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The same way the SEC opens insider trading investigations based solely on market data - eg. unusual volume of transaction preceding a major unplanned announceme
by ucha 13y ago
The same way the SEC opens insider trading investigations based solely on market data - eg. unusual volume of transaction preceding a major unplanned announcement - a government body should mine employment data from LinkedIn for example and investigate cases where there are very few employees switching jobs between large corporations.
This is even more unsettling when you realize that Google, Apple and such have employees that generate revenue in the range of a million dollar per head yet pay a average salary that is 10-20% of that. They end up with absurdly large piles of cash that banks and financial institutions never see because they compensate their employees more fairly.
- mschuster91 13y agoHow do you quantify in a team how much money a specific employee generates to the company?
- ucha 13y agoI don't know and I doubt that can be done for a large tech company. I only mentioned averages.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoMoney not given to the employees doesn't vanish, it's allocated to the owners. So no matter how you do it, you're quantifying how much some people are worth. Sometimes it's the employee, sometimes it's the owners.
- rbobby 13y agoIsn't the case for owners that the quantifying is "what ever is left over"?
- ForHackernews 13y agoDoes it matter whether you get the granularity down to a single individual? If a 10 person team builds a product that delivers $100 million in revenue for a company, and the team members are paid $90k on average...then they're pretty underpaid.
- mschuster91 13y agoWell, this might be working for a team of 10 elite-class programmers... but what about those working to support them? Like, IT maintenance staff, HR, accounting, marketing etc. Without either of those, the programmers would not earn a single cent. Now, how do you determine how to pay the support staff? What do you do when one group of HR staff works for a stellar, 100M+$ team and another HR staff group works for a 1M+$ team? Pay the same? Pay different?
- nitrogen 13y agoHow replaceable or irreplaceable are the support staff in this scenario? What's the ramp up time for a new member of the support staff compared to a new member of the team in question?
- iopq 13y agoYou pay replacement costs to all of your employees, so that you don't care whether they leave or stay. That way it depends on the market, not their worth to you.
- FLUX-YOU 13y agoDoes Google give bonuses? Because I'd like to think they could afford to give a million to each of those people if that actually happened. If not cash, stock or something else. It's a hell of an accomplishment. Bonus programs could cover rare events of massive success so employees don't feel so taken advantage of. Certainly if this team could regularly produce $100 million in revenue, they wouldn't be paid $90k.
- colmmacc 13y agoThat's one sort of "fairly" - that employees should participate in profit sharing and that their compensation should be tied directly to the value they create (though should employees also share in the losses?). Another kind of "fairly" is that Labour is its own market, and employees should be paid commensurate to their replacement cost. Both are valid models, though the latter is much more common. The difference between which model is followed can often come down to the negotiation abilities of the individual employee (or their agents) and their relative scarcity. E.g. an extra for a hollywood blockbuster movie is paid the same daily rate as an extra on an independent art-house film - because it's easy to hire extras and they are interchangeable. The movie stars on the other hand are more scarce (at least those with marketable reputations are) and so can negotiate points on the gross.