To put it in perspective, the average income in Kenya is around $1.25 an hour and tbh (as a Kenyan) I really can't see it as a bad thing. A lot of people here live in abject poverty, they live in situations you can't really begin to imagine. So any sort of help coming our way is good.
I don't think your comment makes it any better. With all respect but given the HDI of Kenya, I don't think your average Kenyan worker is that versed in English, has a laptop and an Internet connection. $2/hour for a company like OpenAI (which can, most likely, afford more) is pure modern slavery.
It's not slavery though, since nobody is forced to take the job. This clearly was something Kenyan workers were happy to have as an option, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the job. If everyone did what OpenAI did and moved work like this to Kenya, salary would quickly go up. If few companies moved their work there, comp will stay low. It seems the low price is one of the main attractors right now. So shaming companies into paying more, likely will just move the work elsewhere and leave workers there with $0/hr.
That’s some BS that we were fed about competitiveness. I used to buy that BS at some point. But these companies (and the people having them) have a choice and they do have enough money.
One of the companies I’m following now is Oxide (https://oxide.computer/careers). They pay everyone the same salary ($200k) regardless of position. It’s a bit extreme but am following them precisely for that. It’d be interesting to see how Oxide fares down the road.
It’s funny that some years ago that software developers were complaining that they were getting paid less because of politics and because people who talked controlled the businesses and the money. It’s funny because now that the table turned, most of them are doing the same thing.
> It’d be interesting to see how Oxide fares down the road.
I have been hearing about Oxide since 2019 [1]. 3 years later, it seems they don't yet have paying customers that one can read about. And with a tag line like: "Servers as they should be" I'm inclined to ask: "Servers as they should be [by whom?]".
Is the demand for such ideal servers driven by engineers/sys admins or by businesses (i.e. businesses who are currently being served poorly by existing options in the market)?
Is the demand for such ideal servers enough to make them a sustainable business, especially with the enormous amounts they'll likely be pouring into R&D before they can bring a product to market that lives up to their ideals?
If you are asking "does anyone want a rack-scale computer?" the (short) answer is: yes, they do. The on-prem market has been woefully underserved -- and there are plenty of folks who are sick of Dell/HPE/VMware/Cisco, to say nothing of those who are public cloud borne and wondering if they should perhaps own some of their own compute rather than rent it all.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/holistic-bo...
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-oxide-s...
[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringup-lab...
[3] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/more-tales-...
[4] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/another-lpc...
[5] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-pragmat...
[6] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...
[7] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-sidecar...
[8] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron