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Comment by rolltiide | Hacker News Reader

> We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

Relative to other wage workers yes, but nowhere close to the ratios between wage and housing last seen 30 years ago. There are opportunities to negotiate for that sort of compensation again.

As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do.

Comparing yourself to other trades is not relevant. Wage growth in one not-so-rare trade will benefit many more trades and people.

Most of us would not be where we are today if we limited our aspirations to what other people do.

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As if companies determine the price for housing. With Sillicon Valley wages, you could easily afford housing within 5 years somewhere else. It is not companies' fault that housing prices have gone up - it is politics preventing building of available housing. It is also an example that shows that no matter how much you pay the employees, housing prices will simply adapt if more housing is not being built.

The companies are at least partly culpable for choosing to aggregate themselves in these insanely high CoL areas, contributing to the rent jumps, and failing to engage in the proper corporate social responsibility of working with their ambient communities to alleviate these living situations for both their employees and their neighbors.

Well the people living there can vote, can't they? I don't see how it is corporate responsibility. Corporations can't vote.

Yes, the corporations are contributing to rent jumps, but that was part of the point: by paying higher salaries, as is being demanded by the pro union crowd here, they also increase the rents. So they can't simply pay enough so that "people can buy a house within 5 years", because housing prices rise along with salaries.

The union crowd isn't unilaterally asking for higher salaries. Hell, the Kickstarter employees in the OP aren't even focused specifically on compensation. There are issues at stake such as toxic environments, anti-age/race/gender discrimination, open offices, etc.

Even on matters of comp it needn't simply be "give raises to all the engineers", as pro-tech unionization efforts tend to also support non-technical workers such as the custodial and cafeteria staff, who would be in higher need of pay raises. The pay for engineers is usually more directed towards addressing unpaid overtime, which is more of a work-life balance/anti-death march measure more than a monetary one anyway.

Corporations can't vote, but they do have free speech when it comes to political expression, and tech companies already do plenty of lobbying. Perhaps they could have spent some fraction of those efforts on influencing the housing shortages in the places they set up camp in. Being a good, responsible neighbor should be part of CSR.

We are in a thread about the claim that "As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do."

That is what I was referring to.

I think companies are already trying to alleviate the housing issues. But their influence is not as high as you think. Google buses were attacked by locals, for example - they would have enable Google employees to live farther away, alleviating pressure on prices in the immediate neighborhood.

Corporate buses are helpful to their workforce (and at this point normalized to the extent that such backlash is far less common) but are also just a bandaid that can lead to extreme commutes [0]. Ultimately, the faults of development in the Bay Area, Seattle, and other high-growth/high-CoL areas are mainly on local governments and residents, but large employers share part of the responsibility because their presence is what drives up the desirability of a region in the first place, as well as prices.

Yes, you can't ask Google to solve everything themselves (even if their PR likes to paint them as being in the business of doing that), but they could at least explore more policies like opening larger offices in regions with more housing, embracing more remote work, working more closely with local communities, etc. You'd think megacorps with the resources and supposed strategic foresight that FAANGM possess would be more proactive about addressing an issue that impacts their workforce. Is it no wonder then that their workers will seek desperate measures like unionizing?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22362271

If they would open offices elsewhere, they would drive prices up there, too. In fact here in Berlin they cancelled their plans after protests by the locals.

Then perhaps they should take remote work more seriously.

You assume it is as effective as onsite work, just like that? If that was the case, why haven't remote work companies trounced on site work companies en masse?

We're not debating the efficacy of the practice, but whether or not it can help prevent rising costs of living caused by tech agglomeration. Certainly "taking remote work more seriously" would include investing in pilot programs, experiments, and innovating processes/technologies to make it better and better. And it's something that large megacorps could work with, if they cared about rising CoL.

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