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This is all well and good to argue around a very literal meritocracy, but I don't think anyone actually argues for this. It's not just "lol, 1 - 1 = 0, meritocr

This is all well and good to argue around a very literal meritocracy, but I don't think anyone actually argues for this. It's not just "lol, 1 - 1 = 0, meritocracy is impossible". The underlying principal, as I understand it, is that it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company, or a farmer. Yet zuck is compensated as such. We can recognize the "unique" value facebook creates by giving unique compensation, but should that compensation really be x1m times more than the farmer? Reworking wealth distribution is the goal - not rewarding everyone equally for everything in some meme level paradox.

donatj 6y ago
> it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor. A well connected person can bring many many times the value to a company of someone without connections. The right strong personality can be a performance amplifier for the rest of the company, Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that. The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.
- theelous3 6y ago
  > Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor. I am. It's not me being careless. We reward both by the same means - money. Not my fault it's this way. I think it's perfectly reasonable of me to work from the means of compensation outwards, when making comparisons. > The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value. In my opinion, this is nothing more than business based, pyramid scheme level, cult-like thinking. I'm a well paid webdev. The company is fairly flat, there are only two distinct levels above me - engineering management, and founder-ceo(s). My day to day work is designing and building out random systems, and handling tech debt. I would be doing this in a vacuum too, and to the same standard. The personality and input of the ceo has little to no bearing on my performance. Me and my team would perform equally well under any given non-maniac. CEOs are not like, high level gods or something. They aren't remotely as rare a set of personality traits as the voodoo-thinking of SV seems to think. C-tier management is not literally multiplying my output. Sensible feature requests from users and sensible filtering by product managers has ten times the impact that C-tier has on my work. > deserves a proportional [...] > Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that The resignation and subsequent death of Jobs had, in the macro perspective of apple's stock prices, literally no impact on the value of the company. Apple stock is currently over x10 what it was when he was there. An essentially infinite number of things took place that were far more important than Job's personality, which lead to the success of apple. He was more like a train driver railing down the tracks than some maverick cutting through the jungle. At least Bill Gates has the introspection to realise this. General luck, and luck of timing is what generated nearly all of that value, and the rest was generated by labour. Somewhere in there is some ephemeral and unquantifiable sliver of value coming from the specific personality of the founders / ceos. So, what proportion do we dole out? Who do we compensate for luck? For all of the endless work done before that wasn't compensated to the moon but was absolutely required for this moon-level capital generation? It's all too up in the air to try and rationalise that CEOs should earn one million times what a farmer earns and think that makes any kind of sense at all. Think of all of the wealth, (generational too) that came from equally traited men setting out for oil. Literal random chance would go on to create mega-empires that have lasted a hundred years. Our current system of compensation, is pretty close to being nothing more than a load of bollocks, when it comes to this kind of thing.
dsego 6y ago
Public services in my country (like teacher, police, nurses etc) have salary coefficients (job complexity ratio) depending on qualifications and duties. Not sure what the proper terminology is in english and if it's the same in other countries. There are socialists in Europe supporting the max 1:12 ratio between minimum & maximum income. Although, there is an old saying in my country: "They couldn't pay me so little that I couldn't work even less" (not sure about the rough translation), so that's definitely a danger of such schemes. Aside from that, I don't really believe in the musks and zucks of the world. Our society shouldn't rely on charismatic leaders, who for all we know could be fronts for the NSA/CIA operations. Shock workers or strike workers could be used to motivate and promote labor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik).

donatj 6y ago

> it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor. A well connected person can bring many many times the value to a company of someone without connections. The right strong personality can be a performance amplifier for the rest of the company, Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that. The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.

theelous3 6y ago
> Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor. I am. It's not me being careless. We reward both by the same means - money. Not my fault it's this way. I think it's perfectly reasonable of me to work from the means of compensation outwards, when making comparisons. > The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value. In my opinion, this is nothing more than business based, pyramid scheme level, cult-like thinking. I'm a well paid webdev. The company is fairly flat, there are only two distinct levels above me - engineering management, and founder-ceo(s). My day to day work is designing and building out random systems, and handling tech debt. I would be doing this in a vacuum too, and to the same standard. The personality and input of the ceo has little to no bearing on my performance. Me and my team would perform equally well under any given non-maniac. CEOs are not like, high level gods or something. They aren't remotely as rare a set of personality traits as the voodoo-thinking of SV seems to think. C-tier management is not literally multiplying my output. Sensible feature requests from users and sensible filtering by product managers has ten times the impact that C-tier has on my work. > deserves a proportional [...] > Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that The resignation and subsequent death of Jobs had, in the macro perspective of apple's stock prices, literally no impact on the value of the company. Apple stock is currently over x10 what it was when he was there. An essentially infinite number of things took place that were far more important than Job's personality, which lead to the success of apple. He was more like a train driver railing down the tracks than some maverick cutting through the jungle. At least Bill Gates has the introspection to realise this. General luck, and luck of timing is what generated nearly all of that value, and the rest was generated by labour. Somewhere in there is some ephemeral and unquantifiable sliver of value coming from the specific personality of the founders / ceos. So, what proportion do we dole out? Who do we compensate for luck? For all of the endless work done before that wasn't compensated to the moon but was absolutely required for this moon-level capital generation? It's all too up in the air to try and rationalise that CEOs should earn one million times what a farmer earns and think that makes any kind of sense at all. Think of all of the wealth, (generational too) that came from equally traited men setting out for oil. Literal random chance would go on to create mega-empires that have lasted a hundred years. Our current system of compensation, is pretty close to being nothing more than a load of bollocks, when it comes to this kind of thing.

dsego 6y ago

Public services in my country (like teacher, police, nurses etc) have salary coefficients (job complexity ratio) depending on qualifications and duties. Not sure what the proper terminology is in english and if it's the same in other countries. There are socialists in Europe supporting the max 1:12 ratio between minimum & maximum income. Although, there is an old saying in my country: "They couldn't pay me so little that I couldn't work even less" (not sure about the rough translation), so that's definitely a danger of such schemes. Aside from that, I don't really believe in the musks and zucks of the world. Our society shouldn't rely on charismatic leaders, who for all we know could be fronts for the NSA/CIA operations. Shock workers or strike workers could be used to motivate and promote labor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik).