You’re completely ignoring the customer (people like you) in favor of the (already mega rich) corporations. What a mindset.

> You’re completely ignoring the customer (people like you) in favor of the (already mega rich) corporations. What a mindset.

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?

Car companies already and always have made money from continued support of their products. Car maintenance and repairs and spare parts and the work already cost money. So, not even remotely the same.

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...)?

>to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation

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?

High prices require both a buyer to be able to pay and the buyer to have to pay (due to lack of sufficient sellers). High profit margins provide the first condition.

So you're fine with fucking over the customer, as long as you get your cut of the compensation? Is that what you're saying?

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?

Who cares about your compensation or your corporation's margins? We want to own our goddamn cars.

Your compensation has very little to do with the profit margins of your well-established employer.

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

If you want a higher salary, find a job and a company that will give you one. Don't advocate for your company to charge their customers for something that costs them $0 to provide. I guarantee that things like that will turn the world into a place none of us want to live in over the long run.

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.

It's fine if they get more profit from having a better and more unique product for some sub-market. Everyone is happy in that case.

Not by locking features.

I have zero fucks to give for the profits of corporations, and the idea that any of this money will make it into the hands of engineers is ludicrous. If you want higher salaries start a union, otherwise the people at the top (executives + shareholders) will just use any extra profits to pay themselves more. There's no incentive for them to do anything else.

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.

It's fine for automotive companies to maximize their profit margin. If they have smaller margins than google, that's probably because google is nearly a monopoly, and there's fierce competition in the automotive space.

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.

I think it might be if automobiles weren’t such a necessary item in many parts of the world. Or, for many people in North America you require a car to engage in society.

What does that have to do with anything? If you sell a product and then try to put a subscription on hardware that is already in the customer's hands, that's scummy.

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.