Slashdot Mirror
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."
nuff said
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
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!
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.
I can't tell if you're joking, but Netflix started as DVD rental by mail service. It was several years before they added a streaming component.
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.
Businesses were throwing wheel-barrels of money at Y2K conversions at that point.
I hate being a grammar nazi, but that article in the link looks like it was written by a third grader. There's enough misspellings to make an editor want to kill himself.
“High prices, which out to be a cost of doing business for them, are actually a key revenue driver,”
"is telling clients that the start-up economy is has turned into a sophisticated"
Makes it hard to take seriously.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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.
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)
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.
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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
This.
I now make about 2/3 of what I could earn in that Silly Valley. But I paid about 100k for my house and have living expenses of roughly 1000 bucks a month.
In other words, I have more money left at the end of the month. Despite our crazy high "socialist" taxes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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%.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
RTFA. This is not caused by H1-Bs. Salaries for tech workers have gone up, and according to TFA they are "thriving". Tech salaries are up 32% after adjusting for inflation.
What TFA is talking about is everyone else. People that work in Sunnyvale grocery stores, or San Jose car dealerships, or Palo Alto restaurants. It is workers in the non-tech economy that are doing poorly, and those people aren't competing with H1-Bs.
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.