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Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation's strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average. While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley's income ladder have been hit hardest as their inflation-adjusted wages declined between 12 and 14 percent over the past 20 years, according to a study from UC Santa Cruz's Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the labor think tank Working Partnership USA, which examined the economic impact of technology companies.
Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. Also, a smaller percentage of wealth is going to workers. "In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent. The drop translated to $9.6 billion -- about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker -- that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study."
Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. Also, a smaller percentage of wealth is going to workers. "In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent. The drop translated to $9.6 billion -- about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker -- that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study."
Inflicted
Goal
nuff said
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I wonder How many Googlers, Netflixers (is that what Netflix employees are called?), Oracle employees, etc. who earn high incomes support the higher-rate optional tax. That would be a great way to stick to the conservatives. I would think it would be very popular in that part of the US. Anybody have a number?
I see what you did there
BILLARY
Competition is always good.
Maybe because it is all a big Ponzi scheme?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
How many hb1 visas are there verses 1997?
Look at the first paragraph of the article.
Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nationâ(TM)s strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average.
But if you read further down in the article, it references other companies.
Benner said big technology companies like Google and Facebook are so dominant in their respective markets that they have been able to direct a larger share of revenues to investors and some top employees.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
are making everyone else poorer.
Because progress.
I know there are a lot of "elementary rules" when it comes to running a business. "Location, location, location", "law of supply and demand", etc. But one corporations in today's day and age just don't seem to get is this one:
Invest in your employees, and your employees invest in you.
Modern corporations continue to fester this flawed mentality that every employee is just a cog in the machine; if one breaks, replace it with another. But humans aren't machinery. We have this subconscious that interferes with our ability to work at a constant rate of speed and productivity; it requires sleep for one thing, and it distracts our ability to focus continuously due to emotions which interrupt our concentration. Emotions, including feeling jaded by our employer who decided to give all the new employees a raise, but cut veteran employee bonuses and benefits. Or feeling depressed, because your employer is continually threaten to cut your position and move it to another part of the country if you fail to meet your quota. Et cetera, et cetera.
Most employers have forgotten now that when employees feel -valued-, their emotion doesn't impede their production, but rather boosts it.
The rest of the world has done fantastically well since then. You have to get your head around the ideas that are in play here. American elites decided to ruin our middle and working classes for the benefit of hostile people in distant lands. NAFTA, the Iraq war, TPP, they are not running things for the benefit of their own people. Heck, they don't even consider that they have anything in common with us. They are "citizens of the world" and anyone who says Americans are getting screwed is immediately labeled a Nazi and ignored. When you look at the actual goals of our elites, they are accomplishing them. It's just that they decided that they were going to ruin us to achieve them. It's working well so far.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Seriously? I thought it was only a few years old. Most people did not even have broadband in 1997...
I feel for you guys but honestly: Go complain to the politicians and their special interests who's policies and politics have created the mess in California.
In that time period, SV has also added half a million people (2.5M -> 3M). It could be that those new residents represent an influx of lower-paid workers (remember, the SF boom happened after 2000). So it would be useful to know how the makeup of jobs has changed. If tech jobs are a lower percentage of total employment now than in 1997 (an increase in lower-paid jobs "diluting" the tech salaries), then it would appear that wages are declining in real terms.
A better study would consider whether the pay of specific job types has changed since 1997.
No need to ask the why. Between the constant flow of H1-B workers and the court documented collusion between companies to suppress wages by not poaching/trying to hire talent from each other how could anybody be surprised by this?
At some point all of this is going to come to a head. Like Bastille Day.
Corporate America is endeavoring to lead us into neo-Feudalism.
The market, rental prices, and related businesses will have to adjust, in order to avoid imploding.
So tech workers now, who are very numerous, are making less then tech workers during the peak of the DotCom hysteria, when they were quite scarce? Shocking.
Slashdot your i and slashcross your t.
They referenced Netflix's launch as a marker for when a specified period of time began. Netflix was not used as an example but as a marker for a point in history.
In the second citation they do cover all businesses, as they state "companies *like* Google and Facebook" which would mean many more companies than only Google and Facebook, which would likely include Neflix, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.
Businesses were throwing wheel-barrels of money at Y2K conversions at that point.
If these jobs had the highest incomes, and they bought enough to shift demand, then they moved prices which shows up as inflation.
Real wages have been down for decades, and no, the Trump tax cut didn't change that https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...
I have an MBA and I cannot afford to pay for the house I grew up in. My father paid for it on a single wage and hadn't finished college. It is easy to see where the culprits are: a high reliance on imports for manufactured goods and a significantly large share of earnings being diverted away from labour and going to the highest earners.
