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I'm an average software developer in the USA. Would you please provide some examples of how my wealth is being redistributed to the already wealthy?
by snikeris 8y ago
I'm an average software developer in the USA. Would you please provide some examples of how my wealth is being redistributed to the already wealthy?
- protonimitate 8y agoHow much do you pay for rent? Who does that rent go to? How much do you pay for your car payment? Who does that go to? How much of your paycheck goes to health care 'insurance'? Who does that go to? How much do you spend on frivolous items/entertainment that is owned by a mega-corp? How much did you pay for college tuition? How much of any of that do you think goes into lining the pockets of the highest person in the corporate food chain? If you don't see the issue you are being willfully ignorant. Stop it.
- organsnyder 8y agoWhat does the CEO of your company make?
- influx 8y agoA lot, but he also provides a lot more value than I do.
- Drakim 8y agoBut does he provide x200 more value than you? Think of it this way, if there was two hundred of you all working together, would he still be adding more value than you?
- artificial 8y agoWhy not work on starting a company instead of working for people you consider unfair?
- organsnyder 8y agoMany of us have families to support, and can't afford to take the risk (especially with the poor social safety nets in the United States).
- artificial 8y agoWould you contribute money to other people so they can take risks? If so, maybe consider becoming a backer to a company.
- mi100hael 8y agoMost likely, yes. The CEO is the public face of the company. (S)He attracts both investors & customers either through direct hands-on interactions or by providing stability and confidence. Put it this way: - Would you feel comfortable investing your money with a company run by 200 engineers? - Would you feel comfortable entering into a contract or purchasing agreement with a company run by 200 engineers?
- jimbofisher1 8y agohttps://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ Its totally not because the 1% has captured all the value created by increased productivity over the past 50 years. Definitely not.
- 013a 8y agoYes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A thousand times Yes. At least in a healthy company. What exactly do you think separates companies like Oracle and Microsoft? Oracle has hundreds of very talented engineers. But their position in the market is stagnating. This is hard for HN types to accept, but Engineers are not the people in software companies producing value. No individual person is producing value. Its a combination of the leadership who can lay down a plan toward something that produces value, and the line workers who can actually produce it. Both are necessary. Here's the difference: If you need to replace an engineer, go for it. Who cares. There are millions of us. We're code-monkeys. If you need to replace a CEO, you better be careful. Github couldn't even find a good CEO, so they sold out. If you're not careful, you might get a Larry Ellison or a Marissa Meyer instead of a Satya Nadella or a Tim Cook. Successfully leading companies legitimately requires personality characteristics that are present in less than 1% of the population. I would guarantee that if we dissected the brains of enough C-suite people from successful companies, we'd see some sort of genetic or brain matter similarities, probably something resembling sociopathism.
- chaseha 8y agoWell said. I think the reason it's easy to feel that people at the C-Suite don't produce value is the "leadership" qualities that matter are very hard to define, and success or failure often doesn't make itself clear until months or years down the road. As a lower-level employee, sometimes you think that the company would be successful without a leader, or even is successful in spite of poor leadership - while that may sometimes be true, much of what happens at that level is hard to understand unless you've been there
- pascalxus 8y agoi think we over-attribute the success's of companies based on the talent of both their CEO and their employees. Here are some examples: I've worked in the gaming industry at big company for 5 years. I've seen a ton of games fail and few succeed. I was on the most successful game team that made hundreds of millions of dollars. And, I don't believe our team was more talented than all the other teams. We simply had the right market timing with exactly the right game, inexorably leading to an enormous success. Within this company many other teams built clones, executed just as well if not better and yet, none of those games received the success as the first one with the right timing.
- tacomonstrous 8y agoHow is this value being measured? There is no counterfactual.
- Analemma_ 8y agoIn the 1950's, American CEO's earned about 11 times as much as the median employee at their firm. Today it's about 200x. Are you claiming that the gap in value contributed between CEOs and employees has increased by a factor of 20 in that time? Do you have any evidence for this? Absent any, I think it is much more reasonable to conclude that there's little to no justification for current CEO compensation and that they draw their current compensations mostly "because they can".
- bitL 8y agoYou have to keep up with the increasing sophistication of lies enabling business, so perhaps? (not sure I should put /s here as I am torn if I meant it seriously or as a satire; it's kinda blurry these days)
- tome 8y agoWhy do boards and shareholders agree to that? EDIT: So collusion amongst CEOs explains why boards agree to it. Why do shareholders?
