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I think because individual tech workers are so highly paid relative to other industries, we fail to see how low our pay is relative to what the people at the to

by habosa 4y ago

I think because individual tech workers are so highly paid relative to other industries, we fail to see how low our pay is relative to what the people at the top are making. A high performing Google engineer may make 500k+ in total comp, Sundar Pichai makes $100M+ in many years. That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high. You see startup founders who exit with generational wealth (tens or hundreds of millions). They are also frequently able to cash out along the way, or borrow against their success. Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets < 1% of the equity and none of the glory. It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry. The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. I don't envy the culture of those industries, but I do sometimes wonder what tech would be like if we leaned a little more that way.

lezojeda 4y ago
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zozbot234 4y ago
Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. All things said, it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  But CEOs don't actually have that much impact... So whatever decisions - in this example - Sundar makes, it only carries so much weight. And, you also get fired if you're a $500k engineer and you suck at your job. So I'm not sure what's so much different about Sundar - except that if he sucks at his job he has a way better golden parachute.
  - coding123 4y ago
    You're Apple's CEO, its 2018 and you are about to bet 80% of the current profit stream on M1 platform or stick with Intel. What do you do?
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      You're Apple's CEO in 2018 and due to a decade of skillful engineering you own a proven platform that's already shipped in 2 billion devices, and is now objectively fast enough to run a PC, the demands of which are not all that different from the 12.9" iPad that already exists. Do you respect the work of this talented semiconductor organization by refactoring the Mac to use the same CPU? In what way is this a tricky decision?
      - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
        I'd be surprised if Tim Cook even greenlit this decision. It's really something that should be decided by whoever is running the Mac business line.
    - flashgordon 4y ago
      Except the M1 did not magically show up at the CEO's doorstep by one of their underlings in 2018. Apple (i am guessing) would have had several secret projects pointing towards this. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary given how many parallel streams they would have had to invest in to bring all those iP[aeiou]*d devices (running non-intel) to market?
    - rchowe 4y ago
      You take the bet because it's not even your entire profit stream and iPhone is much more of your revenue. Tim Cook's operational experience helped them increase their market cap dramatically once he took over, so I'm not sure you can discount the value of him as CEO. A bad CEO can definitely drive a company into the ground, so in many cases I think the pay can make sense. Spending the money does not assure a good pick though...
    - chongli 4y ago
- hourago 4y ago
  > Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. No, it is not. His job is to maximize profit, and his personal goal is to earn as much as possible. To say that the CEOs goal is to make money so employees have salaries is a very strange statement. > If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. Google revenue is not at risk, but many engineers are already out of a job. Sundar job is only at risk if the board is not happy with him. > it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement. No, it is not. That the people that earn more money is not the ones that produce the most but the ones that protect the rich is far from fair.
throwaway23597 4y ago
> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry. I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?
  - MockObject 4y ago
    From my job to my marriage to my artwork, what couldn't conceivably be done by someone else, if I wasn't available? Most of us are fungible.
    - matwood 4y ago
      Bingo. Nearly everyone is replaceable. It may not be easy to replace a certain individual, but it can be done.
EduardoBautista 4y ago
Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world. Crashing Twitter into the ground will never come close to diminishing what he has helped achieve with SpaceX, putting his money where his mouth was to the point of almost going broke, and, to a lesser extent, Tesla where, despite not being a founder, he was the biggest investor at the beginning.
- deleted 4y ago
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- duped 4y ago
  SpaceX does not belong in the same conversation as "net positive impact."
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  > > Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world. I always hear this argument about the supposed great impact on the world, society etc. But I am a citizen of the world and think this guy is a scam because he actually hasn't done nothing for me but he keeps pushing his name into my face. Kinda like the POTUS except the POTUS is forced to do media and speeches whereas this guy injects himself into every situation or debate out of his own will to shill his products. For a regular individual who is not concerned about climate change or has a deep desire to life off the grid (but still wants internet) mr. Musk is like the Kardashians with the trash entertainment unfolding on twitter instead of E!
- electricEmu 4y ago
  Examples of Musk benefitting Musk do not demonstrate a net-positive impact on the world. The artists criticizing Mr. Musk make a good point about what's really happening. https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k
coding123 4y ago
I can guarantee you employee 20 at Google is very well off, buying houses left and right.
norir 4y ago
I once worked at a startup that was acquired and the founders made a killing. A few years after the acquisition, they founded a new company in an adjacent domain and started raiding their original company for talent. At the time I was working with a guy who had product and marketing experience who happened to be close college friends with one of the cofounders. No one liked working with this guy. Yet rumor had it that he was offered a 5% stake in the new company while the engineers they were recruiting were being offered .25-.5%. I was very confident that they would be successful but I opted not to work for them because I was so offended by the inequity of the offers. The developers they were attempting to raid also had proven that they were productive and effective so it wasn't as though they were making a wildly speculative bet on them. I also knew that in a major exit, I would be more resentful of the relative difference between my rewards and that of this other guy than I would have been pleased with my windfall. I had once had serious respect for the cofounders, but their greediness and willingness to perpetuate these systems of inequity permanently diminished my opinion of them. Yet, I have to concede that the cofounders were correct in their assessment that they could lowball the engineers with little impact on their prospects for success. They were able to exploit their way to a second major windfall, far larger than the first.
- freedsoftware 4y ago
  It's also that good marketing of a product is probably more integral to its success than its engineering. There are so many stories of superior technologies failing because of bad marketing.
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    Good marketing would make a mediocre product succeed, but it will not save a crappy one. Also, "superior technologies" is a loaded term, because it is in fact very subjective.
    - trimethylpurine 4y ago
      Lots of products literally don't work at all and still sell, and even lead their industry in revenue. I wish it wasn't true.
toss1 4y ago
Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees? Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees). In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ratio has increased from 20-to-1 in 1996 to 202-to-1 in 2018. [0] "The average S&P 500 company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 324-to-1 in 2021." For NuSkin Enterprises, the ratio is 22,092:1, for Amazon, it is 6,474:1 ... pretty amazing chart. [1] And this is why the tax system should recognize and tax excessive pay ratios. These are nothing but the financial result of abusive relationships between the executives and the workers, and the other taxpayers who pay more than their share of the burden. It is also easily measured to tax fairly (which of course corporations will hate, since it is hard to game). But of course, all the tech bros will cry that we need no govt so why should we be taxed? (Not incidentally, the same tech elites and wannabes as the article properly exposed as abusers.) [0] https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/ideal-ceo-to-employee-pay-ratio https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/ideal-ceo-to-employee-... [1] https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios
- novok 4y ago
  Pay is determined by supply and demand, not just how difficult it is to provide the supply. And what determines the good pay of tech workers & CEOs is their BATNAs. To hire a CEO of a top tech company, you essentially have to be a better offer than the EV of them starting their own firm with copious amounts of venture capital out there and them out competing you with the efficiencies that come from startups. That is what big-corp tech CEO pay has essentially stabilized on.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  It's even more doubtful when we see historically the multiplier was more like 20x than the numbers now. Have they got that much better, while everyone else hasn't ? The extra value we all add is being skimmed off the top, and worse we are being treated with contempt.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
Lionga 4y ago
It is that 95 to 99% of the ones that go the Musk, Bezos or Kalanicks way fail and be left with no payout. In return the ones succeeding will have 20 to 100 times the payout. Its almost the same as if you just take your salary and bet everything on 13 at the roulette. Small chance of huge payout, high chance of failure.
- gentoo 4y ago
  all the engineers at an early stage company are "gambling" with exactly the same stakes as the founder. If they fail, they're all out of a job. The founder risks nothing more than that: he's gambling with other people's money. Why should one of those people reap generational wealth while everyone else ends up in the upper-middle class?
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    Hmmm it seems like the engineers bounce around jobs whenever they feel like it while the founder is locked in for 5 to 25 years. Way different stakes.
  - Lionga 4y ago
    You have to invest a lot of time and effort to convince other people that they should "gamble" their money on you and your idea. The early engineer has a pay check from the start. Again if you want your shot at generational wealth just bet all at the roulette. Or convince someone that they should gamble their money on you.
- Haga 4y ago
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- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  But is that true? Every VC-backed founder I know "failed up". They pulled a more-than-dev salary from the company during the failure, and then after the failure they just started a new company and had an inside track on VC. OTOH, the bootstrapped founders have my respect. They had their houses as collateral for their company's operating loan. They also succeeded at a much higher rate than the VC backed founders I've known.
eevilspock 4y ago
I don't know. Where is all this anger and righteousness when it comes to all the people servicing tech workers, from farm workers picking your food in record high temps for slave wages and no protections to food industry workers to janitors to delivery people to the nannies and school teachers caring for your children? What about the other people who are more deeply exploited by your employers, the factory workers in poorer countries, the $2/hour workers in Kenya "tortured" by having to tag obscene material to make ChatGPT less toxic? What about all the people downstream in space and time who pay the costs of all the environmental debt incurred by your luxurious and convenient upper caste first-world lifestyles, lifestyles made "efficient" by waste, consumption and the ability to outsource life's chores to bottom workers, enabling you to put all your time into higher rate-of-return tech work?
- deleted 4y ago
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- steveBK123 4y ago
  All this whinging is what happens when SV restricted stock stops going up 20% annually for what, six months.. a year? Imagine some actual oppression.
jmeister 4y ago
In finance, law, and medicine, the workers are the product roughly. Anyway this debate about being 1000x more valuable is pointless. It does not matter what any individual thinks about their worth. We've all agreed(#) on this system(the worst, except for all others) ostensibly because of the benefits to the rest of society. The internal allocation of profits within a company is irrelevant. # The old Marxist limitations about lacking capital or means of production don't count in tech/software. It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital.
- eropple 4y ago
  > It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital. It takes time.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  There's no such thing as the cloud, just other people's servers (means of production) you're renting.
- oblaff 4y ago
  The idea that the solution to lacking capital is to _raise capital_ is a contradiction.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    I’m saying it’s way easier than for a factory worker in 1823 or 1923 to raise money or gather machines. I’m not being cynical. I’d really like to see alternative governance structures to produce and sell software. Co-ops are an example.
whimsicalism 4y ago
> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. Not true at all. Partners & MD take a much larger share of the pie compared to execs at tech companies.
- meetingthrower 4y ago
  That's because of leverage. MD : consultant is 1:7 or so. Plus another 1:2 or 3 for admin staff. So there is a limit to the scale of wealth generated. That said, MDs make 10x what entry level consultants get. This is different than tech where exec : professional staff can be 1:x,000 or more. (Source: was a consulting MD.)
welshwelsh 4y ago
I don't see the problem here. A burger flipper makes $10 in an hour. An engineer designing a burger flipping robot makes $100. Their department's engineering manager makes $1,000. The CTO makes $10,000. The hardest worker here is the burger flipper. They work 16 hour days just to afford rent, and it's hard manual labor. The engineer makes 10 times as much because each line of code they write produces more value than an entire day of manual burger flipping. Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems. The CTO makes 10 times that because their policies affect many engineering departments throughout a large organization and have multibillion-dollar consequences. It doesn't matter if they work 1000 times harder than a burger flipper, they probably work less than the burger flipper. But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.
- topaz0 4y ago
  This is not 100% wrong, but you are missing an important part of the calculus, which is that as you go up the hierarchy you have more overall and more concentrated power to demand higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor To the extent this is a problem, it's a problem of corporate governance. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that problem is fixable, since its root cause is a shift in corporate ownership from individual stockholders to mutual funds (because mutual funds is how most people now invest their retirement savings in 401ks or the equivalent). The effect of this on individual corporations is to make their time horizon for stock price growth much shorter, because unlike individual retirement investors, most of whom adopt a buy and hold strategy and don't trade very often, mutual funds trade stocks all the time based on short term performance.
    - topaz0 4y ago
      Somehow that wasn't always the case in the past, so presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future. If we have the audacity to imagine a different world, it is fixable through organizing and demanding that incentives be aligned with our values rather than with the spiraling fortunes of a handful of extremely self-centered people.
geodel 4y ago
This again comes to same place. The person who wrote code can launch their company and keep all proceed of billions to themselves if code is that good. For now its like asking for upside of owner and risk of hired hand. Doesn't really work that way in past or now. For law, finance and medicine there is lot more personal liability to reach for big rewards unlike coders sitting in office and implementing business requirements they received from management which in their view is clueless.
kortilla 4y ago
> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. This is wrong. Lawyers get paid worse than FAANG SWEs unless they make partnership, which is the equivalent to becoming a co-owner or working as a lower level exec at a big tech company. Doctors at big hospitals in the bay make worse money than Google SWEs last time I was chatting with my friend’s wife who was a Doctor at Stanford medicine. The super highly paid doctors are the ones who found or cofound practices. Finance can pay a little higher, but that’s only because the teams are usually smaller and you have more direct impact. You might pull down 1M/year at Renaissance or whatever, but the partners are still pulling in nearly 100x that. > It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. This is the same across nearly all businesses. The owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs. It’s not a coop.
- ketzo 4y ago
  I don't think the discrepancy is the same in any other field of knowledge work, though. Even hospital CEOs and partners at law firms are making 3-15x what their doctors and attorneys are making. Not 100-200x. The magnitude of the gap is way higher in tech.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  IME the OP is correct. In my experience, doctors, lawyers and veterinarians all make 6 figures. Low six figures if employee, high 6 figures if partner. 3X difference maybe, nowhere close to 100X.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    The key difference is that those professions don't "scale", and the output is linear to the labor (hours) put in. The wealth doesn't lend itself to concentrate into a few hands, and the professional worker is mostly independent and in control of what they do themselves. In tech, people work in teams where each person is a tiny cog in a (relatively) big machine. We still don't agree how to objectively quantify a person's work output. (Eg: do 10x programmers exist?) When a product becomes successful, there's no objective way to distribute the windfall, so the default capitalist rule applies (whoever invested money and/or has access to the best lawyers gets most of it).
diebeforei485 4y ago
I couldn't care enough about how much someone at the top makes, as long as I'm getting paid fairly for my work. Startups often use this argument in reverse ("we're a small company, we can't pay you as much") while paying their founders far, far more than 200X what they pay early engineers. I'm including equity grants in this calculation because you are, as well.
- amrocha 4y ago
  The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly Did you mean to say you just want to be paid modestly?
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    > The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly Really, "by definition"? You can't think of a possible universe where a CEO draws on all their skill to make a crucial decision, that most other possible people in that role probably wouldn't have made, that saves a company billions of dollars, and that this is 100x more valuable than what you or I have contributed or are likely capable of ever contributing? That's a lack of imagination, to say the least.
    - amrocha 4y ago
      Sure, maybe the CEO makes great business decisions, but I don't see how that entitles them to 100x the compensation of the people around them. I don't think researching and making decisions is 100x harder than engineering or HR or law etc.
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        This misunderstand markets. It's not about some abstract and subjective notion of difficulty. It's about how much value you bring to the table in the context of labor market supply and demand. You are 10x more valuable to your company than a cleaner, so you get 10x the pay. Why? Because your skills are more scarce than a cleaner, and because you can have a bigger impact on the company's profitability by writing code than cleaning toilets. The CEO is 100x more valuable to your company than you are, so they get 100x your pay. Why? Because their skills are even more scarce than yours, and they can have an even bigger impact than writing code. That's it.
anonuser123456 4y ago
Nature abhors arbitrage. If you think the tech elite are somehow renting out ill gotten gains, the go out and eat their lunch.
- deleted 4y ago
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fallingknife 4y ago
Abstract arguments about fairness and who provides more value aren't really useful, IMO. What is definitely true is that the engineers, who have lots of options, accepted those terms. The investors decided to invest their money, and grant the authority to spend it to those particular founders. Could somebody else have done it better? Maybe, but I'm not sure how I, or anyone else, would have the confidence to tell the VCs how to invest their money, the founders how to hire, or the engineers about which offers to accept, and do it better than the people directly involved.
edouard-harris 4y ago
> Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets < 1% of the equity and none of the glory. For whatever it's worth, market comp for Engineer #1 equity is significantly above 1%. Depends on a lot of things (number of founders, how many founders are already technical, whether hire is pre or post PMF, prior experience, etc.) but by and large <1% is not going to be competitive at this level.
matwood 4y ago
> That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high. People have a hard time with big numbers. See richest people in the world or how much money Apple makes. It's staggering when you turn it into visualizations or $/second or something. And even then, it's hard for our minds to comprehend something so completely foreign.
speby 4y ago
I think your argument is advocating that the 'person who probably wrote half the damn code' should get a lot more, right? What should that person have gotten, exactly? Either they did not negotiate for a better package with compensation and equity early on OR sadly, they joined too late. If they wanted a lot more equity (and therefore risk but also potential for a high return like Musk or Bezos or whatever), then they would have needed to join super early, or better yet, have been a co-founder to a Musk or a Bezos or whatever. But they weren't, so no, they don't get anywhere near the sharing in the big reward, just a small or tiny slice.
VieEnCode 4y ago
Big law (at least outside of the US, in the UK/EU) is very much pyramid shaped. Typically the model is based on getting the maximum number of chargeable hours from the minimum number of associates, for a dim prospect of eventually making partner. The overwhelming majority of profits flow to partners at the top of the equity structure.
SergeAx 4y ago
At the same time, thousands of companies, where hundreds of thousands software engineers writing the damn code, going into oblivion, generating billions of dollars losses for their investors. Writing the damn code is not a big deal. Knowing what to write is.

by habosa 4y ago

lezojeda 4y ago

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zozbot234 4y ago

Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. All things said, it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
But CEOs don't actually have that much impact... So whatever decisions - in this example - Sundar makes, it only carries so much weight. And, you also get fired if you're a $500k engineer and you suck at your job. So I'm not sure what's so much different about Sundar - except that if he sucks at his job he has a way better golden parachute.
- coding123 4y ago
  You're Apple's CEO, its 2018 and you are about to bet 80% of the current profit stream on M1 platform or stick with Intel. What do you do?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    You're Apple's CEO in 2018 and due to a decade of skillful engineering you own a proven platform that's already shipped in 2 billion devices, and is now objectively fast enough to run a PC, the demands of which are not all that different from the 12.9" iPad that already exists. Do you respect the work of this talented semiconductor organization by refactoring the Mac to use the same CPU? In what way is this a tricky decision?
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      I'd be surprised if Tim Cook even greenlit this decision. It's really something that should be decided by whoever is running the Mac business line.
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    Except the M1 did not magically show up at the CEO's doorstep by one of their underlings in 2018. Apple (i am guessing) would have had several secret projects pointing towards this. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary given how many parallel streams they would have had to invest in to bring all those iP[aeiou]*d devices (running non-intel) to market?
  - rchowe 4y ago
    You take the bet because it's not even your entire profit stream and iPhone is much more of your revenue. Tim Cook's operational experience helped them increase their market cap dramatically once he took over, so I'm not sure you can discount the value of him as CEO. A bad CEO can definitely drive a company into the ground, so in many cases I think the pay can make sense. Spending the money does not assure a good pick though...
  - chongli 4y ago
hourago 4y ago
> Sundar Pichai's job is to make sure Google has enough revenue to keep paying all those $500k+ engineers. No, it is not. His job is to maximize profit, and his personal goal is to earn as much as possible. To say that the CEOs goal is to make money so employees have salaries is a very strange statement. > If Google's revenue is at risk, the stock plunges and Sundar is out of a job. Google revenue is not at risk, but many engineers are already out of a job. Sundar job is only at risk if the board is not happy with him. > it seems like a remarkably fair arrangement. No, it is not. That the people that earn more money is not the ones that produce the most but the ones that protect the rich is far from fair.

throwaway23597 4y ago

> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry. I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.
goodpoint 4y ago
> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin Citation extremely needed. Do you think without some billionaires around everybody else would be sitting on their hands all day?
- MockObject 4y ago
  From my job to my marriage to my artwork, what couldn't conceivably be done by someone else, if I wasn't available? Most of us are fungible.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Bingo. Nearly everyone is replaceable. It may not be easy to replace a certain individual, but it can be done.

EduardoBautista 4y ago

Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world. Crashing Twitter into the ground will never come close to diminishing what he has helped achieve with SpaceX, putting his money where his mouth was to the point of almost going broke, and, to a lesser extent, Tesla where, despite not being a founder, he was the biggest investor at the beginning.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
duped 4y ago
SpaceX does not belong in the same conversation as "net positive impact."
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > Recent events might mislead us, but I believe Musk has had a huge net-positive impact on the world. I always hear this argument about the supposed great impact on the world, society etc. But I am a citizen of the world and think this guy is a scam because he actually hasn't done nothing for me but he keeps pushing his name into my face. Kinda like the POTUS except the POTUS is forced to do media and speeches whereas this guy injects himself into every situation or debate out of his own will to shill his products. For a regular individual who is not concerned about climate change or has a deep desire to life off the grid (but still wants internet) mr. Musk is like the Kardashians with the trash entertainment unfolding on twitter instead of E!
electricEmu 4y ago
Examples of Musk benefitting Musk do not demonstrate a net-positive impact on the world. The artists criticizing Mr. Musk make a good point about what's really happening. https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k https://youtu.be/i9qWYUH5x3k

coding123 4y ago

I can guarantee you employee 20 at Google is very well off, buying houses left and right.

norir 4y ago

I once worked at a startup that was acquired and the founders made a killing. A few years after the acquisition, they founded a new company in an adjacent domain and started raiding their original company for talent. At the time I was working with a guy who had product and marketing experience who happened to be close college friends with one of the cofounders. No one liked working with this guy. Yet rumor had it that he was offered a 5% stake in the new company while the engineers they were recruiting were being offered .25-.5%. I was very confident that they would be successful but I opted not to work for them because I was so offended by the inequity of the offers. The developers they were attempting to raid also had proven that they were productive and effective so it wasn't as though they were making a wildly speculative bet on them. I also knew that in a major exit, I would be more resentful of the relative difference between my rewards and that of this other guy than I would have been pleased with my windfall. I had once had serious respect for the cofounders, but their greediness and willingness to perpetuate these systems of inequity permanently diminished my opinion of them. Yet, I have to concede that the cofounders were correct in their assessment that they could lowball the engineers with little impact on their prospects for success. They were able to exploit their way to a second major windfall, far larger than the first.

freedsoftware 4y ago
It's also that good marketing of a product is probably more integral to its success than its engineering. There are so many stories of superior technologies failing because of bad marketing.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  Good marketing would make a mediocre product succeed, but it will not save a crappy one. Also, "superior technologies" is a loaded term, because it is in fact very subjective.
  - trimethylpurine 4y ago
    Lots of products literally don't work at all and still sell, and even lead their industry in revenue. I wish it wasn't true.

toss1 4y ago

Does a CEO provide 10x, 100x, 200x, 500x, or 1000x the value of ordinary employees? Doubtful, especially for the higher multiples (although they can certainly cause orders of magnitude more financial damage than ordinary employees). In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1. Yet the CEO-to-employee pay ratio has increased from 20-to-1 in 1996 to 202-to-1 in 2018. [0] "The average S&P 500 company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 324-to-1 in 2021." For NuSkin Enterprises, the ratio is 22,092:1, for Amazon, it is 6,474:1 ... pretty amazing chart. [1] And this is why the tax system should recognize and tax excessive pay ratios. These are nothing but the financial result of abusive relationships between the executives and the workers, and the other taxpayers who pay more than their share of the burden. It is also easily measured to tax fairly (which of course corporations will hate, since it is hard to game). But of course, all the tech bros will cry that we need no govt so why should we be taxed? (Not incidentally, the same tech elites and wannabes as the article properly exposed as abusers.) [0] https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/ideal-ceo-to-employee-pay-ratio https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/ideal-ceo-to-employee-... [1] https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios https://aflcio.org/paywatch/company-pay-ratios

novok 4y ago
Pay is determined by supply and demand, not just how difficult it is to provide the supply. And what determines the good pay of tech workers & CEOs is their BATNAs. To hire a CEO of a top tech company, you essentially have to be a better offer than the EV of them starting their own firm with copious amounts of venture capital out there and them out competing you with the efficiencies that come from startups. That is what big-corp tech CEO pay has essentially stabilized on.
stuaxo 4y ago
It's even more doubtful when we see historically the multiplier was more like 20x than the numbers now. Have they got that much better, while everyone else hasn't ? The extra value we all add is being skimmed off the top, and worse we are being treated with contempt.
yamtaddle 4y ago

Lionga 4y ago

It is that 95 to 99% of the ones that go the Musk, Bezos or Kalanicks way fail and be left with no payout. In return the ones succeeding will have 20 to 100 times the payout. Its almost the same as if you just take your salary and bet everything on 13 at the roulette. Small chance of huge payout, high chance of failure.

gentoo 4y ago
all the engineers at an early stage company are "gambling" with exactly the same stakes as the founder. If they fail, they're all out of a job. The founder risks nothing more than that: he's gambling with other people's money. Why should one of those people reap generational wealth while everyone else ends up in the upper-middle class?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Hmmm it seems like the engineers bounce around jobs whenever they feel like it while the founder is locked in for 5 to 25 years. Way different stakes.
- Lionga 4y ago
  You have to invest a lot of time and effort to convince other people that they should "gamble" their money on you and your idea. The early engineer has a pay check from the start. Again if you want your shot at generational wealth just bet all at the roulette. Or convince someone that they should gamble their money on you.
Haga 4y ago
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bryanlarsen 4y ago
But is that true? Every VC-backed founder I know "failed up". They pulled a more-than-dev salary from the company during the failure, and then after the failure they just started a new company and had an inside track on VC. OTOH, the bootstrapped founders have my respect. They had their houses as collateral for their company's operating loan. They also succeeded at a much higher rate than the VC backed founders I've known.

eevilspock 4y ago

I don't know. Where is all this anger and righteousness when it comes to all the people servicing tech workers, from farm workers picking your food in record high temps for slave wages and no protections to food industry workers to janitors to delivery people to the nannies and school teachers caring for your children? What about the other people who are more deeply exploited by your employers, the factory workers in poorer countries, the $2/hour workers in Kenya "tortured" by having to tag obscene material to make ChatGPT less toxic? What about all the people downstream in space and time who pay the costs of all the environmental debt incurred by your luxurious and convenient upper caste first-world lifestyles, lifestyles made "efficient" by waste, consumption and the ability to outsource life's chores to bottom workers, enabling you to put all your time into higher rate-of-return tech work?