Great thing about a free country, you get to choose your employer, who should be eager to pay you more because you're valuable
Unless they're bogged down by needing to hire specific groups regardless of skill
It's not that controlling immigration is "bad", its that braying about immigration with volume set to 11 is an attempt at creating a red-herring to distract from much, much bigger and more fundamental problems with western greed-reigns-supreme, I-got-mine-fuck-you approach to "society".
You are on a sinking Titanic, with sea-water coming in through a hole the size of a house while you run around with hair on fire about the kitchen help filling out bottles with drinking water for the life-boats and therefore being responsible for the ship going down.
why I don't work at Apple, ;-) Loving living in cheap Berlin, Germany ,-)
Corporations absolutely get it. But, you're thinking long term and the good of the people/nation. Corporations don't give a flying fuck about the people and the nation. They care about stock price, exit strategies, and the compensation of the officers.
'I'mma get mine; fuck everything else.'
When officers and share holders are sitting on millions in profits, why should they care about middle rung staff? They don't and they won't.
Don't fall for the banal platitudes of EVERY single corporate officer. Don't guzzle the horseshit of the Zuckerbergs and Bezos of the world. They only care about one thing, themselves. But, before we point fingers, let's reflect for a moment... Do you care about other people and the nation, or do you mostly care about yourself, as is natural. I know that I'm only concerned about me and my family as I desperately try to "get mine" too.
Are stock options counted as wages? They probably shouldn't be. Also, how are the issues like compensation against the level of education in Silicon Valley compared to the other areas? Oh, I forgot. No unions or labor laws like in some other places. Can't keep the good fellows down.
The kind of immigration that brings in people with high level skills -is- very much controlled.
How many 'illegal aliens' so you think work at Silicon Valley tech companies?
It's got very little to do with immigration, and everything to do with development work getting easier and more common as a profession. Back in 1997 it was much harder than it is today, with modern frameworks and sandboxes to play in like the browser. Back then web apps were CGI scripts written in C++, and Javascript was only two years old and far from widely supported or standardized.
It would be strange if modern JS developers were getting paid as much as C++ people in 1997. There are far more JS developers, it's a far easier job. This is what happens as industries mature and the barriers to entry are lowered, and the skills required become more mainstream.
Today if you want the big bucks you need rare skills, like embedded or AI research.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Competition is always good.
Yep, that's why I'm sleeping with your wife! Step up your game, man!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Yes. By paying off Dems and Repubs to import H1B. Vote harder, that'll tell em. I'm just beaming with a big grin. I see it happening now in accounting and numerous other fields. HAHAHAHA
Silicon valley was overpaid in 1997. We call that a correction. I bet outside Silicon Valley, tech workers are earning more.
When I worked in the valley, at a variety of places, there were never more than 5% of workers born in the US. 95% immigrants. Yeah, I think that affects wages just a little bit.
And don't forget, in the late 1990s you had "webmasters" and "HTML developers" who were fare less skilled than JS guys.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is why you unionize. So workers get a larger share of the profits.
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Stagnant wages for every job but IT and they're trying to hold down IT wages by either outsources or bringing in visa workers. Neo-feudalism indeed.
It’s kind of funny to read about how the U.S. is dying when you still have loads of people trying to come here. All the funnier is that it’s often from of the same places where they implemented systems to try to solve that supposed greed reigns supreme problem you think the west has.
Tech jobs have seen wages grow, which suggests the problem is likely related in some way to an influx of low skill labor that will work cheap or even under the table for below minimum wage. This concern is hardly a red herring.
It costs a million dollars to raise capital, by government fiat. Since poor people cannot raise capital, it's a sellers market for the capital providers, and they make a monopoly profit.
The late 1990's was full of stupid.
What was the real driving force was the Y2K scare. The Year 2000 was approaching. A lot of businesses running mainframes which were decades old had the choice, of updating their software to handle the 4 digit years, get new systems, or both.
BY the late 1990's with the 486 and the Pentium Chip in place as a solid 32 bit platform their decade(s) old mainframes needed to be upgraded anyways, and might as well go with the cheap Desktop systems which were arguable more powerful (in many aspects) and being cheaper then a Dumb Terminal, they could get more of them.
So A bunch of Companies and people were getting new computers having new computers all in the same same time. With everyone getting a new computer and finally upgrading their Old Apple II, Commodore 64, and IBM XT (And compatibles) (The big names in America) They now were on the Same OS (windows), with similar hardware, which supported TCP/IP and modem speeds exceeding the 14.4k with was enough to browse the internet with small pictures. This got people hooking onto the Internet. Often with Services such as AOL.
Now with the Consumers and Businesses all on similar protocols. Businesses could actually use the internet for commerce. So other then hiring tech workers to fix Y2k and get the new systems working for business, they were also trying to find people who could manage this new World Wide Web Thing.