- organsnyder 8y agoGroupthink.
- Analemma_ 8y agoWho is on the board? Boards are mostly made up of CEOs of other companies. Agreeing to excessive compensation is a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" situation.
- jimbofisher1 8y agoBecause they are also CEOs at large companies and also want bloated salaries so they approve them for their counterparts.
- typon 8y agoBecause the average shareholder has negligible say in the operations of the company or who makes up the board.
- CamTin 8y agoCould somebody else provide the same amount of value (as your CEO) for a much lower salary? In principle at least, employees (including CEOs) shouldn't be compensated according to the "value" they provide, but instead only paid the minimum necessary to prevent them from quitting, or at least from quitting too frequently.
- typon 8y agoThe level of stockholm syndrome of the American worker is astounding and depressing
- snikeris 8y agoA lot more than me, but that's not him taking my wealth. I'm in a voluntary relationship with his company, I've agreed to my salary, and if I'm unhappy with my pay, I'm free to find other work.
- lghh 8y agoIt's not voluntary if you can't eat if you stop working.
- xj9 8y agoworking is compulsory, working for a particular company is not.
- lghh 8y agoWhen the problem persists to all companies you could work for, does it really matter which one you're at?
- xj9 8y agoit doesn't have anything to do with the company. before companies existed you still had to work to survive. it was of a different nature, but you have always had to gather and manage resources to stay alive.
- lghh 8y agoYes, and I'm not disputing that. What we're discussing though is the fact that CEOs make around 200x what their employees make and that you are required to help them uphold their standard of living if you want to eat or have health care regardless of which CEO you work for.
- xj9 8y ago[citation needed]
- conanbatt 8y agoIf you are a software engineer in the US, you are the wealthy.
- hellofunk 8y agoWhat's your definition of wealthy? Because many software developers in SV might make over 100K (most do) but have vastly less money left over to actually save compared to someone earning less than half that in other places. I recently considered an opportunity in SV and after getting over the initial shock of how much they thought I was worth, I realized I as in better economic shape staying where I am and earning what appears to be a lot less. And I'm not what I'd consider wealthy at all. I recently saw an article here on HN about a guy who worked for Google for 10 years then quit and started his own company. He says in that decade he saved 100K, and my thought was, that's all, for 10 years at Google? I earn a lot less than he did, but I'm saving at nearly triple that rate.
- daok 8y agoHe might have only 100k in cash, but he probably has more than 500k in stock
- akhilcacharya 8y ago1) There are lots of people that are really bad at saving. 2) $100k could be liquid savings in cash, with the rest in GSUs or diversified investments.
- deegles 8y agoTo be more wealthy than 50% of the planet, you need a net worth of... $2,223 USD. https://qz.com/848181/half-of-all-adults-in-the-world-have-less-than-2300-in-wealth-credit-suisse-global-wealth-report-indicates/ https://qz.com/848181/half-of-all-adults-in-the-world-have-l...
- maccard 8y ago> Because many software developers in SV might make over 100K (most do) but have vastly less money left over to actually save compared to someone earning less than half that in other places. That's just not true. If you're working in SF on 100k/year, your pay after tax is 5750. Spending 2k/month on rent leaves you with 3750/month, which is almost the pay before tax of someone on half that.
- musage 8y agoWar, for one.
- whataretensors 8y agoI was hell banned on HN for mentioning it so this will be my last post, but think about royalties. Do you get any of the things you build? Or if you left your job, would you be legally required to delete all your work and have to pay tax money on an illiquid second-class asset that only has a percentage chance of payout(the startup scam). As for HN, I love engineers and have been on HN for over a decade, but this site is the same as startups and ycombinator in general. Built for VCs to extract value out of engineers and the public.
- jcbrand 8y agoThere is a class of people who make obscene amounts of money while introducing systemic risks into the economy. When the inevitable blowup happens (like in 2008), then these people keep their bonuses of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars while the losses are socialized, which means you're on the hook and your tax money is used to bail out "too big to fail" banks, insurance companies and auto companies. 10 years later people are still talking about a "recovery". The money supply has been diluted via money printing (so-called "quantitative easing") which is still being done in EU and Japan on a massive scale. The already wealthy are positioned much closer to the money spigots (by being able to get money at much lower interest rates), and can therefore do "carry-trades". Basically a license to print money. Money printing and interest rates kept at an artificially low rate deprives from savers and pensioners of income they would otherwise have.