deleted 4y ago
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steveBK123 4y ago
All this whinging is what happens when SV restricted stock stops going up 20% annually for what, six months.. a year? Imagine some actual oppression.

jmeister 4y ago

In finance, law, and medicine, the workers are the product roughly. Anyway this debate about being 1000x more valuable is pointless. It does not matter what any individual thinks about their worth. We've all agreed(#) on this system(the worst, except for all others) ostensibly because of the benefits to the rest of society. The internal allocation of profits within a company is irrelevant. # The old Marxist limitations about lacking capital or means of production don't count in tech/software. It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital.

eropple 4y ago
> It takes nothing to sieze the means of production(just grab it from the cloud) or raise capital. It takes time.
RobotToaster 4y ago
There's no such thing as the cloud, just other people's servers (means of production) you're renting.
oblaff 4y ago
The idea that the solution to lacking capital is to _raise capital_ is a contradiction.
- jmeister 4y ago
  I’m saying it’s way easier than for a factory worker in 1823 or 1923 to raise money or gather machines. I’m not being cynical. I’d really like to see alternative governance structures to produce and sell software. Co-ops are an example.

whimsicalism 4y ago

meetingthrower 4y ago
That's because of leverage. MD : consultant is 1:7 or so. Plus another 1:2 or 3 for admin staff. So there is a limit to the scale of wealth generated. That said, MDs make 10x what entry level consultants get. This is different than tech where exec : professional staff can be 1:x,000 or more. (Source: was a consulting MD.)

welshwelsh 4y ago

I don't see the problem here. A burger flipper makes $10 in an hour. An engineer designing a burger flipping robot makes $100. Their department's engineering manager makes $1,000. The CTO makes $10,000. The hardest worker here is the burger flipper. They work 16 hour days just to afford rent, and it's hard manual labor. The engineer makes 10 times as much because each line of code they write produces more value than an entire day of manual burger flipping. Their department manager makes 10 times as much because they solve problems impacting entire teams of engineers that are more important and more difficult than coding problems. The CTO makes 10 times that because their policies affect many engineering departments throughout a large organization and have multibillion-dollar consequences. It doesn't matter if they work 1000 times harder than a burger flipper, they probably work less than the burger flipper. But their work is 1000 times more important, so it's worth 1000 times more.

topaz0 4y ago
This is not 100% wrong, but you are missing an important part of the calculus, which is that as you go up the hierarchy you have more overall and more concentrated power to demand higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > higher pay, out of proportion to the value of your labor To the extent this is a problem, it's a problem of corporate governance. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that problem is fixable, since its root cause is a shift in corporate ownership from individual stockholders to mutual funds (because mutual funds is how most people now invest their retirement savings in 401ks or the equivalent). The effect of this on individual corporations is to make their time horizon for stock price growth much shorter, because unlike individual retirement investors, most of whom adopt a buy and hold strategy and don't trade very often, mutual funds trade stocks all the time based on short term performance.
  - topaz0 4y ago
    Somehow that wasn't always the case in the past, so presumably it's also possible for things to be different in the future. If we have the audacity to imagine a different world, it is fixable through organizing and demanding that incentives be aligned with our values rather than with the spiraling fortunes of a handful of extremely self-centered people.

geodel 4y ago

This again comes to same place. The person who wrote code can launch their company and keep all proceed of billions to themselves if code is that good. For now its like asking for upside of owner and risk of hired hand. Doesn't really work that way in past or now. For law, finance and medicine there is lot more personal liability to reach for big rewards unlike coders sitting in office and implementing business requirements they received from management which in their view is clueless.

kortilla 4y ago

> The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there's a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. This is wrong. Lawyers get paid worse than FAANG SWEs unless they make partnership, which is the equivalent to becoming a co-owner or working as a lower level exec at a big tech company. Doctors at big hospitals in the bay make worse money than Google SWEs last time I was chatting with my friend’s wife who was a Doctor at Stanford medicine. The super highly paid doctors are the ones who found or cofound practices. Finance can pay a little higher, but that’s only because the teams are usually smaller and you have more direct impact. You might pull down 1M/year at Renaissance or whatever, but the partners are still pulling in nearly 100x that. > It's not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. This is the same across nearly all businesses. The owners get to decide how much to pay for operating costs. It’s not a coop.

ketzo 4y ago
I don't think the discrepancy is the same in any other field of knowledge work, though. Even hospital CEOs and partners at law firms are making 3-15x what their doctors and attorneys are making. Not 100-200x. The magnitude of the gap is way higher in tech.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
IME the OP is correct. In my experience, doctors, lawyers and veterinarians all make 6 figures. Low six figures if employee, high 6 figures if partner. 3X difference maybe, nowhere close to 100X.
- hnfong 4y ago
  The key difference is that those professions don't "scale", and the output is linear to the labor (hours) put in. The wealth doesn't lend itself to concentrate into a few hands, and the professional worker is mostly independent and in control of what they do themselves. In tech, people work in teams where each person is a tiny cog in a (relatively) big machine. We still don't agree how to objectively quantify a person's work output. (Eg: do 10x programmers exist?) When a product becomes successful, there's no objective way to distribute the windfall, so the default capitalist rule applies (whoever invested money and/or has access to the best lawyers gets most of it).

diebeforei485 4y ago

I couldn't care enough about how much someone at the top makes, as long as I'm getting paid fairly for my work. Startups often use this argument in reverse ("we're a small company, we can't pay you as much") while paying their founders far, far more than 200X what they pay early engineers. I'm including equity grants in this calculation because you are, as well.

amrocha 4y ago
The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly Did you mean to say you just want to be paid modestly?
- hackerlight 4y ago
  > The problem is that by definition, if the CEO is making 100x what you do then you're not being paid fairly Really, "by definition"? You can't think of a possible universe where a CEO draws on all their skill to make a crucial decision, that most other possible people in that role probably wouldn't have made, that saves a company billions of dollars, and that this is 100x more valuable than what you or I have contributed or are likely capable of ever contributing? That's a lack of imagination, to say the least.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    Sure, maybe the CEO makes great business decisions, but I don't see how that entitles them to 100x the compensation of the people around them. I don't think researching and making decisions is 100x harder than engineering or HR or law etc.
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      This misunderstand markets. It's not about some abstract and subjective notion of difficulty. It's about how much value you bring to the table in the context of labor market supply and demand. You are 10x more valuable to your company than a cleaner, so you get 10x the pay. Why? Because your skills are more scarce than a cleaner, and because you can have a bigger impact on the company's profitability by writing code than cleaning toilets. The CEO is 100x more valuable to your company than you are, so they get 100x your pay. Why? Because their skills are even more scarce than yours, and they can have an even bigger impact than writing code. That's it.

anonuser123456 4y ago

Nature abhors arbitrage. If you think the tech elite are somehow renting out ill gotten gains, the go out and eat their lunch.

deleted 4y ago
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fallingknife 4y ago

Abstract arguments about fairness and who provides more value aren't really useful, IMO. What is definitely true is that the engineers, who have lots of options, accepted those terms. The investors decided to invest their money, and grant the authority to spend it to those particular founders. Could somebody else have done it better? Maybe, but I'm not sure how I, or anyone else, would have the confidence to tell the VCs how to invest their money, the founders how to hire, or the engineers about which offers to accept, and do it better than the people directly involved.

edouard-harris 4y ago

> Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets < 1% of the equity and none of the glory. For whatever it's worth, market comp for Engineer #1 equity is significantly above 1%. Depends on a lot of things (number of founders, how many founders are already technical, whether hire is pre or post PMF, prior experience, etc.) but by and large <1% is not going to be competitive at this level.

matwood 4y ago

> That's 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high. People have a hard time with big numbers. See richest people in the world or how much money Apple makes. It's staggering when you turn it into visualizations or $/second or something. And even then, it's hard for our minds to comprehend something so completely foreign.

speby 4y ago

I think your argument is advocating that the 'person who probably wrote half the damn code' should get a lot more, right? What should that person have gotten, exactly? Either they did not negotiate for a better package with compensation and equity early on OR sadly, they joined too late. If they wanted a lot more equity (and therefore risk but also potential for a high return like Musk or Bezos or whatever), then they would have needed to join super early, or better yet, have been a co-founder to a Musk or a Bezos or whatever. But they weren't, so no, they don't get anywhere near the sharing in the big reward, just a small or tiny slice.

VieEnCode 4y ago

Big law (at least outside of the US, in the UK/EU) is very much pyramid shaped. Typically the model is based on getting the maximum number of chargeable hours from the minimum number of associates, for a dim prospect of eventually making partner. The overwhelming majority of profits flow to partners at the top of the equity structure.

SergeAx 4y ago

At the same time, thousands of companies, where hundreds of thousands software engineers writing the damn code, going into oblivion, generating billions of dollars losses for their investors. Writing the damn code is not a big deal. Knowing what to write is.