So there was a shortage of Tech Workers, Companies bent over backwards to keep them hired, even if they couldn't afford it, because they hoped to get a strong foothold before they had to pay all the bills. Also a lot of these tech guys were starting their own businesses because it was so easy to get customers at the time. So there was a High Demand and Low supply. Thus high paying jobs. Like over 50k a year for a Microsoft Front Page web designer.
Now what happened?
The Clinton Administration seeing the low supply and high demand decided to open the H1B for more tech workers. While with hind sight this was a bad idea, but at the time, it seemed the only logical thing to do. Because there was so much demand that such shortage in tech workers could bring the economy to a halt, Especially if y2k turned out so bad.
So this increased supply, then after y2k people got all their new systems and everything was upgraded. So the economy Upgrade Schedule was in sync. and from 2002-2006 the Tech bubble popped. Demand dropped with extra supply from the H1B. Companies tried to save money, by prolonging their upgrades, and Trying to outsource all IT work with very cheap labor. Around the 2005-2010 time frame, Outsourcing had stabilized, realizing that outsourcing wasn't as cheap as it seemed, and also a lot of jobs didn't scale well. So the Tech industry recovered a bit, Then the great Recession of 2008 hit. While Tech workers were effected less then other sectors, it was still hit. The Recovery wasn't really in effect until around 2012. However now a few Tech Giants had firmly gained Ground, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The big guys now hold a lot of the keys, and with Cloud being popular method of deployment The demand for the Little guy Tech worker was needed less and less. So while it is better then after the Tech Bubble pop, it isn't like it was during peak bubble of 1997.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Obvious
they've got the H1-B program. They can pit you against workers from around the globe. Workers who trained themselves. Billions of them. So many that a few are bound to work out. Plus they can work them 80+ hours a week and not worry about burnout since there's a 100+ guys right behind them and behind those 100 guys is you.
This is what happens when workers get too confident in their abilities to start to think they can make it on their own. A single employee can't effectively negotiate with a mega corporation unless that employee is in the top 10% of geniuses, and, well, the reality is 90% of us aren't. If we were we'd know that, because 100-10=90...
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Can you give some examples of companies that have 95% immigrant worker populations?
I've heard his claim made about companies like Google and Intel, but their own stats paint a very different picture.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
r > g, my friends. r > g
The government should be requiring companies to pay immigrant H1B workers 150% of an equivalent US citizens salary and should tariff software services imports at 50%.
American workers shouldn't be punished because our currency is propped up artificially through unsustainable monetary policies and American workers can't compete in a race to the salary bottom with billions of overseas workers with lower regulatory burdens.
Hardcore conservatives didn't want a bank bailout. The banks had made bad some decisions, which came back to bite them. Irresponsible companies deserve to bankrupt. The House Republicans vetoed the first bailout. Then the media started its panic and W said, "It's gonna blow." Banks spread their money across DC, and the second time, the bailout passed with BIPARTISAN support.
A huge problem is the H1B program. These ppl come over and are pretty much slaves to the companies. We need to kill the H1B program with 50k/year, and instead add 25-40k in greencards, but only for needed job. This way, we address the jobs, but still force competition into the job market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
Well, it's bad, uh, everywhere except our field! Because values!
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
Well there's an invasion coming, apparently. Or at least there was before the mid-terms. I guess they got tired and gave up.
The big companies seem to be more like 80% (talking about developers, not employees). Not going to give my job history on slashdot, but one small company I worked at had, before I was hired, no native-born tech people of any kind, excepting the VP of development. At the time they got bought they had 30 US employees and about 100 in India (devs etc, not talking about support), and 2 of us were born in the US (plus one technical non-dev). The acquiring company forced out everyone senior who wasn't Indian in the most blatant racism I've yet seen. Even the Nepalese guy got pressured out.
In the large company I worked at before that the numebrs were about the same: 30/100 US/India split, with 2 US-born devs (plus 2 managers).
When I worked at Amazon (which was Seattle, not Silly Valley) our group of 50 or so needed 3 people who could get top secret clearance. Problem was, we only had 3 devs who were born in the US, and I wasn't interested. Amazingly, the "we're trying to recruit US citizens, we just can't find qualified people" hiring process suddenly found another 3 qualified US devs over the next 6 months. Amazing coincidence, really.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Itâ(TM)s kind of funny to read about how the U.S. is dying when you still have loads of people trying to come here.
Its a relativity problem. You see, if the whole continent is sinking into the sea, people clamour to the high land, even though its also doomed and sinking just as fast. Eventually everyone ends up crammed on the highest peak when that finally goes under.
You are watching people running for the highest hill and construing it as a sign of that hill's innate supremacy over the low-lands. The flood won't be nearly so impressed when it gets there.
