4 ms·
On the flip side, much of the value you are able to create may come as the result of the infrastructure and colleagues provided to you by that same "someone els
by sparky 16y ago
On the flip side, much of the value you are able to create may come as the result of the infrastructure and colleagues provided to you by that same "someone else". Seems particularly true at a place like Google.
When you work for yourself, you get to keep 100% (minus taxes) of (probably) a smaller number; whether that is best for you depends on your personality.
- thetrumanshow 16y agoEven so, if you're a top performer, you end up subsidizing the paychecks of a lot of people.
- ced 16y agoSubsidizing is such a loaded word. Your comment is an example of the pie fallacy. Yes, your colleagues may get a bigger paycheck because you're a top engineer. But that doesn't necessarily imply that the additional money they get is "taken" from you. And obviously, doing a startup is no guarantee that your returns will be better.
- thetrumanshow 16y agoIs it really a pie fallacy? Here's what I really mean by subsidizing, in context, and you can decide if it fits, or if I am suggesting something else... If you buy into the idea that a developer, for example, can be 10x more productive than another, which I do (and I'm not one of the 10x guys at all), then you tend to think that those people should be paid a heap more than the average IT guy... but in fact, they are bound by the same corporate salary ranges as everyone else on the team... so you end up with the delta between the bottom guy and the most productive guy is at most 70K. Therefore, thanks primarily to the top performers, our overall team performs well and everyone benefits similarly... but they really shouldn't benefit similarly since the amount of value creation is wildly different from developer to developer.
- jshen 16y agoso that developer decides to try his hand doing his own startup and quickly realizes that the market generally rewards those that are best at marketing and not those that are best at writing code 10x faster than the average.
- mathgladiator 16y agoThe problem of being super productive is that the organization can't exactly support it. Just because you are 10 or 100 times more productive doesn't mean the company can sell 10 or 100 times more.
- enneff 16y agoAnd guess what - we need those lesser mortals so we can keep doing the fun stuff.
- vladd 16y agoLook at it this way: A and B can be freelancers and gain at most 100K yearly, or they can work for C, where they commonly create wealth for C in amount of 1000K; C pays them 150K each (and keeps the rest, 1000K-150K-150K=700K). Economically, it would make sense for A and B to work for C, since they gain 50K more. Economically it makes sense for C to hire them since together they create wealth, and the 700K that C gets to keep is a reward for his willingness to risk hiring them and managing them into a productive team etc. If A and B would like the risk, they could start pairing themselves together and attempt to create wealth independently. But they could fail. 10% chance of a 1000K is still just 100K on average (it just has an interesting distribution of the payout). The difference up to 1000K is a payout to C for the risk they took in growing their business up to the current level of scalability. (otherwise other companies would pay more for the value that A and B provide) If A and B care only about technology and are risk adverse, the economy doesn't award them more than the 150K which they are already getting. For such people, creating wealth of 1000K for the companies where they work is not a result of their behaviour, but a reward for the founders that took the risks and had the vision to create organizations allowing that.
- jshen 16y agoHow much of your startup is subsidized by all the open source software that many engineers work on for free? Your subsidy argument cuts both ways.
- MaysonL 16y agoNeither society nor the enterprise are zero-sum games, and that kind of thinking seems to imply that they are.
- pauljburke 16y agoIf you're a top performer, unless the place you are at is losing money you aren't subsidising anyone's paycheck - I assume that the people skimming the cream off your contribution do exactly the same to every employee and anyone that isn't contributing (the value of) at least their own salary (should) would be shown the door. I suspect it gets diverted to senior management (founders?) and shareholders. Given we are commenting on this at ycombinator.com, I don't have a problem with it, since I'm hoping to end up in either or both categories at some point.