281–290 of 974 posts
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> Your income should not be based on input (risk, comfort), but rather your output (scale, value). Why?
Compensation, in a perfect world, should be based on how much value you bring to the company.
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Remember the whole drive to push all the Techies out of SF? Remember rocks getting thrown at the Google busses? It's both. At the end of the day Bezos makes headlines but his personal largesse has very little effect on most people in the country. It has very little impact on the lives of folks getting "pushed out" of SF. That's the folks he employs.
> Remember the whole drive to push all the Techies out of SF? Remember rocks getting thrown at the Google busses? It's both. This is primarily attributable to two causes: 1. distorted views that result directly from inequality and the extreme poverty some communities have: to the (stereo)typical Tenderloin resident, as person who is able to afford a modest 3/2 townhome appears to be vastly wealthy 2. the mistaken vie…
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> Your income should not be based on input (risk, comfort), but rather your output (scale, value). Why?
Because people pay for output, not input. They don't care if you bought a pencil from someone else or grew the tree, made the paint, etc all yourself. They buy a pencil.
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> Compensation is more than just money to us. It's vacation, stock, better healthcare, expanded education resources and benefits, buying programs, etc... This can be both good and bad. I don't think this is the right take at all. They way I see it, Americans want to get rich so they have access to the same quality of education / healthcare and leisure time / stability that the average (western) European has by defaul…
That explains the net flow of Americans immigrating to Europe and not the reverse.
You're missing the point, which is that the higher baseline QoL means that it's better to be poor / middle class in Germany or UK than it is to be poor / middle class in the United States.
With regard to immigration rates, there are many factors to consider:
Yes, some small percentage of Americans can get lucky and make the jump from middle class to upper-middle- or upper-class, perhaps enticing Europeans who hope to get that high-paying SV job.
However, moving your entire life from one country to another requires a certain amount of social and financial security. The argument might be made (whether or not it's true--I don't know) that more Europeans move because more Europeans have the financial means to move, along with a quality education that enables them to outcompete domestic American talent. It might be that many Americans want to leave, but are trapped into staying for social / political / economic reasons (e.g. "if I leave, my elderly parents will have no one to care for them due to our expensive healthcare system").
So without further investigation, the inflow/outflow rates can't really be used to support either side of the argument, even putting aside that the number of people who leave their home country is peanuts compared to the number of people who remain.
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> Remember the whole drive to push all the Techies out of SF? Remember rocks getting thrown at the Google busses? It's both. This is primarily attributable to two causes: 1. distorted views that result directly from inequality and the extreme poverty some communities have: to the (stereo)typical Tenderloin resident, as person who is able to afford a modest 3/2 townhome appears to be vastly wealthy 2. the mistaken vie…
Sure, but reducing inequality is as much about pulling the bottom up as it is pulling the top down. If you bring people closer together you solve both (1) and (2).
Unless you believe--quite wrongly--that SWEs aren't in the bottom....
Then market dynamics have come in and you fund 1 company with a gazillion dollars it pays Market + 30% then another company gets a gazillion and it pays Market + 30% + 30% (of course it isn't all cash it's tied up in options, and bonuses etc).
So when someone at google say earns 350k/annum* it's not as insane as that sounds to a european because they actually mean something like: 180k (money) / 100k (shares) / 70k bonus (I mean it's still insane). So having companies and a healthy stock market, and bonuses are usually tied to performance of individual and/or company so It's possible in a bad year they dont get their bonus and their shares reduce heavily in value.
* No idea if this is even ballpark, but just random names and numbers for example sake
Major US tech companies earn a profit-per-employee of $200-400k[0]. That's across every employee, so depending on how you attribute value the profit-per-SWE is much higher. That gives a lot of headroom to drive up salaries when competing for hires, and in part sets the market price. I suspect that low European software salaries are just a function of low profitability of European software companies. e.g, spotify is (…
I would love to see some research on the factors that contribute to this. Work culture? Leadership culture? Rigor in interviewing process? Education? There has to be a reason US tech employees are 5x-10x as "productive". What are we doing differently?
It’s really a function of a willingness to make “big bets” that, when they pay off, pay handsomely.
I got my higher education for free. I expect to save nothing for my children or their education. I expect to have to put aside very little for retirement. The thing is, I just can’t find an argument why I should be able to get very rich doing my job. It’s a comfortable job. It pays a good salary. I got here by taking no risk at all. I wouldn’t want to switch jobs just to drive up my pay even if I could. I have other…
You are taking a risk. The risk is that you assume your government will be able to provide you with a comfortable life even when you can no longer work. And when the time comes for your children to get higher education and retire themselves eventually you hope the government will also be there to step in. It works, until it doesn't. In America you can compensate yourself for this risk by simply getting a job where yo…
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From your link, GINI of Canada and Tajikistan is the same or Finland and Azerbaijan. Totalitarian states like Belarus or Kazakhstan have one of the lowest GINIs in the world, now I question gini usefulness even more.
In totalitarian states, everyone is equally poor.
Not quite. In totalitarian states, typically everyone's income is fairly equal.
Wealth, however, is often another matter.
In the soviet Union, party apparatchiks often had very nice dachas to live in, fancy cars, exclusive shopping venues with imported goods, vacations abroad, etc. But these things weren't necessarily purchased with disposable income, per-se. At least not officially.
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Because people pay for output, not input. They don't care if you bought a pencil from someone else or grew the tree, made the paint, etc all yourself. They buy a pencil.
That does not answer the question. Why should someone's income depend on their output? Why is that the ethically correct outcome?