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The expected monetary value of the average software engineer’s work working at Google is much higher than that of the same engineer working at a small company,
by ericd 6y ago
The expected monetary value of the average software engineer’s work working at Google is much higher than that of the same engineer working at a small company, launching the same product. The difference is the leverage provided by the structure that is Google - the audience, brand, machinery, etc. The software is important, but so is the massive built-in audience.
It is the company’s structure accounts for the majority of the value created by that engineer’s work. So, how is it exploitation to give them less than the total profit created?
- webmaven 6y ago> It is the company’s structure accounts for the majority of the value created by that engineer’s work. Except that billionaire founders also persist in flattering themselves that their company "only hires the best". If that were true, FAANG salaries for ICs ought to be even higher than they are, and competition between them for employees would be cutthroat rather than collegial. As it is, they are competing for employees as a group with the rest of the industry, more so than with each other, so the truth is a mixture: individual employees matter more than their compensation actually reflects, and the company the employee is embedded in matters a great deal too (enough so that we only ever see a randomly occurring concentration of high quality employees producing innovative products and services when that group is more-or-less the whole org: a startup. Inside a larger org, such groups only flourish deliberately).