In other terms: the US has accumulated an undue share of global wealth (by a myriad of reasons, prominently featuring luck, malignancy, savagery, brutality and kleptocracy, which would take ages to go over) and therefore looks like the tallest peak where to shelter from the global disaster. Also many, if not most migrants only care about their next meal and long-term planning does not figure much in their actions.
The collapse of the economic house of cards, Ponzi scheme, or whatever name you give to the scam is in fact imminent and global. All the metrics you care to look into point firmly to a crisis of massive proportions that will hit hardest in the places which consider themselves most lofty and untouchable. As such catastrophes usually do.
Or to put it yet another way, hordes of people were immigrating to the US on the very Wednesday right before the Black Thursday too.
I would assume they referenced Netflix to give the reader a sense of time. It's like saying "Company X, founded when Hayes was President, ..."
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Ignoring the long term effects of mass immigration, the current USA system is mostly working. Big universities can be efficient, if they would unload their bloat, and aimed for lower profit margins. Big Pharma, and their minions at the FDA have worked to stifle foreign competition of generic drugs. On a related note, doctors, hospitals, and health insurance companies have worked to screw the individual whom pays for health care with cash. Zoning codes have expanded the features, and price of housing, along with rising expectations over the last 70 years. The original Levittown house was only 1,000 square feet, and it was expected to be good enough for a family of 4.
Right now 50% of Americans have no wealth! Using data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and using Jupyter notebook and numpy to create a regression plot, you can see where America is headed. Credit Suisse data agrees with the plot.
Right and there was basically no tooling for JS either back then. To write in you had to know it. Not fumble your way thru with intelisense. Also you had be very aware of browser eccentricities and often implement mirror functionality in vbscript.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Interesting, because Amazon's numbers from 2014 suggest that 60% of their employees are "white". That of course includes people at all levels. Managers are 73% white.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
So either it's a problem very specific to development, which isn't born out in more detailed numbers we have from other companies, or you were extremely unlucky.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I hear these 90%+ claims and never see a shred of evidence of it being true anywhere. When I ask people get evasive or the available evidence doesn't back them up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As others already pointed out, comparisons between pay today and in 1997 will be skewed because the late 90's was when investors were foolishing throwing money at every tech startup with a flashy name, creating an unsustainable tech bubble that burst a few years later on. You also had all of the Y2K crisis fears emerging, so again, a one-time panic mode that caused a flurry of spending to update major systems or do rewrites on older code.
I mean ... I was working in I.T. as a PC "support specialist" for a metal finishing business in the midwest at that time, and I had friends who never even held a corporate I.T. job before, but who did a lot of freelance web page design for spare cash who ran off to California to get high paying jobs with companies like Excite.
Fast-forwarding a few years? They came back to the midwest, unable to make it with the high cost of living and lack of available jobs..... (But hey, I guess they had a good run there for a short time.)
I propose someone compare pay between now and a more reasonable time in the past, after I.T. settled down a bit ..... Maybe 2004? Then see how it compares.
And if you are who I think you are, there won't be a $90M severance package for that b***job! Pack your bags, 'cause I'm packin heat!
People only want to come to the US en masse if they're from somewhere awful and they can get to us by land, so everywhere south of us.
And then some Europeans fleeing the high taxes, but they're always highly skilled.
Not really an amazing coincidence. They probably lowered their expectations until they found anyone. Based on my history of living in the US, American workers are terrible at judging their value. Most people think they deserve more when they actually should receive pay cuts. When Americans are employed to build something that the company projects will make 1 billion in revenue, and it only makes 3/4th that, the employees want to be recognized for the 3/4th and try to ignore the 1/4th lost opportunity. Meanwhile they cry fowl when they don't get a bonus when it brings in 1.25 billion.
You can't have it both ways. Either you fail most of the time and engineers live in a high risk high reward career, or they play it safe and they make minimum wage. There is no in between. None.
Yes, it's a problem specific to development. They don't hire H1B's as managers.
Salaries and contract rates are down in the Midwest, too. I can't recall how times I've been contacted by recruiters hawking contracts that are paying rates that would have been nice in the early '90s but are a joke with today's cost of living. Even contracts for periods for very short term (2-3 months) stints are paying crap rates. To be fair, the recruiters know that the compensation being offered by many employers today is a joke but also know that submitting someone at a higher salary/rate won't even get that candidate a phone screen. And that doesn't even take into account the abuse of contract-to-hire where the employer has no intention of ever converting a contractor into an FTE.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I'm white and a foreign R&D specialist in a white country.
It always pains me when westerners forget that not all white people are westerners...
Classic!
Reading comprehension it was talking about non-technology fields.
It's worth noting that Google and companies like it have offices all over the world, and lots of their workers will move to the USA for promotions or to do other jobs, but they were employees to begin with. I know that people working at the Google office in Montreal decided to make the jump to the main campus at some point for various reasons, so even if there are a high number of immigrant workers, it's not like they were just scooped up off the street in India or China or something. These people aren't working for peanuts; I hardly think they're driving wages down.
