Somewhat off topic, but to your question about why we don't value certain kinds of work...
Culture provides a kind of distributed wage-fixing. The free market fallacy gives people the idea that wages are optimized and reflect true economic value. But in reality employers pay as little as they can get away with.
Imagine two societies. In the first, its generally accepted that people in any position, including nurses and receptionists and customer support people, can create immense business value if they accel at their jobs. A customer service agent who makes big impacts on retention could expect to make a six figure salary. Others who are less useful might make minimum wage.
Now imagine another world where the general social consensus is that your job title implies a ceiling on how much value you can bring to an organization. In this world a programmer can make millions but a customer service rep is capped at $25 or so per hour. General belief is that if you want to make more you can't just create more value, you have to get a different job title.
In the first world, corporations have to compete for every employee, and overall compensation costs are higher. In the later world, only the top slice of jobs are subject to market forces, and costs go down. It also has social side effects that appeal to the ruling class, but that's another story.
I would argue that businesses who think this way are actually leaving money on the table, and that by removing title-based compensation caps, you have a more accurate picture of the economics of your business and can harvest more value, but most people don't seem to think that way.
> In the first, its generally accepted that people in any position, including nurses and receptionists and customer support people, can create immense business value if they accel at their jobs. A customer service agent who makes big impacts on retention could expect to make a six figure salary. Others who are less useful might make minimum wage.
Sorry, but as a matter of real-world fact, individual receptionists and customer service representatives can't create immense business value. Or rather, the individuals in those roles might be able to, but only if they are moved to different, higher-leverage roles. (If you can retain hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of business by talking to individual customers, "customer service" is not your job title. Maybe "sales" is.)
The market has two parts: supply and demand. If you do a job that just about anybody could do, you don't get paid much because there are a lot of people who can do a job just about anybody could do.
That's largely because of the deliberate deskilling and commoditization of labor by capital. If you structure your business so that most labor roles have low requirements and low productivity, you shouldn't be surprised when you have low productivity.
Of course, this model fails to account for all the low-paid but high-skilled employees in technical, high-productivity roles, who are being quite simply exploited.
> That's largely because of the deliberate deskilling and commoditization of labor by capital. If you structure your business so that most labor roles have low requirements and low productivity, you shouldn't be surprised when you have low productivity.
Is anyone surprised by this? Is anyone expecting receptionists to deliver millions of dollars of value to their business? There are just some roles that have to be done where the value delivered per worker is very low. Labor intensive work. And, in fact, some of it is paid proportional to the value delivered. Fruit pickers are paid proportional to the amount of fruit they pick, for instance.
> Of course, this model fails to account for all the low-paid but high-skilled employees in technical, high-productivity roles, who are being quite simply exploited.
This is why the myth being spread that "anyone can code" is so long term dangerous. Because it doesn't matter that it isn't true (beyond trivial stuff like websites): it will still drive down what people in general think programmers are worth.
Consider that you don't see "Anyone can be a physician" campaigns. Then again, physicians are unionised, if you consider the AMA a union. Why is it that unions are anathema in the programmer community when you can see that they work nicely for other professions?
First a professional association like the AMA restrict supply by demanding substantial credentials. So you wouldn't be allowed to work with any developer without a degree from a program recognised by the association. That means that you could get kicked out for working with people like John Carmack or Steve Wozniak before he went back to school.
Next, in the US most unions were built around unskilled or semi skilled labour and the culture reflects that. So seniority is king and productivity suffers. Unions will fight to keep old obsolete technologies around to protect existing workers.
That doesn't produce an environment conducive to making cool things.
when I startup company I was at years ago started failing and laying people off, someone proposed unionizing to prevent it. In the serious discussions that followed, many reasons came out. I don't agree with them all, but these were floated by people at that time:
1. Unions are about more than simply the jobs 'n' wages. There's lots of favoritism, a whole new layer of politics beyond the question of "who works enough to earn their paycheck".
