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If you pay people more than they produce (across the board), the company fails. That qualifies as too much to me. If you pay people far above their value add,

If you pay people more than they produce (across the board), the company fails. That qualifies as too much to me. If you pay people far above their value add, most would consider that unfair, and vice versa for being underpaid. I don't think we should consider people being underpaid or overpaid as being just in a moral sense. Obviously everybody would prefer to be overpaid for themselves. Of course high comp in tech is more a function of supply/demand of labor, and the industry still being new. It won't be this way in 20-30 years, as people continue to trickle in and correct the supply imbalance

jstx1 4y ago
Company performance is so separated from employee input, and value add is so difficult to measure for most positions that I don't trust this model as a useful guide. It's like an oversimplified model from an outdated econ textbook that has nothing to do with how things work in the real world.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Company performance is exactly defined by employee input from the start. Later on people can coast on input from past employees, sure. But the company in the end is a result of the aggregation of all current and past employee input
  - WJW 4y ago
    Citibank is well into the "Later on" part then. They have 200k employees and are in a heavily regulated industry, it's not some startup where you can make a meaningful difference with a cool MVP that you developed over the weekend.
matwood 4y ago
> Of course high comp in tech is more a function of supply/demand of labor, and the industry still being new. It won't be this way in 20-30 years, as people continue to trickle in and correct the supply imbalance Except demand has continued to expand, and I believe it will keep expanding. Salaries are high because of what technology can do for a company. Your type of argument has been made since I started writing software in the 90s. All that's happened since then is software has relentlessly eaten every other industry. The classic widget selling company had material input costs, labor costs, delivery, etc... for many companies now the marginal cost of adding the next customer is almost zero with the primary input cost being labor. Salaries can certainly be a bit high right now while also staying on a long term trend where tech salaries outpace other careers.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  It's inevitable. Just because it takes a long time doesn't mean it won't happen. Higher level abstractions = less labor required (e.g. serverless), plus additional supply of labor = lower costs. Wages are always defined by the equilibrium point between supply and demand of labor, never by the value add of the job. Simple thought experiment, say you have a button that makes you $1m dollars every time it's pressed and it can be pressed only 100 times per day. How much do you have to pay somebody to convince them to press it each day? Now say you have the same button but only 1 person in the world can activate it. How much do you have to pay them to convince them to do it? The answer to these demonstrates the principle in quite an obvious way.
  - matwood 4y ago
    > Higher level abstractions = less labor required (e.g. serverless), plus additional supply of labor = lower costs. I've been hearing this about new technologies also since the 90s - going to make programmers obsolete/need less programmers. What ends up happening is what's required expands. I'm sure there's some quippy law here. > Wages are always defined by the equilibrium point between supply and demand of labor, never by the value add of the job. Your analogy is only focused supply while keeping a fixed demand. In fact, 'value' drives demand. The reason why demand keeps outpacing supply is the value of technology is enormous. Will the demand side eventually slow? On a long enough timescale I have to say yes, but a lot of people have gone broke betting against the pace of technology.
    - sumedh 4y ago
      > I've been hearing this about new technologies also since the 90s - going to make programmers obsolete/need less programmers. What ends up happening is what's required expands. I'm sure there's some quippy law here. We used to have manual QA now most of the testing is done via automation, there used to sys admins handling all the servers now its all cloud which can be handled by programmers/dev ops people. Maybe in the future we will have code as a service where most of the code is written automatically while few programmers oversee it.
    - 4y ago
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Being overpaid and underqualified in a job you hate is an intensely sucky place to be in. It's not just about vague morals.

jstx1 4y ago

Company performance is so separated from employee input, and value add is so difficult to measure for most positions that I don't trust this model as a useful guide. It's like an oversimplified model from an outdated econ textbook that has nothing to do with how things work in the real world.

adam_arthur 4y ago
Company performance is exactly defined by employee input from the start. Later on people can coast on input from past employees, sure. But the company in the end is a result of the aggregation of all current and past employee input
- WJW 4y ago
  Citibank is well into the "Later on" part then. They have 200k employees and are in a heavily regulated industry, it's not some startup where you can make a meaningful difference with a cool MVP that you developed over the weekend.

matwood 4y ago

> Of course high comp in tech is more a function of supply/demand of labor, and the industry still being new. It won't be this way in 20-30 years, as people continue to trickle in and correct the supply imbalance Except demand has continued to expand, and I believe it will keep expanding. Salaries are high because of what technology can do for a company. Your type of argument has been made since I started writing software in the 90s. All that's happened since then is software has relentlessly eaten every other industry. The classic widget selling company had material input costs, labor costs, delivery, etc... for many companies now the marginal cost of adding the next customer is almost zero with the primary input cost being labor. Salaries can certainly be a bit high right now while also staying on a long term trend where tech salaries outpace other careers.

adam_arthur 4y ago
It's inevitable. Just because it takes a long time doesn't mean it won't happen. Higher level abstractions = less labor required (e.g. serverless), plus additional supply of labor = lower costs. Wages are always defined by the equilibrium point between supply and demand of labor, never by the value add of the job. Simple thought experiment, say you have a button that makes you $1m dollars every time it's pressed and it can be pressed only 100 times per day. How much do you have to pay somebody to convince them to press it each day? Now say you have the same button but only 1 person in the world can activate it. How much do you have to pay them to convince them to do it? The answer to these demonstrates the principle in quite an obvious way.
- matwood 4y ago
  > Higher level abstractions = less labor required (e.g. serverless), plus additional supply of labor = lower costs. I've been hearing this about new technologies also since the 90s - going to make programmers obsolete/need less programmers. What ends up happening is what's required expands. I'm sure there's some quippy law here. > Wages are always defined by the equilibrium point between supply and demand of labor, never by the value add of the job. Your analogy is only focused supply while keeping a fixed demand. In fact, 'value' drives demand. The reason why demand keeps outpacing supply is the value of technology is enormous. Will the demand side eventually slow? On a long enough timescale I have to say yes, but a lot of people have gone broke betting against the pace of technology.
  - sumedh 4y ago
    > I've been hearing this about new technologies also since the 90s - going to make programmers obsolete/need less programmers. What ends up happening is what's required expands. I'm sure there's some quippy law here. We used to have manual QA now most of the testing is done via automation, there used to sys admins handling all the servers now its all cloud which can be handled by programmers/dev ops people. Maybe in the future we will have code as a service where most of the code is written automatically while few programmers oversee it.
  - 4y ago

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

Being overpaid and underqualified in a job you hate is an intensely sucky place to be in. It's not just about vague morals.