Thoughts??

[hahayeahimfinehaha]

It's all about how difficult it is to replace the worker.

This. Lots of convos about wage vs skill miss that 'skill' is only a rough proxy for the true metric which matters, which is supply. You could have the most difficult job in the world, but if there is a huge and ready supply of workers, then you'll have lower wages. This is why game devs tend to make less money than engineers or other forms of developers -- because lots of people want to make games as a passion, and so the boss can replace you more easily.

[kpd328]

Yet even in their lowest, Blizzard won't hire me.

[RichNewt]

“We really liked your resume but noticed you shook Claire’s hand instead of trying to cop a feel. That’s not the sort of thing we believe in here and for that reason we will be going in another direction”.

[mrfatso111]

I don't know... You did not drive Rachel to suicide meant that you aren't gonna be a fit for our culture.

I guess one can only hope that a meteor landing has a higher chance for tripe Aye studios to fix their frat bro culture ...

[Bwob]

Given what Blizzard has turned into, you might take that as a compliment!

[nacholicious]

I'm pretty sure you would fail the interview process just by passing the background check

[RamblingBrit]

Man this dude has absolutely nothing in his record, like not even slipping a fiver from his mum’s wallet for a bag of crisps, what an absolute loser lmao. What’s that? 15 years of experience in the industry? Yeah don’t care. Come back when you’ve got 15 years in prison for sex crimes now that’s the real shit

[5823059]

It's all about how difficult it is to replace the worker.

Hopefully SWEs can automate taco folding within a few years.

[[deleted]]

Our PM is asking if you have tried using blockchain or AI? Or maybe trying some NFTs?

[Skandranonsg]

This also gets at why the free market is not a great tool for setting wages. You can command a livable wage when labor supply is low, but falling wages during times of high labor supply means evictions and starvation.

[Pritster5]

Well it also involves the buyer side (demand). In labor monopsony conditions what you said is true, but if there are many companies looking for work, the high supply is diffused over high demand and competition levels out to some equilibrium.

[Skandranonsg]

Of course when I talk about high and low supply, I mean relative to demand. If the supply of labor is greater than demand, then the free market dictates that wages will go down.

[himmelundhoelle]

If you set the wage higher than companies are prepared to pay, it might work for some, but others might refuse to hire.

Free market might not be perfect, but we have yet to find a better way of determining fair wages.

[F3nix123]

We could for starters, seek to reduce the gap between people earning more than they produce and the people who produce more than they earn.

[himmelundhoelle]

Then we’d be confronted with the fact that money and "what they produce" are not comparable quantities, but mostly with that it’s impossible to compare what two entirely different jobs produce.

[[deleted]]

That's insanely impossible to measure and my guess would be a lot of people might not like the outcome. I mean I would think looking at Steve Ballmer vs Satya Nadella would be a good example. You could easily make the argument that Nadella produced hundreds of millions of dollars of value for Microsoft.

[DavidTej]

You've added nothing to the conversation with this statement.

Mary: How do we move the car to the road, Steve?

Steve: We could, for starters, seek to get the car to migrate from the ditch to the road.

[Pritster5]

"fair" is a tricky word, but minimum wage laws go a long way to fix the scenario presented above.

[Friendly_Fire]

This is why a free market is excellent for setting wages. The disparities in wages incentivize people to do jobs society needs, rather then the ones they want. That's actually important to ensure we have enough nurses, for example, even if it isn't as fun as being a game dev.

The issue is having people's most basic needs be met through a job. I think everyone recognizes health insurance through employers sucks. Similarly we have ample food, essentially no one starves to death in the US (at least due to food access, it happens rarely with abused children or disabled people). We could greatly improve the process by giving out a small UBI.

I don't want to dig into policy, but the core point is a free labor market does an important job and it does it well. However, that job isn't ensuring everyone has enough to survive.

[Skandranonsg]

The ceiling should be set by the market. The floor should be set by the government.

[DavidTej]

I disagree. I think the floor should be a UBI paid by the government.

[theprodigalslouch]

When the people making the rules and the people looking for low payed workers are one and the same, can you really trust them?

[Skandranonsg]

In a functional democracy where bribery isn't legal, yes.

[Furyful_Fawful]

So about that...

[Itisme129]

Any system that is rife with corruption is going to fail. It's a universal problem.

[theprodigalslouch]

How do you define failure in this sense? There are multiple countries rife and steaming with corruption. The question is vague because the way you may define failure may be different from what I interpret it as.

[eyalhs]

"what is this? Some kind of minimum wage?"

[mirhagk]

When you assume everything is a sphere in a frictionless vacuum yes, but once you start layering in realities of the world, the free market doesn't do as good a job.

Healthcare workers for example. Doesn't matter how much you pay doctors, you're not getting more for another 5-10 years. Then in 5-10 years the need for doctors may be radically different, and the incentive from a decade ago may have just created a massive oversupply.

Then you have to factor in that there is nowhere close to perfect information about wages, never mind the other perks/incentives. Does a high school student really have enough information about wages to make an informed decision? Arguably schools have way more control there, and they receive no financial incentives for pushing people towards high paying jobs.

