figures for first employees as well as founders.
From link: “Most of the returns have gone to a tiny minority of super-successes. The founders of AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe are worth about US$7 billion, about 80% of all founders’ equity, although they account for 0.5% of the companies. Outside of the most successful companies, it was still possible to earn significant returns. 12% of companies from the first five years of Y Combinator are now worth US$40 million or more, and a further 10% have sold for US$5-40 million. The remainder probably earned little more than their (low) salaries.”.
This is where the analogy fails, I think, because it assumes a static market price, or a lack of competition for the tickets. Where the price changes or competition changes availability, we run into the same issues where those who already have power/money are more able to exploit the system than those who have to collude just to have a shot.
> Problem is the employees aren't willing to bear the risk that early investors were willing to.
Employees take on considerable risk by joining early startups, and they take on opportunity risk when working for other companies, as well.
An early employee risks their ability to house and feed themselves and their family, along with their ability to afford medical care or retirement, by working at a company that could fold or fire them at any moment. An investor might experience some capital loss they can write off at tax time.
That's just how life and the universe works. The level of risk employees bear is one of the lowest possible. Reality won't let you go much below that.
I'd bet in most early stage startups nowadays developers are paid way more than the founders themselves. And they work way less hours, with way less stressful problems than the founders.
The difference in pay, hours dedicated and stress (along with damages to health and life in general) represents the founders' risk appetite for future earnings.
Employees are not at all open to bear this level of risk and they should not be compensated for not bearing this risk. Founders and investors deliver value to society by bearing higher risks. We have better and cheaper services as a result. They should be compensated accordingly, so we keep them motivated to continue servicing us in increasingly better ways.
Exactly. And investment includes buying the tools that lets the worker be productive enough to create a surplus.
There's three people (or entities) in this: the one who makes the tool, the one who buys the tool, and the one who uses the tool. All of them need some of the rewards from the increased productivity that the tool empowers, otherwise we stop getting tools that let us be more productive, and we're all worse off. So you have to pay both the capitalists and the workers.
Now, you can argue that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the capitalists. That's a defensible position. But the answer is not to move to "the workers get 100% of the gains". That's going to leave everyone worse off, including the workers.
Would it? As I understand it, most companies don't distribute losses to owners either. I believe that's the core of "limited liability" corporations. Except for capital losses for shareholders, but employees are already paid in RSUs too, so I think that's relatively moot.
'Capitalism' is neither theoretically, nor in practice, limited to "only reward people for their time". Some industries where the labor is low-skilled trend that way.
The basic concept of capitalism is that there are capital owners, and they hire workers who use that capital to generate value. The capital owners receive all of that value and then pay the workers for their time.
This is not a comprehensive description of capitalism but it is the low level idea. Obviously there is a distribution of real world behaviors.
Capitalism is about trade and industry being done by private owners, instead of by the state. It's a decentralized economic system that acknowledges a state's inability to fully plan the economy due to imperfect information.
> Capitalism is about trade and industry being done by private owners, instead of by the state. It's a decentralized economic system that acknowledges a state's inability to fully plan the economy due to imperfect information.
> The basic concept of capitalism is that there are capital owners, and they hire workers who use that capital to generate value. The capital owners receive all of that value and then pay the workers for their time.
This is incorrect. You can have state capitalism as well as non-state non-capitalism (worker-owned cooperatives are a common example of private non-capitalism).
As the person you're responding to said, capitalism is the philosophy that concentration of capital should be rewarded. It's that simple.
Whether the state or private magnates concentrate the capital and get rewarded for it is irrelevant.
That's only the 'basic concept of capitalism' at a reductionist Fischer-Price level-of-understanding by its detractors. That's just as impoverished a model of the real world, in its own way, as simple microeconomics analyses of 'perfect competition'.
Ideology can make even the highly-credentialed pretty dumb.
But did Mr. Wolff really say – "The basic concept of capitalism is that there are capital owners, and they hire workers who use that capital to generate value. The capital owners receive all of that value and then pay the workers for their time." – ? Where?