Why do you think they are building company towns again?
Once a worker moves in, they can never afford to leave again.
It's happening to every "tech center", not just Silicon Valley.
Benner said big technology companies like Google and Facebook are so dominant in their respective markets that they have been able to direct a larger share of revenues to investors and some top employees.
Google and Facebook do not pay a dividend, so unless he's talking about stock buybacks - investors aren't getting a share of revenue.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If you made $85,000 starting in January 1997. You better be making at least $132,434 by January 2018.
(I'm one of the rare people who are ahead in the game. It's partially skill, and mostly luck.)
ZIP
subsidized by somebody else then no, you're not dumb. You're doing something perfectly rational. I think the phrase is "tragedy of the commons" but I could be wrong.
Workers are now paying for their own educations thanks to massive cuts to state and federal college funding.
Also, cheap work visas let you get workers trained overseas. These workers are either trained by their governments or (again) often on their own time/dime because of the intensely competitive economies they come from. India is especially bad about this as they've got a massive educated class and not nearly enough to do with them.
What I'm saying is that workers have been made into disposable commodities. But pride keeps us from facing that harsh reality head on and taking the steps needed to mitigate the damage (read: Unionize and solidarity).
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What's wrong with trying to get a fair share? Also consider that the American dream is expensive; a house, 2 cars, properly funding retirement, college for the children, good health care etc. are all expensive.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
more than anything. Before Y2K you had the cold war keeping jobs from going overseas and from cheap work visas flooding tech. That kept wages high.
I'm not saying we should go back to isolationism and xenophobia. I don't think we could if we wanted to, cat's out of the bag on that. And it wasn't good for the 30% of the population that wasn't white (just ask a black person over 60 what life was like 40 years ago, bonus points if they're from the South).
The solution, at least for America, is more social services. Medicare for All, jobs guarantees, etc, etc. Right now nobody's getting any benefit from the global economy unless they're in the top 15% or so (e.g. rich enough to invest in the stock market). For everyone else globalization hasn't got us anything but cheap TVs and Playstations. If the tax dollars those immigrants paid gave me healthcare, schools, jobs, roads, etc, etc we'd have a lot less friction.
Of course, somebody is profiting from that...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Don't conflate "white" with US-born. I've worked with plenty of good people from Canada, Israel, and Russia (and South Africa: BTW I don't advise telling them they're not "African-American"), and OTOH good American-born Chinese, and Canadian-born Chinese for that matter, and pretty much any other mix of race vs nationality that's around.
Believe it or not, "immigrant" is not a code word for "non-White", and race is a poor proxy for immigration status.
I only have anecdotes, of course, but I worked at 6 companies in Silly Valley and Seattle, so it's a reasonable sample. Of those, only Microsoft was more than 20% native-born.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No point in thrashing about H1-B's. From TFA
"Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found."
If I were a smart worker bee, I'd be investing in stocks like crazy. Of course, that may all come crashing down when the current real estate bubble pops.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Not really an amazing coincidence. They probably lowered their expectations until they found anyone.
No, they merely stopped over-sampling immigrants at the start of the funnel. Amazon has a very strict process to avoid filling reqs by lowering expectations, the strictest of any place I've heard of. Every hire must be approved by an interviewer unrelated to the hiring team who's only job is to make sure the team doesn't lower the bar to get someone mediocre instead of an empty seat.
It's the only bit of Amazon culture that's positive IMO: there's never any sense that any of your peers were let in to meet some quota. They work their e.g. gender hiring targets at the front of the process, not the hiring decision.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
JS dev was certainly a dark art back in the day, and far more skill required than today. However, "web developers" who had read one book on the internet were a very common thing (and actually employed all over, before the bust). It was a very different world, looking back, given it's only 20 years ago.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent
Maybe, but you're still part of the highest-paid 10%. Cry me a fucking river.
Okay, so you are saying that at least 35% were white but not born US citizens, likely much higher given that as you say some of the non-white employees were likely US born.
This is just taking us even further from the published stats, which are legally mandated with consequences for them being inaccurate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Employees, not contractors. Contractors are not Human Resources, they're literally counted as an expense like a computer or a software license subscription.
That's why companies love contractors, they don't have to do a bunch of paperwork like pension funding or worry about compliance to various frameworks. When it comes to liability it's a "third party vendor" to blame and it doesn't count towards your H1B and other statistics.
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Don't you? Perhaps read a lot of CNN and Foxnews?