2. There was insufficient inertia. A chicken and egg problem. No one was used to unions and no one knew exactly what to do or how to determine if it was being done properly.
3. Some people were uncomfortable having a more exact spotlight shone on their work. In more physical, less individualized jobs like plumbing, pipe-fitting, etc., people are more interchangeable and less mysterious. Programmers at this company preferred to endure the risk of layoff rather than have their art/handiwork/craftwork get recast as something that another individual could do just as well.
4. At least in the startup we were in, failure was more of an anticipated outcome than other professions. Unlike a tradesman, most of us didn't invest our whole lives in a set of skills with a known or "background" level of demand. iow, many of us just said "fuck it" and went to a new startup or a new white collar job.
5. Elitism: At least some people viewed unions as something "lower-class" people have to do to earn their wages. Some people at this company felt they were of high class and didn't need "lower" themselves by unionized. (yes the cognitive dissonance here is strong).
Personally, I still don't know the answer, but it can only help us to give these objections some thought from time to time in considering the next several decades of our trade.
"when I [sic] startup company I was at years ago started failing and laying people off, someone proposed unionizing to prevent it."
Attitudes like this is why I feel unions are harmful. The company is failing, but people want a union to step in to prevent cost-cutting via layoffs? Sounds like a sure-fire way to destroy any hope the company has from recovering. Now everyone loses their their jobs.
Union-mentality seems totally divorced from business sense. Union employees demands take precedence over business wants and needs - e.g. seniority takes precedence over competence, wages forced to be higher than competitors who pay market-rates, etc. It's a long-term spiral into company failure
Possibly. But that's a different issue. The owners of the company, unlike the employees, have invested their personal hard-earned savings in the venture. It's their responsibility to be monitoring management to make sure that funds are spent appropriately.
Not as simple as that. A founder invests his savings, but that might be less than the total salary difference for employees and the market rate. So they have given up more than he has invested, but for a fraction of a fraction of his stake. How is that a sensible deal for them? There needs to be some balance.
"A founder invests his savings, but that might be less than the total salary difference for employees and the market rate [...] There needs to be some balance"
Irrelevant. The employer made an offer of employment. The employee weighed the pros-and-cons of the offer and accepted or not. "Balance" makes no more sense the the kid I pay to mow my lawn asking for a balance between my household and himself.
"How is that a sensible deal for them?"
Not for me or you to say. Each and every employee needs to take personal responsibility and determine whether or not a employment "deal" is sensible for their situation. If an employer is making all non-sensible offers, they won't attract a quality workforce and will fail. Market-force in action. Happens every day.
The reason the AMA gets to limit the number of seats at med school is because the government limits the number of residency spots there are. You can't be a real doc without doing a residency.
The American Bar Association got sued for antitrust violations for trying to restrict the number of law schools.
Culture provides a kind of distributed wage-fixing. The free market fallacy gives people the idea that wages are optimized and reflect true economic value. But in reality employers pay as little as they can get away with.
Imagine two societies. In the first, its generally accepted that people in any position, including nurses and receptionists and customer support people, can create immense business value if they accel at their jobs. A customer service agent who makes big impacts on retention could expect to make a six figure salary. Others who are less useful might make minimum wage.
Now imagine another world where the general social consensus is that your job title implies a ceiling on how much value you can bring to an organization. In this world a programmer can make millions but a customer service rep is capped at $25 or so per hour. General belief is that if you want to make more you can't just create more value, you have to get a different job title.
In the first world, corporations have to compete for every employee, and overall compensation costs are higher. In the later world, only the top slice of jobs are subject to market forces, and costs go down. It also has social side effects that appeal to the ruling class, but that's another story.
I would argue that businesses who think this way are actually leaving money on the table, and that by removing title-based compensation caps, you have a more accurate picture of the economics of your business and can harvest more value, but most people don't seem to think that way.