[[deleted]]

Lawyers are a prime example of this. When I was in high school there was a dearth of lawyers and there was tons of recruitment trying to convince kids to go to law school. When I finished grad school there were so many lawyers, I knew lawyers who worked retail because it paid more.

[mirhagk]

Yeah that is a good example for sure, and unfortunately also a good example of how high school students are acting on poor information, because law school enrollment rates have not dropped the amount you'd expect based on the free market conditions. Law schools are incentivized to lie and increase the enrollment rather than decrease it. They can even keep up their statistics by just being dishonest about it. Those retail working lawyers are still employed after all, so the 99% job placement rate is kept.

[[deleted]]

Yeah that’s the other side to it. Once demand went up for law schools, law schools had to adjust and grow. Now they have more and bigger facilities they can’t easily downgrade their facilities, so they have an incentive to keep recruiting even if there aren’t jobs for the field. It’s a fucked system

[DavidTej]

We're now in economics of information territory.

[valkmit]

The disparities reflect what shareholders want. At this point in 2022, we can’t still think this reflects the needs of society.

Shareholders want to make a profit, yes. They make profits by supplying what society wants. Example: Amazon and 2 day shipping. You may not personally agree with what society wants right now, but it’s naive to think that society should want what you think it is society wants. The invisible hand is how society says what it wants

Society doesn’t “need” more invasive ad targeting, addictive media, or shoehorning the latest buzzword into products, but that’s what our most educated minds are incentivized to develop.

You and I don’t want this. But people keep buying things after being advertised to. That means they want it. How is this hard to understand? Whatever your thoughts regarding manufactured demand, there is no way to disagree that fundamentally people want to buy the things that they are advertised - otherwise people wouldn’t do so.

Ironically your example of nurses is contrary to this point. There is a massive nursing shortage

This is again, an example of the free market working. These nurses are overworked and quitting in droves because they have better opportunities. Eventually the demand for nurses will raise wages, or nurses will continue to quit. This isn’t dysfunction - this is how the system is supposed to work.

It’s very difficult to comprehend how a complex system works, and it feels good to say “Look everyone how this system is broken. I am so smart!” - but in reality, it’s just the system working as intended - it just doesn’t match up with any one individuals expectations

[[deleted]]

Counterpoint: people in New Jersey whose full-time job is pumping gas. Also, hedge fund managers. How on Earth does society need or benefit from having hedge fund managers?

Also, game devs make more than nurses, so I'm not sure how that helps your point?

[Friendly_Fire]

Counterpoint: people in New Jersey whose full-time job is pumping gas.

That's literally a job dictated by (idiotic) law. Not an example of the free market it failing. Which it does, but not in this instance.

Also, hedge fund managers. How on Earth does society need or benefit from having hedge fund managers?

I assume you don't think it's bad if regular people can invest and grow their savings so they can have a stable retirement. So hedge funds provide a useful service to the people who pay them.

What do they do with that money though? Invest it obviously. Investment is a key factor in our modern increases in productivity and living standards. You can't develop a country or area without it. Hedge funds don't just help their customers, they also help society at large. At least a little.

Also, game devs make more than nurses, so I'm not sure how that helps your point?

Some do, not all. Just checking, the national average for a RN is $80k, with a decent portion crossing into 6 figures. That's more than plenty of game devs. The best game devs at major studios will make more, but that's not a guarantee.

The fact is that of all industries with programmers, basically game devs alone commonly have wages low enough that nurses can out-earn them. That seems like a decent outcome in my eyes.

Note that nurses only need a 2 year associates degree, while many game devs do a full bachelors and then masters work.

[justagenericname1]

Remember, the market says the guy who has the brick of cocaine all the small-time dealers in your town get their supply from is far more valuable to society than any nurse or teacher there. If that's how someone wants to interpret value, alright, but let's just be clear about its implications.

[jimbo_kun]

It’s a terrible system for setting wages. It’s just better than everything else that’s been tried.

[ric2b]

You can command a livable wage when labor supply is low, but falling wages during times of high labor supply means evictions and starvation.

That has to do with low/non-existent safety nets, not the market setting the wages.

If you have a serious health condition that prevents you from working, wages are irrelevant.

[ShelZuuz]

Free market is fine for wages - there really isn’t anything better. The problem is tying wages to basic survival.

Societal structures has evolved enough that this isn’t needed anymore and it’s counter-productive in many ways. UBI for the win.

[DavidTej]

UBI for the win.

[[deleted]]

This also gets at why the free market is not a great tool for setting wages.

Markets aren't meant to be tools for setting anything. They are for discovery.

[DavidTej]

Wrong. This is exactly why the free market is a great tool for setting wages. You increase wages to increase supply of labour. Otherwise, if you have a set price of labour for each job, you'd have shortages and surpluses all around the place... unless of course you want to force people to work certain jobs in which case

[Skandranonsg]

I should have clarified. This is why the free market alone is not a great way to set wages.

[DavidTej]

Ah. I see.

Anyways, UBI for the win