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Well one interesting implication of your insight here is that the more fungible/replaceable your skills are as an employee, the easier it is for the market to a
by seanhunter 5y ago
Well one interesting implication of your insight here is that the more fungible/replaceable your skills are as an employee, the easier it is for the market to accurately price your labour and the less pricing power you have.
Conversely niche skills would mean a large variance in compensation due to price uncertainty ("I can't just go out and hire an exact replacement for sokoloff!"), and if there is demand for those niche skills it should mean high comp overall. And that's what we see in general in the labour market.
- sokoloff 5y agoAgree. I think an additional corollary is the wider gap between say $50K/yr and the value possible to create (as roughly capped by the gross margin fraction of sales/employee), the more variability you’ll see. For a Subway sandwich artist, not only is the production process standardized (making “exact [practical] replacement” possible), but the value is also capped by how many sandwiches are sold on a given shift. No sandwich artist will make 5x as many as another. Rarely will excellence in an individual employee result in a sharp uptick in sales. For a company that sells online ads, cloud computing, streaming services, or software that cap is so much higher as to be practically irrelevant for many roles.