Sorry to be so harsh, but it's worth saying. Yes, there are bad workers coming here on Visa contracts. But in aggregate they're just fine. They also work longer hours and, since they're contractors, companies don't worry about burning them out. They also don't have to worry about them Unionizing and they have tremendous leverage of the employee since they can fire them at any time and send them back to their native country, usually with a large pay cut when they go back.
If these workers were a bad deal for companies then that would show up in the market. Companies that didn't use them would have poorer results and eventually the programs would wither and die. That is the exact opposite of what happens. Every year companies demand the caps be increased (and some, like Hillary Clinton, wanted no caps whatsoever). The companies that rely on them are some of the most profitable in human history.
The H1-B visa program works great for companies. But not so much for American workers. I think if we had more social programs and less dog-eat-dog capitalism that wouldn't be the case (e.g. if the average American worker got some sort of benefit from all that cheap labor), but as it stands it's a raw deal.
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And to balance your anecdote mine is how having worked in Seattle for 20+ years the IT staff I've known at Microsoft, Amazon, and dozens of lesser known companies, has been overwhelmingly American. Which doesn't always mean white, particularly in this part of the country.
the problem is rent seeking. Owning property is traditionally how working class Americans build wealth. You own your house and don't pay rent. Then you can take the money you save on rent and invest it in education, if not for yourself then your kids. This is how things worked for the boomers, but they seem to have broken that for Gen X.
.com boom and housing booms to store a little away. Those poor bastards walked out of college with $100k+ in debt into the worst economy since the 1930s. They tried to protest at that "Occupy Wall Street" thing and were shut down by the FBI & provisions in the patriot act. Man, what a world.
The boomers gave up their pensions for the promise of big cash payouts tax cuts and deregulation. The didn't get the tax cuts, and the deregulation tanked the economy and destroyed what little they had in their 401ks. They're taking their limited savings and buying houses to rent to Gen Xers and Millennials. Those Gen Xers & Millennials have even less money since they didn't have the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to build wealth like the boomers did. We got wiped out by the 2000 crash and outsourcing bonanza that shifted trillions to the 1%.
The Millennials have it especially bad. Us GenXers at least had the tail end of the
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Fuck em
It's got very little to do with immigration, and everything to do with development work getting easier and more common as a profession.
If it had nothing to do with immigration, companies wouldn't work so hard to bring in cheaper employees from abroad. But they do.
If it had nothing to do with immigration, nobody would squawk when we said "OK, we have enough now. We don't need anymore H1Bs, etc." But they do squawk.
If only there were some way to organize workers to increase their bargaining power when dealing with company owners so that they would get a fair portion of the profit from their labour. Imagine if IT workers had one unified voice and worked together for their own benefit so that the industry did not cause workers to burn out, age out and were able to have lives outside of serving their employer. Crazy talk on my part.
I rather suspect those stats are for "workers", not "developers", which especially for Amazon measures something different.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Also, why did they choose the founding of NetFlix as the starting point? That was in the middle of the dot-com bubble, where there was a relative dearth of technology workers and massive demand for them.
because they won't release those stats. They use contractors to hide it. The published stats are for FTEs. A huge part of the reason to use contractor firms for that is to hide those stats.
Anecdotally the last 4 places I've worked at are pushing 80%.
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If you aren't getting some company stock as part of your compensation then you have failed to negotiate a fair deal for yourself. When you are reviewing your job offer you need to look at what percentage of your base salary will be your target for bonus compensation, and consider how much of that will be stock versus cash (you need some cash to cover taxes on that stock lest you lose a third of it to the tax man when it vests).
It almost as if when you have to pay the janitors a minimum wage, that money has to come from someone else's pay packet.
they won't hire me for programming gigs. One guy said the Indians were "Java Savants". It was mostly the new guys who didn't realize they were committing a crime. I've also seen job postings specifically asking for H1-Bs (posted where the other H1-Bs were to see it and pass it along back home).
My State doesn't really have a labor department and with a Whitehouse packed full of ex-Goldman Sachs employees I haven't bothered to report it. I'm not so naive that I think anything is going to be done. I've been showing up at my state's primary elections to try and get folks like this in office since they refuse corporate PAC money. I figure that's a good place to start, no more politicians who get bought off.
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I was making minimum wage ($5 per hour IIRC) as a dishwasher in 1997. If I was still a dishwasher, I would be making 3X as much at minimum wage.
the ruling class have the Military. They'll send drone strikes and bomb you into pulp. Best case scenario you become like Afghanistan; a small group of terrorists pushed into the land nobody wants and occasionally coming down to blow up a school bus or something. Worst case the Military "joins" your revolution and you get Juntu and a change of masters for the worse.
If you want to stop this now's the time. Do it before turning to violence. Violence just plain doesn't work. You lose out to the "King Rat". The most violent of the violent. That's what happened with Mao & Stalin.
