Is it not OK for the automotive folks to get to the same level as their FAANG brethren?

Disclaimer: I work for an automotive OEM.

No, I want the company I work for to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation. Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?

You can complain about any company that wants to continuously make money for nothing in return. Just look at ink printers. Rent seeking sure is attractive, yes.

Nobody owes you anything. There are MANY jobs that deserve such high salaries far more, just try anything related to caring for sick and/or old people. It's just that "deserve" has got nothing to do with anything!

Also, look at all the other countries and companies. That kind of complaint to me sounds more like a multi-millionaire looking at the even grander mansion next door and claiming they deserve at least that much too and that the world is so unfair to them. You picked the very, very few where some people make even more. It's hardly all the tens of thousands of employees of the FAANGs that all make a few hundred thousand, just a small fraction.

Cars also are not nearly as innovative. They are much farther along their product cycle. Oh sure, they did a lot of work, but the car still uses about as much fuel as it always did, and gets you barely any faster than it always did from A to B. But all the entertainment you get now! And all the electronics! Yeah okay. But the end product still doesn't deliver that much more value compared to a 1970s car. Some of them were actually more comfortable, easier to use, and easier to look out of. I do understand that there's been a lot of work on safety too since then, and that deaths went down. But I didn't claim there was zero innovation, did I? Only that you compared yourself with the latest and greatest new tech, such as AI, and in that elevated niche you again picked their highest paid people, and that seriously is your chosen comparison?

Oh and when we are looking at all the innovation in cars, may I point to the discussions - right here on HN too - about software, UIs, and cheating German car makers (I'm German too by the way), and how German car makers are big losers in China, and quality issues in German cars (https://newsingermany.com/german-car-manufacturers-fail-us-s...)?

Why would they do this? They have enough labor working for the money they give already. If their profits doubled, why on earth would their labor costs go up too instead of them just keeping the money?

As long as tech companies do it, I guess it's fine if everybody does it, because profits, and you get a cut of it?

(Tesla is profitable. Uber is not. Who pays their software engineers more?)

Also, if you think that your employer is going to increase your compensation due to anti-features like this... well, hate to break it to you, but they won't. They'll pocket that money and/or distribute it to shareholders. Your salary is, roughly, the smallest number that they can offer you to get you to do the job, and has very little to do with their profit margins.

> Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?

I would attack any company that charges customers extra for nothing.

Not by locking features.

And as a software developer whose income is propped up by adjacency to FAANG: we're paid an inordinate amount compared to our contribution to society. The vast majority of software development makes rich people richer at the expense of everyone else. I've managed to avoid the most egregiously harmful companies my entire career, but the idea that FAANG pay or any pay is meritocratic is just wrong. I'm paid well because my work pays my clients well, not because of anyone involved "deserves" our high salaries.

A key difference here is a car is a product that we buy and own. It doesn't cost Mercedes an ongoing cost every month to support these hardware features they change a monthly fee to unlock, and so the monthly fee doesn't provide additional value. To the extent it does, it's because the manufacturers are artifically limiting their product. Compare this to, say, and Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. With that, you're getting access to cloud services that costs Adobe to keep running, it also gets you access to new features and security updates. Whether or not you like Adobe's business model, this provides a justification for the subscription model that is simply absent in the automotive space.

Going back to the competition point, even if you just look at the monthly fee as cost shifting, it lets the manufacturers advertise a price that's lower than what the consumer is going to pay.

If you put a subscription on something where you have to continuously maintain server capacity and build and distribute new features, then that... seems fair?

Not gonna claim that there's no rent-seeking going on in the software industry, certainly. And they're scummy.

But once I'm sold a car, every bit of hardware in that car should work without artificial limits (well, modulo safety and legal concerns). Sure, it's fair for a car maker to charge for map updates for the navigation, real-time traffic information, remote functionality, etc. -- stuff that requires on-going cost to the manufacturer. But charging a subscription to send a few bits of information to the software in the car to give the motor more power? Robbery.

I ask these questions because often times people work themselves into a frenzy, and then take zero action. Hopefully you aren't one of them.

We can't all afford to devote our lives to activism. But change starts with education and we can be educators when these topics come up. That's not useless.

Nobody's asking you to do anything, except maybe stop with the ad-hominem attacks and participate in the conversation in a rational way.

I think a lot of people defend this because they themselves work for tech companies who's products or services are also profitable due to some for of rent-seeking which ensure great profits and wages that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

It is indeed hypocritical to criticize automakers for doing the same thing beloved tech companies are doing which is what makes them so profitable and nobody bats an eye.

A one-time car purchase costs the car company some capex upfront. They actually incur more cost running whatever DRM servers lock these motors down to prop up this extortionary business model.

We take issue with big techs locking down computers too. No problem with them running whatever they want on their servers but we want to run whatever we want on our computers too without their interference.

I would pay to get software not as a service. Fuck your updates, I don't want bloody updates that end up breaking my stuff and wasting my time. Give me one version, no updates and no support, and I will give you top dollars. If I want an update I'll come back to repeat the process again, giving you top dollars again, several years down the road.

Are big purchases every several years cheaper than a subscription? I don't know and I don't care. Sell me your fucking software as a fucking static product, I am happy to pay the premium for it.

Wait till you hear how many people it took to build Roaler Coaster Tycoon .... in assembly. Spoiler alert: 1; one; uno.

Why do you think it is strange?

As long as those people have morals, what’s wrong with that?

Since it's unavoidable, the best next thing is to design a system which takes greed as an input and outputs productivity. That system is called Capitalism and that is why it always wins.

mercedes isn't selling baby formulas or epipens

plenty of other brands will take your 100 years of 3rd world salary to give you some shiny vehicle

should I cry for some pampered millionaires who just want to drive faster?

The point is that everywhere outside of the powerhouse first world economies runs on second hand cars imported from those economies. I'd know - in my country most cars are ex-german cars. And then once we're done with them, they go to Ukraine(or they used to). Then after that they go to far east or Africa. Your 100k mercedes has 15 lives before it gets scrapped.

But you know what stops that chain early? If everything in the car has subscription and strong encryption to prevent messing with payment options, which "incidentally" will mean those cars can't be worked on by anyone other than the official garage. Wouldn't want anyone to pirate some subscription-only stuff now, would we.

I'm not mourning rich people wanting to drive fast - I'm mourning regular folks who will get these cars at 15-20 years old and find out that the heating seats don't work because Mercedes won't enable them on a "legacy" vehicle. Or it's from the wrong region so they can't do anything for you, sorry.

EV cars are most likely not going to be exported to have a second life.

Well, that's absolutely inevitable given how things are going. It might not be in the next 10 years, but in 30? Almost certainly guaranteed.

What reason do you have to believe that?

Where is this sea of simps? I don't see anyone defending this type of behavior.

Power imbalances mean that some people will use contracts to exploit others. Protecting people from that is valuable.

Certainly a Mercedes purchaser is not quite in the same league there, but it's not like we haven't heard of similar subscription ploys on lower-end cars too.