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People generally get paid the amount that it costs to find someone else to do their job¹ It is very easy to find someone else to be a "rater". Certainly easier
by airstrike 4y ago
People generally get paid the amount that it costs to find someone else to do their job¹
It is very easy to find someone else to be a "rater". Certainly easier than it is to find another software engineer
You can argue SWE wages are inflated but comparing them to someone testing whether YouTube search returns the right results is inaccurate and feels disingenuous
"Fairness" is a vague concept which nobody can agree on. It's definitely not as easily observable as, say, the marginal cost of replacing a worker
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1. This also happens to be a helpful framework for establishing "value", beyond the context of labor. For instance: how much is a company worth? The amount it would cost to replace them if they were taken out of the picture
- segasaturn 4y agoBy that logic, Sundar's pay is completely justified, as well as the pay cuts for Software Engineers, as more and more people become software engineers every day and available pool of workers continues to increase.
- ceejayoz 4y agoYou don’t think they could find a competent CEO for, say, $100M?
- segasaturn 4y agoYou don't think you could find a competent software engineer for $80k?
- ceejayoz 4y agoSure can. A race to the bottom for engineers at the same time there’s ever-increasing CEO pay is gross. That’s the point.
- unpopular42 4y agoNo chance if the competitor next door pays $300k
- eftychis 4y agoDepending on the field: No. Depends also on the definition of "competent."
- eftychis 4y agoWell the whole argument here by a big section of comments -- if not the majority -- including Googlers is "they haven't found one in Sundar." I think finding a great CEO for the particular strategy and company is harder than we all think. (Yes I know the fault of the previous sentence -- it was on purpose.)
- PeterisP 4y agoThey probably could find "a competent CEO", but that's not the bar, and it doesn't make sense to do so, because of the oversized impact and risks. If you're 99% certain that a person is as competent as the current CEO and 1% they're a dud like Carly Fiorina, then saving a measly $100m is not worth the enormous risk. And if you've got a candidate that makes you certain that they would be even slightly more competent than Pichai, then it would be worth paying an extra $100m to get them; if CEO A can get e.g. 1% more efficiency than CEO B (for example, by being more aggressive at laying off people) then that's easily worth that money.
- ceejayoz 4y agoYou can't be certain of any of this, though, without a time machine to do some A/B testing.
- junipertea 4y agoWell, yeah. Experience with multibillion companies is lottery, knowing software a commodity.