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I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive. If there
by jjj123 5y ago
I hear that and I do think that raises the ceiling for pay, since you can pay engineers a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still a net positive.
If there was a surplus of engineering talent I guarantee you our salaries would drop significantly, no matter how much profit we generate. Under capitalism, there’s no incentive to scale workers’ pay based on how much value they bring. Even in your examples, the engineers that pull in 200k/month for the company are making a tiny fraction of that, and if they start making 400k/month on average it’s unlikely salaries would increase if pressures in the labor market are unchanged.
Edited for clarity
- lotsofpulp 5y agoWhat does that have to do with capitalism, or any -ism? You would not pay $4 to seller A for the same apple that seller B is selling for $1. Attempting to maximize utility to cost ratio is natural, maybe even necessary as it would convey evolutionary advantages.
- piva00 5y agoI think that OP just means that capitalism, as a system, has absolutely no incentive to increase wages as productivity increases, it's a race for profits so extracting maximum profit is the metric. It's this reliance on a single metric that, for me personally, is a major failure of the current economic system to provide not only wealth and innovation but also good standards of living for people. I'm a bit of a humanist and quite leftist in my views though, not a communist by any means but I will always try to look into economic systems with this more humane optic.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoThe problem is you can pull any old programmer in off the streets to work on the stuff that brings in 200k/mo per person, so I'm doubtful there will be a surplus of engineering talent at the desired skill level.