I disagree. The description I used is helpful in distinguishing capitalism from previous modes of production like feudalism or alternatives like communism. I explicitly said the description is not comprehensive, but it is one aspect of capitalism.
It’s suppose to be the value you added. The investors get payment for the risk they take by investing in or loaning money to the company. If a company has monopoly power and/or gets bailed out by the government consistently there is no risk to investors. What ends up happening is rent seeking a behavior by theses companies and they will also take unnecessary risks since they are incentivized to.
You would also see much fewer companies to begin with. Maybe there's a better way to reward highly skilled people than beating this extremely dead horse?
Capitalism has nothing to do with fewer or more companies. A founder can currently be rewarded as much as 1000000X than an average employee simply because the arrangement is that employee gets paid for time (a highly limited quantity) while founder gets paid for capital (virtually unlimited quantity). Assume that you forced founders not to capture all of the capital gains generated by employees such that the founder was rewarded "only" 1000X more than average employee. I don't think this is so badly under-rewaeded that founders will just stop being founders.
A founder that's rewarded 1000000X is cashing in on a lottery ticket. That's all there is to it. Just as in most lotteries, even most founders are losers.
That part about "a social networking bubble of imitations and tag alongs" is ironic, given Google's numerous failed attempts to tag along on the social networking bubble.
What this email doesn't say is that Google's solution for fixing retention problems was to reach out to Apple and many other large tech employers and sign illegal agreements to not hire each other's employees.
The subject of this email (Facebook) famously declined to participate however.
Then for years Google denied wrongdoing but said they couldn't address it because it was in active litigation.
Finally, the whole thing got settled (slap on the wrist but something at least), so Google employees could finally get an answer in the weekly all-hands (TGIF).
Laszlo Bock was their head of people at the time, and claimed that Google still did nothing wrong, and that they only settled because they were caught up in the whole thing with other companies like Adobe who did do something wrong. He said they did nothing wrong because they only stopped outbound recruiting towards employees at those companies, which had no effect, and still accepted inbound applications.
This raises the obvious question - if outbound recruiting had no effect, why was Google so eager to put at end to it? And how could Google act like they were caught up it the crossfire when it was specifically emails by Sergey Brin that provided the strongest evidence of illegal collusions?
It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart people to believe it rather than have their intelligence insulted.
But sadly, most Google employees did seem to buy it. There's a strong cult of indoctrination, starting with calling yourself a Googler and wearing the stupid hat, that Google execs just had a halo effect. I think between 2010 and now that halo effect has massively worn off, especially with all the dirty details about misbehavior from Sergey Brin, Vic Gundtora, and Andy Rubin.
Nonetheless, it served as strong evidence as to how even really smart people can get caught up in cult-like communities. The "founder worship", the indoctrination into company culture, all of that is super common in Silicon Valley tech companies and for an obvious reason - it works.
It could be posited that the huge jump in salaries in tech that started happening in the mid-to-late 2010's came about due to the discovery and removal of this illegal collaboration(google,apple etc) to fight attrition and bring down wages. It would be very interesting to see if there is a direct correlation to that event. I know my salary and salaries of my peers(at fangish companies) started going to the moon around 2016 onwards.
> Nonetheless, it served as strong evidence as to how even really smart people can get caught up in cult-like communities.
I see it differently. It seems like strong evidence as to how smart the average googler really is. If you start with the assumption these people are smart then you can reach your conclusion, but if you discard that assumption you just have a group of gullible employees.
Lol, every HN commenter knows Google was in the wrong but the Googlers themselves didn't because they're gullible. No, the Googlers didn't buy it but continued working because when it comes to it, thinking your company does shady things is very rarely sufficient to get you to up and leave. Is your company bigger than, say, a thousand people? Then they have definitely done something as bad as Google's collusion and you know it even if you don't know what. Are you going to leave?
I agree with you, and I'm very much of the opinion that most techies are entitled assholes who only care about enriching themselves. I was just pointing out what I considered to be a flaw in GP's reasoning.
> Are you going to leave?
I did, actually (more than once). And it's what made me realize how few engineers care about anything other than their paychecks and ultimately themselves. When push comes to shove, the vast majority of people I've met and worked with have no qualms looking the other way for more compensation.
> When push comes to shove, the vast majority of people I've met and worked with have no qualms looking the other way for more compensation.
When push comes to shove, those people would have no power to change things anyway in the vast majority of cases. You can either live in a terrible world rich, or poor - in both cases the world wouldn't change but at least your life will be better.
A lot of problems are big enough that only governments can deal with them by the use of laws and appropriate enforcement (eventually escalating to violence if needed). But if the governments themselves benefit from the problem, or are owned by the corporations (corruption, or "lobbying" as it's called in the US), there's no chance for a few individuals to make a difference.
I disagree that employees have no power to make a difference. It's learned helplessness. By that logic, unions are also ineffective at bargaining. The point is you have to actually work together instead of for yourself.
If we all left every company as soon as they commit some immoral things, there'd be no company surviving beyond a few months. If we ditched all our friends as soon as they commit some immoral thing, we'd have no friends. If we ditched our countries as soon as they commit some immoral thing, we'd have no countries.
All entities, one day or another, commit some immoral thing according to some relative morality. We can't expect that they never will. Of course, a consistent and repeat offender should not be rewarded with our support. But it's unreasonable to hold people and groups of people to unreasonable standards, such as "sustained perfect moral behavior".
The average Googler most likely than not thinks that what Google did is bad, but not bad enough overall to warrant their quitting.
> But sadly, most Google employees did seem to buy it.
What makes you say that? Everyone I know is aware that Google was doing dirt, but salaries were going up so fast at the time it hardly mattered. Especially when the collusion ended we went through several years of absurd salary growth. Even during the period of collusion, Google was being pretty generous with compensation (e.g. this event -- https://www.businessinsider.com/google-options-repricing-bai...).
Every programmer who was there at that time and has stayed has either been spending profligately or is fairly wealthy at this point.
This is certainly true for some Googlers, but there are many true believers (at least when I was there). Many people there sincerely think Google is a special company - the company was even arrogant enough in their IPO to say they "not a conventional company, and not intending to become one".
Even outside Google, the halo effect is insane. Look at how much hate companies like Facebook and Uber get on HN. But if you break down the scandals side by side, you'll realize Google has by far the worst ethics in the industry.
For example, Uber is accused of being sexist because a woman wrote an open letter that she was excluded in various ways as an employee there, such as not receiving swag in her size as the only woman on the team. That sounds like a shitty culture. Meanwhile, Vic Gundotra was credibly accused of inviting 22 year old junior SWEs to exec offsites to sexually harass them. Andy Rubin was found to have sexually assaulted a subordinate, according to Google's own investigation, and recieved a 90M payout.
What's a worse workplace for women? Not getting swag in your size, or being raped?
Yet when I worked at Google when all these scandals took place, ordering an Uber was a huge faux paus. You had to order a Lyft because "Uber=sexist."
Even now on a recent thread I mentioned how all these tech companies are more evil than your typical crypto startup, people said "only Uber and Facebook" look bad on a resume. I would argue that's purely a function of PR because I challenge anyone to debate me that Facebook or Uber had worse ethics scandals than Google.
Google has one of the strongest PR machines of all time and its effect on sentiment inside and outside the company is indisputable.
Your characterization of Uber leaves out the sexual harassment from the source you mentioned:
“On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat… He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with… When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to… Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.”
See 'anyone working at a large company ever'. Any large group of people with any kind of goal and any amount of power(doesn't even have to be a company) will do despicable things, it's almost a law of nature. Google's collusion is barely a blip on the bad stuff people do.
> It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart people to believe it rather than have their intelligence insulted.
They don't hire the smartest people, they hire the greediest people. The only thing people worship in silicon valley and tech in general is money. That's it. An if your salary, stock options, etc are dependent on believing and selling lies, that's what you do. When an industry or group gets "saint status" or proclaims to be the agents of good, your spidey senses should start tingling.
