Earlier quoted context omitted.
>US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock. That's a reason for first-generation employees to get paid highly, not a reason to continue to pay that highly to new employees joining today. The real determinants of tech company salaries are the same old boring ones that govern salaries in most lightly regulated industr…
Can you please define the difference between average and marginal productivity?
Marginal productivity is harder to pin down empirically, it's the first derivative of productivity with respect to inputs of labor. Not all labor is productive to the same degree, it was hired at different times, and there's variance in negotiation so your comp definitely doesn't (===) your marginal productivity. It's also probably greatly distorted for startups that are banking on a unicorn valuation where the expected productivity is something like (0.99 * 0 + 0.009 * 1 million + 0.0001 * 1 billion). But for Google et. al where they're in a relative steady state, they have a good idea of how much revenue grows when they add an employee and they'll be willing to pay up to that.