> Currently employees in reality, are provided 0.00001% of the company. 0.00001% of Amazon's entire revenue (not profit, but revenue) last year would be about

> Currently employees in reality, are provided 0.00001% of the company. 0.00001% of Amazon's entire revenue (not profit, but revenue) last year would be about $14,000. Fortunately, every one of their full time employees is paid more than that. Entry level engineers make 10X that amount and the best engineers make 50X that or more. At some of the most highly paid companies like Uber, paying employees according to the value they create would actually make salaries go down in every scenario, because the company is still fueled by investor funds and can't self-sustain on revenue alone. After round-tripping from IC to manager and back a couple times, I've come to realize that the value given to engineers especially is extremely high. Many initiatives in the tech industry don't ever turn a profit for the company or investors, yet we get paid six figures all the same. If anything, I would expect such a hypothetical initiative to redistribute more of the wealth away from engineers like us and toward people like the customer support team who are fixing all of the problems created by products that don't work quite right. The person on the phone with grandma walking them through a support issue arguably contributes more to the LTV of that customer than anyone else. Stepping outside of tech, I think people imagine profits to be much higher than they are in reality. Grocery stores are a common example of a business that has very narrow profit margins (some times a couple percent) that don't actually have large amounts of leftover profit to distribute to employees. Regardless, it's all hypothetical. The employment market is supply and demand, and that's why engineers are paid so highly. End of story.