Vote. Especially in your primary. Look for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money (google "Our Revolution" and "Justice Democrats", sorry, but I don't think you'll find a GOP equivalent, yes, this is a partisan issue now...). Demand vote by mail if you don't already have it. Demand an end to voter suppression. If you're going to take back the country now's the time.
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NPC is just millenial for 'herp derp'. Nothing new about it, except the unhinged reaction it gets from derpers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You would be able to compete with those third worlders easily if your cost of living were lower.
And why is your cost of living so high?
To grossly simplify it: because taxes.
Your landlord pays taxes... and thus it is you who pays the property tax.
You pay income tax-- and a high one at that.
Your grocer and the farmer who produced the food pay taxes... and thus it is you who pays the tax on food.
Your computer, your chair, your phone, and all the other goods you bought... you paid taxes for those.
I'm no economist, but it seems to me that the only reason first worlder's are having a hard time competing for jobs is that we must make so much more money than a third worlder because we have little choice because everything is so much more expensive here... and I put that down to taxation as a major driver of the increased cost.
If you chopped out most of the taxes you pay then you'd be much closer to a third worlder in terms of how much money you need to maintain your life and thus you could more easily compete for jobs-- you live here next to the office and you have a great first world education; these make you more valuable.
The whole thing is a cherry pick. What was happening in 1997 in SI valley? (First dotcom boom, seat warmers made six figures.)
Compare todays pay to 2001 and you get a very different answer.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's been said California pioneers many things that other states later follow. And we see all these new companies in new buildings developing new technologies but surrounded by tent cities and people living in RVs and cars on the streets. Will this become the norm of 21st century living standards? So far it seems ***nobody*** has any idea how to deal with this imbalance. There may be articles about homeless and certain charity drives but nobody knows how to deal with large companies buying up portions of cities and accumulating billions more.
mfwright@batnet.com
In other terms: the US has accumulated an undue share of global wealth (by a myriad of reasons, prominently featuring luck, malignancy, savagery, brutality and kleptocracy, which would take ages to go over) and therefore looks like the tallest peak where to shelter from the global disaster. Also many, if not most migrants only care about their next meal and long-term planning does not figure much in their actions.
VS Heinlein
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Robert A Heinlein
You are right about something. The U.S. is dangerously close to allowing that kind of bad luck here, and if we go it will be the collapse of Rome all over again.
Way to make it about yourself! The article isn't about Indians on H1-Bs taking your coding jerbs but about non-tech salaries for people living in the Valley (as in the physical place) not keeping up or even falling over time.
It's bad because it's usually pushed by xenophobic morons such as yourself based on no evidence whatsoever.
> Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997
How much does a job pay?
In every profession, there is an enourmous range of salaries.
1. How do you decide "how much" a job pays? is the method used in 1997 the same as the method used now? is the method reasonable?
2. Are the jobs considered now the same as the jobs considered in 1997? no professions omitted, none added?
3. Are all professions included? could it be there are large changes in pay which have not been recorded?
> despite one of the nation's strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average.
I don't know, but if there are strong factors which would indicate an opposing outcome, it can be a hint a study is incorrect.
> employees in the middle of Silicon Valley's income ladder have been hit hardest as their inflation-adjusted wages declined between 12 and 14 percent over the past 20 years
Assuming this is true, what happened to living costs over that period? has the price of living decreased, which means people are paid less in real terms but in fact are wealther anyway?
The first thing which comes to mind is high rents in the Valley, but I would guess if you're middle-income you could be commuting and live somewhere cheaper.
> Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found.
How is this calculated? are we including for example the annual product of Apple, which is a global company, and then using this to say the income in the region has increased hugely?
Is "region" here Silicon Valley or California as a whole?
> In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent.
What does it mean that money "went to workers"? how is this calculated? is it calculated reasoninably, or is someone trying to make the figures say what they want? does it include non-wage benefits? what about social security taxes?
Assuming these numbers are correct and meaningful (see above for some ideas on the unknowns), two data points are not useful. Perhaps it's normal for this figure to vary by 20% over a few decades, and a 4% change is both normal and small.
There are too many assumptions, too many unasked questions, to draw any conclusion from such information as has been given.
my Dad got screwed by his. Had to go back to work when the market crash took his retirement out. That's kind of the problem with 401ks. The stock market is too cyclic to rely on for retirement. The creator of the things himself said that. 401k was a tool for high income earners (think $300k+/yr in 2018 dollars) to save a little extra. It was never supposed to be a primary retirement tool; it got turned into one when the rich stole our pensions.
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1. They got tax cuts
2. 401Ks rebounded from both busts
3. They're in debt because of ever-rising college fees for ever more bloated administration.
4. Occupy Wall Street was never more than a tiny handful of hard-left loons designed to attack Romney and withered away on its on when Soros et. al. decided to fund a new batch of loons.
