3 ms·

it would be interesting if companies that size would distribute more to their employees one fantasy calculation i do a lot is google-profits / total-google-emp

it would be interesting if companies that size would distribute more to their employees one fantasy calculation i do a lot is google-profits / total-google-employees or apple-profits / total-apple-employees and you get something like half a million dollars a year (60 billion dollars of profit divided by 132,000 apple employees for example) in the above scenario, work a few years at a company like google or apple and your a millionaire basically... what would happen to the economy if suddenly there was hundreds of thousands of millionaires? how many new businesses and ventures could be started? would it in the end be good or bad economy? what about the company if it only had a few billion of liquid assets on hand instead of hundreds? would it make a difference?

xur17 7y ago
Isn't that already what is happening at FAANG companies? According to levels.fyi, a senior developer at Facebook and Google is at ~$360k in total comp. After working 5 or 10 years, you could easily have $1M in savings (perhaps a bit more challenging given the cost of living where these companies are located, but still possible).
- andrekandre 7y ago
  yea, that is definitely true that they are compensated very well, but i was thinking in a more “equitable” way considering the insane profits they are generating if you added say half the profits to employees and half the stock as well, they could become multi-millionaires even sooner.... maybe it’s just my bias, but i feel like if those employees were really empowered by their earnings they would be more entrepreneurial and start all kinds of new ventures i guess this is just my crazy idea, but it’s something i feel strongly recently... it’s just weird to me to see such huge amounts of capital just sitting there (or being used in buybacks)
  - alain94040 7y ago
    An engineer at Google started a new ambitious project and the rewards were structured similarly to doing your own startup. After the math was done, his payment added up to $600M. Anthony Levandowski then left for Uber and the rest is history.
johannes1234321 7y ago
Well this is not a new thought. That discussion goes back to the early days of industrialization and involves thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, where a chain of thoughts (alternative to "socialist mainstream" of giving the "production capital" to the state, where those two mentioned ended up) to put companies into a collective/cooperative, where the company is owned by the workers, thus workers make the decisions and take the profits. These thoughts are part of the roots of many social democratic parties in Europe. While this debate came to an end when the East collapsed, the capitalistic system won an Social Democrats became more market oriented (i.e. "New Labour" in UK or German SPD with Gerhard Schröder's reforms of unemployment and social systems)

xur17 7y ago

Isn't that already what is happening at FAANG companies? According to levels.fyi, a senior developer at Facebook and Google is at ~$360k in total comp. After working 5 or 10 years, you could easily have $1M in savings (perhaps a bit more challenging given the cost of living where these companies are located, but still possible).

andrekandre 7y ago
yea, that is definitely true that they are compensated very well, but i was thinking in a more “equitable” way considering the insane profits they are generating if you added say half the profits to employees and half the stock as well, they could become multi-millionaires even sooner.... maybe it’s just my bias, but i feel like if those employees were really empowered by their earnings they would be more entrepreneurial and start all kinds of new ventures i guess this is just my crazy idea, but it’s something i feel strongly recently... it’s just weird to me to see such huge amounts of capital just sitting there (or being used in buybacks)
- alain94040 7y ago
  An engineer at Google started a new ambitious project and the rewards were structured similarly to doing your own startup. After the math was done, his payment added up to $600M. Anthony Levandowski then left for Uber and the rest is history.

johannes1234321 7y ago

Well this is not a new thought. That discussion goes back to the early days of industrialization and involves thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, where a chain of thoughts (alternative to "socialist mainstream" of giving the "production capital" to the state, where those two mentioned ended up) to put companies into a collective/cooperative, where the company is owned by the workers, thus workers make the decisions and take the profits. These thoughts are part of the roots of many social democratic parties in Europe. While this debate came to an end when the East collapsed, the capitalistic system won an Social Democrats became more market oriented (i.e. "New Labour" in UK or German SPD with Gerhard Schröder's reforms of unemployment and social systems)