If you got an offer from Facebook they would beat it. I did this in 2012 and instantly had 10x the RSUs. Some Googlers thought it was immoral to do this. It was at this time that comp for engineers radically changed.
Zuckerberg is widely despised on HN, but he should get some credit for standing up to the Silicon Valley wage cartel. As your example shows, it put potentially life-changing compensation within the reach of a much larger group of software engineers.
Previously you pretty much had to get lucky as an early engineer through IPO, but in the past decade it's been possible to save millions by working at FAANGs. And those millions trickle down into the ecosystem: people can afford to start their own companies, do angel investments, etc.
Zuckerberg doesn't seem that despicable to me. Certainly not in the company of companies like Google. What's the worst thing you can say about him or Facebook?
I think most of the bad press just comes from media clickbait. Mainstream news identifies Facebook as a competitor and threat on ideological model, see people complaining about conservative news sources topping most shared on Facebook lists, and on a business model basis (Facebook controls a large stream of traffic).
I mean a good argument against Facebook (and by proxy Zuckerberg) is that Facebook designs the product in a way that benefits them rather than the psychological well being of their users.
Do companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Google, etc prioritize their customers over their own interests? Other companies in tech or outside of tech?
I don't think Facebook is some well run charity doing philanthropy - I just don't think they are meaningfully worse than their peers. I do think there is a concerted media campaign to malign Facebook and I think this is where the differential in how people think of Facebook versus these other companies comes from.
…is this statement not true for any, say, Fortune 100 company?
Does P&G put the psychological health of their customers over their own profits? Does Walmart? Apple? Exxon?
One might be able to make the slightly stronger argument is that the average user’s psychological health is more at odds with Facebook’s interests/profits than most other companies — putting it in the same category as, perhaps, Phillip Morris — but even that is not an argument against Facebook or Zuckerberg; any company in the same position would likely be doing the same kind of thing.
I signed a job offer in late 2011 and was due to start a couple months later. Two weeks before the start date, the hiring manager emailed out of the blue to say that they were bumping up my starting salary by 10%. It was a wild time to be in tech (although the situation today isn't all that different).
Google isn't nearly as nice of a place to work at as people make it out to be.
As an example they will finally increase vacation from 15days to 20days on April 1st this year.
The media reports this as "on top of already lavish perks Googlers are now getting 20 days of PTO a year!".
Gee whiz amazing. An increase from 15 days of PTO. If only we didn't much more than that in my much lower quality of life home country as a standard for tech workers.
And sorry if this sounds a bit spoilt. I should be grateful to work at a large megacorp in this economy right? It's just that Google isn't any better in terms of working conditions than any other big tech company. In fact in general it's a little bit worse yet there's propaganda movies (The Internship) about how great it is to work at Google.
It's a job. No one else seems to want to acknowledge it.
> As an example they will finally increase vacation from 15days to 20days on April 1st this year.
That change is for junior employees. It's still overdue, but vacation bumps up to 25 days per year after you have some tenure, and has done for more than a decade. I'm not saying that 25 days is anything to write home about -- I've heard of places that give 30, or unlimited -- but 25 is not bad.
Yep. Went from a job that has 40+ days of PTO *starting* for all employees, tech and non-tech. Now I'm a consultant making 40-70% more depending on RSU math, with "unlimited time off" but as a consultant I certainly feel less comfortable taking a two week vacation on a whim like I did before.
It's been a long time since I went through these bumps, but I had thought that in your third year you got 20 days? Is that not right? So odd to make you wait for three years for your first increase and then only two for your next one.
> Gee whiz amazing. An increase from 15 days of PTO. If only we didn't much more than that in my much lower quality of life home country as a standard for tech workers.
I am not saying 15 days of PTO is high (it isn't) but you're comparing different countries. Local customs vary hugely from country to country: for example, when I was at Google UK, I got 30 days of paid annual leave.
>and many other large tech employers and sign illegal agreements to not hire each other's employees.
I don't remember reading about any formally signed agreements. Executives aren't going to create an incriminating paper trail like that. Instead, it was some complaints in emails and an implied understanding. E.g. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt emails:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement-i...