Don't conflate "white" with US-born.
... and don't conflate "brown" with foreign.
Santa Clara County was one of the main areas settled by refugees from the Vietnam War. That was over 40 years ago. Those refugees now have US-born adult children and grandchildren. So that Vietnamese guy in the next cubicle is most likely a native born US citizen.
Santa Clara County has a Chinese community that dates back to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and a Hispanic community that goes back centuries before that.
Many organizations do not follow US Census Bureau standards by calling everyone who was born on the Asian continent "Asian". Indians are Caucasian and by and large are as white as most Mediterranean people.
The issue isn't really race at this point, it is citizens versus imported indentured servants.
People who make decisions about our lives, and attend yearly secretive meetings that bar the press, and where you're not invited.
To grossly simplify it: because taxes.
Meh. I hate taxes as much as the next 3 guys, but it's more than that. Look at medical care: almost 20% of workers in the US work in health care and related fields, vs almost no one in many countries. No matter how you slice it, that's going to make living here a lot more expensive. Of course, we get something for that. (Now, if we had single-payer, all that cost would in fact be "taxes", but that's sort of beside the point: 20% is 20% regardless).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't know why... I mean, he completes the same task faster. Surely that makes him more efficient?
I don't normally reply or mod ACs up, but I think your post is the most insightful answer to the GP so far. I had come here to point out the same thing.
While I agree that globalization definitely exerts downward pressure on wages, that doesn't explain why the price of real estate has grown so much faster than inflation. One of the reasons is speculation, the other is (too) easy credit, along with tax incentives to buy homes. However, I think that one of the fundamental reasons for the increase is population growth, like you outlined in your post.
which is why you won't see much talk about this outside of forums like /. Even talking about it is heavily discouraged. It doesn't help that you're inevitably lumped in with racists. If anything I really, really wish racism would go away so we could have an honest discussion about immigration and it's impact on wages.
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Get ready for civil war Americans...
You rent not own. The landlord does not have to renew your lease.
Would it be ok for the government to use eminent domain to take over and displace an ethnic neighborhood to build a park or a sports stadium?
When I was at Oracle in the 2000s, for tech staff, about 15% would have been from the Bay Area, 25% from elsewhere in the US, 30% white from other western countries, 25% Indian, 5% misc and 0% Hispanic.
The US's ability to import talent was what made it great. It was a brain drain from other countries.
Interesting that although almost half the general population was Hispanic, 0 of them were in tech, despite often being third generation. It is hard to get ahead if you start at the bottom.
It was always one days worth of fence jumpers made into a big deal by the media on both sides.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Okay, so you are saying that at least 35% were white but not born US citizens, likely much higher given that as you say some of the non-white employees were likely US born.
This is just taking us even further from the published stats, which are legally mandated with consequences for them being inaccurate.
Most Indians self-report as Caucasian.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
"Tech salaries are up 32% after adjusting for inflation."
Obvious fake news. Everyone knows Silicon Valley tech worker nominal wages have been stagnant for 10+ years, while cost of living more than doubled.
It's a race to the bottom - and we're winning!
You're really obsessed with race and "whiteness", aren't you? He's said several times, and made it clear with details, he's NOT talking about the color of anyone's skin.
But hey, to a hardcore racist like you, EVERYTHING is about skin color. Go home, nazi - we don't want to listen to any more of your racist crap.
"jerbs"
Found the richie rich private school Democrat nepotist!
They're still coming, but the court pointed out that if they get inside the country, Congress already said they can apply for refugee status.
And Trump sent the military, but none of the jobs the military is allowed to do were needed. So now they're maybe going to have the military try to give them medical care instead.
Because they don't want to look like they gave up.
The funny part; half a million people illegally cross the border every month. The caravan that is "invading" consists of about 2000 people so poor and frightened that they traveled as a group for safety, instead of hiring gangs to smuggle them across. These are the ones that scare Orange Man and the Frog People the most.
Then why are you all cherry picking tech workers when the article is about all workers...
It even mentioned tech workers were getting more and everyone else less.
Did you all miss the entire point in your race to rant away on your pet troll topics?
Really? Government teaches people the processes in my company now?
Where do I sign up for that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Really? Government teaches people the processes in my company now?
Well, they do indirectly. The indoctrination centers they call schools provide an environment where the kids have to learn about processes, and figure out how to follow them at least enough to not fail. And this isn't just the explicit processes like school rules. Kids can pick up the implicit processes that goes on with all the social interaction and hierarchies, preparing them to engage in petty office politics!
Software is a global industry. You can keep out foreign programmers, but you can't stop them programming, and their code is competing with yours.
Come back when people become replaceable without training.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
CIGNA , Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc All of their IT force is around 70% Immigrants , sometimes I felt like i was in a foreign country