> "It made me want to look at income disparity, power and moral disengagement. Does this income gap help the leaders to feel comfortable setting up policies tha

> "It made me want to look at income disparity, power and moral disengagement. Does this income gap help the leaders to feel comfortable setting up policies that hurt the people at the bottom?" An alternative hypothesis: Higher compensation can instill a sense of pressure that makes a person more on edge, stressed, and curt with people, regardless if you're an engineer or a manager or something else. I've got anecdotes both ways, but generally speaking, whenever I've been working on something with lots of pressure or higher compensation, I've noticed myself being unintentionally more on edge and a little shorter with people. The best example I can think of off the top of my head - I spoke at a few conferences from I think '06 to '08. I always tried to be really nice to all the staffers and volunteers there, assistants, everyone making it happen. I remember how when someone who was slightly important was nice to me I always remembered that and felt good, and made a big effort to do so. Largest conference I ever spoke at my hands were shaking bad before I went to speak. Actually, my hands regularly shook before public speaking, I broke a water glass like this once. But this time it was bad. Someone came to chat with me, and I just said, "N-n-n-not now. Sorry. Later. Maybe later." I tried to mumble out something about having the shakes but it didn't come across really well. Now I'm comfortable admitting I've got the shakes before speaking and I fight through it by acknowledging it and fighting through it. But how many people push that inwards? The result comes out, you get shorter with people. So I think the author came in with a perceived notion - executive compensation might lead to meanness. Then she picked metrics that would indicate an atmosphere of intense pressure and labeled these signs of "meanness" - whereas maybe cause and effect runs the other way? Maybe people under pressure are more curt and "mean"? Now, I might not want to work somewhere like that. Or, if that place did produce the best results and offered me the best mix of compensation, advancement, travel, and furthering my other goals - well, maybe I would want to work there for a little while. The more interesting question to me is how effective these cultures are at accomplishing their goals - I wouldn't mind spending time in a pressure cooker for a while if it furthered my goals. (But then, it might not - but it'd be interesting to see some results; I'm going to go off on a limb and guess Apple has a more intense culture than Yahoo, for instance, but also much more prestige and opportunity these days)