> And employees don't work for Google out of the goodness of their hearts, what's your point?
My point is that the current value of a Google employee in Mountain View is the result of the negotiated value between the buyer and the seller. A Google employee in Mountain View earns more than a Google employee in Atlanta even if they are engaging in the same labor for the same number of hours.
> How exactly would you go about doing this? How is it possible to say that you don't deserve to live in a nice house, or have a nice car, or send your children to college based on the job you have and how much Google decides to pay you -- all while they capture the value you're generating so their execs and VCs can live in a nice house, have a nice car, and send their children to college?
Are you really making the argument that software engineers outside the Bay Area do not live in nice houses, or drive nice cars, or send their children to college? In fact, even with the currently lower salaries of software engineers outside the Bay Area, it is easier to buy a house, buy a nicer car, etc. This can be calculated by computing the ratio between the median house price in a locale and the median salary in that same locale[1]. In San Francisco, one must earn $183k to afford the median home. In Chicago, one must earn $63k to afford the median home.
> The system we live in is disgusting.
The system we live in is one in which we try and minimize the cost of goods and services to consumers. The role of markets is to minimize the amount of input necessary to produce goods/services, while maximizing the output of those goods/services. In practice, this means driving down the price of goods/services to the minimum possible price, while making them as abundant as possible, and as high quality as possible. This is good for consumers, because they can purchase those goods/services cheaply. This is why bread, milk, eggs, washing machines, clothes, TVs etc have gotten cheaper over time, relative to inflation.
Another good/service that consumers purchase is labor, mostly indirectly. The market is also very good at driving down the price of labor, and this is why wages don't outpace inflation, in the same way that the price of bread doesn't outpace inflation. Again, this is excellent for consumers, because the labor is an input in the production of goods/services, and the former’s cost is a part of the latter cost that consumers ultimately pay.
For software engineers, this is largely fine, because there is virtually no market in which software engineers are not in the top quintile of wage earners — or at the very least, in the top 2 quintiles. High skill workers will always find higher leverage work to do, and it's easiest for them to adapt to a changing market. Low skill workers, on the other hand, struggle to do this, and we must help them out through welfare and safety nets.
[1] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...