Hacker News Reader

Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

It might just be me, but aren’t they all filthy rich, excessively profiting from their workers, handing them selves extreme wealth, while cutting their workers off from this wealth.

This is exploitation. The owning class for the owning class. The rich benefit and the workers are left exploited. Larry, Sergey, Pichai, they are all participating and benefiting at the cost of the workers. Any in-fighting and rivalry is at best a spectacle. At the end of the day, they all go home to the wealth, earned by their workers but enjoyed by the owners, and the owners alone, whether you call them bosses or shareholders, they are all simply exploiters.

View on HN

Here's the world's smallest violin to those poor Google engineers who have some of the highest compensation in tech.

First of all, I don’t care if they are well payed, their bosses and shareholders are still taking more profits than they deserve.

Second, Google’s workers famously include many many contractors who do not get the same benefits as Google’s direct employees. This is exploitation.

Third, the exploitation runs deeper than just google workers. Their customers include companies which are paying a bunch of money to use their services. This is money which otherwise could have gone to the developers of those customers. Those workers are also exploited by google’s bosses and shareholders.

Well seeing constantly degrading quality of Google products, I would say that Google engineers also taking more compensation than they deserve.

While the system certainly has its flaws, calling them 'simply exploiters' ignores the immense value they've created and the hard work required to build a company like Google.

The rich benefit and the workers are left exploited.

Good grief.

The highest paid workers on the planet, work for google. You should spread this communist blather at the proper place, coffee shops where workers aren't paid a living wage.

Not people able to retire wealthy, is they invest their salary coreectly.

Talk about entitlement.

Google runs coffeeshops with low paid workers.

This is why this country sucks, no one wants people to be paid adequately if it's more than they make. Talk about crab bucket mentality.

You can have a standard for maximum fair wage without it being some kind of personal irrational gripe.

Those wages are what middle class is due to inflation.

Stop wanting everyone to be as poor as you god damn. I want employees to make as much as they can, not all the wealth concentrate in a capital class. WTF is wrong with people?

If an employee makes enough money they aren't middle class. And if a CEO is getting paid normally then they're an employee too.

Also I was thinking in terms of math applied to percentiles and other statistics, which don't change with inflation.

Are you really going to say it's crab bucket if I say a number like "a million dollars" and say it should apply to both income and capital gains? Maybe even a lower number for capital gains, if I'm being feisty?

I actually like to use worker class and owning class. Bosses (including CEOs) are apart of the owning class. CEOs being employers is just semantics, they are still bosses, and is the reason I use the word workers to make it clear.

Well paid google workers are still workers and deserve our solidarity. Making a distinction among workers between lower classes, and middle and upper class only serves to divide us, destroy our solidarity, and for our bosses to keep exploiting us.

How many workers get more than a million dollars, keeping the same example threshold? It barely affects solidarity.

And why shouldn't I have some solidarity with an owner of a business that has 30k more assets than debts and personally makes 40k a year?

I think income and wealth are better distinguishers than the role you have.

They are still paid a tiny fraction of the value they generate while a handful of people receive most of the value generated.

I don't think anyone here is advocating for cutting Pichai's pay to $500k or something, but nearly a quarter of a billion dollars? JFC

I don’t see any reason to suggest that the CEO’s pay here is some failing of the market. Google’s owners felt it was appropriate to pay the CEO that amount, and it doesn’t really affect the pay or well being of Google’s other employees, who are/were some of the highest paid already.

From a class perspective, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, they are all equally guilty of exploitation. Board of directors agree pay their CEOs excessive salary, and the CEO in turns keeps this money away from the workers and away from the customers. Stock prices remain high, bank accounts in Panama fill up, workers gets fired, bosses get rich.

For me “Market rate” is just something the owning class tells us to gaslight us into accepting our exploitation. They created this market, they control this market, and exploiters go on exploiting.

Well under your definition the whole capitalist system is just masked exploitation. If that’s the case then I don’t think this is any more egregious an instance of exploitation than the every day income disparities already happening.

What benefit does a board of directors have over helping out the CEO (an employee as well) vs customers and employees?

You are not wrong. Books have been written about how the whole capitalist system is just masked exploitation—including a very famous one by one Karl Marx in 1867. But you must see the scale at play here. When bosses are getting millions upon millions of dollars, hundreds of millions even, and shareholders are in the billions, this is capitalism turned to eleven (and don’t get me wrong capitalism turned to 1 is still bad for workers).

> What benefit does a board of directors have over helping out the CEO (an employee as well) vs customers and employees?

Note I say workers. Even though a CEO is technically “employed” by the company, they are still very much a boss, a part of the owning class, and part of the problem. When the pitchforks come up, they will very much be directed at CEOs. This is why CEOs help out their fellow bosses and shareholders. Class solidarity is very much a reality for the owning and ruling classes.

Hello, the 19th Century is calling and they want their economics back.

They "generate" the value by putting software on multi-billion dollar server farms, while sitting in buildings on top of billions worth of real estate. Did they pay for those and keep them running?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com